Bullettime by Nick Mamatas Read Free Book Online Page A

of praxis you shall achieve
theosis
, or knowledge of God.” Erin holds up two corners of the blanket she had spread out.
    Dave giggles and says, “Sure, lay it on me!”
    Erin rolls her eyes and sighs. “You are a fucking idiot, you know that.” Then she swings the blanket over Dave’s head and covers him with it, then whips it off with a practiced movement and I go screaming into the Ylem, trapped for what seems like eternity, but what is really just an endless moment. What’s left of me in that dumpy bedroom in the unfolding universe is the Dave who cannot help but obey.

CHAPTER 8
    E rin tackles him and gives his lips a lick with the very tip of her tongue, then rolls off him and out the door. Erin rises up like a snake and shifts out of her shirt, then grabs Dave by the sides of his head to drag his mouth up to her body; she stays and they fuck clumsily on Dave’s sagging twin bed. Erin stays on her corner of the bed, folding the blanket in her lap and mumbling about her parents—their ridiculous demands, Old World expectations (no dating, work work work, Christmas in January), and her father’s regular thundering at the TV, over tax bills, at the Puerto Rican busboys down at the diner. Erin teaches Dave several lines from
The Iliad
, or says that they’re from the poem—and an important part of his initiation—but they were really just a string of modern Greek curses:
Gamo ton shisto bou s’eshese
, she says, and he proudly repeats in an ancient sing-song, “I fuck the pussy that vomited you out.” It doesn’t matter which choices she made, Dave was hers regardless. I love to live through his eyes as her belly and shoulders roll over him; over and over I replay her solemn little talk, wondering if this time she’ll cry, or admit that it’s all lies. Never happens.
    I can be anywhere Dave ever was, in any of the streams of his life, of
my
life. It’s hard to remember, especially as I stand over his body, tucked and curved into itself like a fetus in his own blood and urine, his last rattling breath still hanging in the air amidst the whimpers and the moans of the wounded. Once, a kid, a sensitive little guy named Ray who liked trip-hop and weed, caught a glimpse of me—me, standing over my own stained corpse—through the chicken wire and papier-mâché of the world. He shrieked and ran.
    “I saw that guy. You know, that dude! He was standing over another guy who looked just like him,” Ray explained to his crew of friends who had already grown bored with Hacky Sack.
    They were a smear of baggy black clothing, clownish makeup, and whiteboy dreads, and they didn’t believe him, despite their steady diet of Wiccan paperbacks from the New Age section of the B. Dalton at the mall. “Bullshit,” they said. The ones with a bit of a rep for being tough or especially magically powerful among their cohort—they bought their books from the real pagan shops in the city—made their pronouncement like it was two words. “Bull. Shit.”
    But they all went to go stare at the corner between their classes, and a couple of them were even sure they saw me, though I was actually standing behind them. Ray’s story sounded much better when Ray wasn’t the one telling it. “Oh man, I
totally
saw that guy. It was like he was crying over his own body—like a guardian angel who failed.”
    The corner has a chill attached to it. Can’t you feel it?
    It smells like blood and steel here. It smells like the streets did on the afternoon of 9/11, when the wind shifted and carried the dust of the ruins over the river. I can taste it on my tongue, like I could when the shooting began.
    In an hour the school was united in gleeful horror over the idea of the dead white guy haunting the place. The district even sprang for an extra counselor for a week or two. The vice principal got online and sold the story anonymously to one of the tabloids for five grand, then bragged about it to everyone in the faculty lounge, then