Meridien K - Chapter 29: The Known Universe (Again)

One bang on the side of the prefab like the scuttle-scrape of a mortar. The klaxons didn't go off and I gave it no mind until a second sound matched the first. Horse and I were the only ones in the prefab; the rest of 716 went off on a mission to find a shield for the turret or something.

             

"You hear that?"

             

"Hear what?" said Horse, looking up from a thick tome.

             

My own book down and a third very loud knock on the wall.

             

"This is bullshit," spit to no one.

             

Outside in my Death black. Around to the rear of the prefab, positioned on a deserted lot for no-longer-there-even-though-they-were-there-the-day-before tents, were two crews of Regs, one near and the other in a strict formation away from most others. I had to process the sacks on the ground as bases and an overturned crate as the pitcher's mound and our prefab as the backstop.

             

No one bothered to stop. A change-up and a Reg staff sergeant swung early. The ball went past the invisible catcher and smacked 716's prefab.

             

"What the fuck do you think you're doing?"

             

There must've been traces of authority in my voice because they snapped to, like some brass was prowling the back alleys of the FOB. They saw me and my uniform and the pitcher called time and jogged over.

             

"Hi," he said.

             

"Hey."

             

He only had a buck sergeant's stripes but he seemed to be in charge. I jerked a thumb at the prefab.

             

"We're trying to get some reading done in there. What? You don't have a fuckin' catcher?"

             

"What? I thought that building was empty."

             

"It's not."

             

"Huh."

             

The sergeant, unfazed, offered his glove and, "If you're in, it evens up the teams. Winners get off nightwatch for a week."

             

Not even a look at the glove and, "I'm left-handed."

             

"Um… what?" like it was a logic puzzle.

             

"That glove is for right-handed throwers. I throw left."

             

"Oh. Um… you think you can manage?"

             

Suddenly I felt all their eyes. It didn't seem prudent to retain my gruffness.

             

An excuse as good as any: "I'm waiting for orders."

             

"Oh, right, right, sorry, sir," and then to the firstbaseman, "Hey Blackmar! Go get something, uh, soft to, uh, absorb the impact of the, uh, soundwaves so this fine man can get some reading done."

             

I took a step back, ready to turn and let them forget my face.

             

"Sorry about the noise, sir. Won't happen again, sir."

             

Not in a mood to correct all the Sir nonsense and, "Appreciated, sergeant."

             

I lingered around the corner and watched the supposed Blackmar reappear with a cot mattress, quickly folded in two and held in place by rocks. The sergeant tossed a pitch and it made no sound.

             

"Batter up!"

             

And then the staff sarge--

             

--at the plate, bat touching the far end, that slow-speed check swing, bent knees, eye on the pitcher, eye on the ball, no guaranteed fastballs anymore at that age, some curveballs that were mostly junkballs. I still swung at most everything. The pitch and I connected with the ball the wrong way, the alloy vibrating hard, stinging my hand like I grabbed hold of a live wire. Foul ball. Then a clean strike, a curve outside that wasn't a strike but I swung anyway, my long reach a match for my height. Batting gloves tightened, the wind-up, ball from the pitcher's hand, followed all the way in, my eyes almost down at my cleats with the swing, the ball's physics-defying dance over my bat, a strike the catcher dropped, yells from the bench to run to first, those awkward few steps of the unexpected, bat still in hand before discarded, a few short steps before I was tackled from behind, face full of brown-red dirt, motherfucker didn't need to hit me that hard, claps for the opposition, back to the bench, my mom close behind the chainlink fence with the spiral-bound scorebook, a big K on the diagram of a baseball field. Drab enthusiasm, solidarity with teammates, hell, not teammates, just guys who happened to sit on the same bench, played in the same defensive field, neither teammates nor friends. To the back of the bench, my Newport Knights cap's brim pulled low to hide the tears, the fucking tears even though I was seven goddamn years old, too old for that shit, saltwater tracking down my dusty face, the look of my dad burning a hole in my neck, dad seated next to Ben Meridien, who drank an Irish coffee out of a covered mug, his three daughters dragged along for a pithy attempt of a setup, Hey, Isn't The Guy Who Just Struck Out Kind Of Cute, You Know, John Kraid's Kid, Bobby?

             

We won but, hell, when was the last time I really felt I won? All the non-existent self-esteem of pre-pubescent depression. Back through the home team's foreign land to the known streets of Easthaven. My dad driving and my mom in the passenger seat.

             

"I'm going out west next week," said my mom.

             

"Again?"

             

"There's still work to be done. And come on, John, it's not like you don't--"

             

"Fine, K."

             

"John--"

             

"No no no, go. You have to. It's your job," and in a crude syncopation to approximate a backward sarcasm, "Because, shit, we all know how important it is how wildlife reacts to radiation and how fast it comes back, because when all the real bombs fall and not some nuke waste in a goddamn suitcase, we'll need to know what's safe to eat."

             

"Are you done?"

             

Sitting on a towel because my ass was all grimy from slides into second on stolen bases, the one thing I could still do without fail, the Gift of Speed, dirty cleats shaking off their grime on the sedan floor that they'd make me vacuum the next day. In uniform for a team, no, a Cause, a Cause I no longer believed in.

            

 "I want to quit," I said to the front of the car.

             

My dad, still driving, unintentionally veered into the oncoming lane as he turned and looked at me.

             

"What do you mean, quit? Quit what? School? Life? Come on, Bobby, be specific for once in your life."

             

The silent disapproval of my mom, resigned to looking out the window at the nauseating rush of vegetation parallel to the roadside.

             

"I want to quit the team, dad. I don't like it anymore."

             

"Why? Because your batting average dropped from nine-hundred to three-hundred once the kids could start throwing curves?"

             

"Part of it, yeah."

             

"You don't have to be the star player, Bobby," said my mom.

             

"Then why the fuck am I playing?" I asked.

            

"Hey!" said my dad.

             

"What? Ben says it all the time."

             

"You shouldn't follow Mr. Meridien's example," said my mom, emphasis on Mister.

             

"His name is Ben," my dad grumbled, "and he has a doctorate. So if you want to be proper, it's Doctor Meridien."

             

Getting close to home, wanting the conversation to end before it took place in a locale I couldn't escape, in the kitchen or living room or my cramped bedroom.

             

"I'll quit after the season," I said, trying to make a reasoned compromise.

             

"Bobby, honey, just because you struck out twice in a game doesn't mean--"

             

"If you want to quit, go ahead," said my dad without any doubt in his voice, without any of those parental tricks that try to get in your head and make you secondguess your own thoughts.

            

 But then that across-the-middle look from mom to dad, that Shouldn't We Discuss This Between Ourselves? look.

             

I didn't need to try to hide a smile. It was only a quarter of the way through the season, early, but late enough to know I had gone from a baseball all-star with a shot at a prep-school scholarship to a passable firstbaseman who simply lost the ability to strike fear into backing-up outfielders when I strode to the plate. And not like the season was interfering with school or my dwindling social life or the scant Quality Time left with twelve-year-old Rid. That look from my mom to my dad more indicative of the growing rift in which my dad gave us approval to, in my mom's opinion, run wild and focus all and everything on academics. She didn't see that as a recipe for a well-rounded childhood. The disintegration of the American Family encapsulated in one look from the passenger seat to the driver, simply in the proclamation of quitting baseball; in my mom's announcement of repeatedly going out to the Zone to work on something other Family Members (dad) didn't particularly condone; in openly swearing; in feeling uncomfortable with those strangers in the car, who'd all get out of the car in the garage, bump into each other as we took off our shoes in the mudroom, retreated to our separate places in the house, my dad to his office upstairs, my mom to her office in the master bedroom.

             

Night.

             

Awake in bed, staring up at the invisible ceiling. Looking at all the separate parts in the pitch-black room, seeing only the LEDs from various electronics, the different-colored stars of my universe-room. But we were on a giant rock hurtling through space and I couldn't even feel it, shut up in some bedroom in some town.

             

I remembered when I was a few years younger. Back then I had a bad sleepwalking habit that I obviously couldn't quit by sheer force of will. But I was lucid the whole time. Like those locked-in syndromes, except I was moving and my eyes were open but I couldn't stop whatever it was that I was doing. Not that I was murdering captured woodland mammals in the garage.

             

I'd descend to the cavernous main level of the house, lit dimly by rope lighting above the cupboards, lights over the bar. My mind, half-asleep, fractured it as an impossibly-foreign, post-human landscape. My legs took me down to the basement, turning on a CRT television to the station that played old multicam laughtracked sitcoms that were as old as my parents. Jokes long past their expiration dates. Sitting there nightmare-eyed, unable to blink, to shut my eyes, to look away, to turn, to move. Paralyzed. Wanting to do something, anything, to jump out a plate-glass window and run howling down the street, terrorizing the neighborhood before a Police helicopter landed on top of me and pinned me down, SWAT teams coming out and unloading whole canisters of pepper spray in my face. I Want To Get Out And I Can't and watching old sitcoms, ha ha, he tripped down the stairs, ha ha, jokes about the war, the wars. Rising panic, the pregame to full-on panic attacks foretold by a combination of sleepwalking, night terrors and vicious anxiety, something that seemed possible to cook up a heart attack in an otherwise-healthy seven-year-old.

             

Thinking about the summer, barely begun, knowing already that it'd end before I figured out to do with it, all that Time discarded like paper bets at a racetrack. Thinking about some of the few things Rid ever told me about school, about how, god, about how he felt, how he said he was going to join the Forces after graduation because he was so crippled, so institutionalized, that he didn't trust his own free will, even if it meant marching into another giant Machine. Ridley: Not so much His Own Worst Enemy but His Own Worst Nothing, already so Gone that I once overheard Mr. Meridien crassly joke that Rid wouldn't even be at his own funeral and--

             

And then when the curse had its fill of nostalgia-laced programming I'd turn off the television and, still devoid of free will, retreat back to my room, past the closed door and the arrow pointing to both "DO NOT DISTURB" and "ASLEEP" on the homemade sign scrawled on Rid's door.

             

My cloistered bedroom. Hands that weren't my own pulling the sheets to my chin, eyes locked open, staring up at the blackness, the conscious part of my mind knowing there a bumpy textured ceiling there; and I'd look past it, up into the attic, up into the smear of Easthaven city lights, then past that, to the upper layers of the atmosphere, the magnetosphere, past the bright wash of the moon, all the way up there in that ether, the Void, feeling myself rise until, without knowing it, I was asleep.

(Chapter 30 coming Monday, January 23, 2012.)