by Norman Crane
I live in Canada. I write books. I’m also a historian, a wise guy and a cinephile. When I’m not writing, I’m probably reading or trying to cook. Philip Dick, Haruki Murakami and Graham Greene are some of my favourite authors. I enjoy fiction that makes me curious because curiosity makes me creative. I peer under mossy rocks, knock on hollow trees and believe in hidden passageways—not because I have proof of their existence, but because imagining them is itself the reward. I like non-fiction for the same reason. I also like computers, text editors and mechanical keyboards.
For more info and links to my writing, please visit my website: normancrane.ca
“And you’re sure your mom won’t rip your head off?”
“She’s not a praying mantis.”
“Motherfucker.”
Three of them laughed. Paulie wanted to punch them all in the nose. It wasn’t a secret his mum was hot. At least by boys’ standards, which meant she had big boobs and wore clothes that were less baggy and showed more cleavage than other mums. They called her Mrs Baggins sometimes because of a joke that had started after the first part of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy opened in town and before everyone had seen it too many times and knew it sucked balls compared to reading Tolkien. The joke was: she wasn’t short or hairy-footed, but Paulie’s dad was, and he smoked a pipe and saw the movie more than four times and complained each time that Radagast was a wizard, not a pot smoking Greenpeace activist. They liked Paulie’s dad, too, but, come on, like he could ever fuck a pair of titties like hers.
“She sure could rip my head off if she sucked me off first,” Pinder said. “I’d die headless and happy.”
“She could breast feed me,” Akira said.
“That’s gross.”
“Not in Japan,” Akira said. “There are entire manga about it.”
“They fuck octopuses in manga,” George said.
“Just because they have tentacles doesn’t mean they’re octopuses,” Akira said.
“As if that makes it any better.” Pinder smirked. “Though I wouldn’t mind seeing Paulie’s mom wrapped up in tentacles…”
Paulie knew his mum was hot. He’d had it pointed out to him many times. He was an expert by now. But what was he to do but force the steam out of his ears and show his fists and yell, “Shut up!” so loud Pinder said, “You shut up, man. You’ll wake somebody and get us caught.”
They were still in the subdivision, cutting across the Akers’ back yard because it was the fastest way to get to the path which led through the trees and down the hill they sometimes went tobogganing—swerving to avoid the pine trees—to the foot of the lake, on which winter always formed the perfect sheet of ice.
The air was crisp, their cheeks red. Plumes of warm vapour streamed out of their nostrils like smoke, meaning they were dragons—fire breathers with duffel bags and hockey sticks. They ran down the hill, half sliding, half losing their balance, laughing, making all the noise they wanted to make because now they were in the company of themselves, out of the range of the adults.
“Paulie sucks cock!” Pinder said.
“Like mother like son,” George said. “They pass it down from generation to generation, like corporate shares.”
“Or defective genes.”
“If you were a girl, I’d let you give me a blowjob,” Akira said.
Paulie raced past all of them and into the cold, crisp air that was rushing off the lake mixed with just the right amount of snow to sting your face and make you feel alive.
He dropped his stick and his bag and slid onto the ice.
It creaked.
George slid by beside him, before kicking out his feet and falling straight onto his ass.
“Did you hear that?” Paulie asked.
“Hear what?”
“The ice creaked.”
“Hey, guys,” George said, “Paulie’s scared again.” He got up, cleaned the ice off his pants and jumped a few times. Nothing creaked. “Sure seems fine to me. Of course you could always run home and hug your mom’s tits till you grow a pair.”
“The ice is good,” Akira said. “My dad monitors it every day. If he says it is safe, it is safe.”
Akira’s dad was a scientist, though what exactly he studied was beyond anyone’s comprehension. When he was in town he didn’t do anything other than measure things, like the water temperature of the local lakes, and go birding. When he was out of town he was gone for weeks at a time, to Waterloo or Toronto. Lately, he’d been involved with some experiment that suggested time was merely the consequence of two protons—no, not protons: some other particles, maybe quarks—was the consequence of two quarks coexisting in the same physical space, which was impossible unless you applied quantum theory and, at any rate, it was not visible to anything outside of those two quarks, meaning that to an outside observer everyone and everything was as eternally still as the frozen water on the lake.
Pinder opened his duffel pack and tossed out a few pucks. Then he sat down and started lacing up his skates. “My mom says real hockey is played on grass.”
“That’s because she’s from India,” George said.
Paulie was listening to the ice, waiting for it to creak again. It refused. When he was satisfied he’d imagined the first creak, he said, “On your mom’s grass, you fucking Paki.”
Three of them laughed. Pinder laced up his skates tight. He looked like he wanted to punch all of them in the nose.
“My dad says Indian women are hairier than Japanese and white women,” Akira said.
“I bet he has computer simulations and pie graphs for that, too.” They laughed at pie graphs. “Pubes per square centimetre.”
“No, he just has circumstantial evidence.”
They laughed at cum.
“Well, is it true?” George asked.
Pinder realised they were looking at him. “How the fuck would I know?”
“Like you haven’t peeked.”
“Fuck you. Gross.”
“Pinder the fucking Paki peeking at the poontang.”
They all got to lacing up their skates. The moonlight reflected off the ice, illuminating the only world that mattered.
Pinder was half Irish and half Tamil, but his skin was dark, his hair black, and everyone assumed he was born in Bombay, or Mumbai, or whatever it was called. Bollywood. Belly dancing (not actually Indian), Slumdog Millionaire (not actually Indian), and Aishwarya Rai (Indian), who was hot even after getting pregnant, mostly because her boobs got even bigger. Everyone agreed on this, even Pinder.
Their laces fastened, they grabbed their sticks and skated onto the ice.
The surface was chippy, but there’s a specific way of skating on a surface like that, and they knew it by heart. In a few minutes their careful strides extended, increasing the speed with which they zoomed and circled on the ice. When they were warmed up, Paulie and Pinder started hitting pucks back and forth, willing them to bounce over the other’s stick blade while taking extra care that it didn’t bounce over their own. Catching a bullet pass softly on your stick as if it were made of pillows was one of the secret joys of hockey, unknown by the uninitiated.
They all still had wooden sticks for this type of stuff because they were cheaper and you weren’t afraid to break them, and, besides, there was something downright mystical about cutting figure eights in the night on a frozen lake surrounded by tall, living trees covered in snow while holding something made from them, constructed from trees exactly like these, and feeling the wood become an extension of your body the way Marshall McLuhan once said new technologies become extensions of your body. Paulie’s dad had once met Marshall McLuhan and collected signed first editions of his books.
Akira took a few pictures with his phone.
“Get one of me,” George said, gliding to a halt with his stick raised for a Zdeno Chara slap shot, “and send it to my Bruins account when you do.”
“Fuck you.” The sound of Maple Leaf blood boiling.
“Stanley Cup, baby. Stanley Cup.”
If McLuhan was right, if the internet was their external central nervous system, then hockey was their external, shared, soul. Paulie liked that idea.
“I took two photos,” Akira said. “But you look pretty gay in both.”
George shot the puck in Akira’s general direction. Akira didn’t even budge. “Got that Boston accuracy,” Paulie said.
“And you’re a loser. A true Leaf through and through.”
Pinder sped up, swung a lazy loop around an imperfection in the ice, and came to a beautiful stop. The edges of his skate blades sliced a shower of ice particles into the air. They twinkled as they fell. “Usual rules, boys,” he said. “I call Paulie.”
“Good,” George said. “I look forward to beating your asses.”
“We call Toronto.”
“Good. I look forward to beating your asses even more. We call Boston, but only because I feel extra cruel.”
“I don’t want to be Boston,” Akira said. He was a Canucks fan. Everyone glared at him.
Paulie put down one goal, made from a modified recycling container, and George put down the other.
“Just pretend you’re Henrik and you got traded,” Pinder said.
“Oh, come on! Like that would ever happen. Bean Town don’t play with ballerinas and fairies.”
“Can I be Kessler?” Akira asked.
“You can be Paul Kariya.”
“You guys always say I should be Paul Kariya.”
George did a deke and almost fell on his butt in the process. “I’m Lucic.”
“We just saw as much,” Pinder said.
“Seriously, why do I have to be the Asian guy?” Akira asked.
“Because you’re Asian.”
“George isn’t Slavic and he gets to be Lucic.”
“But Lucic sucks,” Paulie said, “and Paul Kariya was amazing.”
George stomped his skates. “Oh, it’s on, bitches. Now it’s fucking on. Full contact rules.”
“No hitting from behind,” Paulie said.
“No hitting from behind. No hitting from behind,” George teased. “Is that what your mom told you before you came out?” He did his stereotypical female voice, which was also his stereotypical gay voice. “You can go out and play with your friends, munchkin, but don’t play too rough and remember no hitting from behind?”
“I’d like to do Paulie’s mom pretty rough from behind,” Pinder said.
Paulie skated by and punched him in the shoulder.
“Ow, fuck.”
“You’re on my team.”
“So? It was a compliment, dude.”
“Anyway, my mom doesn’t know I’m out here,” Paulie said, “so she didn’t say anything.”
“I though you said that she wouldn’t rip your head off.”
“She won’t, because she won’t ever find out about me being out here in the first place. Ignorance, boys, is bliss.”
George grinned. “Unless you lose, because I just decided them’s the stakes. You’re playing for your head. Maybe you’ll actually play good if you feel that little extra pressure, eh?”
“If I remember correctly, you’re the one who lost last time,” Paulie said.
“That’s because I was playing with Pinder.”
“Like it was my fault,” Pinder said. “If you moved your fat ass once in a while instead of trying to nail people maybe we could have—I don’t know—actually scored some goals.”
“And what if we win?” Paulie asked.
“If we win, we get to come on your mom’s face,” Pinder said.
“Dude!”
Pinder grimaced even before Paulie skated by to punch him in the shoulder again.
“I’m being serious. If we win, what do we get?”
“We could even do it on a photo,” Akira said. “Coming, I mean. It would not have to be directly on her face. The photo would be a substitute. There’s this site on the internet where—”
George banged his stick on the ice. “You’re fucking weird, you know that? You’re the Paul fucking Kariya of weird.”
“More like Steve Kariya.” Pinder stuck out his tongue and licked at the space between two of his raised fingers.
“That’s about all you’ve ever ate out,” George said.
“Licking pussy’s gross,” Paulie said. “It’s also not hockey. Let’s start this shit because I feel like wrapping up my win before midnight.”
“Our win. And we haven’t set stakes yet,” Pinder said.
Paulie flashed a devilish grin. “If we win, George has to tell his parents he’s gay.”
“No way.”
“I’ll do it,” Akira said.
“Your dad wouldn’t even care,” Pinder said.
“No, I mean I can tell George’s parents that he’s gay. I can even Photoshop proof, like North Korea does with its submarines.”
“You guys are fags, I swear,” George said. He turned to glare at Akira. “And if you ever stick my head on man on man porn, I swear I’ll kill you.”
“How about,” Pinder said, “if we win, you have to bark in Miss Collins French class every time she says ‘asseyez vous’.”
“I’ll bark in her class anyway. I hate that bitch. She almost failed me last year.”
“That’s because you’re stupid at French.”
“Fuckez you in your merde hole.”
“I would like to do that to Miss Collins,” Akira said. “Did you know that almost all Italian porn is anal porn?”
George barked.
“Doggy style!” Paulie yelled.
They all barked a bark that turned into a long, unsynchronised howl.
“Now that the stakes are settled, I propose a challenge for first puck and for lucky bounce,” Pinder said. “What I propose is a race. George and Paulie to the middle of the lake and back, with pucks.”
“Wait,” George said—
And he was off. Long legs taking short, powerful strides.
Paulie set off after him.
He skated more gracefully, covering more ice with each push of the skate, moving with the smooth rhythm of a speed skater. It didn’t take him long to catch up to George. It wouldn’t have taken him much longer to pass George, either, if George hadn’t lifted his stick with the aim of hooking Paulie in the chest, missed, and smacked him in the teeth instead.
Paulie dropped to the ice, covering his face.
George looked back, still skating.
“Shit.”
He stopped and skated to where Paulie was just getting to his knees. Paulie spat red blood onto white ice.
“Yo, guys, get your asses over here,” George yelled at Pinder and Akira, who were both already skating over.
“You OK, dude?” George asked Paulie. Paulie looked at the blood on the ice, touched his hand to his mouth, looked at the blood on that, and spat on the ice again. “Dude, check you didn’t lose any teeth. If you didn’t, that’s great. If you did, chicks dig tough guys.”
Paulie shook his head.
Pinder and Akira crowded around. “Jesus, what the fuck did you do?” Pinder asked.
“I hit him with my stick,” George said. “By accident.”
Paulie heard the ice creak.
“Let me see,” Akira said. “I watch a lot of dental surgeries on YouTube.”
Paulie waved his hands for them to back up. The ice under him trembled and whined.
“Seriously, let us take a look at the damage,” Pinder said.
“You’re already on your knees, just open up your mouth real wide and say ‘ahhh’,” George said.
Nobody laughed.
The creaking ice started to crack—
“Get back,” Paulie said
But he said it with a swelling mouth full of blood and it sounded more like—
“You can get me back, buddy. I promise,” George said.
“Get back now,” Paulie said.
He heard the crack rush by below him.
He gesticulated.
“Now!”
He wanted to yell more, to yell it louder, but in the next instant none of that mattered any more because Pinder, Akira and George had become blurred shapes behind a window of cold and there was water in his mouth, water that he was swallowing, against which the upward force of the words stuck in his throat were nothing but rising, popping bubbles, and so, eating the bubbles, he closed his eyes because they felt in danger of getting freezer burn.
In other words—and to the three pairs of eyes watching him from above—the ice under Paulie had opened up and the lake had swallowed him whole.
When he was a baby, Paulie’s parents would wrap him in warm clothes and blankets and take him for stroller walks in the dead of winter. It was a memory he shouldn’t have been able to remember, but he did.
He first kissed a girl in the sixth grade. Her name was Diana and she was a Jehovah’s Witness. Pushing his tongue into her mouth felt like nothing had ever felt.
In 2013, the Maple Leafs took the Boston Bruins to the seventh and deciding game of their first round Eastern Conference playoff series. That night, the Leafs led 4-1 in the third period, only for the Bruins to score three times in the final eleven minutes of the game, including twice in the final two minutes, take the game to overtime, and win on a goal from Patrice Bergeron. Watching in his living room, Paulie had thrown up all over the carpet.
Now he felt like all of that at once, like his layers and layers of warmth were soaked through with wetness, like being a tongue thrust into a dead girl’s cold mouth, like being floored with a shot to the liver that went past the goalie and rippled the mesh.
Paulie knew he was drowning.
He knew he was dying.
He swung at the cold water with his fists and kicked at it with his feet, but the circle of light that he knew was his salvation refused to grow bigger.
He screamed into relentless, icy liquid.
The blood pumping through his ears sounded like disintegrating kettle drums.
He felt numb.
He couldn’t breathe and he had no more breath left in him. His lungs were but twin sacks of water.
He stopped struggling.
And the world turned so cold it was warm and so peaceful that Paulie pretended he could remember exactly what it felt like to have been born…
The light went out, eclipsed by—
Akira’s head.
Steam was escaping from between its moving lips.
The sound was still turned down low.
Paulie was shivering.
His cheeks stung.
Akira slapped him again and again. Each slap turned up the sound, turned it up to:
“Paulie, can you hear? Paulie!”
Behind Akira’s head was Pinder, kneeling down, chewing on his nails, and George’s naked cock.
“The fuck?” Paulie puked out half a liter of water.
“He’s alive!” Akira yelled.
“The fuck,” Paulie said again, “are you naked for?”
“Jesus, Paulie. I thought,” George said without finishing the sentence. He was shaking, too.
“He saved you,” Pinder said. “George saved you. After you went under, he—he stripped off his clothes… and dove right in.”
“I thought you were dead,” George said.
Paulie propped himself up on his elbows into something of a seated position. He was naked, too. He knew that meant he should have been cold, but he wasn’t. He was shaking and feeling nothing. “You should put your clothes on,” he said to George.
George smiled.
“Those are for you,” Akira said. “They are dry.”
Pinder looked at his wristwatch, pressed a button and looked back at Paulie, his mouth hanging slightly open and his eyes the shape of saucers.
“I suppose there’s no not telling my mom now,” Paulie said. He was trying to sound as ordinary as possible, but, inside, he was terrified. He wasn’t entirely sure whether he was dead or alive, an uncertainty that was made increasingly surreal each time he thought about it. So he tried not to think about it. He tried instead to think about how pissed off his mum would be, and how long she’d ground him for, and whether he wasn’t already too old to be grounded, which might mean she would send him to live with his grandma in Texas…
Yet even as he was imagining these things, his three best friends taking turns blinking at him, he couldn’t shake the sensation that he was different in the world than he remembered: that some part of him was still at the bottom of the lake while the rest of him had sunk through the bottom and landed somehow back on top of the ice covering the lake. In the days that followed, he would try to describe this sensation. “Think of being in bed,” he would say. “It’s one of those nights when you’re really tired but you can’t actually fall asleep, so you’re just lying there, your mind collapsing, making your body feel like you keep falling and falling—and now imagine that you do fall, and you fall so deep that you fall all the way through your ceiling and right back onto your bed, causing you to wake up and not feel tired any more.”
“Dude,” George said, “I am so fucking glad you’re alive.”
“Although your mom would look super hot in a tight black funeral dress,” Akira said, before looking sheepishly down at the ice and pecking at his phone with his fingers.
“Too soon,” Pinder said.
But they all laughed way too hard anyway, until Paulie saw the paramedics flicker into existence on the side of the snowy hill, making their way between the trees, toward the four of them gathered at the edge of the lake.
Paulie squirmed in his chair as soon as the door swung open and the doctor walked in. He wasn’t holding a clipboard. “Good afternoon, Paul,” the doctor said, “Mister and Missus Key-es-love-ski.” He bowed his head and sat down in a hideously vermilion leather chair tucked behind a metal desk.
Paulie’s mum hadn’t taken her arm from around Paulie’s shoulder since they sat down. His dad was more hands off, but even he couldn’t stop looking at Paulie and smiling, saying, “I love you,” and every once in a while reaching over to ruffle his son’s hair.
“Good afternoon, doctor,” Paulie’s mum said. “How bad is the news?”
The doctor stopped ogling her breasts, wiped his lips and made a salesman’s face. “Everything is perfectly fine, Missus K. Do you mind if I call you folks Mister and Missus K? My Russian pronunciation isn’t what you might call ‘the best’.”
“Polish,” Paulie’s dad said.
“We don’t mind, doctor,” Paulie’s mum said. She wiggled her chest to straighten her back and the doctor ogled her again. “You were saying, doctor…”
“Yes, I was. I was saying that after having conducted the proper testing, whose details I won’t bore you folks with, it appears that your son”—He addressed the patient.—”It seems that you, Paul, are a lucky and hardy young man.”
“There’s no brain damage?” Paulie’s dad asked.
“None. There’s nothing worrying,” the doctor said, “other than the boy being an apparent fan of the Toronto Maple Leafs. However, I am told this is a pre-existing condition.”
The humour was lost on the pair of worried parents. Paulie just thought it wasn’t funny. “You see, I grew up in Detroit,” the doctor tried to explain.
When there was still no reaction, he tried to salvage the joke by saying in a hushed insider’s voice to Paulie, “This was ages ago, back in the Cup days, when the likes of Steve Yzerman and Serguy Fodorov laced them up in the Joe Louis. Nicholas Lidstrom and Scottie Bowman. All before your time, I’m afraid. Google it some time.”
Paulie estimated the doctor’s age at no more than forty. He estimated the doctor’s personality as jackass. Nonetheless, the jackass was right. Paulie didn’t feel like there was anything strictly wrong with him. He didn’t feel brain damaged. Unless that was one of the effects of brain damage, though that sounded too much like a paradox. Paulie did feel different, but not in a way he could properly explain, and different without being worse. The only part of his body that actually hurt was his tooth, the one behind his left upper fang, but he chalked that up to George’s errant stick.
“Are you telling us that a person can spend—”
“No, Mister K,” the doctor said, “I am certainly not saying that. Obviously, your son—Paul, you did not spend nine minutes underwater. That would be impossible.”
“But Pinder turned on his stopwatch and measured,” Paulie said. He had seen the watch himself, and Pinder had purposefully not reset the timer because it did show nine minutes. His own perceptions Paulie would have doubted, but how could a watch be wrong?
The doctor leaned back in his chair. The leather crackled. Paulie shuddered at the sound. “Obviously, a boy’s perception is affected by many factors, not least of which is his excitement and a natural inclination to ‘fudge’ the truth when it comes to adventures and episodes, and while I don’t discount that the boy may have subjectively believed the time elapsed was nine minutes, the objective fact of the matter is that that is impossible. If the time had been nine minutes, we’d be a person less in this room right now.”
Paulie didn’t follow the logic.
His dad put his elbows on his knees and leaned forward. “Tell me, doctor,” he said, “have you read The Hobbit?”
“Honey…”
The doctor raised an eyebrow. “The children’s book?”
Paulie’s dad opened his mouth to say something serious but Paulie said instead, “My tooth still hurts.”
The doctor cleared his throat and spread his arms theatrically. “I’m a miracle worker, not a dentist.” Then he made several consecutive “Boo yeah!” When the faces around him failed to be any less blank, he said, “Al Pacino? Scent of the Woman?”
“That doctor is an idiot,” Paulie’s father said.
His eyes were focussed on the empty road taking them through a subdivision. They were in their car, going home. Paulie’s mum sat beside her husband in the passenger’s seat and Paulie sat in the back by himself. He was looking out the window at the town passing by at a constant fifty-five kilometres per hour. His dad rarely did more than five over the limit. It was his town, Paulie thought, because he’d been born here and raised here, but it felt no more his than the world at large did. Since the accident, he felt an alien even in his own backyard.
“He was looking at my breasts an awful lot,” Paulie’s mother said.
“Children’s book,” Paulie’s dad sneered. “I bet he couldn’t recognise real literature if it bit him in the butt.”
“Honey!”
“Oh, pumpkin. I’m sure Paul’s heard worse.”
Paulie blushed, not at his dad’s language, but at the innocence his parents still thought he possessed.
Yes, alien: that was word.
He felt that way at school on Monday, too. Everyone treated him as if he’d been diagnosed with cancer over weekend, and people he hardly knew walked up to him to tell him they were so glad he was back. He supposed he was glad to be back, too. He did get plenty of hugs and more than a few kisses.
In class, his teachers singled him out. For example, instead of giving a quiz, Miss Collins made everyone translate a newspaper article from the French CBC about the local Ontario boy (le garcon) who fell in a lake (le lac) while playing pond hockey (l’hockey). The article barely mentioned Pinder and Akira, but did mention George, who came across as a bonafide Canadian hero—brave and loyal, the epitome of non-European hockey values—which, Paulie admitted, George actually was. Sometimes stupid, always tough, in most situations willing to do what others expected of each other but never of themselves.
George had also come out of the whole ordeal without any serious health problems, but, unlike Pauie, he had always been a hardy guy. Fever kept him bedridden for two days, but after it broke he was good as new.
Whenever he and Paulie sat together in the school cafeteria, other students crowded around and took photos. Paulie supposed it was because genuine offline adventures were rare these days. Even bullying was migrating online. Ironically, many of the photos the students took made their way onto a Facebook page that someone had opened to celebrate the events of “the day Paulie almost drowned and George saved him”.
Their popularity lasted a little over a week. The Facebook page stayed up, as they always do, but the comments section quickly dried up. There was even a kind of backlash after an anonymous user posted an unsubstantiated theory that the rescue was all an elaborate hoax designed to garner popularity and sympathy for George for some undefined reason. Consequently, George was paranoid that one of the paramedics, who was a sworn enemy of his older brother, had taken a photo of him naked with shrinkage and would share it with the world. No photo ever surfaced and George eventually forgot about his paranoia.
And then it was over.
Everything went back to normal.
Normalcy reclaimed the school, the town and even Paulie’s family. His parents’ joy that he was alive turned to anger that he’d been reckless with his life. “And if Frodo had been so thoughtless,” his dad said to him one night in a slightly raised voice, “where would the One Ring be? What would have become of Middle Earth?” Paulie didn’t answer, but he did go to his room, from where his mum forbade him from emerging for two weeks unless it was to walk to school, use the bathroom or go downstairs for dinner. His parents also disconnected his internet. But, because they were from the pre-technological generation, they merely pulled the ethernet cable from his laptop and hid it in a kitchen cupboard. Paulie used the neighbour’s wireless connection instead.
He used it mostly to chat with Pinder and Akira.
George didn’t have his own computer and dropped by the house instead to chat face-to-face and collect the free dinners that accompanied being the saviour of an only child’s life. More than once, Paulie heard his parents entertain the possibility that they, too, could be the parents of “a boy like George”. When they put the possibility into practice in the evenings, Paulie put on his headphones to drown out the rhythmic movements of the bed springs.
“r they fucking again?” Pinder asked.
“yeah but dont call it that,” Paulie wrote back.
“its hot.”
“it most definately is not.”
“does ur mom moan a lot during it? like is she wild and loud?”
“you better not be fucking jerking off.”
“im not jeez.”
“hey was i really under there for nine minutes?”
“and 41 secs.”
“why’d you turn on the stopwatch anyway?”
“bcz i thought we should know when to give up on you coming out alive.”
“how long did you give me?”
“2 mins max.”
“but you didn’t give up on me after 2 minutes.”
“we didnt,” Pinder wrote. “did you kno that the world record for holding ur breath is 22 mins and 22 secs?”
Paulie did know that. Over the last few days, he’d looked up as much information about holding one’s breath underwater as he could find. There was just one problem. “but i didn’t hold my breath,” he wrote. “i swallowed water right away. i drowned.”
“maybe im typing to a ghost.”
“maybe i’m an alien.” Paulie’s heart started to pound as soon as he pressed Enter and sent the message.
There was a pause. Pinder wrote something, deleted it, and wrote something else. “what u mean? like an alien like bernard hopkins or like roswell?”
“i mean an alien for real. when i was underwater… was there any bright light or anything strange like sounds or smells, do you remember all 9 minutes and 41 seconds?”
“i remember all of it. there wasnt anything weird except us panicking and thinking you were dead and then george deciding to go in after you.”
“could you see me?”
“not after the first few secs. do u think u were abducted?”
Paulie’s fingers hovered over his keyboard. Then he typed five true letters: “maybe.”
“thats crazy. have u told anyone?”
“just you.”
“do u feel different than u did b4? maybe its just like ptsd and american soldiers in iraq.”
Paulie couldn’t describe how he felt. The only thing he could describe was his tooth. “my tooth hurts,” he wrote.
“hehe u serious? u got a stick to the face.”
“i’m probably just stressed, you’re right,” Paulie wrote. But he didn’t believe it. “i should get some sleep.”
They said goodnight and Paulie took off his headphones. The house was quiet. His parents were no longer making a baby George. Paulie crept out of his room, to the bathroom. He looked at himself in the mirror—he didn’t look like an alien—and brushed his teeth. The tooth that hurt was bleeding. He took off his clothes and was about to step into the bathtub to take a shower when he had an idea.
He plugged the bathtub drain and turned on the faucet.
When the tub was full, he shut off the water and stepped inside. Unlike the lake water, this water was warm and inviting. He sat down and reclined. Being submerged was relaxing. He had expected it to be somewhat traumatic, to bring back memories, but it didn’t. His body didn’t shake. His mind didn’t travel into the past. He reclined further until his neck was submerged and only his head was above the water, his nose still breathing as usual. Then he grabbed a mouth full of breath and pulled his head under, too.
He started to count.
He got to ninety two before feeling tightness in his chest and coming up for air.
He gasped. If he could only hold his breath for ninety two seconds in a controlled situation, at home, in a tub of warm water, there was no way he could have held it for more than that in the icy lake while panicked out of his skin.
Yet he knew that already. He knew that, that night, he hadn’t held anything. He’d let the water fill his body, he’d given up, and five hundred eighty one seconds later he was still very much alive. He congratulated himself on confirming the obvious. It was the next step, he knew, that was hard. He had to recreate the situation he’d experienced in the lake. He needed to drown again. But, for that, he would need help.
Akira paced back and forth in his dad’s kitchen, scratching his head. “I don’t know, Paulie. I mean it seems kind of risky.”
Paulie sat cross legged on a wooden chair. He was holding a stopwatch and a pair of boxer shorts. No one else was home. “It’s not risky. It’s an experiment. If you see me struggling, pull me out. That’s the rule. If you don’t see me struggling, keep track of the time and pull me out after nine minutes and forty one seconds.”
“What if you drown?”
“I won’t.”
“How can you be sure of that?”
“You were there. You saw what happened.”
“What if that was your ‘get out jail free card’? What if God gave you one extra chance and all you are doing now is wasting it by seeing if you have another?”
Paulie handed the stopwatch to Akira. “Your dad taught you not to believe in God,” he said.
“My dad taught me not to believe in things that cannot be proven,” Akira said. “That includes you staying underwater for ten minutes without holding your breath.”
“I’m not asking—”
“You’re asking me to have faith.”
“Only in what you saw for yourself, with your own eyes.”
“People saw burning bushes, didn’t they?”
“They thought they did.”
“And visions of spirits, and the Virgin Mary.”
“Hallucinations.”
“What if we all hallucinated?”
“I think your dad would say that’s highly unlikely. Besides, you saw Pinder’s watch. Machines don’t hallucinate.”
Akira fiddled with the stopwatch. “You know, even if you approach this scientifically, there are still hundreds of factors that have changed. The water is different, the temperature is different. The time is different. The day is different. Even if you could breathe underwater—”
“I wasn’t breathing underwater. I was existing.”
“Even if you could survive underwater without breathing, that does not mean you can do it now.”
“So if I can’t, if I start struggling, you pull me out.” Paulie bit his lower lip. “I simply need to know what happened.”
Akira nodded.
Paulie changed into his boxers in Akira’s room. When he entered the bathroom, the bathtub was already full of still, transparent water. What Paulie was about to do was both hard and easy. It was easy to drown. Everyone could do it. It was hard to drown intentionally, without flailing about in panic. He slid into the tub without a word.
“You are sure?” Akira asked.
“Yes,” Paulie said.
Akira dragged the tripod into position, placed the camcorder on top, tightened the clasps, and opened the viewfinder to point the lens in the proper direction.
“Make sure you get the outside of the tub, and don’t move the camera once it starts rolling.”
“People will still say you have tubes running in from underneath,” Akira said. “They will say you had packets of oxygen in your cheeks, or that the video was edited.”
Paulie moved his arms lazily through the water. He let some of it flow into his mouth, and swallowed it. “I don’t care what people think. This video’s not for them. It’s for me. I need to feel what I feel and then I need to see it, to know it inside and out.”
“As soon as you flap an arm or leg I will pull you out,” Akira said.
“That’s the rule.”
Paulie let his head fall back against the wall tiles. The energy-efficient light bulbs emitted clinically clean white light. The bathroom shone. Although Paulie had been here before, it had never registered with him just how clean the place was. It was like a lab or a hospital.
Akira put his finger on the camera’s red record button. “I will start rolling and, on three, I will start the timer.”
“Start the timer,” Paulie said.
Akira pushed the button. The camera beeped.
“One, two…”
Paulie heard barely heard “three”. The water rushed into his ears, dampening all sounds. He let his body fall deeper until his back was against the tub’s bottom. His eyes were open but his mouth was still closed. He opened it. The water rushed in. He swallowed and swallowed until he was as full of it as the tub. He choked—but concentrated on staying calm. There could be no rash movements, no jerking limbs. Even his head had to stay motionless, or else Akira would reach in, pull him out and the experiment would be over.
He felt the same things as before:
The white light was bigger than just a hole in a sheet of ice, but he was still a bundled up baby in a stroller being pushed through a cold winter day.
He was kissing Diana.
He heard the horn go after Patrice Bergeron’s overtime winner.
And he didn’t want to die. He wanted to live. The desire to live was strong—stronger than anything—a feeling all its own, comparable to nothing but itself—as obvious as an erection.
He coughed.
His knees bent and relaxed, bent and relaxed.
His hands scratched at his thighs.
His head fanned, side to side, while his mouth opened and he screamed into the surrounding liquid, which tasted like melted butter poured into his nostrils, behind his eyeballs and into every one of his pores.
It was over.
It had to be over.
He’d failed. He couldn’t keep calm. Any second now Akira would clasp his shoulders and pull him out of the tub and dry him off and say, “I told you, Paulie. I told you it was no use. I bet you are glad you didn’t try this stupid stunt yourself.”
Except it was his mum’s voice he heard, not Akira’s.
And Akira didn’t reach down.
And when he finally did and Paulie gasped, taking air into his lungs again, Akira didn’t say a single word. He merely showed Paulie the watch. Paulie rubbed his eyes. The watch’s display read:
9:57
Akira put the watch in front of the camera.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
Paulie stared at Akira, then at the camera, then at Akira again. “Fine,” he said, spitting out water. “I feel fine.”
Akira pressed a button and stopped the camera recording.
Paulie stood in the tub—the water he had spent the last ten minutes drowning in didn’t even reach his knees—and stepped onto the floor. Water dripped off of him. He took the towel Akira was holding out to him and wiped himself dry. “Why didn’t you pull me out?” he asked.
“You were not struggling. You were not moving at all. The rule was—”
“Show me the video.”
Akira loosened the clamps securing the camcorder to the tripod, picked up the camcorder, and rewound the recording. When it was ready, he opened the viewfinder and pressed play. Paulie huddled beside him, and together they watched ten consecutive minutes of Paulie’s body lying peacefully underwater on the tub floor. For the full duration, the picture barely changed. Paulie didn’t move. Even where Paulie distinctly remembered moving—his knees, his hands, his head—the Paulie in the viewfinder remained motionless. The second Paulie barely flinched.
When the recording reached the point of extraction, Paulie’s subjective experience merged with what was in the camcorder’s memory. Watching himself gasp for air, he remembered gasping for that air.
The video ended.
“I don’t believe it,” Akira said. His eyes were open wide. His skin was paler than usual. “You should be drowned.”
“I did drown. But you don’t have to believe. You’ve seen it three times now, twice in real life and once more through the eyes of a camera. A camera doesn’t lie.”
“There are not any videos of burning bushes,” Akira said.
“There aren’t any burning bushes.”
“You are for real?” Akira asked. “You are not playing a trick on me?”
“I’m not. I mean I don’t understand it any better than you do,” Paulie said, which wasn’t exactly true because only Paulie knew that his own experience was different than what the camera and everyone else had seen, but the point was still valid. “But I don’t think either us can say it didn’t happen.”
“It happened,” Akira said.
“I’m some sort of freak,” Paulie said.
“You are an unexplained phenomenon,” Akira said. “That is not the same.” He folded up the tripod, keeping the camcorder cradled under his arm. “If it is OK with you, I would like to show the video to my father. He may have insights to help you understand.”
“I’m not sure I want to understand,” Paulie said. For the first time, he was entertaining the idea of letting the matter drop. Despite how different he still felt, everyone else was back to treating him like they always did. That might be good enough.
“Or you could make a post online. There are forums for unexplained phenomena. Another user might be able to help.”
Paulie grinned. “I’m not a UFO or the Sasquatch.” The grin wilted into a grimace, and he sucked in air. His tooth had made itself known again. “Don’t tell your dad, either. At least not yet. However, there is something you can do for me. Do you have any Aspirin?”
Paulie drowned again in the evening when his parents were sleeping. And again in the morning after they’d left the house. He drowned for ten minutes the first time and twenty minutes the second. Within a week he had stayed under for more than three hours total, and once for over thirty minutes. It got easier with practice, too. The more he did it the more easily he believed in not dying, and the less of a distraction was his will to live.
Soon, drowning became his favourite activity.
He stopped looking at porn and he stopped playing video games. His social networking accounts lay dormant. When George came to his house, wanting to hang out at the rink, he was busy. When Pinder messaged him about coming over for dinner, he felt sick. He didn’t even notice when his mum gave back his ethernet cable because he’d stopped using the internet altogether, just like she wanted.
It was hard for him to say what it was he did when he drowned. Once he got the hang of it, it was like what he imagined meditation to be: the art of doing nothing, of emptying his mind. He fancied himself a Buddhist monk or maybe a Taoist, letting the water run freely over him, body and mind. Or were the Taoists supposed to be the running water itself? He wasn’t sure and couldn’t be bothered to check. It was a waste of time.
As Paulie became increasingly obsessed, he also became more brazen. He began drowning when his parents were still awake, or cutting school and going home to drown instead of going to French class. To drown: noyer. I am drowning: Je noie. What else did he need to know?
It was during one of these stolen drownings that Paulie finally discovered the way in which drowning was unlike meditation. That it was this way wasn’t hard to guess. It made perfect sense, given the physical reality of drowning. For emptying yourself is merely one aspect of drowning. Being filled with something else, with water, is the other. When a Buddhist monk empties his mind, it stays empty. The nothingness is the goal. When one drowns, nothingness is the creation of a vessel, and vessels exist to be filled. The first visions Paulie had while being drowned was of a desert castle drenched in milky fog being bombarded by strong gusts of wind that carried metal buckets, and with each gust the buckets scooped up a small part of the castle and deposited it on a nearby hill. Paulie watched for what felt like several minutes as in this way the wind decomposed the castle into a pile of rubble.
Later he was in space, watching an invisible hand (if it was invisible, how did he know it was a hand?) tip over a ceramic pitcher decorated with colourful flowers he couldn’t identify, pouring forth the Milky Way: Earth, Mars and Saturn as intergalactic cereal.
Not all of the visions, if that’s what they were, were so dramatic. Sometimes he saw regular brick buildings, fields, mountains and suburbs. Sometimes he saw nothing but sounds. He didn’t hear them. He saw them, the chirping of birds, the rumble of a waterfall, the crunching of pebbles beneath boots expressed as lines, colours and shapes. Although he didn’t know where these or any of the images came from, what they meant or how they fit together, from the beginning it was clear to him that the images were not his own. They were not of his mind. He was letting them inside from an unidentified external source, and just as easily letting them out, like a projector being fed a roll of film.
But when a film ends, you feel returned to the drabness of an unflinchingly vivid reality. You are back in your living room or sitting again in the fifth row of a smelly movie theatre. When Paulie awoke from his drownings, his bathroom felt increasingly blurred, almost pixelated. And it wasn’t just the bathroom. It was the hallway and his room, the school, everything. He wanted to awake again to a reality of sand castles and astro-pitchers.
“Are you feeling OK?” his mum asked him one evening. She had a parent’s look of concern on her face. “You’re not grounded any more, you know that right? You seem so distant.”
“Tell him he should get a girlfriend, a real Galadriel type,” his dad said from the living room.
“I’m fine,” Paulie said.
“And your tooth? You used to complain about that.”
“Fine,” he said.
“If you need anything, you let us know,” his mum said. “I know you think we’re fuddy duddies who don’t have a clue about what you’re going through, but we went through it ourselves. Everyone does. We’re not so different from you.”
Paulie doubted that very much.
That night, instead of watching TV with his dad or the Leafs game with his friends, Paulie pretended to go to sleep early, opened his window, and escaped down the side of his house toward the lake. It was frozen, but he pounded through the ice with a stick, and when the hole was big enough he jumped in and drowned until morning.
George grabbed him by the arm and pushed him against a row of lockers. A few people looked over, but when George gave them the stink eye they went back to minding their own teenage business.
“I know you’ve been back there,” George said.
Paulie shrugged. “Back where?”
“At the fucking lake. I’ve seen you out there. I’ve seen you go in and I’ve waited all night for you to come out.”
“And here I am.”
“What if you screwed up or floated off somewhere and couldn’t find the hole you made? What if it froze over, or it snowed so much you couldn’t tell how to get out?”
George was mad and there was a hint of garlic on his breath. George’s family didn’t eat garlic. That meant George had been over to Paulie’s house for dinner again.
“Did my parents tell you to spy on me?” Paulie asked.
“They’re worried. I’m worried.”
“Don’t worry.”
“You can’t keep doing this. Whatever it is you’re doing or taking, you’ve got to fucking stop.”
“He’s right,” a voice said. It belonged to Pinder.
“What is this, an intervention?” Paulie yelled, a little too loud. People looked over. George had taken hold of his arm again. Paulie shook it loose. “I’m not doing anything to you guys. Leave me alone.”
“You’re our friend,” Pinder said.
“You saw what happened to me out there that night. You know I’m different.”
“Because you can’t drown? Maybe I can’t burn, but I’m not about to go setting myself on fire to find out.”
“I didn’t go looking for this.”
“It was an accident. Maybe you should leave it at that. Fluke goal, lucky bounce. That’s it,” George said.
“What, this is hockey? You’re the one who pulled me out of the water after nine minutes. You thought you were pulling out a corpse, something to stick into a casket for my parents to cry over. What’s the first thought that came to your head when you saw that you were wrong, when you felt me breathing?”
“That you’re a lucky son of a bitch and none of us are on the verge of getting sued,” Pinder said.
“And you?” Paulie asked. His eyes bore into George’s.
“I felt guilty.”
“I didn’t ask what you felt. I asked what you thought, the first thought that crossed your mind. The thought that keeps crossing your mind, that I’m a goddamn freak.”
George shook his head. “I don’t like to think about that night at all, dude.”
“None of us do,” Pinder said. “Like the time I walked in on my step-sister rubbing one out. I saw it, I processed it, I purged my mind of all the details.”
“Was she hairy?” Akira had completed the circle.
“She’s not even Indian,” Pinder said.
“Point being?”
“Yes, she was hairy. There. Are you happy now?”
Paulie wondered whether Akira had told the others about the experiment in the bathtub. He was leaning to the side of no.
“The point of this discussion, which for once ain’t about sex at all, is that you fell into a hole you weren’t supposed to fall into and you should forget it and stop going back.”
“Get a hobby,” Akira said.
“Start smoking pot,” Pinder said.
“Anything. Just stop fucking drowning yourself because it’s unnatural as fuck.”
The morning bell rang.
“I’m late for class,” Paulie said. “And so are you.”
“Promise me you’ll at least take a break and think things over. We miss you, buddy.”
“I promise,” Paulie said.
As they scattered, each going off in a different reaction, Paulie grabbed Akira’s shoulder. “I didn’t tell them,” Akira said. He looked frightened. “I didn’t tell anyone.”
“When does your dad get back?” Paulie asked.
“Next week on Tuesday.”
“Fill him in, show him the video, and tell him I want to meet.”
Akira swallowed hard. “I will tell him—but what if they are right, what if it is better to leave it alone?”
Paulie’s own doubts had vanished the day he laid eyes on the castle in the desert. The doubts and fears of his friends only served to reinforce his determination. Science always frightened the unenlightened. The clueless masses would do anything to keep the exceptional among them down.
“Set up the meeting.”
Akira’s dad, Dr Ichi Mizoguchi, was a small, thin man in thick-rimmed black glasses that magnified the size of his eyes. He wore a blue vintage wool sweater that looked like it belonged on a European jazz musician. Indeed, he probably was a jazz musician in his spare time, as well as a photographer, astronomer and geologist. The walls of his study were covered in European pre-war film posters and blown up covers of prog rock albums from the 1970s. He was sipping hot tea from a small porcelain cup.
“Sit, please,” he said. His voice was so confident that Paulie had no trouble imagining it echoing around an auditorium, discussing particle physics or theories about the theoretical uses of dark matter.
Paulie sat.
Behind him, Akira, who’d been standing watch and staring at his own feet, said, “I guess I will leave you two alone,” and left.
The study door clicked closed.
“Please, have some tea,” Dr Mizoguchi said, holding out an identical cup to the one he was drinking out of.
Paulie took the cup. “Is it Japanese?” he asked. He wanted to say something because he was nervous and that was the first question to spring to mind. It was a stupid one. He wasn’t even sure if he meant the tea or the cup.
“Scottish,” Dr Mizoguchi said. “I bought it in Glasgow.”
“It must be great to be able to travel… so much—I mean, so frequently, as yourself.”
Dr Mizoguchi smiled. “Sometimes I travel as someone else entirely.”
Paulie took a sip of tea. Boiling hot.
“That was a joke. To lighten the mood. Yours feels oppressive. Tell me, are you a bright boy, Paul?” Dr Mizoguchi asked.
Paulie stumbled over an answer.
Dr Mizoguchi glanced at a poster of King Crimson’s In The Court of the Crimson King hanging on a wall by a window. “At school, for example. Do you receive top grades, are you contemplating attending a superior university?”
“A bit better than average, I guess,” Paulie said. “My grades.” He blew on his tea between sentences. He didn’t know whether that constituted ill manners or not. “And I’d like to go to university, yes. Maybe in Toronto. I haven’t looked at my options very well.”
“You may be honest with me, Paul.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Call me Ichi. Akira has told me your story. I have seen your video. I have spent most of my life studying matter and forces that others do not understand. I am not frightened by the unexplained.”
“Have you ever studied… someone like me?”
“I have not.”
Paulie’s hopeful expression faded.
“You are a unique specimen, Paul. Perhaps the only one. Probably the first of many, but a specimen far before your time.”
“I’m a freak, that’s what you’re saying.”
“A prototype, a deviation. Time is a freak, Paul. It is an aberration. And, yes, you are an aberration, too. You do not pursue the same interests as normal boys your age, do you?”
“I like hockey,” Paulie said a little defensively. “And I like girls, if you’re implying…”
“Continue drinking your tea. Do not get upset. I am not implying anything. I am asking, do you still like hockey and girls, after your first experience with the Ninetieth Degree?”
The Ninetieth Degree? Paulie had no clue what—
“Never mind the nomenclature. Please answer my question. I am not here to judge, only to learn.”
Paulie still liked hockey and girls, but where before there was passion and yearning, now there was boredom. A hockey game on TV wasn’t interesting. A girl in his class wasn’t what caught his eye. Both were faded photographs compared to the sublimity of what he saw during his drownings. “Not as much as before,” he said.
“My hypothesis is proved correct,” Dr Mizoguchi said.
“What is the Ninetieth Degree?”
Dr Mizoguchi put down his tea cup. “It is, so far, a mathematically based philosophical construct. Are you familiar with my work on theories of entanglement, Paul?”
“Quarks?”
“Of course you wouldn’t be. I apologise. It is just that I am getting ahead of myself, becoming presumptive in the presence of a fellow superior mind.”
“Like I said, I’m not especially smart. Akira’s way smarter than I am.”
“Akira,” Dr Mizoguchi said, “spends his time browsing hardcore pornography and sports statistics. He passes his school exams. He will go to university, and he will enter a profitable profession. He does not, however, have a superior mind.”
Paulie downed the rest of his hot tea in one gulp. His throat burned and he was sure he was going to have loose layers of dead skin in his mouth in the morning. There was a story on the BBC recently about the high rate of mouth cancers in certain parts of Iran, where people drank hot tea all the time. Paulie’s mind raced. Its thoughts were fractured, one slicing another in half, both falling, and as Dr Mizoguchi gazed at him he was sure that he was gazing into his mind, too. Who was gazing into whose?
“Relax, Paul. Calm yourself, and I will tell you about entanglement.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ichi.”
“Yes, Ichi.” Paulie considered the possibility that Dr Mizoguchi was trying to hypnotise him, so he looked away. Was hypnosis scientific or bogus?
“Time is not universal,” Dr Mizoguchi said. “It is, at its core, an illusion caused by the entanglement—let us say the occupation of the same space—of two different objects. These objects interact.”
“I think I get that,” Paulie said.
“Now imagine that both of these objects are you, Paul.”
Paulie remembered seeing himself on the video that Akira had made, unmoving at the bottom of the tub while simultaneously remembering the movements that he had actually made.
“Paul A is entangled with Paul B. You interact with you. Do you follow?”
“Somewhat.”
“We only ever follow somewhat. Anyone who claims to understand completely is a fraud. Good. Now imagine observing this scene. Because Paul A occupies the same space as Paul B, to all observers outside of this space, there is one Paul and he is static.”
“Like on the camera…”
“Yes, exactly like on the recording. However, if one were to go inside that space of interaction, to become entangled with Paul A and Paul B, that observer would no longer see a single static Paul. To that observer, there would appear to be motion, action, happenings.”
Paulie picked up his empty tea cup, mostly just to hold something and keep his fingers from betraying his anxiety.
“Do you want a refill?” Dr Mizoguchi asked. “There is plenty of tea.”
Paulie shook his head.
“Let me propose another hypothesis. I propose that during your drowning, when to the camera and to Akira you appeared static, you yourself experienced something else.”
Paulie’s cup dropped to the floor and shattered. He stood up to pick up the pieces.
“Leave them be!”
Paulie froze.
“I apologise for raising my voice. Sit again, please. I am not angry. I need to know, Paul. I need to know what you felt when you were drowning.”
“I felt shaking, my head was moving, and my knees…”
Tears started to stream down Dr Mizoguchi’s cheeks. “Yes, yes, and…”
Paulie weighed what to say against what to keep secret. He wanted Dr Mizoguchi to know. No, he knew that Dr Mizoguchi already did. But at the same time he felt that the details of the visions he had seen within the drownings were his and his alone. They were private. He didn’t want to share them.
“I saw things,” Paulie said. “Incredible things.”
“Things not of this world?”
“Yes.”
“Alien things?”
“Yes.”
“The Ninetieth Degree,” Dr Mizoguchi cried. “You have seen the Ninetieth Degree.”
Paulie sat back down in his chair.
Dr Mizoguchi went on, speaking faster and faster. “What we know as time is merely an emergent phenomenon come about as the result of entanglement. That we observe this phenomenon means only that we are observing it from within. Had we the capabilities to send an observer—a camera, for example—beyond the range of the entanglement, all of our world would appear dead.”
“But it wouldn’t actually be dead. I mean, we would still be here, talking and going to school and drinking tea?”
“The difference between being and seeing is meaningless in this context. But, yes, we would still be here. We would observe one so-called reality and the camera would observe another. But you, Paul, have gone beyond being and seeing, life and death. You possess the power to create time within time, do you understand?”
Paulie didn’t understand anything any more. Too many concepts were being expressed in too many words, which were themselves imprecise.
“Entanglement within entanglement.”
He just wanted to drown again. He wanted to forget everything and drown and see new visions.
“Visualise it like this. Every life is a conveyor belt running north-south, or along the x-axis of a Cartersian coordinate plane that represents our known reality. Have you studied calculus already, Paul? No, no, it hardly matters. You grasp these concepts at a higher level. You have no need for useless crutches.” He was gesticulating madly with his hands and salivating at the mouth. His glasses had turned crooked on his head. “The conveyor belt, it runs north-south at a constant rate for all, but it has a definite beginning and a definite end for each, and we say that its length is measured in time, and for each person his conveyor belt is called his lifespan. When you are born, you are dropped at the beginning—let us call this point B—and you ride the belt until you die, where once and for all you thrown into the endless abyss at a point we may call D.”
“I don’t think I—”
“The idea is simple. By creating time within time, you stop your conveyor belt, Paul. You get out and you walk in a straight line exactly ninety degrees east or west of your lifespan. Unlike the finite world between points B and D, the world that exists east and west—the world that none but you have perhaps ever seen—is infinite. It is as real as the highest quality Scottish tea, yet you can sip from it forever.”
Paulie, grasping at anything to conceptualise the insanity of what Dr Mizoguchi was saying, tossed aside math, physics and religion and settled on Minecraft. “Endless creation,” he said, aloud to himself as much as to Dr Mizoguchi. “Endless creation and all the time in the world to explore it.”
Akira had introduced him to Minecraft several years ago, when it was still in beta.
Dr Mizoguchi wiped his cheeks. “You truly understand.”
Paulie shivered. He did.
“How much Earth time have you spent in the Ninetieth Degree, Paul?”
Paulie wasn’t sure, but he did a quick calculation in his head to figure it out. “Ten hours, maybe. Less than a day for sure.” He knew he should be keeping better track. He would start a dedicated spreadsheet.
“You’re that much younger, Paul. Your body doesn’t age when you’re off the conveyor belt. According to my model, Earth time passes you over.”
Paulie didn’t feel any younger. He felt older.
“Have you written of your experiences anywhere—on your computer, perhaps? In a Google doc?”
“No.”
“So the NSA doesn’t know yet,” Dr Mizoguchi purred.
They were startled by a knock on the door.
Dr Mizoguchi straightened his glasses and cleared his throat and the usual confidence returned to his voice. “Yes?”
“I thought you might want cookies. I know that thinking always makes me hungry. I baked chocolate chip and peanut butter,” Akira said from the other side.
Dr Mizoguchi scratched his head.
Paulie shrugged.
“I suppose being aware of infinity does not mean one cannot enjoy a freshly baked cookie or two,” Dr Mizoguchi said. “Bring them in,” he told Akira.
Akira opened the door and walked in carrying a tray of light and dark cookies, which he placed on the desk. “Help yourselves. I already took several for myself. These are all for you.” He bowed. “Are discussions proving fruitful?”
“Quite,” Dr Mizoguchi said.
Paulie stuffed an entire chocolate chip cookie into his mouth. It was so deliciously creamy it nearly melted on his tongue. The proportion of chocolate to butter was exquisite. Though he’d never admit it publicly, the cookie was even better than the ones his mum made. “These are really good,” he said while chewing.
Then he sucked in air. His tooth was making itself known again.
“Is the tooth still bothering you?” Akira asked.
Dr Mizoguchi broke off half a cookie, put it in his mouth and then placed other half back on the tray. The topic of the tooth had piqued his interest.
“Uh, no,” Paulie said. “Kinda. Less, I think. It’s not a big problem, anyway. Comes and goes.”
“Has this toothache been bothering you since the time you fell into the lake?” Dr Mizoguchi asked.
There was something suspicious about the way Dr Mizoguchi was feigning nonchalance. He wasn’t good at it. And the way he kept grinding his peanut butter cookie into mush without swallowing it…
“I don’t really remember,” Paulie said. “I think it hurt before then. It’s my own fault because I don’t floss every day.”
“Who does? I know an exceptional dentist. I can arrange a visit. And if money is a problem for your parents, I can put in a word for a discount rate,” Dr Mizoguchi said.
“Thank you,” Paulie said, “but it’s really OK. You’ve already helped me so much, Dr Mizoguchi.”
“Ichi.”
“Yes, Ichi. I should be going now.”
Scooping up a handful of cookies on the way, Paulie backed out of the study. “See you at school tomorrow,” he said to Akira, but he was already running out the door.
An innocent question (“Mom, do you think maybe I can go live with grandma in Texas for a while?”) had turned into an improvised family meeting, which usually meant it wasn’t far from devolving further, into an interrogation. Not that it would be a malicious interrogation. Nobody would get beaten with a wrench or have his family shipped off to Siberia—this wasn’t Cold War-era Moscow—but, then again, what did Paulie know about the Soviet Union? His knowledge of interrogations was limited to the third season of Game of Thrones. Hence, even interrogations that would have made Stalin chuckle made Paulie distinctly uncomfortable.
Not to mention that the questioning was taking place awkwardly on the living room stairs, with Paulie trapped between his grim-faced dad, looking up, and his worried mum, looking down.
“I knew something was wrong,” she said. “A mother always knows these things. I wish you would have come to us sooner. Your father and I, we want to help. We really, really do.”
“Is it bullies?” his dad asked. He held a rolled up newspaper in one hand and a glass of orange juice in the other. Paulie ventured a guess that he had just finished reading about some bullying incident in Newfoundland or New York State. “Because if it’s bullies, there are things we can do. You shouldn’t feel pressured to leave just because other kids are being cruel. You’re not the one contributing to a poisoned school environment. They’re the poison.”
It wasn’t bullies. It was Dr Mizoguchi—the things he’d said and, more than that, the way he’d said them, with a gleam in his eye and razor sharpness to his tongue. “Yes,” Paulie said, “it’s bullies.”
His mum descended several steps.
“What have they done to you? My, gosh. They haven’t touched you, have they? Has it been physical? You’d tell us if it was physical, wouldn’t you? It’s just been name calling and that kind of bullying. Have they been taking your lunch money?”
When she was close enough, she hugged him. Paulie didn’t mind the hug. It helped him pretend their life experiences weren’t actually miles apart.
“It’s because you’re small. I always knew it,” his dad said. Paulie didn’t feel small. He considered himself average size for his age. “Obviously these other kids haven’t the faintest idea about the great achievements of the small people in history. Napoleon carried the ideals of the French Revolution. Frodo Baggins saved Middle Earth. How big were they? They were your size, or smaller. Gollum, too. All played their parts.”
Ever since running home from the Mizoguchi house, Paulie had encountered a rising sense of dread wherever he looked and whatever he did. The only thing that provided him with any respite was drowning, but he couldn’t drown forever, could he?
“It’s because of the thing with the lake,” Paulie said.
“The other children are teasing you because of that? They quite obviously don’t know what this family went through,” his mum said.
“Bullying,” his dad corrected her, “not teasing.”
“Is there a difference?”
“Of course.”
“But he said they didn’t touch him.”
“There’s still a difference.”
Talking about him, they were talking through him. Paulie sat down on the steps and rubbed his head with his hands. “It would be temporary. I don’t want to move to Texas for the rest of my life.”
His parents stopped discussing the interplay of teasing and bullying. “You can’t just move to the United States,” his mum said, “even if you wanted to. Not without a visa.”
“Especially since nine eleven,” his dad said.
“Maybe we could arrange for you to visit your grandma for a few weeks during the summer.”
“But anything else is out of the question.”
“It’s January,” Paulie said. “Summer’s still a long way off.”
“What you need to do is stand up to those cowards,” his dad said. “Running away from them won’t solve anything. The only direction to run is towards Mordor, not away from it.”
So it was hopeless. Paulie could live in fear, take a Greyhound over the border, or he could take George’s advice about the whole thing and forget he was special—but how could he ever forget the fantastic landscapes he’d seen, the theories Dr Mizoguchi had told him, and the trips the combination of both took his mind on each time he closed his eyes to go to sleep.
Afterwards, he’d wake up in a cold sweat, confused about where he was and what was happening. He’d gasp for air, automatically aiming for the surface of the water he wasn’t under. Sometimes he’d yell out. And in the mornings, having aborted sleep half a dozen times, he’d be sore and tired and waiting for the first opportunity to quit the world and drown.
In the days that followed Paulie’s meeting at Akira’s house, Dr Mizoguchi started leaving him messages, first on the phone (“Paulie, it’s Akira’s dad. He says you forgot something at the house and that you should come pick it up and stay for dinner,” his mum would say after picking up the phone, then she’d check to see if Paulie’s dad was around. If he wasn’t, she’d flirt with Dr Mizoguchi for a while before hanging up.) and later on paper, in neat handwritten notes stuck to the outside of Paulie’s bedroom window or slid inside his locker at school. The content of these was terse: “Must meet”, “Vital, you know what”, “Ignorance is death”, “It is coming for you.” The last two freaked Akira out the most because they reinforced the sense of impending doom that he felt and that he was trying desperately to convince himself was all in his head.
Yet despite Dr Mizoguchi’s persistence, and despite Paulie seeing his thin Japanese silhouette behind every shadow the sun happened to cast his way, Dr Mizoguchi never made direct contact. He never accosted Paulie outside of school. He never knocked on Paulie’s front door. Paulie assumed it was for the same reason that Dr Mizoguchi never communicated over the internet, either: the existence of spies, whom Paulie usually imagined as an international cabal of black-suited NSA types and pale-skinned l33t hackers gone over to the dark side.
When George came over to his house, Paulie locked himself in his room and pressed his ear to the bedroom door to listen to George’s conversations with his mum. She would ask mostly about her son being bullied and George would say, “That’s the first I’ve heard of it, but if someone lays a finger on him, I’ll lay my fist on his face.”
Pinder came too sometimes, which was weird. Usually Pinder just sent instant messages or an email, or shared tweeted pictures of cats saying things like, “What? Is got your tongue?”. All of these Paulie left unanswered. He also deleted his Twitter account and religiously cleared his chat logs after every message, just in case. Who knew what was bugged and what wasn’t. His Facebook account was a tougher beast to kill. It stayed active. As for Akira, Paulie considered him his father’s tool, a set of obedient hands that baked cookies and were possibly capable of much, much worse.
That still left interactions with people at school, but Paulie kept those to a minimum. He cut class a lot. When he did go, he was always the quiet guy who sat at the back. The most any teacher could get out of him was an “I don’t know. I didn’t do the homework.” They could do nothing with that. Therefore, they simply noted his lack of participation in their grade books and pestered other students instead.
Between classes, Paulie hid in the bathroom stalls, sneaked into the boiler room, or camped out under the bleachers on the girl’s football field, the one the school board didn’t care about. It was a cold place, but Paulie preferred the company of his own mind and the bitter wind to the company of his friends. He was sick of their concern, which sometimes sounded no more genuine than Dr Mizoguchi’s nonchalant inquiry into the state of his tooth. He didn’t suspect George or Pinder of anything nefarious, but at best they were a hassle and a distraction where frostbite was a more pleasantly passive worry. Tender earlobes healed themselves.
He existed this way for weeks.
His parents gave up trying to pry information out of him and settled on the useful narrative that he’d fallen in love, been publicly humiliated by his cruel object of affection, and that that was what had started the bullying. “The other kids are probably making fun of his broken heart, but he’s not going to talk to us about girls,” his dad said. “Hobbit business is hobbit business, so unless you’re Gandalf the Grey, you best leave it alone and let it sort itself out.”
“I don’t know,” his mum said. “We could find him somebody, a nice girl who doesn’t wear makeup, to hold his hand and blush when he whispers into her ear how pretty she is. Just like you found me. What do boys these days like in a girl?”
“The same thing they’ve always liked,” his dad said. Then he lowered his voice, though not far enough. “Big melons.”
His mum squealed, and the pair of them giggled all the way up the stairs to their bedroom, where they slammed the door shut with the obvious intention of attempting to make a baby George again.
Paulie put on his headphones.
He was glad his parents had each other. They were normal and they were still in love. For them, life would never be the unfathomable individual exercise in perseverance that it had become for him. His parents would never feel solitary. Indeed, he doubted they even remembered those days. And if they were successful in making their baby, their family life would go on too. As Paulie saw it, he was a welcome—but not intrinsic—part of their lives, and they of his. They smiled to him, they cared, they provided him with food and shelter. He helped out with the chores. If he disappeared, they’d be sad for a while, but their sadness would end, and the money they saved by not spending it on him they could put to better use for themselves or for the child they were now trying to conceive.
In that frame of mind, Paulie decided to vanish.
It would be better for everyone. Most of all, it would be better for him.
Because he was already in the process of gradually extricating himself from his school life—would a teacher miss a student who never spoke?—and the lives of his friends, he decided to adopt the same tactic at home. An abrupt change would trip his parents’ silent alarm. It was better to tread carefully over creaky floors.
This boiled down to coming home later after school. The final bell would ring, and Paulie would escape to his spot under the bleachers, where he planned the route he would take and the life he would lead once he left town forever. He fantasised about getting a part-time job and renting a small cabin somewhere in the woods, far from the city. It wouldn’t be in the United States any more. Texas was off the table. His flight would now be to the west or north, perhaps to the remote areas of British Columbia or the Yukon.
When he did get home, his parents usually didn’t notice that it was later than it had been yesterday, and later still than on the day before yesterday. On the few occasions they did ask where he’d been, he had an answer ready: “I was playing intramural volleyball” or “I decided to join the school paper.” These types of answers were twice useful. Not only were they acceptable alibis, but they also lowered his parents’ vigilance. If he was getting involved in activities, it could only mean that his heartache and bully problems were easing. Calmed, his parents retreated nightly to their love nest.
As for Dr Mizoguchi’s notes, they continued to arrive in the usual places with the usual frequency, but Paulie simply ignored them. He took them off his bedroom window without reading them, and he let them pile up in his locker like a bunch of losing lottery tickets in a wallet. For all he knew, the notes were blank or contained the secret to making money on the stock market.
At six forty-three on a gloomy overcast Tuesday evening under the girls’ football field bleachers, as Paulie braved the blistering wind, busying himself choosing the routes he’d take travelling through Alberta and imagining the dazzling visions he’d experience once he was free to spend all his spare time drowning, one of Dr Mizoguchi’s notes that Paulie had read came true.
It came.
It slipped silently under the bleachers, undetected in the darkness until Paulie felt the heat of its furry paw reach around the side of his head, pulsing in pain with his tooth, and press vinegar softness up his virgin nostrils and into his lips.
The world wobbled.
Paulie wobbled along with it.
It pulled him backward by the face on rubbery legs struggling to stay solid enough for his boots to find balance or ground—
They were on open terrain.
Its paw inched up to cover his eyes. They stung. His mouth gaped open. Breathing was hard. Screaming was impossible. The sound that he wanted to be “Help me!” left his throat as a muffled babble.
“Be silent,” it said in accented English. Its voice was deep and distorted. “Make a sound and I kill you.”
Paulie’s eyes rolled back in his head seeing grey clouds moving across a sky in which no stars twinkled.
A dull orb moon blurred.
It sped up. Its grip was strong. Paulie’s legs moved faster to keep up, to keep vertical. The girls’ football field bordered a forest, toward which it pulled Paulie…
Into it.
Branches bent back by its body snapped when they passed.
Dry branches broke.
“Stupid boy, imbecile head. Tell me all or I kill you,” it said. “I beat you harder than your heart beat you now.”
Paulie’s pulse raced.
Over the forest floor they went, the two of them moving swiftly over exposed roots and rocks slick with snow.
Paulie’s foot lost traction, slipped.
It spun him around—briefly, Paulie saw its shape: slim, taut and pure black, a head with a humanoid face obscured by mesh that was like the magnetic triangle of Miss Collins’ panties behind a layer of panty hose as she bent forward to correct someone’s accent grave into an aigu—said, “Keep ahead or I kill you,” and prodded him in the back with something hard and sharp, like a rifle barrel. “Don’t look back.”
The ground inclined.
Ahead, the trees thickened.
Their branches scratched Paulie’s cheeks.
It prodded him.
He moved.
They crested a hill and began traversing its decline. Paulie had never been here before. He closed his eyes and tried to picture Google Maps, to place himself, to predict where it was taking him. He nearly walked into a tree.
“Watch where we’re going,” it said—accentless for the full sentence, before adding immediately in its accent again, “Or I kill you.”
Paulie’s back hurt because of its prodding.
The forest opened into a clearing.
In the middle of the clearing beckoned a hole, human sized and freshly dug. A shovel lay nearby. Next to it was a snow shovel. Several ropes were slung over the stub of a branch.
Paulie stopped several strides from the hole.
“Go,” it said.
He stepped obediently to the edge.
It spun him so that they were face to mesh-obscured face. “Don’t look at me,” it said.
It had a cube shaped lump on its neck.
It held a gag in its hand—the kind of spider gag that Paulie recognised from BDSM porn and a party last summer, where a group of twelfth graders had tied a naked ninth grade girl to a table and forced her to swallow alcohol until she threw up all over her face. “Vodka boarding,” they’d called it. They fucked her after wiping her down.
Paulie closed his eyes.
It placed the spider gag in his mouth and fastened it around his head.
It placed its furry paw on his throat.
“Imbecile boy, you are a mistake. I will correct you,” it said, squeezing. And with its other paw it punched Paulie so hard in the stomach that his heels stepped back on air and he tumbled into the hole.
He landed on his back on a painful mix of hard packed dirt and ice. The hole wasn’t deep, perhaps three feet, but before he could do more than reach out with his arms, a shovelful of snow landed on his face. He wiped away as much as he could and swallowed the rest. He lowered his arms and tried to undo the gag.
A snow shovel smashed into his face.
He turtled.
“Leave the gag,” it said.
It was looming over him, looking down, the snow shovel poised for another strike.
“What do you want?” Paulie said. The words came out garbled but distinct enough to be understood.
“Do as I say and live,” it said. “Do else and no.”
“I’ll do whatever you want,” Paulie said.
He wanted to see his friends and parents again. He couldn’t believe how much he wanted to see them. He felt the onset of fear paralysis. He still tasted vinegar. He prayed in his head to a God he didn’t believe in to save a life he didn’t care about, making promises he knew he wouldn’t keep.
“Take snow,” it said.
Two more shovels of snow fell on Paulie’s face. He couldn’t see. Two furry fingers pushed themselves and snow so deep down his throat he gagged. He fought to keep his own tongue from choking him. His eyes watered. The heat of his body melted the snow, and the water filled him. More snow fell. Furry fingers pushed more of it into him, making more water, as a chip clip closed his nose, and through eyes breaking through a crust of snow he saw it and that he was drowning.
He threw himself upward.
It punched him down, grabbed his right hand, and bent a finger backward, breaking it.
Paulie screamed through the snow and ice water in his throat.
The water pouring from his eyes was tears.
The spider gag kept his mouth open. It worked methodically. “You raise hands again, I break another. Understand?”
Paulie moaned, “Yes.”
“You be good boy now and drown,” it said and cut across Paulie’s neck with something that felt like a razor blade. Warm blood flowed down his skin. “Do not panic. If you do as I say you live… I say drown. This was control slice… after you drown I slice your body up and down… so much… do not pretend… sliced dead.”
The words faded.
The pain and the fear fell away.
The lights knocking on Paulie’s closed eyelids—ended, and Paulie was drowning…
Neon tigers stalked a stegosaurus through a maze of eroded stalagmites. Organic skyscrapers sprouting leaves burst through a layer of broken nut shells. Hens laid glass eggs filled with the embryos of cities. White ladybugs orbited protons. Paulie sat on a mountaintop on a bench made from spray paint. He looked over at the discarded cans. The cans blinked.
A shovel blade hit dirt inches from Paulie’s head.
Instinctively, he tried to get out of the way, but he couldn’t. His stomach was a mess of butterflies and water. He coughed, expelling liquid and accidentally swallowing topsoil.
He’d been buried alive.
After drowning.
Naked.
The shovel blade hit again, a little more carefully this time, carving out enough space to expose Paulie’s face to moonlight.
Moonlight and its face. “Blink,” it said.
Paulie blinked several times with his right eye. The left was still holding up three feet of dirt.
“Good,” it said. “You are still living. Close your eyes. Be still. I dig you out.”
When Paulie was free, it pulled him out of the hole, undid the gag, tied it around his wrists held together in front of his crotch, and pushed him backward until he felt tree bark sandpaper against his spine. Goosebumps had spread themselves across the entirety of his skin. He saw his ruined clothes laying in a bloody pile by the hole.
It slid three straps around Paulie’s body, securing him to the tree: one over his neck, one over his chest, and one just below his knees.
“Tell me how to do it,” it said.
“How to do what?”
“Tell me how you drown.”
Although its clothes were black, Paulie began to discern patterns on it, shapes, as if someone had applied spray paint over…
“I don’t know. I didn’t do my homework,” Paulie said.
A Vancouver Canucks jersey. That hideous orca was unmistakable even under a coat of black paint.
It slapped Paulie in the face. “Tell me everything about it, you imbecile boy. Such sublime knowledge is wasted on you.”
“I die,” Paulie said. “All I do is die.”
“There is no other trick?”
“No trick.”
It reached down—metal clanked against metal—and produced a pair of needle-nose pliers. “It is just the tooth, then.”
The mesh on its face didn’t just look like Miss Collins’ panty hose. It was panty hose.
Its fuzzy paw was a winter glove.
It took the glove off, revealing a hairless human hand, to better handle the pliers.
“Doctor Mizoguchi?” Paulie said.
“Silence. Open your mouth.”
“Ichi?”
It brought the pliers close to Paulie’s mouth. “Shut up, open up and let me take what’s rightfully mine.”
When Paulie didn’t comply, it forced the pliers inside.
“Which one is it?”
Paulie bit down and tasted metal.
The pliers closed on whatever tooth was closest. “Is it this one?” They tugged. “If you don’t tell me, I’ll simply take all of them, you fool. Resistance is pointless. Give me what I deserve and go on with your pitiful life.”
“No,” Paulie said.
It pulled on the tooth.
“No,” Paulie cried. He knew it was right. If it wanted to, it could pull all his teeth, one by bloody one. “Not that one. Upper row, left side, the one behind the fang. That’s the one that’s been hurting.”
“Since you fell into the lake?”
“Yes, since.”
“I don’t know if I believe you. Do you swear you’re telling the truth?” It released the wrong tooth and gripped the right one. “I may start with this one, yes. But I think I shall do them all, just in case. I’m sure you understand. You would do the same in my place, Paul.”
“I swear it’s this one.”
Dr Mizoguchi took off his other fuzzy glove and using both bare hands to get a stronger plier grip on Paulie’s tooth ripped it clean out of Paulie’s mouth.
Blood sprayed onto his panty hose mask.
Paulie felt a surge of pain, followed by immense, immediate relief.
Dr Mizoguchi dropped the tooth into his palm, observed it for a few seconds in the pale moonlight, and shoved it into his pocket. “One down.” He came forward. “Thirty one to go.”
“Hey, motherfucker. I don’t what kind of fucking freak you are but if you don’t want me to beat you to death you better back the fuck away from that tree,” a voice boomed.
It belonged to George.
He walked into the forest clearing wearing his Boston Bruins jersey and flanked by Pinder, who was in a vintage Maple Leafs sweater. Both of them held hockey sticks and looked like they were ready to go full McSorley on anybody unwise enough to get in their way.
Holding the pliers, Dr Mizoguchi spun and stared at the two teenagers.
“This be some perverse occult shit,” Pinder said.
“You OK, Paulie?” George asked.
Paulie nodded. He didn’t quite believe what he was seeing. He tongued the empty space where his tooth used to be.
“Get on your fucking knees, freak,” George said.
Dr Mizoguchi laughed. “You’re too late, you idiots. It’s you who are already on your knees, you…” His deep, distorted voice became a stream of static. He clawed at and ripped the voice distortion box off his neck. In his altogether normal voice, he continued, “You pathetic mental deficients, fated to drown your inconsequential lives in sex, beer and your beloved NHL. As for me”—He threw his pliers at George.—”I’ll be exploring the Ninetieth Degree for eternity!”
George ducked.
The pliers smacked a tree trunk.
Dr Mizoguchi took off past Paulie and bolted into the forest, where he vaulted nimbly over a downed cedar before being utterly and completely consumed by the deepest darkness.
“Let him go,” Paulie said. “He’s not coming back.”
“Are you sure you’re OK?” George asked.
“I’m sure.”
Pinder picked up Dr Mizoguchi’s pliers and used them to cut through the three straps binding Paulie to the tree.
Freed, Paulie shivered. It was a cold winter night and he was as nude as a newborn.
George glanced at the pile of Paulie’s bloody clothes.
“Believe me, there’s a lot I have to explain,” Paulie said. He was about to go on and start the explaining when George raised his hand.
“And we do believe,” he said. Pinder nodded. “That’s why, like I said before, there’s some shit we just don’t want to know, understand or ever see again.”
“Let’s get you home,” Pinder said.
They started to trudge through the forest, toward the girls’ football field.
“And don’t worry, all we’ll tell your parents is that bullies followed you after school and chased you into the forest—where we were waiting to wreck their faces so that they’ll never bother you again,” George said. “Because that’s what friends do. They wreck faces for each other.”
Paulie smiled. Although George had now saved his life twice, and despite how grateful he was for that, Paulie was also jealous of George and Pinder’s ignorance. They could choose not to understand, they could refuse to know. Paulie no longer had that luxury. He had visited the Ninetieth Degree. He knew it existed and how amazing it was, and how dull their lives must be in comparison: moving uniformly along three separate line segment conveyor belts until, one day, each of them would reach his point D and go head first into the abyss…
Paulie touched the razor wound on his neck.
He also knew what it was that Dr Mizoguchi had confirmed as a result of tonight’s harrowing experiment. For a drowning body, time stops. Drowning creates its own time within Earth time, but that time is the result of entanglement. To an outside observer, it does not exist. The drowning body, actually two dynamic bodies, appear as a single static one. Tonight’s conclusion was that this static body is indestructible. Everything done to it, whether natural aging or a thousand razor slices, is reset when the drowning ends. The body returns to Earth time in the exact physical state as it left. Dr Mizoguchi could have put Paulie through a wood chipper, and once the drowning was over Paulie would have come back whole. In other words, one could drown, and therefore explore the Ninetieth Degree, in perpetuity.
“How did you find me?” Paulie asked.
“We’d been keeping an eye on you for a while,” Pinder said. “You were acting really weird. Everyone was worried.”
“We knew most of your hiding places. So when we found tracks leading from the bleachers into the forest, we followed them,” George said.
They stepped onto the football field.
“You should probably stay here, unless you want to walk nudies through town,” Pinder said.
“I’ll borrow my brother’s truck and pick you up,” George said.
“And where’s Akira?” Paulie asked.
“He wasn’t at school today and he’s been offline for hours. With all due respect, he’s been acting pretty nuts lately, too.”
“Just nowhere near as nuts as you.”
“Plus he’s weird.”
Morbid thoughts flooded Pinder’s mind, most involving a boy’s dead body stashed: under a bed, in an oven, in a massive safe hidden behind one of Dr Mizoguchi’s prog rock posters. “We need to stop by Akira’s house,” Paulie said. “Before you take me home.”
George was a bad driver, heavy on the accelerator and always late on the brakes, but that pretty much described him at everything, and who was Paulie to complain. If it hadn’t been for that personality, he would never have discovered drowning. George screeched the truck to a halt at a stop sign, looked both ways at empty suburban streets, and spun the truck’s wheels back into forward motion.
Akira’s front door was unlocked.
They moved in quietly through the front entrance and explored the interior room by room, staying together for safety. George and Pinder kept their hockey sticks raised, ready to force back any attackers. It reminded Paulie of playing playing Left 4 Dead.
But the house was empty.
No zombies came.
There were no signs of wrongdoing.
In Akira’s bedroom, Paulie found some clothes to put on.
In the kitchen, a tray of cookies sat on a counter. Paulie picked one up and took a bite. “Freshly baked. Still warm,” he said. The cookie was as delicious as before.
“Maybe they drove somewhere,” Pinder said.
They checked the detached garage, where Dr Mizoguchi usually kept his Range Rover.
The Range Rover was gone.
Next to the empty garage was a plastic garden shed from Canadian Tire. Someone started pounding on the inside. “In here!”
The shed was locked, but George yelled, “Stand back as far as you can,” and body checked the door.
On the third try he broke through.
Akira stood bug eyed inside. “You guys should not be here. It is my father. He is… Paulie, you are in danger. Ever since…”
“I know,” Paulie said. “But it’s OK now.”
“Before he locked me in here, he gave me this,” Akira said, handing Paulie a handwritten letter in the same neat style as the notes that Paulie had found stuck to his window and delivered to his locker. The letter said: “Dear Akira, I regret that you are unexceptional. We could have done much together. Nonetheless, I leave you everything in time. Goodbye. Do not attempt to find me, for I will be in a place whose very existence you are incapable of understanding.”
“Do you make sense of this?” Akira asked Paulie.
“He won’t be back.”
As if on command, Akira lunged forward—and wrapped his arms around Paulie to give him one of the strongest bear hugs Paulie had ever experienced.
“I’m sorry,” Paulie said.
Sorry about your father, sorry about the loneliness you’ll feel, and sorry that I ever doubted you, my friend.
Paulie’s mum hugged him, too. She also covered both his cheeks and his ice cold forehead in violent kisses, before handing him off to Paulie’s dad, who was a little more discreet in his affection on account of George, Pinder and Akira standing and watching in the hall.
“We were worried sick,” his mum said, now hugging George, whose face she was smushing against her bosom, an act he didn’t seem to be minding one bit.
“We called the school to ask about your volleyball team and your newspaper. They told us that volleyball season’s over and that the paper closed last year from a lack of funding,” his dad said.
George finally came up for air. He had a big smile on his face. Pinder greedily took his spot.
“You shouldn’t lie to us like that,” Paulie’s mum said.
“After calling the school, we called your parents,” his dad said to George and Pinder. “They didn’t know where you were, either.”
Paulie’s mum let Pinder breathe, but he pushed right back in for seconds. “That’s when we figured you must be laying a trap,” she said.
“For the bullies.”
George cleared his throat.
“We got them good,” Paulie said. Lying, like any skill, improved with practice. “Once and for all. They won’t be messing with me, or any of us, any more.”
“It looks like it was quite a scrap.” His dad was noting the razor blade cut on Paulie’s neck. “And you lost a tooth, I see.” He crossed his arms in front of his body. Like that, he looked slightly regal, definitely not a run of the mill hobbit. “Which is not to say that I condone the use of violence to solve problems, but in this world sometimes you’ve got to drop the gloves.”
A hockey reference? Paulie was stunned. His dad didn’t like hockey. He watched baseball and golf.
“Drop the gloves to teach people a lesson,” his dad went on. “You fuck with the Shire, the Shire’s going to fuck back with you.”
“Honey!”
“They’ve heard worse, pumpkin. Trust me.” He turned to Paulie. “But no more lies. We know you’re growing up and you’ve got your own life and your own problems that you want to solve your own way, but we’re a family and a family depends on honesty. If you don’t want to talk about something, tell us you don’t want to talk about it. Don’t make up stories.”
“Yes, dad,” Paulie said.
“As for the rest of you boys, you’re more than welcome to stay for a late spaghetti dinner but only if you call your parents first. I’m sure they’re worried.”
George and Pinder called home. Akira pretended. Tears welled up in his eyes as he held a short, imaginary conversation with the only parent he’d ever had, and whom Paulie was sure he’d never see again. Thankfully, eating brightened Akira’s mood and for an hour they all set the world aside. Spaghetti had that ability. Akira slurped down long strands of it, sending sauce flying everywhere.
George and Pinder left by ten o’clock. Akira lingered, visibly dreading going back to his own house, but when Paulie suggested he stay overnight, Akira refused. “I will have to return some time. I do not see the point of delaying.”
“Do you want a ride?” Paulie asked.
“I will walk.”
“You’re not your father,” Paulie said. He’d blurted it out, hoping to say something trite and soothing, but the words appeared to sting Akira instead.
There was more than a hint of jealousy in his response. “I apologise in my own name and in my family name for what my father did or attempted to do. He was a brilliant man who was corrupted by an evil world.” Or perhaps men like him were the ones who made the world evil, Paulie thought. He didn’t say it. After a pause, Akira added, “He was interested in you, Paulie. He was never interested in me. Maybe you can find value in that.”
After Akira left, Paulie heard his parents wooing over George and what a brave boy he was, and he felt perhaps some of the same emotions that Akira was feeling. If it wasn’t quite jealousy, it was certainly inadequacy—the feeling of being welcome but insufficient, like non-alcoholic beer.
After his parents disappeared, giggling, into their bedroom, Paulie disappeared, silently, into the bathroom.
He plugged the bathtub drain and opened the faucet.
Warm water pounded first against the tub and then against itself, as the water level rose.
Paulie stared at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. It seemed no less illusory than the objects it reflected. Is that what Paulie was, an object? His face was scratched, his neck cut and the taste of blood persisted in his mouth. He treated his wounds with a Q-tip dipped in hydrogen peroxide and gargled salt water. When the tub was nearly full, he turned off the faucet and stripped off his clothes.
He flicked on the bathroom fan. It came alive, droning out every other sound.
He slipped into the tub and sat with his back against the cold wall tiles and his shoulders above water, absent-mindedly rubbing cheap shampoo into his hair.
His desire to drown bordered on desperation.
The girls’ football field bordered the forest, through which Dr Mizoguchi had pulled him—had guided him…
His neck was still tender.
He scooted forward, letting the tub water cover that, too.
And drape his chin.
When he swallowed the first mouthful of water, it flowed through his mouth tasting of chlorine and the salt that he hadn’t properly rinsed out after gargling. It flowed over his tongue, navigated his gums and pooled in the swollen gap where his hurting tooth used to be.
That tooth wasn’t exceptional. He was exceptional. That the tooth allowed him to drown without dying and enter the Ninetieth Degree was a hypothesis, a theory. It wasn’t proved. It wasn’t a certainty. All he needed to do was allow himself to die. That was the key. There were no other tricks…
He took a deep breath, exhaled and went under.
Underwater, he felt free. The thrill of the full potential of the unknown was incomparable. He knew that ordinary human experience was but a sliver of all that existed beyond, and he possessed the gift: the power to explore that beyond. But, no, it wasn’t a gift. A gift implied a giver. Here there was no giver. Therefore, there was no gift. His was an ability, a mutation. He was a freak, like an X-Man or the first single-celled organism. And everybody else—they were a blind mass of dumb meat.
The water started choking him.
Baby carriage point of view of a night sky, first kiss, Patrice Bergeron pumping his fist.
But:
The carriage tipped over, sending baby sprawling to the concrete sidewalk, where lips weren’t kissing him but were a dog’s, threatening to bite, and Patrice Bergeron wasn’t pumping his fist. Patrice Bergeron was punching him in the gut, over and over and over—
Paulie exploded upward out of the tub.
Water splashed everywhere.
He was coughing, wheezing, bent over and puking, trying to breathe, as his dad forced open the door and rushed to his side.
All Paulie needed to do was allow himself to die. That was the trick. It wasn’t about the tooth. The tooth was a coincidence, an explanation his mind had concocted because it was convenient. Coincidence was not causation.
His dad slung a towel around his body and patted his back. “It’s OK. Everything’s OK, just get it out. Get it all out.”
Except that allowing one’s self to die wasn’t easy. Not when you were no longer sure.
Not when you so badly wanted to live.
The plane landed in Prince Rupert without incident. Dr Mizoguchi stepped outside with the dozen other passengers and crossed the tarmac to the airport. He didn’t wait for the luggage claim. He hadn’t packed anything. The only things he needed were on his person.
Still at the airport, he rented a car with a roof rack and drove it to a nearby sporting goods store, where he bought a canoe and a large waterproof bag. He paid in cash.
He attached the canoe to the car roof in the store parking lot, and took Highway 97 south out of the city. At McLeese Lake he turned east onto Beaver Lake Road.
Beaver Lake Road merged with Horsefly Road.
He took Horsefly Road all the way to its terminus at Haggens Point on Quesnal Lake.
He got out of the car, took down the canoe and filled the waterproof bag with gravel using his bare hands. He tossed the bag into the canoe, pushed the canoe onto the lake and jumped in. He paddled until he was far out on the lake.
It was a beautiful spring day. The sky was blue dotted with fluffy white clouds. The sun shone.
Dr Mizoguchi reached into a hidden pocket on the underside of his jacket and retrieved Paulie’s tooth. He’d sliced it into several pieces. He swallowed each of them in turn.
He tied the waterproof bag to his ankle.
He stood up.
The canoe wobbled.
Dr Mizoguchi jumped in.