“What’s it like in there, Dad? Asleep like that.”
“It’s like nothing. It’s like a waiting room.”
“I hope you do visit again. I like this.”
“Me too. Just, no punches next time, ’kay?”
I agree.
We walk down the beach to where there’s a lawn chair I didn’t notice before. Dad sits down in it and takes a cold glass of water from out of nowhere and sips it, the ice chiming. Then he crosses his arms and looks over at me and says, “You turned out wonderful.”
Then, standing up with a huff, the chair and glass vanishing behind him like they were smoke, my father says, “You can’t trust Grandpa Razor.”
“How do you know that?”
“I met him, once, long time ago. Back when I was doing my thing, there was a group of them. We used to, well, when I was with this woman, Jimi’s mother, there was a wild scene going on in Denver. It was the late eighties and people were funny then. There was this punk rocker kind of guy, Bob, I think his name was-”
“Slow Bob?”
“Right, so you’ve met him too? Well, he kind of put together this group of people with similar talents. It wasn’t anything but a feel-good club, an opportunity to talk and drink and get our respective highs in a private place. Things, of course, got bad fast. Excess always leads to, well, regression. Deep down, people really are just animals. Grandpa Razor, he was the worst animal of all. What I’m saying is, be very careful around him. Be strong.”
And with that I’m pulled out of the vision the way a stuntman on a bungee cord is, just snapped back up into the sky and into the night and back behind my eyelids.
FIVE
Before I even open my eyes I know something is wrong.
I can hear it.
The room is silent the way a cat is silent right before it jumps on an insect. I open my left eye first, just a crack, just enough to see through the haze of my eyelashes that the lights are still on and there’s no one standing over me. Then I open the right eye. Again, just a crack. I move it around, open it just a tad wider, and see a shadow to my right, in the corner. A cat ready to pounce.
I roll to my left and I do it fast.
I fall off the futon onto the floor and then stand up quick, both eyes wide open.
Grandpa Razor’s the cat; he’s standing on the opposite side of the bed with a syringe filled with red liquid. He looks surprised, but it’s hard to know ’cause his eyes are so heavy-lidded.
I back away from him, my fists up like I’m a boxer.
“What’s the deal, Gramps?” I ask, pushing back my fear.
He says, “Seriously? You weren’t supposed to wake up so soon.”
I notice a pile just under the table; it’s Dr. Borgo. He’s lying there pretty jacked but he’s breathing. Has a big lump on his head. Pointing at my shrink, I say, “You sure get around with that billy club. I hope that right now he can see the future and I really hope he’s enjoying a nice screening of me kicking the shit out of you three minutes from now.”
Grandpa Razor doesn’t laugh like I expect him to.
If anything he looks more determined and jabs his syringe around.
“You knew, didn’t you?” I ask, summoning up my new angry mode. Trying out my new angry voice. It sounds very effective.
This gets Grandpa Razor talking. He stops moving at me with the needle and he says, “You have no idea what you’ve gotten into, Ade. Wasting your gift, throwing it all away to try and…” He shakes his head in frustration. “You need to accept what the gift brings. There should be no debate about it. And if-”
I cut the slob off. “If you believe this rules business, then you couldn’t stop me. Doping me up here or OD’ing me wouldn’t do anything, right? If destiny is destiny, then why the hell are you trying to inject me with that?”
“This isn’t what you think it is,” Grandpa Razor says. “Regardless of what you saw, what Jimi’s father told you, you still don’t know what’s really happening. You’re still just as clueless, and what Janice told you, it’ll happen, and I’ll be there just cheering them on-”
He stops right there.
He stops because my rage boils over and I kick him full in the jaw. He goes back fast and he falls down hard, crushing a chair. There are teeth on the table and I see blood, but it doesn’t stop me. I jump on top of Grandpa Razor and just start whaling. After a while my knuckles hurt and they look ugly and I take a breather, but then I just go back to it.
At least until Dr. Borgo stops me.
I’m about to bring both my hands down together, my fingers all intertwined, down on Grandpa Razor’s mess of a face, when Borgo grabs my hands and tells me to stop. He tells me that if I don’t, I’ll kill this guy. He says, “Already, he won’t look the same for a few months at least.”
I stop. I fall back on the floor, my legs crossed, and look down at my hands.
They’re shaking from my rage. They are all ballooned up and red. My hands, they look like the hands of a boxer’s after a night of cheap rounds and hard faces. I look up at Borgo and say, “You don’t look very good, Doc.”
Borgo’s lump on his head is bigger than I thought at first. A classic egg.
Borgo says, “It’ll heal.”
“You see anything?” I ask.
My shrink tries to laugh but he says it hurts his ribs. He says, “If I didn’t stop you, what do you think you would have done to him?”
“Pounded him into a deep retardation.”
“Where do you think that’s coming from, Ade? You were never this way before.”
I shake my head, look at my hands again. “That’s because I think I’m someone else now, Doc.”
SIX
The two girls in my life, both of them are sitting on Paige’s bed, staring at me.
One of them, Paige, has her mouth dropped open. I’ve seen this look from her before, it’s the same expression she had when she saw Vanessa Pallor, who she was sure was a lesbo and had a major crush on, making out with Carlos “Mad Bull” Lopez.
The other, Vaux, is closing her eyes and, I think, holding back tears.
I’ve just finished telling them that this guy I’ve been battling, the same guy Vaux’s been sleeping with, is my kin. I’ve just described, in almost excruciating detail, how I tried to turn Grandpa Razor into a pile of something he’d probably eat. And I said, “Basically, it comes down to something entirely biblical here. It comes down to brother versus brother and even though I’m still going into this with a plan of stopping it, of changing it, only now I think I might actually for real have the capacity of doing it. I mean, I didn’t before, but now I could totally see myself killing him.”
It’s been pretty much silent since then.
Paige’s never liked anything too quiet for too long and so she’s the first one to talk. She says, “That’s not good.”
Vauxhall starts to talk but stops herself. She looks way vulnerable.
“I was thinking at first that this is kind of the way the Incredible Hulk was, you know? The smart guy, the weak guy, Bruce Banner, trying to stop himself from raging into this monster of destruction. But it’s not really the same because it’s still me. It’s just like me amplified. And really, what I’m most worried about is that I won’t go back. If I kill Jimi, then this is it. This is me forever. The future Janice showed me, it’s pretty much for sure.”
Paige asks, “What do you think’s happened to you? This change?”
I take a deep breath, hold it in a while. “I don’t know, but it’s something severe. And what’s funny is that I’m not sure which I like better, you know? Me being messed up and concussed and high and not remembering most of my life, or the clean me who has some serious anger issues and is dealing with this familial insanity? Honestly, ignorance truly is bliss, I think.”