‘That’s great, Blowjob,’ Dennis rejoins. ‘Now all Skippy has to do is find his way into a parallel universe.’
‘It is theoretically possible,’ Ruprecht says.
‘Well, is it theoretically possible you could come up with something that might actually help him?’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know, like a death ray to shoot Carl with.’
‘Violence never solved anything,’ Ruprecht asserts sanctimoniously.
‘Violence solves everything, you idiot, look at the history of the world. Any situation they have, they dick around with it for a while, then they bring in violence. That’s the whole reason they have scientists, to make violence more violent.’
‘It sounds to me as if your grasp of history is of a similar standard to your ability on the bassoon,’ Ruprecht snaps.
‘Shove it up your hole, Ruprecht, and your lame theory too.’ Dennis kicks back balefully in his chair. ‘The truth is, Skippy’d still be a loser in a parallel universe. We’d all still be losers, even in a universe of tiny girly ants.’
In the hallway some of the swimmers are gathered around the noticeboard. ‘Hey, Juster! Have a look at this!’ Antony Taylor calls out.
Coach has posted up the team for the meet. Your name’s second from the end.
‘I can’t believe he picked you,’ Siddartha Niland says. ‘He might as well throw a fucking brick in the water.’
‘You’d better not blow this for us, Juster,’ Duane Grehan says.
‘Why the fuck would he pick you?’ Siddartha shakes his head. ‘It just doesn’t make any sense.’
Upstairs you call Dad to give him the news. ‘That’s great, buddy!’ Dad’s voice crackles from far away.
‘Do you think you’ll be able to come along?’
‘I hope so, sport, I really hope so.’
‘What does Dr Gulbenkian say?’
‘What does he say?’
‘Wasn’t he coming over?’
‘Oh yeah – oh, you know, just the usual. You know him. Listen, D, it’s crazy here today, I’d better go. But that’s great news, great news. This’ll really give us a lift.’
You hang up, you go to the window and look through the telescope. From the back of the door, the dead plastic eyes of the goggles watch you watching.
You don’t know why Coach picked you. You’ve got the worst times in the whole squad. It’s not just that you’re slow. Whenever you swim now it’s like there’s this secret tide waiting there just for you; and while all the other boys power ahead in straight lines to the finish, while Coach claps his hands and shouts them on, it is trying to lead you away, down to some unseen place there under the water, a dark door behind which lies a room that, as you descend towards it, you find you almost recognize… and like in a dream when you realize it’s pivoted into a nightmare, that’s when you start freaking out, flailing and thrashing, which only helps the dark magnets pulling you down, till it genuinely seems you’re going to drown, there in the shallows of the school pool – only at the last second something will kick back in and you’ll fight it off, struggle to the surface and claw for the wall as fast as you can, Paddy Last again, Daniel, and behind you it will disappear again, sink back into the innocent blue, waiting for the next time…
She’s not out there. You abandon the telescope, step back into the room. The X of the meet burns red on the calendar. The pills call to you from the dresser. Deep breaths, Skip. Remember what Coach said. A lot can happen between then and now. A mer-boy enrols at Seabrook and bumps you off the team. You get stuck in a lift, you break your arm. Something worse.
For now though it’s back to class, turgid deserts of grammar and rules and facts, the faraway life it is all a preparation for glimpsed through the windows of reading-comprehension texts and business models and vocabulary-boosting role-plays –
‘Good morning, I would like to buy a new bicycle.’
‘Certainly, sir. What kind of bicycle are you looking for? Is it for everyday use?’
‘I need it to commute to work. I am looking for something durable, portable and not too expensive. Can you show me your range?’
– seeming only fractionally less desolate than the preparations themselves, and the malign influence of the bruise still working its evil magic, like an anti-amulet, a bad-luck charm you can’t take off…
‘Oh, Mr Juster…’
Calling you back to the doorway of the now-empty classroom. Hanging there across it like a spider in an invisible web. ‘Deep in thought, Mr Juster…?’
‘Uh, yes, Father.’ He keeps talking to you.
‘Is something troubling you, my son?’
‘No, Father.’ Trying not to wriggle under his incendiary stare.
‘You’ve been in the wars, though.’
‘Uh… I ran into a door.’
‘Mmm.’ The fingers that reach out and touch your pulpy temple are chilly and damp and curiously grainy, like they are on Ash Wednesday, rubbing wet ashes onto your skin. ‘That wasn’t too clever, was it?’
‘No, Father.’
‘What are we going to do with you, Mr Juster?’
‘I don’t know, Father.’
‘If you can’t negotiate even a simple door.’ The priest pauses. A sigh ripples through his knife-like body. ‘Well, boys will be boys, I suppose.’ The black eyes sparkle. ‘Won’t they, Mr Juster.’
‘Uh… yes, Father.’
‘They will,’ Father Green exhales, as if to himself, ‘they will…’ And he withdraws, like smoke being sucked out a chimney; leaving you to scurry away, wiping the spot where the fingers touched you, the bones that seem to push right through your skin and into your soul…
Ruprecht returns from the lab that night to find Skippy sitting with the lights out and the duvet wrapped around him, doing battle with a deathly-white hydra that breathes frost and flails its limbs like blizzards of razors.
‘Nasty-looking character,’ he says.
‘Ice Demon.’ Cross-legged on the floor, Skippy tugs the controller left and right, his mouth set in a tight line, his expression one of furious concentration; when Mr Tomms comes down the corridor for lights-out he switches off the machine and gets into bed without saying another word.
Then, just when Ruprecht is sure he is asleep, through the darkness: ‘Carl hitting me doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with Lori.’
‘No?’
‘Carl’s an asshole. He’s always doing that kind of thing. He doesn’t need a reason.’
‘That’s true,’ Ruprecht concedes.
There is a pause, then the voice comes back over the gulf of floor between the beds. ‘Anyway, how would he even know I’d texted her?’
Springs groan as Ruprecht redistributes himself, folding his hands on his stomach and twiddling his thumbs computatively. ‘Well, the surmise would be that your friend had told him…’
This followed by another pause, as in a long-distance phone conversation in days of Yore; and then the defiant reply, ‘She wouldn’t do that.’ He turns on his side, towards the wall, and, shortly after, tinny music rises from his headphones, the BETHani song in miniature like a distant field of harmonizing grasshoppers.
Ruprecht, still humming with sugar from a feed of doughnuts earlier, cannot sleep. He gets up, opens the SETI window, spends a while watching the computer processing the meaningless news the universe brings it; he makes a list of random M words, moose, marker, milk, minnow, to see if any unusual connections emerge; he watches the softly rising and falling shape of his friend, cocooned in his nimbus of nanomusic.
He is thinking about asymmetry. This is a world, he is thinking, where you can lie in bed, listening to a song as you dream about someone you love, and your feelings and the music will resonate so powerfully and completely that it seems impossible that the beloved, whoever and wherever he or she might be, should not know, should not pick up this signal as it pulsates from your heart, as if you and the music and the love and the whole universe have merged into one force that can be channelled out into the darkness to bring them this message. But in actuality, not only will he or she not know, there is nothing to stop that other person from lying on his or her bed at the exact same moment listening to the exact same song and thinking about someone else entirely – from aiming those identical feelings in some completely opposite direction, at some totally other person, who may in turn be lying in the dark thinking of another person still, a fourth, who is thinking of a fifth, and so on, and so on; so that rather than a universe of neatly reciprocating pairs, love and love-returned fluttering through space nicely and symmetrically like so many pairs of butterfly wings, instead we get chains of yearning, which sprawl and meander and culminate in an infinite number of dead ends.