“Amen,” they said. PLATOONS VANGUARD
MACCABEE
Gurion ben-Judah
June Watermark
Eliyahu of Brooklyn
The Five
Ally’n’Googy
Josh Berman
Other armed Aptakisic Israelites
NAKAMOOK
Benji Nakamook
Jelly Rothstein
Leevon Ray
Mark Dingle
Salvador Curtis
Fulton Market
Jerry Throop REARGUARD
PORTITE
Vincie Portite
The Janitor
The Flunky
Ronrico Asparagus
Jennie Mangey
Ansul Entsry
WOLF
Ben-Wa Wolf
Chunkstyle
Anna Boshka
Forrest Kenilworth
Christian Yagoda
Jesse Ritter
Stevie Loop
Cody von Braker PIPELINE
GYMNASIUM at 10:38 AM on 11/17/0
We shut the door behind us and got beneath the bleachers. Chemicals were firing and blood was swelling muscles, lungs and arteries opened wide as runways, our joints and ligaments superelastic. Benji kept whispering, “Do not scream.” We pushed on the wall and pounded our fists, twetched ponds of gooze and touched the floor standing, not to let steam off but redistribute it, to stir the snat to delay the flood. Air-seal the spout and flip the boiling kettle. Potentiate, potentiate, potentiate potential.
“I give you… Boystar,” announced Chaz Black, and we gathered by the bleachers’ easternmost opening.
The gym went dark and I whispered to the soldiers: Wait for my go, then stay to the borders. Look away from the light.
“Do not scream.”
Feedback crackled.
Boystar spoke. “Whuddup ’Kisic.”
A spotlight revealed him.
He was outside the locker-rooms, tearing off an anorak. He flung it and stood there, touching his headset. Padlock for a buckle, his belt was a tirechain, the links hanging low between the loops and shining.
We averted our eyes as he dance-walked west, and soon our pupils were the widest in the gym.
Everyone above us stomped and clapped. Shirts came untucked. The floor shook its dust. On its own, the crowd-noise would have zeroed our footfalls, but with the enhancements effected by the man at the soundboard — machine-made enthusiasm booming at his keystrokes — we could have warcried our lungs flat and stayed undetected.
I gave my go.
Half of Portite trailed Nakamook west beneath the bleachers. The rest followed me out the same way we’d entered. We stealthed south and singlefile along the eastern border, our left arms brushing the wall.
On his unlit way from the locker-room to centercourt, Main Man tiptoed across our path. If he saw us, he pretended not to.
“Here we all are,” said Boystar to the crowd. “At last. Together. Here we are.”
The crowd roared more, some still stomping. The man at the board jacked the volume on the synth. Cheerleaders jumped in the darkness, soundless.
By the time that Boystar was halfway to halfcourt, Portite owned both of his zones: Mangey, Ronrico, and the Janitor by the locker-rooms; by the pushbar-door, Vincie, Ansul, and the Flunky. Nakamook assembled near the southwest corner. I stood behind Desormie, searching the bleachers. I bent all my fingers with all of my fingers and none of my fingers would break.
The hundreds I looked on were blind to us.
Hands forward like a boxer, Boystar fancy-footworked. “You ready?” he said. “Are you ready?” Every indicator light in the gym blinked green.
Eliyahu was sitting between the Five and Miss Pinge — western bleachers, middlemost bench. Floyd, eyes hooded, sat low in his chair in the special gallery with four local newsmen, Jelly’s sister Ruth, and the New Thing fatcats. I sightlined as obliquely to the spotlight as possible, but some of the photons got in my eyes. I located June — top corner northeast, Starla beside her — then turned away south to recover dilation.
“Are you ready for some of this?” said Boystar. The chain around his waist clanked briefly. I didn’t have to look to know what he was doing.
Giggles, many ersatz, bounced off the walls.
“Whoa!” Boystar said, hoisting his crotch. “Ha ha!” he said: a hoist for each ha, a clank at each hoist.
“Haha!” added Main Man, unlit beside him. “Ha—” he said, and his mike-feed got cut.
Hoist-clank hoist-clank giggle giggle giggle.
“You guys are crazy, you know that?” said Boystar. “I’m just dancin here. All you guys have dirty minds. Especially all you Jennys… Now, you Jennys ready to get emotionalized?”
Ecstatic moaning, mostly bogus.
My night-vision maxed.
“You ready. To get. Romantacized?”
I drew my gun. I loaded a wingnut. Proceeded on my stomach toward the spotlight.
“Are you ready. To get… Infantalized?”
The manufactured moans died warmly beneath a sampled orchestra’s doleful tuning. The audience grown all hush and tension. A long sighing rustle of fabric, of hundreds leaning forward at once.
The principal squeezed his chin in his fist. I was coming around on his right.
Swelling cellos bled a hesitant pianoline. The lightest of drumrolls, a kind of sated cicada-sound — it murmured near the threshhold, almost subliminal. And then a tweet of birdsong. And then a muted waterfall. Boystar’s mom was futzing with her purse-zipper. Nothing got by me. Slokum’s popping knuckles. Chaz Black blinking rapidly to unseat a dust-mote. The music got louder, and I could still hear everything. The scratch of Brodsky’s mustache against his stroking pointer. Nakamook’s pulse. Jelly’s kiss on his hand. The tiny suck of disrupted pomade as Boystar’s father passed a comb through his hair. All the wet air Desormie pushed through his lips to prove he wasn’t gay and had contempt for birds and cellos. Eliza June Watermark whispered my name.
I looked hard inside the spotlit oval, sockets tingling behind my pinned eyes.
Posed and fitted for maximum exaltation — with platforms in his bootsoles to show off his height; his fringeless kneeholes arty-yet-unslovenly; pantslegs symmetrically a-riot with buckles, decorative zippers, glued-on snaps that couldn’t unsnap; his pitch-checking finger, bereft of utility, professionally pressed to his headset’s earpiece; his tanktop in November attesting to his ruggedness as below it his chain-belt did his streetness; his earstud’s gleam bespeaking glamour, its ¼-carat weight counterpointing at humility; his orbits shadowed and his lashes mascaraed, his ecstatic tortured saint’s stare, aimed at one o’clock, thus thrown into starkest, most spectacular relief — Boystar opened his mouth to sing a sweet and abdominal measure-spanning nothing of the kind child-pop crooners who fancy themselves “vocal artists” precede all the kicks of their drumtracks with.
Had he oohed, mmmed, or even heyed, I might have targeted a different part of him. The vowel he trilled, though, the second in “robot,” required so much maw-gaping I took it for a sign.
And hooded I rose before the spotlight: completely invisible to those behind Boystar; to those in the bleachers but something in the way. A sudden blackness roughly boy-shaped.
I split the penumbra and blasted.