“What about him?” Case asked, pointing to another guy whose hands and legs twitched too rhythmically and regularly for it to be a dream.
“Clouddiving,” I said.
He laughed. “I thought only retards could do that.”
“That’s,” I said. “Not.”
“Okay,” he said, when he saw I wouldn’t be saying anything else on the subject.
I wanted very badly to cry. Only retards. A part of me had thought maybe I could share it with Case, tell him what I could do. But of course I couldn’t. I fast-blinked, each brief shutting of my eyes showing a flurry of cloud-snatched photographs.
Ten minutes later I caught him smiling at me, maybe realizing he had said something wrong. I wanted so badly for Case to see inside my head. What I was. How I wasn’t an imbecile, or a retard.
Our eyes locked. I leaned forward. Hungry for him to see me, the way no one else ever had. I wanted to tell him what I could do. How I could access data. How sometimes I thought I could maybe control data. How I dreamed of using it to burn everything down. But I wasn’t strong enough to think those things, let alone say them. Some secrets you can’t share, no matter how badly you want to.
I went back alone. Case had somewhere to be. It hurt, realizing he had things in his life I knew nothing about. I climbed the steps and a voice called from the front-porch darkness.
“Awful late,” Guerra said. The stubby man who ran the place: Most of his body weight was gristle and mustache. He stole our stuff and ate our food and took bribes from dealer residents to get rivals logged out. In the dark I knew he couldn’t even see who I was.
“Nine,” I said. “It’s not. O’clock.”
He sucked the last of his Coke through a straw, in the noisiest manner imaginable. “Whatever.”
Salvation Army landscapes clotted the walls. Distant mountains and daybreak forests, smelling like cigarette smoke, carpet cleaner, thruway exhaust. There was a sadness to the place I hadn’t noticed before, not even when I was hating it. In the living room, a boy knelt before the television. Another slept on the couch. In the poor light, I couldn’t tell if one of them was the one who had hurt Case.
There were so many of us in the system. We could add up to an army. Why did we all hate and fear each other so much? Friendships formed from time to time, but they were weird and tinged with what-can-I-get-from-you, liable to shatter at any moment as allegiances shifted or kids got transferred. If all the violence we visited on ourselves could be turned outwards, maybe we could—
But only danger was in that direction. I thought of my mom’s man, crippled in a prison riot, living fat off the settlement, saying, drunk, once, Only thing the Man fears more than one of us is a lot of us.
I went back to my room, and got down on the floor, under the window. And shut my eyes. And dove.
Into spreadsheets and songs and grainy CCTV feeds and old films and pages scanned from books that no longer existed anywhere in the world. Whatever the telecom happens to be porting through you at that precise moment.
Only damaged people can dive. Something to do with how the brain processes speech. Every time I did it, I was terrified. Convinced they’d see me, and come for me. But that night I wanted something badly enough to balance out the being afraid.
Eyes shut, I let myself melt into data. Shuffled faster and faster, pulled back far enough to see Manhattan looming huge and epic with mountains of data at Wall Street and Midtown. Saw the Bronx, a flat spread of tiny data heaps here and there. I held my breath, seeing it, feeling certain no one had ever seen it like this before, money and megabytes in massive spiraling loops, unspeakably gorgeous and fragile. I could see how much money would be lost if the flow was broken for even a single second, and I could see where all the fault lines lay. But I wasn’t looking for that. I was looking for Case.
And then: Case came knocking. Like I had summoned him up from the datastream. Like what I wanted actually mattered outside of my head.
“Hey there, mister,” he said, when I opened my door.
I took a few steps backwards.
He shut the door and sat down on my bed. “You’ve got a Game Boy, right? I saw the headphones.” I didn’t respond, and he said, “Damn, dude, I’m not trying to steal your stuff, okay? I have one of my own. Wondered if you wanted to play together.” Case flashed his, bright red to my blue one.
“The thing,” I said. “I don’t have. The cable.”
He patted his pants pocket. “That’s okay, I do.”
We sat on the bed, shoulders touching, backs against the wall, and played Mega Man 2. Evil robots came at us by the dozen to die.
I touched the cord with one finger. Such a primitive thing, to need a physical connection. Case smelled like soap, but not the Ivory they give you in the system. Like cream, I thought, but that wasn’t right. To really describe it I’d need a whole new world of words no one ever taught me.
“That T-shirt looks good on you,” he said. “Makes you look like a gym boy.”
“I’m not. It’s just… what there was. What was there. In the donation bin. Once Guerra picked out all the good stuff. Hard to find clothes that fit when you’re six six.”
“It does fit, though.”
Midway through Skull Man’s level, Case said: “You talk funny sometimes. What’s up with that?” and I was shocked to see no anger surge through me.
“It’s a thing. A speech thing. What you call it when people have trouble talking.”
“A speech impediment.”
I nodded. “But a weird one. Where the words don’t come out right. Or don’t come out at all. Or come out as the wrong word. Clouding makes it worse.”
“I like it,” he said, looking at me now instead of Mega Man. “It’s part of what makes you unique.”
We played without talking, tinny music echoing in the little room.
“I don’t want to go back to my room. I might get jacked in the hallway.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Can I stay here? I’ll sleep on the floor.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re the best, Sauro.” And there were his hands again, rubbing the top of my head. He took off his shirt and began to make a bed on my floor. Fine black hair covers almost all of me, but Case’s body was mostly bare. My throat hurt with how bad I wanted to put my hands on him. I got into bed with my boxers on, embarrassed by what was happening down there.
“Sauro,” he whispered, suddenly beside me in the bed.
I grunted; stumbled coming from dreams to reality.
His body was spooned in front of mine. “Is this okay?”
“Yes. Yes, it is.” I tightened my arms around him. His warmth and smell stiffened me. And then his head had turned, his mouth was moving down my belly, his body pinning me to the bed, which was good, because God had turned off gravity and the slightest breeze would have had me floating right out the window and into space.
“You ever do this before? With a guy?”
“Not out loud—I mean, not in real life.”
“You’ve thought about it.”
“Yeah.”
“You’ve thought about it a lot.”
“Yeah.”
“Why didn’t you ever do it?
“I don’t know.”
“You were afraid of what people might think?”
“No.”
“Then what were you afraid of?”
Losing control was what I wanted to say, or giving someone power over me, or making a mess.
Or: The boys that make me feel like you make me feel turn me into something stupid, brutish, clumsy, worthless.