I turned back to Maureen. “Call your pal,” I whispered. “Keep it quiet. Have him bring in the cops, but quiet, and slow.” She looked at me, stunned out of her outrage. “I’m serious. Call him. And stay in here. Whatever happens.”
I didn’t leave her time for questions. In my pants and bare feet I crept out into the hall and made my way to Peter’s door.
Inside I heard him whimpering softly, as if through a gag.
I burst in.
Peter was spread-eagled on his bed, bound with neckties. His pajamas were in shreds around his ankles. Frank, who wasn’t wearing anything at all, was kneeling on the side of the bed, as if praying over Peter’s helpless body. One hand was resting lightly on Peter’s stomach. In the other hand he held his own penis. His pubic hair was white. He looked up at me and his eyes widened for a moment, then fell. And then he grinned. His hands stayed where they were.
I picked up Peter’s keyboard and smashed it against Frank’s white skull. He straightened up and stopped grinning, and reached back to feel his head.
“Tommy,” he said, his voice soft, almost beguiling.
I drew the keyboard back like a baseball bat and hit him again. This time I drew blood. I didn’t stop hitting him until he fell back against the floor, his mouth open, his eyes full of tears, his erection wilting.
Peter watched the whole thing from the bed, his mouth gagged, his eyes wide. When I dropped the keyboard and looked up, he met my eyes, for a minute. Then I looked away. I found his floppy disks for Hell, the main disk and the backup, and I tore them in half and tossed them onto the floor, beside Frank.
Peter didn’t get untied until the police showed up. Maureen was hiding in her room and I, try as I might, just couldn’t bring myself to touch him.
21
I live alone now. The settlement went like this: I see Peter every other weekend — if I happen to be back from Hell, that is — and only in the company of his mother. And I don’t go anywhere near the house.
Yes, Uncle Frank was Colonel Eagery, aka The Happy Man. He’d molested me as a boy, right in our house, while my father was away, and with my mother in the kitchen making breakfast. I remember it all now.
And yes, I killed him.
Needless to say, there wasn’t any Mob on his trail. The call he’d been dreading was the Baltimore police. He was on the run from a molestation offense.
Like I said, I live alone. It’s a pretty nice place, and a lot closer to the station. There’s a pretty nice bar around the corner. Different crowd every night.
Yes, I still go to Hell, but it’s different now. There isn’t any horse, or witch, or Happy Man. There isn’t even a forest.
When I go to Hell now it’s like this:
I’m back in the house with Maureen and Peter. I live with them again. But I’m unable to speak, or reach out to them: I’m a zombie. I start by sitting in front of the television, flipping channels, and then eventually I wander around the apartment, brushing past Maureen, but never able to speak to her, never able to take her hand or hold her or lead her into the bedroom. After a while I go and stand in the doorway of Peter’s room. He turns and looks up at me, but I look away, afraid to meet his eye. I pretend to look the other way, and he goes back to his computer.
And that’s it. I spend the rest of the time standing in his doorway, looking over his shoulder at the computer screen.
Watching him play my Hell.
VANILLA DUNK
Elwood Fossett and I were in a hotel room in Portland, after dropping a meaningless game to the Sony Trail Blazers — we’d already made the playoffs — when the lottery came on the television, the one where they gave away the Michael Jordan subroutines.
The lottery, ironically, was happening back in our home arena, the Garden, while we were on the road. It was an absurd spectacle, the place full of partisan fans rooting for their team’s rookie to draw the Jordan skills, the rookies all sitting sheepishly with their families and agents, waiting. The press scurried around like wingless mosquitoes.
“Yo, Lassner, check it out,” said Elwood, tapping the screen with his long black club of a finger. “We gonna get you and McFront some company.”
He meant the white kid in the Gulf and Western Knicks jersey, stranded with his parents in that sea of black faces. Michael Front—“McFront” to the black players — and me were the two white players on the Knicks.
“Not too likely,” I said. “He won’t make the team unless he draws the Jordan.”
Elwood sat back down on the end of the bed. “Nobody else we’d take?”
“Nope.” There were, of course, six other sets of skills available that night — Tim Hardaway, if I remember correctly, and Karl Malone — but none with the potential impact of Jordan’s. In a league where everyone played with the skills of one star or another, it took a Jordan to get people’s attention. As for the little white rookie, he could have been anyone. It didn’t matter who you drafted anymore. What mattered was what skills they picked up in the lottery. Which star’s moves would be lifted out of the archives and plugged into the rookie’s exosuit. More specifically, what mattered tonight was that the Michael Jordan skills were up for grabs. It was fifteen years since Jordan’s retirement, so the required waiting period was over.
The Jordan skills were just about the last, too. The supply of old NBA stars was pretty much depleted. It was only a couple of years after Jordan retired that the exosuits took over, and basketball stopped growing, started feeding on itself instead, becoming a kind of live 3D highlight film, a chance to see all the dream teams and matchups that had never actually happened: Bird feeding passes to Earl the Pearl, Wilt Chamberlain going one on one with Ewing, Bill Walton and Marques Johnson playing out their careers instead of being felled by injuries, Earl Maginault and Connie Hawkins bringing their legendary schoolyard games to the pros, seeing if they could make it against the best.
Only a few of the genuine stars had retired later than Jordan. After this they’d have to think up something new. Start playing real basketball again, maybe. Or just go back to the beginning of the list of stars and start over.
“Nobody for real this year?” asked Elwood. He counted on me to read the sports papers.
“I don’t think so. I heard the kid for the Sixers can play, actually. But not good enough to go without skills.” Mixed in among us sampled stars were a handful of players making it on their own, without exosuits: Willard Daynight, Barry Porush, Tony Smerks, Marvin Franklin. These were the guys who would have been the Magic Johnsons, Walt Fraziers, and Charles Barkleys of our era, and in a way they were the guys I felt sorriest for. Instead of playing in a league full of average guys and being big stars, the way they would have in the past, they were forced to go up against the sampled skills of the basketball Hall of Fame every night. Younger fans probably got mixed up and credited their great plays to some sampled program, instead of realizing they were seeing the real thing.
The lottery started with the tall black kid with the Pan Am Nuggets drawing the David Robinson skills package. It was a formality, a foregone conclusion, since he was the only rookie tall enough to make use of a center’s skills. The kid stepped up to the mike and thanked his management and his representation and, almost as an afterthought, his mom and dad, and everyone smiled and flashed bulbs for a minute or two. You could see that the Nuggets general manager had his mind on other things. The Pan Am team was one of the worst in the league at that point, and as a result they had another lottery spot out of the seven, a lean, well-muscled kid who could play with the Jordan skills if he drew them. If they came up with Robinson and Jordan the Nuggets could be a force in the league overnight.