K Breese - Future Imperfect

This guy, he’d lose a race against my coma dad.

We’re standing there long enough, in full view, that you’d worry the guy was dead. The way he turns to look at us, it’s like he’s moving backward. And when he speaks, he stops and starts like a busted-up cassette tape. His voice, it’s the blandest thing I’ve ever heard.

“Gilberto told me you might stop by,” Slow Bob says. “Funny, that.”

“So you know me already too, huh?” I ask.

All slow, Slow Bob says, “I’ve heard a fair deal.”

“Who doesn’t know about me?” Mostly I ask Belle that.

Belle says, “You weren’t ready, Ade. I’ve told you.”

I just let that go. “So, what’s this guy do?”

Slow Bob motions to the computers around him, says, “With these I can get everything I need. So long as I’ve got an inch of skin in some earth, I can read anywhere. And that means that I can see what goes down in the ground. Geomancy, I can read a place like you read the future.”

I look down at the tray of dirt his feet are buried in; it’s clear plastic but cracking and there’s dirt spilling out. I’m pretty sure that through the yellowed plastic I can see worms, but they might be roots.

“Where you want to go?” Slow Bob asks.

“Cherry Creek Reservoir, the north end, east side. Beach area,” I say.

“Big beach.” Slow Bob yawns. “Can you narrow it down more?”

“Right across from the tennis courts.”

“Cool.”

He types away at one of the laptops, fingers like bird beaks, and then leans back in his chair and says, “Okay, this look like the place?”

I walk over, lean in, and look at the screen. It’s an aerial shot of the beach. “Looks like the place,” I say. “Right there in the water is where it goes down.”

Slow Bob says, “Someone needs to grab me a drink from the fridge over there.” He points behind us. Belle volunteers to get the drink but has a hell of a time finding the refrigerator. Slow Bob shouts directions, only he does it so slowly Belle looks at me and gives a silent scream of frustration. When she does find the fridge, she slams the door shut hard. Computers rumble and belch. Slow Bob yells about that too. Belle comes back shaking the can vigorously.

He puts it on the floor by his feet and then tells me to give me his hand.

I do, his skin is cold, and he bites me.

Hard enough to draw blood. I pull my hand back fast, look down at the wound. Belle, she’s looking around for something to drop on Slow Bob’s head. I tell her I’m okay and Slow Bob says, “Part of the process. Just need a teensy bit.”

He spits into the dirt at his feet and then leans back in his chair and closes his eyes. He says, “This will probably take a few minutes. Just sit back and relax.”

A full sitcom later we’re still standing there.

I’ve been watching the bite mark on my hand, looking for swelling, redness, pus, or any signs that it’s as horribly infected as I’m afraid it is.

Belle says, “It looks fine, stop stressing.”

I dream about hand-sanitizing gels.

I whisper to Belle that I’m ready to jet, that this isn’t working.

That’s when Slow Bob comes alive again.

Even though the approach of his voice is distant, sluggish, it still spooks us.

“Geomancy’s totally different these days,” Slow Bob says. “I don’t know a geomancer who’s had to go to an actual location in the past five years. What with the GPS and the mapping software, most of us are doing just fine like this. Sure, there are some show-offs like Stanley Pulse who feel the need to go trucking around with a rod, but that’s all sport. This is the future of our art. Besides, if I were out there checking out every landfill for Indian Burial Grounds and digging my nose into snowbanks for lost hikers, I wouldn’t be here developing software and making a killing on my GeoMagic Toolkit CDs.” Slow Bob points to a stack of disks sitting in a crooked pile on a monitor.

He opens his eyes, swivels his chair a bit to face me, without moving his embedded feet. He points, says, “That beach is a terrible, terrible place.”

I ask him what he means.

“Murder’s what I mean,” Slow Bob says. “That beach’s seen its fair share of blood before. What you’re going to do to your buddy, it ain’t the first time, is all I’m saying. The place has a funk to it. The way truck-stop restrooms do. Locker rooms. This beach has a bad aura. Most people, probably running around in the sand, sunbathing, fishing, whatever, they don’t even sense it. Cursed, is what it is.”

“Can you see what happened?” I ask.

Slow Bob coughs. “That’ll cost you fifty.”

Belle shakes her head, digs into her purse, pulls out two twenties and a ten. She hands it over, says, “Better be worth it.”

“’Course it will.”

This scrawny, pale man reaches down, grabs his energy drink, pops it open, and ignores the spill of fizz before downing a mouthful that gets most of his shirt wet. He wipes his chin with the back of his hand and then, to me, Slow Bob says, “Maybe ten years ago, maybe not that long, there was a kid swimming in the reservoir. It was winter. Kid was swimming hard. He was freezing. This kid’s mom was yelling at him from the beach, right there where you will do your thing. No one else nearby, just these two out in the freeze of it.”

“Jimi,” I say. I think back to how Vauxhall told me the story. How it was the thing that really stuck in my mind, it might have been one of many abusive things Jimi’s mom did, but it was one that haunted Jimi. One that haunted Vauxhall.

“This kid, little guy, skinny like me,” Slow Bob says, “he just can’t take it anymore. The bitch on the beach, screaming at him, smacking at him when he gets out of the water all red like a lobster from the cold. This shaking boy, he decides right then and there that he won’t take it anymore. Whatever this woman had done to him it had been bad enough that the kid cracked. He grabbed a rock. His mom was screaming, top of her lungs, calling him horrible names, embarrassing names, and he hit her. Just plunked the rock down on top of her head.”

We are all silent. Slow Bob closes his eyes. There is much motion under the lids.

He says, quieter, even slower, “What happened next was kind of funny. Funny not like in the ha-ha way but in the uncanny way. You know the word ‘uncanny’? That’s what this was like. The mom, she just stood there with this crazy, confused look on her face. The rock hit her head and her shouting stopped and then, just a trickle of blood. Tiny trickle. Stopped yelling, looked up at her kid with this look of just total shock and confusion, and then she keeled over. Time she hit the snow she was dead as the rock that hit her. The kid, he was a calculating type, he pushed, dug into the snow with his already numb fingers, grabbed some more rocks, stuffed them in his mom’s yellow parka, and pushed her out under the ice.”

I look to Belle. Her eyes are probably as wide as mine.

“Killed his mom,” I say softly.

Slow Bob opens his eyes, turns back to the flickering screens in front of him, says, “That woman sank like she had been made of rock all the time. And to add to the surprising nature of this little story, she was never found. Probably getting her bones gnawed on by catfish right this moment.”

“What about the kid?” I ask. “What happened to him next?”

Slow Bob shrugs. “He left the beach. Rest, I don’t see.”

Learning that Jimi is a murderer, honestly, it doesn’t faze me. I’m not surprised either. If anything, I was expecting it. Not this exactly, not him having sunk his mom in the reservoir, but knowing my feelings were justified feels right. It’s satisfying. First thought is: Jimi’s a danger. Vauxhall needs to stay away from him. And the follow-up: How come she didn’t know this earlier? Or did she?