Austin Bunn - The Brink - Stories

“Call your father,” Mom says. “Tell him to get his ass over here.”

Sam is kneeling on the couch and watching from inside, through the blinds, when his father’s van pulls up a half hour later. He’s come straight from a job, overalls crusted with paint and flecks of white on his cheek and in his beard. His parents face each other coolly, Mom on the stairs, Dad on the lawn with his hands on his hips, as though they don’t need a single thing from each other. His mother points to the car, hood up, and his father peers into the engine.

His father does nothing, just looks up at Sam’s bedroom window and scratches under his cap. A kind of joy warms inside Sam. This is what he wanted.

“Come here, Judy,” his father says.

“No lessons, please,” Mom says.

“Just. Come. I want to show you something.”

She goes to him. If she would only keep going to him. They stand together at the open hood and consider the damage. Sam knows he’s been discovered. His father leans on the bumper. Mom puts her hands to her lips in a sort of prayer, even though the Unitarians only bow their heads.

“Sam, get out here!” she calls through the screen door.

When Sam gets on the porch, his father sees him and says, “Jesus Christ.”

“Sweetie, what did you do?” Mom says.

A breeze seems to gather the heat of the day and press it toward him. An old woman in a robe walks by with a little dog and stares.

“I cut my hair,” Sam says. With the kitchen scissors. All by himself, while they waited for his father.

Mom sits on the top step and pats next to her. Sam joins her, his go bag between his legs. She runs her fingers through his hair and asks if he knows that they love him. But it’s a stupid question. Loving someone is easy — look at Latrice! And knowing someone loves you is useless, like knowing the name of a bird.

“You broke the car, didn’t you?” she says. “And you told some fibs.”

“Fibs?” his father says. “That’s the word we’re using?”

Mom gives him her look. “Do you know what he said? He said you come around at night and watch me.”

His father sighs and scratches at the flecks of paint, scraping them off.

“Why?” Mom asks. “Why did you do it, Sam?”

Under his breath, his father whispers, “We know why.”

“If you don’t tell us, sweetheart. .” Mom says, and he can see her hunt for terms. “We’ll have to take you out of that class.”

“We need to go back and live with Dad,” Sam says.

Mom takes his hand and brings it to her chest, like it’s broken and you make it better by holding. “If you want to go live with your father, you can do that, Sambo,” she says. “You can. But I can’t.”

His father turns away, and his chest begins to convulse. Seeing his father cry is like watching a building collapse when someone you know is inside. It is raw and close and terrifying. Sam shudders too, and the tremor grows inside, a tremor that started months ago with his mom waking him up, late at night, in the house in the woods, to take his hand and whisper, “I need you to be brave, sweetie, because tomorrow we leave.”

A row of black cars have parked outside the hall, golden seals on their doors and flags on their radio antennae. In the shade of the oak, a group of men in suits and sunglasses wilt in the heat, their suit jackets hung on the branches. They seem to be waiting for Sam, a gang of fathers ready to administer punishment.

His father parks the car at the hall entrance. He’s wearing sunglasses to hide his eyes. The Beach Boys tape flips over, another harmony starts. His father looks straight through the dash. “As smart as you are,” his father says, “one day you’re going to grow up and forgive us.”

“How do you know?” Sam says, stepping out of the car. “Nobody knows anything.” Growing up is pure luck. Two thousand warheads are ready in their silos, waiting to grow up. If the class taught him anything it’s that every place in the world is inside the kill zone. He grabs his bag, with the Band-Aids and the granola bars and water bottles, all of it rolling around in a big swill.

“I’ll wait for you outside,” his father says. “I’m not going anywhere.”

So Sam will need to find a distraction, a way of sneaking out. Because he’s not going home, not going back. He’s on his own now, as he always was and will be. The moment he steps inside the foyer, Sam hears clapping. The main hall is crowded with parents and other professors, strangers he hasn’t seen before, the whole summer school, and he can’t make his way in. Spread across the carpet, students sit attentively, preparing for a transmission. On the stage, a fat man in a blue suit jingles the change in his pockets. He surveys the room with a smile like he’s at the top of a mountain and they are the trees. The room is hot already, sun glaring through the windows.

New Jersey believes you will do great things, the man says to the crowd. New Jersey is, frankly, astonished. “Would any of you like to ask the governor a question?” the professor says, at the edge of the stage.

One of the twins raises his hand. “The Russians have these missiles so that if all their cities burn up, these missiles fire automatically and everybody dies,” he says. “Can we have that?”

The governor dips his head. “Excuse me?”

“It’s called The Dead Hand,” the twin says.

“Very good,” the professor says.

The governor glares at the professor. “Good lord, what’s this all about?”

He shrugs. “This is what they’ve been learning all summer,” he says. “This is the state of our world, the one you have made.”

“You must be kidding.”

Jerusha raises her hand and asks, “Where is your special cave when the war starts?”

The governor stammers. “When the war starts. .?”

An emergency blare shatters the air. Sam takes his hand off the fire alarm. At first, no one is sure what’s happening or where to be. Then a mother screams, and frantic parents crush into the room, toward their children. The governor presses toward the exit. He wants out, to his special cave, but he’ll never make it. He is caught in their panic. “Stay inside!” the professor yells to the room, but the children are fine. The children look calmly up to the windows, ready for incoming.

Our favorite world was almost over. Tonight, when I dropped, a countdown clock hung in the game sky. You couldn’t miss the bright yellow numbers up in the twilight. There were just days left in the Also, to be who we were. I zoomed to the old homestead in Gjajan, where I built my manse and gardens and dug my private sea, where Aremi came to me, but the place looked like it was having a stroke — just a throb of pixels, a cloud of bad data that fluxed and ate at the terrain. Years of questing wiped away, and I could take nothing with me, like a refugee from a dream. I moved closer, to brush the metaphysics of it all, and my machine seized. The Core was as stable as a stilt on a stilt.

I dropped again, this time to the foothills of Origin Park to wait for Aremi. We had agreed to find each other here, the last place they’d wipe. The Park debuted on the first compile — ganked from topos of the Acropolis — and the texturing was smeary and low-res, not like a place but the memory of a place you drove by in a car. The engineers kept it around as an artifact, proof of how far they’d come. I zoomed to the edge of the gray-green butte. Below me, the city stretched out on five peninsulas into the ocean, a hand on a mirror. Hundreds of players hived at one of the city terminals. The Also’s composer, this nineteen-year-old kid who made the game sound like a nail salon, was having a live farewell jam. If I boosted my speakers, I could just perceive the twee.