"Warped," Part I

I feel compelled to start this post with a few hundred or so disclaimers. But that seems like a rather hostile way to introduce a work of fiction. And why should I not leave the judging up to the readers, as is rightful?

Here is what I will say: This is the story I wrote in response to This Post. Except, it's not a story. It's what I like to call, "A CP(?) Novella in Three Parts." The riddle of the question mark is yours to unravel.

These were my wildcards: a watermelon-seed spitting contest, kingfishers, a first kiss, "ultimate mocha," a cellar door, a nice but shy-at-first sci-fi geek, a grandfather clock.

I will take the opportunity to also add this: In writing out the list of original wildcards, I realize I forgot to include one of them, and will now be hastening to slip it in somewhere in Part(s) 2 and/or 3. If you read the whole super-long thing, you can guess which one!

***

"Warped"


What’s it like to have the sex appeal of a gay hobbit?

From his thirteenth birthday til the day Greta Greenbaum asked him to sit for a portrait, Isaac Levinson was a hostage in an Impenetrable Totalitarian Time Warp. Also known as high school. Everything before 8th grade he flavored generously with the spice of nostalgia; Little League was all home runs and hot dogs, hardly a memory of wedgies. He forgot that most of his classmates aimed for his ear during the watermelon-seed-spitting contest and recalled only the sweetness of the juice.

Like he can help it, he thinks third base involves LARPing.

The details of the past were beside the point, anyway. Maybe he was never exactly Señor Popular, but still — things would be different if Cousin Phil hadn’t given him a copy of Ender’s Game for his bar mitzvah.

Got any tips for us, Lord Sir Space Fag? You know, moves, maybe some Dungeons & Dragons stratagems in case we wanna score at the next convention?

That damn book. It changed his life. In honor of his manhood, Isaac also received a bike, a digital camera and a sum of cash his mother told him would be impolite to repeat – but those he barely noticed and soon forgot. He spent the Hava Nagila cloistered in the cloakroom, lost. Though his pimples and cracking larynx suggested manhood was still some years off, Isaac had found his destiny.

He finished the entire Ender series in six days. Soon followed Stephenson, Wells, Tolkien, Asimov, Heinlein. The digital camera slumbered in its original packaging. The bike served mainly to transport him to the bookstore.

Like most adolescents who rush full-throttle at that which gives them joy, Isaac soon discovered the price to be paid for passion in junior high.

What’s Klingon for ‘I’m a cocksucking elf?’

He figured out quickly (and painfully) that it didn’t do any good to draw distinctions between Otherworlds for the benefit of certain prepubescent males.

He was Trekkie, hobbit, faggot, Spock, dork-ass, Jew-baca, Java the Butt, and the perennial favorite, retard. They picked him last in gym. Flushed his books down the toilet. Flushed his face down the toilet. Threatened, and sometimes perpetrated, violence against his person. Created false profiles for him on the internet wherein he professed lust for Alien Worm Ladies.

His parents suggested he read less.

“Books are the only reason I haven’t gouged out my own brain with a spork,” Isaac told his parents.

“Oh. Okay, then.”

Life pursued its cruel course for three years. Three wretched, earth-shackled years. His face broke out and his voice broke down, his arms grew too long and his legs too skinny and his hair too shiny, his body developed a keen sense of when and where it could rebel in the most humiliating fashion.

Like today. Locker room. Isaac had been withdrawn in some corner, working on his latest telemolecular transmogrification. That is, willing himself into invisibility. The Others were vulgar and vocal. It had been diverting, calling attention to Isaac’s supposed Middle-Earthly impotence, but they eventually moved on.

“Serious man, Crissy was looking at him like she wanted cock sandwich for lunch today.”

“Whatever, I don’t chase the chubbies.” Such was the assertion of Aidan Fields, the ‘him’ in question.

“Why so picky, Fields? Still holding out for the ultimate mocha?” Josh punched Aidan in the arm, to a lusty roar of approval.

Josh Elwood: Captain of the basketball team, douchebag of repute. Aidan Fields: Second in bro-mand. The ultimate mocha: Marisol Rojas, or more accurately, oral pleasure from Marisol Rojas. She was a Colombian exchange student whose legs and accent provoked what Isaac considered a disturbingly colonial reaction among the males of Summerville High.

Alas, he too was a victim of disturbing reactions. And his charming peers were quick to note them, cracking both jokes and towels.

“Yo, Ewok wants to sip the mocha!”

“Sweet. Let’s go find Marisol and ask her, all right, buddy?”

“Would you like her to dress up like E.T. for you?”

“ ‘Ooh, talk dirty to me Marisol… Tell me I’m sexy like Chewbaca…”

“How’s she gonna talk with her mouth full?”

“Please, it’s Levinson. Her mouth won’t be full.”

Even inside the Warp, there were rules, and one was that gym could not last for infinity. At lunch, Drew tried to cheer him up.

“Want me to ask Sam if he’ll lend us some pot?”

“No thanks.”

Isaac preferred his mind altered by books and films alone.

“It’s supposed to entirely radicalize the experience of Space Odyssey.”

“Maybe some other time.”

Drew believed strongly in geek solidarity. He took such relish in his perceived status that he basically nominated himself for the position of Isaac’s aide-de-camp. Even though Drew was really more comics-and-gadgets and not particularly well-versed in the genres. Still, a friend’s a friend. Isaac didn’t feel very much nerd empowerment. He just liked certain books, that’s all.

“What do you think. Should I learn judo?”

Drew appraised him. “Could you learn judo?”

“I haven’t tried.”

“Your athletic record doesn’t point to probable success, though.” Drew knocked back a tater tot. “You need a lady.”

“Yeah, you’re really the guru there.”

“Hey. I have a girlfriend.”

“For the last time, Drew, Jenny is not your girlfriend. She’s your lab partner.”

“Our love is real.”

“It’s not love, it’s an alphabetical coincidence.”

“She’s into me.”

“You’re like a stereotype of yourself, you know that?”

Whatever Drew’s quirks, he remained Isaac’s best non-fictional friend in the world. They were collaborating on a comic series (“graphic novel,” Isaac told his parents) about a teenager who fought against the wily Clock Guards – a malevolent body bent on manipulating time — with his powers of invisibility. Evan S. Kent: conceived before Drew’s and Isaac’s reading level comprehended the silent ‘c’ in evanescent. What happens to kids who read more than they talk. What with the silent ‘c,’ the pastiche-bordering-on-plagiarism of the surname Kent and the practical difficulties of drawing an invisible hero, they were at something of a creative impasse.

“See, what you need is a theater chick,” Drew continued. “They’re into all the wizards and swords and shit. They put out if you take them to the Ren Faire.”

“Sure, Drew.”

Isaac avoided girls. As a demographic they were generally more subtle than the Summerville males, but Isaac was wise enough to the ways of the hall to know that they were equally capable of malice, and usually far more skilled at it. He had seen too many freshmen shredded like cafeteria slaw at the fangs of the she-pack.

Mostly he hung out with Drew.

And he expected life to continue as such – Drew’s basement, 7 hours a day of state-mandated torment, literary escapism – ad nauseam til graduation.

But that day, the fates had other plans for Isaac Levinson.

“I need a model.”

That’s right – she never really did ask.

Isaac poked his head out of his locker, where he’d been stashing his physics textbook. The words belonged to a female voice, which belonged to a female human. Said human female was currently leaning against the locker next to his, and clutching sketchpads to her chest.

It was a long time before he realized he was supposed to say something.

“Hi?”

“I need a model for a project in art class. I’m a painter.” Her eyes made a quick vertical scan. “You’ll do.”

He didn’t know what to do.

“Um.”

She launched herself from the lockers and headed toward the lunchroom. “Meet me in the lot behind the Drama Hall after Seventh,” she called as she disappeared down the corridor.

That was it. And it was a long time before Isaac realized he was supposed to move.

Every public institution for the education of teenagers has at least one girl like Greta Greenbaum. An artistic waif with a calm, unapologetic eccentricity that fended off both friends and enemies. She doodled naked centaurs in the margins of her math tests, occasionally ate raw beets as snacks and had never been known to throw a birthday party. She carried her books in a carpet bag. It was rumored she wore a necklace made of dead snails. Any objective observer would concede that Greta Greenbaum really was much weirder than Isaac.

And yet, no one ever bothered harassing Greta. She floated through high school in her own little orb; moved through it like a scientist in the jungle, her lab coat impervious to the grime.

Still, though. She was unambiguously a girl, and this was new territory for Isaac. He hadn’t even infiltrated the nerd-girl circles of Summerville. Sometimes a bookish girl with a kindly face would catch his eye, but he couldn’t bring himself to ever talk to one. What would he say? He read a lot, but he wasn’t a genius. He wasn’t handsome or hilarious or dangerous or experienced… He wasn’t anything. Just Isaac, behind a tattered edition of Slaughterhouse V.

A lie about a dentist appointment excused Isaac from comic-book duties with Drew. As soon as 7th period ended, he made for the parking lot outside the Drama wing.

She was drawing on the pavement in chalk. What could have been a fruit bowl, or a sea kraken. She seemed deeply preoccupied.

“Hey.” Isaac felt barely humanoid. A hex had thickened his tongue and all the moisture responsible for sliding words from his throat had migrated to his clammy palms. The sun gobbled his black T-shirt with fetishistic greed.

Greta Greenbaum ignored him.

Should have known. Isaac stiffened, instincts raring to crouch or flee or assume the fetal position, eyes scanning for hidden wolfettes waiting to pounce. Were they giggling behind the shrubbery, iPhones poised to capture his humiliation? He shouldn’t have been so naïve. Not even freakatron art girls would meet with Isaac for anything but a setup. Twit.

“Do you believe in a manifest hereafter?”

Isaac was so suspended by paranoia that he hardly realized Greta was talking. Not until she set her chalk down and twitched her head toward him, a hint of reproach behind her glasses.

“Well?”

“Pardon?”

“Afterlife. Do you believe in a tangible realm of post-vital souls, coexisting eternally in some numinous parallel dimension?”

“Uh… I’m Jewish.”

Greta smudged the edges of her drawing with her finger. Isaac wondered if he should leave.

“Frankly, the decomposition of the body interests me far more than the hypothetical flights of the soul. After all, the soul…”

Greta examined her work, nose precariously close to the pavement, before standing up and turning to Isaac.

“My father’s Jewish, too. But in a hereditary-secular-socialist sense. Do you pray?”

“No. Not really. Like, on holidays I guess.”

Greta stared at him quietly and directly in a most unnerving way. Isaac slanted his gaze to his shoelaces, until his unease turned into annoyance. What was her problem? He stared back.

Her appearance was in no way outlandish, but there was something about Greta that made it impossible to compare her to any other teen at Summerville High. She wasn’t wearing makeup, but her lips were somehow as red as dark wine. Beets? Isaac couldn’t come up with a label for the shade of her hair — it seemed to reflect every nuance of brown. It was long, and clean but scraggly. Her limbs were loose as her hair – too long for her body, they dangled from her torso like the limbs of a marionette. She wore big round glasses, an oversized trench coat and clothes that looked like they’d been fished from an old attic trunk.

“You said something about a portrait?”

The lack of response in Greta’s expression filled Isaac with the sudden dread that their conversation at the lockers had been a hallucination. And then, understanding blinked back onto Greta’s face.

“Oh, yes. The painting. I paint.”

“I see that.”

“That’s chalk, not paint.”

“Well. Then that certainly explains my poor performance in Art class.”

Greta’s nose crinkled, her lips widened, and something very weird happened. She laughed. Isaac had never made a girl laugh before. It shocked him so much he thought he might hyper-vibrate himself into a parallel dimension, or something.

“There’s an assignment for Advanced Painting. I’ve decided I want to be ambitious in its rendering. I need a subject for a portrait. I see you all the time, always reading.”

Isaac blushed. This was also perhaps the first time a girl had admitted to noticing him.

“This is good for me. I need someone who’s good at sitting still.”

Pride tingled inside Isaac. “I’m the best at that,” he said, with an enthusiasm that immediately shamed him. Slow down, Skywalker.

“Didn’t anyone tell you it’s not cool to read for pleasure?”

“Oh, it’s definitely cool… The trend won’t catch on for another eighteen months, though. Then I’ll be elected prom king.”

“Then you’re clairvoyant. Or a time traveler.”

“Yeah. The second thing. But currently I’m caught in an impenetrable time warp that won’t break til graduation.”

Greta cast a bored glance at her chalk sketch. “I have a recurring dream in which I’m a wounded medic in the Crimean War.” Her attention returned to Isaac. “A still sitter with plenty of time. You’re the ideal muse, Isaac.”

It startled him, the sound of his own name. So much so that he only half-registered Greta’s ensuing instructions on how to get to her house and when to show up there. She also had wardrobe requirements – “wear that” — and advised him not to consume an excess of fluids before the sitting.

“Tomorrow then?”

Isaac must have answered, because she strolled away without further negotiation, but he had no clue what he said. The same single electrifying chord resounded again and again inside his brain: I, Isaac Jeremy Levinson, just had a conversation with a girl.

Cartoon stars were still twinkling around his head when Josh and company attacked.

“Time to find the Mocha, dipshit. Hope you’re thirsty.”

“Get off of me!”

“You’re getting off on me? Sick, dude.”

“Stop wriggling around and focus on learning your lines.” A wet whisper assaulted his ear. “Got that? Cause you’re gonna repeat that loud and clear for Marisol. Don’t forget to enunciate, either, cause this will be on YouTube.”

Isaac’s molecules were transmogrifying into pudding. He flopped like a fish in Aidan Fields’ grip; they dragged him like bait across the parking lot.

“Oh, yeah, and we forgot… If you don’t deliver, Marisol will have the pleasure of seeing us kick your Klingon ass.”

“That’ll also go up on YouTube.”

Isaac closed his eyes, willed his mind to teleport him to another universe, and thanked all that was holy he’d visited the bathroom ten minutes earlier. Soon they stopped, and after an elapsed pause in which Isaac was not pummeled into the asphalt, he opened one eye. They were standing in an empty parking space.

“Where is she?”

“Hey, Alyson,” Josh called out to a girl climbing into an adjacent Lexus. “Marisol leave already?”

“She wasn’t in school today. Sick. Mono or something.” She cocked her head. “Didn’t you give it to her?”

The arms holding Isaac slackened. “Tomorrow, bitch.” They threw him at the pavement and moved on.

***

“Was into abstract depictions of death and evisceration for awhile. Then summer in England last year was all country lanes and nature hikes… Explains the kingfishers, wrens and sheep series. Please don’t touch that.”

Isaac pulled his hand away from an Uzbeki water pipe.

“Sorry.”

“Who’s your favorite artist?”

“Sorry?”

“You like that word a lot. Your favorite artist.”

“Er… ” A series of uninspiring class field trips and PBS specials flashed through Isaac’s memory. Zilch. “I don’t know. I’m more into reading, really.” Stupid Cousin Phil. “Sorry.”

They were in Greta’s studio. Isaac didn’t know any other teenager who had her own studio. The Greenbaums lived in a sprawling old house with an aura of dilapidated grandeur. Dusty globes, heavy drapes, a grandfather clock. Greta got the attic. It was packed with canvases.

“Who’s your favorite artist?” he asked. Maybe it was time to check out some of the other sections of the book store.

Greta did not appear to be listening. She’d managed to find a canvas-free stretch of floor and had lain flat on her back, nose pointed toward a skylight.

“Greta… You’re on the floor.”

“Verticality can be trying on one’s scope. Not to mention spine. I ought to paint these cobwebs.”

She turned her face to Isaac.

“Van Gogh. But then, who doesn’t have a weakness for melancholic religious types who slice off their ears and send them to whores?”

Isaac started to wish he was back in his own room, reading.

Greta sat up, legs still stretched out in front of her. “Have you ever cut off a body part and sent it to a woman as a romantic gesture?” she asked gravely.

Isaac blinked. “No, Greta.”

“You don’t seem the type.” She started to pull absently at her toes. “I notice people at school aren’t very nice to you. Do you find this character-building?”

“Very much so.”

“In the fourth grade, Luke Sullivan pulled my braid and spilled Kool-Aid on my watercolor. I grabbed his throat and told him that if he ever grew any brains, I’d eat them.”

“Oh.”

“I haven’t had much trouble with bullies since. Of course, it’s possible Luke just had a crush on me. I’ve never had a boyfriend since, either.”

“Since?”

“In third grade, Tommy Walsh and I exchanged vows. So did me and Lisa Farrell.”

Isaac’s eyebrows peaked.

“You know what they say about the third grade,” she shrugged.

Greta got up lazily and began rummaging in a massive wardrobe.

“Am I talking too much?” she asked, muffled by the closet. “My parents say I lack adequate social intuition.”

“My parents say I read too much.”

“Parents are sensitive creatures.” When she emerged from the wardrobe, she was holding a sketchpad and a fistful of pencils. “Sit on that stool,” she instructed.

Isaac obeyed. The second he sat on the stool, he felt his body triple in weight and his sweat go radioactive. What possessed him to agree to this?

“Today will be just sketches,” she explained as she arranged herself several feet away from Isaac. “Maybe the next day too. I take sketching very seriously.” She eyed him sharply. “You’re sitting wrong.”

“How should I sit?”

“Naturally. Be at ease. You’re like a petrified cucumber.”

Isaac shifted painfully in his stool. Greta was not impressed.

“Come on, Isaac,” she goaded impatiently.

“You know I don’t have professional modeling experience, right?”

Greta didn’t answer. She was staring at him with acute intent, chewing her lip. Isaac longed for invisibility to kick in. Maybe Greta would fare better at portraying it than Drew.

Suddenly Greta stalked across her studio to the corner where Isaac had deposited his backpack. Without a word, she unzipped it and began rifling through its contents.

“Hey!” But by the time he leapt from the stool to protect his property, Greta had claimed her prize. She thrust his copy of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? into his hands. Her next action put a thorough stop to Isaac’s protests, and his all-over verbal capacity: She grabbed his wrist and led him to the stool. He sat down dumbly, and continued to gape as Greta arranged him there herself. She opened the book to the page he’d saved and positioned it in his lap, adjusting his hand. His other hand she placed on his thigh. She took hold of his calf and bent his leg such that one foot rested on the top rail of the stool, and the other leg dangled freely over the side. She circled around him and tilted his head down. She stood back and evaluated. After a moment, she stepped forward, and nudged his glasses an inch down his nose.

“There,” she said. “Let’s get started.”

* * *

“No shit. Greenbaum?”

Drew took a hearty swig of Dr. Pepper and gaped. Isaac nodded.

“Man. She’s on mad drugs, you know.”

“What?”

“All the art kids are. They drop acid and go all Jackson Pollack.”

It was Tuna Surprise day at school. Isaac had made it to lunch period without assault from Josh and Aidan’s assorted goons. Marisol was still absent, but Isaac intended to practice invisibility to the full extent of his powers.

“You have no proof that she does acid. You have no proof she does… Pilates, or her math homework, or anything.”

“Well, sorry, I assumed the rumors were corroborated by her behavior.”

“Shut up.”

Isaac slurped his soda, frowning. He was (mostly) sure Greta wasn’t on LSD, but he couldn’t deny a certain quality of… Well. Trippiness. He wasn’t entirely convinced she wasn’t the type to X-acto her own ear.

“Still,” Drew conceded, “she’s got that rebel-art-chick thing going, not bad. You could do all kinds of worse.”

“We’re not, like, dating.”

Drew granted him a half-pitying, half-reproachful look. “Oh, please. ‘Come up to my private attic and let me spend hours and hours painting pictures of you?’ Have you seen Titanic?”

“No.”

“Really? Good god. You know, the effects were totally ahead of their – ” With a shake of his head and grunt of frustration, Drew returned to point. “Look, she is transparently hitting on you. I mean, it’s Greta, she’s not exactly known for subtlety… Remember in ninth grade when she
let that wild turkey loose in school to protest Thanksgiving?”

“Well…” Isaac was about to suggest that it was a fluke brought on by the acid, but at that moment he caught sight of Greta making her way across the cafeteria. She had a way of stepping on the tile as if it were rolling beneath her. Isaac was debating whether to call out or duck when her eyes met his.

“Isaac, dude – she’s coming over here.”

Greta set her tray down on their table. “May I sit here?”

Drew stared at the tray, then at Isaac.

“Yeah, sure,” said Isaac.

Greta slid in next to Drew. “I almost always eat lunch by myself.”

Isaac provided a noncommittal “Yeah.”

With unnecessary flamboyance, Drew shook his wrist in front of him and peered at his watch.

“Oh, shit… You know, just remembered I have a Chemistry quiz next period. Should really study for that. Left the book in my locker.”

He disengaged from the table and winked at Isaac. “Nice seeing you, Greta.”

And then he skidded out of the cafeteria without a glance behind him.

“He’s an odd boy. Who is that?”

Isaac didn’t think Greta had much of a right to go throwing about the “o” word. But he didn’t say so. “That’s Drew. He’s my best friend. He draws, too.”

“All the cool kids do, don’t they. What’s his medium?”

“He draws cartoons, mostly. Com — you know, like graphic novels. We’re actually, um, collaborating on a project. A high school superhero.”

Greta smiled. “Let me guess. He’s a time-traveler.”

“Well… He does contend with certain irregularities in the time-space continuum, but his main power is invisibility.”

Greta crinkled her nose, but did not laugh. “Invisibility? Not much of a power.”

“What do you mean?”

“It sounds more like a debilitating condition. Not to be seen? Who’d want that?”

Isaac couldn’t even speak.

“If no one can see you… What on earth is the point?”

Drew must have been right about the acid. He was ready with a retort about entering secret labs, when —

“Yikes, didn’t mean to interrupt the Klingon mating ritual.”

Josh Elwood had stopped at their table to cock a grin of pure malevolence.

“Just use protection, Frodo.” He winked, then eyed Greta. “Wow. Well, that’s definitely outside the species, so I guess she’s just your type.”

He slouched across the caf, back to his adoring posse. Isaac turned to throw a so-there in Greta’s invisibility-doubting face, but when he looked up he found her on her feet, glowering at Josh’s table.

“That is completely intolerable.”

“Greta, no, let it go – ”

But she was off. She stalked straight to his table and tapped Josh on the shoulder. A quiet so unnerving you could taste it settled over their section of the lunchroom. She bent creepily close and spoke in a calm but noxious tone.

“Please listen closely. I realize that you are so pathetically thick-skulled you barely qualify as sentient, and a corroded sewage pipe has more interesting thoughts than you, but speak to me that way again and I will laugh when I watch you suffer. You are a nonentity. No woman will ever find you gratifying and no man will ever take you seriously. I’d wish syphilis to ravage your loins, but then, there’s not much to ravage, is there.”

An awkward laugh broke from Josh’s face.

“God, Greta, if it’s my loins you’re after… Sorry, I’m morally against breeding with mutant.”

Greta pulled back. And then she slapped Josh in the face — with a force that was not merely symbolic. Its echoes seemed to reverberate in slow-motion. There were about eight seconds of total cafeteria silence: unprecedented. Something leapt inside Isaac, perhaps a fear that Josh would take a swing at her – but she marched out of the lunchroom with purpose and without fear, and Josh turned back to his lemmings, muttering about “the psycho bitch.”

Isaac relaxed. A split-second later, he contracted with tension again. No good could come of this. The rules were out of wack. Greta was supposed to be immune from violence within the Warp – half a lunch with him and she was smack in the path of the douche-ray. She can handle herself.

True enough. Could he?

For the rest of the day, Isaac shuffled through the halls, downcast and hidden in a series of inconspicuous slumps. He was nearly marked absent in Spanish class. A sense of foreboding followed him, thicker than the crowd at Worldcon. His classmates flirted by lockers and competed for teachers’ praise and texted each other rapidly from opposite sides of the courtyard. Athletes and artists and stoners and punks and representatives of the student council. All adamant and bitter about things — academic success, sports scores, resume building, rebellion, sex… Isaac couldn’t see where he fit into any of it; even in his wildest fantasies, he was a hero nobody could see.

And Greta – Greta fit into the scheme about as well as Drew fit into his Green Lantern costume.

He was thinking about the enigma of Greta when a pair of steel tentacles coiled around his arms and dragged him into a vacant chemistry lab. Further observation revealed that the tentacles were in fact Josh Elwood’s arms.

“Oh, shit. Look’s like Levinson’s psycho-freak slut isn’t here. Whatever will he do?”

Spit followed. Pain followed. Isaac’s gut absorbed most of Josh’s retribution, but his face won a couple shiny bruises, and one of the stems on his glasses snapped.

After Josh loped off, Isaac lay on the floor of the chem lab for ten impossibly long minutes. It wasn’t a bad view. Fluorescent light installations. Air vents. The abyss of unending despair. Tile.

Later that day, Isaac found himself bicycling around Greta Greenbaum’s block for the third time. You’re an idiot, squeaked his tires from the concrete. Don’t I know it. Here was a quandary. He didn’t have Greta’s number, and ditching their appointment without notice struck him as particularly uncordial… However. Not like he could play model with a fucked-up face. Or be seen, again, ever.

So he circled the block over and over, like one of Asimov’s Eternals circling the centuries.

“Isaac! What are you doing?”

He almost tottered off his bike. Greta was leaning out the attic window. He skidded to a stop and stared up at her.

“Hi, Greta,” he called.

“Get up here.”

“Um, see, that’s the thing – well I sort of came by just to tell you that today isn’t really a good –”

“You’re late.”

As Isaac plodded up the Greenbaums’ stairs, he wondered if he should try just ordering people around. It seemed to work pretty well for Greta. Then, his brain and his feet entered into a heated dispute – his brain commanded his feet to head the opposite of up, and his feet responded with gross defiance. His brain was then distracted by the task of figuring out how to conceal his face in a way both speedy and believable – this was not a fruitful venture for the brain.

He met Greta at the top of the stairs, and words evaporated. He stared at her feet. Moron, creaked the echoes of the stairs.

“Go to the stool. I feel very artistic right now.”

Then he looked at her directly.

“I can’t, Greta.”

She took inventory of his bruises with a placid gravity.

“This?” Her hand reached out, and the tips of her fingers tested the air around his injuries.
“I can work with this.”

Greta walked to her easel and picked up her tools. Isaac didn’t budge. He was transfixed by her business-like movements, by the echo of her hand as it cracked against Josh’s cheek, by the throbbing in his left eyelid and the contortions of his intestines. Keep listening to Greta and you’ll both get hurt, a voice told him. She waved him to the stool. Isaac went.

“Don’t forget the book. Get in place.”

He sat.

“So I guess you and Drew came to blows over artistic differences.”

Isaac smiled. “His aesthetics are way too commercial.”

“True art always requires sacrifice.”

“Plus, his jokes suck.”

He watched Greta’s eyebrows clench in concentration, watched her hands work invisible magic on the other side of the easel. Thought, none of this can really be happening, this is either the Matrix or I finally let Drew get me stoned.

“Greta…”

“Yes?” Her tone carried a constrained indulgence that indicated she was busy.

“You’re not going to – I mean, don’t paint the bruises, okay?”

Greta took her eyes off the canvas and set down her instruments. “Look at the book, Isaac.”

“I will, I just want to —”

“No, I mean, look at the book. Now.”

“Were you born this bossy?”

“What’s it say? What’s it about?”

“This? It’s… ” Isaac turned the volume over in his hand, staring at the cover. “It’s about this guy…”

“A hero, right?”

It was about an android bounty hunter in a post-apocalyptic future, but Isaac felt it best to humor Greta. “Sure, yeah.”

“Fighting against the odds, braving dangers and enemies, standing up for truth, struggling against adversity… Young, untested heroes. Quests and trials. Those are the kinds of stories you like, aren’t they?”

“Well, yeah… And alien battles, and stuff.”

Greta came to the stool and took the book from Isaac’s fingers.

“You’re the hero, Isaac,” she whispered, staring into his eyes in that horrifying unblinking way she had. “Don’t you get it?” She set the book on his lap, brushed her thumb over the bruise on his eyelid. “This is your testing.”

This is not actually happening. “Greta, if you’re on drugs, can I take them too?”

She didn’t take her eyes away. She didn’t take her thumb away. Isaac listened for his brain, but got no reception. So he grabbed Greta’s face, and kissed her mouth instead.

***

[END PART I]



Stay tuned for Part II tomorrow! (Or, you know. Read real CP stories. Do productive things. Your call.)