THE FUTURENESS Ch12: Not Ball Lightning

“Gabbyella.”

Seemingly delighted by the teen girl’s surprise appearance (to me) through the trashy tree line behind the Golden Apple, Xavier indulged himself in a smirk. He’d popped in on me and Francesca and now he’d proven he could keep this, I guess, what, very small version of an adult Julia Child tucked into a waste strip of land until I’d ambled up.

“My assist,” he said.

“You’re my first Gabbyella,” I said, but from the insanity of what, following Xavier here over breadcrumbs, trauma bonded with him over a little bit of dismemberment? Do better when presented with the same situation, my imaginary camerapersons lurking there in the corners.

“Were you ever Gabby for short?” I asked Xavier’s assist. I needed everyone to walk away from me repulsed if they weren’t serious about what they were doing. Being an asshole was the only way I’d been taught or maybe was interested in how to do that.

“I’m short already now,” she said. “It’s Gabbyella. I have a bunch of degrees that I put off finishing to come here, so don’t bug me, please?”

Xavier’s smirk was unspeakable.

She carried two massive oxen cases, silver, heavy-looking and likely stocked with Xavier’s toys.

“Fair,” I said. “How old are you?”

“I’m fifteen. It’s different here.”

“It’s different everywhere, I imagine.”

“Please don’t.”

“What, don’t?”

“Imagine where young girls are older?”

“Who has the camera?” I asked the air.

“Gabby does,” Xavier said.

She was Shorty from that moment, I decided.

The rickle-tickle of small stones falling. We looked up the waste strip, to a grey power company box the size of a van with a teen girl perched atop, a girl not at all like Shorty. Dust rose from the earth around the power box where her thrown rocks had struck.

“Ignore me,” she said.

She was long, or just lean, in a full-length tan work suit with a wide zip down the front and a respirator that even from our distance showed a lack of maintenance. I heard Gabby’s two silver cases touch the ground as she set them by my side.

“Is this your space?” Xavier called to the girl.

She snorted. “You like it?”

“Were you here when the balloon thing happened?”

Which balloon, I wondered.

“Where were you?” she asked him.

Xavier turned to me, his Tom Cruise whites showing.

“We’re not getting anywhere with her,” he said.

“Fuck alive, are you trying?” I whispered to him. I turned to the girl. “Did you see it happen?”

“Poof, poof, poof,” she called down as she plucked three pebbles from her collection on the box. She threw one rock per word: “They…just…disappeared.”

Xavier pointed at the clouds of dirt around the stones she’d thrown from her perch.

“Dust in the wind, she’s showing us, friends. But look, the kids aren’t dust. They’re just alive and regressing. Witness testimony? No, I say. She doesn’t count. Look! Her head’s full of rocks!”

Gabby said, “She’s been here. She’s a real witness.” She moved just a small step behind me.

“Speak American,” the girl said as she sailed two rocks over our heads. “Why are you here?”

“This is bigger than you,” Xavier said.

“She’s a freaking victim of it, is what she was,” Gabby muttered.

“Yeah, her head blew,” Xavier whispered.

I would be damned unto eternal rumination if I didn’t ask the girl, “What do you think happened to the kids?”

“Ball lightning.”

“That’s very good, okay,” I said. “Great. People love ball lighting.”

But Xavier wasn’t laughing.

“He takes it serious,” the power box girl said. She pointed at my right eye and motioned me to Xavier, as though I were on a wire.

“You,” the girl said to me. “You’re not tech or money, so what are you doing here.”

“He’s doing miracles,” Xavier said.

“American?”

“Pop out the camera,” Xavier told Gabby.

 She set to work opening the spindle feet of a tripod and attaching a recorder.

“I’m American,” I said.

“The other one is Italian for something.”

“The other what?” I said.

“American Dream Doll Experience, stay up there, although you’ll want to see this,” Xavier said.

“Where am I going, Shorty?” I asked Gabby.

“That’s it,” Xavier said.

“They stood right over there,” Gabby said.

Gabby waved me to a nondescript spot at the wall, with no brainwash marks left behind, since the snows and rainfalls gone by. And so it was that I kept my head by thinking about the weather as I walked to their spot, not my spot. My spot was the Aventura. This spot, the Golden Apple, was my second home, where nothing ever happens and where, with another step, my lungs filled with oxygen a bit deeper. I gently gasped. The air tasted sweet. Another step, and a glow began in the center of my back, a feeling not unlike my dad’s pills—the real painkillers, not skrip—and floated out across my shoulders with a Queen Anne embrace…. I felt, in slow-motion, the flames funneling out of the home on TV at Michelle’s house, mute, numb but warm, the soothing of the pain you can’t get to. Then, a cover of calm settled over us from the sky down to the horizon where, at a huge distance, something like fireworks were popping off points of light that faded only to be momentarily replaced by another silent burst to one side or the other that quickly died, too. The sky turned red from the explosions and smoldering light. All at once, the ground beneath my feet buzzed. My ankles buckled and I sank to my knees.

I heard, Film his back. The blood.

Why’s he bleeding?

My back felt exquisite as shallow splinters slowly drawn free. Like insect bites scratched to oblivion with one stroke. Like a miracle.

I felt my shirt gently lift from my back. The pleasure was still too great. I stayed on my knees with my eyes slit.

“Rich, what color shirt were you wearing that night at the mall, you remember?” Xavier asked me.

“Sure,” I managed to say. I didn’t remember, but agreement felt good.

“Blue,” Gabby said. “Had to be.”

“Okay,” I said. “Bleeding?”

“Just some razor burn-type bleeding,” Xavier said. “Apparently, they missed a few bits of your shirt under the blast. Your back is kind of like, pushing them out now.”

I could breathe so well. “That glass is finally coming out?”

“No, actually, ah, the fibers of your shirt are coming out around the glass, so to speak,” Xavier said. “We need to talk about that, too.”

I straightened and turned to face them. The sky swirled with distant flowering bursts of fire behind Xavier and Gabby. They didn’t seem to notice anything other than me.

“It’s not glass in your back, Rich. Glass was a word people could go with. Explosion and glass are easier to explain away than ball lighting and quartz crystals shocked into a molecular form no one’s seen before. I’m afraid we’ve theorized what’s inside your skin is some very exotic silica, not a shopper at Bag and Baggage.”

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