The Removed(19)

I knew Jackson in high school, back when he was a misfit. Maybe we were both misfits. For a while we would shoot hoops together. He couldn’t jump very well, sat on the bench. In ninth grade I was one of the taller kids and could touch the rim. I could shoot a fadeaway jumper and decent baseline shot, but by my sophomore year I’d injured my shoulder during a game and was done for good. People said I could’ve gotten a college scholarship in basketball or football. I was a good cornerback in football until that shoulder injury. The coach, a white man, compared me to Jim Thorpe. “You even look like him,” he used to say. I made three interceptions in one game, but after that injury I quit all sports, no matter how much people encouraged me.

“Remember when I got suspended for bringing my twenty-two to school?” Jackson asked on the drive.

“Who brings a rifle to school? Fucking nutcase.”

Jackson was still proud of that. I always thought he was criminally insane, but others called him a genius.

In the car, he wanted to hear about what I’d been up to. I told him about Rae and how she left me. “I don’t know if she’s kicking me out of the house or what.”

“You’re here now, Chief.”

“I guess so.”

“I got a job for you. You’re Sac and Fox tribe, right?”

“Cherokee.”

“I was thinking you were Sac and Fox, like Jim Thorpe. What difference does it make?”

I looked at him, unsure what he meant by that.

“We can get around all that,” he said. “I mean, we have this software in development you can help us with. It’s a sports game.”

Jackson jerked the steering wheel, swerving to miss something in the road. The sudden jerk jarred me, and I held the dashboard. “Goddamn,” he said.

“What was that?” I asked.

“Wolf, I think. Or bobcat.”

I felt a sudden and overwhelming fear. Where was I? We drove down a street with little traffic. The world was gray-blue, with snowy fog. Bare trees without leaves lined both sides of the road, though it wasn’t winter. The houses we passed were all older wood-frame houses, with porches and maples and oak trees in yards. I noticed a sign: BEWARE OF AIR QUALITY.

“Where are we,” I said.

“The Darkening Land.”

“Stop saying that. I mean the name of the town.”

“It’s the Darkening Land,” he said again. “Don’t worry. Are you worrying? Do you need to go to the hospital, Chief?”

“What are you talking about?”

“The hospitals here are failures. People can’t breathe here. There’s coughing and disease. I’ve been through six surgeries to correct a broken rib with too much pain. They gave me hardly any pain meds. I wanted the good shit, morphine or fentanyl. The doctors ended up removing the rib while I watched.”

I looked at him.

“I was stabbed in a public toilet,” he continued. “I won’t tell you the details. It was a restroom in a park. I thought the guy wanted sex, but he stabbed and robbed me. Turns out he was a skinhead.”

“You got pain pills at your house?” I asked.

“I wish.”

While holding the steering wheel with one hand, he pulled up his shirt with his other and showed me. I saw a mass of scars on his side. He didn’t want to talk about it further and quickly changed the subject. “People keep themselves entertained in weird ways around here. They play all kinds of games around town. Gaming consoles aren’t keeping them satisfied anymore. But with real-life games, you don’t know what’s real and what isn’t. Kids are spending twelve, fifteen hours a day playing. Adults, too.”

“What do you mean, real-life games?”

“The new games are augmented reality. That’s what we’re working on developing right now for the game: holograms. Images. What’s real and what isn’t. Structure and chaos. You can be a big help, especially with the sports game.”

“Where the fuck are we?” I said again, more to myself than to Jackson. I had a metallic taste in my mouth. I was still nauseated, and the road was in bad shape, full of potholes, jarring the car every time we drove over one.

“The images are a distraction,” Jackson went on. “People find real-life games more interactive. They get people out of their homes and communicate more in society. Remember those zombie campus games college students used to play?”

“No.”

“Some students were zombies and some were humans, and they went around trying to shoot each other. It’s like that here, but everywhere, with more people. We’ll have to get used to it. Nothing we can do about it, Chief.”

I questioned everything he was telling me. I wondered if he’d become a compulsive liar or if he was trying to make me paranoid; either way, something was off about him.

He glanced at me, then turned up the radio, but there was no music. There was static, only static.

TWENTY MINUTES LATER WE PULLED into his place, a small brick house with a front porch and flickering yellow porch light. The yard was in need of being mowed, part weeds, and wet from humidity or rain. The air felt heavy as I got my bag from the trunk.

I decided right then I wouldn’t stay long. I felt as though I was in some alternate universe. It reminded me of the black-and-white horror movies Papa used to watch before we had cable TV. His yard was washed out, and everything felt distorted, hazy with movement. I saw the ancient tree in his yard with cracked tree bark that resembled the faces of the dead. I saw insects crawling all over the bark. The insects buzzed, twitching their antennae.