The Removed(50)

“We could all go tomorrow,” Jackson said.

I finished off my beer and set the cup down. “This is for the Thorpe game?” I said.

“Yeah, for the Thorpe game,” Jackson said. “It’s killer.”

Lyle laughed. They both laughed.

I told them I needed to find the toilet for a piss and walked away. Fuck it, I thought. Fuck Jackson for bringing me there. I felt paranoid and antisocial and knew I had to get out of that place. I was able to move quietly and unnoticed along the wall to the front door, where I stepped outside into the cool air of the moonlit blue night.

I walked away from the warehouse, following a road heading south to a small field. I thought I recognized the street on the other side of the field from one of my walks. Squeezing my way past a large bush and a wooden fence, I walked down a small slope of grass to the dark field, where I heard things around me creaking in the night. It was still warm enough for bugs, night insects and creepy sounds. I felt the urge to get high then. It came out of nowhere, and suddenly I saw it: the fowl, running toward me with its wings outstretched. I ran. The red fowl chased me as I scrambled through the darkened field toward the main street, breathing heavily without looking back, feeling the soft dirt underneath my feet as I made it to the edge of the street. I saw glimpses of red traffic lights up ahead. I turned around, then, and saw the fowl was gone.

When I finally made it all the way back to Jackson’s, I was still trembling from anxiety, and I desperately wanted to get high but I had no more weed. I drank a couple of beers from the fridge and sat in the chair for a while, trying to relax. The urge to leave the Darkening Land made it difficult to calm down. I missed Rae, too. She hadn’t called once, which made me feel awful. She wouldn’t want to be with me anymore, not with my lying to her about my drug use, but I still hadn’t accepted this.

There were too many unanswered questions. I sat on the couch for a while and started to doze. Maybe I fell asleep for a while, but soon enough I heard Jackson come in. He was a little drunk, I could tell, and asked me why I left so suddenly.

“I fell asleep, I guess,” I said.

“But why’d you take off?” he asked again. “Lyle was annoyed. We looked everywhere for you.”

“Too many people there for me. You know me. The place was crowded.”

He staggered into the kitchen and opened the fridge. He took something out, unwrapped it, and heated it up in the microwave. He sat in the kitchen and ate.

“I should go to bed,” I said.

“Wait a minute,” he said, turning to me. His words were slurred a little. “Let me show you something new I’ve been working on for the Jim Thorpe image on the projector downstairs. The hologram.”

I agreed, though somewhat reluctantly, and followed him downstairs to the basement. He turned on the light, and the air felt warm and heavy. There was a stepladder. He pointed above it, and I saw a gray device that resembled a projector installed in the ceiling. “This is it,” he said. He stepped on the ladder and reached up to the device. He was a little wobbly, drunk, and I worried he might fall.

“Maybe we should do this tomorrow,” I said.

“It connects to the Wi-Fi,” he said, ignoring me, “but it’s a little spotty most of the time. The light from here projects to the screen on the floor and then bounces to the Mylar screen on the wall over there. All of it creates a hologram that looks very fucking real.” He turned and barely kept his balance, drunk. “You’ll see in a minute.”

I watched him work. His face twisted as he tried to focus. He powered up the device, and blue lights blinked around it. “Here, yeah, you’ll see an image of Jim Thorpe in a minute,” he said.

The projector began clicking, and a moment later a robotic voice spoke: “I am the Indy Ann,” the computerized voice said. “Shoot the Indy Anns.”

The light on the device blinked, and I saw a blue light project from it. In front of us, a cloud was forming into something human-shaped. The image that slowly appeared in front of us was not Jim Thorpe, but a hologram of an Indian man in full headdress, with feathers, standing before us. I stood up. He was maybe six feet tall, with his arms at his sides. His body was in focus, but his face remained a little bit blurry. There was a cool tint to his body, as if he were standing under a blue lightbulb.

I lost all awareness of my surroundings, if only for a moment, lost my interest in the image and the technology and in Jackson, consumed as I was by the reflection of blue light, but the moment reasserted itself and almost immediately I felt the absurdity in the situation.

“That’s not Jim Thorpe.”

“Fuggin’ glitch,” he said. “Must be a damn glitch in the software. I need to get in there and screw with it.”

“Glitch? It’s a man in a headdress.”

I watched the image of the man flicker while Jackson, still up on the ladder, looked inside the machine. He picked up a tiny microphone and spoke into it: “Testing, testing,” he said.

Slowly, the apparition began approaching us. He didn’t so much walk as he glided slowly toward me. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. When he reached me, I could hear a ticking sound coming from his head. The expression on his face was horrific, a cry for help.

“Testing,” Jackson said into the tiny mic again.

The apparition said, “I am the savage. Shoot the savage.” Then it froze, staring out into the distance. I realized it had paused, fallen into sleep mode, unresponsive and still.