Future Imperfect (2 page)

Those concussions were good but not great.

In June I decided to push things even further.

I paid a guy five bucks to hit me in the back of the head with a two-by-four in the vacant lot behind the train station. I was hit by a car and went flying thirty-two feet on Hampden in front of the Whole Foods. Threw myself down one of those long staircases at the Performing Arts Complex. Even took a bike off the side of the Millennium Bridge.

After that it was hard going back to the usual.

The “accidents” just weren’t delivering.

My best friend, Paige, she was not at all happy. I can’t even count how many times she threatened to ditch me. How many times she called me the most selfish person she’d ever met after seeing me at the hospital. How many times she suggested I just go ahead and schedule the lobotomy the usual way. How many times she cried and hit me.

The All Souls Chapel ladies, they’d never understand this. My mom, she gets it because I’m her only kid and I’m giving her what she wants. My coma dad, if he was awake I’m sure he might have had a problem with it all. Guess we’ll never know.

Anyway, early July is when I sort of reached a peak.

It had been a slow day, I’d made the rounds downtown, trying to jump in front of the mall buses, but they were all going too slow to do anything but knock me down. I entertained the thought of getting hit by a light-rail train but didn’t want to get mangled. So I wound up at Monaco Lanes Bowling.

Good thing the Skins were there.

I’d seen these particular skinheads at the bowling alley before. There was the one with the Mohawk and the combat boots and the older, pudgy one with the really lame mustache. All told there were five including a girl and she was wearing tons of mascara and had a swastika tattoo on her neck.

The day had been such a bust I figured this would be fairly easy.

I walked in and got some shoes and a ball and then took a lane a few over from the skinhead gang. This was maybe at two in the afternoon and besides me and the punks the place was pretty much empty. A lone bowler at the end in a bowling jersey like he really took the sport seriously and the guy working the counter.

I threw a few gutter balls and got antsy.

I was thinking of what to yell over to these Skins, eager to get the show going, when one of them, the pudgster with the caterpillar on his lip, shouted over, “Why are you even trying? You suck.”

This was my opening and I walked over to them, them all standing up, eyes narrowed, putting on their violent faces, and poked the pudgy dude in the chest. I said, “I might suck, but not as much as your mom does when I’m visiting her in the nursing home.”

And voilà! The magic happened. The girl hit me with her bowling ball in the lower back. That kicked my breath out, and knocked me to the floor, and then the Mohawk dude just started stomping. Actually, all of them just started stomping. So predictable. I was out fast.

Unconscious for nearly two days.

Saw footage of the beat down on the news the evening I woke up in the hospital. Those skinheads sure were inventive after I was unconscious. One of them slid me hard down the lane and I hit the bowling pins something terrible. Got a strike for sure. This video, last time I checked it, had a million plus views online. Good to know I can provide some entertainment.

Last night, if my mom’s Friends-in-Christ at the All Souls Chapel heard all this, they’d have freaked out. They’d have laughed, wondering if I was joking, and then, when they saw I was serious, gone all pale and walked away. I’ve seen that so many times.

I started my junior year at Mantlo High two weeks ago.

Summer’s gone and I’m stuck chasing down concussions at school. Pretty much just guarantees me getting suspended a whole grip of times. But this year, it’s going to be different. This year, it will be the best year of my life. The year where everything changes. I know because I’ve already seen it.

Fact is: I don’t hit my head for the pain. This isn’t some masochistic thing.

I have a gift. A power.

I am an oracle.

A soothsayer.

When my head gets rocked, when my skull cracks and my brain bounces, there is this tunnel of light that appears and in my mind I dive down into it. This tunnel, it doesn’t lead to Heaven or some other universe, it leads to what comes next.

When I get a concussion I can see into the future.

THREE

So it makes sense that in about forty-five seconds I’m going to jump off the roof of my school.

It’s about two stories up and I’m expecting a pretty major concussion.

For me, this roof is a stepping-stone. Just like today and tomorrow are only heartbeats in the way of what’s coming.

What’s next is all that matters.

Fact is: When I’m not in the future the world just seems so slowed down.

The right here, the right now, for me it’s like an ancient civilization.

On the lawn right now, snacking on their lunches and guzzling sodas, making out and smoking, my fellow classmates are Romans and Greeks. They are soon to be fossils and ash sculptures from Vesuvius. Stuck in time the way trees are.

But me, I’m always moving forward.

How do I do it?

How does me getting my head bashed in send me spinning into the future?

Who knows?

I’ve been writing to experts, people like doctors and physicists and philosophers, but none of them can give me a straight answer as to why. Either they don’t believe me or they feel sorry for me. Like, short bus sorry for me.

All but one guy and he’s my shrink.

His name is Dr. Reginald Borgo and he knows that what I can do is real. He’s mentioned to me that he’s seen others, people who can do some pretty spectacular shit, but I’ve yet to meet any of them. Borgo assures me they’re out there. That it’s just a matter of time. I should also mention that most medical professionals consider Borgo a quack. Figures, right?

Thirty-six seconds from jumping and my sneakers are already half off the roof.

I’m moving out of Denver.

I’m quickly moving out of my junior year at Mantlo High School.

I’m moving away from my coma father and my Jesus-obsessed mother.

But I’m going to get into all that soon enough.

Today, it’s the roof and the ground and my eyes on the prize: When She and I are together and moving toward what comes next at lightning speed.

Who is She?

Only the most astonishing girl in the world. I’ve only ever seen Her once and it wasn’t now. Like not in the present. I don’t know Her name or where She’s from. I saw Her in a vision in eighth grade, one of my very first visions, and I know that we’ll be in love. As cheesy as it sounds, I know this girl’s the one.

Us meeting will be classic.

Blockbuster.

Twenty-one seconds.

How it’ll go down is like this: She will walk into the lunchroom with Jimi Ministry like they own the place and She’ll get on top of a table. Jimi’ll beat-box and She, standing there bright as a burning building, will sing. Yeah, She’ll sing.

Her voice will be low and smoky and start almost like a whisper.

She’ll sing,
“Your own personal Jesus … Someone to hear your prayers…”

And then She’ll move over to me. Me sitting there enraptured.

“
Your own personal Jesus…”

And I won’t feel myself stand but will see my perspective change as I rise up above the table and over my little lesbian friend Paige’s sloping shoulders. It’ll feel like I’m going to float to the ceiling, but I’ll stop, caught up in that voice. She and I, we’ll stand there, staring into each other, for what will seem like millennia. Clouds’ll swirl, mountain ranges’ll rise and crumble to dust, oceans’ll swallow land and then retreat, leaving lakes and sinuous rivers, and dubbed on top of it all will be this girl’s voice.

It’ll be epically sick.

But I realize now there’ll be a little wrinkle in our whirlwind romance. This is because Jimi Ministry is there with Her. He’s an asshole. And the fact that he introduces Her, well, I didn’t know it a year ago but I know now that it’s not good. I can’t put my finger on it, but things could get ugly. With Jimi, that would make sense.

Ten seconds.

Below me no one looks up.

Below me it’s just the ground rushing.

I’ve spent two years of sleepless, clammy nights waiting for Her to arrive.

Six seconds.

Good thing I noticed the calendar in the vision. Right there on the wall just under the poster of the food pyramid. The date I’ve been counting down to for twenty-four months is August 10, 2010.

Three seconds.

Want to know the best part?

August 10, 2010, is tomorrow.

FOUR

It’s an old joke, but it’s true: Jumping off a roof is easy; it’s the landing that’s hard.

I need to land on the lawn.

Last time, the time that Nancy Springer saw me and puked, I missed the lawn by two feet and hit the bike rack. Took twenty-seven stitches to get my scalp back on.

Today, I’m feeling confident.

My aim is good.

There is a fury of wind.

The flapping of my clothes.

And then, well, forget the rolling, skip the falling on your side, the key to me making this a successful journey into my near future is by hitting my head at just the right angle and not busting up the globe of it too bad. From what I’ve read on the Internet, I’m guessing that giving the “dorsolateral prefrontal associative” area a decent wallop is what makes the magic happen.

Smack.

Crunch.

Going unconscious, it’s like standing in an explosion.

Most times, like this time, I find myself in a tunnel. I go down the tunnel and the lights whiz by me and then, where it ends, the light parts and I dive into the darkness between.

It’s dizziness and sleep and then only pure, beautiful, matte black.

And I open my eyes to the future.

Today, what I see is me ten years in the future. How I know it’s the future is because things look plastic. Not twisted or distorted the way they do it up in the movies. No CGI, no carnival colors. Just plastic like you’re in the suburbs. Plastic the way the waxed-up leaves are on the zebra bushes in the planters by the play space at the Cherry Creek Mall. My skin is shiny. My body feels so much more malleable.

And in this plastic future I seem happy.

Really happy.

I’m walking downtown, still Denver. This time I’m wearing a suit and it’s very sunny and I can feel the first pinpricks of sweat popping up in the small of my back. I think about taking off my coat but don’t because I’m turning the corner and now I’m on the shady side of another street. Downtown is busy. Cars pulling people places. Buses heaving back and forth on the mall. This must be spring because the sun is small and tight in the sky and the air smells like rain though there are no clouds anywhere. I walk into an office building and wave to someone, a woman with brown hair and thick-framed glasses sitting at a small desk, and then take an elevator to the fiftieth floor. When I get out, I stand at a bank of windows and admire the hustle and bustle of downtown, the mountains where there is snow.

In this vision I’ve got a backpack on but it’s not heavy. No one mentions it.

I take a flight of stairs to fifty-one and walk through a maze of offices where people wave at me. Then I walk out onto a balcony. I’m sweating more, but it’s not from the heat.

What I do next is I climb up onto the railing.

I stand there for a few seconds, swaying gently, my arms outstretched, just balancing on this two-inch-wide tube of metal. I’m thinking I’m glad it’s not a windy day.

And then I jump.

I fall face-first.

Arms at my side the way soldiers drop out of planes in the movies. The wind’s rushing up into my eyes and ears, grabbing at my hair and making my cheeks float open like the cheeks of astronauts do when they’re in simulation machines.

The backpack, it’s a parachute.

I don’t pull the cord until I’m fifty seconds from hitting pavement; I time it on my wristwatch. And when I do pull the cord, and the chute explodes behind me, I’m smiling so wide that I can see the white of my teeth reflected into the dark windows of the office buildings as I rush past them.

The way the chute’s set up, my fall won’t be totally broken.

I’m going to hit the ground and hit it hard.

My future: It’s just me getting crazier and crazier.

I’m guessing I have the ultimate concussion from the fall. How crazy is it that I see myself in the future jumping off a roof just to see the future? I assume that I don’t actually die. Maybe I do. Can you imagine the future I’ll see in those few split seconds before my soul jets skyward? Must be like a thousand years in the future.