Terminator

The reason everybody knows about James, the reason he wasn’t just a nobody like the rest of us, that all came later. This was before. Nine days before. I got a call from him. Hey old buddy, blahdy-blahdy-blah, howyadoin? Got any weed?

We planned to meet right away, so I put on triple layers and headed out. The two feet of snow that fell on New Year’s Eve had stuck around and sparkled in the late morning sun. Using the shoveled and salted sidewalks, it was easy walking up to the park, and all the way I kept wondering about James. We weren’t anywhere near as close as we used to be, that’s for sure. Not too long after we graduated, he’d left town without telling anybody. Then Covid. When we bumped into each other downtown this past Christmas, he’d lost like a hundred pounds and said he’d moved back. We texted about getting together, but it never worked out. I tried a bunch of times to get him on the phone and couldn’t, so I called his mom. She said he was at rehab.

When I got to the park, James was sitting on top of a picnic table, the one under the shelter on the far side of the baseball diamond where we’d played tee-ball as kids. I had the genius idea of taking a shortcut across the infield—the snow was iced-over and looked plenty solid—but I postholed from the pitcher’s mound to first base. By the time I got on bare concrete under the shelter’s roof, I was bent over, hands on knees, blowing out clouds of fog. I yanked open the zipper of my down jacket.

“The cigs are gonna kill me.” It wasn’t the funniest thing I ever said, but I kind of expected he’d at least give a little chuckle or something.

He didn’t. He just sat there in his snow pants and giant navy blue parka, staring out at the field of snow. The parka’s fur-edged hood made it hard to see his face except for his chin and the tip of his nose and a pair of goofy looking super-big sunglasses. What was up with that?

I swatted the snow off my pants and stamped my boots, then climbed up on top of the table and sat next to him. In my jacket pocket, I felt one of the cans of Foster’s Ale. He was just out of rehab—yeah, but who called who about the weed? I pulled the can out and tapped it against his knee.

He grinned, grabbed the beer. “Bleedin’ bloody ’ell,” he said in the fake British accent we’d used with each other since junior high.

We cracked the big green and gold cans and knocked back a couple of gulps.

“So…rehab, huh?”

“Got back last night—a little earlier than planned.”

I wasn’t sure what to think about that last bit—he’d fill me in if he wanted. “How was it?”

“Rules up the butt.” He sipped his beer. “When to go to bed, how to keep your room, how to take a shit. No phone. Covid-mask Nazis like you wouldn’t believe.”

“You vill vare zuh face die-puh unt you vill like it!”

He snorted, kinda smiled, enough so I could see his teeth. “Group sessions, AA, classes and frickin’ homework, one-on-ones, exercise. Every afternoon it was quiet time and self-reflection.” He said this all airy-fairy. “Honest to god, it was on the schedule—four to five.”

“A big place, or small, or…?”

“Seventeen of us—our co-hort. From all over. Mostly scum—losers. There was this one, Lois from St. Louis. Green eyes, long blonde braid.”

He tilted back a good-sized swig and wiped his mouth with the back of his gloved hand. “Totally into sex. We did it almost every day—during self-reflection.” He thought that was pretty funny and swirled what was left of his beer around in the bottom of the can.

“She sounds hot,” I said, but didn’t believe him for a second. He never had a girlfriend—no dances, no prom. Horrible skin. Fat from the first day of first grade—kids at recess yelling jumbo Jimbo, jumbo Jimbo. He wasn’t fat anymore, and he’d made a big deal about changing his name from Jimmy to James, but ten-to-one, as close as he ever got to this blonde babe was stroking it.

“Was it like on TV?” I said. “The group sessions and all that?”

“Our leader was this guy Armando—stupid goatee, sweater vest with square buttons. He had us sit in a circle. Honest sharing is the foundation of recovery.” James hacked at the back of his throat and launched a world-class oyster. “Half of ’em sat there, arms folded across their chests, not saying shit. Others wouldn’t shut up. Made me sick.” He drained his beer, drop-kicked the empty out into the snow, and ripped a good belch. Leaning forward, he rested his elbows on his knees. “I’ll tell you one weird thing about rehab though.”

“Okay.”

“Or maybe not so okay.” He took off a glove, bit at a fingernail. “Remember in Poltergeist, the little girl staring at the TV right before the ghost-thing jumps out at her—all the fuzzy dots on the screen, like static.”

“Snow.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what I saw. Snow between me and…everybody. Like a curtain.” He swept his bony hand, waxy and almost blue in the cold, up and down in front of him. “Sometimes there, sometimes not.” He aimed the huge dark glasses at me then quickly turned away.

What was I supposed to say? What came out was, “Jeez, that blows,” which immediately sounded dumb. “Is there any medicine, stuff like that?”

“Only like ten different pills—every doctor has a new one for me to take.” He stared out at the diamond, glum as hell. “Nothing helps.”

I had the idea of saying something funny about our mighty exploits playing tee-ball, like maybe that would distract him or make him laugh. But somehow I knew it wouldn’t, and I didn’t want to try to be cute and have it totally fail and leave me hanging out there like a jerk with him still feeling like crap.

I zipped my jacket up all the way. “Colder’n owl shit. You wanna go?”

We stood. With all the weight he’d lost, his parka hung extra loose and baggy.

“Isn’t that the same coat from when we snuck the 40’s of Olde English in to see John Wick 2?”

“Yeah,” he said with not even a hint of a smile for what was one of our craziest nights ever. “The old Roxy—before it closed.”

We followed the shoveled walkway past the swing sets and basketball court and all the way up to The Overlook. James stopped at the bench by the “Highest Point in McKinley County” plaque with the view out over the train tracks of the river and the Chem-Gen plant with its fat smokestack painted like a checkerboard.

“Where is everybody?” he asked, his eyes on the mostly empty parking lot.

“Home. The holiday.”

This didn’t seem to register.

“MLK day,” I said.

We walked on, the wind in our faces, a line of mean-looking storm clouds boiling on the northern horizon—the forecast was for us to get slammed by a front blowing down from Canada. As we got closer to my place, I wondered what James was gonna think about me moving back in with my parents. But he didn’t say anything when we turned onto my block or went up the driveway.

We clomped down the stairs into the basement. I switched on the light, cranked up the heater.

“Welcome to the Batcave.”

James pushed the parka hood from his head and took off the big sunglasses. His cheeks were sunk in and the skin around his eyes was dark, almost like he had on Goth makeup—which he didn’t—but he definitely looked like garbage compared to when I saw him a month ago.

He scanned the room. Pretty much the same castoff junk it had when we played down here as kids—two worn living room chairs, a sofa with a blanket tucked over its torn upholstery, brick-and-plank bookcases sagging under piles of magazines and board games from who knows when. I plugged in the two strings of twinkly Christmas lights that gave the place a little cheer.

“Still got the ping-pong table?” he asked, looking at the door at the end of the hallway.

“Yeah. You wanna play?”

“Nah.” He walked toward the furniture, his nylon pants making a sheesh-sheesh sound with each step.

I got two more Foster’s from the fridge and handed him one on the sofa, then flopped into the La-Z-Boy. “Behold the IMAX,” I said, pointing at my new 54-inch flatscreen with twin twelve-inch subwoofers.

No response—busy chugging half his beer.

I opened the cigar box and took a nice pinch of bud out of the baggie and packed the pipe and handed it to him with the lighter. He sparked it and took an epic hit. We passed it back and forth. Reloaded and smoked some more—not saying a whole hell of a lot.

I unzipped my jacket. “Warming right up.”

He rolled his head around on his shoulders. “I didn’t tell you the weirdest thing.”

“Huh?” I was sailing pretty good on the weed.

“About rehab.”

“Oh, right, okay. Weirder than the snow?”

He dragged the edge of one boot back and forth through a little pool of melted snow on the linoleum. “We’d be sitting there, all of us in our little chairs, in our little circle.” He tossed back a nervous slug of his beer. “And I’m looking at Armando, right, and he didn’t…he didn’t really look…real.” James turned his head at an unnatural angle until his neck cracked like a knuckle.

“Nobody else did either. They were like mannequins, or not even that, just movies of people—projected onto screens kind of shaped like bodies, but more like round pillars—totally stiff. When they moved or talked or turned their heads to look at me, it wasn’t really them, just some weird grainy video of them.”

I was thinking, Holy shit, that’s fucked up, but saying so would have been totally douche. “Whoa, intense.”

He lit the pipe again. There wasn’t much left in the bowl but what was there he burned down to ash.

Straining to hold in the hit, he choked out, “Not just people. Food looked like plastic. My hand.” He exhaled. “I’d seen the plastic stuff before, but only a couple of times—and for just a few minutes, then gone, like a headache.” He ran the fingers of one hand through his hair. “After the first week in rehab everything was plastic all the time.”

In my head, I had a super clear picture of a plate of food that looked like Claymation—bright green broccoli and a pork chop and a yellow ear of corn—but I couldn’t keep straight about the plastic, and the snow, and what the hell he was seeing when.

“I wanted to go home, crawl in bed, let things kinda, you know, settle down,” he said. “I snuck out. Hitchhiked home—froze my ass off.”

“That’s rough.” My hand started to reach for the pipe and the baggie, but I caught myself—the last thing he needed was more weed—so I stood and walked to the heater. I turned the control knob from high to medium, then took off my jacket, tossed it, and sat back down.

“Got home late last night. Surprised the hell out of my mom,” James said. “She was pissed, started yelling. What sucked ten times worse was everything was still all flat and plastic-looking—even she was.” His hand shot up to his forehead, rubbed it hard. “I ran into the bathroom. Felt like I was gonna puke or something. I looked in the mirror, saw this giant sack of rotting meat.”

He was blinking a lot, his eyes kind of twitchy.

“And the meat’s hissing at me, What a useless waste you are. What a total fuckin’ piece of shit. And it stunk, the rotten meat—worst thing I ever smelled.” He reached one arm across his chest and grabbed onto his shoulder.

“You’re not, like right now, you know…seeing stuff?”

It was like BAM, he snapped out of whatever it was. “Oh no. Now? No.” He shook his head, waved his hand. “It comes and goes—stopped now. I’m—I’m good.”

Along with this load of bullshit came a forced smile, but it melted away in like two seconds. He jumped up off the sofa and just stood there looking scared to death. Then he reached deep into his coat pocket and felt around for something, seemed to find it.

His other hand shot out, pointing a shaky finger at the baggie. “You know where I could get some…?”

“Weed?”

“More like heroin, oxy, fent—anything like that.”

I knew a guy who did business like a CVS, but hooking them up—yeah, right. I shrugged. “I can get weed easy enough.”

He kind of grunted. “Well, if you hear anything, huh?”

“Sure. I’ll letcha know.”

I thought he was going to leave—which would have been just fine with me—but he mumbled, “Pisser,” and took off to the bathroom.

I put the pipe and baggie back in the cigar box and slid it behind my chair.

The toilet flushed. Water ran in the sink. I picked up my beer so he could see me taking a casual sip as he came back—everything’s cool. It seemed like I was waiting forever, and still he didn’t come out. Sack of rotting meat—what the hell was that? Definitely taking way too much time in there. Snooping through the medicine cabinet? I swigged my beer, swished it side to side, swallowed.

Maybe it was the weed—warping my sense of time. How much did we smoke? Plus four big Foster’s—five-and-a-half percent. How long had it really been? I looked out the above-ground slit window—it had clouded over and started snowing, the wind was blowing super hard. Hadn’t noticed that before. Was he ever gonna come out?

Finally, the door opened. He looked better—seemed back to normal. I gave him a chin bob, tilted my can at him, took an easy sip.

 “Remember all those movies we used to watch down here?” he said, lowering himself back onto the sofa and pointing to where the old TV and DVD player used to be. “Over and over, a million times.”

“Didn’t need no steenking Netflix.”

“Hell no!”

“Goonies,” I said. “Bill and Ted. All the Indiana Joneses.”

“Back to the Future. Nightmare on Elm Street.” He was laughing now, totally goofing like we goofed ten years ago. “Keanu kicking major ass in The Matrix. The ever-awesome Iron Man.” He raised a fist in front of him like Tony Stark flying through the air.

“Transformers.” I hulked out my arms. “GRAAH.”

“And Terminator. T-1 and T-2, the all-time greatest.”

“All-time, definitely,” I said. “Hasta la vista, baby.”

“Arnold. Skynet taking over. Nuclear annihil—”

Crash-BOOM. We jerked our heads toward the door at the top of the stairs. One of the metal trash cans rolled past the window.

“And it’s all totally come true,” James went on. “Robots everywhere. Facial recognition, A.I. controlling the surveillance grid.”

“Arnold and his grenade launcher,” I said, still yucking it up. “Blasting the living shit out of the cop cars.”

 “We gotta fight the machines, man.” James shuddered, not goofing at all now. “Fight or die.” He stared at the floor, pinched his lips tight, and started to rock back and forth. In a quiet, little, almost baby voice, he said, “M-16, full auto.” He shouldered the imaginary rifle, closed one eye, opened the other wide, angled his head to look through the sniper scope.

He rocked.

“Twelve-gauge auto-loader.” Rock. Rock. “Double-ought shells.” The baby voice was now a singsong chant.

“M-134 Minigun. Four thousand rounds a minute.” He gripped the minigun, fanned it side to side, made the zzzzz sound of spraying a zillion bullets. Rock.

“Winchester shotgun, sawed-off.” Rock.

“AK-47.” Rock. “Thirty-round steel magazine.”

Every time he named another gun his eyes closed a little more. Heavy lids getting heavier, drooping into slits, now completely shut.

“HK MP-5.” Rock. “Nine-millimeter parabellum.”

We’d watched Terminator and T-2 like twenty times, and we never paid any special attention to the guns—but now he was babbling like some whacked-out doomsday prepper.

“MAC-10. Uzi.”

The rocking slowed, came to a stop. His eyes opened, blinked a few times, then locked onto mine, vicious, like a snarling dog ready to bite.

An icy fear grabbed me—those guys you always hear about, the kid who shoots up his school or whatever, they’re always crazy into guns. Posting pictures with their ARs. My heart was like dah-dah-dah-dah-dah, my brain going even faster. Why was his hand still in the pocket of his big-ass coat?

“I gotta pee,” I said and tried to walk as regular as possible to the bathroom and once inside turned the lock, careful not to make any noise.

Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.

After escaping from rehab, James Lee Dutton, Kennedy High School class of 2019, went berserk Monday afternoon, shooting his childhood friend—

Shut up, shut up. It wasn’t going to be like that. This was Jimmy. He wasn’t going to do anything weird. Calm down. You just smoked a little too much weed—got a little too high, a little paranoid. Let it go. Everything’s okay.

I zipped and flushed, checked my face in the mirror to make sure it didn’t show anything, then coughed as I undid the lock. I stood up straight, took a deep breath, turned the knob.

He was gone. At the top of the stairs the door was open, banging back and forth in the wind.

I ran up the steps and outside. Heavy snow was dumping, blowing sideways—musta dropped ten degrees. I followed his tracks through the soft powder down the driveway to where they turned onto the sidewalk and went straight until I couldn’t see them anymore. I squinted and stared, hoping to catch sight of his dark coat, but he’d disappeared into the whiteout.

The flakes stuck to my sweatshirt, my cheeks—so much snow falling I could barely make out the house across the street. Was this what it was like for Jimmy, a blizzard howling in his head? All I could think of was him wandering around out there in the storm, all alone, babbling the names of guns from some old movie about the end of the world.

I texted him all afternoon and a couple of times over the next week. He never replied. I called but got no answer. I hoped he was okay, wondered what he was up to.

Two days later I found out.

Me and the hundred million people who looked at the news.

Six months passed between James getting arrested and his trial finally getting started. When it did, I stayed up late, night after night, hunched over my laptop reading every news story I could find, listening to every podcast, watching every video. All the crime scene evidence—DNA, ballistics, timelines and floorplans, where the bodies were found. And all the crazy shit on the Internet—theories about everything. The gun. His motive. Was he in a gang? Did his skull tattoo mean he was in a Satanic cult? Who were these people who dreamed up this crap? None of them knew him—never met him, never spent one second with him. He got the tat when we were drunk on his birthday. What a bunch of assholes.

But then I read about what happened today in the courtroom. The psychiatrist was giving her testimony about James’s mental state on the night of the murders. That got all the headlines, but she also said one other thing that most of the media didn’t cover at all, and the ones that did only mentioned it as a minor detail. She said James has had invasive suicidal thoughts since he was in fifth grade.

Whoa. What? He’d never said anything about that to me.

I ran up the stairs two at a time, out into the humid August air, walking fast through quiet midnight neighborhoods. I sucked down one cigarette after another and replayed my memories of what had happened on MLK day. All those nice tidy memories.

I’d been afraid—terrified—that James had a gun in his pocket. Okay, say he did. But what if I wasn’t the one in danger? What if he was thinking of using the gun on himself?

Maybe that whole day he’d been trying to convince himself not to blow his brains out. Even with all that crap in his head—the snow, the psych drugs, the messed-up plastic visuals—he could have been putting up a fight against bad impulses, could have been trying to hold on to something normal, the way things used to be when we were kids.

Maybe if we’d just played ping-pong.

I turned a corner, followed the street up the hill.

Had James really been thinking about suicide, or was I making excuses for a murdering monster just so I wouldn’t feel like such an idiot?

Did he even have a gun that day? I never saw it.

And what was up with the drugs? Was that why he called me, to get some hard stuff so he could off himself?

A streetlight lit the entrance to the park—inside, a field of dark grass and the sandy dirt of the baseball diamond. At the shelter, I sat on top of the picnic table, lit another cigarette.

First-grade tee-ball, two on base, Jimmy swings, hits a slow-roller past the pitcher. He runs up the first base line, trips, everybody starts laugh—

If I had helped him overdose, all those people would still be alive.

Everything stopped. No sound. No thought.

After I don’t know how long, I heard myself whisper, “But they aren’t.”

It could have gone so many different ways. He could have emptied his pistol at me through the bathroom door. Or shot himself while I was taking a leak. I could have made a phone call and got him the fent.

I had to move, do something. I hopped off the table, flicked the butt, and followed the walkway up toward The Overlook.

It wasn’t me who burst in on those people. I didn’t pull the trigger. All I did was play a bit role in somebody else’s movie—the clerk who sold Jeffrey Dahmer pliers and duct tape, the fry cook who made a cheeseburger for Charles Manson.

But still, Jesus Christ, I did sit there with him, we did get high, laughing our asses off about the Terminator—the killing machine. Hasta la vista. We did this shit nine days before he opened fire.

What the fuck do I do with that?

At The Overlook, I stopped, breathing hard, gazing up into the black, starless sky.

Across the river the Chem-Gen plant glowed. Ten stories tall and lit up with floodlights, and streetlights, bare bulbs in cages over doorways, banks of lights above the loading dock, amber and red safety dots running up the sides of the smokestack and blinking around the top. All the conveyer belts and hoppers and pumps and fuel tanks, silos and towers, and pipes going every which way—water, steam, gas, chemicals, who knows—thousands of them, painted different colors, shiny and dull, in fifty sizes from dinky to huge, straight and angled and bent, loners and bundled together in clusters, some strapped to walls, others hanging in midair by themselves.

I stood there a long, long time, staring at all those twisted, tangled connections, a freaky alien beauty that only some insane architect could ever in a million years possibly understand.