The Rage Room Read online

  I girded my loins and sat up in my seat. I was about to open the door and go and see good old Mother when I spotted the car. Actually, I wouldn’t have spotted it, but Mother came out of the house and went over to a black sedan that just screamed SSO. She was carrying a tray of coffees! WTF? I slid right back down again. Oh shit. Of course the SSO would be at Mother’s place. And of course Mother wouldn’t be in my camp. And how could I blame her, this time? I didn’t blame her. But where else was I supposed to go?

  I froze. I had driven up so casually, not a care in the world.Now how was I supposed to get out of this mess?

  I slid back up the seat with enough of the windshield in view that I could see Mother still talking to the officers. Of course they’d suspect I’d come back for a visit, stupid me, and there they were, waiting. Why didn’t they look around and see me? Oh shit. That’s all I could think. Oh shit.

  I shut my eyes, distracting myself with one of my favourite memories of Bax and Sophie playing in a little splash pool in the back garden. I must have dozed off or even passed out for a moment from hunger and exhaustion, because when I woke, it was dark and the sedan was gone. I was lucky they hadn’t seen me. My childhood home was in darkness except for the porch light. I checked the time on my CP. Past midnight. What to do? If Mother was carrying trays of coffee to the enemy, the chances of her having my back were slim. But I had to have a respite from my car and my life. I just needed a couple of hours to get cleaned up and catch my breath. Mother would be asleep. She took sleeping meds and was out cold from midnight to three a.m. I had just over two hours grace.

  I got out of the car as quietly as I could and walked quickly down a side lane. I climbed over the neighbour’s fence and cut across our backyard. I held my breath as I searched for the key. Mother had three hiding spots. She thought I only knew the one, but I knew them all, just like I knew that she went outside every night when she thought I was asleep to drink a small sherry and smoke a cigarette. I always knew Mother’s secrets.

  I got it on the third try. I slipped inside the kitchen and took my shoes off. I needed to get down to the breaker box. I went down to the basement, feeling my way slowly, knowing which stairs creaked. I made it around the corner and fumbled along the wall. Oh shit. Knocked over a can. Mother must have moved things around. I just hoped the flashlight was in its usual place.

  I grabbed it, and just as I did, light flooded the room. Oh shit. I was standing there, a sitting duck, the flashlight in my hand and the world lit up like Strawberry Merv’s Christmas display. I lunged for the fuse box and flipped the switches. Darkness fell so fast that even I lost my focus. Just as quickly, I flicked the flashlight on. I had to find Mother. What if she had flashed an #Emr?

  I rushed up the basement stairs and there, at the top, staring at me and looking more like Norman Bates than any kind of mummy, was Mother in a pink towelling bathrobe, a godzilla masquerading as a fluffy toy. Her arms were folded and she was staring at me, and when I shone the light at her, her eyes were sad and confused.

  “Oh, Sharps,” she said. “I knew you’d come back.” Her expression overwhelmed me. “I knew it. Oh, what did you do? How could you?”

  I launched myself up the stairs towards her, a wild beast. I barrelled into her and pinned her down. She was smaller than I’d thought.

  “Did you flash emerg?” I demanded, but she didn’t reply. She just lay there, staring at me with such sadness and disgust that I couldn’t bear it, so I hit her on the head with the flashlight and knocked her out cold. It’s not like I had any choice. I couldn’t stand being looked at like that. I got up and dug in the miscellaneous drawer and pulled out the scissors and twine.

  “Thank you, Mother,” I said, “for always being so meticulously tidy. I can always rely on you.” I tied her up and stuffed a kitchen towel in her mouth, tying it tight with the twine.

  “Let’s see if you’ve changed your password, Mother,” I said, logging into her path. “TidyMa000. Really Mother, tut tut. Still, lucky for me.”

  No flash comms had been made, no alarms sounded. I had no idea when the officers would come back, perhaps it had been a shift change and there was already a new crew stationed outside. I had to be careful.

  A part of me just wanted to go my room, pull the covers up over my head, and go to sleep. I could do that. I could give up, give in. Get one good night’s sleep and give myself up. But then I’d have to face the music, and it was a pretty terrifying tune. No. I had to carry on. I’d come this far. I had to kick things into action.

  I made sure Mother was well and truly tied up, and then I showered, scrubbing and cleaning like there was no tomorrow. I shaved my head, leaving no rough patches. I looked thinner, but a few weeks of hardly eating would do that.

  What was I going to do with Mother? The question roiled around in my brain, and I stared at my reflection. I went to my bedroom, pulled out some clothes, and sat on my bed for a moment. I knew the room inside out even in the dark. It was all blue: light blue comforter, dark blue walls, and navy carpet with a pale blue throw rug. Just like Bax’s room. Hockey posters once lined the walls, but I’d ripped them down in a fit about something, I couldn’t even remember what. I had a lamp once, but I broke that too. The only things I hadn’t destroyed were my books: The Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, Catch-22, and my Graham Greene collection.

  I slipped into jeans and a hoodie. A pair of red-and-black running shoes. Clothes from before I was a married man and a dad. Why hadn’t Mother given my things away and packed up my room? I knew why. Because I’d screw up and need to come back. She knew it all along. I was so confident that I’d show her and show the world, and I guess I had shown them all right, oh man, I’d shown them all.

  What choice did I have? Mother had seen me. She knew I’d shaved my head, and she’d tell the world. I went downstairs to address the situation. After all, I really had no choice, but I could make it as painless as possible. It was the look of pity in her eyes that drove me to it. I had no idea I could feel this ashamed, and I had to make it go away.

  21. MOTHER IS DEAD

  I WAS ALL OVER THE NEWS SHACK. A repeat flash comm. MOTHER, KILLED BY THE “PERFECT” SON. Under the words: a picture of me and Mother on a sunny day, both of us looking cheery. I had no recollection of when the pic had been taken. When had we ever been that happy?

  I wondered about that comma. MOTHER KILLED BY “PERFECT” SON VERSUS MOTHER, KILLED BY “PERFECT” SON. It fried my brain trying to figure out the difference.

  After I left Mother’s place, I drove to the rage room. I had to let it out, smash things. Norman booked me for a double session and I went wild in there, leaving nothing but smithereens of plastic dust. Norman didn’t comment. He just played my soundtracks and let me have at it.

  Finally, spent, I looked down at the floor. Unbelievable. There was one bright red spot. I examined myself, nope, I was intact. Great, just great, someone else had bled all over the floor. Disgusting. Bleeding was against the rules. Blood carried disease. How had it snuck through the disinfecting process?

  I leaned down to examine the offensive splat. It was fresh blood, bright and sparkly. What the heck? Alien blood? I nudged the droplet and it moved. It was a sequin, not round as I had thought, but hexagonal with a pin-prick hole in the centre. A sequin. Someone was bleeding red sequins. This made me think of Sophie and my heart slammed shut, squeezing the air out of my lungs.

  Sophie, my angel. She would have bled red sequins, not like Celeste who would have spilled thick red motor oil. I couldn’t bear to think about Bax, and I was overwhelmed by pain and remorse. All I could see were their baby faces shining with love for me. Their pure innocence. How I missed those chubby little hands, those feet; their fat little tummies and the way they smelled. Skin so soft and those tiny bones, so achingly fragile. Tiny, perfect little humans. I had been right to fear myself when Bax was born. I’d known then about my potential for terr
ible destruction. But how could I have gone through with it? And now, how could I live with it? I missed them so much my very cells felt lanced with burning pain. I was an inescapable poison to myself. How could I go on?

  So when I pulled off my goggles and stripped off the suit, and Norman asked me if I wanted a drink, I said sure, why not?

  So there we were again, me, Norman, Knox, and the bartender, Shasta. It was mid-afternoon and we were all getting wasted.

  “Man, you know you look like shit,” Knox said cheerfully.

  I shrugged. “Can’t sleep. My brain’s shot. The other day I couldn’t even remember where I parked my car.”

  Knox nodded sagely. “There’s a memory app for that,” he said eagerly. Knox was a know-it-all who always had a better story, and I wasn’t in the mood to hear it. I finished my beer and ordered a scotch. I needed to drown my sorrows. Wasn’t that what tough guys did? Didn’t they drown their sorrows by throwing back hard liquor and wincing at the taste?

  The News Shack was still running me. The headline had changed to MOTHER KILLER ON THE LOOSE. A mother who killed? These guys needed a grammar app. There was a recent pic of Mother looking like a vintage grandma hippie. And good old Celeste with an avalanche of creamy breasts, a milky crevasse into which I could bury my head, softness fragrant with vanilla and coconut and a hint of bitter orange. I’d grown to like Celeste’s expansive breasts. We’d had a few good years, her and me, after Sophie was born, and Celeste stayed sober, and the PeachDiamondDelux Program was flying high. And look, there were my kids. My blameless little kids.

  I ran to the washroom and puked up my scotch and beer.

  “Yeah, man.” Knox had followed me. “That son of a bitch screwed up big time. And now he killed his mother. Wrote a message on her back. Sorry, Mother. I guess I wasn’t the perfect son. Sorry I disappointed you. Guess what? You disappointed me too. What a sicko. Neat handwriting. They’ve been showing it nonstop. How they haven’t caught him, I’ve got no idea. Pretty boy like that. Probably in St. Isidore now or St. Malos. They’re welcome to him. So hey, Shane, there’s a guy I know who can help you with the memory thing.”

  I got up from kneeling over the putrid toilet bowl and washed my face. How could Knox not recognize me? And yet, I could hardly recognize myself. I walked back to the bar with Knox following me.

  “Norman was telling me,” Knox rambled on, “about this guy who’s like this cyborg—biohackers they call themselves. They go way beyond Minnie’s shit. This is all black market stuff. Tell him, Norm, tell him!”

  Norman shrugged. “Yeah, I heard of a few things.” But he didn’t elaborate.

  “There’s other things people do.” Shasta joined the conversation, and Knox looked all perky. He shuffled closer to her, grinning. “Porn contact lenses where people get together and they put contact lenses in, and it changes what they see, collectively. Like you’re on a beach and everyone around you is screwing like rabbits, and the lighting is out of this world and you feel like you’re really there. But those were contact lenses, not chip implants.” She shuddered. “Porn sucks large. I had a really sick experience with one woman. It was so fucking twisted, I can’t even talk about it.” She looked haunted.

  “I’m sorry.” Knox pulled her in for a hug and she let him, staying close, and Knox looked like he’d been visited by the rapture.

  “The biohackers want to become more machine than human,” Norman said. Shasta pulled away from Knox to listen. “They want robot limbs and to be able to overcome biological limitations. It started out with people just wanting toys, like the guy who had a magnet implanted in his hand just for the thrill of it—a cheap thrill if you ask me—or the guy who implanted glowing lights in his forehead. That was kind of stupid, but the merging of man and machine makes sense in a way. It would make us stronger, fitter, faster.”

  “None of that shit appeals to me,” Knox said, first sensible thing I’d heard the guy say. “Now time travel, yeah, baby, that’d be cool. I’d go back in time, win the Universal Bingo Draw, and take Shasta here to buy the best ShyRichRollyPolly shit she wants, and smoke the best weed in the world!”

  Shasta grinned. “Yeah, baby,” she said. “But if you had that much money, I’d do coke twenty-four-seven, not pot.”

  “Too much coke will fry your brain,” Knox argued. “I love it too, but it’s a slippery slope. Miss MaryJane’s medicinal, keeps you level and happy. Let me doctor you, baby, I’ll keep you high in all the right ways.”

  “I don’t think you can go back in time to win money in the future,” Norman said, sounding reflective. “You can take a future action back into the past, but you can only go back into the past and change the future.”

  “You’re wrong.” Knox was certain. “Winning ticket numbers don’t change. It would work, for sure. There was that guy in 2003 who said he came from 2256. Andrew Carlssin. He made it big on the stock exchange, and he did it by time travel. Turned eight hundred dollars into three hundred and fifty million!”

  Norman laughed. “Don’t tell me, vintage YouTube. Ha ha! The crap you can find on there! I saw that one too.”

  “He was arrested by the FBI,” Knox argued. “But then he disappeared. I’m telling you, he made money by time travel.”

  “He was a gambler on the stock exchange, and he was killed by the mob he ripped off. No mystery there.” Norman corrected him.

  “I’d go back in time and get revenge for what happened to me,” Shasta said, and we turned to her and I inwardly sighed. She was, no doubt, back to her bad porn memory, but I wasn’t interested. I had real things to deal with. I’d go back and fix them, and Mother was only one of them. I’d definitely undo what I did to Celeste and the kids, and since Mother came after that, it would naturally follow that she’d live, too.

  And then it hit me like a tidal wave. They were never coming back. I’d lost them forever. I’d killed them. I got dumped so hard that my lungs filled up and I couldn’t breathe, and when I surfaced, it was like a heavyweight champion of the world had come back from the dead, walked into the bar, and punched me in the gut. That’s how hard it hit me, the knowledge that I would do anything, absolutely anything, to be able to undo what I had done.

  The only thing I wanted in the entire universe was my old life back. I wanted to turn into my driveway and see the lights on at home, the Christmas lights twinkling, and even if Strawberry Merv, the asshole neighbour, had won the War of the Lights that year, I wouldn’t care. In fact, I’d give anything to have my ass handed to me by Strawberry Merv.

  I’d go over, a bottle of tequila in hand, because I just knew Strawberry Merv was a tequila kind of guy, and I’d confide in him and tell him how I’d maxed out my credit cards on Christmas lights and gifts I couldn’t afford. I’d spill my guts about how worried I was that I wasn’t going to make it through the next year. I’d tell him how work was going to hell in a handbasket with sales sliding daily. I wouldn’t tell him that Celeste was a full-fledged drunk, only close to sober on Sundays for an hour when we took the family to Church.

  I’d tell Strawberry Merv congrats on a great year of lights and hey, that maybe the next year, I’d come close. We’d get a bit drunk on the tequila, and then I’d stumble back to my house, my belly filled with the warmth and camaraderie of men sharing men’s problems.

  And I’d look at the warm glow coming from the living room window, and know that Bax and Sophie were playing with their toys while Celeste warbled on about the Baby Jesus or streamed channels of Christmas carols, three sheets to the wind. Yes, I would do anything to get back that moment, to be able to open the door and hear the carols playing, see the Nativity scene near the fireplace, and the tree in all its magnificent glory.

  Because that was the moment of sheer and utter perfection, and for that moment, warmed by tequila and good conversation and how proud I’d be to have eaten humble pie so graciously with Strawberry Merv, my life would be eve
rything I wanted, flaws and all.

  “I’d like to have an app that goes forward and back,” I heard Knox say. He turned to Shasta. “I’d spend my whole time fast forwarding and rewinding, only to be with you.”

  I heard her giggle, and I felt myself wrenched back into the present, the harsh and lonely present where I had nothing but bludgeoning memories that I couldn’t escape.

  I ordered another round.

  22. FINDING THE PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE

  “HEY FELLA, YOU PASSED OUT,” I heard a voice say. I tried to sit up. “Buddy, your friend here passed out.”

  I opened my eyes to see Knox standing over me. I was on the washroom floor of another bar, one with an animal name—what was it? It seemed crucial that I remember. Right, The Barking Frog. We were in The Barking Frog. We left The Bar None and came here. I turned my head to the side and threw up, and Knox and the guy jumped out of the way.

  “You don’t look good, fella,” the guy said and I struggled to sit up.

  “Sorry,” I said weakly to Knox, and he helped me to my feet.

  “We’ll get you a coffee,” Knox said. “Come on, Shane. It’ll be okay.”

  He led me back to the bar, and I sat down. Man Bun was there. What was his name again? Norman. Right, Norman. Had he been there all along? How had we got here? I tried to focus, and Shasta put a coffee in front of me. Did she work here too? Nothing made any sense. I sipped the coffee, and my vision started to clear slightly. I held my hands out in front of me. I was trembling like an old guy, and it was unnerving to see.

  “So listen,” Norman said. “You guys. This is going to fry your brains, but I do know a guy who sells time travel.”