Back From the Grave?

Stitches!

Coming Soon!

Happy Valentine's Day

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day, so I thought I would wish you all, zombie and trad alike, a happy one. I hope that you have a happy one filled with mushy cards, flowers, and free candy. Especially free candy. Last year some trad kid gave Karen a box of candy, which I guess was really sweet of him but, guess what? Zombies don't eat, brainiac! Karen did eat one, though, before giving me the rest of the box which I very greedily devoured barely sharing any because I can be that way sometimes. I did ask Karen the next day if she wanted another one (I had a few left, and I suspected that they were pretty much all those chewy chocolate covered caramel ones, yuck) but she declined and then did some Jedi mind trick where she told me exactly how many I ate and what order I ate them in. Spoooky! But we miss yoooouuuu, Karen! Where are you? When ya coming home? Anyhow, she didn't have any more of the chocolates and I wondered if giving a zombie a chocolate was like giving a dog a chocolate but that really isn't a good thing to speculate about, omz!

I do not have a special sweetie (sob) but that does not mean my heart is not filled with love. Some of the nastier, meaner zombies (yes, I'm talking to you, Popeye) call us beating hearts as some sort of insult, but I actually think it is kind of a nice thing to be called. They like being called zombies, so go figure.

Anyhow, a certain zombie believes that love is the answer to making dead hearts beat again. I look forward to the day when that happens, for everyone. Maybe tomorrow!

Living with the Dead

So now I have my very own login and password, courtesy of Mr. Tommy Williams. I asked him if he wanted to post anything and he said that he didn't really feel like it.

"Really?" I said. "But what about being the voice of the Dead Generation? What about all the people that supported you in your trip to Washington? Don't you want to update them on your, ah, life?"

He just stared at me. Whatever you do, don't try and win a staring contest with a zombie. Ain't gonna happen.

Some of you have asked about Phoebe posting as well; I wish I could give you an update but she's kind of not speaking to me because of my last post. I'm sure she already regrets giving me her password (remember kids: don't give out yer passwords), just as I'm sure Tommy will regret it in a couple days, too. Oh, well. She'll get over it. If I can't be me, I can't be me.

Colette is still talking to me, of course. She dyed half of her hair metallic blue and it looks super cool. I'll stick with pink, though.

Oakvale High Update: Classes are way way over-crowded now that the db kids have come back. There's got to be over thirty of us packed in a class now. And I get to sit next to that charmer, Popeye, in one of those classes. His real name is Chad, can you believe it? Chad Doyle. He absolutely flipped out when Mrs. Rodriguez called him Chad, though. He took off his sunglasses and everything. And his shirt, which was not a pretty sight, believe me, because he's done some really disgusting things--bodifications, he calls them--to himself. Like removed layers of skin right down to the muscle and stuff like that. Too nauseating to write about, really.

"Please put your glasses on, Popeye," Mrs. Rodriguez told him.

"Why?"

"You know why. And your shirt."

"I don't get it. Pinky Tuscadero over there gets to do whatever she wants to her hair, and gets to wear like three thousand bracelets, but I can't..."

"The school has a shirts and shoes policy, Popeye," Mrs. Rodriguez said, interrupting him. "And pants, before you get any ideas. It's all in the handbook."

"Oh, well, if it is in the handbook," he said. "That's like being in the Constitution itself. Or the Bible. The handbook. What about the sunglasses, Mrs. Rodriguez? I bet 'the handbook' has a policy on those as well, doesn't it? And the policy is that they need to come off."

He's such a jerk sometimes. He didn't even seem to notice that Tori Simmons was crying, she was so scared of him.

Mrs. Rodriguez sighed. "We're willing to make an exception for you," she said.

"Maybe I don't want to be the exception. Maybe I want to be the rule."

She told him that if he didn't sit down, put his glasses and shirt back on, and spend the rest of the class with his mouth closed and his hands neatly folded in front of him, she would make certain that he was suspended from school.

He complied, taking his time about it. I don't think he really cares about being suspended, but I think he wouldn't want to miss a few days of getting in people's faces and offending them.

He's in trouble all the time and the weird thing is I know he's trying to get into trouble. I think I'm pretty close to telling him off.

Desert Highway

Driving through the desert for seemingly endless miles, working our way back east. We stop every couple hours or so, so that the living among us can stretch their legs and breathe. There further we go the windier it gets, so that at our last stop you could actually see thin curtains of sand rising and falling away. The living people don’t like to stand out in it for very long, but I wish that I could feel the grainy air abrading my skin. We wear sunglasses, even at night, when we are outside. Not to look cool but to keep the sand out of our eyes.

I could look out at the desert sky all night and get bored. Sometimes I think that, rather than go on to Washington, that I should just gather up as many zombies as I could and more them all here to the desert, where there isn’t anyone to bother us. We could move into the Grand Canyon. Or maybe Death Valley would be more appropriate. We don’t need to worry about water, and while the wind, sand and sun would most likely take a toll on our skin, it wasn’t like we could feel sunburned. We’re immune to rattlesnake bites, too. We could find the ghost towns of the old west and move right in and create our own town.

The thoughts make me smile, because the idea of being able to get away from everyone that hates us certainly is appealing sometimes. But I know it isn’t the answer, not really. It might be nice to have a secluded corner of the world, but the world will always turn its eyes on you, eventually.

It would be great if zombies established some communities outside of “Normal” society—in the desert, at the poles, under the ocean. For all I know we could colonize the moon—we could go Anywhere we could be safe and free. But only if it was by choice, not because we were forced there or in hiding. Maybe if things go well in Washington we’ll have some of those options.

Those were some of the thoughts I had as we moved sleeplessly through the desert.

Dead in Hollywood

I could write an entire book on the adventures that we had in California. In some respects, California seems like its own country within our country, there is so much diversity within the state in terms of lifestyle. I’ll keep today’s entry quick though, confining my comments to the time that we spent in Hollywood.
I’ve got to admit, that the trip to Hollywood was really more about satisfying my own curiosity. What would America be without Hollywood? I really didn’t expect to find a very big undead population there, and I was right. I mean, the Sunset Strip was loaded with zombies, but only at night, and most of them were doing their best to blend in with the rest of humanity. If, that is, you consider them to be a part of humanity.
We didn’t stay long. Not because we pelted with rocks or driven to the edge of town by angry villagers or anything like that, but I’m not sure that any of us felt less comfortable in a place than we did during our trip to Hollywood. I was talking about it with Christie in the van when we driving away, heading east. It wasn’t that the beautiful people there were hostile, or even curious. It was more like they were completely indifferent to us—like we didn’t even show up on their radar. Like they were so inside themselves and their own concerns that they didn’t even notice we were dead.
I’ve got to tell you, in some ways I found that even more terrifying than the guy who pulled a gun on us outside a gas station in Utah.
We didn’t stay very long. The police kept us moving along and didn’t really give us a chance to talk to anyone. They weren’t violent—actually they were probably the most polite of any of the cops we’ve dealt with thus far, but they kept us moving, like we were trash they would like to see swept out of town.
The only thing that even came close to a normal human interaction was when a bearded guy stopped Christie and I and told us really liked our “look”. We were too stunned to speak, at first. He went on to tell us that he was a filmmaker and that he’d really be interested in having us do a screen test. I don’t even think he was aware that we were dead, not at first. He was sort of a heavy-set guy, which set him apart slightly from most of the people we saw in that town, and when he looked at us he seemed to be staring right through us; I felt like he was staring at something that wasn’t even there.
I told him no, thanks. After I spoke he looked at me like he could see me, the real me, for the first time.
“Why not? Really? You really wouldn’t want to get some screen time? I’m shocked. I’m really shocked that you would say that.”
I started to reply, but he kept going. For such a large guy he moved around a lot, shifting from side to side and punctuating his words with his waving arms. Christie would tell me later that his sneakers cost upwards of $500 dollars.
“Look, you people need to get some screen time. Images. Image management. All that newsreel stuff, it doesn’t do you any good. I’m talking positive images, film, documentary. Images people can relate to. Beauty. You’re beautiful. That will translate.”
I remember turning towards Christie in the exact moment that she turned towards me. Whatever it was that would translate, it wasn’t anything the bearded man was saying.
“Look,” he said. “I know. You’re busy. I understand this. You have things to accomplish. But I think we’ve got something hear. Death as attractive. In the right light, makeup, some slice of life, I think we could really make a statement. Do you have a card?”
“A card?” I said.
“Here’s mine,” he said, and fished one out of his jeans, which Christie said were the least expensive thing the man was wearing.
I took his card, which was creased and torn at one corner. It had his name and a phone number, nothing else.
“Kid, call me,” he said. “When you are ready, call me. You can’t get anything done in this country without Hollywood.”
His Bluetooth lit up and he pressed a stubby finger to his ear.
“Yeah?” he said, and, turning, started walking away without another word to us, this hands fluttering and making forms in the air that would remain unseen to whoever he was speaking with.
Christie and I had a long talk about this encounter. Had he understood? Was he offering us something real? Some of the things he said made it sound as though he knew who we were, and what we needed. But most of what he said left of feeling like he had no clue at all.
I kept his card, though.
Actually, we had one other interesting encounter just before we left, again at a gas station. A girl and a boy about our age, beating hearts, walked over to Christie and I as we stood outside the van. They were so tanned and healthy looking; it was hard not to think of them as the our living reflections, the image of what we’d be if we were truly alive. The girl asked if she could add a slogan to the van, and Christie found her a can of blue paint.
“Death, to zombies…” the girl wrote, and a thin drip of blue paint slid down her bare leg, “…is an endless sunset.”
She drew a big blue smiley face, and then she stood up and gave Christie a big hug. Weirdly—or I thought it was weird anyhow—the boy hugged me as well.
“Good luck,” he said, and then he took the girl’s hand and off they went.
I left as confused as ever. Maybe some day I’ll come back to Hollywood, someday when I have the time to figure things out.

Death To Zombies

So we get to Denver. And as cities go, this one is actually fairly hospitable to the differently biotic. We're able to line up a few places where we are welcome to speak about what it is like to be undead in America without much hassle or heckling, and a number of zombie teens want to join up with us on our travels, so we've now got a caravan of three vehicles, and we've got three traditionally biotic supporters who are driving, including the mother and the older brother of one of the new recruits. All and all, a pretty good trip. Except during one of our stops--in the community room of a senior center, no less--we come out of the building and someone has painted "DEATH TO ZOMBIES" in still-dripping black paint on the side of our white van. We're outside staring at this lovely peace of artwork, a whole host of thoughts and emotions going through our head, when Justin, one of the newlydead kids, say "I can fix this." We all looked at him--it was sort of like when Jeff Spicoli trashed the car in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and says his father has a 'awesome tools' or whatever. But we play along and drive Justin to the local hardware store. He comes out with a couple brushes and cans of paint.
"Watch this," he says, and he opens a small can of black paint and makes a few marks. We wait until he's done, and then we see that the van now says:

"DEATH,TO ZOMBIES..."

He opens a can of red paint, and in tiny letters writes:

"another chance to get it right."

"You try," he says, handing brushes out to some of the other kids. In a few minutes there are a number of messages in various spots on the van, messages like

"a sobering experience."
"the great equalizer."
"a laff riot."
"a pain in the brain."
"heaven deferred." (That one was Christie's)

So now whenever we stop we ask local zombies to add their thoughts to our travelling billboard. Thank you, nameless vandal!

What will you write on the van when we stop by your town??





(thx to Dee for the inspiration)

Road Report

Hi everyone--

Phoebe here, with another road report from Mr. Williams. I have to warn you--this is not a pleasant story, definitely not for the faint of heart. I'm still disturbed by it.

I can tell you that Tommy made it safely out of Scranton, but I'm not going to say just where he is, yet.

He thinks he's being followed.

Keep him in your thoughts, please, like I know you do. And again, his report is a very frightening one, so think twice about reading it.

Stay safe,
Phoebe




The Road Journal of Tommy Williams


“We’re not in New Jersey anymore,” Jason said.

The funny thing was that I knew it even before he said it. It was weird, because northwestern New Jersey isn’t all that different from that northeast corner of Pennsylvania, but I knew we were in a different place. Something in the air, or maybe the highway signs were subtly different, or the composition of the asphalt beneath the tires of Jason’s car different that the roads we’d just left behind.

Or maybe we passed a big giant ‘Welcome to Pennsylvania’ sign and my conscious mind did not register it because I was so busy scanning the bare trees for villagers with pitchforks and torches.

I’d been warned about PA, you see.

Jason drove a bright yellow VW bus that he’d nicknamed the Hearse because he’d used it to smuggle at least five dead people out of the state.

“Scranton, PA may be the city most hostile to the undead in the entire northeast,” he told me. “And that’s saying something, really.”

Jason is nineteen. He’s from South Carolina but he goes to school at Princeton, where he wants to major in cultural anthropology. He refers to his trips into PA as ‘field work’.

“Pretty much everywhere is hostile to you guys, though. That school you have over in Connecticut is a rarity. You’ve got a decent db scene in New York, and I hear that there is an even bigger one in LA and in San Francisco. I think it’s because all the dead get chased out of all the other states.”

“Except New Jersey,” I said. “Netcong was good to me.”

“Yeah, ‘cept Jersey.”

We met at a party in Lodi (which I’m told stands for “Lots of Dead Individuals”), where I was staying with DeCayce and his family for a few days. A dead girl from Cleveland named Tanya introduced him to me as ‘the guy who saved my life.”

“I was a little late,” he said, looking self-conscious beneath the brim of his Nets hat. Tonya hugged him and was clearly totally in love with him. I found out later it was because he and a few of his friends have set up a sort of underground railroad for differently biotic people. He brings most of them to Lodi, but he told me that some he’s brought further. In fact, a few of his passengers are now staying at the Haunted House.”

“Scranton hates dead people, man,” he said. “And they are organized about it, too. I think there are some people there that do what I do, except the rides they give to dead folks end in Scranton. And they are definitely one way tickets. Stacey and Rick—you’ll meet them—are pretty sure there is some sort of group that meets weekly, and each week they’ve got a differently biotic person at the meeting. Not applying for membership, either.”

On the surface, it sounded ludicrous that a group could be destroying one of my people each week as a part of some weird ceremony—they’d probably have the whole state of PA swept clean of dead kids within a year if they were—but I knew in my still heart that things like that were happening all over the country, all the time. I saw more white vans on the Garden State Parkway than I’d ever seen before in life or death, and every time we passed one I’d wonder if it was filled with assault rifles and a flamethrower. I know many of you do not quite believe in what some blog trolls refer to as “The Tommy Williams White Van Conspiracy”, but maybe you should talk to Cooper Wilson at the Hunter Foundation for an eyewitness account.

My conversation with Jason would be halted every ten minutes or so for him to answer his cell phone, and every time a certain number came up he would answer the phone “Karen here.” First I wondered why he was giving the name of one of my best friends. It took me a few of these phone calls to figure out the code.

“Charon, as in Charon the ferryman of the dead?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, looking at me only through the reflection in the rearview. “You aren’t insulted, are you?”

“How could I be insulted by something so corny?”

(And if you are insulted in reading this I ask you to reconsider, because I won’t be apologizing and I don’t think Jason should either. Sometimes a sense of humor is all we have to cling to; there have been times where I have thought it is the only thing keeping us alive. I also won’t be apologizing for fishing two pennies out of the cup holder where Jason throws his spare coffee change and putting them on my eyes as we went into Pennsylvania, even though doing so really seemed to freak him out).

Jason told me there was a sight he wanted me to see before he brought me over to Stacey and Rick’s apartment. What he wanted me to see was the towering, wrinkled face of Reverend Nathan Mathers, his five foot tall eyes still managing to look beady and empty as he peered down at us from a massive billboard, holding a copy of his wonderful book The Undead Scourge. For some reason, his greedy cold eyes made me think the title was actually The Uncle Scrooge. Maybe I’ve already been on the road too long.

“That was paid for by a local church group,” Jason told me as we drove by, “they raised part of the money by having bake sales and car washes that the parishioners’ kids did.”

We went past Mathers doing seventy, but his looming visage did not recede nearly quickly enough for me.

Rick and Stacy (who aren’t really Rick and Stacy, the same way Jason and Tanya have different names and the bright yellow bug that Jason-not-Jason drives might actually be a battered old pickup; the work they do being dangerous to themselves and the cargo they transport) are twenty-year old hippies, who speak with the same fervent conviction that I have seen Mathers (the actual six foot version) utilize, although you can see a light in their eyes that is absent even in the larger than life reproduction of Mathers. They don’t eat meat, they don’t wear leather, and they are involved in a number of environmental issues when they are not helping the dead escape to a better ‘life’ further east.

“We respect the sanctity of life and death,” Stacy tells me, her hand on my arm and her eyes scanning my face with an intensity I would find frightening if I were still alive and still fearful. “God created all things. Everything.”

“Yeah,” Rick said, his lips barely visible behind a thick brown beard that would probably let him run covert ops missions among the Amish, “the idea that you guys are some sort of demonic presence on the Earth is just crazy. I think the idea that anything other than God is responsible for creating you is even more blasphemous that what Mathers and those guys say. If God made the Earth and everything on it, and then someone says he didn’t make you and you are blasphemous, isn’t that blasphemy? I mean, what the heck.”

Rick was practically shaking with incredulity, but luckily I had Stacey’s steadying hand on my arm as she scanned my face, appreciating the sanctity of death.

“I could use some coffee,” Jason said, to try and lighten the mood, I guess.

“Man, that’s the most damaging drug of all,” Rick said. “The uptight drug, we call it.”

“You drink tea, though,” Stacey reminded him.

“Yeah,” Rick agreed.

I know my portrait of Rick and Stacey may seem a little unflattering, a little mocking. Don’t let it distract you from the fact that these people are literally the main reason why a number of us are still walking around. But they are real people, just like any of us, and for me to portray them as anything other than who they really are would be wrong.

Jason drove. I sat in the back with Stacey who was telling me all about her theory that we, the dead, were really some type of new human/plant hybrid while Rick cycled through the radio stations without cease. I think we were going south.

“Some plants, they die…as in actual death, roots dried up and all,” Stacey said. “And then they come back. With sunlight, or water. Or because someone is talking to them. Isn’t that amazing, the idea that you could bring someone back to life just by talking to them?”

“Pretty amazing,” I said. The car which may or may not have been a bright yellow bug was regardless cramped in the back seat. Stacey was wearing a peasant shirt and was not wearing a bra. I have a friend who has as many bracelets on her arm as Stacey had ribbons in her hair.

“Worms, if you cut them in half, each grow into a new worm. Energy can never be destroyed, only transformed. Maybe you have just found another way to transform your own energy instead of releasing it when you let go of your body. I see auras; that’s how come we can find the walkaways like we do. You all have this cool blue aura, like that new color of Gatorade or certain fabric softening agents.”

“Thanks,” I said. “What are ‘Walkaways’?”

She nodded vigorously. There were a couple feathers in the shrubbery of her hair that fluttered like tiny wings. “That’s what we call the dead on the lam. Not too many of you can actually run.”

“Oh,” I’d said. That one, at least, made some sense to me.

“I can’t tell who the bad people are versus the good ones. Jason and Ricky have such nice golden auras, really pretty. Most of the people in town have this sickly gray color. Like cigarette smoke or cancer. Ick.”

“I just think we are put here on earth to constantly renew ourselves, every day. Did you know that every seven years your body replaces all of its cells, one cell at a time? Living people, anyways. I don’t know if the dead actually do cell replacement. I’ve never studied the subatomics and molecular nature of the differently biotic before. I studied pre-law in school. Can you imagine me as a paralegal? Can you believe it?”

The funny thing was that I could, and in some ways I wished that she had become one. Jason told me as we crossed the border (after asking me would I please take the pennies off of my eyes) that Pennsylvania was one of the first states to pass legislation concerning the differently biotic (although in their laws the term used is “undead”). The law they passed actually made it illegal to “give occupancy” to an undead person, which meant that she and Rick had broken the law just letting me into their apartment, and it was probably a more serious crime than the one they were committing with their little horticultural experiments.

“They did it because there was a farmer in Bethlehem who was letting two dead people stay in his barn in exchange for free labor. His neighbors complained and lo and behold there was a fire of mysterious origin in the barn. Luckily the zombies weren’t in it at the time; they were inside the farmers’ house tiling his bathroom or something like that. I don’t even think I’m supposed to have you in my car.”

It was strange hearing the story from Jason, as it was one I had heard directly from one of the zombies who’d stayed on the farm, although in his version he and his friend (who never made it out of Pennsylvania) were scaring crows out of the fields. It was weird—so much of our history is an oral history, and hearing the tale retold by a traditionally biotic person gave me an odd little thrill of validation—if not vindication.

Somehow during the conversation with Stacey, we had drifted of Rte. 80 and onto some twisting and hilly back roads, roads more likely to be lined with brush and cattle fences than street lights.

“You are going to wish you’d taken the long way,” Rick said to me over his shoulder, “this isn’t pretty.”

Jason took a sharp left onto a “road” that was really just a set of tire ruts in a hard packed grassy field. He drove about a third of a mile in and stopped within about fifty feet of a metal pole set in a hillock of dirt as if hurled there by an angry deity. The dirt of the hillock, as well as the grass immediately around the hillock, was packed down hard, as though trodden frequently by many feet.

There was a blackish lump, about the size of a small suitcase, at the base of the pole. When I opened the door the smell of gasoline on the air was strong enough to hit even my less than sensitive nose, not the scent one would expect in the middle of an open field.

I looked back at my three living companions.

“I’m stayin’ here, man,” Rick said. Stacey, who was crying silently, squeezed his shoulder and followed me out of the car.

Jason reached the pole first. The suitcase was the charred remains of one of my people, just a lump of charred ash and bone. The pole, which in more human settings would have had a basketball net attached, was streaked with greasy soot.

“They chain them here,” Jason was saying, looking down at the poor thing that used to be a person, the pile listing to the side. “They chain them and douse them and light them up. End of story.”

“Every week?”

He looked at Stacey for the answer, but Stacey had knelt in close to the remains and I realized that she was saying a prayer. “Poor thing,” she said, “poor little girl.”

She stood, and beckoned me to the other side of the hillock. I wasn’t prepared for what I saw on the other side. I wasn’t really prepared for seeing the charred body, even though Jason told me that’s what we were going to do, but the trench on the other side of the hillock…I could not even guess as to how many bodies burned into ash it had taken to fill that trench, a trench that was long and wide and filled with a crumbling black substance that looked like charcoal until you realized that the dots of white, some as big as my palm, were bone fragments. I didn’t even know there were that many dead people living.

I thought I felt the wind then, looking down into that trench. At that mass grave.

Some people, the people who might be scared of us but not scared enough to want to burn us like monsters, say that we are ghosts wearing human flesh. Looking at the trench I could feel the ghosts of my people;they were tugging at my sleeves and whispering in my ear and urging me to do what I had taken this trip to do.

I don’t know how long I stood there. Eventually Jason said that we shouldn’t hang around.

I stopped at the burning post again on the way to the car, and when I got down on one knee I blinked; I thought I was hallucinating because I thought I saw a flash of light in the center of the burned remains. I looked again and saw that what had flashed was a tiny lump of metal glinting in the sunlight. I pried the lump, a flat melted disc of gold no bigger than my thumbnail, with fingertips that came away black with soot. The disc came free of its charred prison with a brittle snap.

A locket, I thought. This was once a locket, given to her by someone, a relative or a boyfriend perhaps, someone still living who had no idea that the little girl who they’d given it to would spend her last moments on this earth chained and aflame, ringed by a throng of blank-faced men.

I put the disc in my pocket and wiped my fingers on the sides of my jeans. Jason started the car and Rick, without turning around, said that they needed to get me out of Scranton.

Words From A Beating Heart--Tommy's Travels, Adam's Observations

Hello—
I just wanted to give you a quick update on Tommy. He’s safe with friends in Pennsylvania right now, and he’s going to be sending road reports pretty soon. For reasons known only to him, he was lucky enough to have caught a ride from a sympathetic truck driver he met at a service center on the highway. He said that so far just about everyone he’s met along the road has been very kind and helpful to him which has been great. But he also said he’s seen some horrific evidence of crimes against the undead. Please keep him in your thoughts and prayers.
Speaking of thoughts and prayers, Adam wanted me to thank everyone who has posted on mysocalledundeath for all of the kind thoughts you’ve sent his way. We both really appreciate it, and I really think it helps Adam as he tries to deal with things now that he’s on the other side of life. The thing that amazes me the most about Adam in this difficult time is how he’s kept his sense of humor. It shows up at really strange times in really strange ways. Like we were watching a basketball game (ok, he was watching a basketball game and I was trying to read) a few weeks ago and every so often he’d make a comment. He doesn’t speak all that much right now—it still takes him a great effort—but during the game he was practically chatty.
The first time it happened I was right in the middle of a really good paragraph so I hadn’t really caught on to what he said, just that he’d spoken.
“What?” I said, looking up.
He nodded at the screen, where a tall man in green was trying to in-bounds the ball.
“Dead…ball,” he said, not looking at me.
A few minutes later he spoke again.
“Watch,” he said. I looked up at the screen as another player in green was jumping and sort of falling back as he shot the ball from far away from the basket.
“Dead…eye,” Adam said as the ball left the player’s fingers. It sailed in a perfect arc into the hoop.
The other team called time out, and after some milling around the station cut to a commercial, and there was a three second gap between the broadcast and the advertisement.
“Dead…air,” Adam said. I made a funny face at him, but when he turned towards me he was completely free from expression.
“I’m trying…to…wink,” he said.
He’s a funny one, when he wants to be.