Transcendence (30 page)

In school, miles away in another town, Luke excelled. He found that he was adept with numbers and could quickly collate a number of large concepts, enabling him to do very well in the advanced maths. History and civic courses held a strong interest for him, as well, especially stories of great men and their great achievements. At the time, he had no idea the two disparate fields of study would later merge into one.

But school was not a pleasant place for Luke. Since he was skinny, pocked with pimples, and wore thick eyeglasses, fellow students mocked him mercilessly. As much as he seethed with hatred for this treatment, he hated them even more when, later, they simply ignored him. Some of the athletes would shove him aside between classes in the busy hallways, bang him against lockers during the lunch hour and threaten to pull his underwear up over his head, but mostly they forgot he even existed.

By 16, his life had grown silent. Wind howled through the walls of his father’s ancient house, winter’s claws picking out gaps in the termite-eaten wood. Dogs barked mindlessly nearby until their owners kicked them silent for a few minutes, and the barking would return. Pickups roared through town, guided by drunken teenagers or their adult counterparts whose faces had grown rigid with the grimace of age and too many defeats. That was all. No voices entered his consciousness except those of his teachers.

He was able to survive in the vacuum, content absorbing book after book: Watching history expand back through time through the perceptions of historians, conquering formula after formula and proof after proof. Many nights he stayed up late, studying by lamplight until elder Herrschaft bellowed that he shut the goddamned thing off; many times, he’d told Luke that school was his only way to earn a better life, but enough was enough.

Then Gladice Stevenson had entered his field of vision, and he had been stricken with all the symptoms of what the books called love.

Gladice was not beautiful, but then Luke had long before given up his desires for beautiful girls. They had laughed often enough at him, and he was able to look beyond their porcelain faces into their minds and see the loathing they nurtured there for him. No, he had stopped being attracted to pretty girls. Gladice was short, knobby-boned, quiet, and her downcast face was as expressionless as Luke’s own. She sat a row ahead and to the left of him in Geometry III. The only words she spoke were flawless answers to questions the teacher had directed at her, and even then she spoke not to the man near the chalkboard but at the open book on her desktop.

He recognized in her silence and perceived loneliness a kindred spirit. Following that recognition, he burned with the sudden revelation that he, too, was desperately lonely. It was as if she were a beacon illuminating uncharted caverns in his mind, as if she were the sun rising over hills and revealing cornfields hidden in shadow, as if her reflection of him did more than show how he looked inside, but magnified his every flaw and desire. In the multiplied emotional state of adolescence, he nearly drowned in the full range of feelings he hadn’t known existed in him before—all the worse because he had denied them all along. He had been a stable hydraulic system, but Gladice had pushed a lever. Under pressure, the static emotions within him sought release, and they squirted out.

One day after class, he grasped an opportunity to talk to her.

“
Here’s your pencil,” he said, handing her the fallen instrument. Her pallid cheeks blushed as she muttered her thanks.

That simple incident gave him such pleasure—simply because she had not rejected him, as had everyone else he had encountered in his short life. Even his grandparents, if he had any, had never acknowledged his existence.

But this girl had given him the priceless gift of a smile. No matter that it had been largely concealed by brown bangs hanging long around her face; he had seen her smile, at him. Two days later, he found the nerve to wish her a good day after class, and, by the following week, he asked her if he could walk her home. It meant that he would have to find an alternate way back to Big Stone besides the bus, but that would be an insignificant sacrifice.

She nodded assent. The rest of the day passed like a dream, but painfully slow.

Gladice met him on the granite steps that led down from the high school’s auditorium, as she had specified. He quickly offered to carry her backpack. They walked in pleasant yet awkward silence for a few minutes.

“
You’re real smart in math,” Luke said, abruptly.

“
You, too,” she responded. They continued along a gravel path through tall grass. The sun shone warm and comfortable. Afternoon in September.

“
What do you want to be when you grow up?” she asked.

Startled by the unexpected words, Luke didn’t know how to answer. He said the only thing that came to mind, the truth: “I don’t know. Just away from here.”

“
Really,” she agreed, relaxing. Luke swore he saw her eyes light up.

They walked for perhaps 20 minutes, a timeless canal carved through the stone of Luke’s empty days, a lifetime. They talked about geometry, about the new dimensions reachable only through virtual reality sets, how those were only to be found in big cities, and how they both wanted to escape these little towns.

A block from her house, Gladice grew nervous and asked for her books.

“
I better not be seen with a boy,” she said as an apology, agony sweeping pleasure off her face.

“
Can we do this again?” he asked, trying not to sound as if he were pleading.

Her smile returned, briefly. “Yes, I hope we do.”

With the nourishment of those few words and the promise they held, Luke walked the five miles home without even noticing the burn in his thin leg muscles.

The walk became a daily ritual, and when the cold breath of November arrived, Luke gained his father’s grudging approval to get a driver’s license and use the man’s half-disabled pickup to drive to school and back—provided Luke get a job to pay for gas and repairs.

“
It’s time you earn your keep, anyway, boy,” the man grunted, stinking of moldering cheese.

On November 26, 2016, Luke nursed the old Chevrolet all the way to school. He was triumphant at the success since his own hands had replaced the spark plugs, wires, and distributor cap to make the machine run again. After school, Gladice had shown not a hint of disgust at the rusted heap. Nor did she cringe when Luke opened the passenger door and revealed a bench seat whose threadbare cover he had hidden beneath a green wool army blanket. A model of what Luke imagined to be a four dimensional cube hung from the rearview mirror, toothpicks held together with epoxy in a complex pattern of box within box, joined at the corners. Glued to the bottom-most toothpick was a small piece of paper that declared in block letters: “GLADICE’S EXTRADIMENSIONAL ROOM.”

“
It’s beautiful,” she proclaimed.

Luke wasn’t sure to what she was referring, but he didn’t care. Another approval was all that mattered. He walked around the bed of the pickup, ignoring the taunts of others whose vehicles had at least been built in this century, and climbed inside. He thought it strange how his classmates’ teasing no longer produced any reaction in him. It gave him a sense of power over them: They were small and petty.

“
Don’t take me straight home,” Gladice said. “Let’s go for a drive.”

So Luke drove the rattling Chevrolet along a county road that followed the lake, past the last houses bordering town, to a pine forest. As they drove, they talked about black holes, a topic the geometry teacher had brought up in class; about cities and virtual reality. Luke had learned that Gladice was passionate about astronomy, and, since he had been reading up on the topic since discovering this fact, Luke was able to ask intelligent questions and make intelligent conversation about black holes and stars. They talked about NASA and the solar system. The words flowed from Luke like water, as though he had become another person, one who could carry his end of a conversation.

When Luke slowed to turn back toward town, Gladice abruptly forgot their talk about the bleak future of space exploration.

“
Don’t go back yet,” she said. She laid a hand on his arm. Luke read longing and fear in her eyes, a combination he couldn’t understand.

“
Park up there,” she said. “Let’s see where that trail leads.”

He did as she requested. As she walked silently beside him, he held her hand. The packed-earth trail wound into a lakeside forest of pine and elm and oak, bordered by brush and matted mixture of pine needles and fallen leaves. Sunshine filtered gray through the bare branches, tinged green from the pine.

Beneath a naked weeping willow Luke would never forget, Gladice swung around and pressed her lips against his. She kissed him long and hard, her tongue moving past his lips and into his mouth, her body pressed against his and moving ever so slightly yet suggestively; she did it so well that Luke knew without asking this was not her first kiss, as it was his. But no matter. No matter at all. What mattered was that it was him she was kissing of her own free will, and she was entirely his at this moment, and this moment lasted forever.

A single duck’s quack overhead pulled her away from him. She was flushed, breathing deeply and slowly, her lips glistening with a smile that held something he couldn’t identify but which produced excruciating pleasure within him. Luke had never seen such a beautiful girl as this, her brown hair revealing amber and auburn highlights in the sunshine. Before now, he hadn’t even realized she was beautiful. Then she turned away and said they’d better get back, or she would be in deep trouble.

The afternoon’s perfection was spoiled when the old pickup didn’t respond to Luke’s turning the ignition key. He avoided using the curses that seemed to be his father’s only vocabulary and tried again. Nothing.

An hour later, another driver stopped. Gladice had been huddling against Luke’s chest, her face cold on his neck. When she looked up, he noticed that she had been weeping.

The man gave them a jumpstart, so Luke was able to drive Gladice home. By the time she timidly stepped out of his truck, night had fallen.

Gladice didn’t come to school the following day, and the day after that she avoided talking to Luke. Then the weekend crawled past like a million years, so by Monday Luke couldn’t help but approach her after school.

“
I’ve missed you, Gladice,” he said. Her eyes were downcast. “What’s the matter?”

“
Oh, Luke,” she burst out, falling against him with her arms wrapping around his back, “let’s get out of here. Now, let’s go as far as we can away from this place. I love you, Luke. Please take me away to someplace we can be together.”

“
Sure, of course,” he said, stunned by her reaction, unsure of anything except that he wanted above all to please her. That phrase echoed over and over in his head: “I love you, Luke.”

They got into the pickup—which now sported a new battery and starter—and drove through town to the highway that led away, toward Minneapolis. They reached the Twin Cities just after nightfall, and checked into a motel along the road.

Gladice wouldn’t answer any of his questions, as silent as she had been when he had first noticed her in geometry class.

However, as soon as Luke closed the door behind them, she pushed him down onto the bed and began to remove his clothing, an odd look on her face. When she opened his pants, she quickly reached inside his underwear and took hold of his erection, squeezing it painfully pleasure-hard. The next hours were like a dream: disjointed, seemingly unmotivated, pleasure and fear and confusion. He noticed bands of bruise around her ankles but thought nothing of them. Perhaps she had fallen—she was not the most graceful girl. But now she moved over him expertly, slid her silken skin across his as if they were meant to be together; straddling Luke, Gladice took him inside her and only smiled when he ejaculated almost immediately. A few minutes later, after lying cupped against his stomach, she reached behind her hip to find him hard again, and guided him inside once more. This time they moved together like waves against a shore, like wind through leaves. Something about the desperation in her motions made him wonder whether she was driven by desire or something he couldn’t grasp. But his passion for her drowned such concerns; he knew she would always be the only one he would ever love, and she would always love only him, and therefore she would always possess his every atom. She had animated his soul.

The next morning before dawn, the phone woke them. It was the innkeeper calling to inform Luke that a man wanted to see him. Luke thought very little of having someone wishing to speak to him: They had paid cash for the room, so no one from the place they had escaped could know he was here. Luke must have parked badly, blocking someone’s way.

As he dressed, Gladice received the news with a face devoid of any emotion. He was hurt by her lack of affect when he felt only ecstasy. He couldn’t see their future together past this afternoon, but that didn’t matter; he was intelligent, he could run a cash register, he would earn enough so they could begin a life here, near the Cities. They could enroll in high school here—just not in one of the dangerous inner-city schools. He was certain they would both finish with A averages so they could go on to college together. Together for life.