BANG, BANG, YOU’RE DEAD

Billy was used to playing alone. He had learned a long time ago that he was different from all the other boys and girls, even if he did not know how exactly was he different. He would just have to take his Momma’s word for it, he guessed. Well, if we are going to talk about words, special had been the one that she had used. He was so special, in fact, that he did not even go to that place the other kids called school. Momma taught him everything that he needed to know right there in the comfort of their home. He had heard the boys mentioned it, though, from across the street as they played and laughed and fought and cried. Momma was right, he must really be different, since he could never see any sense in that second part of their rituals. He never fought with himself and, as far as he could remember, had never once cried. Well, probably when he was a tiny baby. But that did not count. Babies never know what they do, whether they are laughing or crying. And he was definitely not a baby anymore. He was already six. He was a man. Momma had told him as much.

It was not that he was not curious. He was. Very much so. However, the rules had always been very clear and he dared not break them. It would upset Momma and he would never do anything to upset her. All that he knew was that his realm extended only as far as the fence which delimitated the yard and anything out of those boundaries was strictly forbidden to him. Truth be told, as long as he had his toys, that was all that he needed. Of all his toys, his favourites, the ones that could hold his attention for hours, were the little plastic soldiers which he had found in a tin box, hidden away in the attic.

“Were they daddy’s”, he had asked Momma then.

“Father has no use for toys. Never had”, she explained. She always called him father instead of daddy. “His plays are of a different kind, of a more pertinent importance”.

When he asked her the question he liked best – why – she merely said one should never question father. Momma had always been mysterious about father.

Billy could spend hours on end absorbed by the demands of the plastic soldiers. They were different too, special like him, since they took part in no wars. Instead, he would use them to populate the cities which he designed with his building blocks. Once, he had even made an attempt at reproducing their neighbourhood. He had set up all the houses in the street, including their own. He then proceeded to arrange the toy soldiers, each an equivalent for all the people that he remembered seeing outside the boundaries of the fence. It was only when he got to the point of placing the equivalents to himself and Momma that he realized how inadequate for the task the soldiers were. How strange that he had not felt it when creating the duplicates of everyone else. His Momma and he were a whole different business, though. They were both too real to easily allow for the deceit. They did not possess the intangible quality that coloured the world outside the yard. That was his nickname for the whole of the universe: the world outside the yard. Even if the universe, for him, ended right where his eyes could no longer reach. A universe befitting his own size and scale.

He still had the yard and his toys, nonetheless, the toy soldiers holding rank over everything else and, once again, that was all that he needed. That and his Momma, of course. So, when Gretchen moved in next door, halfway through spring, he did not quite know how to behave. He was used to being ignored, more often than not. Gretchen, however, would stand by the fence which separated her yard from theirs, thoughtfully surveying the progression of his plays. She was fair-headed and always dressed like the dolls that her Momma kept on her bed, full of frills and sashes. He thought of asking her if she was actually a doll – a living one apparently – but decided against it. He was too scared to address her more than shy looks. She had been the one brave enough to start up a conversation, one sunny afternoon, not a week after she had moved in.

“Hi!”

“Hi…”, he echoed suspiciously.

“Who are you?”

“I’m Billy”, he said.

“No. That’s your name. Who are you?”

“I’m the son of Momma”, he answered bewildered. She did not seem convinced enough, eyeing him sceptically. “I’m a man”, he volunteered, hoping it to be a better, more adequate answer. “I’m already six. How many are you?”

She held out one of her hands, open palmed.

“I’m Gretchen”, she then said and immediately scurried back inside her house.

The days that followed proved to be slight variations of that first encounter. It was a welcomed routine, as every repetition which happened to visit his life usually was. It made him feel safer knowing that he could count on it to happen, whatever it might be. It brought logic into his world and his world craved logic. Gretchen’s visits had the supplementary bonus of adding sweetness and pleasure to logic.

He would go out to the yard with his toys, arranging them on the ground and, then, just sit there, waiting for her time to come. Gretchen’s time. He would not play. He would simply wait. Then, as he felt or heard her front door creaking open, he would dive into the middle of his toys, acting the elaborate play he wanted her to testimony. He would pretend that he had not noticed her, involved as he was with the evolutions of his warless toys among the building blocks. And he always thought that he was successful at it too. As a rule, it was up to Gretchen to speak first. Billy would act surprised, sometimes feigning a slight jolt, others delaying the retort as if indicating that he had more serious matters on his hands. Interiorly, however, there was a glow of happiness in his heart each time that he finally heard her voice.

“How do you do that”, she had once asked.

“What?”

“Move them without touching them”, she explained pointing to the plastic soldiers.

He could not get over how silly the question sounded to his ears. It was like asking how he walked or ate. No, not even that, because those were things that he had learned to do, most frequently with the able aid of his Momma. It was more like asking how he breathed. He did not know. He just did. He had been born knowing how to do it. Was not everyone like that?

“They seem old.”

Why was she so interested in the toy soldiers, he mused. Not that he did not sufficiently know their charm, because he did, but he did not think it a good sign that she might covet them so much.

“They were my daddy’s”, he lied.

She would not dare try to kidnap them from a scary grownup like daddy.

“Where is he”, she asked.

Billy shrugged.

“Is he dead?”

“What is dead?”

She considered the question with a thoughtful frown and then shrugged it away, running inside her house as she always did once conversation between them reached a standstill.

Eventually, their daily routines did not go unnoticed. If Billy had known a little more about how the world worked, he could have predicted it or, at least, not be as surprised by what followed. One of the three boys who usually played across the street started to get annoyed by those encounters of theirs. He did not understand what interest the cute fair-headed girl could have in that freak. He had already tried talking to her, but she had merely turned her back on him. Now, there she was, merrily chatting with the freak. It was okay as long as they kept to themselves, but once freaks like him started stepping out into the common folk’s territory… there was just something terribly wrong with that. Freak, freak, freak, the boy’s mind ranted. His voice quickly followed his mind’s lead.

Startled by the unexpected taunts, Gretchen began crying, probably thinking that the insults were directed at her. Billy tried to calm her down, but she ran inside her house, amidst persistent tears. He turned his attention back to the mean boy. He could see him laughing and taunting him, from a distance, jeered by his friends. He felt a ravaging fire building inside. He recognized it at once. It was very similar to the one he had watched on his Momma, every time that she got mad at him for involuntarily doing something naughty.

He raised his arm, pointing his index finger, thumb cocked, like he had seen the other boys do so many times. His eyes squinted, trying to focus on the leering face all the way across the street. His hand jerked up as he uttered the familiar words: “Bang, bang, you’re dead”.

The boy’s head immediately burst open like a ripe fruit, a spray of blood and brains and tiny bits of skull bone hitting the other kids full in the face. Billy gasped, unbelieving. For a moment, he thought that he might be dreaming and half-expected his Momma to gently nudge him, as she did every morning: “Wake up, sleepy head”. All that he heard instead were the high-pitched screams of the other boys, shock welding their feet to the ground. He was sure that they would come for him, except there was no real gun in his hand and no one could assume that the mind of a six year old boy had done such a thing. Billy did not know that, however. He was scared. He was more frightened than he had ever been in his life. Was that what the word terrified had been meant for? He looked around himself and was a bit more reassured once he realized that Gretchen had not seen it. She was probably still inside her house.

What perplexed him the most was how the body still stood there for a few seconds – interminable seconds – an unbearable emptiness where the head used to be, the neck a ragged hole overflowing blood continuously. It seemed like a toy. Had he not done something like that to one of his Momma’s dolls once, by accident?

The screams eventually brought out his Momma, as the boys finally froze out of their panic and started running back to their homes, blood dripping everywhere. Now he was going to get it. He was sure of it. His Momma would really be mad and punish him beyond his wildest dreams. He looked up at her as she stopped by his side watching the gruesome headless boy on the other side of the street. The fact that she did not seem surprised was what puzzled him first. The unsettling feeling only grew stronger when she kneeled by his side, hugging him and forcing him to face away from the scene. His eyes rested on the familiar façade of their home, as she whispered reassuringly: “It’s alright, baby. It’s alright”.

She asked no questions, demanded no explanations, imposed no punishments. She merely lifted him up in her arms and carried him inside. Later that afternoon, he listened as she answered the door and the word police was uttered a couple of times. After a while, he heard what seemed like a struggle and Momma screaming that she could not leave her baby alone. That was him, he knew. He ran out of his room in time to see two men in uniforms – were they real live soldiers? – dragging his Momma across the yard, as she tried to kick loose. There were people all over the street, their neighbours, frowning disapprovingly.

“Leave Momma alone”, he shouted angrily, but no one paid any attention to him. He could not bear seeing his Momma treated like that, though. He knew what he had to do. He had learnt it already. You cannot unlearn what you already know, of that much he was sure. He again raised his arm, index finger pointing, thumb cocked. And, then, he just started shooting away. The two live soldiers were the first ones to go, at once dropping his Momma as their headless bodies fell to the ground. He might have stopped there, but he had seen the mean looks on all the people on the street, how they had frowned down at his Momma. So, when they screamed and looked to him as if to something evil, he just went on shooting. Every time that he heard a shout or registered the movement of someone trying to make a run for it, he would merely turn in that direction, cocking his thumb again and again, not even worrying with pointing at the head anymore. People were falling lifeless on the street outside, big chunks of their bodies obliterated by his shots and a river of blood taking over every inch of the pavement. He felt ignited, as if the hottest fire and the most freezing ice were coursing his veins at the same time. He was so absorbed by it that, when he heard the scream coming, not from the street, but from a little behind him and to the left, he did not give it a second thought. He simply turned and pulled his imaginary trigger. He saw the surprised look on her face give way to emptiness, as the tears stopped streaming from the lifeless eyes. There was a big round hole in the middle of her body – where her heart and tummy used to be, he thought – and he could see through it into her well-cared yard. After wobbling for a few seconds, Gretchen’s body fell back like a wooden figurine.

Billy stood there, in silence, contemplating the incomprehensibility of it all. He turned to the house, dazed, refusing to acknowledge what had just happened, and started climbing the front steps with difficulty. He heard rustling behind him but did not turn.

“Billy…”, his Momma’s low voice called, tentatively.

She followed him inside the house and finally reached him when he stopped in the living-room, not knowing what to do, trying to make sense of the world. He felt as her hand reached for him, but he did not want to be touched. Not now. All that he wanted was to hear again “Wake up, sleepy head” and therefore wake up. He waved her gesture away with a quick sweep of his arm. Her body immediately flew hard against the wall and stuck there, the clothes’ hanger piercing her throat. He looked at her, gurgling sounds coming from her mouth as she tried to speak. Instead, only gushes of blood were coming out. “It’s alright, baby. It’s alright”, his mind invoked as an omen. He felt as if all the air in the room had gone away all of a sudden and his eyes stung painfully. They finally burst into fat tears as he screamed hoarsely, an immense rage sweeping through his innocence. It was all their fault. The people out there. The real live soldiers, the neighbours and everyone else in the world outside the fence. He wished them all dead. They had made him hurt Gretchen. And Momma. He wished it so hard that he could almost feel a wave of hate rattling the house’s foundations as it burst outside its limits and stormed in all directions. Then, it all went silent again.

He walked out to the yard again and stood in the dead centre of it, looking at the fence. More specifically, at the small gate that interrupted it and allowed access to the street. He had never stepped out. Now that he was so irremediably alone, it seemed as if he had no other choice. With his Momma gone, what was left for him there? Maybe he should try and find daddy, which Momma had always called father. He wondered if he would be somewhere beyond the gate. He must. Where else would he be?

Billy decided it was enough. No more thinking. Time to do. To be a brave little soldier, like the plastic ones that had made so many of his hours much more colourful. After all, he was already six. He was a man, was he not?

He carefully unlatched the gate and took two steps into the sidewalk that ran along the street. He was amazed at how silent the universe was. Had it always been like that or was it just now? He looked to one side and then to the other, trying to decide which direction might be best. Where could he more easily find father, he wondered.

In the end, he left the decision to chance and merely started walking, no specific destination in mind. He avoided the bloody trails and the fallen bodies as best as he could and walked ahead. He walked for hours and, then, for days. He knew it was days since he had seen the sun setting several times and rising again in the morning. The first time, he thought that he would be scared of those darkened hours that stood in between, but he did not. And not once did he stop to sleep. Oddly enough, he felt neither sleepy nor tired, no matter how long and hard he walked. He merely kept going.

On his way, he found many people. They were most commonly fallen on the ground and, regardless of how forcefully he nudged or called them, they would not move or answer. He could not understand why they were so deeply asleep. From time to time, he would approach one of the houses he passed by and peek through the windows only to find the same bizarre scenario inside. They would be sitting in the living-room sofa or at the dining-room table – fallen over it, really – eyes closed, their bodies limp.

How much they resembled his plastic soldiers in that forced immobility. Well, not that much, since he could move his soldiers around at will. He wondered if he could do the same to those people and even felt a bit tempted to try it. Something deep inside his mind – not his Momma’s voice, this time – told him that it would be unkind to do such a thing, so he faltered. How very much he missed and longed for his toys – the soldiers, as always, above everything else – and how distant they seemed to him now. Miles and ages away, in fact.

How long had he walked already, he found himself thinking. Enough to be seven instead of six? Or more? His Momma would have known, but she was no longer there. Perhaps father would know. If he ever managed to find him, that is. Hopefully, there would come a time or point when or where he would meet someone who was awake or, at least, his father. That would be so much better. That was, after all, what made him start that endless voyage. So that he could find his daddy. “Father”, Momma’s voice corrected inside his mind. How he missed her too. He wished that he could be in her arms again. That she would hold him and once more say: “It’s alright, baby. It’s alright”. Even if he was no longer a baby. Even if he was six and already a man. Apparently, six year old men also needed their Mommas to assure them that everything was alright, from time to time.

Eventually, he reached the end of the road which he had been taking for the last few days. It stopped abruptly and beyond it there was a mirrored wavy surface that seemed to go on for ever. He tried to distinguish what might be at the end of it, unsuccessfully. If his Momma had been there, she could have told him it was called ocean. If his Momma had been there, she would have never allowed him to leave the yard, though.

He tried a step onto the greenish ever-moving surface and felt the wet humidity seeping through his sneakers. It held his weight, nonetheless, and he risked another step. And, then, another. Feeling more confident, he started to walk the watery ground.

Perhaps father would be somewhere on the other side. Maybe he could explain. Maybe he could forgive.

He kept walking.