I don’t believe David when he tells me that he’s dead, but he sends me a link to his obit, and when I say he’s fucking with me, he links me the news video about the car crash, with the drone footage circling the gore. Shoulda started with that. 

They don’t say his name in the video, since David is a minor, but I recognize the car: it used to be his dad’s. On the back windows, David’s little sisters stuck so many stickers that the windows couldn’t be rolled down anymore, and nobody ever bothered to scrape them off. As the drone swoops past the wreck and the pixellated, blurred out corpse, it catches the glittery pink unicorn and the entire pack of dog stickers in the frame. When I pause the video, my browser provides a popup link to a product page, in case I want any stickers of my own.

He says the accident took his head clean off. Chop. Instant. Landed twenty feet away from the car. One of those guys who camo’s their car to hide from the traffic cams got him. But he got lucky, I guess, ‘cause they scanned his head, even if the rest of him was smashed to orange juice pulp. I can kinda see it: the pixelation of the news video is pretty pulpy. 

He tells me he doesn’t remember it. Doesn’t remember getting in the car, though he kinda remembers what he did that morning— took the SAT again. This was two weeks ago and I almost scroll back through my messages to see if he texted me since then, but I don’t want to think about, like, him lying to me or hiding it from me, and I don’t think we’d talked because I was busy with shit and anyway— 

You don’t remember the crash ‘cause you got brain damage, or? 

I mean, it makes sense that they don’t let you remember. I wouldn’t want to remember. That’s what I tell him. But I ask, does it bother you, not remembering? 

No. 

Well, anyway, he says. Nothing has to change, I guess. 

And everything he says isn’t true and he knows it and I know it, but he just died so I let him have his lies. 

He tells me how he woke up one morning and his mom and dad were waiting for him in the kitchen, and he didn’t notice what was going on until he saw the way they were looking at him and he thought it was weird that they were both there instead of being at work and he was like, did somebody die or something? And they were like, well, actually… It’s not really a funny story but I try to laugh. Haha. 

Is it any different, being inside all the time? 

Why don’t you come over? he asks. And by this, he means, will you please come over?

So I come over. I think about not doing it but he waited until a Friday night and I’m never doing anything on Friday nights because I’m always hanging out with him. So I put on my headset and lay down in bed and then I’m in his room and he’s sitting on his bed. 

I don’t think it’s really exactly like his bedroom in real life because it’s clean for one thing, but he never really liked adding in all that stupid digital shit. My sister keeps a shark in a fishtank and every time I see it I tell her you know that’s not real right. 

But I say hey and he says hey. He looks the same. And so I ask again: what’s it like being dead? 

He tells me he doesn’t feel any different. I can’t really look at him so I just go around his room and touch all his stuff. His computer is turned on, open to our messages. I say, you still type everything out? 

And he says, yeah, maybe there’s some setting where I can be totally hooked in, you know, but if there is it’s hidden. It’s kinda stupid, though— if I want to play Ringdom I still have to put on my headset. 

He holds up his hands and looks at them. He’s got that scar from when he accidentally slammed a beaker down on the table in chem lab in middle school, and the glass went up in his palm. 

I still even have to shower, he says. My hair still gets greasy. 

Crazy, I say. 

Yeah. 

I fiddle with the kalimba on his bookshelf, plinking out stupid notes. I kinda remember how to play “Amazing Grace” but I mess up about halfway through, and when I try the third time David says, you’re killing me, man. So I put it down and give him what he wants, which is

what we always do when we’re watching a movie or whatever. I sit in his bed next to him and then we lay down. It’s kinda nice. Obviously not as good as last time I saw him in person, when he came to my house over winter break and we went skiing together, but it’s, you know. 

You have to be careful with it. Most of the things he wants to do will trip the breaker. Sure, you can kiss, that’s allowed, but if you kiss the computer starts to mute you, more and more until your lips feel like rubber and your body feels like a robot. So you don’t kiss, and instead there’s this alternate language you develop where you’re tightrope-walking just on the edge of what’s allowed. He runs his hands through my hair over and over and down the sides of my jaw and I brush my fingertips just over the top of his arms with a touch so light it makes his skin crawl, because that’s the best you can get. 

You know what the worst part is, he says. And I ask what, but I already know what he’s gonna say. I can’t even fucking jerk off, man. 

You’ll be eighteen in, like, a month. 

No I won’t, he says. I’m dead. 

Yeah. 

*** 

He’s always online. We play Ringdom, but his level goes up and up and up ‘cause it’s all he does all day, and eventually we can’t even quest together anymore. 

He has this project, to walk across the whole country. I come visit him, strolling along the highway, with those little blue flowers tucked into the grass that they don’t mow ‘cept once a season. There’s no cars, so we walk straight down the middle. I always used to wonder what it was like in the little stands of trees in the median and now I get to find out with him. I don’t get tired, he says. I can just keep walking.

Run and not grow weary, I say, though I don’t know why I do. 

Sometimes he does run, he says, because he can feel the way the world creates itself, and he keeps trying to catch it in the act, like if he crests a hill fast enough or turns fast enough he’ll see the edge of the world. I sit in the dusty pine needles in the dappled light and watch him demonstrate: he pirouettes, arms perfectly poised, and snaps his head around like a ballerina. 

He asks what I’ve been up to and I tell him nothing and he says he’s sure it’s not nothing, I’ve been doing nothing, man. But what am I supposed to tell him? 

I tell him let’s keep walking. And I tell him, put some cars on the road, will you? It’s creeping me out that there aren’t any. 

They’re not real. 

But they’d hurt if they hit you, wouldn’t they? Isn’t that real enough? Mostly I want something in the world that isn’t just the two of us. 

You wanna get hit? he asks. And when he makes a car appear, all camo green coming down the bright center of the highway at a million miles an hour, he stands there with his arms out and laughs and laughs and laughs. 

I’m standing at the side of the road and yelling my head off like David, what are you doing, I’ll kill you, fuck you David, you stupid asshole! But the car goes right through him like a breeze or like the sunlight. 

He turns to me and says, you forgot I wouldn’t even feel it. Nothing’s allowed to hurt me, man. 

*** 

I turn eighteen in August. He sees me log in the moment the clock stikes midnight but he doesn’t bother me until the next day.

David gives me a gift— he’s been grinding in Ringdom even though he hates it now— a set of armor that costs three solid months of quest rewards. I didn’t get him anything for his birthday months ago. I don’t think he wanted me to and I don’t know what I could have gotten him anyway. I went to his birthday party and left when his mother started crying and he never talked about it after. 

He asks me what it’s like being eighteen and free. I tell him what he wants to hear. It’s great. It’s heaven, man. I’d tell you about it but, you know. Not allowed. 

He knows. 

He thinks I went to do exactly what everybody else does the minute, the second, the microsecond the clock ticks over. I didn’t. Instead, I set myself up a program and I set it to record and I cranked all my settings up to maximum. 

Got you something, I tell him. I give him the video of it. 

He watches it. The content filter blurs the blood but he sees plenty. 

Did it hurt? 

I think for a second that I should tell him it felt like nothing because honestly probably it did for him. It really did happen fast. But that’s not what he wants to hear, and I slowed down the moment in the sim and so I felt it all. 

So I sit on his twin bed next to him and I watch his frozen face and tell him how it felt when I saw the car coming, how my heart sped up so loud in my ears it drowned out his favorite song, how I yanked the wheel and how that didn’t matter, how my foot wasn’t fast enough on the brakes, and the first sensation of my chest slamming into the steering wheel and biting my tongue right off and my arms wrenching backwards and how the airbags didn’t do anything and how the steering column went right up through me and the glass of the windshield

spiderwebbing and bursting and the sound of the hood and engine crumpling and the pain of it cutting me open wider and wider and wider until there was nothing left of me but the hole it made. 

By Natalie Paris 

Litro Magazine

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