The Fiction of Owen Thomas

A Better Place (“The Calling”)

A Novella

Excerpt C

Tyler leaned over to his other side and stole a look at the boy with the tablet, the only one in the oval room, other than the fish, who had not looked up.

It was a driving game he was playing. The vantage point was over the hood of a red Ferrari, navigating the winding roads across an idyllic, vaguely Europeanish countryside. Other cars darted in and out of view, often requiring sharp correction and acceleration. Not infrequently, in fact with suspicious regularity, these other cars ended up plowing through vegetable carts and split rail fences in clouds of dust and debris.

“Do you have to stay on the road?” Tyler asked.

“No,” said the boy after an unnaturally long delay that left any answer at all in doubt. “You can go off road, but it will cost you points.”

“What good are the points?”

He shrugged and shot past a yellow Astin Martin.

“They go on line,” said the boy.

“What goes on line?”

“The points.”

“To who?”

“Other people that play this game.”

“Do you know them?”

“Who?”

“The other people. On line.”

“No. They just play the same game. Everyone tries to get the most points.”

“Then what?”

He shrugged again, this time without any follow up.

The red Ferrari crossed a finish line of flowers that had been tossed over the road leading into a small Italian-looking hamlet. Farmers and shopkeepers were waving their arms and shouting, presumably in celebration but the lack of detail in their faces left their emotion a matter of interpretation. They might have been rioting at all of the sudden automotive mayhem upsetting the chickens. It might be the beginning of the end for the clean windshield and the flawless red paint job.

The boy sat up in his chair, stretching out his spine. He held out the tablet.

“Wanna try?” he asked.

Tyler laughed a little like he was being given the opportunity to pole vault.

“It’s easy,” said the boy. “There’s a super-simple level.”

He handed Tyler the pad and gave him rudimentary instructions. Left, right, faster, slower. That was all there was to it, he promised. The boy reset the game and after a dramatic on-screen countdown, Tyler watched all the cars around him zip off in a cloud of bucolic Eurodust.

“You have to tip it forward,” said the boy. “Give it some gas.”

Tyler tipped the pad forward, leaning out into the room as he did.  Scenery inched towards him on its digital conveyor belt, growing larger and disappearing off on either side of the screen in a simulacrum of forward movement, as though he were pushing a zipper painted to look like the hood of a Ferrari. He tipped and tipped until the countryside was suddenly a blur and he was quickly out of control.

Some of the oval room detainees looked up at him, perhaps misinterpreting his full body contortions, throwing himself over one side of the chair then the other, lurching forward and back, as if he were experiencing some form of seizure.  Accidents abounded. Spinouts and ditch dives and splintered chicken coops. Twice the boy needed to reset the game.

But soon enough Tyler found a comfort zone and he was unzipping the Old Country, slowly, other cars passing him regularly, with relative ease. In the distance was the Mediterranean, shimmering an electric blue. Tyler tilted right, leaving the road. He broke through a split rail fence and headed out across a pasture. The cattle seemed indifferent. Like this sort of thing happened every day.

“What are you doing?”

“Going to the beach,” said Tyler.

“You’ll never get there.”

“Why?”

“That’s not the game. It’s a driving game. The point is to stay on the road. And the road is back there.” He pointed over toward the box of tissue and the stack of magazines. “You’re losing points.”

The pasture lands that lay between the front of the red hood and the glinting blue sea seemed to lengthen before him. It was like moving along a nightmarish rubber hallway that stretches and stretches out into the murky dream distance with a door at the end that moves farther away with every step, only in the driving game the hallway was a beautiful pasture and the door at the end was a glimmering blue ocean, and the murky dream distance was an exotic digital sunshine and everywhere there were cows, all of which Tyler was beginning to recognize as the same three cows over and over again.

“I’m losing points?”

“Yes. They’re all passing you, dude.”

The boy lifted the right side of the pad. The shimmering sea rolled away behind him and the broken fence and the road beyond loomed up over the hood as if he had never really been moving towards the sea at all. Cars on the road sped past. A French mime on a bicycle pedaled by and waved just to rub it in. The boy pushed down on the front of the pad, tilting it forward. The Ferrari rejoined the road in a spray of debris and sent the mime sprawling.

“That never gets old,” the boy said, laughing. 

There was suddenly a presence towering above them.

“Okay, kiddo,” came the voice. “Let’s beat it on home.”

Tyler looked up as the boy was rising out of his chair, one hand extending down towards the pad. Tyler handed it up to him.

“Thanks for…” he started to say, but the man cut him off.

“Tyler? Tyler Freeman. I’ll be damned.”

He looked up at the man, focusing on his features. He was old, Tyler’s age at least, but had a disconcertingly lively countenance; a broad smile and luminous eyes the color of the sea on the far side of the pasture he could never reach. It took a moment, but he got there.