The Replacement by Paul Rousseau
“It is prom night.” It is prom night. It is prom night. It is prom night. All four sections of Paul Rousseau’s “The Replacement” begin with these four words. As a humble and distanced narrator recounts the moments leading up to a significant shift in his life, the reader is misdirected by time—how it seems to move along first like a wave, and then stutters and restarts. While the narrator isn’t sure whose car he’s riding in, or which girl in the group is his date, he knows that something significant has occurred. He also understands that he is being pressured to move forward through it, to begin again—as time resumes, so must he go on. In his author’s note, Rousseau writes, “The piece is a representation, in miniature, of what it feels like to be inserted back into the real world after a near-death experience, overwhelmed by its many moving parts, while also shouldering the expectation that everything’s back to normal, peachy keen.” Beginning at the not-so-“normal” end of the story, the writer plays with time in a way that feels futuristic. Rousseau compares his style to a “software glitch/reset.” Each section of the story spurts, grounds itself, and then jerks backward or forward. And the reader anticipates the machinations within each progression. The reader grapples with the narrator’s reality as it unfolds. “The Replacement” is indeed a jolting ride through time, but a ride well worth taking. —CRAFT
4.
It is prom night. A group of us are out to eat at The Urban Hive, on the rooftop. Couples sit in pairs around a table forged of meteorite. Smoky black, with a network of tiny bubble cells, as if blown with a straw, now rigid. Someone made a reservation. These are my friends, from school, but I have no idea who they are really.
We gnaw on charred duck. Sip hot chocolate out of clear-glass pints. And for dessert, each couple shares a bite of red bean mochi, individually wrapped. But I am not me. I am a fever, adhesive. I am melting clay with an electric current.
A giant neon sign of a cybernetic bee, nimble metal mechanics, a laser eye, hangs by the kitchen’s port window where the chef sweats and sweats and sweats.
1.
It is prom night. I am in bed, at my house on Somnos Street, last in line to get picked up. The house, I know: I could map the layout with paper and pencil from memory, if I had to. The last place I ever felt safe. Then the tactile crunch of a car approaching the curb. Excited teenagers. One of them is my date. But I don’t know who, exactly. There’s Evelyn, Frances, Claire. They are my friends, but not really. I am a placeholder, seemingly handmade, undercooked. I am a cardboard cutout. I feel like I am in someone else’s body.
I wait for one of the girls to hang around me more than the others and say something like, Should be fun tonight. Turns out it’s Claire, the blonde one, I make note, and very very very pretty.
Each couple takes turns getting their picture taken in the front yard. Claire and I pose like old movie posters, arms crossed, back-to-back, finger guns. We laugh. I hear something strange behind us. Like the low hum of a hovering bee. Tiny gears always in flux. Small modulations.
“Yeah?” I call. But nothing. Just an empty street. Windblown chromium houses and synthetic greenery. For a second, it felt like the sound was coming from inside.
2.
It is prom night. I am sitting in the back seat of someone’s father’s NuRetro convertible with the top down. Lake Placid blue. There is heavy traffic in the exit ramp tunnel. The slow coast through the BioLife scanner.
“What are they even scanning for tonight?” Hunter says. Or was it Avery? Everyone in the group emits the same vague shared history. They are familiarity personified, only imprecise. The permutation of every face I’ve ever seen in a dream.
“Contraband?” their date says. Evelyn, or Frances. “Confirming our identities?”
“Is this a toll road?” I ask. Just guessing.
Nobody thinks so.
I stand up a little, to get a better view.
“Careful,” my date says, panicked. The others give her strange glances. Something about that was wrong wrong wrong.
The scanner looks like an old security camera. Like the kind that would watch over an ATM in a bank lobby about a hundred years ago. Safety through nostalgia. A way to ease people into change.
The snake of vehicles inches forward until it’s our turn to be processed. I stare right into the lens, let the holographic grid-light sting my retina. Prom night defiance, maybe. The one time we get to experience adult freedom without adult consequences. Or maybe I knew we’d get flagged.
3.
It is prom night. The NuRetro convertible automatically parks and kills the engine when it detects we made it to the BioLife checkpoint.
“Let’s make this quick, I don’t want to be late for our reservation,” says Hunter, or Avery.
Inside, the checkpoint looks like a DMV from a hundred years ago. Safety through nostalgia. A way to ease people into change.
We fill out the forms. We hand over our identification cards. A clearance slip is required to get back on the road.
The BioLife agent takes off her helmet and asks us what the plan is tonight.
“Dinner. Then there’s a dance later, in the gymnasium,” Claire says. She whispers something only the agent can hear. Her face morphs into a kind of startled understanding.
“Why’d we get flagged?” I ask, massaging my forehead.
“This is such a waste of time,” I hear someone mumble behind me. “I thought everything got taken care of at the hospital?”
There are flashes of wreckage, fire, smoke, bloodied asphalt. An operation. Sparks, the sound of tin foil being microwaved. Living metal.
“The scanner had a brief malfunction,” the agent says, sliding my form back to me across the counter. “Sometimes the system is a bit slow to update and our records mistook you for…someone else. Have a good prom.”
Something changes. I’m shaky, weightless, and top-heavy at the same time, a sensation that seemingly left to its own devices would cause me to pinwheel in midair, repeatedly.
“Hey hey, everything’s cool,” Claire says. “Just chill.”
She rests her hand on mine. I wonder if the hand she’s touching is real. It feels real.
“The plan was to take it easy. Let the kinks work themselves out,” she says.
“I don’t know who I am,” I say, unable to steady myself.
“You will,” she says. “Time.”
My head is suddenly overwhelmed by inertia. A jolt surges straight into my cerebellum, which causes the room to go a glaring white superimposed with green text, software code.
Reset reset reset.
PAUL ROUSSEAU is a disabled writer. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, his work can be found in Roxane Gay’s The Audacity, Catapult, Necessary Fiction, Jellyfish Review, and Wigleaf, among others. Follow him on Twitter @Paulwrites7.
Featured image by Michal Jakubowski, courtesy of Unsplash.
