Are You There and Other Stories (12 page)

“But you can,” she said. “It’s like anything else. Really. I mean, it’s even like boxing.”

“What?”

“Sure. Same mental thing, in a way. Like you throw the punch through, as if the jaw wasn’t even
there
. And it’s not. Neither’s the marble. I mean it’s there, of course. But also it’s
not
there. And if it’s not, well, then you can throw your punches right on through. You can do anything.
Anything
.”

“Aimee, come on.”

“Don’t be afraid.”

“I’m
not
afraid.”

“Honey.” She got up and came to me and hugged me. “It’s all right.”

I fought it, but the mote around my heart filled with tears and I sobbed into Aimee’s hair, “I want everything to be normal again.”

“Darling, I know. It’s okay, it really is.”

But it wasn’t. The rational world tilted, threatening chaos, and my anchor was talking phantom punches.

“It’s accelerated evolution,” she said, excited. “You know, all the little grays, and the crop circles and UFO’s and synchronicity and deja vu, just
all
of it—those things are projections, the evolutionary psyche of human potential manifesting in consort with the conscious Universe. Do you see? Oh, I’m not saying it right. But listen. You didn’t think real aliens looked liked
X-Files
puppets, did you?” She laughed. “The Harbingers are
real
. All the stuff happening now is real. It’s to get us going before it’s too late, to get as many of us going as possible. Before we completely fuck over the planet and the whole human race.”

We were still holding each other, but now it was like we were two separate people and it didn’t matter that I had been inside of her countless times and we had spoken every living shred of our lives to each other. She was just somebody I was holding. In her excited voice I heard my sister’s delusional rantings while Dad hunted drunkenly for his car keys.

“Don’t, Burt,” Aimee said. “You’re going away. Please don’t do that. You could be so close, if you wanted to be.”

I continued holding her but the good between us was gone and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. I don’t think I was afraid. I don’t know that fear had anything to do with it.

“It’s like being shut up in a little room,” Aimee said. “A room with no windows and a closed door. And it’s fine because you don’t know you’re in a little room, you think you’re in the middle of the world. But what if you knew? What if all of a sudden there
was
a window and you could see there was a universe of marvels right outside, and all you had to do was open the door, because it’s not locked or anything. It’s just a door waiting for the person in the room to wake up enough to open it.”

All this while she looked earnestly into my face, her eyes shining.

I said, “Aim, I am so tired.”

*

Most people weren’t onboard for the Evolution, and things got pretty bad. The End Is Nigh contingent. Economic collapse. Suicides, lots of suicides. By July I had given up opening Bean There. I just wanted to sleep, perchance not to dream.

Then reality snapped back, and I woke one morning with some kind of hangover and—unknown to me—all my recent memory furniture drastically re-arranged. Harbingers? Never heard of ’em.

The natural response to hangover is aspirin and coffee. I dressed, grabbed my keys, and strolled down to Bean There to open the doors, only vaguely recalling that hard times and some kind of throbbing apathy had compelled me to close the place for a few days.

Open it and they will come. I guess I wasn’t the only one with a hangover. I worked my ass off that first day, riding a caffeine bullet train to stay
focused
. Aimee was not around, and I sorely missed her. What in hell had we been fighting about, anyway? I closed up at seven, after a nice relaxing twelve hour day. My CLOSED sign depicted a sad little coffee cup with wavy steam hair.

I got on my cell and called Aimee, because whatever we’d been fighting about wasn’t worth it. Dimly I seemed to recall some kind of tiff over her latest artistic indulgence. She picked up on the second ring.

“May I speak with Ms. Rodin, please?”

“Funny guy.”

“Aim, I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“I, ah, dunno.”

She laughed, sounding extra perky and normal and non-pissed-off.

“So how’s it going?” I said. “If I come over will you lure me upstairs with promises of showing me your erotic statues?”

“You’ve got the only erotic stonework I’m interested in, mister.”

“I am so
there
.”

*

And later, during a wine and underwear moment in her kitchenette, I said:

“I could really use you at Bean There, tomorrow.”

Teasing: “Like you used me today?”

“With variations, only not as slippery, and you’ll have to pull espressos, too. Aim, business is picking up in a major way. I can’t even believe I closed down for a while. I must have been nuts!”

She was quiet awhile and easy within herself. I was the one with jitters all of a sudden. On the way over it had occurred to me that I wanted to marry Aimee, that I’d always wanted to. It was nothing other than fear that had kept us in separate apartments, which had allowed our lives to intersect in work and love-
making
, but not in the long sweet haul of committed love itself. My fear, not hers; Aimee was fearless in all things.

So I’d jacked myself up to ask her, but before I could get the words out she dropped a safe on my head.

“Burt, I think I’m going to do some traveling, see some things, maybe do a little good in the world.”

“You’re joining the Peace Corps?” I didn’t know what she was talking about, and I struggled to keep the irritation out of my voice.

“No, silly. More of a private thing.”

“I thought we were partners.” I couldn’t even mention the marriage thing. Suddenly it wasn’t irritation I felt. My throat tightened down with emotion.

“We could still be pards,” she said, taking my hand. “But you’d have to be unafraid to come with me, Burt.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Where are you going, really?”

“Burt, what if there was no Time or Space, and if you wanted to be somewhere, wherever and whenever, you could just be there? What would you pick, what would make you feel safe and happy?”

It wasn’t what she said exactly, it was some upheaval within myself. I wanted to cry but didn’t.

“Does opening day at Disneyland count?” I said, thinking I was being sarcastic.

She laughed. “Sure.”

“Okay, I pick that. Now can we talk sense?”

“Won’t there be a lot of people?” she said.

“Yeah, but it’s the happiest place on Earth, so they’d all be happy, right? Aim, come
on.
Don’t go. Please.”

“I’m sorry, Burt.”

She hugged me, and I wanted to melt into her but that wasn’t happening.

“I finished my sculpture,” she said. “I want to give it to you.”

“Going away present? Thanks.”

“Shush. Nobody goes anywhere, not really. I love you. Let’s call it the anniversary present, okay?”

“Sure, okay.”

“Don’t be sad.”

She had to be kidding with that one.

*

I called the next day but she didn’t answer. After I hung the CLOSED sign out I walked over to her apartment. A white envelope with my name printed on it was taped to the outside of her door. I ripped the envelope open, but all the note said was “Don’t forget your present. Love, Aimee.”

That damn rock.

The garage was completely bare except for the marble block pushed into the corner on its rolling cart. The air smelled dry and the cement walls held the heat in. The last of the evening sunlight fell short of the block, which, in shadow at least, appeared as unworked and raw as the last time I’d seen it, its blunt face only slightly scarred by Aimee’s amateur chiseling.

A sheet of printer paper was taped to the block. The sheet had been written upon, but I couldn’t decipher it from where I stood. And I didn’t want to get any closer. I just didn’t.

The daylight terminator crept across the oil-stained floor, almost to the toes of my shoes before I imagined Aimee whispering
Don’t be afraid
.

But I
was
afraid.

Nevertheless I took a tentative shuffling step into the shadow, then another, and then I was close enough to read the paper. THIS IS YOURS, BURT. MY MIGHTY MAN! And something about Aim’s familiar, jokey intimacy took the hex off and impelled me forward.

Close up, Aimee’s sculpture was as artless as any random hunk of stone you might happen to stumble upon. Wondering if there was something chiseled into the side facing the wall, I bent my back and braced my feet to pull it around—and instead fell flat on my ass.

Because the thing on that cart weighed no more than a basket of feathers. It kept rolling around after I fell, and stopped with the sheet of paper facing me again.

I sat stunned for a while, then turned my hands up and looked at them. White eggshell-like flakes clung to the sweat on my fingers. I crawled over to the block and reached out with the spread fingers of my right hand. The outer shell of the sculpture fell away with an airy crackle where I touched it.

I brushed my trembling hands over the block like a palsied conjuror, and it collapsed in an avalanche of rice paper-thin marble flakes, as if it had been held together by nothing more substantial than a hopeful thought.

What remained was something like a Christmas ornament. One fashioned from and held up by polished marble nets of filamentous intricacy, as if spider-spun. Aimee had created this wonder
inside
the block.

Which was impossible.

An impossible artifact from that newly forgotten world of teleporting housewives and stumpy, non-deciduous aliens, of Evolutionary human consciousness. Capital E. Bleh.

A worm uncoiled in my stomach. The room seemed to sway, and I had nothing to hold onto. Kneeling on the hard cement, my hands clenching, a singlet of sweat oozed out of my body. The object before me was a memory ornament, intended to remind me of the impossible world of E. And I wanted it to go away.

I squeezed my eyes shut.
Aim
. But I was on my own. Memory ornament, invitation to the impossible—it was still my choice to accept or reject it. I knew amnesia was hovering in the foyer of my consciousness, waiting. The chaos of a world without rules—at least the rules I was used to—also hovered out there. I opened my eyes and moved incrementally toward chaos, because that’s where my girl was.

The light changed. Heat lay on my back like a wool blanket fresh out of the dryer. I didn’t have to turn around, I knew that. But maybe it wasn’t chaos out there. Maybe it was Freedom. Freedom from fear. Capital F.

I stood up and brushed the marble flakes off on my pants. Then I turned.

A vast and eerily silent crowd milled beyond the garage. Thousands of people, and an ersatz castle, and a high blue sky without clouds where a dozen or so giant soap bubbles drifted serenely, unnoticed by the multitude.

All was utterly quiet until I crossed out of the garage, and then it struck me like a Phil Spector Wall of Sound, the surf roar of the crowd and brassy clamor of a New Orleans street band. It was
hot
and dazzlingly bright. A trombone bell flashed the sun at me. I shaded my eyes. Mickey Mouse was working the crowd. Then I saw Aimee, waving. I felt a big goofy grin on my face, which was appropriate. “I’m going to Disneyland,” I yelled and ran to her.

Girl in the Empty Apartment

S
omeone was going to die.

My name is Joe Skadan. These were the days of phantom invaders, unexplained disappearances, and Homeland insecurities. I stood in the back of the Context Theater on Capital Hill, Seattle, nursing a few insecurities of my own; the bottle of crappy Zinfandel hung loosely in my left fist, demolished over the duration of the third act. Me
and
the bottle. Free tickets guaranteed there were only two empty seats in the house. Mine and the one my girlfriend was supposed to have occupied. Cheryl hadn’t come, though, and I couldn’t take sitting next to that empty chair.

The third act ended with the monologist (my cranky alter ego) putting his hand over the gun on his desk while the lights adjusted, turning him into a dark cipher. Artsy as hell. The prop gun was actually my own .38, minus the ammo clip and none in the chamber. Kind of a family heirloom, stepfather-to-son. The question is left hanging: Who’s he going to use that gun
on?
This character’s interior darkness had become a filter that warped the entire world.

A beat of silence followed the final lighting adjustment. It was hot and stuffy in the theater. Programs rustled. Somebody coughed. Then the applause started, thank God. There were even a few appreciative whistles. The lights came up and the cast took their bows.

I slumped against the wall and breathed out.
The Only Important Philosophical Question
, my first fully staged play, had successfully concluded its maiden performance in front of a live audience. I was twenty-six years old.

Fifty or so sweaty audience members shuffled past me. The Context had been a transmission shop in a former incarnation, and not a particularly well-ventilated one. I hopped onstage and grabbed my gun, put it in a paper bag, then wandered outside for a smoke. In those days I smoked like crazy—the days after the advent of the Harbingers. Or as I preferred to think of them: the mass hallucination. One morning the world woke up with a headache. Dreams became strange, disturbing, inhabited by “Harbingers,” which the dreamers occasionally described as conscious trees, or something. Rumors abounded. The juiciest being that large numbers of people had disappeared without a trace.

Some of the audience lingered in front of the theater, talking about the play. Mostly they seemed impressed by all that stage blood in the second act fantasy. It was weird to hear strangers discussing my work. I didn’t much like it, and wished I could stuff the play back inside my head, where it had festered in its lonely way for years.

As the last of the audience wandered off I noticed a girl sitting on a patch of grass looking at the moon. Tear tracks shone on her cheeks like little snail trails. She was only about eighteen. Cheryl’s failure to show had cut deep, and my instinct was to slink off and lick the wound. Instead I asked this girl if she was all right.

“Oh, yes. It’s just so beautiful.”

I flicked ash, adjusted my glasses, followed her gaze. “The moon?”

“Sure. I’ve been staying in the Arctic Circle up there.”

“Doesn’t that get cold?”

“It’s not that kind of Arctic Circle.”

She wiped the tears off her cheeks with the heel of her hand and stood up—rather gracefully, considering the dress she wore. A tarnished gold fabric, intricately pleated, that wound around her like flowing water, or the ridged skin of some exotic tree. She had a generous mouth and kindly eyes.

“You’re Joe Skadan,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“You wrote the play.”

I nodded. “How did you know me?”

“You’re famous on the moon.”

“All right.”

“Can I walk with you, Joe?”

“If you want.”

“I’m Nichole.”

In my mind I depersonalized her with a character tag: MOON GIRL. I did this sort of thing more and more frequently, estranging myself from the world. The part of me that resisted this estrangement grew weaker by the day. Like the child I’d once been, locked in the closet, weeping from belt lashes, subdued and enfeebled by darkness, listening to the sound of Charlie, my step-dad, stomping off to work on Mom next. Before things turned bad she used to swoon about Charlie’s blue eyes, “Just like Paul Newman’s!” Charlie liked to fold that belt over and snap it together with a whip-crack sound, to let me know he was coming.
Where there’s smoke there’s fire
, he used to say, accusing me endlessly of transgressions I hadn’t even considered.

MOON GIRL and I walked along. It was one of those pellucid Seattle evenings, the royal sky inviting stars to join the moon. Mechanically, I asked, “What did you think of the show?”

“It was different. Did Camus really say that, about the only important philosophical question being whether or not you should kill yourself?”

“I think so, but I never could verify the quote. Maybe I made it up. Who cares? I thought about calling it, ‘What’s So Grand About Guignol’ but that seemed too jokey, though it fit with the bloody stuff.”

“It’s Woody Allen meets Taxi Driver,” she said.

I looked at her. That description, same wording, was scribbled in a notebook back in my apartment. Coincidences made me uncomfortable.

“Maybe I’m your secret muse,” MOON GIRL said, as if she knew what I was thinking.

“You don’t even know me.”

“Or I do, just a little.”

“That dress is strange,” I said, to change the subject.

“Does it seem familiar?”

“I don’t know.”

The dress almost shimmered, exuding energy. Or maybe I’d had too much wine, or I was a poor judge of energy exudations. Who knows?

“You’ve had dreams,” she said.

“Everybody dreams.”

I thought of my mother’s birch, a little tree she’d claimed as her own even though it just happened to be growing in the backyard of the cruddy duplex we rented. I’d been dreaming about it for weeks now. The tree had been a private thing between my mother and me, excluding Charlie. While he was at work we sat under it for “Elvis picnics,” which meant peanut butter sandwiches and bananas and Cokes. I still remember the checkered pattern of the blanket and the way the leaf shade swayed over us; a portion of my secret landscape. Another was the piece of sky I could see from my bedroom. Sometimes I’d put my comic down and stare at the night of moon and stars, and it was like a promise of freedom.

Arctic Circle
. Not the polar regions but a 70s vintage burger franchise Mom used to work in when she was a teenager. My real Dad, another swoony teen, would come in and “make eyes” at her. The way I pictured it was like a scene from Happy Days. Safe and innocent as a chocolate malt. I have only a vague memory of him, and I may even have made that up. Mom had been a romantic all right. The freeway accident that killed my dad took a lot of that out of her, though. And Charlie took the rest. Arctic Circle. I really hated coincidences.

“It’s a Neodandi,” MOON GIRL said, referring to her dress. “The designer had dreams, too. Now you’re kind of having the
same
dream. The world is changing, Joe. What do you think of the Harbingers?”

“I don’t think of them.”

We had arrived at the corner of Broadway and East Thomas. A man I’d tagged HOMELESS VET sat on the sidewalk in his usual spot, like a deflated thing. His beard grew almost to his muddy eyes. He thrust an old Starbucks cup at us, and a few coins rattled in the bottom.

“I served my country,” he said, his standard line.

Nichole dropped in a quarter.

“Anyway, see you around,” I said to her. I didn’t want her following me all the way home.

“Goodnight, Joe.”

“Yeah, goodnight.”

I snapped the remainder of my cigarette to the sidewalk. HOMELESS VET reached for it, pinched the lit end between thumb and forefinger. My mind began to deconstruct him: nails like cracked chips of yellow-stained plastic, wiry hair and beard, moist eyes nested in wrinkles—separate labeled parts, not a man at all. I halted the process by an act of will. Once you take the homeless guy apart it’s easy to keep going.

The girl was halfway down the block in her crazy energy dress. Nichole. Unaccountably her name stuck, the objectifying MOON GIRL tag dropping away like a dead leaf.

*

Cheryl London called. I was sitting in the kitchen drinking a beer and watching a girl in the window of the building across the street. This girl, whom I’d tagged THE EXHIBITIONIST, liked to keep her blinds open while she dressed and undressed. Sometimes she lay topless on her bed reading magazines. Her performances lacked real carnality, though. The thing about THE EXHIBITONIST was that she may not have existed. My mind played tricks on me all the time. Only they weren’t good tricks like which cup is the pea under. I seemed to know too much about THE EXHIBITIONIST. Her window was probably thirty yards from my kitchen. Yet I could see details, some of which weren’t even in my line of sight. I knew, for instance, that she had a
Donnie Darko
movie poster on the wall. Sometimes, lying in bed thinking about her, I wondered if she was a dream I was telling myself. I never had a girl in high school, though there was always one out of reach whose sweetness I longed toward. I imagined the safe harbor of relationships, and denied them to myself almost pathologically. Nichole looked like the kind of girl I used to moon about.
MOON GIRL
. So did THE EXHIBITIONIST.

Anyway, when I picked up the phone and heard Cheryl’s voice I averted my gaze.

“Are you busy?” she asked.

“No. What’s going on, where have you been?”

“I’m at Six Arms. Meet me?”

I walked downstairs with an unlit cigarette in the corner of my mouth. The building manager came out of his apartment and reminded me The Dublin was a non-smoking building.

“It’s not lit,” I said.

THE MANAGER was a balding Swede with a thick gut. In the summer he wore wife-beater T-shirts that showed off his hairy shoulders. Occasionally I was late with the rent, and we were both cranky about it. He was the crankier, though. I think he would have loved to evict me.

“I smell smoke up there sometimes,” he said.

“Not mine,” I said and pushed through the door.

She was sitting in a booth by the window, her hair like bleached silk in the bar light. Cheryl was my first and only girlfriend. We had met at the University. She had taken Introduction to Twentieth Century Theater as an elective, aced it, and returned her full attention to more serious matters. I barely pulled a C then dropped out before the next semester. Cheryl now had a government job that required a secret clearance. Since the Harbinger Event it demanded more and more of her time. I sat across from her and lit a cigarette.

“Thanks for coming,” she said.

“You’re welcome,” I said, the wrong way.

“Let’s try to be grownups. Please?”

“Are you dumping me?”

“Joe.”

“You’re dumping me.”

She looked out the window at East Pine Street.

My heart lugged like something too tired to continue. The sounds of the restaurant grated on my nerves, the music, voices barking, clatter of dishes from the kitchen. I looked through the reflection of Cheryl’s face in the window.

“We don’t work,” she said. “We’re too different.”

“When did you figure this out?”

“I guess I’ve always known it.”

My stomach clenched.

“Cheryl—”

Finally she looked at me.

“Sometimes we don’t even seem to live on the same planet,” she said. “You don’t have any friends. You stay up all night. I don’t understand you anymore and I don’t think I ever really did. It’s like you’re slipping away.”

“I’m right here.”

“I’m sorry, Joe. But there’s something so wrong. I mean with you. I don’t blame you for it. It’s not your fault, I know that. But it
is
your fault if you don’t do anything about it. You won’t even see a therapist. And it could be even bigger than you think. Gerry says—”

“Mr. Homeland.”

She had been mentioning some guy from a special division of Homeland Security. She seemed to think he was a fascinating son of a bitch.

“This is too upsetting,” Cheryl said. “I have to go.”

She stood up.

“Hey, wait a minute.”

I grabbed her wrist and started to rise from my chair. She pulled away.

“Don’t,” she said. “It’s hard enough.”

She wouldn’t meet my eyes. Then she was gone, walking out of the bar and my life. She was the only one I’d ever told about Charlie. I even showed her the scars like white worms on my body. Now I wished I hadn’t. I sat back down. My hands were shaking. For hours I remained in that booth, smoking, drinking pints of Nitro Stout. The clatter and clamor of the bar jagged through me. The voices of people were like the barking and grunts of animals. I tried to fight this vision, but now I was fighting alone.

*

I had three days off and I spent them in my apartment. Charlie’s .38 sat on the kitchen counter, a chrome-plated object of meditation. Chekhov said if you display a gun in the first act it had better go off by the third. My first act started right after Charlie’s third concluded. I had curled fetally in the closet where he’d thrown me after the latest beating. There was the usual shouting and screaming, then the first shot, followed by ringing silence. The coats and sweaters hanging over me were like animal pelts in the dark. Charlie was a hunter and I’d once watched him clumsily skin out a doe. When I vomited he grabbed me by the back of the neck, furious, and pushed my face into the reeking pelt. That blood stench. Charlie’s smell.

After the first shot he walked right up to the closet door in his heavy steel-toed factory boots. His breath was ragged. I waited, my knees drawn up, my chest aching. After a while he retreated back down the hall to the bedroom. A minute later there was a second discharge. I would have starved in that closet if a neighbor hadn’t heard the shots and called the police. When they finally broke into our half of the duplex I wouldn’t come out. They had to drag me from the closet. I was nine. In a way I never did come out.

There had been a note, in Charlie’s crooked scrawl:
No choice
. I spent the rest of my life pretending there
were
choices. Just to show him. But maybe there weren’t after all. Maybe the self-determined life was as illusory as THE EXHIBITIONIST.