by Adam Felber
He gets to the big arch in front of the Coop, and Marylou is just finishing. A killer cover of “All Dead, All Dead.” None of these tightasses recognize the song, but they love Marylou—sweet voice and cute little alterna-baby persona, can’t miss. She smiles at Floyd, he signals her that it’s cool, she can do one more. No rush—Floyd’s gotta get his ax ready.
Floyd strums along idly with Marylou, trying not to look at the crowd, so he doesn’t have to hate them right away. He’s briefly impressed as he fingers the chords: This song was clearly written on a piano, and it feels strange on the guitar. Just getting the idea to cover it is pretty cool, let alone coming up with a decent way to do it. Not that the crowd appreciates it, thinks Floyd; they’d be just as happy with the standard-issue teen camp-fire crap that passes for a repertoire around here.
Marylou finishes, says good night, collects an unbelievable amount of bills in a dirty flowered hat, kisses Floyd, vanishes. Floyd’s plugged in, he’s playing, feeling slightly less dead inside, but only slightly, as the crowd sways and Floyd sings:
“So, So you think you can tell / Heaven from Hell / Blue skies from pain….”
Bang! The President of Montana can’t sleep, so he rereads his manifesto.
THE UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF FREEDOM
We, the people of what has been known as the State of Montana, do hereby proclaim our complete independence from the Union of States known as the U.S.A. We have suffered enough, paid enough, seen enough to know that the International Governing Cartel behind the so-called democratic government of the U.S.A., …
Bang! The President’s attention starts to drift. It doesn’t have the same zing it used to. And that stuff about biodegradable GPS transmitters in fast-food burgers seems, well, kinda loony. Bang! It all suddenly seems kind of silly, even though the President knows he started most everything himself. It’s just that tonight makes everything seem different, what with Dix questioning his authority in front of everybody and all. For a minute—bang!—the President thought that Dix was going to shoot him right there where he sat. Just because he said that he thought too much money was being spent on ammo. And that was true, damnit—they need more building materials, not to mention food, if they’re really gonna make a go of it. But Dix wouldn’t have any of that. So now the President can’t sleep.
Bang!! But it’s more than that, and the President of Montana knows it. He slowly lets his head take in what he’s been avoiding noticing these last two hours. He looks out the window, and there’s Dix, only twenty yards away or so, standing about fifty feet from a man-sized shadow drawn onto a freestanding wall, which is now hopelessly damaged. Dix has never been subtle. The President watches him reload and level the shotgun at the shadow once again.
The President of Montana looks away, pretends he didn’t see it, pretends to read, pretends not to know that his wife is only pretending to sleep next to him. He feels cold and his mouth tastes like metal and his heart is racing and he hopes he’s having a heart attack but he knows he isn’t and he squeezes his eyes really tight now turned away from his wife trying to shut out everything and become a tight little ball that can’t see or hear or take in anything….
Bang!
Arlene said, “It’s good to be with you guys, just sitting here, eating ice cream, y’know? It makes everything seem less fucked up right now—sorry, Deb—‘messed up.’”
Grant was partly listening, partly savoring the taste of his Double Fudge Brownie Swirl. But mostly he was trying not to look like he was compulsively ogling Deborah.
She had to get a cone, he thought ruefully. He tried to casually eat a bit more ice cream, and nonchalantly plunged the cone into his eye.
“Are you all right, Grant?”
“Yeah, fine,” Grant said, taking the napkin from Arlene, wildly looking for a distraction. He found a handy one nearby. “At least I’m getting more of it down than Johnny….”
This was true. Johnny Felix had more or less plunged his entire face into a dietetically evil-looking sundae, seemingly trying to eat it from the inside, and now was sitting there staring into space with an unsettling smile on his lips.
“Everything feels a little strange tonight, doesn’t it?” said Deb.
“It’s the humidity, probably,” said Grant idiotically, mainly to keep Arlene from going into her Burning Johnny thing again. Sometimes Grant’s perception of Deb-as-unreachably-desirable-woman overwhelmed his perception of Deb-as-just-one-of-us. This was one of those moments. He was about to make things worse by justifying his statement with a mini-lecture on positive ions and Summer Seasonal Affective Disorder and related minutiae when his overactive mouth was bailed out by his over-active friend.
Johnny got up. His face was turned skyward, and he moved like a sleepwalker, charmed, transfixed.
Heading straight out into the sluggish traffic of Harvard Square. Grant and Arlene and Deb watched him for a long second, exchanged a few glances, and followed.
Pok! Pa-pok!
We’re trying to sleep. Trying to ignore the sound coming from the living room, an absurd, occasional pa-poking sound that we can’t quite identify, though we know two things for sure about it:
1) The sound is being made by our guest for the second night running, Dr. Schrödinger.
2) He is making the sound precisely because he wants us to come and inquire as to its nature.
Resolutely, we resist the urge. The old scientist will not have his way with us tonight!
Pa-pok. Pok. Pokitty pokitty pok.
Sighing, we throw off the covers and go to investigate. Quietly. We’re thinking that maybe we can take a quick peek and, curiosity satisfied, sneak back off to bed undetected.
He’s sitting up on the couch wearing the spare pajamas we lent him. He’s somehow located a few Ping-Pong balls. These he is tossing over his shoulder behind him. They bounce off our sliding glass door and hit the floor with the familiar, (now) unmistakable poking noise. Aha. As we watch, Dr. Schrödinger gets up, retrieves the balls, counts them, chortles, and scampers back to the couch. He then repeats the procedure.
Pokkitty pok. Pa-pok. Pok. Pok pa-pok pokitty pokitty-pokpokpokpokpokpok …
It’s no use. We were lost as soon as we left the bed. Beaten, we clear our throats and ask the old maniac what he’s up to.
“See!?” he exclaims. “It’s like I said—big objects don’t behave like subatomic particles! I’ve just proved it.”
“How?” we ask hopelessly.
“Why, I’m not observing the flight of these balls, am I? Therefore, they should remain as simultaneously particles and waves until observed, right? But they don’t. Oh no. They’re bouncing right off the glass door instead of passing through it! Proving?”
“That they’re Ping-Pong balls?” we ask dully.
“Exactly. Not like subatomic particles. Oh no. More like cats. Real cats.” As if it were cued by this, we suddenly hear a distinctly feline yowl emanating from somewhere with the house. Our house. Dr Schrödinger stares at us tentatively. He seems to be hoping that we won’t say anything about it. But we do.
“Oh, that’s just Werner,” says the physicist, in what comes across as a music-hall parody of casualness. He doesn’t seem inclined to explain where “Werner” is or how he managed to smuggle the cat into our house in the first place. Instead, he returns to the subject of Ping-Pong balls. “Now, if I were to toss Werner toward the glass, the result would be much like that of the Ping-Pong balls, which—”
“Good night,” we say, withdrawing. Then a thought strikes us: “But you hear them.”
“I beg your pardon?” asks Dr. Schrödinger.
“The balls—you hear the balls as they hit the glass.”
“Yes …”
“Isn’t hearing a form of observation?” we ask, perhaps a bit more sharply than we need to. But it’s late. And it’s our house.
“I suppose it is.”
“Then of course they’re bouncing off the glass. You’re observing them.”
Dr. Schrödinger is crestfallen. So much so that we begin to feel bad for having burst his bubble. But his face brightens almost immediately, and he chuckles and points to the little white ball in his hand. Then he tosses it behind his back and in one smooth motion covers both his ears.
Pok. Pokitta pok pok.
Grinning now, he scrambles to his feet and locates the ball behind the couch. Wordlessly, he holds the ball up in triumph.
We inform him that we were observing it that time.
We really wish we hadn’t said that. Now we are compelled to sit next to the demented old coot, facing away from the sliding glass door, as he holds a ball aloft.
“Now, on the count of three, shut your eyes and plug your ears, all right? One, two, three!” He tosses the ball. We follow his instructions and count to ten. When we open our eyes, the doctor is already scrambling around, muttering, looking for the ball.
We can’t find it. We look everywhere, even though we’re really very tired now. Dr. Schrödinger is beside himself, rambling, insisting that the ball is Definitely in the room. He’s probably right—we never saw the point of this anyway. We talk him down, assure him we’ll find the ball in the morning, give him a glass of water, and stalk off to bed.
In the morning, on the patio, just outside the sliding glass door, we find a Ping-Pong ball.
Chapter 4
WHERE’S JOHNNY? Johnny is not here. Grant and Arlene and Deborah had him in their sights but he kind of slithered ahead in the crowd, so now they’re heading in the direction Johnny was going. Grant allows Deborah and Arlene to lead the way.
They are walking in rhythm, Grant realizes. The rhythm of a guitar, playing just ahead. The music is familiar, fascinating, completely new. They walk toward it, not exactly forgetting Johnny but temporarily not thinking about anything except the music….
The President of Montana has declared war, and all construction has ceased. This is exactly what the President didn’t want to do, but Dix forced his hand. Well, Dix didn’t actually say anything, but the President felt the need to act swiftly and shockingly. Just to let Dix and everybody else know who the real power around here was, who started it, who had the real vision.
He’d needed a pretense, of course. He’d taken the most foul-sounding Nonpayment of Taxes threat he’d been sent in the last few months (they all were pretty dire, and more or less identical), and read it aloud at the last meeting.
“Can you believe this?” he’d thundered. “They really think these threats are going to scare the Independent Nation we’ve worked so hard to build? No, friends. No!!” At this he pounded the table, and reached slowly underneath it….
“As of this moment,” he went on, “a state of war exists between the United States and the Free State of Montana.” Then he raised up his shotgun. “And may God have mercy on their souls.” Cheers, of course, followed.
So now they were taking a ten-minute break, after which they’d reconvene and decide exactly how they were going to break the news to the United States. And their own families. The President of Montana looked out at the compound. His wife wasn’t going to like this. Most of the people weren’t going to like this. The President hoped that actually declaring war wasn’t going to attract much attention or get anybody in trouble. Why should it, after all? They hadn’t really done anything (except for the “assassins” that Dix had … dealt with, who were doubtless being searched for, and whom the President tried not to think about). What is this country coming to, thought the President of Montana, when a God-fearing, formerly taxpaying citizen can’t secede and declare war on his country without causing some kind of self-righteous PC ruckus?
“Mr. P-p-p-p-president?” This was Boone, Molly Jeurgens’s boy, a member of one his new nation’s most unstintingly loyal families. A model Montanan. “The C-c-c-c-council is b-b-back….”
“Thank ya, Boone.” He put his hand on the teenager’s shoulder. “Let’s go kick some ass, huh?” Boone giggled hysterically for reasons that the President couldn’t quite fathom. Eventually the giggles turned into a choking fit, as they always did with Boone. The President of Montana clapped the boy hard on the back and waited until he regained his breath; then the two of them headed back into the chamber.
———
Floyd doesn’t know how it happened. One minute he was playing “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” for a mildly appreciative crowd, and the next he was listening to someone else play it for a wildly appreciative crowd.
The thin kid with the blondish hair had just walked right up to him, smiled, and kinda hugged him from behind, his hands smoothly taking Floyd’s place without missing a chord, without a break in the rhythm. It felt good, which made Floyd again think maybe he was queer, and then made him vow to never fucking go out without underwear again. Floyd had just kinda sunk to the sidewalk, overwhelmed by something, and now he was several feet away, watching the kid play his guitar.
Beautifully. The kid is standing there, strumming, bending, improvising music that goes beyond sound. The growing crowd is transfixed. Some are crying. Floyd realizes that he is one of the ones who are crying. Something about the sound, the sweet smile on the kid’s face, the arching melodies, something about it washes Floyd with the unconditional, easy forgiveness that can only be granted to him by music. He listens without trying. It’s still “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” but it’s a lot more than that. It’s as if someone has answered the Door and invited everyone in for a nice slice of pie.
Or maybe it’s this, Floyd is thinking: I thought the song was about the struggle to reach heaven. Or the futility. Or the sense of expectation about what’s behind the door. Maybe nothing’s behind the door. We don’t know. Something like that.
But not now. With the familiar chords of the refrain swirling around him, the kid isn’t playing about the struggle or the expectation. He’s playing the joke of it all. He’s playing how fabulous and ridiculous and wonderful it is that a single man can stand before the gates of heaven and knock on the door. It doesn’t matter how hard it was to get there or whether or not someone will open the door or whether people created heaven in the first place only to imagine challenging it. What’s perfect is the moment of the song, the audacious act of knocking.
It should be tragic, but it isn’t. And Floyd should want his frickin’ guitar back already, but he doesn’t. Floyd is listening, and Floyd is thinking about listening, for what seems like the first time in a while.
Still, no music, no matter how transcendent, can completely erase several decades of Floyd. He’s also thinking, My guitar, my tips.
We’re starting to think that we cannot escape Dr. Schrödinger.
We had had a hard day, we were walking through the Square, pretending to ourselves that we were not angling toward the ice-cream store, when we suddenly saw what looked like the outline of the renowned physicist in the crowd ahead.
Fortunately, the ice-cream parlor was right there, so we ducked inside. It’s fate, we reasoned, so we got in line.
“You know, the crystalline structure of frozen yogurt is remarkably dissimilar to that of ice cream.”
That voice. Unbelievably enough, it was him. He was right up at the counter, talking to a very bored, slightly chunky Latina girl who was scooping the doctor’s ice cream.
“I knew that,” said the girl implausibly, as her voice managed to convey absolutely no interest. The doctor took this as a sign of interest.
“In fact, crystalline structures themselves are fascinating. Clay, for example, reproduces its own structure much like an organism. There are some who speculate that life might have originated from a self-replicating silicate that somehow managed to incorporate organic substances in its crystalline structure. To give you some idea of the complexity at work here, let me …”
We were slowly edging our way toward the door when Dr. Schrödinger saw us and called us over.
Two minutes later, we were holding a match to the bottom of a sundae glass, our eyes locked in helpl
ess camaraderie with the scoop girl, while the doctor illustrated a particularly “interesting” property of fudge.
Arlene was the first to snap out of it. Like everyone else, she was taken on a personal, private trip by Johnny’s song (hers was, of course, mainly a cathartic experience of grief and hope for a certain recently departed pet), but she rose out of her reverie pretty quickly.
Because Johnny was lying on the ground.
He’d hit that last keening note and then just melted to the ground. Arlene got to him seconds later to find him conscious but a little bewildered.
“Johnny, you all right?”
“Yah. I just … What’s with everyone?”
Arlene looked around. “I think they really liked your playing.”
“Looks like it.” Johnny giggled.
The crowd surrounded them, motionless, stuck in the last notes of Johnny’s song. For a moment, short and infinite, Arlene felt that she and Johnny were the only animate beings in a world of frozen time. It was the single most intimate moment of Arlene’s life, even though she had no clue as to what was going on behind Johnny’s now perpetually goofy grin.
And then Deborah and Grant were with them, and they were helping their wobbly friend get back on his feet, and they bought him a Gatorade at the Store 24, and Johnny took the plastic bag and released it into the wind so that it flew, full of air, high above the pointy church and across the Common and into a tree, where it hung, open, waiting.
As plastic bags in trees go, it didn’t have to wait very long.
Dear Diary,
A good day, except for some cruelty from some of the younger skate rats, who don’t know better until the older rats tell them that the crazy old bag lady is Brenda the Crazy Old Bag Lady, and they’ll end up as friendly as the others, though they won’t really know why. But I know. A name is all you need in this life, it’s the magic key, the difference between a stranger and a person, thing and friend, salt and sugar. And I’m sugar—it’s my birthday and I’m taking stock and things look pretty damn good. Being a sad old whore, one step before being a crazy old lady, sucked the big wazoo. But once you’ve been out of the whoring game for long enough (and it’s been a looong time since I’ve actually sucked the big wazoo! at least for cash—ha-HA!), no one remembers you were ever a whore to begin with. Gives you dignity. Absolution. If those confessional booths really were freezing chambers that unfroze you say after forty years then they’d really work, Hail Marys or no. That is not a great idea because then you’d need so many more booths and people’s families would miss them and going to church would be like dying in a way and people just wouldn’t do it unless they’d done something really bad and the whole thing would just fall apart, so let’s not add that idea to The List.