Black Wave

by Michelle Tea

  You’re Kidding, Michelle said, wishing Joey were there. Where was Joey? Joey would love this. Like A Yearbook?

  Exactly! The man brightened, hopeful. Like a souvenir.

  You Got To Talk To The Boss, Michelle said. I Can’t Help You.

  The man squinted his bloodshot eyes at her. You just could’ve had a really great sale, he snapped, and stormed away from the kiosk. He paused at the door and dunked his hand into the display window, grabbing the Australia book and pushing back into the throng, the volume held tightly to his chest. Michelle scanned the kiosk for a replacement for the window display. A book of black-and-white photographs from the punk years, No Future, the title like a blast of spray paint across the cover. She slid it into the plastic book prop where the Australia book once sat.

  That’s what’s wrong with this country, a voice shot out of nowhere. Maybe the whole planet. Michelle craned her head around. There was a longhair crouched down in the sci-fi stack, sitting on the floor by the pile of Star Trek paperbacks. Long hair and oversized pervert eyeglasses. They think it’s a goddamn sporting event out there, he grumbled. This is precisely why everyone hates us. America. What’s with the flags, already?

  Yes, Michelle said, grateful for the sudden presence of someone she agreed with. She shook her head up and down, her fried blue hair bobbing in stiff waves around her head. She wanted to tell him he could pocket a few of the Star Trek books and she would look the other way, but he seemed so moral she wasn’t sure how he’d take it, so she just gave him a lot of room instead.

  16

  In the morning a terrible sound woke Michelle up on her futon. A blast and a howl and another blast and a thump. Michelle lay in bed, a warm dread moving through her body. The noises were so loud Michelle could still feel their echoes clotting her ears like cotton. She kneeled on her futon and tugged the worn string that lifted the blinds. Behold the rottweiler. Behold the mess of it, flung around the apartment. Behind him sprawled the man, behold his dreads fanned across the floor, his face gone. There was his gun. Michelle immediately wanted it.

  Uh-oh. Is this how shit went nuts? When people start hoarding the guns of the suicided? Michelle had once read the phrase The way you do anything is the way you do everything inside a Buddhism book on the Self-Help shelves of the bookstore back in San Francisco. It had resonated with her. The way she did anything was the way she did everything. She did everything sloppily, thoughtlessly, with anxiety. She did everything alcoholically, selfishly. The desire for the gun, the man’s still-warm fingers draped across it on the floor, made Michelle ask herself questions. How did she want to spend the next year of her life? Did she want to live in fear? In fear of her neighbors, of other people, of humanity?

  She did not want to live in fear. A gun could help her accomplish this. With a gun, she could afford to risk being kind to people. If she had misjudged their intentions she could simply kill them. Could she? Could she kill someone? Michelle’s heart said yes. She could totally kill someone. Michelle had always known this about herself. Still, she was a good person. And she’d be a better person if she had a gun.

  In the supply closet out in the hallway Michelle grabbed a ladder and dragged it back to her apartment. It was a new world, one in which extreme acts of bravery and self-protection should not be shrunk from. She hoisted the ladder between the two windows. Michelle had always known her apartment was much too close to her neighbor’s, but it was still a surprise to see the ladder bridge the distance so easily. She began to climb onto it, but the slight wobble brought her gaze down to the darkened alley and she felt dizzy. She paused for a moment and breathed, her eyes closed. In every apocalypse movie she had ever seen, people needed guns. She began again her crawling and was soon at the window, puzzling how to leap into the apartment without landing on the dog. Michelle aimed for a square of linoleum sticky with blood and placed her bare foot upon it. She was in.

  Michelle was fine. Fine with a pulse of sadness, with a hint of the unreal, but she was fine. Michelle recognized it to be, not the denial Joey had diagnosed her with, but a sort of fast-acting acceptance. Michelle was resilient and adaptable. Once again she was in the moment. A place people paid money to try to get to, people sat in silence for days at a time, people fasted to achieve a state that came naturally to Michelle. She was fortunate. She felt internally equipped for the end of the world. She would be one of the lucky ones.

  Michelle lifted the warm gun from the linoleum, the faceless man’s fingers sliding off it smoothly. Chekhov’s gun, Michelle thought. What was that famous bit of writerly advice? If in the first act there is a pistol upon the wall then by the second act it should be fired? Was she going to have to use this thing? And also, was the safety on? Of course not, it had just killed its master. The man’s face looked like strawberry rhubarb pie, chunky and reddish purple. Michelle did not know where the safety was, she would have to search guns on AOL. She would find an instructional video and learn how not to kill herself.

  Bringing the gun back over the ladder was a challenge. She needed a backpack or something. The man’s rickety cabinets were held shut with bungee cords, and in a fit of inspiration Michelle went for one. The cabinets flung open, spilling dog treats everywhere, a variety. The man had loved his dog. Michelle felt regret and respect for the both of them and wished they could each have a proper burial, but supposed such things weren’t possible. The paramedics were busy carting off dead celebrities and the cops were all stationed outside the shops on Rodeo Drive, Melrose Avenue, and Hollywood Boulevard. Michelle had seen the pictures of them in full riot gear, guns drawn, looking ready to fight off zombies. Probably the man and his dog would begin to molder, and Michelle would become as accustomed to the smell of it as she had the stink of the cows on the highway.

  Michelle looped Chekhov’s gun through the bungee cord and hung it around her neck. It would be awful if she shot herself in the face as she crawled. Don’t think don’t think don’t think. She thought that maybe guns were harder to shoot than you’d imagine. A friend in San Francisco had once gone to a shooting range with that gay self-defense group, the Pink Pistols. She’d returned with a sore, cramped finger, complaining how hard it had been to pull the trigger. Michelle crawled gingerly across the ladder and made it through her window. She removed her strange jewelry and laid it upon her kitchen table.

  Immediately Michelle regretted not ransacking the man’s apartment. What was she thinking? She could have picked his pocket. She could have walked around and checked if there was anything she needed. The man was dead, nothing was of any use to him. What were the ethics of the apocalypse? If Michelle was dead and some nice queer girls came upon her she hoped they would help themselves to whatever they needed. She supposed that even if they ate her, why should she care if she was dead already?

  17

  Michelle surfed the Internet. She’d learned everything she needed to learn about Chekhov’s gun, which she had deduced was a .44 Magnum, which sounded like a a condom or brand of malt liquor. Michelle taught herself how to keep the thing locked. She practiced holding it in front of the bathroom mirror, aiming it at her reflection, squinting through the sight. After a bit the novelty of the gun wore off. Maybe she’d go shoot bottles with it, really learn how to handle it. But then, she didn’t want to waste the bullets, either. The gun was not a toy.

  On the Interweb, Michelle read about a new global phenomenon. Since the end of the world began, everyone had been having intensely sensory dreams of love affairs. Michelle was always a fan of such articles—dreams, the afterlife, hauntings. Anything supernatural fascinated her. And she had had one of these dreams, hadn’t she? The boy in the garden. It wasn’t often that Michelle found her own experience reflected in the media. She read on. Some nutjobs were beginning to believe that the dreams were real. That the people in them were real people, alive on the earth right now. The article showed a picture of a couple smiling together, they lived a city or two away and had run into each other at a Chili’s. They coul
dn’t believe it. They recognized one another and they recognized their love, and had gotten married right away and were psyched to spend the End Times together.

  And there were more couples like this. People began posting ads in papers and on Craigslist. Dreamtime missed connections. People found one another. Sometimes they liked each other and sometimes they didn’t. They hooked up or else were totally repulsed by the person, who looked nothing like they had in the dream. It left some people bitter and some people obsessed. Michelle opened a new tab and went over to Craigslist.

  There were many In Search Of Dream Lover postings. Just reading them was like cracking open a book of psychedelic poetry. The ceiling was spinning, we were on top of it and you had three eyes, read one. We were on a soap opera set and we were being filmed by Princess Diana, another offered. Leaves flew from a tree like butterflies and carried us over a hole in the ground. Michelle really liked that one. Michelle wondered why no one had thought to use their dreams as personal ads before. Back when the world wasn’t ending and dreams were just dreams. It would have been a great way to get a vibe on someone.

  That night Michelle dreamed she was having sex with a boy inside a painting. The paint was not yet dry and their sex tossed them against oily dunes of it, it got all over their skin but they liked it. Michelle was on top and the boy was shuddering beneath her. The ends of the boy’s long, greasy hair were clumped with wet color that slid across his cheeks and made him look wild. He was drunk but Michelle was not. Her body in the dream was a miracle, felt like a balsa-wood plane flung into the air. She rode him in a pool of paint glittered with sugar, the sprinkles clumped and hardened into little caverns, like the inside of a geode. The sparkle of it called to Michelle and she begged the boy to take her there, but no, the boy told her it would crumble, it was very delicate. Someday it was meant to be broken, but not by her. Michelle woke up.

  The entire planet was dreaming of the lovers they would have had if only they had lived. In the dreams everyone was their highest self, everyone was present and their hearts were wide-open. It was a gift and a plea, from the planet perhaps, or from the universe, from the essence of life—no one knew enough about such things to be certain.

  The planet is showing us how beautiful our lives will be if we stay here and work together to heal it, pleaded mystical people and ecologists on television. Psychologists deemed it an episode of mass hysteria on a scale previously unknown and commentators blamed the Internet and globalization for allowing it to spread so rapidly. Christians blamed the devil and deemed sleeping a sin, other religious people insisted it was God and that what was happening was a miracle.

  Michelle found that it was possible to achieve a sort of lucidity in her dreams, causing the more fantastical elements to fall away in order to get closer to the truth of the affair. Dreaming that a creature had implanted a device in Michelle’s head, causing dark thoughts and spontaneous orgasms, Michelle became lucid and found herself holding a cell phone, masturbating on a pillow while a girl on the other end told her filthy stories. Dreaming that her junk was an endless supply of pastries, a cornucopia of tiny cupcakes and fat croissants and cream puffs, Michelle became lucid and found herself in bed with a boy so skinny Michelle forced him to eat baked goods off her own naked tailbone. Dreaming her face was a popped balloon, bits of rubber and ribbon dangling from her mouth, she became lucid and found herself with a girl who had kissed her so passionately Michelle’s lip had split against her tooth.

  Michelle inspected shyly the bustling Internet world of dream missed connections. She found the anorexic pastry boy but he lived in Stockholm and his English was poor, and he was not even a boy but a girl, a fifteen-year-old girl who cut herself with razors and whose parents were poised to send her off to boarding school. The one who had busted her lip with a kiss, she too was a troubled teenager, with a bristling jet-black Mohawk and a Joy Division shirt hung on her slouched shoulders. The painter was a girl as well, also quite young. She emailed a photo of herself atop a horse, in a pair of jodhpurs and a velvet helmet, leaping over a small white fence. Michelle stopped emailing these children. She felt like a creep.

  18

  In the bookstore Michelle rang up a customer, a woman buying old feminist books from the 1970s, herbal healing and witchery. A book about periods. So many women didn’t even get periods anymore, hadn’t for years. Michelle’s were spotty. The doctor at the free clinic in San Francisco had told them everything was fine, no growths, no cancers, that’s just what was happening to some women. Michelle had had a dim concern about it, like what if she maybe wanted to have a baby someday, was she no longer able? But now that the world was ending it wasn’t an issue. Michelle felt a sad kind of relief. She’d always felt torn about having a kid and wished the decision could somehow be made for her—that the people she slept with could accidentally knock her up or that she would become infertile, anything to cancel the seesaw of indecision in her mind. And now it was done. No babies, no planet, no future. Most everyone who had become pregnant was having an abortion and those who weren’t looked disturbed. Michelle had glimpsed women too far along, committed to the things inside their giant bellies. They looked like animals at the pound, stuffed into too-small cages. A lot of pregnant women were killing themselves, but then a lot of people were killing themselves. Michelle didn’t know if the percentage was any higher.

  The lady left and Junkie Ted came in, the doorbell jangling with his entrance. Michelle reached into the waistband of the cutoff camouflage pants she’d sworn never again to wear in case she ran into Matt Dillon. Chekhov’s gun was tucked into her underwear, little boy’s briefs that sat snug on her body. She unclicked the safety and pointed.

  Get The Fuck Out Of Here.

  One of Michelle’s unexpected talents in the world was appearing totally detached and together when really she was practically shitting herself with fear. She could be very, very inebriated and hardly anyone around her would gather that she was more than a bit tipsy. Her vision would be split into a blurry triad but her voice would leave her mouth clear and concise, not a slur to her words. And she could fake it even better sober, freeze the surge of adrenaline, becoming as cold as a gun-toting avatar in a video game.

  Junkie Ted put his arms in the air as if Michelle was a cop busting him for possession. What’d I ever do to you? He kept coming toward her, in a ratty flannel and a pair of sweats.

  Get The Fuck Out Of Here. I Am Not Buying Your Fucking Mariah Carey Cassingles, You Got No Money To Shop, You Got No Business In Here, Get The Fuck Out.

  Ted’s arms flopped to his sides. Come on, now, he whined. You work in a fucking bookstore, what do you need a gun for? You gonna kill someone to protect a fucking roomful of used books? Huh? That’s how you want to go out?

  Michelle honestly believed that she could shoot and kill Ted and feel no remorse. She doubted the cops would care enough to come after her or that anyone’s life would be ruined by his subtraction. That’s not right—a little thought, her conscience she supposed, nagged at her. It wasn’t, it wasn’t right, and yet Michelle would be lying to herself if she acted like she couldn’t do it. Or that doing it would traumatize her somehow. Didn’t Ted threaten to kill black people and faggots?

  I’m A Fucking Dyke, Michelle said. You Want To Fucking Kill Me? You Want To Fucking Kill Black People? You’re Not Allowed In Here. You Know Who I Want To Fucking Kill? Junkies In Sweatpants. Get Out!

  The door jangled open and Matt Dillon walked in. Fuck! Michelle said out loud. She looked down at her shitty camouflage pants. She could not believe it. Her camisole top was at least okay and the chains she had around her neck were tough and cute. Also, she hadn’t drunk wine last night and couldn’t underestimate the effect of a night of abstinence on her system. Her skin was brighter and the overall puff of her body had come down, like a molested soufflé.

  Whoa, Matt Dillon said in that voice, that gruff voice, classic Matt Dillon, Dallas Winston, Rusty James. What’s going on in here?


  She’s a fucking crazy dyke, Ted spat. I just want to sell some fucking books, she pulls a gun on me. I know the owners, you know. I’ll get you fired, good luck finding a job in the apocalypse, no one’s hiring.

  I Will Fucking Shoot You. Michelle tried to stay on track with Ted, which was hard with Matt Dillon watching her. She blew her bangs, an indigo fringe of split ends, out of her face so she could see clearly. If You Don’t Want To Die, Get The Fuck Out Of My Store And Don’t Come Back.

  Why don’t you leave, man? Matt clapped sweaty Ted on the back. C’mon. And don’t be calling girls dykes, it’s rude. C’mon. Matt held the glass door open with a tinkle. Here, guy. Matt pulled out his wallet, a leather billfold tucked in the ass of his jeans. He pulled out some money and pushed it into Ted’s hand. Ted took it.

  I’m not scared of you! he spat at Michelle as he left the bookstore. Matt Dillon released the door and it swung shut with another tinkle. Michelle laid Chekhov’s gun down, gently, on the counter. Her hands were shaking, which was embarrassing. A gun was a heavy thing to hold in front of you like that. Those minutes she had considered, really considered, killing Junkie Ted had felt like hours. She was grateful to Matt Dillon. She didn’t think she really wanted to shoot anyone, no matter how cold and determined she could feel when she got scared. All the pent-up nerves threatened to burst through her eyes in the form of tears. Please God don’t let me cry in front of Matt Dillon. Michelle believed in no such God, but had to clutch at something lest her face turn blotchy and snotty. She took a deep, rattling breath. She felt like there were two people inside her, regular Michelle and then the Michelle she was capable of becoming under extreme provocation. She wondered which was true. Matt lifted the gun.

  You know how to use this thing? He clicked the safety back into place and turned it in his giant Matt Dillon hands.