I walked fast. I always walk fast. That’s because you’re always fleeing destruction, Saskia says.
The house looked too nice, too neat, too landscaped to shelter anarchists.
I didn’t knock. That was one of the things anarchists didn’t believe in.
Two dudes I didn’t know were playing Xbox in the living room. They weren’t townies.
“Who the fuck are you?” one of them asked.
“Neptune.”
“Fucking A,” he said. “Get Calvin.”
“You get Calvin.”
“It’s my turn,” the first guy said, mashing his controller.
The other guy went to get Calvin.
I could describe these guys to you, but it wouldn’t matter. It only matters to their mothers and their girlfriends, their boyfriends, their mirrors, occasionally an eyewitness, often the cops. Mainly can I say that I don’t remember? Will you use that against me later when I say things you don’t believe and you want to accuse me of fictionalizing all the weird shit that happened? I forgot what those losers looked like, but I didn’t forget the important stuff.
“Neptune,” Calvin said. He reached down to shake my hand. Calvin had hands the size of roast beefs. He was humongous, six foot seven or something. He’s one of the only people I know who’s a lot bigger than me. If you look at video clips of the World Trade Organization riots in Seattle on YouTube, look for the huge anarchist in the black ski mask. That’s him. Calvin outgrew anonymity in eighth grade. He was bald but not a skinhead. Instead of your hand, he shook your whole arm up to the pit.
“I’m just here to see the stuff,” I said.
He didn’t let go of my arm, but he stopped levering it like a pump handle.
“Guys,” Calvin said, “this is our special guest.”
“Shit,” one of the video game players said, and they both got up, and they left the game on. Its digital forces kept trying to destroy them anyway.
“You want a beer?” Calvin said. There’s only one answer to this question: I always want a beer. In the kitchen, we found two young women and some beer, plus a couple of other dudes playing quarters.
“This is our special guest,” Calvin said. “This is Neptune.” Calvin and the two video game players stood really close to me.
I was starting to mistrust the word special and the word guest. I drank my beer anyway.
“Let’s go take a look,” Calvin said.
He led me down a hallway, and a woman in a Pantera shirt followed us.
“Not now, sweetie,” Calvin said. She shrugged at us, and Calvin said to me, “Come on.”
He led me into a room where a black backpack sat on a bare double bed.
“Take a peek,” he said.
I unzipped the bag and looked at the dynamite: six sticks, each as fat as a baseball bat, about a foot long. The white string fuses were braided together: light one fuse, and they’d all blow.
“I expected it to feel eviler,” I said.
“It’s enough to destroy the whole building,” Calvin said. Then he paused, cleared his throat, said, “You in?”
I hadn’t done anything violently stupid or stupidly violent for a couple of years, but once you’re dirty like that, you never get clean.
All the worst shit I did happened when I was thirteen, fourteen. All that shit’s supposed to be sealed. I’m supposed to be innocent again.
Well, not exactly innocent. Free to start anew.
But when you have a reputation for stupid stuff, it follows you around. A guy in Wichita once offered me nine hundred bucks to run his ex-wife off the road. The cops used to question me once a month: Do you know anything about that knifing outside the frat-boy bar?
Calvin wanted me to walk up to the University of Kansas campus, use Marilynne’s keys to unlock Wescoe Hall in the middle of the night, plant dynamite, set an electronic timer, and get the hell out of there. Calvin had talked about this plan for a year. He had never actually had dynamite before. I had thought he was bullshitting. He had talked about blowing up other things: the campanile, Allen Fieldhouse, the AT&T tower behind the Eldridge Hotel, the transformer station east of downtown. He deemed some of these things too beautiful, and some would cause collateral damage.
A few months earlier, over a bottle of vodka, Calvin insisted he didn’t want to kill anyone. He wanted to wake people up.
“To what?” I asked.
“All of our experiences are fake,” he said, and then he changed the channel on the TV. “I’m aware of the irony,” he said, nodding at the TV. “I need to be woken up too.”
You’d think I would have stopped associating with people like that, but I wasn’t really associating. I was just breathing the same air, drinking the same liquor.
Now Calvin actually had the dynamite. He was fucking serious.
“No one will be there, dude,” he said. “We’ve been watching every night. No one’s in there from, like, two to six. Nobody’s dying, I promise.”
“No way,” I said.
“We’ll do it now, tonight. No one’ll miss that building—big old punk-ass garage-like piece of shit.”
I didn’t say anything.
“We’ll slip in, set a timer, sneak out.”
“I don’t want any part of this shit, Calvin.”
“No one will know, dude,” he said. “Wescoe is the only building on campus without security cameras. No one cares if it gets trashed.”
He looked at me with all of his bulk, one eyebrow cocked up, one hand working in and out of a fist. I’d fought guys almost as big before. I tried not to make a habit of it.
“I don’t have the keys,” I said.
“We’ll go get them from the old lady, me and you.”
He meant Marilynne.
“I don’t think so, Cal.”
“I thought you believed in anarchy! I thought you believed in not giving a shit!”
I had always believed in not giving a shit—it’s my birthright—but not like that.
He was breathing hot death down at me. He was holding onto my arm.
“We’ve got to send a message to this state, this governor, this country.” Every time he said this, he squeezed a bruise into my biceps. “This is an act of civil disobedience!”
He pulled me back down the hallway and planted another beer in my hands. He sort of nodded at the woman in the Pantera shirt.
“We need you,” Calvin said.
“We need his fucking keys! We don’t need him,” one of the guys playing quarters said.
“That’s true,” Calvin said. “We could just beat the shit out of you, Neptune. Or worse.”
“Let me think about it,” I said. “Let me get a cigarette.” “
Who’s the skinny?” the woman asked.
“Neptune,” Calvin said. “He used to be known as a solid guy.” Then he looked at me, tipped his pack of Marlboros in my direction, said, “Think!”
“Think hard!” somebody else said.
Maybe you’re already aware that thinking isn’t one of my specialties.
Calvin went to the front room to watch TV. He tuned into something brutal on the History Channel. I could tell from the solemn narrator, the sound of explosions.
I smoked with one hand, and with the other I held the cold can of beer up to my forehead as a catalyst. Still no thoughts. I began to administer it orally.
“You want to play quarters?” a wiry guy asked. He had a snaggletooth.
I shook my head.
The woman in the Pantera T-shirt now pressed up against me.
“He knows what we need him to play,” she said.
One of her breasts rubbed on my arm. Her eyes were kind but blasted out. She probably hooked up with Calvin most of the time. “
Let me think a bit,” I said.
“About what?” she said, and her breast whooshed across my arm again.
If I had lived like a monk, I’d be a goner. I was never a monk.
I was always a goner, though. I was a born gone
r.
“Let me think on it,” I said.
She kissed me on the forehead, right above the left eye— a slimy blessing—then wandered off. I could hear a heavy bass beat in one room and the television in the other. The quarters players were fucked up beyond coordination.
I flitted like a moth to the sources of light: the TV, the refrigerator, the room with the dynamite, back to the TV.
At the anarchists’ house, none of the clocks had the right time. None of the clocks had the same time. Time became malleable.
Time became a guess.
“Will you chill out?” Calvin said.
“I’m too alive,” I said.
CHAPTER ONE
Neptune is the god of the sea, but everybody likes Poseidon better.
Everybody likes Aquaman better.
It’s the blue planet because of all the methane in the atmosphere. I don’t usually broadcast this.
I’m Neptune, and I like long walks on the beach.
I was trying not to do shitty things. I was trying not to do the things I did.
I don’t like cookouts.
I like to turn those pages fast.
CHAPTER ONE
I wandered again to the room with the dynamite. The backpack just sat on the bare mattress—it had a big round stain, and someone had written “Sergio did this” with a magic marker in the middle of the stain. The backpack wasn’t that heavy really. I slipped the straps over my shoulders. You’d think something so deadly would have some real weight, but it just felt full of paperbacks. There’s no harm in those, except to your thoughts, except to your soul.
I adjusted the straps, and it felt snug, right somehow. I walked out into the hallway and then down the hall to an old sun porch. A man and a woman were making out on a futon, hands down each other’s Dickies, up each other’s T-shirts.
“I’ll be right back,” I said, then I clicked out the back door. I closed the door really carefully.
I walked a couple of steps into the backyard. It was unfenced, unmowed, unlit. I took some even, casual strides. I waved and puffed my cigarette, like I was taking the air, saving them all from my pollutants. It was a strange foggy night all of a sudden, and the air felt slick. I circled the yard, then took a wide turn out into the back alley parallel to Ohio.
Then I ran like a motherfucker.
When I was about halfway down the block, I heard a crash— a door being thrown open. Then Calvin yelled “Neptune!” in a B-movie type of way, and I always thought I was stupid and histrionic, but maybe everyone is stupid and histrionic. I didn’t think they could see me from the house, but I ran harder anyway. If I had to, I thought maybe I could do it: blow myself up. I had my lighter in my pocket, right next to my phone, which was vibrating away. Those Buddhist monks do it slow, but I wouldn’t.
I realize that this, too, is stupid and histrionic, but I really thought about it, becoming a big human fireball and then, for eternity, being nothing. At that point, I didn’t believe in ghosts. Do you see how I know nothing, and how on each page I grow dumber? Be careful—as Dr. Cobain said, stupidity’s contagious.
I knew who was calling. I looked anyway: Calvin. He could make my pants vibrate, but I didn’t have to pick up.
I sprinted down the alley for a couple of blocks, and then I turned, heading down Tenth toward downtown. I was still booking it. My lungs were sacks of crumpled paper. My heart was a reactor. It felt like a meltdown. I had an explosion on my back. I had an explosion in my chest.
I have no idea if stealing the dynamite was incredibly smart or incredibly stupid. So many of my decisions live in that deadland.
Out on the street, the beautiful people who wanted to be scuzzy were trying to differentiate themselves from the scuzzy people who wanted to be beautiful. It’s not as easy as you might think. I had my own scuzzy veins and lungs and skin.
My lungs said, “And yes and yes and yes and yes.” My heart said, “And yes and yes and yes and yes.”
I followed these affirmations all the fuck back to the Replay.
CHAPTER ONE
If you don’t like profanity, then fuck you.
CHAPTER ONE
I suppose I had better tell you about Marilynne.
Two years ago, I had a work-study job where I made photocopies of photocopies for professors in the English Department at the University of Kansas, which for a very short time considered me a student in good standing and then a student in not-so-good standing and then someone who wasn’t welcome on campus.
On the day I met her, I had a big pile of fresh smudgy words, and I knocked on her barren office door. Other professors taped up postcards in French and souvenirs of horrible academic excursions (Popular Culture Studies in South Dakota!). Marilynne had a brass nameplate that said “M. Hobson.”
I didn’t know what the M. signified. I knocked, and I could hear breathing on the other side, but the door didn’t open. I knocked again and the breathing rattled on. I knocked some more.
“Who is it?” someone asked.
“Neptune,” I said.
“We don’t want any,” she said.
“Copies,” I said, and the door opened.
“There’s the young scribe,” she said.
Her voice had a tease in it, but it wasn’t unkind. She seemed about sixty, and her hair was the gray of dishwater. She sat me down in the office. She made me chicken bouillon with a mug of hot tap water. It tasted like watery salt. She listed three other professors whom she hated to various degrees. That’s roughly what I remember. I was supposed to be making more copies.
“I feel like I’m looking in a mirror,” she said to me. I looked right back at her, at her plump pink face and her gray hair.
I didn’t say anything, which was the clever strategy I had worked out for dealing with any and all authority figures.
She said, “You have your mirrors, I have mine.”
She was always getting copies made. I was always making them.
She was cracking up. I knew it, and I even drove her to a doctor’s office once, and she sat in the car in the parking lot, and she wouldn’t get out, and she called me a cunt fucker, which is not inaccurate but seemed unrelated to her mental well-being.
Besides the skins, whom I didn’t even hang with anymore, she was maybe the closest I had to family.
I made her bed and did her laundry. I brought her meals from the Mad Greek. I sometimes read books to her.
When I started taking classes, when I started working for the English Department, she’s the one who said I belonged.
Maybe you can blame her for all of this.
Not for what happened.
For the fact that you have to read about it.
CHAPTER ONE
Did you notice I used whom right in that last chapter? Or maybe I didn’t. I might have rewritten that part.
I might not even know the right rules.
But don’t think that I’m lying to you. I won’t lie to you— because I love you as much as I can love a complete stranger. And you can love a complete stranger. Try it some night, some afternoon, at a laundromat, in an airport, at a library. We’re already twenty-eight pages in, and I haven’t lied to you yet. Go back and review. Do your due diligence.
And I promise that I’m not going to say, “I’m not going to lie,” and then lie anyway. That’s not what this is all about. It’s not really about alcohol or Marilynne or commas or Lawrence or sadness or ghosts or murder or the Ghost Machine or skinheads or dynamite, so maybe I lied about all of that. It’s about sitting down and reading a book. Let’s just say that’s what it’s about. Go ahead. Keep going.
It’s not really my fault if you can never find your place in this thing. That’s on you.
Get a fucking bookmark or something.
And if you’re bored, you can skip Chapter One.
CHAPTER ONE
I wasn’t kidding when I said I needed to think. I still hadn’t thought, hadn’t thunk.
I couldn’t go home, and the
anarchists would probably check in on some of my friends.
I ran some more, backpack heavy as a motherfucker, then I jogged, then I walked.
I had to get somewhere that would take me in.
I’d be safest at the bars. The anarchists could find me, but they wouldn’t be able to do shit with all of the people around. That was my theory anyway, but remember this wasn’t exactly thinking—this was feeling. This was spiritual.
I had my breath back. I was headed to the Replay. It almost seemed like a normal night again, and when Marilynne called—each of her calls delivered a distinct snake-like buzz—I answered it.
“Yes,” I said, and it wasn’t even a nice yes. It was flat and hard, a two-by-four of affirmation. You swing that kind of yes at someone.
“Can you come over here? Can you come over here, please?” Marilynne said.
I chewed on my lip. I made a clicking sound with my tongue. I adjusted the backpack full of dynamite that I had just stolen. I stretched out time. I was standing on Massachusetts Street again, outside the Replay, and I could hear the muffled thrum of music leaking out of the windows. I knew I shouldn’t go home, that various anarchists would be headed that way. Marilynne was breathing on the other end of the line. It sounded like aerosol spritzing from a can.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“No,” she said, “not really.”
“Oh, Christ,” I said, and then I said it again.
“Will you stop saying ‘Oh, Christ’?”
“Oh, Christ,” I said, and then I listened to more of her spray-can gasps.
“I’m coming to see you,” I said. “Give me a few minutes.”
I knocked on a tinted window at the Replay, but no one seemed to notice or care. If I had been on the other side of that glass, I wouldn’t have given a shit either. I could see a gray splash of myself reflected in the window, and inside I could see the shapes of pinball machines and a few regulars and Missy behind the bar. I could see that fucking asshole Tax with his stupid cymbal hands.
The night sent a cold swirl of wind slinking down the back of my neck, and I zipped up my hoodie. I shrugged my backpack up and down.
This Book Is Not for You Page 2