So I kissed another man I liked and wanted to love, a man with a life already rich in things. I kissed him one late afternoon in my place, kissed him and lay with him, and he left my bed because he had to be somewhere else and he had to hurry and I began to think it was okay, I was silly ever to wonder about this, and ten minutes later my phone rang. He was calling me on his cellular phone from his BMW convertible and he said, “I had to call. I had to tell you that I have many things in my life, but your kiss is very special.” And then, I figured out from the police reports, he went around a bend on the Dan Ryan Expressway, perhaps with his eyes drifting out to the east, over the lake, to a moon still pale from the verging sun, and he ran right under a stalled semitrailer.
And the bathroom door swings open and Philip steps out and he stops and he is looking at me. His linen pants and his linen collarless shirt hang loose on him and I sense his body inside there, naked and soft, and my heart is pounding and my lips feel tumescent, as if they have their own separate yearning and they are filling for him. With what? A kind of venom utterly new to this world? A plague from God? Or not so grand as that, after all. A plague simply from some sick, mutant monkey in some dark jungle in Africa. He kissed a sleeping traveler on safari who kissed a flight attendant who kissed a businessman from Chicago who kissed his secretary at the Merchandise Mart who kissed a mail boy who kissed me a happy new year at an office party. Perhaps it is as blandly horrific as that. Or maybe I am the scourge of the Old Testament, a modern harlot who dares love a man on terms quite different from a bunch of desert dwellers three and a half millennia ago and eight thousand miles away and so is doomed herself and destined only to bring doom.
Philip says, “I love you.”
He’s not said this before. Still, though we’ve known each other only the briefest of times, I’ve sensed it. We met at the Merchandise Mart. He brought some product drawings to show at a fair and he was lost in the building and he stopped me and he asked for directions. We spoke and I never even looked at his drawings. I showed him the way and gave him my phone number, in spite of what I knew about myself. In spite of that. He looked me in the eyes, he looked at me and did not look away and I gave him my number, and when he called me, before anything else, I told him. I told him all that I knew about myself. So he came here and he was dressed in linen and he is standing now before me and his eyes are soft on me.
“Are you afraid?” I say.
“Yes.”
I feel a lifting in me, a warm rushing feeling about him because he loves me and because he believes me, and though this makes him afraid, he is here. He has dressed in white for me and I have dressed in white in this new and empty place where I live. I want this to be pure. I want to sit here with him on the floor and I don’t know what it is that we will do, but it will be in a place without tapestries and without carved work and without myrrh and aloe and cinnamon. The linen is all right. They wrapped the dead body of Jesus in linen. He was killed by a kiss and then they wrapped him in linen.
He believes me when I tell him about this curse. I did not fully believe it myself even after the phone went dead from the Dan Ryan. I promise that it was still partly my disbelief that made me stop on Dearborn at noon a few weeks later. I was passing a construction site, and a worker there in a T-shirt and a hard hat was calling out to all the women going by. “Oh man,” he cries as I pass. “That’s just enough for me. Give me a kiss, honey.”
And I stopped and some part of me still couldn’t believe. But it’s true that part of me did. And that part was thoroughly pissed at this man. He sought not solace. He sought not love. He would use the signs of those yearnings in order to control and demean and cast away. And so I turned and I moved into this space of unlaid stone and churning cement mixers and he was sitting beneath a web of steel beams and a half-risen wall and I went to him and his eyes widened and he flinched, expecting a blow, but I took his face in my hands and kissed him on the mouth, a kiss full of wrath. And I turned and walked away and I had not reached the end of the block before I heard a creaking of steel and a crumbling of mortar and then a long roar of falling concrete and beams. There was no doubt left in my mind.
It is tempting now, to send Philip away and to accept this role. I have eyes to see and ears to hear. I know easily from the pages of the newspapers every day that there are men who do evil and would ask for my kiss and all that I would do is comply with their wishes. I have done this once and I could do it often again. I have kissed in anger and killed. But surely only the wicked can consciously do that, can turn this act of love into death. And what does that suggest about a God who has brought these things into the world? Not to kiss in anger but in tenderness, in the yearning for closeness and care, and from this to kill. Is that not more wicked still?
Philip sits down now in front of me. “I’m afraid too,” I say.
“That you will hurt me?”
“Yes. That. And another thing.”
“What is it?”
I see my father’s face in me, rising above his pulpit. He was right. On earth, the father is the image of God.
“I hated my father,” I say.
“That frightens you?”
“Not exactly.”
“What, then?”
I say, “I’m afraid that God is as loveless as he was.”
He says, “Your father was not God.”
“God gave me this evil.”
“No. Not him. Did any of the men you kissed know the risk?”
“None of them.”
“I do.”
“Yes.”
Philip draws his face near to me. “Then kiss me,” he says.
“I want to kiss you. I want to. I want to touch.”
“I understand. Kiss me. I’m asking you.”
“We can stay here afterwards,” I say.
“Yes.”
“Will we be safe?”
“We will,” he says. “I’ll fill the room with furniture. I am a carpenter.”
Then I kiss him.
“Doomsday Meteor
Is Coming”
So we settle in at this new place in Westwood called “Coffee, Beer and Irony” and it’s a Saturday afternoon, there’s practically a whole weekend left ahead of us. I’m thinking I could stay here the entire time. When you find a place with a TV over the bar and a lot of light and hazelnut coffee, which is my favorite, and beer the color of Evian, you can almost think that the world isn’t so bad after all. And the place even has tables with umbrellas out in the back, away from all the traffic. The Zima Garden. And I’ve got forty-two hours before I have to put on my suit and tie and go out and tread water for a while. I say I “have to” do that, but I choose to. It’s a choice I make. I’m in my Converse high-tops today and that’s me, but I’m no slacker. Not that anybody is pushing me to be. Tolerance is the word. Even Janis doesn’t get after me about the job. She understands, in a certain way. The thing that’s happening between us on this otherwise-should-be-fine Saturday afternoon isn’t about my job, exactly.
She’s across the room at a table with Peggy Sue and Liza. I’m at the bar with Justin and Seth. I look over at her and she’s beautiful, my Janis Joplin-Hendrix Jones. Razored tangerine hair and six rings in her face and the poutiest, softest lips in the world with one of the rings through the lower one. I’m just beginning to suspect that I’m going to lose her. But what I don’t know is if that’s a real big thing for me or not. And all the while I’m sitting here looking at her, I have no idea that the end of the world is on the way.
Though I’m about to learn. We have our Zimas, the three of us guys, and I lift mine and I’m looking out the front window through it, watching the passing cars swim in my beer like tropical fish, and Justin says, “The world will be okay when all the rivers and lakes look like Zima,” and Seth says, “Who are we kidding?” This stops Justin and he no
ds his head. Like yes. He hadn’t thought of that point.
“Kidding about what?” I say, a black Firebird convertible billowing through my drink like a manta ray.
“That the rivers will ever run full of crystal clear malt liquor,” Seth says.
“Don’t tell me it’s so,” I say. “Where did we lose our idealism?”
“I left it in my other genes,” Justin says.
So we all clink our bottles and drink to whatever that was. Meanwhile, the bartender is flipping channels and cursing because the UCLA game is blacked out. “They’re just playing over at the goddamn Coliseum and we can’t see it,” he says.
Then he’s got the Saturday rerun of Inside Scoop, and Justin says “Stop. There might be something on Madonna.” So the bartender leaves it and goes about his business and my attention is drifting, back to Janis. I look over my shoulder and I catch her eyes sliding away from me and she leans toward Peggy Sue and they talk low.
It’s about my nipple, I figure. Well, our nipples, actually, one of Janis’s and one of mine. She wants me to get my left nipple pierced, the one over my heart, and she wants to do the same, and that would mean we were joined at the nipple, or something. More than that, I guess, but I’m not sure what I think about this particular gesture. I’m resisting it, and this is what’s happening between Janis and me to make this Saturday go bad. It’s kind of a big deal, somehow, the question of our two nipples, until I turn my face back and I look up at the TV.
There’s a guy on who’s the editor of a newspaper called Real World Weekly. He’s a forty-something, a Double-Us, from the look of him, and he’s got an air about him, like he’s from the CIA or somewhere and he knows things that other people don’t. I’ve seen his paper at the supermarkets and we always go “Cool” around it and laugh that in-between laugh, that sort-of-with-it, sort-of-against-it kind of laugh, that I’m-going-to-take-this-as-real, I’m-going-to-stand-away-from-this kind of laugh, and that always feels good, one of those laughs, because it tucks you away in a sweet little quiet nowhere. So Justin and Seth are starting up like that already, but for some reason, I’m seeing this guy like through a real clear glass of beer.
He says that a meteor about a mile and a half wide is on a collision course with the planet Earth and it will arrive in about a year, though the scientists are all keeping quiet about this so as not to start a panic, so it could be any minute, really, or perhaps not for two years or so, but not much more. But when it hits Earth it will be like a fifty-million-megaton bomb and, to make a long story short, it will end all life as we know it on this planet.
Yeah, right. This is how you find out. Looking for the UCLA game while everybody’s drinking beer and it’s on a regularly scheduled show, and on a rerun, even, and nobody’s paying attention and CNN doesn’t have the story and never will.
Justin says, “This can be a unifying thing, you know? Bring all the earth together.”
And Seth says, “No. We’ll all kill each other before it even gets here. Every store will be looted. The justice system breaks down if all the maximum sentences are two years.”
Like they don’t believe it. I hear them and I’m thinking I should be throwing in some comment like that, but for some reason I don’t. I sit here and my face has gotten real hot real fast and everything is seizing up in my chest and there’s still enough in me of the guy in the Converses to step back and think, Hey, this is pretty weird, but it keeps going on in my body just the same.
The Inside Scoop people are asking the editor some tough questions now, I think, though I’m not concentrating very much on that. I’m already feeling that thing out there, hearing a static in my head like it’s the solar wind peeling off it, if meteors have solar wind. Then the editor is looking right at me, at everybody in this bar, and he says, “It’s real,” and I know it is.
Justin says, “These are the guys who found out about that talking waterbed in Encino.”
“I heard about that,” Seth says. “That’s true.”
“True you heard about it?” Justin asks, seeking a clarification that I’m having trouble taking an interest in at the moment.
“I have to take a leak,” I say just to get away for a little while and I put my Zima down and drop off the stool and my legs are having trouble holding me up, though I haven’t even finished one drink, I’m still sober. I wobble off toward the back of the place and I’m drawing near to Janis and she looks up from her two friends.
“Linus,” she says to me, “you look awful.”
I’m feeling awful, too, and I sink into the empty chair at the table, next to Janis, and I’m trying to find a way to say this without it being taken wrong.
“Janis,” I say. “The world’s going to end, probably sooner rather than later, but in two years max.”
Peggy Sue says, “My dad says I got to move out of the house in two years or else. So this is good. I won’t have to find an apartment.”
“I’m serious,” I say. “There’s a meteor.” I stop. There’s a lot of reasons to doubt me.
Liza says, “I’m going skydiving with Justin next weekend.”
I’m not sure if she’s trying to say something relevant here, maybe something about facing death, or if she’s just changing the subject.
I look at Janis and she’s studying me. She has a row of wrinkles between her eyebrows and she’s touching the ring in her lower lip with the point of her tongue, something she does when she’s thinking. “I’m serious,” I say, lowering my voice and leaning toward Janis, like this is just for her.
Peggy Sue says, “Linus, you just have to do this nipple-piercing thing, you and Janis, it is so cool and so romantic.”
All of a sudden I am very aware indeed of my nipples. And my chest as a whole, in light of this mile-and-a-half-wide ball of rock. And the top of my head and the soles of my feet. Something is happening to me and I’m starting to pant.
“What is it?” Janis says, also low, also bending near. I’d like to take her by the arm and walk her away from this table, maybe out into the sun, then I think, No. No. Not outside. Get under the table, for Christ’s sake. But I don’t have the strength for any movement at all at the moment, so I just try to control my breath, like a cowboy trying to jump up into the saddle of a moving horse.
Somewhere nearby a crowd is cheering. It sounds like a big crowd, but the sound is small. I think, That’s how the meteor must look to those scientists. A very big thing but it looks small. And what I’m hearing is a portable radio nearby tuned to the UCLA game. I imagine the crowd all suddenly looking up and they make a great collective gasp.
“Let’s take a little walk,” Janis says.
I try to stand up. It’s okay. One hand braced on the table, then the back of the chair, and my legs are working for the moment. She touches my arm, on a bare place, near my wrist, and her hand is impossibly soft. We move off.
She says, “Is it that you can’t see us together?”
“No. I’m seeing everybody breaking up,” I say.
“You have nothing pierced,” she says. “This would be such a sweet thing for me.”
“Like a virgin,” I say.
“Yes,” she says. “You are.” And she puts her arm around my waist. I feel her bones there, her ulna, or her radius, whichever, what the hell good was all that education anyway, I think, with no world left. And her fragile bones: how simply, how completely, Janis would disappear. And all of us. I stop. We are in the middle of tables. People are all around. My face grows hot again, quickly. This woman smiling. That man dabbing at his mouth with his napkin. What a sad gesture, trying to keep himself clean while his death rushes to him, very near. Any day, perhaps.
“You’re crying,” Janis says.
“I’ve got something in my eye,” I say, and I draw away from her. Her arm slides off me, but something remains, a shadow of her. I stumbl
e on, down a passage, past a pay phone, a woman talking there, whispering into the phone, a man on the other end, no doubt, and they think they will marry and have children but there will be no more children, never again. I push into the men’s room and into a stall and I slip the bolt and I back up against the wall and then I turn and lean my head into the wedge of the corner.
I don’t know all that much about death. My dad’s mother died, but I was very little, maybe about four, and I don’t really remember her. I don’t even remember whatever talk there was about Nana going to heaven to be with God, though there must have been some of that. Yes I do remember something. I grew up in Seattle. My dad works at Boeing. I think I had a picture in my head of Nana flying off to heaven in a 747 made by my dad. Which shows you what a little kid knows. If you’ve earned heaven, you should do better than airline food on the way. And they still had smoking sections back then. And the idea of God depending on my dad to get His souls to Him: no wonder I’m so unprepared for this moment. And there aren’t enough jets in the world for all of us. That’s a thing that makes me push my head harder into this wall. No seats. No room. Sold out.
I’m still crying, I realize. I dig at my eyes with the heels of my hands. I try to think about the bright side. The budget deficit will disappear. The whole national debt will be forgiven. Discrimination will end. All the handguns will fall silent. You don’t have to go out and burn up your days working at meaningless things. You don’t have to slowly drip your days away trying to do nothing. And you and Madonna will share a very intense moment.
I’m not sure I’m doing better, but my eyes are dry. I pull my head out of the corner and it feels like my skull has been compressed. I cover my temples with my palms and I worry, for a moment, that I’ve caused permanent damage to my brain. But that’s another worry that instantly loses its bite.
Tabloid Dreams Page 11