Dr. Death was now playing abstract air guitar, his long hands fingering delicate strings of air, his face intensely cringed, orgasmic. He swooped near to the couch, and drew forth a baggie from his back pocket.
“Breath mints, no doubt.”
“DMT. Took a little doing, mon frère, mon semblable, but I did indeed manage to bring a couple of these in.”
“Still not totally sure what we’re …”
“You know Skinny Ray?”
“No.”
“He’s been getting shit out of Canada, Boston, New York. Getting all kinds of shit that way, you know, better than we get through Philly.”
“Right. Right.” G.P.’s high was starting to turn on him. “And the meek shall inherit the earth” floated ethereally by in Geddy Lee’s dulcet tone.
“Well, he’s been bringing back like a lot of high-end coke, some rock, a bit of crystal, and lately a bunch of heroin.”
“We are the priests of the temples of Syrinx.”
“Heroin? You’re buying heroin now?”
“No, no, no, not my style. I’m more of an active explorer, you know? What you get from coke or crack is just a really fast heart rate, an acceleration that burns right back out, you feel fast-forwarded, and with heroin, oxy, whatever, you end up just feeling lobbed in some eternal softball pitch, floating just above, gently rolling around, until you come down and reach home plate and someone hits you in the face with a fucking bat.”
“Still, I’d have to say, a bigger-picture-type sentence or two could really help me out.”
“Basically, I was able to hook up through Skinny Ray. He got a selective little sample of DMT, old, outdated shit, and offered me in on it, knowing this was more my thing than eightballs and all that.”
“So what exactly is it?”
“You ever hear of Machine Elves?”
“The band?”
“I don’t think so. No. These are like noncorporeal beings of light and pure thought that exist in another plane, another dimension, which you access through DMT.”
“Escape to realms beyond the night …”
I’ve got to say, that sounds kind of … stupid.”
All in one motion, Dr. D opened the baggie while turning in his chair and singing along with Geddy Lee. “They left our planet long ago, the elder race still learn and grow, their power grows with purpose strong, to claim the home where they belong. Home to tear the Temples down, home to change!”
He held his hand out, palm up, to G.P. Two pills.
“It’s like a five-minute high, but by minute two you’re fully in the world of the Machine Elves, and by minute four they’ve shown you all about, like, interdimensional travel and telekinetic expression.”
“So that’s it? We’re just going to pop these and have a five-minute voyage of the Dawn Treader? You spent all that time getting a couple pills so we could sit here, already stoned, listening to 2112 and hallucinating for five minutes?”
“But, see, it’s like dreaming, where the way you experience time with the Machine Elves is like how we can experience time in a dream. I didn’t just make this shit up. It’s been studied. Tested. This guy McKenna.”
“How do you know any of this?”
“Shh, shh. Listen.” They listened. “2112 is quite possibly the greatest human achievement since The Rites of Spring.”
“I would have to say no. Moving Pictures.”
“You’re just fucking with me.”
“Or maybe the greatest thing up until Moving Pictures.”
“Moving Pictures?”
“Yeah.”
“Moving Pictures.”
“Yeah?”
“Today’s Tom Sawyer? Monday Warrior? Mean, mean stride, mean, mean pride?”
“What you say about his company is what you say about society.”
“That album is so fucking … commercial. It’s radio play.”
“I think you’re thinking Permanent Waves.”
“I’m not even sure what to make of you. Clearly you know Rush’s oover—”
“Oo-vra.”
“—but it’s like you know the names of all the albums without any understanding at all of what is really on them. What they really are. It’s like you know all the rules of baseball but then you ask something like OK great now show me: Where is the inning?”
“I don’t see how that applies.”
“Here, should we play them? Side by side, do a little comparison?”
“I mean 2112 is fine, it’s good. I just like Moving Pictures more, personally. That’s not that big a deal. We can have some disagreement, you know that, right? There is not one right answer to what is good, what we should like and dislike.”
“No, here, seriously. I want to hear Moving Pictures with you and hear what you think is so fucking good about it, so earth-shattering.”
“I didn’t say it was earth-shattering. I don’t even know that I applied an adjective at all.”
“OK, here—is this it?—let’s just see, OK?”
Music. Quick, descending scales.
“No, this isn’t …”
“There are those who think that life / has nothing left to chance / with a host of holy horrors / to direct our aimless dance. A planet of playthings / we dance on the strings / of powers we cannot perceive. / The stars aren’t aligned, / or the gods are malign; / blame is better to give than receive. / You can choose a ready guide / in some celestial voice. / If you choose not to decide / you still have made a choice. / You can choose from phantom fears / and kindness that can kill. / I will choose a path that’s clear, / I will choose free will.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah.”
“Sort of like a compromise. Almost.”
“I’m with you. I feel that.”
“I’m kind of really fucking high.”
“Well, you can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice …” Dr. Death palms the DMT, toggling each lightly along the topography of his lifeline. “I will choose free will.” He pinches one in his left hand, offering the right palm out to G.P. And then, fluidly, slips it onto his tongue and away it goes, as his eyes light up momentarily with disconnected excitement, and then he lights a cigarette and leans his head back onto the edge of the couch, sinking deep into the cushions.
G.P. tries smelling this little dusty pill in his hand. Nothing distinct, though for a moment he is convinced there is a slight ammonia tang. That could just be the couch itself, he realizes. Unsure even still what to expect, he rolls the pill once across the surface of his hand, and then swallows it dry. “Jacob’s Ladder” is playing on the tape deck, music of an astral plane. “All at once the clouds are parted; light streams down in bright unbroken beams.”
JULY 8, 1985
“Marco.”
“Polo.”
“Po-lo.”
“Polo.”
By now, Dimley and G.P. had retreated to the folding plastic deck chairs, their highs abating in the incandescent sunlight as they languidly led Walf around the pool. It was his idea, after all, this stoned recreation of childhood summers, of the blind pursuit of unseen ends through overly chlorinated water.
“Mar-co?”
Though she didn’t know it—how could she?—it was the last time Hegda, or any of them, would see Walf. “Polo.”
She was pushing her weightless way along the water’s edge, bouncing slightly as she maneuvered, one hand on the pool’s smooth tile edge, with the other variously splashing, and raising her arm to avoid being detected.
Though they all still hung
out, Walf had not spoken a word to Dimley since the incident. Dimley had approached him more than once, to say it was OK, to offer a hand, to suggest there were no hard feelings, that he certainly was not the one, if anyone was getting in the way of the two of them being friends, it wasn’t him, hey. They had now finished high school. It had been almost two years, with the eye patch.
Hegda was filled with the odd sensation of excitement mixed with terror, anxiety, as Walf clearly was honing in on her, moving ever closer to her as she whispered Polo, tried throwing her voice, leading him one way by answering with her head to the left and then pushing off with her toes and flutter-kicking to the right. The game involved just these types of coincidental targetings, the blind pursuer focusing in on presumably an unknown other, not trying to capture her in particular, or so it had to be assumed, but just sensing her nearness, anticipating at any moment his hand might touch this invisible other.
Walf was coming closer, and ever closer, their two bodies separated by the slimmest barrier of water, her legs scissoring out to the side as she tried to keep from being found and yet to slip away, to stay still and yet move. Both of them now feeling the thrill of each other’s proximity, Walf still blind to her identity, Hegda still blind to what was happening. His voice betrayed the slightest edges of uncertainty, of nervous excitement as he again quietly spoke, “Marco.”
It seemed almost at the exact same moment she breathed the two syllables—po-lo—his hands had found her, lightly, not like in other exchanges. His eyes did not open, as one hand touched the soft skin of her belly, exposed beneath her neon-pink top, and the other hand, as she finished the second syllable, touched lightly on her breast.
His eyes opened. They each looked into the other’s face for a moment that seemed impenetrably long. He had not moved his hand from her breast, and she had not reacted, had not flinched away. Though they’d found each other accidentally, they stood like this, almost embracing, almost like lovers, and Walf’s pained look seemed to ease, his eyes to lighten, his manner to change. She laid her hand on his, where it still held the skin of her belly. It seemed the pool was silent, the sun bright, and the sky open and endless.
Though she would remember this odd encounter for many years after (once he’d been found, no note or explanation, just the haunting, open-ended question of his death), its real duration was terribly fleeting. Almost immediately, Dimley shouted, “He touched her tit, hey!” and Walf’s face burned red, his hands had left her body, and before she could think to move, he had splashed his way to the pool’s submerged steps and stormed out and away forever.
SEPTEMBER 1, 1989
“It’s like a mystery where the only thing you learn when you solve the mystery is that the mystery has no solution.”
“What? Life, you mean?”
“No,” scoffs, “life. Life?”
“Yeah, you know. Mystery, then when you solve it, I mean that makes sense to me. Death is like the end of the mystery where nothing is solved, no answers are there, no cause explains it all, no resolution and no ending, really. Everything is over, but nothing is really finished, ended. It’s like a, what do you call that? Sentence fragment? Like where suddenly the story just stops, and you never get to know the ending. But you have that feeling there was another episode somewhere out there, or like another page or something. Know what I mean?”
“No, not at all. I just meant this case, with the graffiti and everything.”
“Oh, yeah, well. I can see that too. I guess.”
“But, you were saying, episode. That reminds me: the reference, what was that: Lost in Space? Family floating out in space, in the nothing, trying to get home, but they can’t. That’s the whole show. Will they ever get home, but, like, the not-getting-home is the show, so that ends up being all there is. Not-getting-home is home. Being lost in space is being home, for them.”
“Maybe. But I don’t really think that’s what the show intended. Their home was earth.”
“Yeah, but, I mean, maybe there is a message here, in these graffiti lines.”
“You know, someone once told me don’t look for difficult solutions where there are easy answers.”
“Who told you that?”
“Don’t remember. But it seems like some idiot kid, or maybe a homeless guy, is writing nonsense words, crazy-person words all over the fronts of buildings just out of your run-of-the-mill craziness like. Or, you know, teenager-young-person street vandalism. That’s what they do now, with this MTV. Empty-vee? Get it? TV, Empty TV, EmpTV?”
“What?”
“You don’t get that, it’s …”
“But if it is some kid, just some crazy person, I mean, for one he would have to know Lost in Space, right? We found that out. But why would he write these lines from poems, and these references to science fiction and stuff? Why not just draw a great big middle finger on the business, or like paint over the windows? That’s enough of a crazy-type act, don’t you think?”
“You can’t look for meaning and reason in these types of deals. A crazy person gets an idea in his head to write his prophecies or messages or whatever all over Scranton, you can’t argue with the idea: He’s a crazy person. Nother one?”
“Wait, you said prophecies.”
“Two more Millers. Yeah, so? What do you mean?”
“Why’d you call them prophecies?”
“Fuck do I know, the point here is that you’ve got a crazy idiot asshole painting nonsense on windows. Don’t make it a Dragnet case, OK? This isn’t, uh, Law and Order. In real life, there’s no point to any of this. If we can make this person stop painting on stores and buildings, that makes the businesses happy. Right now, this crazy person painting crazy messages all over? That’s news, that’s all. People like watching others embarrass themselves, they like staring at car accidents, they like to see other people lose everything, love to watch ’em fall, no matter how high or low they were to begin with. Hey, you know what today is? I heard this on the radio, one of them, like, This Day in History things. You know?”
“The one hundredth day of Bush’s presidency.”
“Oh. Is it?”
“I don’t think so.”
“It’s the fiftieth anniversary of Germany invading Poland. World War II.”
“And? So?”
“What do you mean and so? I mean the Nazis invaded Poland fifty years ago to this very day. War to end all wars. Fear itself. Atomic bomb, military industrial complex, the FBI, the CIA, the Cold War, the Shoah, Israel, Red China, Anschluss, Auschwitz, the Baby Boom, the GI Bill, the Berlin Wall, the last direct war where major powers toe to toed directly, no proxies, basically all Anglo-European types, not like they are now, one-sided, with a superpower against a proxy, and we’re talking any of a number of Asian or South American–type proxies here. Middle Eastern. I mean, fifty years ago the real twentieth century started. Today. Better living through chemistry. War to end all wars? It’s been war ever since.”
“How do you even know any of that?”
“Before all that, it was the end of industrialism, like from the nineteenth century. But that day was different. Everything we know about Americanness comes from that.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Did you know the TV was a result of war-era research? The cathar ray, the cathar tube, or whatever.”
“Cathode. Not Cathar. They were heretics.”
Conjunctions 65: Sleights of Hand Page 29