Then she said when did I want to get the patch sewn on, and I felt so good, because our group of friends was so tight. We helped each other. It was like we had a code, a way of doing things. A way we treated each other. I’d known when I’d picked up the phone to call her that she would eventually say yes to sewing on my patch, but she’d give me a hard time first, and if I stuck with it and stayed cool, it would all turn out nice. And that was exactly how it happened. There was for me in that time a real comfort in feeling a sort of casual ability to predict the future.
I said I could probably come over later that evening, and she said: “You’re so lucky you have cool parents,” and I pictured my parents: how they looked at me now that my hair was long, how they looked at each other a lot when they were talking to me. How obvious it seemed to me that somewhere along the line our paths had forked, and now we were on different tracks looking at each other across a distance that would soon be infinite. Cool parents, I thought, are the ones who know nothing. It made me feel a little sad for mine, but I didn’t say any of this. I had a funny feeling that day, all day: something about how much I liked my life and where I was with it.
So I told Kimmy I would come over at seven. She said, “If I sew your patch on you owe me.” And I said, OK, cool, I’ll see you there.
Lying on my bed, I listened to the Conan tape on my tiny cassette radio. There were ten songs by ten different bands or people on it, nobody I’d ever heard of. Some were just guys with acoustic guitars telling stories and some were bands with loud guitars and maybe a violin in there howling and squealing away. One was just a guy playing an organ with no singing at all. Mostly it sounded very cheap, but some of them were trying very hard to make something that sounded majestic and mighty. I loved it; nobody I knew listened to stuff like this. I looked at the tape shell, trying to think about all these people I didn’t know anything about from somewhere way up north, making music for people who cared about Conan. And I picked one of them at random to make a little mini-poster for, a band called Crom.
First I drew a picture of a skull, and then I put a helmet with horns over the skull. Then I put little flames inside the eye sockets. You couldn’t really see the flames unless you were looking for them. I did the whole thing with a mechanical pencil, and when I looked at the flames, they were still too clear; I wanted the eyes sitting way back, so they looked out from somewhere so far inside that looking into them would require real concentration and effort. I tried different shapes for the flames, first rounder and softer and then little pyramids almost, and then I went with little diamonds instead. You could only see the diamonds if you leaned in super close. The sockets were otherwise completely black.
At the table, Mom asked what I’d been drawing when she came to get me for dinner, and I pretended I didn’t know what she was talking about. It was like walking a tightrope. I’d been lying on my bed with the sketchbook open and several different pencils at hand for different shadings, and she’d knocked once and then opened the door; as soon as I’d heard the knock, reflexively I closed my notebook, just to be safe, I’m not sure from what, but I was still there with a notebook in front of me when she came in.
“The thing you were drawing, just now, when I came to get you.”
“I can’t draw,” I said.
“But you were drawing something, weren’t you? When I came in, just now,” she said.
“Not really,” I said. There are planets so far away from ours that no scientist will ever guess that they exist, let alone know the stories of their civilizations, their beginnings and ends. They’re not being kept secret from us, but they’re secret all the same.
“All right,” said Mom, looking over at my father for support, but he wasn’t paying attention. The TV was on in the living room, and he had a sight line to it from his chair. He was watching the news. I didn’t know why my dad liked to watch the news, because it made him angry, and the angrier he got, the louder he’d have to turn up the volume to hear the news over the things he yelled back at it. It got louder over the space of two hours most nights, and then the news was over. This made the house during dinnertime feel like an insane asylum.
Every night now there was new stuff about Libya. The CBS Evening News would show short clips of Gadhafi, who was president of Libya, or king, it was never clear to me. He was usually in sunglasses. Sometimes he’d be wearing a weird scarf bunched up around his neck, sailing out on the open sea somewhere maybe, or else riding around the streets in a military van. Everyone around him would always be smiling and sometimes yelling. You couldn’t see his eyes through the lenses, so it was hard to say what was going on in his head, but I always imagined he felt good. He looked like a white point in a map of a moving weather system. Cameras pointing at him, people yelling questions constantly, and him just standing amid it all holding his head still, waiting to see what he had to say, and sometimes speaking, subtitles quietly translating on the screen.
My father hated him; a bomb had gone off in the Vienna airport at Christmas, and the story’d been on the news every day for a week. Mom and Dad had gone to Vienna for vacation once before I was born, so for my dad this made the whole thing personal. He’d try to explain the stories to me as they ran, to get me excited about them like he was: and I’d try; I’d nod and pay close attention as his voice rose. But I couldn’t make myself care much about it: it seemed like nothing; I couldn’t keep any of it straight. The jagged, blurry pieces of footage spoke to me a little; there was something in them like a code or a secret message, not for me necessarily but for somebody. Or maybe for nobody, but hidden there all the same. But I didn’t know how to steer the conversation that way, or what I’d say about it if I succeeded.
We were having meat loaf with tomato sauce. I didn’t like meat loaf, but my mother remembered that I’d loved it as a kid. If I ate too slowly she’d say: “You used to love meat loaf!” I never knew what to say back, though that night I tried “It’s good” while stuffing a forkful of peas, potatoes, and meat loaf all into my mouth at once. I tried to remember liking meat loaf as a kid; for my mother the memory was so vivid she couldn’t forget it, but I couldn’t remember anything about it. At all. I knew we’d eaten it a lot, because you could make a pound of meat last longer by making meat loaf with it, but the only taste I could think of was the one I was trying to mask by eating everything on my plate at once. It was sad. “I like the sauce,” I tried again.
Then the story on gas prices came to an end, and they started in on Gadhafi. It had something to do with ships in foreign waters. “American ships in Libyan waters” was how it started off, and that was all I really heard: everything else receded quickly into the background for me and became nothing within a few seconds. Libyan waters. Dad watched while he ate and Mom watched his face nervously, and I wondered to myself whether waters take on special qualities depending on who they belong to.
I went out on a limb.
“Dad,” I said when the commercial started up, “are Libyan waters different from other waters?”
“Sean,” said Mom.
“They’re different because of sovereignty,” he said, keeping his eyes on his plate.
“Bill,” said Mom.
“But there aren’t any actual lines on the water or anything,” I said.
“They have maps and coordinates,” my dad said.
“Right, but the water—”
“The water is the same,” said my dad.
I stopped. There were a lot of things I might have said to either make the conversation worse or move it off in some different direction, but I liked where it rested as I spun: out in international waters with imaginary lines on their surface that no one could actually see.
You can’t see the hall closet from the dinner table, so I excused myself a couple of minutes early. Mom asked if I’d be back for dessert just as I turned the corner out of sight. When I got back to my room, I slid the rifle and the ammo under my bed, and I put on a Robin Trower record: Bridge of Sighs. I’d
bought it in the twenty-five-cent bin with my allowance one week a long time ago, sixth grade maybe. Back then I’d gotten really into it, because I was the only person I knew who’d ever heard of it; nobody listened to Robin Trower. I knew his name from seeing his picture in Hit Parader once or twice. But I’d only ended up with the record by accident, because the name sounded cool and the cover looked weird and I had a dollar in my pocket and it only cost a quarter. I didn’t understand it, really, because without the context of other people’s thoughts on it, it couldn’t really find steady footing in my mind. I wrote his name on my jeans at one point anyway, just to see how it felt: ROBIN TROWER right there on my knee. I outgrew the jeans before it washed out.
In my mind the singer was looking me right in my eyes while he sang. Then he had his hands on my shoulders. Then he was shaking me. I had made up a face and clothes for him, to imagine what he looked like: the album cover was just a swirling white design with words in twisting, curling letters on it, no pictures. I pictured the singer with long hair, big strong hands, wide shoulders, and a blue suit that fit him loosely. I put my head about an inch in front of the speakers, right between them, and I closed my eyes. He sang: “Living in the day of the eagle, the eagle not the dove.” It sounded like he was making up the words as he went along, reacting to a story in his mind as he watched it develop, because he stopped in the middle of the sentence. Right after not the. I liked it, because it was how I felt: not knowing what to say but wanting to say something. Saying something anyway because your mouth just keeps moving and the rhythm is behind you and you can’t stop. The eagle, not the … dove. And then the song went into the slow part, and I began to drift.
Kimmy was out in front of her house when I got there. I heard background music as I drew closer to her; I could picture the street and the lawn and the back of my head, the broader view. Everything on a screen. When she saw me coming, she walked out to the middle of the street and said: “Let’s go”—I wasn’t sure if she put it like that because we were supposed to be getting away from somebody, possibly her parents, so I just went along. The plan had been to study at her place, so I asked what was up, and she said she’d tell me later but right now we should probably go someplace like to the arcade. I never found out why we couldn’t go inside. “I’ll tell you later” is a contingent claim that can be rendered false by any of several moves.
On the way to the arcade she pulled a pack of Marlboro 100s out of her puffy vest and offered me one. Most of my friends smoked now, but I usually didn’t. I took one anyway, and as we walked I took tiny puffs so I wouldn’t cough. Kimmy asked if I was going to be around this summer, and I said, “I’m always around,” which sounded terrible to me, like I didn’t have any real life at all. She was going to Oregon to stay with her mom for at least two weeks. My family had vacation in the summer, too, when Dad took two weeks off work, but we never went anywhere: we stayed home and took long drives, or swam at the hotel pool down the street. It was all right, but every year I felt a little more like I’d never seen anything, like I’d missed out on the stuff my friends kept getting every time school let out.
The arcade was next to a liquor store about six blocks up Monte Vista. It was called Golden Arcade and nobody ever went there. The cool arcade was Starship over in Upland, next to Pic ‘n Save: it had an entrance built to look like a spaceship hatch, and blue track lighting all up and down the walkways inside. It had two levels and six walls, and you could get lost in there, or find things you’d missed every other time you’d gone in. But it would have taken us two hours to walk to Starship, and that was OK, because there were always people there from other schools anyway, and I was always afraid of people my age from other schools. They made me tense. But there was never anybody at Golden Arcade except the woman who worked there. She sat behind a counter listening to a small radio, reading a magazine, waiting for customers who never came. I don’t think she even saw us come through the door.
They didn’t have too many new games there but the ones they had were super clean, and you could see them all from where you stood as soon as you walked in: the arcade was a single rectangular room with games pushed back up against three of the walls and two air hockey tables in the middle. The air hockey tables gave off a loud, cold hum. Kimmy strolled from machine to machine while I got quarters, and then she stopped at Xevious, which is what you play when you get tired of all the popular games. Xevious was mainly gray and soft black, and had music like a lullaby, and everything in it seemed to happen in slow motion. Once when my mom asked me why I liked to play video games I said it was because they were relaxing, and she looked at me like I’d sprouted horns, but Xevious is a very relaxing game. Playing it was like watching flowers bloom. Weird metal airplanes flew over the green and gray background dropping bombs on everything, explosions splashing like soft cymbals, and your only targets were buildings. If there was anybody in the buildings you never saw them go in or out. It was like strafing an abandoned city in an ever-climbing vertical scroll.
We played doubles. I lost. It was a good time, and then after we’d played all our quarters, we went out behind the building to smoke more cigarettes and she asked me if I believed in God. I didn’t have any idea why she was asking but that was something I had always liked about her. She talked about everything.
I was about to make something up about God being an alien consciousness, not even human, because in junior high I worked out a theory about that once during science class. But I had an urge to be as honest with Kimmy as I could. I told her I thought God was just your dad. Like when you grew up and weren’t afraid of your dad anymore you got God instead, and you could make him whatever you wanted.
“You don’t believe in Jesus?” she said.
I said, “I don’t know,” which was kind of true. When people said Jesus it still always sounded to me like it had to mean something special. Different from other words. I knew I didn’t believe what Christians believed, about how if you said the name you would be saved. Saved from what? But still, when anybody said it, when you heard it out loud, something always seemed to happen. A shift in the light. Something about perspective. No matter how quiet they said it or whether they kept talking, it changed everything for a few minutes.
So I knew I believed something about Jesus, but I wasn’t sure what it was, or why she was asking. Kimmy said: “I believe Jesus is Lord,” and I knew this was a signal, a way of opening a path for us into something private and shared. And for a split second, whose limits lie out past the farthest reaches of the universe, I contemplated letting her into the dark, distant corners where Conan grew cruel and lived inside me, where I became a person with the power to blind strangers with a single gesture, where the dull edges of my life grew sharp enough to cut through rock. But instead I kissed her, and she kissed me back, with her tongue. We kept going like this for five or ten minutes and then without looking down she took my right hand in her left and guided it down the front of her jeans.
People were always saying how ugly Southern California was, especially when they came back from their summer vacations. They said it looked plastic or fake or whatever, and talked about all the cool things they saw in Ohio, where their grandparents lived. Or in Pennsylvania. The wall behind the arcade was made of giant sparkling white bricks, just like all the other buildings connected to it. There was graffiti on it, indecipherable gang writing. It was dark now and getting a little cold and then the super-bright lights they have behind stores to keep bums from sleeping by the dumpsters came on, and I thought, people who don’t think Southern California is the most beautiful place in the world are idiots and I hope they choke on their tongues.
Mom was in her purple nightgown when I got home. It was about 9:30. There was another TV in the bedroom and Dad was back there watching. I could hear it. Mom asked how studying went and I said, “Great,” and she asked what we studied and I said, “American history.” She told a story about her history teacher in high school, and my head was so full of other stu
ff it was hard to listen, even though it wasn’t like I didn’t care. But I had to struggle to pay attention.
“What have you got there?” she said.
“One of those free magazines,” I said. I handed it to her. She looked at the cover, her eyes sleepy but focusing hard.
“ ‘Who Hid the Dead Sea Scrolls?’ “ she said. “Jehovah’s Witnesses?”
“I guess,” I said.
“Are you going to join up with the Jehovah’s Witnesses?” she said. I couldn’t tell if she was teasing, or just talking like you do when you get too tired, or if she was trying to see what was up with me. She was asking a lot of questions lately. I felt one of those urges I always got when I was younger and that I still get sometimes: to just say something for the explicit purpose of blasting a hole through the conversation. We’re all witnesses except me. I’m an unaligned cleric. She leafed through the pages.
“The picture on the front, I just liked it,” I said. “And the Dead Sea.”
“ ‘Its glory is like a blossom of grass,’ “ she read from The Watchtower, which I must have underlined sometime during the next hour or two, possibly, I’m not sure; as I say it’s possible the underlining was already in there when I picked it up, I don’t remember.
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