Utopia Avenue

by David Mitchell

  Fiery maples snap, crackle, and pop scarlets and golds into the air. Up they swirl. “Bloody bloody bloody hell…”

  The three sit on a bench. The long grass around them is wriggling. Really? Dean takes a closer look, and it stops. No, it’s just grass. But when Dean looks away, it reverts to its wriggling ways, only to stop again when Dean focuses his attention. Like a schoolboy waiting till the teacher’s back’s turned. “So when we look at a thing,” says Dean, “we change what it is.”

  “Which is exactly why we never see things as they are,” says Jerry. “Only as we are.” A big dog tows a girl on roller skates.

  Where Dean and Jerry walk, Chayton follows. They stop to watch tennis players. The soundtrack is slipping out of sync. The whack of the racquet hitting the ball happens only after impact. As the rally progresses, the players grow bigger. Dean turns to tell Jerry, but Jerry’s head, too, has swollen to twice its normal size, though it deflates again when he exhales. The tennis players’ skin turns first albino-milky, then see-through, like cellophane. Their veins, arteries, muscles, and fascia are on full display. A greyhound darts by. Dean sees its bones, its heart, its lungs, its cartilage. A gull, by a bin, is a living, meaty fossil of a gull.

  At a burger van, a picture of a cheeseburger is, in fact, not a picture at all, but a real cheeseburger. It drips globules of hot fat. Melting cheese stretches down to the pavement. Ketchup shines like blood at the scene of a fresh accident. The bun is a real, soft, puffy bread bun that breathes in and out and in and out. “Your big mistake,” the bun tells Dean, “is to assume your brain generates a bubble of consciousness you call ‘Me.’ ”

  “Why is that a mistake?” Dean asks the talking bun.

  “The truth is that you’re not your own private ‘I.’ You are to consciousness what the flame of a match is to the Milky Way. Your brain only taps into consciousness. You aren’t a broadcaster. You’re a transceiver.”

  “Bloody hell,” says Dean. “So when we die…”

  “When a match dies does light cease to exist?”

  The burger man in a burger van is shooing at Dean with his fry-slice: “Never Never Land’s thataway, kid.”

  Dean looks all the way down the Narrow Road to the Far West and sees Bolívar, the boy he took to the lost kid tent at the festival, in the eye of the setting sun. “Hey, Bolívar…are yer real?”

  Bolívar’s voice travels down the light-rays. “Are you?”

  Where Dean and Jerry walk, Chayton follows.

  In the shadows of a bandstand, Dean pees diamonds. They vanish into the earth. Nobody will ever know. He hears a brass band approaching. The last diamond gone forever, he joins Jerry on the bandstand. “Can yer hear the brass band?”

  The pink sun is reflected in Jerry’s glasses. “I hear the engines of the Earth. It’s a choral roar. What’s the band playing?”

  “I’ll tell yer when I work it out. Here they come…” Under the spreading chestnut tree, a hundred skeletons march in ragged uniforms that hang off their herky-jerky frames. Their instruments are made of human bones. The melody is the forgotten soundtrack of Creation. If we can only get that down on record, thinks Dean, we’ll alter reality…It’s up to you, Moss…Remember…

  Parakeets and herons hang in the dusk, stringlessly.

  Dean lifts his thumb and a heron’s wing moves.

  Dean puffs a puff of air, and a cloud is pushed along.

  Separateness is an illusion, Dean realizes. What we do to another, we do to ourselves. “How obvious.” A ghost now asks a ghost-to-be, “Who shall I say is calling?”

  A small boy brings up the rear in his dressing gown and slippers. It’s Crispin, Tiffany’s younger son, pointing his index finger at Dean. You’re shagging my mum.

  “These things happen,” Dean calls back. “Yer’ll understand, one day.”

  A second finger joins Crispin’s first. They form a gun. He shoots Dean. Bang bang, you’re dead.

  Where Dean and Jerry walk, Chayton follows.

  “This is the Polo Fields,” Jerry tells him, “the sacred turf, where Ginsberg led the chanting for the sun moon and stars until the end of time”

  Dean wonders if he’s gone deaf; or if Jerry’s voice is gone; or if God the Father has slid the volume fader of the cosmos down. Before any answer emerges, Dean’s groin is gouged open by an axe-blade of hot pain. His knees fold apart and collapse. He drops backward onto the grassy bank. The agony is beyond anything Dean has ever felt. He cannot scream; or wonder where his jeans or underpants went; or guess how he could have been so utterly wrong about his gender all his life; or worry about the risks of exposing himself in a public park in San Francisco.

  Dean wonders, Am I dying?

  “No,” replies Chayton. “The opposite. Look.”

  Between his legs, Dean sees the gluey bulge of a fontanelle. I’m giving birth. Dean’s mother is with him, smiling like she does in the photograph on Nan Moss’s piano: “Push, Dean…Push, love…One more push!” With the rip of a root uprooted, Dean’s baby slithers out in a gush of fluids. Dean lies back, gasping and whimpering.

  His mother says, “It’s a boy,” and hands him his baby.

  Dean’s baby is a tiny, bloodied, vulnerable Dean.

  Dean is his own baby, peering up at Harry Moffat.

  Eyes shining with love and wonder, Harry Moffat cradles Dean in the crook of his arm. “Welcome to the loony bin, son.”

  * * *

  —

  DEAN WAKES ON a sofa. He smells cold Chinese food, dope, and a kitchen bin that needs emptying. Here are books; a long-necked snakeskin banjo that must be something else; a giant candle from a cathedral; a stereo; a stratum of records. Through an arch, he sees the Grateful Dead’s kitchen at 710 Ashbury. A Playboy bunny clock says it’s 7:41 A.M. A perky American DJ is talking about the weather before the opening bars of “Look Who It Isn’t,” off Stuff of Life, come on. I love this city, thinks Dean. One day, I’m moving here to live. He feels good. Sane. Stable. Bit sticky…I could do with a bath. He sits up. His body parts are where they should be, and what they were: yesterday’s birth canal was only on loan. The shutters of a large bay window slice bright morning light. I’m Dean Moss, I passed the acid test, and I gave birth to myself. If there’s not a song in that, I’ll eat my Fender. His eyes settle on a battered book entitled The Way of Tarot by Dwight Silverwind. He opens it. Each card has its own page. Dean looks up the Eight of Cups. “The Eight of Cups,” writes Dwight Silverwind, “is a card of change. The pilgrim is turning away from the viewer—the Now—and embarking on a journey across a narrow channel into arid mountains. Belonging to the Minor Arcana, the Eight of Cups symbolizes a turning away from old patterns and behaviors to commence a search for deeper meaning. Note the orderliness of the eight cups ‘left behind’: our pilgrim is moving on, without fuss and drama. Some authorities associate the Eight of Cups with desertion or abandonment, but to my mind the traveler’s decision is an act of self-emancipation.” Dean closes the book.

  Nobody else is up. He puts on his shoes and socks, uses the bathroom, and does not pee diamonds. He drinks a mug of water, takes an apple from a crystal bowl, writes a note on a phone memo saying, Jerry, I leave you not quite the same as you found me. Cheers, Dean—PS I borrowed an apple, and slips it under Jerry’s door. The air on the elevated porch is crisp and cool. The trees across Ashbury Street break Dean’s heart. He can’t say why. Chayton is on his rocking chair, reading The New Yorker. “Another beautiful morning,” says the confirmed Indian. “It may rain later.”

  “Thanks for minding me yesterday.”

  Chayton makes an it’s-nothing face.

  “Where’s that cat o’ yours?”

  “That cat is no man’s cat. She comes, she goes.”

  Dean goes down a few steps, then turns. “Can yer walk to Turk and Hyde from here?”

  Chayton illus
trates his directions with his vertical palm. “Go down Haight Street, all the way to Market. Carry on straight. Hyde is six blocks on your left. Turk’s four blocks up. Forty minutes.”

  “ ’Ppreciate it.”

  “Be seeing you soon.”

  * * *

  —

  THE SUNNY SIDE of Haight Street is too bright, so Dean crosses to the shady side where his eyeballs work better. The neighborhood puts him in mind of the morning after an epic unauthorized house party. Slip off before the bills fall due. Few humans are about. Overturned bins spill their trashy guts into the gutter. Crows and mangy dogs bicker over the spoils. He bites the borrowed apple. It’s golden and zesty, like an apple from a myth. Dean passes what looks like a bingo hall, but is in fact a church. He wonders if it’s the church in the Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin’,” and remembers that he can now phone Cass Elliot and just ask her.

  Three or four blocks later, the hippie vibe gives way to humdrum frontages. A hilly park rears up where birds Dean can’t name sing in trees he can’t name. He prefers the world in its shabbier clothes, he decides. My trip was a revelation, he thinks, but yer can’t live in a revelation. He knows Griff and Elf are going to quiz him about his acid trip; and knows he won’t be able to convey a thousandth of it in words. It’s like trying to perform a symphony with a skiffle group. Dean remembers the skeleton band. A few sketchy fragments of the Music of Creation are near, he’s sure…tantalizingly near…

  But it wouldn’t sound like it did. A teenage couple are asleep under a ragged blanket on a park bench under a tree that mutters to itself. Twins in a womb. Dean thinks of Kenny and Floss and hopes the couple are here as the epilogue of a magical night, and not because they have nowhere else to go. He hears a tram—called a “streetcar”—up ahead, and thinks of a milk-float making its way up Peacock Street in Gravesend. Ray’ll be home now, after a nine-hour shift at the engineering plant. Dean arrives at an intersection. A sign says MARKET STREET. A café is opening, right by the streetcar stop. It’s cool and shady and Dean thinks, Why not?

  He goes in, sits by the open window, and orders a coffee from a waitress in her forties whose name badge says, I’M GLORIA! America loves exclamation marks. He tries to summon up the names and faces of the waitresses he worked with at the Etna Café. He’s forgotten them. One worried about him, that January night he had nowhere to sleep. She wanted to let him sleep on her floor, but was afraid of her landlady. The night Utopia Avenue began.

  Dean takes Allen Klein’s business card out of his wallet. He holds one corner in the flame of his lighter and incinerates it in the ashtray. It burns purplishly. He’s not sure what his logic is, but it feels right. We’re a band. When the card is gone, Dean feels as if a heavy weight has been removed. Out on Market Street, two vans stop for a red light. The side of the front van is emblazoned with the slogan THE BEST TV RENTALS IN TOWN. The second reads, L&H MOVERS—ACROSS THE PLANET! A few seconds later, another van stops in the nearest lane, half-eclipsing the two behind. Its side panel reads THIRD STREET DRY CLEANERS, the four words stacked one above the next. The alignment and position of the vans is such that, at Dean’s eye level, a phrase is spelled out: THE—THIRD—PLANET. Dean takes out his notebook from his jacket and writes it down. “The Third Planet.” By the time he’s finished, the vans have departed. Behind the bar, steam is being blasted through his ground coffee beans…

  * * *

  —

  …and here is his coffee, served in a big blue bowl, like poets and philosophers drink it in Paris, Dean imagines. He takes a sip. The temperature’s just right. He slurps up a third of the cup and holds it in his mouth, letting the coffee work its magic. Dean swallows, and all his tangled thinking about his possible son comes unknotted. I’ll assume Arthur’s my son. I’ll pay his mother maintenance. Every month, no pissing about. Enough so they don’t have to scrimp ’n’ save. We won’t get married, ’cause her ’n’ me both deserve to find someone we love, but we’ll aim at friendly relations. In a couple o’ years, when Arthur’s a walking, talking boy and not a blobby baby, I’ll invite Amanda ’n’ him to Gravesend to meet Nan Moss and the aunts. They’ll know if he’s my son or not. Even I’ll know by then, I reckon. If it’s a yes, I’ll shunt my life around so Arthur knows I’m his dad. I’ll teach him how to fish on the pier up past the old fort. If it’s a no, I’ll offer to be Arthur’s godfather, and I’ll still teach him how to fish. Dean opens his eyes.

  “That should work,” he murmurs to himself.

  “How’s your coffee?” asks Gloria the waitress.

  Dean knows he’s supposed to just say, “Fine,” but he decides to be Jasper for a moment. “Let’s see. Temperature: warm, not scalding. Taste…” Dean sips. “Good blend, nicely toasted, smooth, not bitter. It’s bloody perfect. The danger is that all future coffees sort o’ pale in comparison. But who knows? Maybe it’ll usher in the dawn of a new Coffee Age. Only time will tell. And that, Gloria, if I may use yer name, I’m Dean by the way, that is how my coffee is. Thank yer for asking.”

  “Wow. My gosh. Glad to hear it. I’ll tell Pedro. He made it. So, um…that’ll be thirty cents, then, when you’re ready.”

  “Rightio.” She thinks yer too stoned to pay. He puts a dollar on the table. “Keep the change. You ’n’ Pedro.”

  Her anxiety vanishes. “Are you sure?”

  “It’s yours. And Pedro’s.”

  “Thank you.” The dollar vanishes into her apron.

  “It’s a big day. I…” say it, “…am going to be a dad.”

  “Congratulations, Dean! When’s the baby due?”

  “Three months ago.”

  Gloria’s confused. “So, he’s already born?”

  “Yeah. Bit of a long story. His name’s Arthur. It’s new territory for me, but…” Dean thinks of the pilgrim on the Eight of Cups. “Life’s a journey, don’t yer think?”

  The waitress looks out at Market Street, thinks of other times, and looks back. “It should be. The best of luck with Arthur. You helped make him, but he’ll make a man of you.”

  * * *

  —

  DEAN PASSES NOT-YET-OPEN shops, boarded-up shops, low offices, a building site, a plot of wasteland, a depot. Nothing to write home about. Every twenty or thirty paces a tree is losing its leaves to the warm wind. Traffic stampedes between the intersections of Market Street. Motorbikes swerve between the bigger beasts. A truck is pulled up outside a butcher’s. Carcasses hang on racks. Dean inhales the breath of the abattoir. A force that is not him runs through him, like the current in the streetcars’ overhead cable. What if ley lines aren’t total bollocks? The buildings grow as downtown approaches. Dean finds Hyde Street and remembers Chayton’s instructions. Now I know where I am. Where Hyde crosses Turk Street, that’s the studio. Dean checks his watch. The band will be at the studio in thirty minutes or so. I’ll be there in fifteen. Carry on up to Sutter Street, and there’s the hotel. He’ll have time for a shower. I’d better: I’m hot ’n’ sweaty ’n’ stinking. He passes the Opera House, a big heavy building you might find in Haymarket or Kensington Gardens, with columns and Georgian windows. Hyde Street slopes uphill. It’s not a posh district. Dean passes a pawn shop with steel mesh over the windows. A down-at-heel laundromat. Not launderette. TENDERLOIN GIRLIE SHOW. A parking lot where a rusty sedan has no wheels. Brambles twist out of cracks. A bundled figure is slumped in a doorway. A biro-on-cardboard sign says, I BEEN DOING THIS SHIT FOR 20 YEARS. Poverty in California looks as miserable as poverty anywhere. He puts fifty cents into the man’s hand. Grimy fingers close. He has red eyes and he says, “That all you got?” At the corner of Eddy Street, a shop is open: Eddy Turk’s General & Liquor.

  Dean sees a cold cabinet with bottles of milk.

  It’s been a long walk. A nice cold glass o’ milk…

  * * *

  —

  THE SHOP SMELLS of o
verripe fruit and brown paper. The Sikh shopkeeper has black glasses, a navy turban, and a white shirt. He’s reading Valley of the Dolls and eating grapes. Bottles of spirits line the shelves behind his till. He sizes Dean up. “Fine day.”

  “Let’s hope so. Just came in for a bottle o’ milk.”

  He nods at the cabinet. “Help yourself.”

  Dean gets a half-pint and holds the cold glass against his face. He brings it to the counter. “Twenty Marlboro, too.” There’s a rack of postcards. Dean picks one out of the Golden Gate Bridge.

  “Sixty cents.” He sounds as American as John Wayne. “For sixty-two cents, I’ll throw in an airmail stamp.”

  “Cheers.” Dean digs out the coins. “Could I rent yer pen?”

  The Sikh deposits the coins and hands Dean a pen. “On the house. You’re welcome to use the table at the back.”

  “ ’Ppreciate that.” Dean finds a stool under an old school desk with a liftable lid and inkwell. He sits, looks at the message side of the postcard, and wonders where to start. Maybe I ought to ask Elf. Dean drinks half his milk. It’s refreshing. What matters is the fact I’m writing. Dean takes up the pen:

  Yeah, that’ll do. He writes Ray’s address, and stands up as one, two, three men stream into the shop, wearing balaclavas. Like bank robbers in a film, thinks Dean, just as they pull guns out. Real guns—the first Dean has ever seen. One yells, “Hands in the air, Ali Baba!”

  Glowering with contempt, the shopkeeper obeys.

  The robbers haven’t noticed Dean but he decides he’d better follow suit. All three robbers turn their guns on him and Dean cringes. “Don’t shoot! It’s okay! Don’t shoot!”

  Chief Robber demands, “What’s he doing here?”

  “Just a customer,” says Dean. “I’ll leave if, uh—”

  “Stay right there!” Chief Robber turns to a shorter partner in crime. “The joint was s’posed to be EMPTY.”