by Richard Cox
“This is the same thing you say every time we talk about this,” Kevin says. “You always just go in circles.”
Sherri puts her hand on my wrist, and a little jolt of electricity shoots through me. Her hand is soft, just like her leg.
“This is why your friend told you to read Philip Dick.”
See what I mean? I have no idea who Philip K. Dick is. It’s like a bad film and someone stuck these three minor characters in the wine bar so I would happen to meet them. I didn’t even pick this place. Dick did.
Oh, wait. His first name is the same as the author’s last name. Bullshit. Complete bullshit.
“So tell me about this author,” I say to Sherri.
“That’s what got my attention, when your friend mentioned him. There’s a whole subculture of people who adore Philip K. Dick. We call him PKD for short. It’s easier to say. The three of us talk about his ideas all the time, about how to define reality. How perception is relative. Like if we both look at Kevin’s shirt, how do you know the green you see is the green I see?”
“You could both pick out the color on an RGB map,” Kevin says. “Colors can be assigned values for comparison.”
“But what if he were colorblind?”
“A lack of information on his part doesn’t make the whole world different.”
“But to him it does. That’s the whole point. There isn’t any one objective experience. If Thomas is colorblind, he sees the world in a completely different way than you.”
Kevin says, “It’s not the same.”
“Anyway,” Sherri says. She places her hand on my wrist again, and even though this entire scene is bullshit, the texture of her skin is nevertheless electrifying. “You should come back to my place, and we’ll tell you all about PKD and the Black Iron Prison. Or at least David and I will. Kev’s not a big fan.”
“His books are fine,” Kevin says. “I just don’t think they have anything to do with reality, that’s all.”
“And,” she says, looking at David, “maybe we can get something from Bob.”
“Sherri,” David says. “It’s a Tuesday. I have to teach tomorrow.”
“So?” she says, lowering her voice. “Mushrooms don’t make you hungover.”
“The last time we—”
“The last time we ate them,” she hisses, “you got so shitfaced you couldn’t stand up. That’s why you were hungover.”
“Sherri, it’s a Tuesday evening.”
But though his words say one thing, the tone of his voice says another. He’s going to cave.
“Please,” she says. “This is going to be fun. We’ll put on some music and eat the ’shrooms and tell Thomas all about PKD.”
She looks at me. “Are you in?”
I already know what my answer is going to be, and so do you. How can I not go? Clearly I was supposed to meet these people. It’s obviously orchestrated.
Still, my threat-detection circuit sounds the red alert. I’ve never taken illegal drugs before, and it makes no sense to start with three people I’ve never met. But my curiosity is stronger than my caution. Dick told me to try things I’d never tried, right? And now Sherri’s thigh is rubbing against mine, while I’m still drunk, and I really feel like I have no choice in the matter.
“I’m in.”
“Good. Let’s go. David, you’ll call if you have any trouble with Bob?”
“I hope he’s completely dry.”
“He won’t be.”
On the way into the parking lot, Sherri asks if I would like to ride with her.
“Well, my car is parked right over there. Maybe I should just follow you.”
“No way,” she says. “No way I’m going to let you drive right now. I’ll bring you back later. I don’t live very far away.”
If I agree to go with her, I’ll need a ride back. And who knows when that might happen? Then again, why do I need to go home? Gloria asked me not to be there when she went by to pick up her things. And I have no job to report to tomorrow. What difference does it really make?
“Come on.” She takes my hand, lacing her fingers through mine. They are shorter and thicker than Gloria’s. Softer.
“David’s off to pick up the stuff,” she continues, “and I’ll have Kevin get some booze. In the meantime it’ll be just you and me. Doesn’t that sound fun?”
TWENTY-TWO
Once we’re inside her house, after she calls Kevin with our liquor requests, Sherri pours a couple of vodka sodas. We sit on the hearth of her ’80s-era stone fireplace, close enough that I can feel the radiant heat of her body. It would be easy to lean over and kiss her. But now that I’m here, and the stage is set, all I can think about is Gloria and our first kiss. I’m thinking about college and Whataburger and the night at Goose’s. I’m thinking about our honeymoon on the big island of Hawaii, about the blue convertible rental car and how we couldn’t stop taking pictures of the road outside Kona. It was so foreign, that landscape, chocolate-covered lava rocks all around us and almost no vegetation. It felt like a made-up world. Every few minutes we would pull aside at a scenic turnout and take snapshots with the ocean in the background. I used a small tripod and a timer to get us both in the picture because there didn’t appear to be another human for miles. In that place it was so quiet we might have been the only two people on the island, or maybe the entire world.
“I worked as a corporate trainer once,” Sherri says, interrupting my dream.
“You worked for a corporation?”
“Well, sort of. Originally I was a consultant, but then this company wanted me to be exclusive with them. They offered me a lot of money, so I said okay. But I hated it. It’s one thing to see a new group of corporate drones every week, take them on a retreat in the woods and try to make them one with nature. My angle was this bullshit mysticism I basically made up. I explained how easy it was to become trapped in a prison of apathy, an otherworld of low productivity. And the only way for their company to right its sinking ship was to make people realize they don’t have to be trapped inside this prison, they don’t have to pick this choice. You can be free of the shackles of procrastination and wasteful work. You can choose to work hard and say ‘This is what I want to do today,’ instead of ‘This is what I have to do today.’”
“I can’t believe you could even make those words come out of your mouth.”
“Well, like I said, it was fine as long as it was a different group of people every week. But when I went into this particular company and saw how it really worked, how people made a big show of supporting my ideas, but didn’t really live them…hey, do you know that symbol, that red circle with the line through it, like on Ghostbusters?”
“Yeah.”
“Someone made this artwork with clip-art prison bars and that red circle thing over it. Like ‘no more prison’ or whatever. And people would post that shitty piece of inkjet artwork outside of their cubicles to demonstrate how they were no longer locked inside the bars of their prison of apathy.”
“That’s pretty ironic, posting it outside their cubicles.”
“I know! Like, I would walk past these rows of cubes—”
“Square boxes.”
“Right! They look like jail cells, right? But even that wasn’t the worst. The worst was that no one did anything differently. I mean, I guess the artwork would have been understandable if it actually changed behavior, but it didn’t. Maybe it was my fault. Maybe I was a shitty trainer. When they were at the retreat they all acted like things were different, but as soon as they went back to their cubicles they kept doing what they had always been doing. That annoyed the piss out of me. All these middle managers running around acting like they were solving the world’s problems. Pacing the hallways in their tan Dockers and their worn-out golf shirts.”
“Where did you work?”
“Automotive Excellence. They sell car repair parts. They have a big office here.”
“So did you quit?”
Sherri laughs. Her smiling
eyes glance down at my lips for an instant. “Well…I didn’t actually quit, but I did get myself sort of fired.”
“Sort of fired?”
“Okay, I got fired. See, there was this one guy, his name was Deckard. He worked in the art department. He was a Photoshop wizard or whatever. He looked kind of like you, Banana Republic poster boy. He had spiky brown hair. Cute. I did a retreat with his work group, and after it was over he asked if I wanted to stay late and chat. We walked out into the woods and smoked a couple of joints. We sat on this big log, this huge tree that had been struck by lightning and fallen down. And man, could that boy talk! Turns out he didn’t really care much about drawing up marketing brochures for AE (go figure). What he really wanted to do was write music. He said he wrote all his music on the computer, which at first I didn’t understand. Later, I did, but on that day I had the feeling he was kind of weird. One of his favorite songs was this long, emotional piece of music called ‘10,001 Kisses.’ He described it as almost mystical, the way he arranged it, the instrumentation he used, the ethereal voices, and underneath it all was this spoken word bit about love, about how it took ten thousand kisses before he believed in the concept of a soul mate. In fact, I think I might have his song on my iPod. Hold on just a sec.”
My buzz has been on a slow rise again since I met Dick at the bar, and now, with this vodka soda that is strikingly light on soda, I am blitzed. So when I watch Sherri stand up and bounce away, it seems totally fine that she would do that, and I’m happy to sit here and wait. Life’s good, you know? Everything is good.
But after a few moments of sitting here by myself, I start to wonder how in the hell I got to be in this place. How am I, a regular guy who lives in a shiny new house, a house Gloria and I have spent two years furnishing from the Pottery Barn catalog, how am I now sitting here in this much older house, one that smells like cookies and marijuana? Waiting for a girl I don’t know to come back and play a song written by some guy she met at a corporate retreat? Why am I sitting here waiting?
I get up and walk in the direction of where I last saw her, carrying my vodka soda that is mostly empty now, steadying myself occasionally against brown-stained banisters that reach from the floor to the ceiling. Finally I pass through the living room and into a hallway, shaky on my feet, hearing a bit of music in my head again, except this time I know exactly what music it is: Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Psychedelic and ambient and…and okay, it’s not playing in my head. It’s playing in a room to my left, where it’s dark. The shades have been drawn, and Sherri is sitting in there with a candle burning and a CD case on the floor in front of her. She is mostly turned away from me, leaning down, looking very closely at the CD case. At first I think (quite naively) she must be really drunk to be acting this way (isn’t the song on her iPod after all?) but then I hear a loud SNORT! and finally my alcohol-impaired brain recognizes this scene for what it is.
“Sherri?”
She turns around violently, surprised and angry.
“I told you to hold on.”
“I just wanted to come back here and hang out with you.”
She rubs her nose absently. “I’ll be out in a minute.”
“No,” I say, and just step right past her, clearly against her wishes. I sit down cross-legged in front of her, making sure I don’t spill what’s left of my drink. “So this is coke?”
“What else would it be?”
There are three powdery lines on the CD case, carefully drawn.
“Can I do some?”
“What?”
“I’ll pay, of course.” I reach into my pocket to find a roll of bills. “Here, I’ve got—”
“Keep your money, Thomas. You can pay David for the mushrooms if you really want.”
“Are you sure?”
“Have you ever done coke before?”
The bravado in me wants to lie, but I don’t. “No.”
She hands me a rolled up dollar bill she has been using. “Hold this tight. You just suck it up, really hard, okay? It’s going to burn a bit, and then it’s going to run down into your throat. That’s the drip. You’ll learn to like the drip.”
I look down at the three lines. They are parallel to each other and for just a split second I imagine a tiny man standing behind them, his tiny hands on the white lines, like bars, begging for someone to come along and open his tiny cocaine cell.
A tiny elf. A Fornit man.
“Do I just snort one of them?”
“Hold your nostril closed with this hand and snort one line, then switch hands and do it in reverse with the other nostril. It’s going to feel weird but just do the whole line without stopping.”
I lean down, and every fiber of my body tells me not to do this. It’s not the place to be doing this, and Sherri is not the right person, and—
“What are you waiting for?”
In one quick stroke I place the dollar bill tube at the end of a line and inhale it all. But in my mind it happens very slowly. Like, why the hell is there powder in my nose? This isn’t air! This is solid and not oxygen at all!
And it tastes terrible, burns my throat, and then—
Whoa.
“Good, isn’t it?”
When I look up at Sherri, I can hardly stop myself from taking her face in my hands and kissing her. In fact the only way I prevent this from happening is to turn back and do the other line.
This one is much easier.
One line remains, and Sherri uses the dollar bill to quickly snort it. She brushes against me as she leans forward, and I can’t help but stare into her deep cleavage. I can see the pores in her skin, the marbled texture of her skin shrinking into gooseflesh. Outside somewhere an air conditioner is running. My gums are numb. The carpet we’re sitting on is old, almost like shag. Sherri sits up. Her face is a couple of inches from mine. Her lipstick is the color of an apple. Her nostrils are flared. Her pupils are small. My heart is racing and I want to have sex with her right here on the floor.
We lean into each other with our mouths open like caves. Her lips are soft, like Gloria’s when she was younger. They’re sticky with lipstick. Her tongue is alive, exploring my mouth. I push her to the floor, climb on top of her, her arms circling around me, hands in my hair, legs wrapping around me, her galoshes pressing into my calves. I don’t think I’ve ever been this hard before. There is a snake between us. A royal python.
“Holy shit,” she says. “You’re huge.”
Finally, someone notices.
My mouth moves down her cheek, down her neck, and my hands rove over her breasts.
“So are you,” I say.
She smiles.
And then, from outside the room, which as far as I’m concerned might as well be in another dimension, there is a sound. A door opening.
“Up,” Sherri says.
I roll off her, and she bounces to her feet, smoothing her hair, wiping smeared lipstick from around the perimeter of her lips. I could lie here and watch her do that all evening. Or rather, I want to grab her legs and climb them like trees and—
“Come on,” she says. “Someone’s here.”
Sherri walks out as I rise to my feet. I wonder if her feet sweat inside those rubber boots? I wonder if they smell?
This whole scene is so different from my regular life that it’s hard to imagine I am here. I’m upset with myself, with Gloria; my body is physically ill with guilt and anger and grief. But this is what Dick said to do. I have this one chance, right?
Right?
I hear the crinkling of a paper sack as I wander down the hallway, back the way I came a little while ago. The living room seems too bright. I swear I can hear the light bulb filaments humming.
Kevin is in the kitchen, throwing away a couple of paper sacks. On the bar stands a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, a bottle of Jose Cuervo Gold, and a bottle of Captain Morgan.
“Thanks, Kevin!” Sherri sings. She dances into the kitchen and hugs him. He puts his arms around her for a moment, smilin
g at me over her shoulder, with a look on his face that says Don’t be surprised. This is how she always is.
“So this is your place, Sherri?”
“Yeah. It’s mine but I have a lot of visitors. Right now Kevin is staying with me since he got evicted from his apartment.”
“I was already looking for a place. Agent Fred is a douchebag.”
“Fred is his landlord,” Sherri explains.
“He’s a dick,” says Kevin. “I think he spies on me. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had cameras hidden in the house. And he wants the rent payment two days before the end of the month! Who the hell does that? He knows I get paid on the last day of the month just like everyone does.”
“You could save your money so you can pay him on the right day,” Sherri says. “It’s the same amount of rent no matter what day it is, right?”
Kevin has just poured himself a tall glass of Jack and Coke and takes a big drink of it.
“I pay him every month. I’ve never missed, not once. Anyway, you guys want a drink?”
“We have glasses already!” Sherri squeals. “I’ll go get them.”
Kevin and I stand there, silent for a moment. For some reason I feel an intense desire to tell him about everything…the ball of light, losing Gloria, getting fired, everything. I have to chew on my tongue to keep my mouth shut.
“So you guys were in the back?” he finally asks me.
“She was trying to find a song for me.”
“That ‘10,001 Kisses’ bit?”
“Yeah. She plays it for everyone?”
Kevin nods and sucks down another big gulp of his drink. “She fell in love with that guy, and then it turned out he was married. Not good.”
“Oh boy.”
“It was a couple of years ago and now she has him all built up in her mind. I don’t know why. He’s the one who got her fired.”
“What?”
Before Kevin can answer, Sherri scampers back into the room.
“I got them!” she says. “Plus I got my iPod so we can listen to that song I told you about, Thomas.”
She hands the iPod to Kevin.
“Can you hook it up for me?”