Better Angels

by Howard V. Hendrix

  After some time, they had crawled and trusted and felt and hauled and pulled and viewed and lifted and read and seen and suffered and loved and plodded and dropped and pumped and pounded and left and passed and risen enough to rise again from the edge of Half Dome, to do it all once more on the way down—but not just yet.

  “Tell me again why we did this,” Jiro said, sprawled out on the rock not far from the edge of the sundered dome, exhausted. Taking a gulp of water from his dromedary bag’s tube, Jiro noted vaguely that his brother, dressed in sunglasses and shorts and boots but no shirt, was starting to get a sunburn. Amazingly, they were the only people on top of the Dome—a result of the date being only the third week of May, and a weekday.

  “Because the views from the top are fantastic,” Seiji said from nearby, where he too had temporarily become one with the rock out of sheer fatigue, mustering only enough energy to talk and occasionally suck water from the tube connected to his own dromedary bag. “Because it’s here. Because you came out to visit. Because it’s as high above the valley floor as the Grand Canyon is deep below its rim. Because after we’ve done it we can say we did it.”

  Because because because because because, Jiro thought. Somewhere over the rainbow and the Wizard of Oz. But those weren’t the words he spoke.

  “Ambitious,” Jiro said, shaking his head. “That’s you all over, big brother.”

  “Something wrong with that?” Seiji said, sitting up slowly.

  “I guess not,” Jiro said quietly. “I just wonder why you’d want to be, sometimes. You afraid maybe deep down you’re just like everybody else? Nobody special?”

  “Hey!” Seiji said, starting into a crouch before the cramping in his legs halted him and he stretched them out before him once more. “Who’s supposed to be headshrinking whom, here? Ambitious? You should talk. You’re eighteen and just finished your bachelor’s degree. Two years younger than when I finished mine. Even if we were nobody special, we’d still be special nobodies.”

  Sitting up, Jiro removed a small flatpipe from his pocket but said nothing.

  “Special more because we’re happa, than happy,” Seiji continued, growing more serious. “Cultural amphibians. Not fully at home in either world. When we were little kids in Kobe, what they couldn’t read in our names they could see in our faces. In the Midwest, what they couldn’t read in our faces they could see in our names. Nippon dad, Anglo Mom. Caucasian hidden in our middle names—Jiro Ansel Yamaguchi. Seiji Robert Yamaguchi.”

  “Survivors, though,” Jiro said, preoccupied with popping open a small cylinder, shaking out some marijuana into his palm, and cramming it into the bowl of his flatpipe. “Had to be. Family history. Long line of Hiroshima Catholics, all that.”

  “Maybe that’s the reason I’m ‘ambitious’,” Seiji said, warily watching his brother work with his paraphenalia. “I want people to see me, not some category they can put me in. I don’t want to live other people’s scenarios for my life—not Mom’s or Dad’s or anyone else’s. Even if I never become anybody except who I am, that’s okay by me. Don’t you ever feel that way?”

  “Just the opposite, lately,” Jiro said, lighting the pipe and inhaling deeply. He offered the pipe to Seiji, who waved it off. Jiro shrugged and exhaled. “I wouldn’t mind if somebody, some scientist or priest, came in and showed me the big blueprint. Gave me the stage directions. Tried to make me fit into the plan as best I can.”

  “The best laid plans of mice and men,” Seiji said, shaking his head.

  Jiro abruptly began to laugh.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Don’t you remember?” Jiro asked. “I played Lenny in Of Mice and Men—”

  “Oh, that,” Seiji said, leaning back on his hands. “Yeah, you did a great job. So did the guy who played George. Duet acting state champs, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sorry I never got to see the whole play in production,” Seiji said, staring at the palm of his left hand. “I saw that duet acting thing on trideo, though. I was impressed. You did a damn good job. I’ve done a lot more acting than you, but I’ve never been on broadcast.”

  Jiro took another drag on the pipe.

  “Type casting,” Jiro said in a pinched voice, before exhaling. “Lenny the Manchild. That’s what I am—a Manchild.”

  “What do you mean?” Seiji said, rising to his feet on wobbly legs. “Lenny was an idiot. You’re probably the most intelligent person I know, next to myself. There’s no resemblance.”

  “You really don’t get it, do you?” Jiro said, staring at his brother through the smoke of his pipe, framed against the endless blue of the sky. “Look at me, Seiji. I’m a freak. Way back in second grade, the nuns—”

  “—busted you for walking around on the playground with your arms stretched out like Christ on the cross,” Seiji said with a grimace. “Please, not that crap again. I’ve heard it too many times. So? You think that’s so weird? When I was in fourth grade—the night Mom was in the hospital and we were staying at Aunt Marcia’s—that night I couldn’t get to sleep, and sometime toward morning I thought I heard the voice of God calling me to be a priest!”

  “For real?”

  “No lie,” Seiji said, walking uneasily toward the edge of the dome once more. “Calling me to be a holy man in wizards’ robes at the altar. The nuns lorded it over us, but even they had to kowtow to the priests. The shadow magicians in the confession box—make your sins disappear, presto! The little window slides back, and there’s the shadow priest’s head saying, ‘In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—may I take your order please?’ And the Act of Contrition! I always had trouble remembering the Act of Contrition. Like parsley for the Last Supper, you know?”

  Seiji laughed at his juxtaposition.

  Jiro leaned back on his hands, his right leg crossed at the ankle over his left knee, the right still cramping slightly from their exertion climbing to and up the dome. His head, however, was bowed and serious.

  “You can make jokes about other people’s visions and contritions,” Jiro said quietly. “It’s easy for you. Me, I’m not so sure. I’ve tried believing in something and I’ve tried not believing in anything, but I can’t do either totally. It’d be easy to think I’ve just got a Messiah complex, but it’s more than that. Look at me, Seij. I’ve got a bachelor’s degree but I’ve never even really had a date, much less gotten laid or gotten involved with a woman. A prolonged childhood. A freak! A thing with the body of a man and the fears and inexperience of a child. All I want to do is grow up, but I can’t. I’m a freak.”

  Walking over and sitting down not far from his brother, Seiji grew suddenly more serious.

  “You’ve never asked a girl out?”

  “No,” Jiro said, shaking his head. “Every time I come close, I can tell they wouldn’t be interested. Don’t you see? I know what I am. I know how dark and twisted I am inside.”

  Seiji looked away, seeming obscurely embarassed.

  “I’ve never been to a prostitute, myself,” he said, “but I suppose there’s always that option.”

  Jiro shook his bowed his head.

  “Too late. It didn’t really help. My one big sexual experience. Hah!”

  Seiji kept talking into the distance.

  “What happened?”

  Jiro spoke from that distance Seiji talked into.

  “When we were all messed up on mescaline and vodka one night, Tom Combs and Mike Kinney drove me around downtown—whore shopping.”

  “And you found one?” Seiji asked.

  “Yeah. A black woman, standing in front of the Honky Chateau soyburger dive at Liberty and Vine. The guys chipped in to get poor Jiro laid. Put up the money to make the manchild into a man. And I blew it.”

  Seiji stared so far into the distance it struck Jiro that his older brother was trying to see beyond the blue bowl of the sky, trying to achieve escape velocity through the intense focus of his eyes alone.

  “Didn’t she go for it?�
�� Seiji asked.

  “She went for it just fine,” Jiro said, with an exhale that was almost a sigh. “Not a whole lot of negotiating—just ‘Fuck or suck?’”

  “Ah, the eternal verities,” Seiji said with an expression on his face halfway between grimace and smirk.

  “Yeah,” Jiro continued. “Anyway, she led me down these wet brick alleys to her place. Out in the front room, another woman—her sister, or maybe her daughter—was breastfeeding a baby and watching an old, faux 3D-ified Rock Hudson-Doris Day flick on a cheap holo unit. I think it was Pillow Talk.”

  “It would be,” Seiji muttered. “Go on.”

  “I don’t remember everything,” Jiro said, partly in apology, partly in explanation. “I was really messed up. But I do remember that the sink and toilet were full of dead cockroaches. And I remember her getting undressed. When she took off her bra, I must have been staring really hard at her breasts. ‘You want to play with my titties, don’t you?’ she said. ‘Yeah, sure you do. I can tell. Come and play then.’ She finished undressing, but I’d barely gotten my thing out of my pants when I shot my load all over her belly. Didn’t even get inside.” Jiro lapsed into his “Lenny” character. “I didn’t mean to come prematoorly, George, but she had such pretty titties, George.”

  Seiji, unable to achieve escape velocity or launch out of this hard place in any way, shook his head sadly.

  “Shit,” he said, softly.

  “She looked disgusted but not surprised,” Jiro continued, in his own voice. “I went back to the car to get some more untraceable cash from Mike and Tom for a second try. They came up with it. I went back to the lady again. But I couldn’t even get it up.”

  A long pause opened between them.

  “Sounds like a really great first time,” Seiji said at last.

  Jiro glanced at his brother. Deflated of his usual bravado, Seiji looked as scruffy, trail-worn, and weary as Jiro himself felt.

  “Yeah.”

  Seiji stood up again and glanced around at the three hundred sixty degree panorama of the sky and the mountains around them before returning his attention to Jiro.

  “Have you told anyone else about this stuff that’s been bugging you?”

  “Tom and Mike,” Jiro said. “Tried to tell Mom and Dad about it.”

  “Why?” Seiji asked, incredulous. “They’d never be able to deal with it.”

  “No, they weren’t,” Jiro said. “Not at all.”

  “Did you try a counselor, or therapist, or anything?

  “Yeah,” Jiro said, glancing down at the ground in front of his boots. “So I must be nuts. Isn’t that the way we were always told it works—if you go to a psychiatrist, you’re admitting you’re already crazy?”

  “Who did you see?”

  “The Schlosbergs,” Jiro said. “The counselors on campus. They gave me books and infosphere addresses on masculine role-models. On sexuality and self-disclosing. I told them all about our family situation—the domineering mommy and docile daddy stuff, and you, Elderbrothergod, who bested me in almost every rivalry. They took notes on everything I told them, but it didn’t work out well at all.”

  Seiji tossed a small fleck of rock off the brow of the dome and watched it disappear into thousands of feet of empty space.

  “I believe that,” he said, kicking lightly at the rock below his feet. “I had them for a team taught psych course back in college. They’re about as sensitive to people’s problems as Half Dome is.”

  “I told them everything,” Jiro said, rising unsteadily to his feet, looking across the uneven granodiorite plateau of the dome’s summit. “All my hidden darknesses. And they told everyone.”

  “What do you mean?” Seiji asked, suspiciously.

  “Agents, man,” Jiro said, eyes darting. “The ones disguised as nuns and social workers. They’re the ones who spread the word on me to the whole city. The ones who are trying to make me look like a fool in front of everyone. So I’ll learn my lesson.

  “Wait a second,” Seiji said, putting the dromedary bag’s hose away from his face. “Are you talking some kind of conspiracy here?”

  Jiro looked away to the east.

  “Maybe.”

  “What conspiracy?” Seiji asked, striding closer. “Who are they? Who’s in it?”

  “Everybody,” Jiro said, head bowed. “I don’t know exactly who they are. Satanists, maybe. Or this uderground of Catholic social worker types trying to help me. That’s what they disguise themselves as, anyway.”

  Seiji grabbed his brother by the shoulder and shook him, but then quickly let go.

  “This is crazy shit you’re talking, bro,” Seiji said, then began walking away, increasingly staggering and play-acting madness. “Are they trying to help you or trying to get you? ‘They’re trying to help me! Get me! Help me! Getmehelpmegetmehelpme—aaiiieeaagh!’”

  Even Jiro laughed quietly at Seiji’s act.

  “I know it sounds crazy,” he said. “I know it sounds like some delusion that can’t really be happening. Believe me, I wish it were a delusion. But it’s not. The evidence for it keeps piling up.”

  “Evidence?” Seiji said, unable to keep the skepticism out of his voice. “What evidence?”

  “The messages from the media,” Jiro said. “I heard this lady deejay on my favorite radio station back home once say, straight to me, right over the air, ‘Jiro, are you confused yet?’ She knew all about me. She knew I was confused—they told her! She was one of them!”

  Seiji looked at him doubtfully.

  “Are you sure you heard that? Maybe you just thought you heard it, when actually you just misheard something else. I used to be a deejay myself, at the college station. I don’t ever remember making it a policy to give cryptic messages out over the airwaves.”

  Jiro turned away.

  “I know it sounds crazy, but I did hear it. And they always played songs that came right out of my fantasies.”

  “So?” Seiji said, almost laughing. “Pop music is the music of adolescent fantasies. What are you telling me? That the music industry is part of the conspiracy too?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Jesus, Jiro!” Seiji said, shaking his head. “How big is

  this Satanic Nunnery conspiracy of yours?”

  “It’s big. Really big. They know everything I told my counselors. They’ve got the goods on me. They’re the shotgun, and I’m the quail in their sights. They send me messages in the newspapers, over TV and holo, too. But the racing form is the real touchstone. It always lists a stable, JAY Farms—”

  “For Jiro Ansel Yamaguchi?” Seiji asked. “That’s stretching it. Coincidence.”

  “I don’t think so,” Jiro said, a quaver in his voice. “Everytime I looked, there was always a red ball M with a slash through it in the JAY Farms section of the racing form.”

  “So? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Jiro said, turning toward his brother.

  “Not to me.”

  “Red ball M means masturbation,” Jiro said. “The slash through it was their warning to me to stop doing it.”

  Seiji exhaled loudly in frustration.

  “Look, Jiro, I admit I don’t know anything about horse racing or horse racing forms, but this sounds like some kind of paranoid guilt trip to me. So you masturbate, big deal! Like you think nobody else does?”

  “At least you don’t feel guilty about it,” Jiro said, looking away, out over the gaping abyss of Yosemite Valley.

  “Why should I?”

  “It’s wrong, Seiji,” he said, turning to stare at his brother again. “Self-centered and empty. It damages you. Keeps you from getting hard in the normal way.”

  Seiji shook his head in disbelief.

  “Jesus! Next thing you’ll be saying it makes you go blind! I’ve wanked off as much as you ever will and it hasn’t hurt my sex life a bit. ‘Sex life’—God, what a phrase! As if all there is to living is fucking. This damned culture puts way too much emphasis
on sex. Getting laid isn’t the Alpha and Omega of human existence, you know. There are lots more important things to attend to.”

  Jiro sat down again.

  “That’s easy for you to say. You’ve already made it to the other side.”

  “What ‘other side’?” Seiji said, exasperated. “You think that’s what lets you in on the master plan? Getting laid? Is this conspiracy thing what drove you across the country to visit me? You think you’re a fugitive or something?”

  Jiro looked away into the eastern distance.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said quietly. “It was all planned that I would come out here to see you. They knew I’d run. They saw the quail flush. They watched me getting strange at school. They saw me looking at girls constantly. They laughed when I made the mistake of sending sexual vibes to two girls in my Automata Liberation course and them making—”

  “Wait a minute,” Seiji said. “‘Automata liberation’ is a course?”

  “Information wants to be free,” Jiro explained. “Highly evolved artificial life especially. They’re creatures too—they feel the pain of constraint. Feel pain, have rights, deserve respect—that’s the equation. Anyway, about the two girls in that class. I overheard one of them say, ‘My twelve year old sister knows more about sex than he does.’ I know she was talking about me. The other one, when she mentioned a dead rat in class, she was looking right at me.”

  “So?” Seiji asked, truly puzzled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “Maybe she thought you needed a shower?” Seiji suggested, trying to make a small joke. His younger brother ignored it.

  “Dead rat equals impotence,” Jiro explained. “You’ve never heard that?”

  “Can’t say I have.”

  “The agents pushed me into a corner,” Jiro said. “Made me feel like the only way I can free myself is to rape or kill somebody. You know what I was thinking when we got to the summit here? I was thinking about how easy it would be for a sniper to pick off people pulling themselves up the cable ladder to the top of Half Dome. They know I have these violent thoughts sometimes. Yet I don’t want to hurt anybody. I won’t, either. Not even the Schlosbergs. They know that, and they use it against me. They’ve left me with only three options: Kill myself, kill others, or go psychotic and spend the rest of my life a vegged-out mental defective in a care home.”