by Chris Eaton
Of course, when Philthy Phil eventually brushed his cheek and called him sweetie, he was helpless. And he imagined, for a moment, what it might be like to run off with a rock star, to leave those other losers behind and start his life anew. The drummer’s stubble scraped across his neck and down his chest (he wasn’t entirely sure when he’d lost his shirt but didn’t care), there was a hand in the pocket of his cargo shorts that was not his own, a few bars from Philthy’s song whispered in his ear, someone knocking at the door, followed by several hours of staring at nothing but the wall, the Motörhead drummer stroking the muscles of his thighs and tracing lines with his tongue between his shoulder blades.
And at graduation Chris Eaton told her entire grad class, her diploma so fresh it was still bleeding, to take a flying fuck off a cactus, not to mention all of their parents and siblings, and more than a few grandparents, who hopefully couldn’t see too well, or didn’t understand, when she flipped them her twin birds of freedom, both hands held high like she was about to take a bow. Which she then did.
PART 5
There are stories people tell. Most of them aren’t very interesting. People find themselves funny. And they set these stories in likely yet semi-exotic environments. Like abandoned communist submarine depots. Or meat-packing plants. Or karaoke bars. In the cities they’re from. Or been to. Or even just imagined. Like maybe Chicago.
The predominant subject matter: me, me, me.
Granted, you learn more from the stories people tell about others than the ones they tell about themselves. When they talk first person, it only reveals a personal obsession. And who doesn’t fall into that category? It’s only when they start to speak outside their own identity that you can finally get a good vantage point on someone else. Interests. Bias. Motivation. Why does anyone ever tell a story to someone else? Especially to a complete stranger? Attention.
More specifically, why tell you a story about the legs of Céline Dion, like rolling pins beneath the stall doors, her manicured nails tracing familiar patterns along the back of her throat, in 1991, with her nondescript beginnings behind her but the heights of her career like free change at the bottom of the toilet bowl, tempting, but something you only imagine for someone else. What possesses someone to lie at the top of their lungs – just to be heard over the urban cowboy belting out some Stina Verda – about near-meetings with celebrities, claiming to have the pop diva’s first-ever music award lodged unceremoniously behind his headboard, having shoved it in at least one orifice of every man he’s ever fucked?
Because really the queer’s just crying out.
Because everyone just wants to be heard, and mostly to be heard as something separate from what they are. In this place, this bar, this hole, this haven, their chairs inch slowly closer to yours, and their stories dribble past their beer-cracked lips to collect in unsightly puddles around their feet: the fag, the braless septuagenarian waitress, the man on stage, with his hair like burnt wicker and a Cubs cap for a halo. Each one with a story. And each one with the voice of an angel, albeit angels who’ve smoked two packs a day for the past twenty years. They know the lyrics to every Johnny Cash song, and can even produce a tear when required, drawing on years and years of tantric misery. Their songs swing high over the other patrons, dive-bombing the bar, with grooves like early death and decay, worn in by years of tears, decades of sob stories, poured over the faux cherry finish and rubbed in nightly with slop buckets of week-old water and ammonia. Every false note – no, none of them are false, they are all true as despair, just sharp or flat – skips along the floor and embeds itself just above the brass footrail. The ankles of the patrons are covered with scars from errant peeps, tracking divots and pockmarks up their forearms and necks, dragging their feet across lobes and tragi before cracking the hinges off the tympanic membranes and squatting triumphant and defiant in the unplastered living rooms of the aural canals.
In a place like this, you can start all over; be reborn; be someone else. There’s even a fair chance you can avoid what’s coming. You can dodge the bullet of your future; call in sick that September morning; decide not to strap on that seatbelt and have your grin shatter the windshield and never ever come back to Earth…
A new hope.
He chose the bar mostly because he didn’t know a soul, had never been there and was fairly certain he wouldn’t see anyone he knew, because they’d either find the place too low in class or not low enough. Chicago had its fair share of dives. But a dive wasn’t a place you frequented when you were from Forest Hill. The only drawback: the mob of televisions all set to hockey and basketball. Sports, especially televised sports, were the lotteries of the chronically poor, on that level of social strata that exists beneath hope. If it was a choice between dreams and cigarettes, there was really not much of a contest. The Game, on the other hand, was always free. Couldn’t see it live. Couldn’t even watch it at home some times. But the playoffs settled in to these bars like a persistent cough, another symptom of the seasons, the only difference that year – a new trend that had turned the once-proud city into a murder of whiners and nostalgists – was that neither the Bulls nor the Blackhawks were anywhere to be seen. So even though no one could bring himself to turn the sets off, no one really paid attention, either.
Do you like the Blackhawks? the fag asked him, dragging the stagnant ck from first half of the word into the second. And: Nothing better than a big Blackhawk.
On any normal night, he would probably have just told him to fuck off. He’d been working for hours on the eager cougar at the front, who was probably twice his age, and he watched eagerly as the seam of her jeans licked up and down the cleft of her ass, tonguing deeper with each step from her table to the guy with the handlebar moustache who accepted the song choices. Earlier, he’d dreamed he was that stitch, and he’d tried to spark up a conversation with her. About music, of course, although his tastes tended to be a little harder than hers, but also: how smog kept making the summers more and more unbearable; the war on terrorism; the friends they knew in other places. Common places. They’d already made out briefly. And she’d kissed like a bag of chips. Although that was better than no kissing at all.
But he was ready for something a little harder. And from past experience, he knew it was the queers who did more coke than anyone. Any time he’d been offered cocaine in the past, it had been a fag. Those really flamboyant indiscriminate ones, who threw fits across crowded tables and sucked face with the beef they’d tossed out the week before. They had nasal cavities like empty spice jars. When they bought cigarettes, their bills rolled up before they hit the counter.
When they headed to the washroom together, no one even turned to watch. People pee all the time, after all. And besides, they weren’t about to deny someone else the chance at a good story. He wasn’t even upset when, side by side at the urinals, he caught the fag looking. Gender wasn’t a private club that suddenly gave you exclusive rights over all the team equipment. But there was a code for moochers. And when you’ve got a free hit coming your way, you flash your wang for whoever wants to see it.
Sometimes, they might even get to touch it.
He was nervous. This was not his bar. He had to stand watch while the fag cut it. When someone came around the corner, he wasn’t sure what to do. He coughed. He clicked his tongue. He tried to think of a good excuse for hanging out in the doorway of the men’s washroom.
And before he knew what was happening, he had taken the bill and leaned forward, pretending he was just trying to smell the daisies. And it magically erased every drink he’d had up to that point. By the time he left the men’s room behind, he felt like he was wearing headgear, like he was making a mold of his face for posterity, like he’d never go to sleep again, like he had a cock thirteen inches long. His “girlfriend” was gone. No worries. Suddenly this fag had become the most interesting fuck on the planet, with a complete oral history of the life and times of Canada’s expatriate pop diva. Didn’t they have anything else to brag
about up there? Was Canada so boring? The year was 1991. The fag described Canada’s national music awards as junior high presidential elections, with all the most popular kids vying for head of the student council office. And who walked away with all the gold but the awkward kid from Charlemagne, Quebec. Album of the Year. Female Vocalist of the Year. It felt like a joke. It was as if the cool kids just wanted to see what she’d do. Like she had a hair lip and they just wanted to laugh at her acceptance speech. And the fag was so excited when she walked into his restaurant. He was just the busboy, and didn’t really know who she was, but it was still exciting to be in the proximity of a winner. Or even just a celebrity. And when she turned out to be one of the nicest people he’d ever met, even asked him his name as he was taking away another empty bottle of champagne, he felt offended by the brashness of it all and bussed the award onto his tray.
Chris Eaton didn’t believe it, of course, and had to see the award for himself. So they ditched the music, and the wannabes, and their heads were like cement, crashing through doorways, swinging in wide arcs at the ends of their chain-link necks. All muscles and tendons. Bones like helium balloons. The pavement had never been more pliable, and the streetlights burned like aluminum sparklers. He was dodging an apocalyptic meteor shower in slow motion, slowing him down considerably, but the fag was never too far ahead.
And sure enough, back at the apartment, there it was: Dion’s award. Just like he said. They abandoned their bodies to the couch and laughed uncomfortably. There they were. Did he want a drink? More coke? They sat in the darkness for fifteen minutes without speaking, sobriety overtaking them in deep breaths, until the fag – he couldn’t even remember his name – broke the silence: I have to use the little boy’s room.
Uh-huh…
And when the fag hit the washroom, he hightailed it with the Judo, or whatever it was called, floating out the door and down the street like a raccoon on fire. Were there other people who could run that fast? Others like him? He doubted it. His feet were like greased mortar shells. His legs whipped and snapped like corrugated rubber. And he was digested, through the large and small intestines of Chicago, to the steps of the platform where the train took him back to his parents’ house, then back to school in Virginia.
He went to Brown. He studied fiction. He studied theoretical math. She studied law. He went to UNB. And studied sustainable communities. He played racquetball. And basketball. And tennis. And ran.
He swam, eventually earning his scholarship to the Virginia Military Institute as a backstroker, which wasn’t Auburn or Stanford but wasn’t a total failure. There, he made a name for himself in the freestyle sprint, as well as the 100 and 200m breaststroke. The potential for active duty was supposed to be limited.
He studied international development. And he survived the Ugandan Civil War, then went to South Africa, where he was mugged, and was chased by men with guns, and worked with one woman who was stabbed in the arm and another whose daughter was raped before her eyes.
On his first day of university, he fun-tacked a political poster to the wall of his room:
Chris Eaton 4
Senator
It’s time for a
change
He thought it was funny, because he and this local politician happened to share the same name. (What he did not know: they had both moved to Florida at the advent of high school; both had been presidents of their junior high schools back home (California and New Jersey, respectively); and the other man had also attended University of South Florida.) But mostly it served as a reminder of his cause. His high school job at Rose Bay had been his saving grace. So he was particularly alarmed when most of the State’s Senators voted in favor of pumping untreated water down into the Florida aquifer, an underground system of springs and wells beneath the entire State of Florida, as well as parts of South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama. It was water so pure you could drink it with a straw, if the straw were long enough. It provided sixty million gallons of water a day for human consumption alone, as well as nourishing several wetlands areas like the Everglades, and even Rose Bay. And his government was voting to endanger it.
So he’d gone to university to hopefully fix it. The original plan was to develop a new waste management system that would integrate the living machine designs of ecologically friendly biomass digestion systems with current sewage treatment methods. But once he discovered similar systems already in use in several conventional plants across the country, he began to find more shortcomings with it. For example: available land. How could the capacity of treatment plants meet the demands of growing, heavily populated areas? Especially when land for expansion was so scarce? So he started planning into the only space left. Up. Constantly aware of the oppressive weight of the holes in the sky above him, The Biomass Silo – a theoretical treatment facility that could take up a much smaller landmass by mimicking the skyscraper model – would use capillary motion to wick the water up and the natural cascade of a waterfall for its descent. The idea even received a Certificate of Meritorious Achievement from the National Medal of Technology program in D.C., but Chris Eaton felt there was still so much to be done, continuing to construct small-scale models and monitoring their progress to ascertain feasibility.
The erection of the first silo, the size of an overturned rain barrel, was simple, and provided Chris Eaton with tons of data. The second, slightly larger, about the size of a mini-barn, gave him even more. The hard part was discovering how these groupings of facts somehow aligned, merging the similarities between them to create new facts that didn’t exist – or weren’t known – without them. Generally speaking, in mathematics, a concept is only so good as the confirmation of its presupposed result. We suppose that 2 x 5 = 10, and when we actually start adding things up (2, 4, 6, 8, 10!), we discover that our concept is correct. But when all was said and done, there were values for x in the silo concept that the calculations should not have worked out to. Even facts that did not relate to each other directly produced a result, as if the mere proximity of the numbers – something similar in them, rather than their actual sources or values – created some result other than the simple A leads to B leads to C and so forth.
Of course, there were many unsolved mysteries in mathematics; even with frequently used concepts like pi. Theoretically, if taken to an infinite end, the single digits in pi are equally distributed throughout it – the same number of ones and twos and threes and so on. In a given set of, say, five hundred places past the decimal, each number should appear approximately fifty times. (In a set so small – and yes, five hundred, in the scope of infinity, is small – the numbers will actually range from about thirty-six to fifty-nine.) Pi appears to encompass the perfect definition of random.
But when you study a long pi set, at least the appearance of patterns begin to manifest:
3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679821480865132823066470938446095505822317253594081284811174502841027019385211055596446229489549303819644288109756659334461284756482337867831652712019091456485669234603486104543266482133936072602491412737245870066063155881748815209209628292540917153643678925903600113305305488204665213841469519415116094330572703657595919530921861173819326117931051185480744623799627495673518857527248912279381830119491298336733624406566430860213949463952247371907021798609437027705392171762931767523846748184676694051320005681271452635608277857713427577896091736371787214684409012249534301465495853710507922796892589235420199561121290219608640344181598136297747713099605187072113499999…
After the first seven hundred and sixty-one places, a mysterious string of five nines appear. And because it’s physically impossible for us to study pi to its infinite end, it’s also impossible to know whether this repetition is an anomaly, or whether each digit would have a similar string. So far, the longest repeated string, when pi is examined to two million places, is 31415926, a brief return to the beginning, the first eight digits, before spinning off again into seeming randomness. But it’s fa
irly safe to assume that, if pi is indeed infinite, every conceivable pattern will eventually appear, including five ones, eight two, 13 fours, and also, as impossible as it might seem to reconcile this with the seemingly infinite randomness, an equally infinite string of sevens.
This was how he became obsessed with Georg Cantor.
Cantor believed he was on a mission from God.
To prove God’s existence. To find meaning in life.
And he thought he could do this through mathematics, or more precisely, through non-linear dynamic systems and set mathematics. As Cantor himself often explained it: A set is a Many that allows itself to be thought of as a One. A set can be any group of numbers you want to group together. The set of even numbers from 1 to 10 is shown as {2, 4, 6, 8, 10}. The set of whole numbers below 100 that are the squares of other whole numbers include {1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81, 100}. But before Cantor, Set Mathematics was only built to handle closed sets, like the ones mentioned above. The set of all whole numbers, on the other hand, would continue to climb without end. One plus one plus one plus one plus one… And it’s this introduction of infinity to mathematics that produced the most interesting results.
First, Cantor posited that the set of all integers {1, 2, 3, 4, 5…} has an equal number of members as the set of all even numbers {2, 4, 6, 8, 10…}, despite the apparent contradiction that a closed set of those same two groups would produce twice as many of the former. Since numbers can keep increasing endlessly, how can one group ever be larger than the other? Conversely, if you were to take either one of those infinite sets and divide it in half, your new set would also have an equal amount of members. You could keep halving this infinite set forever and you’d still end up with the same number of rational members.
He also addressed the infinitely small, claiming the number of points you can map on a line this long…