Or Not

by Brian Mandabach

  What’s to stop me?

  Parents. It’s their job.

  But mine is to argue, so it worked out okay.

  “I’m going for a walk, Mom,” I said, walking past her door. “Be back soon.”

  “No, sweetie, it’s getting dark.”

  “It’s twilight, I’ll be back before dark.”

  “No way,” said Dad, from the bottom of the stairs.

  “Da-ad.” I hated the sound of my whiney voice.

  “No-o.” His mocking really helped.

  “I’ll come with you,” said Mom.

  Please, no.

  “Unless you want to be alone,” she added.

  “Of course she wants to be alone,” said Dad. “But she should be alone indoors.”

  “Oh, that’s healthy advice,” I said.

  “It’s safe.”

  “Maybe we should let her go for a short one, Gale.” Unexpected help from the maternal quarter.

  “Deb … Cassie … ”

  The problem is that Dad, as if being a dad wasn’t enough to make him worry, is a public defender. I guess it would be the same for any criminal lawyer, but with the high PD caseload and twenty years in the system, he’s defended more than a few people accused of doing very ugly things. So, he has a hard time letting me out in the big, bad world. Too many crime-scene photos.

  I knew this was what he was thinking about, and I started getting nervous and scared myself. But I still wanted to go—even more, maybe.

  “Just a short one, Gale. It isn’t dark yet, and we don’t want her feeling like a prisoner.”

  “Take my cell phone,” Dad said to me. “Be aware of your surroundings. Don’t talk—”

  “—to anyone or look at anyone you don’t know,” I cut him off and finished his sentence.

  “Why does your mocking not reassure me?”

  I ran down the stairs, took the phone, and reached up to kiss his cheek.

  He put both arms around me, hugging me hard. “Be back in twenty minutes.”

  “Will do,” I said, and I made for the door.

  Unlike every other kid in the American universe, I have never bugged my parents to buy me a cell phone. So I didn’t instantly fire off a three-way call to my two best friends to gossip about the next best two. (Who would these friends be, anyway?) When it comes to consumer electronics, I’m not interested. I prefer real life to mLife or any other campaign for “digital enhancement of emotional life significance.” That’s actually what they called it—I Googled it once, mLife, though I’m not sure I understood it any better than I had before.

  Do people really think they’re more alive if they are digitally connected to everything? And what are you really connected to if you’re virtually connected to everything?

  Cassie Sullivan, asking those tough questions—so you don’t have to.

  By the time I got out the door, I forgot why I wanted to be out so bad. Was I upset about the incident at school, or was I just ready to jump out of my own skin because I couldn’t stand being in here anymore?

  Asking those tough questions.

  Less than ten minutes away, in Valley Park, there’s a good hill for catching the sunset, so I made for that. It looks out on a greenway along the creek, which has been converted from a wandering stream along the seam of the mountains and the prairie into a riprap and concrete-walled ditch that drains our acres and acres of pavement. Red gravel jogging and bike trails thread along the creek and split off along the edges of ball-fields, woods, and playgrounds. Past the creek is the huge and terrible Interstate highway, a constant source of noise, pollution, and other violence. And past that are more of the semi-real neighborhoods, where people live their semi-real existences, and then the mountains rise—mine-ridden, road-scarred, over-recreated, but still grand—to a horizon where the peach sky glows with sunlit smog. Beautiful.

  Up there on the other side of the peak is our family’s own little piece of ground with our cabin and my tipi. This summer—last summer, I guess—Sean and I would have been up on the rocks, bathing in the last rays as the sun sinks into the glacier-white of the Collegiate Peaks.

  We sit for a while.

  The sun sets.

  We talk a little, then walk slowly back, leaving our flashlights off, as it grows darker and darker, cooler and cooler, and bats skim the beaver pond to make ripples that shimmer reflections of the suspended stars.

  23 August

  Another wonderful day at school, Diary. I was getting stuff together for class when Matthew, whose locker is next to mine, started acting all nice.

  “Good job expressing your opinions yesterday,” he said. “I don’t agree, but it sure made the discussion interesting.”

  I laughed, relieved. “Well, it certainly was that.”

  “But there’s one little thing I wanted to make you aware of,” he said with a grin.

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re going to hell!” And he slammed his locker.

  He high-fived Nathan McMahon, who had apparently been watching (morons always high-five—it’s tribal code), and they took off down the hall.

  In reading class, Sinclair gave us something a little safer, a story from the lit book, and we had another discussion. Or they did.

  People were trashing the story, one by Hemingway about a little boy who thinks he is going to die when he gets the flu. He hears the doctor say his temperature is 103 degrees, and he remembers some kid saying that you die if you go over 44 degrees. Trouble is, he’s been living in Europe, where they use Celsius.

  Some of them didn’t get it, and Sinclair let the others explain. Then they thought there wasn’t enough detail. They didn’t like the dad going out quail hunting. They thought the ending was random. They thought it was boring.

  Though he didn’t say so, Sinclair looked disappointed that they weren’t into it.

  “What did you think of the ending, Cassie?” He tried to get me involved, but I wouldn’t play.

  “I agree with everyone,” I said.

  24 August

  Saturday today. I was hoping that we could go to the cabin this weekend, but no. Stayed up last night listening to the Mamas and the Papas but didn’t feel like writing. Slept until noon. Infernally hot up here. Stupid today. Math homework took forever. It’s easy, but I’m just stupid.

  I feel a little better now that it’s late, cooler, and everyone is in bed. I have a record on low—some freaky Pink Floyd, which also seems to help.

  Earlier, I was getting the same feeling of stupidity that I’ve felt before. It started in sixth grade and became even worse in seventh. When Mom noticed that I “wasn’t myself,” she took me to the doctor—who couldn’t find anything wrong with me—then hit the bookstore and loaded me up on vitamins. Maybe the vitamins helped, or the walks she forced me to take, or maybe the increasing light of spring brought me some relief. One of the books Mom got said that Seasonal Affective Disorder (they call it SAD—real funny) and PMS combine in some women for a double whammy. But a vegan diet was supposed to be good for it, so I got some points there.

  Summer’s always better because that’s when I get to be in the mountains, wandering along the creek, hanging in my tipi, reading on a flat rock in the sun. After my first really rough winter in sixth grade, I read a bunch of Native American stuff like Black Elk Speaks and Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas. I loved the reading, but there weren’t any happy endings.

  Dad told me not to “romanticize the American Indian.” I said at least they had some respect for the land. He said I was lucky I wasn’t born a couple of hundred years ago into the Lakota nation because instead of lollygagging around reading and daydreaming I would be working. As a female, he said, my job would be “processor of bison,” so I’d be spending every waking hour in hard labor. That is, if
I was lucky, and the men had been successful on their hunts. I said, anyway, it wasn’t fair the way we took their land and tried to kill them all, and he had to agree with that.

  “But,” he said, “you have to understand. Two cultures collide. They have two completely different ways of dealing with the world—and one was stronger in numbers and technology. The result was inevitable.”

  “Genocide is inevitable?”

  “I didn’t say that genocide is inevitable—I said in this instance, in these circumstances, at this point in history, the end result of the American Indian losing this continent was inevitable. And as the Talking Heads said, ‘Same as it ever was.’”

  “Sean,” I said, “please instruct Mr. Sullivan to answer the question.”

  “Mr. Sullivan, you will answer Ms. Sullivan’s question.”

  “Yes. Not here and now, but somewhere right now, genocide is happening and it is inevitable. There is nothing you or I can do about it.”

  Then he tried to backpedal, saying that just because it had been that way didn’t mean it had to be that way—by doing what’s right and protesting what’s wrong, things can change. So, although he tried to take back the part about there being “nothing you or I can do about it,” the message I got was that melancholia is not entirely a matter of hormones and sunlight. Things happen—things that cause it. It’s not just me—it’s the world that is wrong.

  So I tell myself in the midnight dreary, as I ponder—yes, weak and weary—over many a quaint volume of my own forgotten lore. And wait for the raven’s rapping at my door.

  25 August

  Slept in again today. And I’m dumb again.

  Raven rapping? I’m pretty funny. Or pretty stupid.

  It’s hot. I’m on my balcony. If I wanted to do anything it would be to walk, but it’s almost dark and I’m a prisoner. I had to FORCE myself to eat and try to act normal tonight. The monosyllabic routine works best if I’m faking it, but now I don’t have the energy.

  I imagine the drifting away at the end of “To Build a Fire,” and I wish I could just fade away like that:

  “How’d you sleep last night, pal?”

  “Wonderful. Felt like I slept forever. Slept myself right back to camp, right back to you boys. Too bad about that dog, but I’d like to have a word or two with that old timer at Sulphur Creek.”

  “Looked like you was sleeping the sleep of the righteous—or the sleep of the damned—one.”

  “Heh, heh, heh! You always was a real good pal, Buddy. Now I’m just dozin’ off again. Just dozin’ off … ”

  27 August

  It’s been taking all the energy I have just to, I don’t know what, exist?

  28 August

  Why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?

  —Edgar Allen Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart”

  Do I tell you everything, Di? Do I reserve no secrets? Are we thick as thieves? Will you betray me, like a true friend? Is this life or mLife? Can I text you?

  Maybe I’m not as stupid today. I feel angry and sarcastic—I guess that’s a good sign.

  And I want to play records—that’s good, too. I love my records. I love to clean them with my Discwasher, move the needle-arm over to the right spot, close the dust cover, and lower the needle with the little lever on the side. At first I got tired of getting up to turn the record over every twenty minutes, and the pops and scratches grated on my nerves. But I got to like even those parts, if the scratches aren’t too bad, because they make it more real than computerized music.

  Reading over the last couple of pages, it looks like I was getting maybe a tiny bit depressed. It’s still summer so it can’t be the double whammy. But my winter mood started early last year, too.

  That’s when Sean took off for college in the great Northwest, and though we tried to be excited for him, we were all SAD then. There was a big empty space in the house. Mom and Dad turned to me, trying to be subtle about it, but I felt them watching me. It was supposed to be a good thing—having the house and my parents to myself—but the pressure made me want to be alone more, even while it was harder to do so. If I kept getting good grades, at least they couldn’t bug me about that. So I forced myself to do what needed to be done, though I didn’t care about any of it.

  I hid in my tower on the third floor, reading and listening to my records and looking out on the world. I read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in the fall, and I felt a little crazy, thinking of my room at the top of the house as my cuckoo’s nest. In my institution—school—I wanted to be like Chief, tall but invisible, and I experimented with pretending not to be able to speak. Sliding through the halls, I imagined Chief Broom’s fog. His voice ran through my mind, murmuring about machinery and the sinister something he calls “the combine.” And strangely, he made sense.

  If, as I compose this missive to wherever, I’ve been able to conceal how messed up I am, I guess I should drop the pretense now. Reading that last section, it seems clear that I’ve got more than a few bats in my belfry.

  Not that I’ve tried to pretend that I go along with the herd, but I do act like I’m cool in my own world. And usually, I am—when I don’t feel like jumping off a cliff—but I have strange ideas, weird thoughts.

  For instance: hearing the machinery in digital media.

  Now, to make that sound less weird, let me explain. A record or a tape is a recording of the music. And because analog carries a full spectrum of the sound, all the music is there.

  Digital, on the other hand, isn’t really a recording, it’s a sample. So a CD has sampled bits of each frequency, not the whole sound. Imagine a piano that has ten little keys for each note instead of one single key. That is to say, each of these ten keys combines to make the sound of one note. Now deaden every third micro-note. You only have two-thirds of the sound. My fractions may be off, but that’s digital.

  Why do CDs sound so good, then?

  The samples are high quality, there’s no background noise, and the human ear isn’t sensitive enough, we’re told, to hear the spaces between the samples. But vinyl nuts, like me, can hear the difference: records have a warm tone that digital can’t match.

  That makes sense, doesn’t it? But if I make a leap and say that when I listen to digital music, I hear machinery, then it sounds utterly mad. “Why will you say that I am mad?”

  I don’t actually mean that digital media is a part of the combine, that it implants some sort of machinery, even virtual machinery—

  Ahhh, it’s too late for this, and I can’t think.

  Let me get away from Chief Broom and the ticking of “The Tell-Tale Heart” and simplify:

  1. Digital music sounds robotic to me. It’s too clear, too clean—it’s virtual music, not actual music.

  2. People are used to it. They like it. They think music is supposed to sound that way.

  3. Since environment has an effect on organisms, digital music could change the way the brain works.

  Now, number three may sound like Chief Broom, but maybe, just maybe, listening to digital sampling trains the brain to hear in a certain way. And not hear in another.

  Is there anything wrong with this? I don’t know—but CDs began to sound sinister to me, so I stopped listening to them.

  Now if I were mad, I would think there were mental viruses hidden between the bits in digital samples. There could even be microchips in our brains that are triggered by digital media to produce thoughts like: “Drink Sexy Cola and be Powerful!” “You must buy things to truly exist!” “The virtual and the actual are ONE!” “Security is Freedom is Marketing is Art is Power is America is Right is Peace is Security is Strength is Truth is Might i
s Liberty is Lifestyle is Property is Happiness is Automobile is Independence is Globalism is Diversity is Oneness is Jesus is the Almighty Clean of Dr. Bronner’s Peppermint Castile Soap—Dilute! Dilute! Dilute! Dilute! Dilute!”

  But I’m not mad. So I don’t think that.

  Journal Two

  29 August

  A new journal. I had no idea, when Ally, Sean’s girlfriend (and my self-adopted sister), gave me the first one, that it would become such a habit. I’m getting so wrapped up in all this writing that I’m afraid I’ll get behind in my homework.

  But the question arises, since I hate school, why should I be totally compulsive about homework?

  Exactly.

  Once you ask the question, it starts to make sense.

  The logic is backwards, but that lends the concept a foxy sort of stealth, and as long as I have straight As, I can relax in my own superiority. Not a noble aspiration, I admit, but maybe a small comfort. It’s not all that fun to be cleverer than the low-achievers, but I like to think that I am cleverer than those who actually believe in the whole thing: grades, goals, achievement, the Olympics, whatever, et cetera, whatnever.

  The only ones who might have the edge are those who are sharp enough to do well, but who choose not to.

  I used to think that those smart kids who got crummy grades were too messed up to get it together. But Chris Quillen might be an exception. Is he faking? Is he pretending to be together enough to achieve but too rebellious not to fail?

  On Monday, Quill, as they call him, came into stride next to me on the way to lunch and said, “I heard about your anti-Christ freak-out, Cassie.” Quill talks in character most of the time, and he was using a creepy surfer/stoner/horror voice, not breathy or nasally exactly, but with strange accents:

  “I hearrrd aboutyer annti-Christ frreeak-out, Caaassie.” Sometimes, I’m afraid it really is the way he talks, as if he started acting that way and it gradually stuck, like if you cross your eyes too often.