“I think maybe we should spend some time apart for a few days.”
And there it was. Nothing he could say now could possibly matter. Not all the truth he had to give. The world fell out from underneath him.
She carried on once she’d waited for him and he’d said nothing but “Um” for a minute. “You know what I hate, Alex? Feeling this far away from you, when you’re right here. Like...right there in front of me. You’re a million miles away, and I don’t even know in what direction until you tell me the next day. I feel like maybe you need to get your priorities sorted out. Or maybe I need to think about shit for a while longer than I already have this afternoon. That might be the better move for both of us.”
“Jules. Sheila’s not—”
“Sheila’s fine enough, Alex. Seriously... I don’t even give a shit. I think in other circumstances we’d probably even be friends. But this. With you, and this... Fixation with—”
“It’s not a fixation.”
“Whatever, Alex...it’s too hard. And you’re doing everything wrong. Do you get that? For the first time in our relationship... I’m not easy...with you.”
Alex pouted.
Jules smiled and leaned in to kiss him on the cheek. “I just want tonight to myself to think about this, Alex. This...this probably isn’t anything. Just a bump. It’s just...well, we’ve never had a bump before. Nothing. How did this happen?”
The two of them stood there, a varsity lifetime’s worth of promises and half-sleeping affections draped over them like a lead hula-hoop. Neither of them said anything more. A minute that felt like hours passed in silence, both of them standing there like frozen idiots, then Jules kissed him on the chin before touching his cheek, and left to pick up her luggage. She walked slower than Alex had ever seen her walk anywhere, a jelly mould of awkward misery around her every footstep, as he stood on the Gaol sidewalk. The world passed by him, as it always did.
His head flooded like a flushed toilet, so heavy and saturated it felt as if it might drag on the floor behind his torso when he walked home. He felt breathless, pulled along headfirst into something he didn’t understand. To picture a long-dead world tricking itself into existence, it was strange, but also...empowering. It was so selfish, and sort of ludicrous, but he felt free, to think that maybe his heart was only breaking in theory. This couldn’t be real. This feeling had to be a lie—it was the only thing that made sense. He watched the illusion of the love of his life retreating down Somerset, away from him. What was the point of this kind of pain?
He headed to the Cross Street bar, hoping to find Crink. He walked under jacaranda trees that weren’t real, past cars that were not there. Everything was awful, but it was all right because it was also, somehow, all just an illusion. Hooray for fake, self-imposed pain. Hooray for the damned, who dream up their own worst tortures.
He sat at the bar, his eyes lazy and unfocused, resting on the varnished wood finish. She was really gone. With all of this, everything happening, and she was just...gone. As his back slackened there, he exhaled, a stinging wetness in his eyes.
He was there for less than five minutes before a thin man in a scratchy-looking tweed jacket and jeans emerged from a shadow, ordered a beer, and turned to him.
-
“Things aren’t going like you planned, are they?” the skinny man crooned. His chin jutted out as he spoke, highlighted by his Van Dyke beard and punctuated with a skew smile.
“Excuse me?”
“It’s a watershed, all this. A period of discomfort. Enlightenment. The kind of spiritual awakening that gives Buddhists hard-ons.”
“Loving the poetry, random bar guy, but shouldn’t you be off somewhere stealing electrical cables?”
The gangly stranger laughed through a sip of beer. “You’re a funny guy. Even funnier out on the street earlier.”
“Excuse me?”
“I saw you. Waving goodbye to the young lady with those big eyelashes of yours. You know, heartache like that’s the first step towards true self-discovery.”
Alex picked up his keys from the counter and mock-saluted the man as he turned for the door.
“This happens to every Anchor, you know.”
Alex stopped and turned to him. “What was that?”
The wiry stranger took another sip of his beer and went over to the pool table in the corner of the room, the yellow teepee from the light fixture throwing an unsettling glow across his face. “The deconstruction of the ties that bind you to your regular life? It takes years, and it starts when you’re just a kid. People come. People go, and the salty sting of adolescence rubs muck into your worldview. Now, though, as an adult? This is when it’s a real bitch.”
“Everyone’s got problems.”
“Not like you, Alex van der Haar.”
Alex felt the blood drain out of his face in a mile-long instant. “Who are you?”
“I could ask you the same question.”
“Yeah, or you could drop my name casually into conversation before I’ve even fucking told you what it is to make some kind of statement. Maybe try to scare me. I’d appreciate it if you chose not to be a wank about this, though, because, as you can no doubt tell from the fresh cast on my arm and the dull rage in my eye, I’ve had a long fucking day.”
“You’re shorter than I imagined.”
“I’m six-feet in heels, but that’ll cost you a little more.”
“Got the hero’s sarcasm, though.” The man laughed and nodded. “Which makes up for the height in spades. Hope you’re still funny when the pawpaw hits the fan, though.”
“You know, it’s the funniest thing,” Alex said, in a tone that wasn’t funny at all. “I’ve spent the last two nights appealing to mysterious strangers to cut their arbitrary bullshit and tell me what they know, and you know what?”
His opponent slammed two rand into the pool table slot, and a bowling-alley rumble clicked out, as the polished balls bounced off the return chamber wall.
“I’m more than a little over all that now.”
“You got fuck-all from the witch, then your woman, and you’re getting frustrated with me,” the man cooed. “And I agree with you, man. It’s crazy the things people expect from you. To be happy with all of this half-truth bullshit? Never knowing when someone’s just going to level with you? Be a little honest? You know what’s even dander than all of that, though? That you always stick around for the whole conversation anyway. Now why don’t you grab two cues while I rack?”
Alex inhaled the situation. There was an air of menace to everything the man was saying. Not that there was any chance of something going down here, with the room quarter-filled with locals. He pursed his lips, then doubled back to the cue rack. They clinked glasses and the strange man broke.
“Corporatism is complete bullshit.”
Alex arched an eyebrow. This man was a caricature of himself—an oversized jacket and shit-kicker jeans hung loosely onto the shoulders of a clear conspiracy theorist. A neatly clipped beard looked out of place beneath a pair of the craziest eyes he had ever seen, bloodshot and wet. This man smelled like stale peanuts, and his words sounded like they should be scrawled across a bus station flyer in crayon. He was a crazy. God, there were too many crazies in this town.
“You should probably let the trading floor know things like that, Chuckles.” Alex sighed, convincing himself already that this creep had picked up on a few lucky threads of conversation. Enough to freak him out. That’s all anyone needs, is just enough to unsettle a person. To throw them off balance.
“Chuck.”
“What?”
“Chuck Daedalus. My name. I realise our introduction was a little non-conventional.”
“Yeah, well, Chuck, um, see above, re: serial killifish.”
“Well, whatever, man, it’s the truth. Businessmen scurry about dousing the world’s gears in imaginary oil. And for what? A system people think is faulty, that only exists in a world full of fucking ghosts. And everyone neglects the na
ming of it all.”
Alex replied with a deadpan casualness, “What do you mean, ‘ghosts’?”
“You know exactly what I mean. Don’t play fucking games with me.”
Alex lined up a shot as Daedalus pulled up a stool. He could straighten his arm, but it hurt like a thousand sons of bitches. The way he felt now, though, this creeping, buzzing numbness seemed completely external to himself. He played, regardless of how it felt, because otherwise, he’d have to sit alone with his own thoughts.
That was something he couldn’t bare just yet. Not now.
“I mean, we trick ourselves into rushing on the experience of it all. We rush tits out there. We forego ever really doing anything, because we’re always doing a dozen things. We grow old, surrounded by our things, all chicken-bone joints and asthma. A well-dressed mannequin in a box. Completely spent.”
He stepped up to the table as Alex leaned out of the hanging light. “Hedonism’s key, but we know that, obviously. Deep inside, everybody understands the life force we cling so preciously to. Their desires. Automatic and fumbling. And the only way to really appreciate it is to walk your experiences out. Like somnambulists, walking a deadmarch into the centre of space on this planet coffin.”
“Yeah, well, David Lynch, as much as your rhetoric is charming the pants off me, we do live in a student town, and I have had the ‘hedonism as a justified lifestyle’ speech from first-years younger and prettier than you.”
Chuck continued, “The lifestyle’s obviously much younger than the reality nexus itself. It’s the best new option on a shit pile of bad news. Money. Power on your own terms. Sex, success.”
Alex hated this jag hole so much. “You know, I hope you and I become best friends.”
Chuck went back to his stool, grabbed his beer and eyed his partner by the pool table, as if for the first time.
“So, how’s your sex life?”
Alex responded with half-hearted cynicism, well and truly over this conversation. “It’s a beautiful and wonderful thing that isn’t any of your fucking business, Captain Appropriate.”
As Alex lined up his next few shots, pain radiating a dull catastrophe through his arm, Chuck spoke, off in the darkness of the smoky room, drinkers filing listlessly in and out around them. “I came up from nothing, you know. Well, we all came out of nothingness. But, as a part of this lie, I started my life as an orphan. My folks died when I was just a slug. I lived with uncles and aunts until my seventh birthday when child services got word my uncle Rory was running a dog fight in the living room.”
“Charming.”
“You know what I realised, though?” he continued, lost to Alex’s sarcasm. “Is, the more you take away, the harder you’ve gotta work for what’s yours.”
Alex looked up from his shot. “What do you want with me?”
Chuck smiled. “I wanna make sure you know what you’ve got.”Chuck circled the pool table, a predator’s shadows under his brow. “If we exist solely in this state of flux, Alex, then our hands in life have already been dealt. The only thing to do is operate against the very canvas upon which we’ve painted ourselves. To do anything else would be infantile and senseless.
“Fuck anarchy. Forget hedonism, even, man, because ultimately, even pleasure is too predictable. Everybody expects it of us. Like bush babies, wide-eyed children in the night, clinging fiercely to some primal, phallic extension of our innermost selves, when the answer is so fucking obvious.
Alex sighed and nodded solemnly. “You’re a nihilist.”
“Burn it down,” he said, breathlessly, “convert the system to ashes and go somewhere quiet to wait for the end once you’re done... Then what you’ve got left, friend, is a beautiful endgame. You’re in the driver’s seat for just long enough to steer the car into a brick wall. A last stand, against the tyranny of reality.”
“Bush babies...”
“Try not to get stuck on the imagery, kid. That would be missing the wood for the trees.”
“You’re still not making much of a point here.”
“You know what? Fuck you and your post-adolescent shit. God, I’d forgotten how much I hate people your age.”
The venom in the way he said that made Alex cringe, something he hoped Daedalus hadn’t noticed. What the hell was wrong with this guy?
He needed to smooth things over. “Look, I wasn’t trying to—”
“You want the short and ugly of it? Fine. Nothing matters. You, everyone you know, all the swarming masses in this town or that? You’re all bullets in a gun, long-since decommissioned. You know it, Alex. You’re bombarded with it, everywhere you go.”
“Yeah, yeah. Everything is transitory, and we all die.”
Chuck hurled his draught against the face brick wall, sending a beer-soaked rain of glass and spittle spraying across the carpeting as he lunged towards Alex. Heads turned as he breathed the next words heavily against Alex’s face.
“Everything is transitory, and we are already dead!
“Love. Family. Friends. The things pretentious fuckwads scribble about on forums and bathroom stalls around the world are actually, genuinely, heartbreakingly meaningless. Hedonism’s no cheap ride, Alex, it’s just inevitable.”
Alex was wide-eyed and silent, as the bar resumed its background hum. Chuck breathed. Alex breathed, in a crystalline moment of diamond-tipped implication and dread.
Chuck pushed off of the countertop with his fingertips, brushing his knuckles against his pocket stitching with a smile as he looked, cocksure, from one end of the room to the other. “All of these people here? They’re nothing—even less so than you or I. And therein lies the beauty. Your life? Can be more than you could ever imagine. The power from an ascension like yours...it’s the one chance you’ll get to pull life in close and motorboat the shit out of it. Or everything could be taken away from you in an instant.”
Alex refused to say anything, so Chuck continued, “I told you earlier, I wanted you to know how much you’ve got. That wasn’t some sweet gesture from me—you’re big enough to handle yourself by now, my boy. I just want to make sure you’re ready to push as hard as possible when I’m ready for you. I’ve been waiting a long time to meet you.”
Alex squinted at him, strangely only now beginning to feel honestly afraid. “Who are you?”
Chuck whispered, in a bar full of people, but his voice carried like death. “Someone who cares, man.”
Jerome, the bar owner, had come out with a pan and a broom. Alex got up from his stool. “I have to go. It was horrible meeting you, and I sincerely hope your juggling freakshow convoy crashes on the way out of town.”
Chuck smiled and raised half the broken glass at him in a mock toast as he left. “That’s okay. I’ll be seeing you around, Van der Haar.”
–
Later that night, Alex was back in Albion’s classroom, asleep in his own bed. The room was quiet again, the clawing shapes and flickering swinglights of before replaced with office-space uniformity and whitewash lighting.
Cynthia was at the whiteboard. She had her back to him, and he was in the back row again. She was writing. Alex stood and approached the board along the side aisle.
As he moved closer, the shapes on the board became equations, sentences trailing off in all directions. Fonts of different sizes wound around and in front of each other. A flat wad of information, purposeful, but outside his comprehension, formed, in its entirety, an intricate and developing web. A thousand intersecting points of data formed an orb, as clear in the haze of letters as if it was all that had been drawn there to begin with.
She was transfixed. Standing at her side, Alex tried to speak to her, to motion for her attention in some way, but she seemed almost afraid to turn and look at him. Dread-focused, her gaze was pinned to the work in front of her.
Frank appeared at his side, now watching Cynthia as she scribbled. Alex looked into his face, trying to make out something he couldn’t put into words. An answer? Some clue? Who was this man? He stared
at a pair of widened, terrible eyes, resting on a body on legs on feet atop a silence which blasted out from the floor beneath them. The man, this familiar stranger, said nothing. And then, their eyes still locked, and his mouth moved, slowly.
“You’d better get that.”
Alex shot awake in his bed to the sound of his phone ringing on the table next to him. He reached over for Jules, realised what he was doing then grabbed the phone instead.
An unknown number. He clicked the green phone button. “Hello?” A thick Jamaican accent greeted him. “Ey flyboy. I hope I didn’t crash y’r beauty sleep.”
“Who is this?”
“Ah, I’ll bet y’ve been askin’ that question a lot t’day, no? A pretty little life, suddenly thrown upside down.”
“Sorry, do I know you? You sound familiar.”
“Well, man, you know, at least life’s going better for you than it did your friend Ruth, no?”
Alex froze in bed. Whoever was taunting him, knew well how to do it. “So, you’re someone else who knows about this reality reflex thing? Let me tell you, man, this is the worst-kept secret ever.”
“Yeah, he said you were a kidder.” The voice cooled to a sudden monotone. “Your buddy Crink’s waiting for you at the campus swimming pool, monami. The longer he, waits, the worse his evening’s going to get.
“Sink or swim, Alex van der Haar.”
–
Alex ran urgently down the cobbled varsity walkways on the way to the pool, cutting through Eden Grove parking lot and around the university’s main fountain. He came out from between the chem and computer sciences buildings, quickly spotting the streetlamp where he had first met Sheila and wondered, for the millionth time, what had compelled him to walk over, talk to her and ruin his entire life.
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