The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction

by Paula Guran

  No, I didn’t dress like that. However much I may have wanted to, I was far too self-conscious, too much of a conformist, to abandon my Polo shirt, jeans, and Converse, not to mention, my blue-and-yellow varsity jacket, an article of clothing I’d worn in all but the hottest or coldest weather since lettering in spring track my sophomore year. My clothes didn’t exactly make me fit in at school – my shirt and jeans were whatever brands were on sale at Marshalls or Kmart – but they didn’t make me stand out. They were like a kind of low-grade camouflage. The jacket drew a few startled looks from the self-identified jocks and their girlfriends; that was all. It might have made me a little less visible as a target for ridicule, which was about as much as I hoped for.

  So if I was so obsessed with invisibility, why did I spend my weekend nights in the company of people whose clothes, hair, everything drew all eyes in their direction, right? To start with, there was a girl. Her name was Lorrie Carter. She was my date for the junior prom. When I asked her to go with me, it was as a friend, because she cocked her head to the right, narrowed her eyes, and said, “As boyfriend–girlfriend, or as friends?” and I said, “As friends,” the tone of my voice implying, “Of course.” Lorrie was attractive. I would have been happy to invite her as boyfriend–girlfriend, but I was reasonably sure she was seeing someone who wasn’t a student at Mount Carmel, and I was desperate for a prom date. To be honest, even had I not suspected she was dating, I would have given the same answer. Unlike you, by the ripe old age of sixteen, I had yet to have a girlfriend. I hadn’t even kissed a girl. During the games of spin-the-bottle I’d taken part in at the couple of sweet-sixteens I’d been to, the neck of the bottle never seemed to point exactly at me; instead, the guys to either side of me saw their nights improve. Too much information, I suppose. The point is, as far as girls went, my self-confidence was nil.

  But Lorrie agreed to go to the prom with me, and about two weeks before the event, she invited me to join her and some of her friends for Chinese food on a Friday night after I was done with work. (I had a part-time job at a Waldenbooks, which I’m not even sure exist, anymore, in a mall that I know doesn’t exist, anymore.) Your grandparents were only too happy to give their permission. Until I turned sixteen, they strongly discouraged me from dating anyone. Once my birthday passed, however, they began to inquire and even nag about my romantic prospects. They had looked dubious at my description of my prom date as a friend. For me to be meeting her for a meal was more in keeping with their expectations.

  If they’d been there for the actual meal, though, any comfort they felt would have evaporated. I met Lorrie and her friends in the main parking lot of Dutchess Community College, whose location I knew but to which I’d been only once, the time I accompanied Uncle Matt to the County Science Fair there. The parking lot is at the foot of the hill on which the campus sits. I remember being surprised at the lights still shining in the windows of the college buildings, the number of cars in the parking lot at nine forty-five on a Friday night. Lorrie and the quartet of friends with her had already picked up their order of Chinese and were passing the open white containers back and forth, some using the chopsticks the restaurant had provided, others opting for plastic forks. Lorrie had the door to her old Saab open and was perched on the edge of the driver’s seat, legs extended, ankles crossed. To her left, a tall guy whose white-blond hair rose above his head in a rooster’s comb leaned against the car, while the remaining guy and pair of girls sat in a half-circle on the blacktop in front of Lorrie.

  At the sight of me, sporting the ubiquitous varsity jacket over my shirt-and-tie work clothes, a collective tense stiffened the group, until Lorrie’s face lit with recognition and she proclaimed, “This is my friend, Michael. He’s my prom date,” and everyone relaxed. One of the girls sitting on the ground held up a carton of food. I took it and the chopsticks Lorrie handed to me. I hadn’t seen chopsticks outside Sunday afternoon kung-fu movies on channel 9, but I slid them from their paper wrapper, snapped them apart, and gave it my best try. The container I’d taken was full of large slices of mushroom and green pepper floating in a spicy blue-gray sauce that numbed and stung my tongue at the same time. Mushrooms weren’t something your grandmother served on a regular basis, by which I mean ever, and I didn’t like the way these ones squirmed in my mouth. I ate enough not to be rude, then exchanged the carton with the sitting guy for one full of fried rice, whose taste I greatly preferred; although I spilled more of it than I ate. I hadn’t known to bring anything to drink with me, but no one else had a beverage, either, so I guessed it was okay.

  It was a strange night – the hour and a half of it I spent with Lorrie and her friends before I had to speed home to miss my curfew by only a little. I guess it’s always a bit awkward when you meet a new group of people, but the few times this had happened to me previously, it hadn’t taken long for me to flip through my list of general high-school-related topics and find one that would allow us to pass the time pleasantly if blandly enough. Where do you go to school? How is it? Really? Or, You listening to anything good? Bryan Adams? Yeah, I love the video for his song, “Heat of the Night.” (Don’t you laugh at Bryan Adams.) These guys, though – it was like talking with people who spoke, not another language, but a dialect so profoundly removed from your daily speech, you could pick out only every third or fourth word if you were lucky. School? With the exception of Lorrie, everyone there went to a different private school I’d heard of but otherwise knew nothing about: Heartwood Academy, Most Holy Temple, Poughkeepsie Progressive School, George Rogers; although, from their conversation, it wasn’t clear how much any of them knew about their individual schools, since their days apparently consisted of skipping class, in-house suspension, and blowing off school altogether. If I tell you how shocked I was to hear people comparing notes on the best way to forge a hall pass, I realize how naïve, how sheltered that will make me sound, but I was both of those things. I might have thought about missing Calculus, but fear of being caught – and punished – by your grandfather kept the thought from becoming action. Parents, though, and any reprisals they might threaten, were of scant concern. Even Lorrie talked with cheerful disregard of calling her mother an uptight bitch for asking her why there were so many absences listed on her last report card.

  As for music . . . I liked to think of my tastes as fairly eclectic, extending from Michael Jackson to Prince to Bruce Springsteen to Madonna (although I wouldn’t admit the last one), plus a few bands who were mildly off the beaten track: INXS, U2, Talking Heads. (While I’m sure my examples will seem painfully parochial to someone of your generation, I would make the case that, say, Bad, Sign o’ the Times, Tunnel of Love, and True Blue cover a much larger musical terrain than you might grant them credit for.) In fact, when talk turned from school to records, I felt a brief flare of hope that I would be able to break what had become a long and uncomfortable silence. However, except for a nod when the guy with the rooster-comb – whose name was Jude – asked if I knew INXS’s Listen Like Thieves, I remained outside the discussion. Bauhaus, Love and Rockets, Dead Can Dance, Pixies, Throwing Muses: I had never heard of these bands, let alone anything they’d done. Other bands – Depeche Mode, The Psychedelic Furs, Siouxsie and the Banshees – I recognized as names attached to songs I’d listened to on the radio, none of which had impressed me one way or the other. You know how it is when you’re talking to your friends about a shared passion. You speak in shorthand. While perfectly intelligible to you, it leaves anyone unfamiliar with it with the sensation of listening to a radio broadcast clouded by static, so that only the occasional phrase or sentence comes clear. It’s the type of thing for which lawyers are constantly criticized, speaking “legalese,” but really, there are a multitude of examples.

  Two events redeemed the night. When a check of my watch showed it was time to go, Lorrie walked me to my car. After I thanked her for inviting me, I’d had a good time, her friends were cool, she said, “I’ve been thinking about the prom.”

>   At those words, my stomach lurched. She was about to announce her decision not to go with me, after all. Tonight had been a test and I’d flunked it with flying colors. I wondered if I’d be able to find another date in time.

  Lorrie said, “Remember when I asked you if we were going as boyfriend-girlfriend, or as friends, and you said, ‘Friends?’”

  I nodded. “Sure.” She was going with her boyfriend. Was it Jude? The other guy?

  “I think we should go as boyfriend-girlfriend.”

  For a moment, I literally did not understand what I had heard. Then, when the meaning caught up with the words that had delivered it, I said, “Really?” I like to think my voice wasn’t too high-pitched and incredulous.

  “Uh huh,” Lorrie said, and stepped forward, raised up on her tip-toes, and kissed me on the lips. It was brief, almost chaste. Before I could respond, she said, “See you Monday,” and was walking away. Fully twenty-five years, a quarter century, have passed since that night in March, and the soft give of Lorrie Carter’s lips is as vivid to me as if she had pressed them to mine this minute past.

  All right, all right: once again, too much information. The other thing that saved the occasion occurred as I was nodding to everyone, saying my goodbyes. Jude stepped away from his position on Lorrie’s car, his right hand held out to me. At first, I thought he was offering to shake my hand, which wasn’t something my friends and I did, but when in the DCCC parking lot . . . until I noticed the black plastic cassette tape in his fingers. “Here,” he said as I took it, “if you like Listen Like Thieves, you might get this.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and slipped it into my jacket pocket. There it stayed until the following morning, when I was searching for my car keys. Do you know, I never asked Jude why he gave the tape to me? There were several moments later on when I could have, but the question always seemed to slip my mind until it was too late. And then it was.

  The fact I’d been handed the cassette in the first place had vacated my thoughts, pushed out by the memory of my first kiss from my first girlfriend. There have been a lot of happy events in my life since then: your birth, my wedding to Liz, completing law school, opening my own practice – those and plenty more, but I’m not sure any of them made me happy in exactly the same way I was after that kiss. My first impulse is to compare the emotion I experienced during the drive home that night to what I felt as a child at some unexpected pleasure, say, your grandfather surprising Uncle Matt and me with a trip to the Roosevelt to see Star Wars. But that’s not it. The smell of Lorrie’s perfume, floral (lilacs, I think) without being overpowering; the faint taste of the mushroom and pepper dish she left on my lips; the momentary press of her body against mine – obviously, none of this is anything like sitting in a darkened theater as spaceships arc across a starscape, exchanging dashes of red and green fire. What is the same is the quality of the happiness which infused each occasion, a certain . . . the word that occurs to me is “purity,” which is accurate enough for me to set it down; although further reflection suggests “uncomplicated” wouldn’t be a bad choice, either.

  By the trip to work the next day, my emotion had moderated, though the early sunlight that made me squint and flip down the visor seemed more intense, more charged with raw, unprocessed beauty, than I’d noticed before. I’d brought the tape with me. There was writing on it, a single word I couldn’t decipher beyond the extravagant “S” from which it unspooled. The word was repeated on the other side, no more legibly. I slotted the cassette into the tape deck, adjusted the volume, and waited.

  Considering how important the tape was to become to me, you’d think my first listen to it would have been an experience to rival Lorrie’s kiss. It wasn’t. The quality of the recoding wasn’t particularly good. A low-level hiss underlay a fuzzy collection of longish songs built around an electric guitar whose heavy reverb kept getting in its own way, keyboards whose pipe organ tones clashed with the guitar, and a singer whose nasal whine frequently disappeared into the competing noise. Neither bass nor drums were especially clear, and what was audible through the din sounded basic, uninspired. Had I been told this was a garage band playing in an actual garage, I would have accepted the description without question. I left the tape on for the twenty minutes or so of the drive to the mall, not so much because I thought the music would improve – hope springs eternal, yes, but there are some albums, just as there are some books, movies, TV shows, that you know early on will not change. They may become more of what they already are, speed further and faster down the road they’re on, but they aren’t going to veer off it. I was more curious to see if I could deduce what had prompted Jude to pass this tape to me. Yes, he’d mentioned INXS, but this was nothing like Listen Like Thieves. That record was crisp, clear, the band’s assorted instruments working with one another and Michael Hutchence’s voice to construct each song. At least on a first listen-through – which I completed during the ride home from work that night and the drive back the following morning – I couldn’t hear any obvious connections. I wondered if the cassette was meant as a corrective to the more popular album, an example of the kind of music I should be listening to. I entertained the possibility it was some kind of joke; although if this were the case, it seemed unnecessarily obscure. Unless that was the point, to demonstrate to me that I was not part of the group. As far as explanations went, it fell pretty firmly under the paranoia column, but such is adolescent psychology.

  When I started the tape a second time, on the way home Sunday afternoon, it was because I was no closer to understanding what I was supposed to take away from this music at its end than I had been at its beginning. To anyone in a similar situation, then or now, my counsel would have been, “Don’t worry about it,” but this was advice I myself was (and am) unable to accept. If someone tells me a work of art’s something special, I will stick with said piece of art until I: a) decide the person who recommended it was right, b) decide the person who recommended it was wrong, or c) decide I need more time with it. If something requires more time, I’ll take as much of it as I require, to the point of years. After my first listen to Jude’s tape, I was pretty close to option b), but enough doubt colored my impression for me to conclude another listen was in order. It didn’t hurt that the guy who’d handed it to me was a friend of my newly minted girlfriend.

  However, the most my repeat play accomplished was to leave the cassette in the tape deck, resulting in a third and fourth exposure on the drive into school, the drive from school down Route 9 to work, and the drive home from work. Nothing clicked. There was no magic “Ah-Ha!” moment when understanding dawned on me. But by the time I was back at the beginning of the tape for run-through number five, a vague sense of what was so significant about the music on it had started to suggest itself to me.

  That music. Once you accommodated yourself to the clash of the guitar and keyboard, and could concentrate on the melody they were fighting over, you realized the band’s songs were basically the kind of music that had filled the airwaves of 1950s radio, the bluegrass-inflected R&B gathering itself into rock n’ roll through the ministrations of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and of course Elvis Presley. In an odd way, The Subterraneans – it would be another couple of weeks until I deciphered their name – were doing something comparable to what a band like the Ramones was – only, where the Ramones were trying to refine the rock song down to its simplest, purest state, these guys were trying to widen it, start with those simple chord progressions, basic melodies, and throw open all the doors and windows. Had I known anything about jazz, then, I would have identified the parallel of starting with a straightforward progression of notes, stretching them into new configurations, and returning to the original arrangement. As it was, I just thought they were addicted to long, strange solos. The more used to the music I became, the more of its lyrics I was able to decode; although large patches of every song remained opaque to me. There were references to feeling like death, and to litter on the street, and to puddles of blac
k water, and to walking around at two am. Someone named Jo-Jo lived in an apartment that was a great place to crash at. There were several mentions of standing outside the house, sometimes a church, and the words “in-between” seemed to find their way into every set of lyrics. At least once, the singer proclaimed, “You’ve got to watch out for the crows.”

  Looking over what I’ve written, I realize I’ve failed almost completely to do justice to the music I listened to constantly, every time I was in the car, and soon when I was in my room – I dug out an old cassette recorder that had a single earplug for quiet listening which practically took up residence in my left ear. I’ve made The Subterraneans sound like a concept band, an exercise in performance art, and conveyed nothing of their immediacy, of the immanence in their songs, the overriding impression they gave that there was something they were on the verge of saying, a revelation they were on the cusp of delivering. I went to sleep with their music filling my ear, and their songs followed me into sleep, into dreams where I stood on the streets of a city I did not know while the wind chased paper bags and Styrofoam cups across the pavement.