Speechless, Megan watches as I shrink into nothing and disappear.
29 INFINITY IS ARTIFICIAL
There are things I miss about Earth. I loved the way my mother made a pork roast and I loved getting up in the mornings super early and being the first to see the sun, jogging around the neighborhood in nothing more than terry underwear knowing that everybody else was sleeping. Once in summer 1978 I ran my daily jog naked and if anybody saw me, they never phoned the cops. Even more than sex, that solitary jog remains my most potent body memory of Earth—the air and the sun and the pads of my feet landing on Rabbit Lane. What else? Oh, there was an owl that lived in the tree behind the house. Its roost was bang outside my window and each night around sunset it came out and swooped its long floppy wings—like an Afghan hound's ears. It used to fly into Karen's yard on the hill below mine and catch mice. I used to watch Mrs. McNeil feed it meat scraps but she never saw me, but I know for sure Mrs. McNeil was watching me quite clearly the summer afternoon before eleventh grade when I was mowing the back lawn in my red Speedo. Saucy old broad! I popped a rod and I know she noticed it.
Regrets? I have no regrets about life. I didn't live long enough to make a mess of it. But then I never really had any pictures in my head of adulthood. Had I made it that far I probably would have floundered like the rest of the gang.
I've been watching my friends over the past year or so—ever since Karen woke up. Karen can't remember, but she was with me for much of the time she was in her coma. She receives her 'extra' information in the same way I do—in fits and snatches that make no sense at the time, filled with maddeningly blank stretches.
The technicalities of my visits are strict. My current appearances are only allowed to be brief—I'm allowed only X amount of time to visit the old crew and in these brief stretches I have specific goals that have to be met.
Goals—that word sounds like I'm crew chief at McDonald's or something. But you know, every second of our life we're reaching goals of some sort. Every single second of our lives we're crossing a finish line of some sort, with heaven's roaring cheers surrounding us as we win our way forward. Our smallest acts—crossing a street, peeling an apple, giving Miss January the one-hand salute—are as though we are ripping an Olympic ribbon to thunderous applause. The universe wants us to win. The universe makes sure we're winning even when we lose. I wish that I could have run naked through the streets every moment of my life.
But I think I'm ahead of myself now. Now I have to go see Linus, up on the highest point of the mountain suburb where one can see far over the curved ends of the Earth, the United States and over to the Olympic Peninsula. The sky is clear as a lens. To the east stands Mount Baker a hundred miles away—an American Fuji: solid as lead, white as light.
Linus is thinking about me, and he's thinking about time—about death, infinity, survival, and those questions he sought answers toback when he was so young. He was the only one of us who ever asked questions bigger than where the night's party was scheduled to take place. I've always respected his opinion.
He's sitting on the warm hood of his Humvee, which is parked at the top of the driveway of the film shoot location from a year ago. The film trucks and trailers are still parked on the street. The silent city, pocked with burns and sores and rashes, is spread below him.
In the midst of this serenity comes a surflike roar and then a catastrophic bang. An image flashes through his mind: his drunken father slamming the dinner table with a fist. The ground booms and Mount Baker in the east erupts with a fire pole of lava shooting up into gray, cabbagey Nagasaki ash clouds. A shock wave ripples across the land and throws Linus onto the ground with another boom. The glass in nearby houses shatters.
"Oh, man—"
The spectacle is gorgeous and voluptuous and sad. Sad in that so few people will ever even see it or know about it. Linus isn't even sure if an erupting volcano counts as news. "News" no longer exists, and Mount Baker might just as well have erupted on Jupiter. This is the point when I appear.
"Hey, Linus."
"Jared—hey!—I mean, look at that! I mean—oh man, I sound like a cretin, but look at that volcano."
"I know. It's cool. So beautiful it almost hurts."
Mount Baker stops shooting lava, but continues blowing staggering plumes of ash and steam that are now melting ever so slightly in the easterly winds, off toward Alberta, Idaho, Montana, and the Dakotas. Linus is torn between watching the eruption and speaking with me. "Jared! Man, I missed you so badly." Linus tries to hug me, but he ends up hugging himself around his chest. "Jared—let me look at you." I hover above the ground, shining and radiant as always. "You look so young, Jared. Like a puppy, so young."
"You were this puppy-young once, too."
"It was a long time ago." "Yeah."Linus looks me over more. "You missed so much that happened in the world after you died. Did you see any of it?"
"Enough, I guess. I've been busy, kinda."
"We threw your ashes out into the ocean. Your dad chartered a sailboat. The day was clear like today. We said prayers on the boat."
"I was there."
"Yeah. It was beautiful. Your parents were so nice." Linus scans the plume again. "We never got used to your dying, you know. Richard especially. And then Karen went into the coma and I think it wrecked Richard's life. I guess there must be a connection between you and Karen. I mean, here you are now."
"Here I am."
"Can you tell me what that connection is? I mean, between you and Karen and the rest of the world going away."
"Blunt or what! Okay, Linus—I'm going to be telling you things soon enough, but not right now, okay?"
"Jeez—you and Karen. Why does everything need to be so mysterious? Me, I've tried to make sense of everything over the past year and haven't been able to descramble it at all."
"It's not anything you might expect. By the way, what has the past year been like for you?"
"Scary. Lonely. And quiet! So amazingly quiet. I keep on waiting for people to emerge around a corner or to see plane fly or a moving car. But I never do. I'm still not used to it yet."
"From what I can see, the group of you are handling the situation calmly."
"Let's just thank the drugs for that, thank you. And the videos. And the booze and the canned goods. In some ways it feels as though the world is still the same. At the start, I used to think we'd all feel as if we were waiting to die. Instead it feels as if we're simply waiting— for what I don't know. Waiting for you? I miss so many things about the old world—the way the city used to light the clouds from below, making them all liquid pearly blue. I miss the smell of sushi. And electricity. Fridges. Shopping. New ideas. Oh—I'm married now, too, to Wendy. And I was working in TV.""Yeah, I know about all that."
"Sometimes we all used to feel like a creepy Neil Simon play. Hamilton tried to think of a title and show tunes to go with it. His best title was Five Losers."
"Hamilton—always the witty fellow."
"He's so wacky."
"A real nut."
"He slays me. He really slays me." Linus gathers his breath and looks out at the volcano. He sighs, then says, "Jared, tell me something: Is time over?"
"Huh? Meaning what?"
"I've been thinking about this so much. When I say time I mean history, or … I think it's human to confuse history with time."
"That's for sure."
"No, listen. Other animals don't have time—they're simply part of the universe. But people—we get time and history. What if the world had continued on? Try to imagine a Nobel Peace Prize winner of the year 3056, or postage stamps with spatulas on them because we ran out of anything else to put on stamps. Imagine the Miss Universe winner in the year 22,788. You can't. Your brain can't do it. And now there aren't any people. Without people, the universe is simply the universe. Time doesn't matter."
"Linus, you spent years roaming the continent looking for all sorts of answers, didn't you?"
"I did. In Las Vegas especially. It was a s
hithole, but it gave me space to think. And you're not answering my question, Jared."
"I will. Did you reach any conclusions in Las Vegas?"
"No. Not really. I thought I was going to see God or reach an epiphany or to levitate or something. But I never did. I prayed so long for that to happen. I think maybe I didn't surrender myself enough—I think that's the term: surrender. I still wanted to keep a foot in both worlds. And then this past year I've still been waiting for the same big cosmic moments, and still nothing's happened—except you're here and instead of feeling cosmic, it simply feels like we're cutting gym class and coming up here for a butt. Your arrival seems somehowappropriate; I wish I could feel more awe. I wish you could be here all the time. We're so bloody lonely."
Another smaller rumble tickles the ground and we can see lava flows treacling down Mount Baker's slope. Linus wants to blurt words so I let him: "Jared, I know God can come at any moment in any form. I know we always have to be on the alert. And I know that day and night are the same to God. And I know that God never changes. But all I ever wanted was just a clue. When do we die, Jared?"
"Whoa! Linus—it's not that easy. I don't have that kind of exact answer."
"Nobody ever seems to dish out the real answers."
There's a strangely uncomfortable pause, and I try and switch moods: "Look at Mount Baker," I say. "Remember that ski weekend there when we trashed the transmission in Gordon Streith's Cortina?"
"I kept the gear-shift knob as a souvenir."
The lava now burns gullies through the mountain's glaciers and steam rises as high as a satellite. Linus feels calm and his voice becomes gentle: "I guess this is what the continent looked like to the pioneers back when they first came here, eh Jared? A land untouched by time or history. They must have felt as though they were walking headlong into eternity, eager to chop it down and carve it and convert it from heaven into earth. Don't you think so?"
"Yeah. The pioneers—they believed in something. They knew the land was holy. The New World was the last thing on Earth that could be given to humankind: two continents spanning the poles of Earth— continents as clean and green and milky blue as the First Day. The New World was built to make mankind surrender."
"But we didn't," Linus says.
"No, we didn't."
"But time, Jared—is it over? You never said."
Linus knows he's on to something, but I'm unable to give him an answer. "Not quite yet."
"Again, nobody has full answers. Where's everybody else now— the people who fell asleep? What are we supposed to be doing now?""Linus—buddy—I'm not trying to dick you around. There's a reason for everything."
"Always these eternal mysteries," says Linus. "I don't think human beings were meant to know so much about the world. All this time and all this exposure to every conceivable aspect of life—wisdom so rarely enters the picture. We barely have enough time to figure out who we are and then we become bitter and isolated as we age."
"Wait a second, Linus." I approach him and place my hands on top of his head, making his body jiggle like a motel bed. I say, "There." Linus goes rigid, grows limp, and then swoons to the pavement; I've shown him a glimpse of heaven. "You'll be blind for a while now," I tell him. "A week or so."
Linus is silent, then mumbles, "I've seen all I've ever needed to see."
"Good-bye, Linus." With these words I pull backward, up into the sky, smaller smaller smaller into a blink of light, like a star that shines in the day.
"Well, Hef, I grant you that these seats are comfy, but not nearly as comfy as being dragooned through the grottoes of Fez on a litter carried by four of Doris Duke's seven-foot Nubians."
"Babs, you sassy vixen—make me jealous."
"Shush, Hef—I need to make a transatlantic phone call to the Peppermint Lounge. 'Pardonez moi—est-ce-que je peut parle avec Monsieur Halston?'"
"Sure—call Halston. Last week / had lunch with the Princess Eugenie, Joe Namath, and Oleg Cassini. Lobster Thermador, Cherries Jubilee, and Crepes Suzette. Ha!"
"You tire me, Hef. Please leave."
Hamilton and Pam lounge on the front seat of an unsold Mercedes 450 SE inside the dusty dealership showroom on Marine Drive. The car doors are shut, the tires are flat, and on the seat between the two sits a trove of bric-a-brac connected to their drug use as well as cartons of cigarettes and stray unopened tequila bottles. I appear outside the front window, hovering in the middle of the pane. I glow.Pam shivers. "Umm—honey—I think maybe you should look out the window."
Hamilton is weighing various cones of powder and says, "I'm busy, Babs. I'm hiding my stash of dental-grade cocaine inside Gianni Agnelli's leather ski boots."
"Hey goofball—look up!" I shout; Hamilton turns and I shatter the showroom window and float above the shards through the now-open air toward their car.
"Ucking-fay it-shay," Pam says.
"Oh man, it's Jared."
I lower myself down onto the dealership's floor and then walk across the showroom and into the engine so that my body is half inside the car. "Hi, Pam. Hi, Hamilton."
"Um—hi, Jared," Pam says. The two feel slightly silly being surrounded by so much contraband. Pam giggles.
"Jared—buddy. This is so Bewitched."
"No, Hamilton, it's real life. What are you guys doing inside the car here?"
"We wanted to smell the interior. We miss the smell of new things," Pam says with further titters. "There's nothing new anymore. Everything just gets older and older and more worn down. One of these days there'll be nothing new-smelling left in the world. So we're taking whatever newness we can get." She looks at the dashboard. "Older older older." She lapses into a child's song.
"Old old old," Hamilton adds. "Everything's old. We'd kill for a new newspaper, a freshly mowed lawn, or a fresh coat of paint on something. By the way, great light show this morning at the Save-On. It was like you lifted a rock and everything underneath scurried to burrow into the crap underneath."
They're high and not responding soberly. "Tell me, where else have you been today?" I ask.
"Just you come and have a look." Hamilton and Pam slither out of the car and we go to their pickup truck outside the building. The bed is filled with gems, gold coins, cutlery, jewelry, and other treasures."We raided the safe-deposit boxes at the Toronto Dominion Bank in Park Royal," Hamilton says.
"It's not as treasure-ish as you might think," adds Pam. "There were things like locks of hair, Dear John letters, fishing trophies, blue ribbons, keys, garter belts—not pricey stuff. More like stuff you'd expect to find left over after a garage sale."
"Oh—here's a strange one …" Hamilton says, lifting a plaster casting of a large phallus. On its bottom is felt-penned a date, November 4, 1979, and no other information.
"Must have been a good day for somebody," I say as Pam starts pouring handfuls of diamonds back and forth between her hands and the occasional stray tinkles down onto the pavement, clicking like a camera's shutter. She tosses the diamonds onto the center pile, one at a time. "Pear-shaped, suncrest, radiant, marquise, baguette, my little best friends." She looks toward me: "You're real, Jared, aren't you— it's not just the drugs?"
"I'm real. I'm like a biology test come back to haunt you."
"Oh, wow," Hamilton says.
"Oh wow? I come back to life and all you can say is, 'Oh wow?"
"Jared," Hamilton says, "Mellow out. I seem to remember you were the one who had fourteen people toking their brains out inside your parents' Winnebago the night Elvis died."
"Exposing hypocrisy in itself doesn't make you a moral person," I say.
"Huh?" Pam says.
"Oh, don't be so thick, Pamela," Hamilton says. "He never did have a sense of humor. Jocks never do. Listen to what Jared's say-ing … "
"Don't so-thick me, Heffy-Weffy. I'm the one who cracked the safe today."
"Hurt me, hurt me—"
"Oh Lord. You guys want a miracle to make you go 'oh wow' for real?"
"Dea
l us in, big boy," Hamilton says.
"Very well." I approach them and tap them each on the head."You touch us on the head? That's a miracle? Jared, I—" Pam stops, touches her cheeks, and looks at her body. Hamilton puts his hands to his ears and then falls down on his knees. "No. No. Oh, my. It's—it's real, isn't it, Jared?" Pam asks.
"It's real."
The two go silent; Hamilton crawls across the pavement and lowers his head to the ground, inspecting the dust.
Pam bursts into tears and grabs Hamilton's shoulders and tries to lift him up. Hamilton looks both lost and found at the same time. "Is it what I think it is?" he asks.
"Yes."
He moans. "You mean—we're clean?"
"Yes, you are clean. Your addictions are gone. No withdrawal. No pangs. Nothing." The two unclasp and then come over to me and try to touch me, but as with Linus earlier on that day, they end up batting each other's arms. After this, they stand and do leg squats and stretches and run around the parking lot and spin and look at the cellophane sky.
"It is a miracle. I can think! I'm clear! So clear! I haven't been this clear since—ever. The six wives of Henry VIII! The Fibonacci number sequence! How to make a smooth nonlumpy cream sauce …"
"It's so clean!" Hamilton echoes. "My head inside is clean as a lake! Hydrogen, Helium, Lithium, Beryllium, Boron, Carbon; August, 1969—American talk show host, Merv Griffin launches his late-night CBS show in direct competition with Johnny Carson. Opening night guests include Woody Allen and Heddy Lamarr, but scheduled athlete Joe Namath is a no-show."
"Oh Hamilton—look at the world!"
"It's …"
"Yes …"
The two fall silent; their bodies slacken as though they've realized a friend has betrayed them. Sitting down on the truck's lowered tailgate, they swat diamonds from underneath their bottoms and sit limp.
"Well, well—here we are," Pam says."Clean," Hamilton says. "And I don't feel like getting high. You?"
"No," replies Pam. "I like being inside my own skin again." A seagull shrieks above them and they look up. "There's still birds," Pam says.
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