Friends and Traitors

by Jarett Kobek

  A meager science fiction section occupied the far end of the ground floor, between fiction and sociology. Mostly paperback and kept in no sensible order, runoff trash stocked on the off chance some loser might wander in, jonesing for his fix of fruity elves and space opera.

  Like me. I was that loser.

  Wedged between Mercedes Lackey and Ted Sturgeon, I found an early-’70s reissue of Thomas M. Disch’s Camp Concentration. Beneath the title and copy advertising THE MOST ACCLAIMED SCIENCE FICTON NOVEL IN YEARS was a painting anchored by the crude torso of a male nude pulled open by its own hands.

  The price was penciled inside the front cover. $2. I dodged yuppies hovering around display tables, and took the book to checkout, a long desk that ran parallel with Broadway.

  —Next! shouted a ginger-haired girl.

  I gave her the book, she looked at it and laughed.

  —This looks terrific, she said.

  —It’s for a friend, I said. I prefer Hemingway.

  —Sure you do, she said. It’s two dollars and seventeen cents.

  NOVEMBER 1986

  Adeline Teaches Baby About Marijuana,

  the Secular Sacrament of California

  Everyone in Wisconsin always said they got high, but other than indulgences on overnight trips for track meets, I never saw anyone with weed. I’d been stoned before coming to New York, but I’d never been flat-out baked, never experienced the expansion and contraction of time that encompasses several weeks of smoking pot.

  Adeline, on the other hand, was from California. She’d grown up with marijuana as a secular sacrament. In Pasadena, in Los Angeles, in the whole of the Golden State, pot was a kind of social punctuation. Adeline was stoned through the four years of her ridiculous private high school. She hadn’t smoked much in college. She said it wasn’t a particularly interesting drug, that she preferred hallucinogens and stimulants.

  But then, at last, finally, without recourse, at wit’s end, Adeline was assigned coursework that she could not complete.

  —It’s dreadful, Baby. I’m bored. This nonsense is related to French theory.

  She wasted a few hours staring into her blank paper, fiddling with sticks of charcoal, but never making a line, not even a smudge. Throwing her hands into the air, she announced her intention. She would get stoned and draw whatever came to her mind. Even if the work produced under the influence was of poor quality, it’d be better than showing up with nothing.

  —This woman wouldn’t dare fail a completed assignment, Adeline said.

  She left the suite and came back twenty minutes later.

  —Do you have it? I asked, embarrassed at the excitement in my voice.

  —What do you think I’ve been doing?

  —Can I see it?

  She laid out two ounces. Skunk weed, but I didn’t know it.

  —Shall we? she asked.

  I nodded my head.

  —I bought ZigZag papers at the deli, she said. Isn’t it terrible how we regress to childhood at the first sign of trouble?

  She coached me as I inhaled, talked me through coughing when the heat hit my lungs, eased me into it. We laughed and rolled around on the dirty carpet. My skin tingled, like there were thousands of metal subcutaneous Q-tips bouncing back and forth against the elasticity of my flesh.

  —What about your work?

  —Oh that. Ha ha ha ha. Well. Well. Oh, that. Ha ha! I shall draw several portraits of Bela Lugosi.

  —Who’s Bela Lugosi?

  —Why, Baby, he’s Dracula! Capes and fangs? 1931? Universal Pictures? Directed by Tod Browning? He doesn’t drink wine? In your ignorance, darling, you’re nothing but a philistine!

  —Is that the assignment?

  —Fuck my teacher and fuck her assignment.

  Her hand ran across the paper, leaving behind a trail of dark smudges and rough lines.

  —There are several bookstores on Hollywood Boulevard which cater to the cineaste. Larry Edmunds, Pickwick, Book City. You can find any number of publications on the cinema. I have quite a library in Pasadena. The Golden Age of film remains in Los Angeles, no matter the grime, if only you know where to look.

  I couldn’t see any discernible shape in Adeline’s drawings, but I found myself peering into and through them, my thoughts going free association.

  —Why do you talk like that? I asked.

  —Whatever do you mean?

  —You speak like someone from the past. But you can’t repeat the past.

  —Can’t repeat the past? Of course you can. Why, Baby, I’m a positive fraud. My accent is as affected as yours. It’s sheer insecurity, darling.

  Sally came out of her bedroom. We burst into laughter.

  —Was he really from Santiago?

  —So he said.

  —And by their fruits ye shall know them.

  —Whatever do you mean? asked Adeline.

  —It’s just something that someone said once, I said.

  Adeline completed ten drawings of Bela Lugosi. I fell asleep, starving, too high to climb down the ladder. In the morning, Adeline was gone, in class. I sat around. My money was disappearing, fast, and soon I’d have to get a job. The thought made me sick.

  Around 3 pm, Adeline came into the suite, bursting with success.

  —The Belas went over swimmingly, she said. I suspect they’ll be my best grade of the semester.

  We had two ounces left. You can give it away or you can smoke it. Adeline rolled a joint. I put in my own efforts, but I couldn’t achieve the same crisp California finish, my attempts disintegrating halfway through. We got high and wandered the streets, New York looking somehow different. The mundane was not made magical, but subtly altered. Purple clouds floated in the night sky, backlit by inexplicable luminescence.

  Then we were just stoned. Adeline may have bought more pot. Which was easy enough, the park was full of dealers. It started snowing. Through the window, I could see every individual flake. I could see past the park, out toward the river, but I couldn’t see the river, but I sensed the river, the river lapping against the jagged edges of the city, and beyond the river, Brooklyn, pulsing like a heart, a whole other city that was the same city. A backwater to which we’d only gone twice, on the BMT L all the way to Canarsie. A Polish kid from the design department at Parsons lived there with his family. He’d thrown a few parties. Adeline insisted that we attend. I watched as a blonde illustration student vomited in the front yard, the hacking sound echoing off vinyl siding. I sensed the modest two-storey house, its walls vibrating across the river.

  Then we were just stoned. Adeline did schoolwork, turned in projects, read books assigned for courses. She had a copy of George Bataille’s Story of the Eye. I asked what it was about. She told me. I promptly forgot.

  —It should change soon, said Adeline. We’re reading the Futurists next.

  Then we were just stoned. I watched television with Sally while Jane scoffed. I hadn’t watched television since Wisconsin. There was a program called Alf, about a furry orange space alien with a huge nose that enjoyed the taste of cats and crashed with a human family. I wondered if Thomas M. Disch watched Alf. There was a program called Golden Girls, about four nonagenarian female retirees who were crazy horny for all the withered and desiccated flesh of Florida. There was a program called Starman. This was my favorite. I have no idea what it was about. Then we were just stoned. I stopped watching television. Adeline read more books.

  Our pot ran out. Adeline grew tired of it, I grew tired of it. A week contracted, my brain brittle like a dried-out sponge. We were no longer stoned.

  I walked to Rockefeller Center. Workers were in the process of putting up the Christmas tree. It wasn’t lit. No one skated on the ice. I thought that the walk would clear my head, cold wind whipping through my absurd clothes and my yellow hair.

  I considered taking the subway back downtown, but walked home instead. Broadway between 40th and Union Square is a no man’s land, especially at night. I was alone except for the homel
ess and stray professionals. Closed stores, closed everything.

  Back at Union Square, I walked to the south end, checking to see if Adeline’s light was on. It was. I didn’t want to see her, didn’t want to see anyone. I walked down University Place to Washington Square. NYU kids were in the park, along with drug dealers and the tents and punks and junkies. I sat on a bench, remembering this guy named Peter. We’d gone to high school together.

  He died in our junior year, victim of an undiagnosed medical condition, born with holes in his underdeveloped lungs. We weren’t close but the school was small. Besides, I was an athlete. People always wanted to be my friend. Peter was a guy that I saw, spoke with, waved at. And then he died.

  What would life be like if he hadn’t? Where would he have ended up? Like his parents, I guessed, the long disappointment after his youth terminated into marriage and kids and a job that he couldn’t stand, waking up every morning with a hot spike of acid reflux as he drank his obligatory coffee and then falling asleep with another as he drank cheap whiskey. Peter was a simple guy, an easy case. This was beyond his imagination. All of it. Adeline, Union Square, Washington Square, Alphabet City, Polish kids from Canarsie who attended Parsons, guys who pretended they were from Santiago, illustration students in pink leotards unable to hold their liquor, Peggy Sue’s time-traveling panic attack, three solid weeks of smoking pot for no reason beyond general apathy. I’d spent two months in New York convinced of my own righteousness, convinced of the absolute necessity of being here, but what if I was wrong? What if New York was just a different flavor of bullshit?

  A homeless couple got into a fight, the woman beating the man, the man crying alcoholic crocodile tears. I thought about walking farther south, maybe all the way to Battery Park, but decided against it, figuring I’d better head back.

  At 31 Union Square West, the doorman buzzed me in. His name was Bill. He was about fifty-five years old, maybe a little older. He always wore a baseball cap and a brown leather bomber jacket. Like all the doormen at 31 Union Square West, he was Black. Very few residents of the building, students included, were Black.

  One time Adeline and I were stoned, going out to buy junk food. She had her period. Bill stopped us on the way out and asked:—Where you going?

  —To the deli, I said.

  —What for?

  —Candy, said Adeline.

  —You don’t need to feed that girl candy, said Bill. She’s sweet enough.

  I opened the door to 6B. Adeline sat at the table, hunched over pieces of paper. She was dressed down. Gray sweatpants, which I’d never seen her wear, and a heavy black wool sweater. She’d brought her turntable into the common area, playing loud enough to shake the whole room: Let’s sway / you could look into my eyes / let’s sway under the moonlight / this serious moonlight.

  —Baby!

  Adeline turned to the record player and lowered the volume.

  —Baby, asked Adeline, wherever have you been?

  DECEMBER 1986

  Baby Talks to Thomas M. Disch

  Presented as the found diary of its protagonist, Thomas M. Disch’s Camp Concentration moves through the space of about a year. Louis Sacchetti is imprisoned by President Robert McNamara for dissidence during the ongoing Vietnam War. Shortly after the novel opens, Sacchetti is moved to a secret prison by the name of Camp Archimedes, an installation run by scientists in service of the U.S. Army.

  Unlike Sacchetti, the other prisoners at Archimedes have been collected for their subnormal intellects. Upon arrival, these unlucky few are dosed with an experimental form of syphilis. In addition to the well-known problematic aspects of contracting the Spanish Pox, this iteration of the disease accelerates its infection time, achieving a near-instant form of its tertiary stage, destroying the normal structures and containments of the human brain.

  The end result? Its victims are transformed into the bearers of genius-level IQs. They experience frantic bursts of creative and cerebral spontaneity. Former car thieves and card sharks become great scientists and dramatists. One of them, named Mordecai Washington, develops an ongoing fascination with medieval alchemy.

  The book was a long way from Adeline’s imagined robots and spaceships, a huge distance from the garbage that my father consumed like daily rations.

  When you read a book like Camp Concentration, you want to run through the streets, assaulting passersby, grabbing people by their lapels, attempting to shake them from their senescence, spit erupting from your lips, yelling and shouting: DO YOU KNOW WHAT THOMAS M. DISCH HAS DONE? HE HAS WRITTEN CAMP CONCENTRATION AND SOMEHOW ESCAPED BEING PUT IN JAIL! LISTEN TO ME, DO YOU HEAR ME? THOMAS M. DISCH HAS WRITTEN THIS GREAT UNWIELDY THING! THERE ARE OPEN SECRETS IN BOOKS THAT WILL CHANGE YOUR ENTIRE WAY OF BEING! HOW CAN LIFE EVER BE SANE AGAIN?

  One morning in early December, when I’d gone out to get Adeline and myself some coffee, I tried my hardest not to think about Christmas. What would I do over the holiday? I squeezed my eyes half shut, as if the pressure would push out the thoughts, and walked past the crumbling, filthy statue of Lincoln, momentarily distracted, as I always was, by the bizarre sight of the Great Emancipator wearing a toga.

  Nearing the entrance of 31 Union Square West, I watched Thomas M. Disch go through the first door. I hurried to catch up, coffee sloshing in each hand. I don’t know why, I guess to ride the same elevator. Which I did. I moved inside and stood beside Thomas M. Disch. I noticed again how huge the man was, how large in every sense of the word.

  He pushed the round button marked 11.

  —What floor? he asked me.

  —Six, I said.

  The elevator began its slow ascent, creaking and wheezing on its way. I stared at Thomas M. Disch.

  —What is it? he asked.

  —Sorry, I said. It’s just that I loved Camp Concentration. I read it a few weeks ago. I think it’s the best book I’ve ever read.

  —Have you read many books? asked Thomas M. Disch.

  —No, I admitted.

  The elevator reached the sixth floor, going a little high, then readjusting itself back in line with the exit. The door opened. I hesitated.

  —Look, said Thomas M. Disch, you can ride with me up to the eleventh floor. I’ll answer any question you ask, but that’s it. You can’t come inside my apartment.

  The door closed. We continued our ascent.

  —Well? asked Thomas M. Disch. Don’t blow it. This is your moment.

  I wanted to ask about being gay, ask if his gayness impacted the book, whether being gay hurt his career as a writer, whether or not he was a writer because he was gay, whether or not there were a lot of gay writers of science fiction, about what his life was like, about how he got published, about the experience of being published, what was it like having an abstracted segment of his thoughts encapsulated in small bricklike objects floating around the world in a process that he could not control.

  But I couldn’t. Heat rose to my cheeks. I felt myself blushing.

  —I’m sorry, I said.

  —It’s okay, he said. It doesn’t matter. No one ever asks good questions.

  The elevator reached the eleventh floor. When it stopped, Thomas M. Disch pressed the button marked 6. He walked out of the elevator and then turned back and used his foot to stop the door from closing.

  —You seem somehow less horrible than other people your age, said Thomas M. Disch, so I’ll give you advice that I wish someone had given me when I was young and stupid. Would you be fine with that?

  —Yes, I said, please.

  He took off his outrageous hat. He looked right through me. Thomas M. Disch stood before me, ruminating, thinking. He coughed a little bit.

  And then he said:

  —No one is in charge. There is no central authority. There are people who can kill you, people who can put you in prison, people who can ruin you. That’s a marked difference from someone who is in charge. It’s a wide distance from a person being in control. You have spent your whole life believing in the my
th of human competence, of parents, teachers, politicians, accepting the idea that there is a hierarchy of individuals who have worked hard, done the right things, made the proper choices, and been rewarded for such efforts. You think that there is a natural order in which we are each compensated on the basis of our individual merits, that the truly talented and intelligent reside at the top. This is complete fucking horseshit. The people at the top are as moronic, as base and inept as those at the bottom. The ruling class is simply meaner and more ruthless than us troglodytes. If I were you, I’d stop wasting my time with minor novels about experimental syphilis and start paying attention to the way things really work. I’d abandon any hope of a Great White Father who will save you from yourself. I’d stop pretending like your government and your society possess the capacity to handle any of their ongoing existential challenges. They don’t. Nobody saves anybody. Everyone flails around. Nothing works. All of life is a horror show. Even the people you love will reveal themselves as little more than bags of shit. The whole world is fucked. You might as well become someone who does the fucking.

  Thomas M. Disch pulled his foot away. The elevator door closed. Heat from the coffee burned my hand through the flimsy paper cups.

  Twenty-one years later, he shot open his head and blew out his brains. He was still on the eleventh floor. He pulled the trigger on July 4th.

  JANUARY 1ST, 1987

  Adeline Meets Her New Boyfriend

  We’d just rung in the New Year 1987, an apartment somewheres in the East Village, tinsel and cheers around us. A gauche person actually crooned “Auld Lang Syne.” I considered the drug situation, wondering if there wasn’t a purse floating about with an ’86 vintage of cocaine. Baby spake to me, saying, “Adeline, watch out, that Kurt Vonnegut guy is coming over.” I hadn’t the slightest, so Baby said, “Come on, you remember, this is the guy who always talks about Kurt Vonnegut.” I hadn’t the slightest.

  “Well, Baby,” said I, “this fellow sounds quite the dreadful bore.”