“Look through it,” she said.
“I can’t look through it, for Christ’s sake, Aim.”
“But you can,” she said. “It’s like anything else. Really. I mean, it’s even like boxing.”
“What?”
“Sure. Same mental thing, in a way. Like you throw the punch through, as if the jaw wasn’t even there. And it’s not. Neither’s the marble. I mean it’s there, of course. But also it’s not there. And if it’s not, well, then you can throw your punches right on through. You can do anything. Anything.”
“Aimee, come on.”
“Don’t be afraid.”
“I’m not afraid.”
“Honey.” She got up and came to me and hugged me. “It’s all right.”
I fought it, but the mote around my heart filled with tears and I sobbed into Aimee’s hair, “I want everything to be normal again.”
“Darling, I know. It’s okay, it really is.”
But it wasn’t. The rational world tilted, threatening chaos, and my anchor was talking phantom punches.
“It’s accelerated evolution,” she said, excited. “You know, all the little grays, and the crop circles and UFO’s and synchronicity and deja vu, just all of it—those things are projections, the evolutionary psyche of human potential manifesting in consort with the conscious Universe. Do you see? Oh, I’m not saying it right. But listen. You didn’t think real aliens looked liked X-Files puppets, did you?” She laughed. “The Harbingers are real. All the stuff happening now is real. It’s to get us going before it’s too late, to get as many of us going as possible. Before we completely fuck over the planet and the whole human race.”
We were still holding each other, but now it was like we were two separate people and it didn’t matter that I had been inside of her countless times and we had spoken every living shred of our lives to each other. She was just somebody I was holding. In her excited voice I heard my sister’s delusional rantings while Dad hunted drunkenly for his car keys.
“Don’t, Burt,” Aimee said. “You’re going away. Please don’t do that. You could be so close, if you wanted to be.”
I continued holding her but the good between us was gone and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. I don’t think I was afraid. I don’t know that fear had anything to do with it.
“It’s like being shut up in a little room,” Aimee said. “A room with no windows and a closed door. And it’s fine because you don’t know you’re in a little room, you think you’re in the middle of the world. But what if you knew? What if all of a sudden there was a window and you could see there was a universe of marvels right outside, and all you had to do was open the door, because it’s not locked or anything. It’s just a door waiting for the person in the room to wake up enough to open it.”
All this while she looked earnestly into my face, her eyes shining.
I said, “Aim, I am so tired.”
*
Most people weren’t onboard for the Evolution, and things got pretty bad. The End Is Nigh contingent. Economic collapse. Suicides, lots of suicides. By July I had given up opening Bean There. I just wanted to sleep, perchance not to dream.
Then reality snapped back, and I woke one morning with some kind of hangover and—unknown to me—all my recent memory furniture drastically re-arranged. Harbingers? Never heard of ’em.
The natural response to hangover is aspirin and coffee. I dressed, grabbed my keys, and strolled down to Bean There to open the doors, only vaguely recalling that hard times and some kind of throbbing apathy had compelled me to close the place for a few days.
Open it and they will come. I guess I wasn’t the only one with a hangover. I worked my ass off that first day, riding a caffeine bullet train to stay focused. Aimee was not around, and I sorely missed her. What in hell had we been fighting about, anyway? I closed up at seven, after a nice relaxing twelve hour day. My CLOSED sign depicted a sad little coffee cup with wavy steam hair.
I got on my cell and called Aimee, because whatever we’d been fighting about wasn’t worth it. Dimly I seemed to recall some kind of tiff over her latest artistic indulgence. She picked up on the second ring.
“May I speak with Ms. Rodin, please?”
“Funny guy.”
“Aim, I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“I, ah, dunno.”
She laughed, sounding extra perky and normal and non-pissed-off.
“So how’s it going?” I said. “If I come over will you lure me upstairs with promises of showing me your erotic statues?”
“You’ve got the only erotic stonework I’m interested in, mister.”
“I am so there.”
*
And later, during a wine and underwear moment in her kitchenette, I said:
“I could really use you at Bean There, tomorrow.”
Teasing: “Like you used me today?”
“With variations, only not as slippery, and you’ll have to pull espressos, too. Aim, business is picking up in a major way. I can’t even believe I closed down for a while. I must have been nuts!”
She was quiet awhile and easy within herself. I was the one with jitters all of a sudden. On the way over it had occurred to me that I wanted to marry Aimee, that I’d always wanted to. It was nothing other than fear that had kept us in separate apartments, which had allowed our lives to intersect in work and love-making, but not in the long sweet haul of committed love itself. My fear, not hers; Aimee was fearless in all things.
So I’d jacked myself up to ask her, but before I could get the words out she dropped a safe on my head.
“Burt, I think I’m going to do some traveling, see some things, maybe do a little good in the world.”
“You’re joining the Peace Corps?” I didn’t know what she was talking about, and I struggled to keep the irritation out of my voice.
“No, silly. More of a private thing.”
“I thought we were partners.” I couldn’t even mention the marriage thing. Suddenly it wasn’t irritation I felt. My throat tightened down with emotion.
“We could still be pards,” she said, taking my hand. “But you’d have to be unafraid to come with me, Burt.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Where are you going, really?”
“Burt, what if there was no Time or Space, and if you wanted to be somewhere, wherever and whenever, you could just be there? What would you pick, what would make you feel safe and happy?”
It wasn’t what she said exactly, it was some upheaval within myself. I wanted to cry but didn’t.
“Does opening day at Disneyland count?” I said, thinking I was being sarcastic.
She laughed. “Sure.”
“Okay, I pick that. Now can we talk sense?”
“Won’t there be a lot of people?” she said.
“Yeah, but it’s the happiest place on Earth, so they’d all be happy, right? Aim, come on. Don’t go. Please.”
“I’m sorry, Burt.”
She hugged me, and I wanted to melt into her but that wasn’t happening.
“I finished my sculpture,” she said. “I want to give it to you.”
“Going away present? Thanks.”
“Shush. Nobody goes anywhere, not really. I love you. Let’s call it the anniversary present, okay?”
“Sure, okay.”
“Don’t be sad.”
She had to be kidding with that one.
*
I called the next day but she didn’t answer. After I hung the CLOSED sign out I walked over to her apartment. A white envelope with my name printed on it was taped to the outside of her door. I ripped the envelope open, but all the note said was “Don’t forget your present. Love, Aimee.”
That damn rock.
The garage was completely bare except for the marble block pushed into the corner on its rolling cart. The air smelled dry and the cement walls held the heat in. The last of the evening sunlight fell short of the block, which, in s
hadow at least, appeared as unworked and raw as the last time I’d seen it, its blunt face only slightly scarred by Aimee’s amateur chiseling.
A sheet of printer paper was taped to the block. The sheet had been written upon, but I couldn’t decipher it from where I stood. And I didn’t want to get any closer. I just didn’t.
The daylight terminator crept across the oil-stained floor, almost to the toes of my shoes before I imagined Aimee whispering Don’t be afraid.
But I was afraid.
Nevertheless I took a tentative shuffling step into the shadow, then another, and then I was close enough to read the paper. THIS IS YOURS, BURT. MY MIGHTY MAN! And something about Aim’s familiar, jokey intimacy took the hex off and impelled me forward.
Close up, Aimee’s sculpture was as artless as any random hunk of stone you might happen to stumble upon. Wondering if there was something chiseled into the side facing the wall, I bent my back and braced my feet to pull it around—and instead fell flat on my ass.
Because the thing on that cart weighed no more than a basket of feathers. It kept rolling around after I fell, and stopped with the sheet of paper facing me again.
I sat stunned for a while, then turned my hands up and looked at them. White eggshell-like flakes clung to the sweat on my fingers. I crawled over to the block and reached out with the spread fingers of my right hand. The outer shell of the sculpture fell away with an airy crackle where I touched it.
I brushed my trembling hands over the block like a palsied conjuror, and it collapsed in an avalanche of rice paper-thin marble flakes, as if it had been held together by nothing more substantial than a hopeful thought.
What remained was something like a Christmas ornament. One fashioned from and held up by polished marble nets of filamentous intricacy, as if spider-spun. Aimee had created this wonder inside the block.
Which was impossible.
An impossible artifact from that newly forgotten world of teleporting housewives and stumpy, non-deciduous aliens, of Evolutionary human consciousness. Capital E. Bleh.
A worm uncoiled in my stomach. The room seemed to sway, and I had nothing to hold onto. Kneeling on the hard cement, my hands clenching, a singlet of sweat oozed out of my body. The object before me was a memory ornament, intended to remind me of the impossible world of E. And I wanted it to go away.
I squeezed my eyes shut. Aim. But I was on my own. Memory ornament, invitation to the impossible—it was still my choice to accept or reject it. I knew amnesia was hovering in the foyer of my consciousness, waiting. The chaos of a world without rules—at least the rules I was used to—also hovered out there. I opened my eyes and moved incrementally toward chaos, because that’s where my girl was.
The light changed. Heat lay on my back like a wool blanket fresh out of the dryer. I didn’t have to turn around, I knew that. But maybe it wasn’t chaos out there. Maybe it was Freedom. Freedom from fear. Capital F.
I stood up and brushed the marble flakes off on my pants. Then I turned.
A vast and eerily silent crowd milled beyond the garage. Thousands of people, and an ersatz castle, and a high blue sky without clouds where a dozen or so giant soap bubbles drifted serenely, unnoticed by the multitude.
All was utterly quiet until I crossed out of the garage, and then it struck me like a Phil Spector Wall of Sound, the surf roar of the crowd and brassy clamor of a New Orleans street band. It was hot and dazzlingly bright. A trombone bell flashed the sun at me. I shaded my eyes. Mickey Mouse was working the crowd. Then I saw Aimee, waving. I felt a big goofy grin on my face, which was appropriate. “I’m going to Disneyland,” I yelled and ran to her.
Girl in the Empty Apartment
Someone was going to die.
My name is Joe Skadan. These were the days of phantom invaders, unexplained disappearances, and Homeland insecurities. I stood in the back of the Context Theater on Capital Hill, Seattle, nursing a few insecurities of my own; the bottle of crappy Zinfandel hung loosely in my left fist, demolished over the duration of the third act. Me and the bottle. Free tickets guaranteed there were only two empty seats in the house. Mine and the one my girlfriend was supposed to have occupied. Cheryl hadn’t come, though, and I couldn’t take sitting next to that empty chair.
The third act ended with the monologist (my cranky alter ego) putting his hand over the gun on his desk while the lights adjusted, turning him into a dark cipher. Artsy as hell. The prop gun was actually my own .38, minus the ammo clip and none in the chamber. Kind of a family heirloom, stepfather-to-son. The question is left hanging: Who’s he going to use that gun on? This character’s interior darkness had become a filter that warped the entire world.
A beat of silence followed the final lighting adjustment. It was hot and stuffy in the theater. Programs rustled. Somebody coughed. Then the applause started, thank God. There were even a few appreciative whistles. The lights came up and the cast took their bows.
I slumped against the wall and breathed out. The Only Important Philosophical Question, my first fully staged play, had successfully concluded its maiden performance in front of a live audience. I was twenty-six years old.
Fifty or so sweaty audience members shuffled past me. The Context had been a transmission shop in a former incarnation, and not a particularly well-ventilated one. I hopped onstage and grabbed my gun, put it in a paper bag, then wandered outside for a smoke. In those days I smoked like crazy—the days after the advent of the Harbingers. Or as I preferred to think of them: the mass hallucination. One morning the world woke up with a headache. Dreams became strange, disturbing, inhabited by “Harbingers,” which the dreamers occasionally described as conscious trees, or something. Rumors abounded. The juiciest being that large numbers of people had disappeared without a trace.
Some of the audience lingered in front of the theater, talking about the play. Mostly they seemed impressed by all that stage blood in the second act fantasy. It was weird to hear strangers discussing my work. I didn’t much like it, and wished I could stuff the play back inside my head, where it had festered in its lonely way for years.
As the last of the audience wandered off I noticed a girl sitting on a patch of grass looking at the moon. Tear tracks shone on her cheeks like little snail trails. She was only about eighteen. Cheryl’s failure to show had cut deep, and my instinct was to slink off and lick the wound. Instead I asked this girl if she was all right.
“Oh, yes. It’s just so beautiful.”
I flicked ash, adjusted my glasses, followed her gaze. “The moon?”
“Sure. I’ve been staying in the Arctic Circle up there.”
“Doesn’t that get cold?”
“It’s not that kind of Arctic Circle.”
She wiped the tears off her cheeks with the heel of her hand and stood up—rather gracefully, considering the dress she wore. A tarnished gold fabric, intricately pleated, that wound around her like flowing water, or the ridged skin of some exotic tree. She had a generous mouth and kindly eyes.
“You’re Joe Skadan,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“You wrote the play.”
I nodded. “How did you know me?”
“You’re famous on the moon.”
“All right.”
“Can I walk with you, Joe?”
“If you want.”
“I’m Nichole.”
In my mind I depersonalized her with a character tag: MOON GIRL. I did this sort of thing more and more frequently, estranging myself from the world. The part of me that resisted this estrangement grew weaker by the day. Like the child I’d once been, locked in the closet, weeping from belt lashes, subdued and enfeebled by darkness, listening to the sound of Charlie, my step-dad, stomping off to work on Mom next. Before things turned bad she used to swoon about Charlie’s blue eyes, “Just like Paul Newman’s!” Charlie liked to fold that belt over and snap it together with a whip-crack sound, to let me know he was coming. Where there’s smoke there’s fire, he used to say, accusing me end
lessly of transgressions I hadn’t even considered.
MOON GIRL and I walked along. It was one of those pellucid Seattle evenings, the royal sky inviting stars to join the moon. Mechanically, I asked, “What did you think of the show?”
“It was different. Did Camus really say that, about the only important philosophical question being whether or not you should kill yourself?”
“I think so, but I never could verify the quote. Maybe I made it up. Who cares? I thought about calling it, ‘What’s So Grand About Guignol’ but that seemed too jokey, though it fit with the bloody stuff.”
“It’s Woody Allen meets Taxi Driver,” she said.
I looked at her. That description, same wording, was scribbled in a notebook back in my apartment. Coincidences made me uncomfortable.
“Maybe I’m your secret muse,” MOON GIRL said, as if she knew what I was thinking.
“You don’t even know me.”
“Or I do, just a little.”
“That dress is strange,” I said, to change the subject.
“Does it seem familiar?”
“I don’t know.”
The dress almost shimmered, exuding energy. Or maybe I’d had too much wine, or I was a poor judge of energy exudations. Who knows?
“You’ve had dreams,” she said.
“Everybody dreams.”
I thought of my mother’s birch, a little tree she’d claimed as her own even though it just happened to be growing in the backyard of the cruddy duplex we rented. I’d been dreaming about it for weeks now. The tree had been a private thing between my mother and me, excluding Charlie. While he was at work we sat under it for “Elvis picnics,” which meant peanut butter sandwiches and bananas and Cokes. I still remember the checkered pattern of the blanket and the way the leaf shade swayed over us; a portion of my secret landscape. Another was the piece of sky I could see from my bedroom. Sometimes I’d put my comic down and stare at the night of moon and stars, and it was like a promise of freedom.
Arctic Circle. Not the polar regions but a 70s vintage burger franchise Mom used to work in when she was a teenager. My real Dad, another swoony teen, would come in and “make eyes” at her. The way I pictured it was like a scene from Happy Days. Safe and innocent as a chocolate malt. I have only a vague memory of him, and I may even have made that up. Mom had been a romantic all right. The freeway accident that killed my dad took a lot of that out of her, though. And Charlie took the rest. Arctic Circle. I really hated coincidences.
Are You There and Other Stories Page 13