Mixtape for the Apocalypse

by Jemiah Jefferson

  “At least they didn’t fire you,” she murmured.

  “No.” I shrugged. “I don’t understand it. Apparently I haven’t done anything right in months. I guess all those calls I answered correctly don’t count for shit when it’s coming from me because I am such a horrible person. It’s not like they couldn’t get some other know-nothing dumbfuck to fill my chair. Folks are lined up around the block wanting to work for the legendary Link-Up Telecommunications.” Fresh rage swelled out of the nothingness. I had an endless supply, a self-renewing resource.

  “They won’t let you go because they know you’re brilliant,” she rationalized. “You are a good tech. You know this shit. And they know you’re stressed, and you’re not doing this just to piss them off.”

  “Doing what?” I snapped.

  Lise blinked at me, big astonished eyes. “You know you can be a little difficult. You’re just too smart and you’re so far ahead of them, but they’re just . . . y’know.” She sighed and kissed me on the nose. “They think you’re fucking with them. They think you’re trying to piss them off.”

  “But I am,” I protested. “I’m pissed off. I hate that place. I hate the work. I hate them. I’m a piece of shit and I want them to hate themselves as much as . . .”

  She had her hand down my sweatpants (well, her sweatpants, but I was in them) and she began to gently, insistently stroke my penis. I lost my train of thought. All the blood in my body rushed gloriously downward to my groin and settled in my cock, making it achingly hard and turgid in seconds. Lise smiled without looking at me, and edged the waistband of the sweats down, exposing my penis, my black pubic hairs glistening in spider-web curls in the light coming from the street. I could hear cars passing by on Stark Street, the rumble of fruit trucks in the warehouse district. I gazed up at the trees overhead and listened to the sound of her sucking me, gently, trying to be discreet and firm at the same time. Oh, we’d been promising ourselves this for days. I tried to get into it.

  She raised her head and we looked into each other’s eyes, and both our hands met on my prick and stroked it off. I didn’t hold myself back this time, and within less than a minute I wrenched my tool painfully across and shot a silver strand of spunk against the concrete headstone in whose shade we’d hidden. Lise looked at it and smothered an explosion of giggles. “D’you think that’s maybe good luck?” she grinned.

  For some reason I didn’t find it funny. I was overwhelmed with a dizzy sense of doom that required me to close my eyes and grip double handfuls of cemetery grass. In response to Lise, so she wouldn’t see me freaking out, I sang a line from a Duran Duran song—”’The world spins so fast that I might fly off . . .’“ Lise is a sucker for Duran Duran. It worked. She climbed on top of me and started wrestling me, teasing me that I was going to raise the dead. I turned my face away from her so that she wouldn’t see my grimace, partly from the discomfort of having her on top of me, partly from the discomfort of having had a quick, painful, and dirty orgasm, and partly because of the spinning sickness of vertigo that turned rapidly into a splitting headache.

  It was no good. I didn’t deserve this.

  25 September, 9:04 a.m.

  @ Triste. I couldn’t sleep all night. I even drank some wine and smoked a roach Lise left in the ashtray, but I spent the evening looking out the window at the Leatherworks sign, listening for the sound of cars going up Belmont Street so that they wouldn’t startle me when they came into visual range. I couldn’t wait to get out of the apartment and come down here. Lise is probably still asleep—she was really tired last night and she didn’t want to have sex, or talk, or watch TV. She just came in and stripped down to her panties and pulled the quilt over herself. I stood there and watched her relax into sleep, envying her already.

  I brought Ocean Rain for the Triste staff to play. There’s a new waitress here who I hadn’t met before—a pleasant hippie woman, thirty-ish, with a young toddler (a boy, I think) asleep in a car seat behind the counter. She saw me sitting on the sidewalk outside the café before she opened; she let me in fifteen minutes early and let me have a double shot for free. I sat here at one of the back tables away from the window and watched her take the chairs down, wipe down the tables, grind coffee. She put the tape on without giving me any shit about it, which was nice for a change. Nobody else who works here will let me anywhere near the stereo. The sound of it swells gorgeously like an erotic sensation, bigger than in the apartment, more profound, seeping all through me so that I’m twisting about on the chair in the back of the cafe, so fantastic. I love this whole album.

  It is not mellowing me out, though. I’m not sure why. My heart is pounding for no reason, and I’ve barely had half my coffee. It was hammering away all night, really. Not like tachycardia, but like I’d been lifting weights.

  I wish I’d been able to sleep. That’s two nights in a row. Last night I didn’t even try for more than a few minutes. This isn’t good. I don’t really operate well when I haven’t slept. At least I’m not at Link-Up day or I’d be seriously screwed. There are yellow and green circles dancing around the periphery of my vision. When I press my fingertips against my closed eyelids, the bright spots last a long time. But I don’t feel bad. My stomach aches, and my head aches, and I’m having trouble focusing my eyes, but I don’t feel bad. I feel like I could run a marathon.

  I can’t believe there’s a baby in here. He’s awake now—definitely male, I can tell by his expression. Big, dark eyes. The waitress bends over him and she’s talking to him, her flimsy dress tightening over her back, spine ridging, shoulder blades. Damn, she’s a skinny hippie. In contrast her child is plump and very smooth, glowingly smooth, his expression bullying and malevolent. Already. He’s a little tiny miniature Rob. And his mommy is just doting on him. He’s a little Hitler, this bambino, with his buttercream cheeks and fairy lashes. This is my enemy. All things cute on the surface, and hateful and hostile underneath. While I, kind of twerpy and weak on the surface, contain within my mind all things that need to be known or experienced. When people hurt me, they don’t seem to realize that they disrupt the universe. Within each person, there lies an individual cosmos. I, right now, am unable to process that any other cosmos exists, or at least, every other one ought to be exactly like mine. But obviously, it’s not. People wouldn’t attack me the way they do if they had even the tiniest ounce of compassion for someone else, any appreciation for the simultaneously precious and infinite cosmos held within.

  Blah blah blahhh. . . What the FUCK was that? What am I talking about? See what happens when I don’t get enough sleep? Carl Sagan takes over my shit. This is the kind of weak, over-intellectual nonsense that got me into trouble in the first place. This is the kind of blather that enrages the Robs, big and small, of the world. Makes them mad. Them. Against me. That’s all there is to it.

  Not a good belch. I think I’m going to be sick.

  “You okay in there?” came the waitress’s voice through the closed bathroom door.

  I couldn’t respond for a few seconds. The espresso had boiled off, and I was dry-heaving, the whiteness of the bowl echoing the impotence of my belly. Lyrics. Filtering through, filling in the empty spaces in my bones and giving me the necessary animation to speak.

  “I’m the yo-yo man always up and down,” Mac sang, “so take me to the end of your tether.” Violins, not gentle or peaceful, but slashing like scalpels; I envisioned myself at the end of a noose, a violin bow slashing the rope, and I fell. I felt it so clearly that I felt my neck snap and the floor rushing up to me. But I never hit the ground. I just kept falling. I groaned, and slammed my forehead into the toilet seat; the sudden pain in my skull brought me back to reality.

  “Hey? Dude?” the waitress called.

  “I’m okay, I’m all right,” I said faintly. “Just . . . need . . . Bunnymen . . .” My hands were shaking so badly I could barely work the flush handle. With the swirl of water, the blinding headache spread from my forehead to encompass the whole skull, my
vision crowded with dancing circles of green and yellow.

  25 September, 9 p.m.

  I didn’t go to the emergency room. It would just be too embarrassing to go past the car-crash victims and go up the counter and say “I can’t sleep and I’m having blackouts.” Sensibly, instead, I went to the store and got some generic headache-p.m. tablets. The weird thing is that I don’t remember leaving Triste. And yet I don’t not remember it. It is liminal. It hovers between seen and not seen.

  However my Bunnymen tape was safe in my pocket so it’s not all bad.

  Lise brought home leftover sushi, but I’m not hungry. Despite my difficult morning, I’m horny as fuck. She is smiling at me from across the room. I think I’ll go eat her sushi—I love me some lady sashimi—and take some more of those p.m. pills, because they don’t seem to be working.

  28 September, 2:30 p.m.

  Slept most of the last two days. Needed it. Thank God. Feel better now. It was worth missing work. I don’t remember calling in, but Lise says that she woke me up yesterday and made me do it. I also apparently fell asleep in the middle of fucking her, still hard. Proving that she is the best woman in the world, she isn’t even mad at me. I will make it up to her.

  I woke up this morning thinking about my father, which happens from time to time—not as much now as when I was little, and more than when I was an adolescent. Something about that threshold of genuine adulthood, post-twenty-two, when you know once and for all that there’s no going back to the way it was. You’re always going to be taller than knee-high (although, not much taller, in my case). You don’t want strawberry ice cream first thing in the morning (and if you do want it, you tell yourself that such an idea is disgusting). The Smurfs lose their appeal, and you can only enjoy them in a half-satirical, half-wistful backpedaling kind of way.

  My father was named Jeremy Rutledge Squire. The name always made me think I was the disconnected orphan cousin of some British royalty—nothing grandiose, just a marquis or earl—but Mom assured me that he was ordinary Cockney trash. Just prettier than most. My father gave me my middle name, Bronwynn, which was his paternal grandmother’s name, because he’d hoped that I would be a girl. (I never had a chance, did I?)

  Mom says I remind her of my father—again, less than she used to. I think it was obvious that it kind of bothered me. I have a couple of pictures of him when he was about my age; a rather effeminate gentleman, shoulder-length black hair and very pale blue eyes, never smiling, but rather straining his sleek head forward on a long, skinny neck as though perpetually posing for a Vogue cover shot. In one photo my mother had caught him outside the Beatles’ Apple Boutique, the Paddington side, on the day the Beatles let everybody raid the place for free, and he’s holding an inflatable spotted mushroom ottoman (that Mom still has, collapsed, in a cardboard box in the basement). The picture’s in black and white, but I can imagine the amazing colors of his velvet and fringes and flares. The other one is he and my mother on holiday in Mexico—sunburned, freckles, wearing a white T-shirt and jeans and no shoes. It’s in color, and he looks awkward, uncomfortable, and skinny. Next to him my mother is tanned, grinning, and incredibly pregnant with me. It was 1972 and she totally looked like the young Stevie Nicks, though she denies it up and down.

  My dad committed suicide because of me. Mom hollowly assures me that it wasn’t my fault—and I know it wasn’t my “fault”—I did nothing, consciously anyway, to convince my father that the black void and being slowly eaten by dung beetle larva was better than another minute on this earthly plane—but I know pretty surely that it’s my presence on this earth that drove my pa over the edge. He was more or less gay, Mom admits. She was his fag hag. Or maybe he was asexual, but they don’t tend to have hags. She was enamored of him—she, one of the zillions of free-lovin’ hippie chicks who flocked to England in the late sixties, hoping to ball a Beatle or shag a Stone, and he, this glamorous, beautiful antelope from Stepney who was too proud to admit that he wasn’t really turned on by women—not really men either, actually. Married my Mom, much later managed to knock her up, and even managed to smile when I was produced. And, apparently, he really liked me once I was here. He didn’t trust himself around me—he thought men had no place around babies, and never held me when I was little because he was afraid he might drop me. “He just never seemed like he was . . . there,” Mom said once. “He was wonderful to me. We honestly loved each other. But he never seemed like he could concentrate on anything. I called him my ‘fairy visitation’ . . . he thought that was funny.”

  One day, when I was three, Mom just got fed up with his non-involvement; she made him take me to a playground and play with me, alone, without her (if they both took me out to play, my mom would end up doing all the work while my dad wrote in his Moleskine or stared off into space with his blank baby-blues). He didn’t know what to do with me, so my mother suggested swings—pretty simple, and she figured even my flaky-ass father couldn’t fuck that up. What happened next is ambiguous—apparently, he was roughhousing with me on the swings, we were having a great time, he was pretending to be a bull and charging me, which made the swing twirl—and he accidentally knocked me off the swing into the sand, and I broke my collarbone and hit my head. They had to rush me to the accident and emergency ward. Unfortunately there had just been a dreadful car crash and they were full up, so I had to wait in the lobby for hours with my head in my father’s lap, and he let me sleep. When I was finally seen, they discovered that I’d had a severe concussion and that sleeping was the worst thing I could have done, and I might well have died while waiting to be admitted.

  I hate emergency rooms.

  That next night, when Mom was visiting me at the hospital, my father locked himself in the garage, put the radio on, and kept the motor running. He was quite dead by the time Mom got home. She’s only rarely hinted at how fucked up she was, with her child nearly dead in hospital and her husband blue and stiff in the garage. It must have been a very bad night. I asked her what she did, and she said, “I called my mom and asked her if I could move back home. Then I smoked a joint, drank a bottle of wine, and got some sleep. I knew I’d need it.”

  She never remarried, though she did have a selection of semi-sleazy boyfriends in the early eighties. At a rather young age, though, she swore off such nonsense and dedicated her life to the bookstore. She’s pretty vibrant for a woman who, as far as I know, hasn’t had sex in ten years. I don’t know how she does it. Maybe when you get to that age, it just doesn’t matter anymore.

  Oh, no, how could I forget . . . there was that incredibly brief fling she had with, of all people, Lise’s dad Alex. I think it was only one night—a week, max. And I don’t know if they ever had sex. I never asked and Lise never asked. Mom and Alex both decided that it was too weird, since their kids were best friends, and the thought of forcing us to become family was just too repugnant for everyone involved.

  I can’t believe I forgot that. I’ve been nailing my almost-sister for weeks. And nailing her hard. I literally cannot even believe how fucked up I am. I really don’t belong in this world.

  Lise planned to meet Lucas and I for drinks at the bar down the street from the Squirrell Press offices. It was already ten, and Lise hadn’t shown up yet, so Lucas and I just started drinking. We had a pitcher of margaritas and a brand-new carton of cigarettes, and our hands on the table were stained proudly with graphite and ink. “When are you planning on going home?” Lucas asked.

  “I dunno . . . probably just go with Lise. But I might stay longer. I’m kind of amped.” I lit a match and waved the phosphorus smell away. “I’ve been staying up really late recently. At first it was hard, but I’m kind of getting used to it. I’m able to do a lot more stuff.”

  “That’s cool; like what?”

  “Oh, keeping a journal, trying to write stories . . . sketching the street outside, so maybe I can go back to doing my own pencils.” I noticed Lucas looking at me with dismay or incomprehension. “I mean, eventually, I’ll be
doing another book, and I’d like to do the next one by myself. And in the meantime, maybe Kaplan will give me a break.”

  “Uh . . .” Lucas took a big swallow of his margarita, and wiped salt off his stubble with the back of his hand. “Um, Kaplan just gave me a raise. I think he’s thinking about letting me ink, and just keeping you for lettering, and finishing the book on the next issue. I don’t think you’re going to do another book at Squirrell.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t think it’s quite fair what he’s doing to you here,” he mumbled. “I thought you should know.”

  “You think he’s trying to get rid of me?”

  “He just upped my page rate. Like, quite a bit.”

  “No shit,” I sighed, and drained my glass.

  “Take it easy, man, you could get another book easy. No problem. I mean, the story’s kind of played out; the art’s still good, but the story’s like, ehhhh. There’s nothing wrong with your inks, as far as I’m concerned. You’re good. Kaplan’s just a motherfucker.”

  “He’s a motherfucker who’s giving you more money than me,” I said, wagging my finger at the bartender. “He’s a motherfucker who’s giving you your own title. He’s a motherfucker who’s on your motherfuckin’ side.” I arched my eyebrow at the bartender. “Get us another pitcher, please.”

  Lucas looked at me strangely. “Hey, man, I didn’t do anything to . . . Dude, it’s just business. I told you, I don’t think it’s fair.”

  “Damn straight it’s not fucking fair. It’s bullshit. It’s more bending me over and making me take it like the asshole I am. Is that all I am to you guys? An asshole that you can ream whenever you’re worried about the size of your dick?”

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” Lucas stood up and pushed back his bar stool, blood rushing to his face. I turned away from him. I just didn’t give a damn. I deserved the beating. Let it come. But Lise arrived, sat down in Lucas’s discarded bar stool, and stuck her chest out cutely. Showing him the tits that I figured were mine.