Mixtape for the Apocalypse

by Jemiah Jefferson

  Lise came home, and I was awake, in the bathroom in front the mirror. Lise came in and peed like I wasn’t even there, then left like I wasn’t even there. She poured herself a shot of whiskey and opened a Mickey’s bigmouth, then lit up the rest of the bowl she’d started the night before. She smoked and drank in front of the TV, then made herself a bowl of couscous and raisins. I stood in the bathroom for a while longer, watching all this happen in the mirror. Then I went into the kitchen and looked into the fridge, but everything in it looked like cardboard and death. I settled in my chair by the window and looked outside. Lise came over and stood by me and asked “Do you want to have sex?” And I said “What?” and she said “Never mind.” And then I asked “Do you want to have sex?” And she said “Yeah,” and I said “Um, okay, but just a second,” and I turned down the TV and put Heaven Up Here on. And we started kind of making out. I felt terrible, like my body was made of rubber, like I was watching Lise do it with a sex doll, like I wasn’t even a part of what was going on. And then she tore away from me and sat up and said “Can we at least listen to something other than the Bunnymen?” and I said “No, we can’t.” And she said, “Never mind, Squire, I changed my mind, just do whatever you were doing.” So I went back to the bathroom and looked at the mirror, watching her stop the tape and turn the TV back up. I wish I knew what just happened there, but I don’t. I wasn’t really there. What’s the matter with making love to the Bunnymen? We used to do it kind of often. Well, once. And it was great. I was floating in a sea of liquid pleasure then, fingers and slippery cunt and condoms and Mac’s voice, Mac’s words, Mac’s understanding. Whatever burns burns eternally, so take me in turns, internally. When I’m on fire my body will be forever yours, nocturnal me. Why doesn’t she understand. She is not the same Lise.

  I miss her.

  6 November 4:15 p.m.

  I just woke up.

  In my dream, my mother was dying of a crushed larynx, we’d been in a car accident, and she was bleeding to death while I begged passersby on the street for help. They just looked at me funny like I’d asked for change, and kept on walking past. My begging turned into one long anguished scream, and my mother was shaking her head, telling me not to make so much fuss, that it wasn’t worth it. I started screaming at her, then, telling her that it wasn’t fair. Then, before anything else happened, she died, and a lot of blood gushed out of her mouth. That’s when I woke up.

  I slept in my clothes again. I have to quit doing that. I have a permanent seam in my left leg from my jeans. I’m going to go take a shower.

  5:03 p.m.

  I took a really nice shower, and then I put on a pot of coffee, and the grey album. I used to not like this record, but now I really do. I don’t feel the need to skip ahead to track three. I put the disk on shuffle today, and I’m getting “Blue Blue Ocean”, one of Mac’s best seascapes. Silhouettes and a vulture hoping he’s gonna pick the bones of you and me . . . What are you trying to say here, Mac? Skip to the next random track? Okay, I will. “Lost and Found.” Ugh, I hate this song. I do right now, anyway. Maybe this isn’t such a good album for right now. Maybe silence would be better. Coffee’s made.

  5:50 p.m.

  Best not. It’s not for me to enjoy or not enjoy. It is mine to listen and learn and sing. Start at the beginning and recite to keep the future at bay. I want my mother to be okay.

  7:38 p.m.

  Lise home. She got a load of mail today—more videos, some cards, a letter from her father which she’s reading intently now, trying to concentrate through the haze of whiskey on an empty stomach. She’s putting on weight. Fortunately it looks kind of good on her, but still, I haven’t noticed her getting heavier like this before in all the time we’ve known each other. Meanwhile I get thinner and thinner, though I’ve been trying to eat more. I feel terrible, though, because it’s Lise’s food. I just don’t want anything enough to leave the house to get it. I’d much rather sit still and try to think. Lise brought me food tonight, though, leftovers from her dinner out with the Pronto regional manager, leftover Thai chicken curry over rice. Good. I thanked her with the correct measure of cheer and contrition, but she didn’t really respond, she went straight for her mail and the bottle and the pipe. I pity her, really. But I’m grateful. I think I’ll hug her.

  11:12 p.m.

  The food was a good idea.

  Lise is falling asleep, again in front of the flickering telly. I’ve turned the sound off and changed it to a channel that still transmits static—if I disconnect the VCR cable, I can keep it from displaying that blank, peaceful blue screen that, for some reason, I find really menacing and uncomfortable. Static is beautiful. Leftover radiation from the dawn of creation, sparkles of starstuff, a million patterns apparent all the time, ever changing, ever interesting.

  1 a.m., Pioneer Cemetery

  The rain has slowed down enough for me to write a bit. It wasn’t raining really hard, but enough for me to worry—this paper is a little less durable, and I’m using a Rollerball ink pen. Ideally I won’t shed any tears over this diary. I don’t think I will. I’m pretty far from weeping right now. I am in love with all of creation, from that tree to that headstone to that writhing, drowning earthworm. I have more in common with you than you know, brother! I too am drowning in the very medium that keeps me alive, I too have been vomited up from my home and have no choice except to desiccate and become food for ruthless birds. If I could save your life, my wormy pal, I would, but it’s too late. I can tell by your texture that it’s already too late and your delicate balance of fluids has been hopelessly disrupted. Soon you will die. Myself, as well.

  And I can hear the earth drinking in the escaping souls of the worms. Listen to it. Listen to that supernatural sound! The earth, sipping and gulping and swallowing! The gastric rumblings of an entire planet, shivering, exhausted after the feed, after being made love to and ejaculated upon by the sky. Aah, it fills me with elation and joy.

  4:33 a.m.

  Oh well.

  Of course, I shouldn’t have left. I wanted a soda. I went to the corner store. I got a soda and paid for it with loose change, which was all I had. The guy at the counter gave me shit for paying with loose change, so I flicked my bottlecap at him, and he launched himself across the counter and started throttling me. Fortunately a hollow-eyed junkie came in needing cigarettes, and the counter guy had to let me go. By then I was sitting on the floor, screeching uncontrollably, and the junkie looked at me and said “Fuck, little dude, what’d you do?”

  Lise sleeps. The blanket has moved down to cover her feet, leaving her head uncovered. She’s sweating in her sleep. Hair stuck to her forehead. Does she know that my neck is raw and black and blue? Does she know that my eyes are in agony from not being able to weep? Does anyone know how fierce this heart is, this heart that pains me until I wish I could wrench it out, the heart that keeps my eyes wide open and my breathing quick and shallow? I’ll never sleep again. I knew that I should have avoided soda. It’s bad for you.

  12 November, waking up

  Man, it feels like I’ve been asleep for days. I kind of have. After the convenience store episode I just grabbed an extra blanket and huddled up in the closet, waiting until I could sleep. And sleep I did. I don’t really remember falling asleep, but I do remember waking up, deciding consciousness wasn’t worth it, and going back to sleep. How many times did that happen? I got up and peed at some point, it was daylight, I think. That’s weird. It’s dark in here.

  Great dreams, which was why I was so reluctant to come back. I mean great dreams. Dreams of utter beauty and terror and astonishment and wonder. All my fantasies came true, sometimes with grave consequence (for example, I conjured up a great dragon with red and gold scales, trés Pern, and then she disemboweled me with one swipe of her foreclaw), but with that soft, calm reassurance and remoteness that only exists in dreams. The worst part is, when I wake up, the good parts evaporate and I’m still here, I’m still this.

  Lise home. I he
ar her cleaning the bathroom. Now the kitchen. She’s listening to Haydn, the recording of her mother playing with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. It’s only the second or third time I’ve ever heard her play it, and it was recorded before we met. Her mother is a really superb cellist, but not such a good mom. She left when Lise was only nine, just old enough to take it personally. If I were Lise, I’d tell people my mother was dead. She did, for a while. She said that to me, only one of the lies that she would continue to feed me over the years.

  Lise = Lies. Only the bad parts of us are left. It’s my fault.

  I want something to eat, but I don’t know what’s there. I would order a pizza, but I don’t want to use the phone—if I pick it up, it might ring, and I’d have to answer it, and it might be my mom or someone from Link-Up or the police, wanting to know where I got those pictures, if I could help them in a sting operation; they’d haul me in and then drug test me and they’d find the ∆9-tetra-hydra-cannabinol that I excrete in every single pee. And then I’d be sent up the river. Penitentiary. Solitary confinement. Forever.

  Nice dark quiet box like this one. Hmmm.

  November 14th, night

  Oh thank God!

  I thought I was going to kill myself, I really did—you went missing for a whole day and night and I searched everywhere, even out in the hall, upstairs hall, the laundry room with its cowl of bloodless cobwebs, the lobby where the government spies drop off their covert messages to Lise in the form of Soloflex videos and little plastic packets of fabric softener (and they know who I am!!), I searched through the kitchen, in the pantry, in the cupboards, in the little flap where the linoleum curls up near the sink, in the sink, under the sink, in the lens covering the kitchen light; I looked in the bathroom, in bathtub, vanity, medicine cabinet, under the bathroom rug, into random bottles of shampoo, lotion, and sexual lubricant. Lise came home and freaked, and handed it to me, it having been locked in the old mailbox slot that I had always assumed was broken or nailed shut. “Just take it, for fuck’s sake!” she said. “I thought it might help you if you didn’t have this staring you in the face twenty-four hours a day! Just do me one favor please—call your mother and talk to her. If you do nothing else, please do that.” And a lot more unfair and horrible and untrue things.

  I promised her I’d call my mother. I have no intention of calling my mother. My mother has nothing to do with anything—if anything, she’s with them. She’s a homeowner, a business owner, one of the capitalists, one of them. She has to protect her own self-interests at all costs. It’s not her fault. But she cannot offer me any help, and if you can’t help me, you might as well harm me.

  Only I help myself.

  Are you alive? Should I talk to you? Talking out loud isn’t working for me.

  11:15 p.m.

  Tell Lise to go away and leave me alone. I’m trying to take a bath.

  1:02 a.m.

  I wonder if I can get a really cheap black and white TV. That’d be cool to have in my closet—I could just watch static all day, drinking in the radiation, reading the sensitive messages in the hieroglyphs. There they are now—sound off, Bunnymen on (quietly), hands and eyes and smiles and snarls weaving up out of the storm at me, and then retreating. I can read their expressions for that split second, and if a picture is worth a thousand words, and a picture of a being is worth ten thousand words, the people in the static are worth millions upon millions of words—as many words as there are subatomic particles in the galaxy. All the quarks and bosons that are sitting here and feeling searing pain in the temples and back, the ones that are shaped like girl’s feet, sticking from underneath a quilt—made of the same substance. The faces of the static leap off the screen and swirl around my mind just long enough to transform, and turn into Lise’s beautiful, pink, tired feet. I am experiencing the true vastness of the universe, more fully than any man has ever experienced it.

  What am I? I am nothing. A skeleton white boy with hair reminiscent of the fat Elvis, in boxer shorts, thermal underwear, barefoot, all gooseflesh and fingernails chewed to the quick and yellow with nicotine, a face like the Grim Reaper at Miller Time. Poor fuck. But I am all there is. I am a universe at once self-contained, tiny, and infinite.

  15 November, 7:13 p.m. (?)

  Should I believe the clock? I am awake, and Lise is not here. I woke myself up with a jerk. No dreams. No verbal ones, anyway—nothing I can express with words. I wonder where she is. She’s usually home by now no matter what. I should get something to eat while the getting is good.

  9:45 p.m.

  She’s still not here.

  I ate some soft, going-bad oranges and a bowl of cereal and some leftover mashed potatoes, and drank a pot of coffee, and took a shower. The heat is on, so I’m able to sit around the apartment in boxer shorts and a T-shirt and socks. There was a message from my mom on the answering machine, which I deleted. I didn’t listen to the actual content; just her tone of voice was unpleasant enough that my heart started pounding in my head. It’s no good. At least Lise won’t know Marion called.

  11:00 p.m.

  Oh leaping flaming shit. I went to get Lise’s mail and she was THERE when I returned with my arms loaded with little packages, barcodes, iridescent hologram fibers, catalogues, and government microfilms. She jumped when she saw me and I dropped her mail all over the floor. She told me to go out to the store and get her a six pack of Mickey’s, and she didn’t seem to understand what was going on when I laughed. She’s outside the bathroom right now and tapping on the door and saying something over and over, I don’t know what, I have the water running in the tub and in the sink. I am shaking myself to pieces, wouldn’t that be perfect. Shake and wake and bake. Shake shake shake shake shake. Shakey shakey shakey laughy Mikey shakeyboyshake shakedogshake

  Goawaygoawaygoawaygoawaygoawaygoawaygoaway

  There are ten, no, eleven pages that are scratched out here; a meticulous hand scrawled perfect exact circles and crosshatches through all of the text. It is completely obscured; only the above letters remain, the rest choked out of existence with a few hours of diligent work. The writing continues on the next intact page, with the same pen used to redact the previous pages, in a careful, precise hand that bears only the slightest resemblance to what came on the last legible page. Why didn’t I just tear the pages out?

  2 December, 2:15 p.m.

  Lise and I are at the Convention Center Denny’s.

  This morning we woke up at the same time, in the same bed, touching each other. We woke up and kissed. She gazed at me and said “Are you okay?” and I was able to tell her honestly, “Yeah.” When Lise was in the shower, I called Mom and we talked. The bookstore is doing pretty well—she’s thinking about hiring yet another person and only working twenty hours a week, taking the extra time to take classes. She didn’t bug me about “where I’ve been.”

  That’s good, because I wouldn’t know what to tell her. I don’t know what happened, exactly. I think I was just incredibly stressed because of the whole work thing. Whatever. I don’t care. I’m here now. It’s as if I was covered with mud, and now I’m washed. I understand the religious imagery of washing and cleansing and baptism now; my fish-belly white skin seems perfectly right.

  It’s amazing how long my hair is. I’ve never had hair this long before. I can really truly make a ponytail now—a real ponytail, not a yuppie-scum microtail. I’m rocking a ponytail now, a rubber band and a shoelace as a ribbon. I look like a young, dazed priest. I am kind of cute. Redred lips and whitewhite skin and big, bloodshot eyes the color of the “burnt umber” crayon, my absolute least favorite color in the box. But today, it’s okay; I can look at it and I think of all the crayons, the gradient beauty of a newly opened sixty-four.

  Lise is in the bathroom. Poor Lise. She’s been so patient. She works six days a week now, and most of the time she goes into work at ten in the morning and gets off work at ten at night. She has more money than she knows what to do with, but she barely has time to breathe. She�
��s going to take me shopping today to make it up to me for neglecting me. I wish I could give her something to make it up to her for not even being alive, human, conscious, for the last God knows how long (there’s only so far back in the journal I went before my hand got tired this morning; I did it while I was on the phone with my mother). Whatever. It’s in the past now. And now my beautiful lover returns from the ladies’ restroom, gorgeous in fuzzy black cashmere cardigan and skirt too short for the blustery cold weather, smiling. Beautiful Lise, smiling.

  [different handwriting, same pen.]

  I love you Squire and I’m so glad you’re back.

  6:30pm

  Lise bought me Crocodiles and Ocean Rain used on CD, and also a nice red ski sweater that makes me look like a superbly flat-chested girl. I hugged her and kissed her and danced around, in public, in the Square, where she gave me the gifts. Technically they’re birthday presents; she’d planned them before my birthday, but didn’t have time to get them (besides, she admits, she was pretty mad at me). I actually embarrassed her. This is definitely a first.

  I was stunned by the complete lack of reaction to me. I felt like I’d just had radical plastic surgery, but nobody seemed to notice me. The waitress at Denny’s refilled my coffee cup about six times without realizing how downright weird that was. And nobody on the street looked at me particularly, even with the red sweater on—I mean, that thing stands out like a spotlight. Like blood in snow. Lise says it looks striking.

  I’m cooking for her right now, while she rolls a fat blunt and watches television. I actually think I’ll smoke pot tonight. I’ve already drunk alcohol. We had the last inch of vodka left in the bottle from summertime—I can’t believe it’s lasted so long. It stung my mouth and it wasn’t particularly special or nice, but I didn’t mention it. I’m waiting for pasta to boil and then I’m going to toss it with this cool pesto Lise found which has artichoke and cilantro in it—it sounds good. And a salad, and some hot rolls, which I think I’ve forgotten and they’re burning