Mixtape for the Apocalypse
Page 20
“Feet off the counter—and stop scraping your brains with that Q-Tip. Get out of here. You’re driving me crazy with that nonsense. Go have breakfast somewhere—I know you didn’t eat, I heard you banging around on that balcony this morning. Out out out.”
I grabbed an issue of Scientific American, and crossed the tracks to Angelique’s. I sat at the bar. Again, there was nobody there, and Pilar, the manageress, practically breathed down my neck until I ordered something. I got steak and eggs, and coffee in the mug I left in the café.
“What’s that, steak and eggs?” asked a man who was suddenly sitting next to me at the bar.
I nodded with my mouth full, keeping the magazine cracked to the story I was in the middle of reading. The guy was about my mother’s age, hair gray and thinning, thick glasses and a face like a mile of bad road. “I’ll have what he’s having,” he shouted to Pilar.
“Okay, Larry,” she shouted back, sounding sick of him already.
The man gave an impatient sigh that took years off him—there was something of adolescent boredom in that one little sigh. He explained to me, “She has never liked me, and I’ve been so nice to her all this time.” He looked over my shoulder again. “SciAm?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Bruce Sterling article in it.”
“Bruce is okay, but you really have to read folks like Stainslaw Lem, or, or, like Heinlein. Young people think Heinlein is a cliché, but that’s because the man is an astonishing talent.”
“I’ve never read Heinlein seriously, so I can’t really offer any insights into why the young people have such an idea.” Yes, I was being sarcastic, trying to get rid of him, but he didn’t let me off so easily.
He offered his hand. “Lawrence Trevino Suttman,” he said, “but call me Larry.”
“Squire.” I shook the hand, as scaly and heavy as a glove made of rhinoceros hide. His grip was brief, but I could tell that he could smash my bones to marmalade if he wanted to. “Are you trying to pick me up?”
“By talking about Heinlein? Wow, you are an erudite man, aren’t you?” I expected him to call me a “little” something, but not just “man.” It was unsettling. I was kid, I was boy, I was Poindexter; I wasn’t man. But I could be, I guess. “Heavens, no. I’m a heterosexual. Anyway, you’re far too young, even if I weren’t. Tell me, do you stargaze?”
“Like, watching constellations and planets and stuff? Sure, a little bit.”
“It isn’t just watching constellations and planets and stuff. It’s looking into space—the history of our galaxy, including the past and the future. Astrology isn’t all just bullshit, pal. It’s mostly bullshit, of course—but there’s more information out there than most people even care to find.”
“I have a telescope,” I said. “It’s not in focus.”
“I have several telescopes. Some of them are excellent. I could probably get yours into decent shape, if you’d like.”
“Might I ask why you’re asking me about all this?” I asked.
Pilar slammed his plate of steak and eggs down in front of him. Larry looked up and thanked her with a huge smile. “Hm?” he started, returning to me. “Oh, well . . . you’re the only other one here.”
After breakfast we went to my house to get the telescope. Larry went into the bookstore and stood there with his hands jammed into the pockets of his threadbare wool overcoat. I went straight in and my mother asked, “Who is that?”
“That’s Larry Sutton,” I said. “He says he can focus my telescope.”
“Oh, I bet he can,” said Mom.
Larry smiled, and thrust forth his hand. “Larry,” he said.
“Marion,” she replied. “That’s my son, Squire.”
“Yes, I know. I met him at Angelique’s. I think he’s a fascinating person—alive with potential.”
“Potential to be what?” My mother crossed her arms.
“Well—well, anything, really. He could be anything at all.” He smiled at her. “And no, I’m not trying to pick him up, but I won’t make any promises about you.”
“Oh, that’s tasteful. Thank you, I’m flattered and disgusted, all at the same time. Squire, get out of here, okay? See how the actual crazies of the town are, and see how much better you are in comparison.”
I went upstairs and got my telescope, and when I got back, he and my mother were still quipping at each other, having gotten the attention of everyone else in the store. “You, of all people, should be more generous about recognizing human potential,” Larry was shaking his head.
“There’s a difference between recognizing potential and encouraging people’s silliness—oh, Squire, please rescue me from Mr. Transcendentalism here before I develop the human potential give him a solid, uncompromising knuckle sandwich. Do me a favor and be back here by two in the morning—I don’t expect you any earlier.”
I went over to her and kissed her. “I’ve got my meds with me,” I whispered in her ear. “Don’t worry.” She rolled her eyes.
And I went over to his house, a little ways outside of town on the edge of a hill that was clearcut in the seventies and grew back with small trees and crab grass. The house was full of things—glass containers, large-format artwork, Christmas decorations, and thousands of books. He sat me down in an incredibly comfortable chair, made me a hot toddy, and stuck a big color book of Galileo’s research into my hands. “Read that,” he said. “I’m going to get cracking on that telescope.”
We ended up stargazing that night, on a Gore-Tex blanket on that hill, drinking hot chocolate with whiskey out of a Thermos, and watching the Magic Marker white swish of the full moon as it crested the forest canopy. The sky was more beautiful than anytime I’d ever seen it, gorged full of stars and flocked with pearly pink clouds. “Wow! I forgot about the sky!” I shouted into the solid quiet. “It’s so—it’s so—”
“Isn’t it wonderful? It’s the best and the worst part of being alive. You know the meteors are going to come from there, but it’s sure gonna be beautiful.”
“Is it okay if I yell a lot for a while?” I asked.
“Sure!”
We yelled for a good long time until we couldn’t breathe for laughing. I felt quite drained afterward, as if I’d just gotten rid of the parts of myself that I didn’t need. He whistled softly and said, “Goddamn. Sometimes it’s worth it, isn’t it?”
He told me all about himself—how he’d been in Vietnam as a clerk or something and never saw any combat, only the aftermath; came back and got married and had two kids, then one day woke up in a screaming panic that wouldn’t let up for six months. Trying to lead a normal life was just a little too much for him. He was sent to the state hospital in Olympia for two years, where he was given electroconvulsive shock to cure his depression. While he was in, his wife left him for a real estate developer and moved to Fort Lauderdale. He keeps in very close contact with his teenaged kids, who ran away with an international tumbler’s circus and travel all over the world.
I told him all about Portland, and Lise, and the hospital, and the chilling expression of the man in the bed beside me as he looked at the full moon. “There you go,” Larry said. “That was saying something. Some people are able to pay attention to it. Ever get those sensations of greatness, a sort of tremendous crushing greatness? That’s the universe talking to you. Listen to it. And don’t think that because that happens to you, that you’re the center of the universe. You are not.”
“Well, I know that now,” I replied, a little confused and annoyed.
“And that’s not what I’m getting at either, man. I’m not saying you did anything wrong. You weren’t wrong, and you weren’t crazy. Those drugs they’ve got you on—that’s good—the compulsions you were having, the tendency to strip all things down to a few essentials, that was a good step, but you have to get beyond that. Psychoactive drugs help you to come down into yourself, figure out what you really want. You’re in the process of figuring out. Myself, I know more or less what I want—I want to av
oid apocalypse. That’s all I want. And I’ll sit here and try out strategies until I figure out how to do it.”
“Apocalypse?” I whispered, the word too powerful to say out loud.
He took a big swig from the Thermos. “From above,” he said. “You’re not crazy.”
And that started it. We’ve touched base with each other every day since then.
He’s a real American hybrid, from Tacoma or something, who did his share of acid and biker chicks in the Sixties and has the ravaged skin to prove it. Now he’s quieter, always a little hunched over; he wears ratty dress pants and a white shirt and tie, always the tie. Sometimes he goes weeks forgetting to shave, and then appears well-brushed and smooth and shiny with his pants pressed like an FBI agent’s, often bringing my mother a freshly picked flower or a random pretty object, like a piece of broken safety glass or a little rubber dinosaur. Mom says he looks like a repo man, and I have to admit, he’s got that kind of washed-out, ex-bookie look about him. Kids at the elementary school run away when he walks past their schoolyard because they think he’s creepy. He gives a great Haunted House every Halloween that scares the piss out of the little brats and gives them nightmares that last for weeks.
I asked my mother once why she disliked him so much. “Oh, well, I don’t so much dislike him as . . .” She hemmed and hawed. “Okay, I dislike him.”
“But why? He’s nuts about you.”
“That’s exactly what gives me the creeps.”
“Really? Do you think he’s crazy?” I asked casually.
“Yes, I do,” she sighed. “And I don’t know how I feel about you hanging out with him.”
“Insanity isn’t actually contagious,” I said, walking out the door, heading off to meet him for another round of whiskeys at the Salamander. “You can’t get it by touching someone.”
Of course, this was nonsense—anyone who’s been there knows full well that insanity is contagious. It spreads through groups of people like a virus, and some people have a natural resistance to it and they don’t catch it. Some people breathe in the atmosphere and, shortly, they’re on the other side of the mirror. And some of us catch it, suffer from it, and forge an immunity. There’s a reason why so many schizophrenics and neurotics work in the mental health field—they’re like parents who’ve had chicken pox, being able to nurse their stricken children.
We recognize each other.
Larry is a prolific diarist himself, in the form, mostly, of lab notes and astronomical observations. I’ve sat and read his journals like books—lists of inclinations and degrees, newspaper clippings of unexplained phenomena, “Tues. nite—drank .5 litres of neat grain alcohol and ingested 3 g. amanita muscaria on empty stomach. Bouts of vomiting and communication with beings who live in the Crab Nebula. They promise positive reinforcements P.A.” P.A. was a common abbreviation—post apocalypse. I don’t think he’s on to something, but he might be on to something.
I had forgotten what it was like to have a friend. Just a friend. I think he needed me.
I’m done reading the journals. I’m fresh out. Kind of too bad—I always did enjoy my bit of solipsism, the same as most any writer. One’s own writing has a peculiar smell, a particular liquid flow of being read that makes you just breeze through the pages, like you’re reading someone else’s mind. In my case, it really feels like someone else’s mind. I don’t remember a lot of the states I was in when I was writing that stuff down. Where was I at this time last year?
I don’t keep a journal anymore. I haven’t since Before. I just live through life without documenting it. There is nobody to corroborate my story, to help me prove to myself, or anyone else, that any of it happened. That doesn’t really bother me, actually—I never have to prove that any of it was real, all I have to do is state it. I don’t really care if the things I wrote about ever actually happened that way—as far as that tiny lettering on that Eye-Eaze yellowish paper goes, it happened.
Now that I have the journals back, and I’ve had a chance to read them over completely, I can use them as the basis for my greatest creative work—and it isn’t even fiction. All of it is true.
Well, sure, some of it was delusion.
THE MIXTAPE TRACKLIST
Björk - Joga
Echo and the Bunnymen - All In My Mind
Messiah - Temple of Dreams
Gern Blanston - Headbag
TMBG - Where Your Eyes Don't Go
Brian Eno - Discreet Music
Echo and the Bunnymen - The Back of Love
Echo and the Bunnymen - Rescue
Echo and the Bunnymen- Stars are Stars
Snoopy Come Home Official Soundtrack - It Changes
Echo and the Bunnymen - Over the Wall
Echo and the Bunnymen - Seven Seas
Creedence Clearwater Revival - Proud Mary
Grateful Dead - Magnolia Rose
Echo and the Bunnymen - Villiers Terrace
Spinner - Where We Lived
The Smiths - There is a Light that Never Goes Out
Ian McCulloch - Magical World
Duran Duran - Sound of Thunder
Echo and the Bunnymen - The Yo-Yo Man
The Rolling Stones - Paint It Black
Echo and the Bunnymen - Going Up
The Doors - The End
Echo and the Bunnymen - Nocturnal Me
Echo and the Bunnymen - Blue Blue Ocean
Jacqueline Du Pré - Haydn: Cello Concerto #1 in D
Jeff Buckley - Grace
Eurythmics - Doubleplusgood
Jemiah Jefferson was born in Denver, Colorado in 1972. Her publications include the Vampire Quartet novels Voice of the Blood, Wounds, Fiend, and A Drop of Scarlet, and the legendary erotic short-story chapbook ST*RF*CK*NG. An avid fan of great music, bad movies, sci-fi television, and comics, she lives in Portland, Oregon.