“And that was the night we made Virginia. That girl, that woman, exists because of my mother’s alcoholism and her newspaper and magazine clippings, and because I saw a woman who had just been in an automobile accident and who looked like you, and because you weren’t wearing your nightgown once I got home. That’s why Virginia is on this Earth.” Brettigan leaned back, his story concluded, and closed his eyes. “I never told you that story.”
Alma rose and walked over to where her husband was sitting, avoiding the banana peel on the floor on her way. Positioning herself behind where he sat, she put her chin on the top of his head. She put her arms down over his chest after wiping away the tears from his cheeks.
“Don’t go to the mall,” she said quietly.
“I need exercise.”
“For what? No, you don’t.”
“What are we going to do? If we stay here?”
“We’re going to go upstairs and lie down and hold each other.”
“That’s sentimental.”
“Well, okay, I don’t care,” she said. “Come on. We just have to.”
Together they went upstairs, the cat and the dog padding behind them.
- 25 -
Time and space were getting mixed up and multidimensional, Christina noticed, particularly after the ingestion (by her) of several tabs—in the psychological undertow following the zoo episode, when Wye, or somebody like him, had been on both sides of the wolf cage, those pills were really getting quite necessary, you could say “urgent”—of Blue Telephone from a new improved batch concocted by that genius misfit albino living in Memphis, making daily life like something out of a quantum mechanics experiment, so that what was going to happen seemed already to have happened, and you could be in two places at the same time, and the task that life was about to put onto her dinner plate was getting much closer to where she was actually located at the table, so to speak. As predicted by Ludlow, she was living a quantum life like Schrödinger’s cat. She was both particle and wave. She was here but also there, now and also then. For starters, certain informants now claimed that the Sun Collective had moved into its second phase, “Phase Two,” they called it, the “certain informants” and “they” being Ludlow, who wanted to make his personal initiative sound as bland as possible, and they, or he, announced that in the past, it, we, she, you, had been going in the wrong direction, the direction of compassion and little urban improvements, vegetable gardens on vacant lots and the restoration of street-dwelling human wreckage such as Timothy Brettigan, free clothes and food, universal basic income, that sort of thing, humble ameliorations, but now the right direction would be toward rage and pitilessness, so that violence, which had once been micro, would henceforth be macro. It would leave a strong impression. Nerves would be shattered. Death was implied, multiple deaths. Humanism and terror: one would morph into the other because, it, they, had to. No one would be spared, the custodians of white privilege, especially. Would the white privileged children be spared? The answer, apparently, was also “No.” Why should they be? You had to have courage to wrest control of the narrative. It took real nerve. If white children were not immune, then no one was safe.
Because now Ludlow was not sleeping. He was awake all night, like the fire department. He was talking and being a little more tartly conversational about the making of Tovex sausages, for instance, which Christina had to look up on Google, and you would not like what you found there if you didn’t admire big-time explosives, several floors up from homemade pipe bombs—no, these new bangers were the world-shapers that altered history and about which Ludlow seemed uncommonly happy and enthusiastic. “The point,” he said, “is not to float down the river of history but to alter its direction,” quoting Lenin or Nietzsche or maybe Dr. Phil. Someone had said it.
And he was being sly, Ludlow was, about the garage, “My garage,” he called it with proprietary delight, somewhere on the other side of Minneapolis, though he didn’t say exactly where, a rented and possibly imaginary garage where he was assembling his explosives, which, he said, would turn the tide against President Amos Alonzo Thorkelson, the current Chief Executive; but how would that happen? you might ask. When you were living a quantum life, your mind included a radioactive atomic pile, a critical mass, flaring up now and then, often in two places at once, surrounding your bed while you tried to sleep following the episodes of crying and begging and arguing with Ludlow during which you tried to persuade him not to do what he planned to do. Tears, many idle tears, had been shed by Christina, in an effort to change Ludlow’s mind. You could report him to the police except, no, you couldn’t, because he hadn’t done anything and maybe the garage and the explosives were all, where, exactly? What? Imaginary. Just a garage in his head. You couldn’t tell with him.
He belonged maybe in either a prison or a lunatic asylum or another like-minded gated community, but you couldn’t get him into any such place voluntarily. He was one of many whom President Thorkelson had made mad, in the sense of crazy. He was also quoting from everybody and anybody, he had turned into a quote-machine, an open-pit mine of allusion, spewing words out. He said, “Listen to this: ‘Every act we take now is a response to crisis.’ Oh, and this, too: ‘Spirit is thus self-supporting, absolute, real being. All previous shapes of consciousness are abstract forms of it.’ That’s Hegel. What he means is that scientific analysis of our contemporary history demands that we alter it radically so that Spirit, which is us, overthrows the previous, um, historical situation.”
Also he had a black eye from a fistfight he had had with Timothy Brettigan, who in defense of all human beings everywhere had argued with him and tried to get the location of the garage out of him, which effort had failed. They’d been drunk, both of them, and there had been yelling that had been so loud that even Christina heard it, in her imagination wired to the Blue Telephone, although she had not been there, witnessing the fistfight, at the time. She didn’t have to be. She heard everything he said wherever he was. She had a switchboard connected to Outer Space and to all Earthly points. And to make matters worse, or better, she was maybe falling in love with Timothy Brettigan (again), a man who wanted to save the lost, the unrewarded, the inconsolable, the abandoned, the forsaken, the unglued, the untethered.
And Christina found herself bilocating and sometimes liking it: seated, or standing, in the apartment living room listening to Ludlow pace back and forth as he talked about the necessary historical changes that involved mayhem directed at the innocents (an event that would go viral, really control the internet chatter and help bring about the revolution, topple the old hierarchies, also maybe Thorkelson too, nicknamed “Coach,” because in Ludlow’s opinion there actually and in fact were no innocents, with the result that there would be massive introspection, nerve storms, and stocktaking), and at the same time, she would be, simultaneously, speeding in her old clunker car, the old blood-clot-colored Saab, with no passenger airbag, toward a tree. The tree would stop both history and Ludlow, who had, somehow, mysteriously, turned from being an ordinary guy who practiced yoga to being evil.
Because for an absolute certainty, although she hadn’t done it yet, she had already injured Ludlow. It was going to happen and had happened already; it had to happen, Blue Telephonically, but now she was getting both ahead and behind of herself, or so it seemed. She was in that car headed toward that tree, having forced some tiny pebble grit and a dime into Ludlow’s passenger-side seat belt clasp so that it would jam and would not work, but she was also and at the same time in the living room listening to Ludlow talk in monologue form about how only violence could alter consciousness, a fact that authorized the history-smashing bombing of, it appeared, an elementary school, which was imminent, as planned by him.
With what person could she possibly consult? She, Christina, was high all the time these days in fear and terror on behalf of those children, and, yes, on behalf of herself, so that now she found her own body s
tanding at the bank, which was her employer, and then forthwith inside the tobacco-scented office of her friend and boss, Jürgen, that gentle man, and being careful not to tell him exactly what her boyfriend, or whoever he was, planned to do, she was nevertheless and broadly speaking inquiring plainly how a person like her should act and behave as a citizen and a decent human being, What should I do? et cetera, given this situation, and after all why not Jürgen, whose family had witnessed history with blood all over its teeth and claws and now could give advice, being an avatar of civilization, and German? He stroked his mustache, and his smile diminished into a frown. Overhead the fluorescent light flickered, as if in sympathy, and the room seemed to tilt, a bit, like a fun-house room or a Mystery Spot.
My dear woman, he said, if you know someone who means to do such harm to children, even if he is crazy, you must try to stop him, by any means necessary, notwendig and ehrenwert, he muttered under his breath, as he shook his head at the thought of her boyfriend, this shabby character who intended harm. And even at the same time as she was speaking to Jürgen, she also, past and future, found herself in Timothy Brettigan’s basement apartment, consulting with the former actor, who said, You must talk Ludlow out of it and if you can’t talk him out of it you must injure him somehow, or I will, again, but, no, I don’t know how you can injure him without assaulting him. Sorry. She kissed him because he had tried to give advice, but angels, the true ones, are helpless in the face of malice; they don’t understand it and have no response to it because wickedness is not their department. If they understood it, they wouldn’t be angels, would they? He had also invited her out for a date, but that would come later.
And so there she, Christina, was, back in her own apartment, and Ludlow was breathing on her and telling her to get off the Grid of Addiction, and, “Have I mentioned this already, you, Christina, should stop taking those BT pills, because they’re fucking you up so bad? And they’re doing this other thing: they’re making you sort of transparent, and on some days I can’t even see you when you’re right there in front of me.” She nodded at him, even though she was also elsewhere, bilocated in a classroom of seven- and eight-year-old children using their scissors and paste to cut out pictures of endangered animals. The pictures of the animals went into a scrapbook. Then they were labeled: Bengal Tiger, Giant Panda, Indian Elephant, Snow Leopard.
What did he have against children?
She was under a spell. The wolves at the zoo had approached her against their better judgment and with their pale gray eyes they had said that they were endangered, as wolves, and she was endangered also, as human, unless she took some immediate action. The little grade school children were seated at their desks in their classroom cutting out pictures of wolves, who, on the other side of the fence, had said in no uncertain terms that like all animals they had glimpses of the future, and she had better do whatever was necessary, because, look: There were the children, sweetly cutting and pasting their pictures, and there was Ludlow, still sleepy but defiant at the breakfast table, child mayhem on his mind, his orange juice to his right and his hot steaming coffee to his left, and his scrambled eggs with paprika right there in front of him, his bedheaded formerly cute hair standing straight up, the YOU’RE WELCOME! tattoo visible underneath his T-shirt, his bombs hidden away, and as he consumed the scrambled eggs he said (because he liked to mansplain at the breakfast table) that life had once been very simple before the industrial revolution, when everyone lived on farms in feudal conditions, but those conditions did not obtain anymore, and it wasn’t enough to live simply and to practice loving-kindness and to renounce grudges. That was first-world discredited Buddhism, the dumbbell acceptance of everything that is. After God died, so did the Buddha, and Buddhism, which, in the end, was less powerful than greed, could not meet a spiritual payroll anymore, on account of its love for…well, everything. Quality had died, too. God took it with Him when He left. Now we all had to do the unthinkable, quote unquote, unthinkably opposed by Timothy Brettigan, a lifelong child admirer and charismatic (to Christina) ex-actor and guilt tripper, who would have none of Phase Two. Fuck him.
We have to put holy fear into the rich, claimed Ludlow as he gulped down his scrambled eggs, unchewed. Terror is our friend. Terror is the friend of reform. Humanism plus terror is the ticket. We have to stop being donkeys. The Donkey Era is over! The donkey and the Buddha had ambled away together, not as Two but as One. Fear and terror were our tools now, and, man, what is it with you, Christina, because you’ve gone into, like, a thin place, and I can see right through you. You gotta stop taking those pills. What was I saying? The unthinkable had to be thought right now, the planet was being killed off by the rich, the rich were in their plutocratic money bubble, their dim oligarchic haze, they had turned the planet into a vast Utopia Mall, and, surrounded by their money and the trinkets that cash and credit can buy, they were consuming the Earth, they were eating the Earth, chomping and chewing it up like slugs, and they were even now as we speak devising rockets for leaving the poor wasted post-apocalypse planet behind on their private rockets, they had a Mars or Bust! agenda, but for the rest of us the task is to do a wake-up call that would get the attention of the ruling klepto privileged class and the way to do that was to perform some unthinkable violence against Hilltop Elementary School because if that didn’t wake up the rich not only here but everywhere, nothing else would.
What he was talking about was violence. Violence, he was saying, quoting Engels or Lenin or somebody, was the midwife of historical change. Christina didn’t have many settled ethical principles, but she did have a strong position on that one. Nothing—nothing—on Earth justified harm against children. Which was why she had sort of fallen in love with Timothy Brettigan all over again, post-actor and post-Chicago, and in one of the quantum fields that she was living in now she was walking with him, and it was springtime, and their hands found each other, and they were holding hands, fingers entwined, which was more tender, and sweet, and life-sustaining than when Ludlow’s dick had been inside her doing its nasty business, way back when. At the breakfast table, she had made up her mind, and in another spacetime continuum she had persuaded Ludlow to go out of town to a movie about superheroes and to get into the passenger side, the suicide seat, of the old blood-clot-colored Saab, and the snow leopard, and the Bengal tiger, and the giant panda in the children’s scrapbook quietly and slowly turned their fond animal gazes toward her, and they told her to fasten her seat belt and to get ready to be hurt, because she would be, when, together, they hit that tree, head-on.
* * *
—
They are headed down a dark road at night. They are in the present tense in a both/and dimension. They have left the city. The panda and the tiger and the snowy owl are whispering to her, and the children, who have stopped cutting out pictures from magazines, are singing almost inaudibly to her that they love her (she’s in the car, in the classroom, at the zoo, staggering down a hallway, clutching at the wall, and in a city park, holding hands with Timothy Brettigan), and words in a foreign language, or, no, her own language, English, words that she has recently read spin through her head about an ideal state being one in which the absolute and relative complement each other, and objects are themselves so constituted that they contain in themselves an essentiality and are not merely the accident of a particular moment, and now the wolves are nodding silently, all the verb tenses have changed from past to the immediate present, the story-clock has run out of time and the calendar pages fall from the wall, and now the children stop singing their song, and Christina accelerates toward a tree that’s hardly visible because one of her headlights is out, and Ludlow says, “Hey, what’re you doing?” and then says, “Slow down,” and then he says, “Oh, fuck me, holy shit,” and those are his last words that will ever be spoken as they approach that single, solid oak tree, the gateway spring for a catapult out of the Earth he does not love, because the injury-project has somehow gone overboard
beyond injury, into the other condition, the one from which no one ever returns.
- 26 -
Her friends came by to see her in her apartment as she recovered. A few were simply curious about her, but most were compassionate and sympathetic. Eleanor and Jürgen, from the bank, brought her flowers and a cooked chicken. As they sat in her living room, while she reclined stiffly on the sofa, they told her the bank would welcome her return “with open arms.” Because of her cracked rib, it occasionally hurt her to speak, and it really hurt when she laughed; still, despite her injuries, her mood was good. She realized that she had to be careful about her inappropriate high spirits. Harry Brettigan and his wife, Alma, came by with flowers and a salad, having been informed of the accident by their son, who came a day later, in the morning. He brought her sandwiches and a selection of DVDs to watch, mostly old movies. Other friends from the Sun Collective came by, sweetly inquiring how she was.
Time was still slightly mixed up in her head. It was located on a Möbius strip of some kind.
Her parents never called, but she didn’t expect them to call.
When Timothy Brettigan arrived, he came in through her door looking like all the colors of the rainbow. He sat down next to her and inquired softly about what she’d been through. She loved the sound of his voice. He seemed to have a good bedside manner—the sort of person you’d want to wake up next to. Out of nowhere, he promised to take her to Spain in a week or so. His peacefulness was so soothing that when he asked her whether she’d like him to do anything for her, without thinking she asked him to paint her toenails because she couldn’t bend down. He went into her bedroom, grabbed her nail polish and some Kleenex to separate her toes, and proceeded to do exactly what she had requested. As he bent over her, she leaned back. Guiltily, she couldn’t remember when she had been happier. He said he’d be back in a few days. He touched her hand in farewell. She asked him to call; she wanted to hear his voice again soon.
The Sun Collective: A Novel Page 27