“How’s that?” I ask as we head to the elevators.
I’m ignoring the junkies. I’m ignoring the prostitutes. I’m pretending I’m somewhere else. Belle, oddly enough, does not seem uncomfortable.
Belle says, “I can see it in you. You’re changed. Used to be you had this air about you; people who were willing, who could read it, saw you as someone easy to take advantage of. You being knocked out, strung out, all the time, it was in your eyes. Have you ever seen someone with a concussion? A really serious concussion?”
“Only myself,” I say.
“You looked that way all the time, Ade. Now, not so much. Now you look new.”
We get to the elevator and the first thing we notice is the buttons are missing. Belle takes the initiative and pulls a bobby pin out and sticks it in the metal hole where the button used to be. There is a spark and we hear the elevator groan to life.
This place, it’s lurked just off the highway since before I was born. We’d come downtown, me and Mom, and walk the Platte in the summers and look over the highway where the Esquire was looming, an albino hawk. I heard stories about it the first time in middle school. Kids who wanted to talk tough told stories about decapitated heads found in the Dumpsters there. They whispered zout ghost lights on the eight floor. About the screaming woman who jumped from the roof thinking she was leaping into the sea.
When the elevator comes, the door jerks open. Inside, the reek of piss.
On the back wall is a faded framed poster from maybe 1982. It has a picture of the Esquire gleaming in sunlight. There are futuristic planes flying overhead. The poster reads:
VISIT THE FUTURE OF LUXURY
,
TODAY!
We get inside and hit the button for the tenth floor.
“Going up!” A gutter punk jumps inside just before the doors close. He pushes the button that used to be labeled five. This guy has white-boy dreads and stinks of cloves and B.O. Looking at us, he scratches at something behind his right ear and looks like he goes to say something but doesn’t. He mouth opens and then he closes it, licks his chapped lips. He turns around.
“How many in Denver?” I ask Belle.
“Hard to say, there’s no census or anything.”
“The hand sign. That spray-painted thing.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m seeing it everywhere now.”
Belle nods. “You’re awake now, babe.”
“But I’m not using my abilities? I’m not knocking myself out?”
Belle says, “Kind of ironic, right?”
The elevator moves like it’s being operated by Slow Bob, crawling up floor by creaking floor. We don’t talk until the gutter punk gets out. He waves good-bye, his eyes all bugged out. Belle gives him a weak smile.
When the elevator gets moving again, Belle tells me that she has the feeling that something big will happen. She tells me that with me being clean and all, she can just feel the change buzzing in the air. She says, “How good you look, it makes me feel like I should totally get into swimming or running or something. You know, just clean house.”
“It does feel good,” I say. “But I miss, you know, knowing.”
“Even if nothing ever happens in terms of me evolving to the next level, it’s nice to not know what’s going on when you don’t know what’s going on. Does that make any sense? If it does work, well, how cool will that be?”
“You should quit, Belle. Clean house. You’re already brilliant.”
Belle bats her eyes, says, “You were never this sweet before. I’m not sure how I like it.”
We get to the tenth floor and the elevator doors screech open. The hallway outside is dark, it’s musty. There are greasy stains like shadows on the walls and only one door, a gold-plated one, at the end of the hall to the right.
Belle goes first, says, “What I’m trying to tell you is that I think if anyone can do what you’re trying to do, and I’ve never tried it, you can do it, Ade. Just feels right to me. What I’m telling you is that the Ade Patience of before couldn’t do this, wouldn’t do this. The new Ade, well, I think he can.”
We knock on the metal door and wait.
A voice, the same gnarly one I’d heard on the phone, says, “Enter.”
We do.
The room we go into consists of pretty much just one large banquet table. There are enough chairs around it for a whole school busload of people. At the end of this table, where there windows are overlooking the stadium and the highway, is an enormous old man in a sickly green-checkered suit. Grandpa invites us to sit at the opposite end of the table.
We do.
In front of him there’s this plate with what looks like cheese.
“Go ahead. Take a look,” Grandpa says.
I get up and step forward and peer into the bowl. It looks like a sunk-in cake. The kind you’re supposed to throw away. The kind that didn’t come out right. Before Belle can look, Grandpa Razor pulls the bowl back in front of him.
“This is casu modde, my dears. It’s a most extraordinary cheese. Pecorino cheese, a hard sheep milk cheese from Italy. The cheese itself has a strong, salty flavor. You see it mostly on pastas. But this one is … extraordinary.”
It’s only then that I smell the cheese and feel something in my stomach turn over. The way an engine turns over. And it makes me gag. It’s an entirely muscular feeling. Something I have no control over. It’s instinctual. My body letting me know that the bowl sitting in front of Grandpa Razor, the bowl he’s about to partake of, is completely taboo. Against nature.
“This cheese is illegal. You can only get it on the black market in Italy. Finding it here, middle of the country, unheard of. What they do is take the cheese and leave it outside to ferment. We’re not talking about aging. We’re talking decomposition. As it’s being prepared the cheese skipper, the person preparing it, introduces the
Piophila casei.
A fly. Said female fly lays eggs all over the rotting cheese and soon, it’s heaving in maggots.”
I hear Belle gag.
Grandpa continues smiling. “The grubs eat the cheese and as they do they produce an acid the starts to break down the fats inside the cheese. It gets gooey quick. Seeps out. Thousands of these little white worms working over time. Producing a spectacular dish.”
I recoil. My guts churn.
Grandpa notices and sighs. “I’m not even done. You eat this cheese while the maggots are still in it. Still alive. These suckers are crazy, too. They can jump. Right up out of the cheese. You need to cover it while you eat it so the buggers don’t leap up into your eyes. Your nose. I’ve heard the maggots can also pass through your stomach unharmed. Get into your gut and start eating you from the inside out. Nasty beasties indeed. There are also allergic reactions contend with. This is, after all, toxic cheese.”
Then Grandpa Razor says, “You’re probably not going to want to see this.”
Before I can turn around he digs his fingers into the cheese and then places what he’s removed on a piece of thin bread.
“Salut,”
he says. Then he pops the bread in his mouth. Belle gags again. She spins around and stomps over to the corner. I can hear her coughing.
Grandpa Razor, his lips greasy, tells me to have a seat. Points to a chair. “Talk,” he says.
I start: “You saw me at the reservoir, before I had the vision. You saw me killing Jimi, only you didn’t tell me everything. How can I change it?”
Grandpa Razor cracks his neck. The bulky flesh like a whale turning over. The sound of the crack when it comes is like a backfire. I jump.
He says, “I don’t remember exactly when I heard about you. I think Belle must’ve told Gilberto and he must’ve told me. This was way before the stunt in the lunchroom. Way before you’d proved yourself. No. I heard about you when you tried to stop your friend from dying.”
“Harold.”
“Right, car accident, if I’m correct. I don’t know who you told about it, but I heard. I heard how you raced out there, the hero, trying to change what you couldn’t. To say the least, it intrigued me. Learn by fire, so the saying goes. And you did learn. But then, this?”
The new anger, I can feel it stirring. I say, “I guess I learn slow.”
Grandpa laughs. He says, “Let me have a look-see.”
Runs his hands through his hair and then grabs another chunk of gooey cheese. It comes curling out between his fingers. This he shoves into his mouth. Most of it dripping into his beard. He chews slowly. Looks like he’s sweeping the stuff around in his cheeks. Savoring its taste. And then he closes his eyes and his eyeballs move around under the thin veil of skin. His mouth hangs open and his body jerks but just for a second. As if he fell asleep and then caught himself. He swallows hard and then speaks like he’s channeling something dead. His voice comes out the way a voice comes out of a ventriloquist’s dummy. Grandpa says, “You kill him. In the sand, his feet kicking. Drowned. The look on your face is cold, smug satisfaction.”
“When?”
“Days. Week at the most. But there’s more, Ade. Other visions. Your future, it’s getting bleak, isn’t it? It’s growing darker and more unstable. You trying to change it, you trying to affect the things you’ve seen, has upset the whole balance. Keep it up and you won’t even have a future, my friend.”
“Ah, Grandpa, interesting you should mention the future. Didn’t you read Jimi’s?”
This obese man, he smiles hard. He says, “I see you’re already getting how complicated this all is. I’ve got to tell you that this thing, like most things really, is very puzzling. Not puzzling confusing but puzzling like a puzzle. You can’t think you’ve got it all figured out if you’ve only gotten your hands on a few pieces.”
“Janice says all this is Jimi. That he’s—”
Grandpa shakes his head. The way he moves makes it that much easier for me to believe we evolved from monkeys. “Janice says so many things.”
“But there can’t be two futures, Gramps. Everything I see happens. Everything.”
“Me too.”
“No.”
“I’ve been at this a long, long time, Ade. That’s why I wrote down the Rules. Codified them, so to speak. You’ve seen a future where you kill Jimi. Jimi’s, well, I’ve seen a future for Jimi where he lives just fine. Also, and Janice did mention this to me, you’ve seen yourself being, I guess, harassed by Jimi later. Much later. How can that be?”
“Exactly.”
Razor says, “Someone’s lying. That or you don’t actually see what you think you do. Kind of confusing, right? I think you’d be better off getting a few more pieces for that puzzle.”
“How ’bout I ask Jimi’s dad? The masked wrestler.”
Grandpa Razor’s eyes get heavy, his face falls back. He says, “If this were a movie, right now would be the big dramatic pause. The soundtrack would go silent, maybe there would be a big heartbeat sound, thud, thud, thud, all measured like that, and I would tell you something life-altering. It’s the climax. Sure, everything rising to this one revelatory moment. But, alas, this is an anticlimax, Ade.”
I want to punch this sad old man in the face.
He notices. Smiles. Says, “I agree that Jimi’s dad’s a big, big piece of the puzzle. You come here and let me show you. I can bust it wide open for you, explain it all, but you need to understand that information can be a treacherous thing. What I tell you, you can’t unlearn. What I show you, you can’t unsee. Sound good?”
And I say, without hesitation, “How?”
“You knock yourself out. Knock yourself out really, really good. And don’t focus. Let the future come to you. Find Poppa Ministry in it and confront him. Come back here in two days, bring your shrink, and I’ll guide you.”
ELEVEN
Belle and I drive in silence.
At least until we hit Colorado Boulevard.
“This is the kind of thing I was hinting at earlier,” Belle says. “You have just graduated to the next level, Ade. So how’s it feel?”
“I never really imagined there would be some sort of community. Always knew, Borgo always told me, that there were others, it’s just that I never thought so many would be here. Around me, ignoring me.”
“They weren’t ignoring you, Ade.”
“No? That’s what it feels like. What’s the point, anyway?”
“Point of what?”
“Of this underground deal. Of hiding like mice in the walls. And them blindly following what that fat animal back there says. Honestly, if you all got spines and stood up to Grandpa and his rules I’d bet you could do almost anything.”
Belle looks upset. She pops another cigarette into her mouth and searches around in her purse for a lighter. She does this haughtily. I reach in, find the lighter for her, flick it to life. She leans into the flame and I watch the flicker of it in her eyes. She is very pretty right now.
Taking a long drag and then releasing it, Belle says, “What this is really about is how you’re not accepting who you are. I can’t tell if it’s that you think you’re better than the rest of us or you just don’t want to take your place. Right? You just don’t want to take responsibility.”
“Probably more the former.”
She looks at me, makes a face. “Why is that, Ade? How could you possibly be better than the rest of us, Mister No Memory?”