___
23
AFTER
our little meals
Ethel would grant me a few of her Ziploc sandwich bags and I would go upstairs
where Rodney was listening to Judas Priest or vintage Alice Cooper on his
ghettoblaster. Removing his chemistry set from the closet I would check my
pocket notebook and mix new, untried combinations which I then wrapped in the
plastic bags and hid in my inside jacket pocket. Then Rodney and I would smoke
a little marijuana or a fragment of hash, just to put ourselves in the mood. If
we were feeling particularly uneasy or discomposed, Rodney would get the
airplane glue out from under his bed. By this time Beatrice had arrived,
presenting us with baleful forecasts of our adult years when we would certainly
turn out to be just like our fathers, oppressing women with our corporations
and pocket calculators, adding to the world’s heartless mountains of wealth,
credit-wealth, consumer goods and other mere things and numbers. “You’re all
the same,” Beatrice complained, reluctantly taking our hands at the dilapidated
card table, which was chipped, water-stained, and tracked in places by globular
wax. “You just want to be the center of attention all the time. Me me me.
That’s all you care about.” I was already feeling tremulous and thin from the
grass and the glue. My eyes felt sore and fuzzy. But I felt lucid as well,
lucid inside my own mind, where hard crystal shapes emerged, and spirits
gathered firmness, gravity and substance. These were real things here inside my
head, not just ideas or shadows. When I closed my eyes everything suddenly made
more sense. Then Rodney would begin to hum.
On
a Wednesday, separately and silently in Rodney’s dark room, we all experienced
our first real encounter with the world of pure spirit.
I
was feeling particularly heady and diffuse with marijuana and glue, sitting on
my seat like a swami floating on a carpet. Lights, candle, smoky incense, cabala,
grimoires, totem and taboo. “I think we’ve been patient long enough,” Rodney
said. His entire tone and demeanor had changed. He was wearing a Nazi insignia
framed by a pentagram on a leather thong around his neck. The knuckles of his
right hand displayed his new tattoo, a bright caduceus with rippling scaly
skin. His hair was shaved in a mohawk and dyed an almost fluorescent orange. “We’re
not looking for handouts, you know. It’s not like we’re asking for favors. We
just thought, like, we’re young, and we’re going to be around on this earth for
a while, and we’re willing to do literally
anything
you want, and all you’ve got to do is just
speak
to us for about five seconds and let us know you’re interested. But do you guys
have the time? I mean, do you guys even make the measliest little effort? I
don’t think you appreciate all the time and energy my friends and I have been
wasting here.”
Beatrice
took her hand from mine momentarily and yawned, holding her tiny hand to her
smudged moist mouth, her eyes closed while she stretched. She looked like a
small white kitten when she yawned. Whenever Beatrice yawned it reminded me of
how much I once loved her.
“So
anyway,” Rodney concluded, “let’s get this relationship going, and stop beating
around the bush. We’re here, you’re there, and it’s about time somebody made
the first move. You guys are more experienced in all this than we
are–we’re looking for a little mature guidance in the matter. So let’s
go
. Give us a
sign
, for chrissakes. We’re starting to look pretty stupid, if you want
to know the truth. Holding hands and waiting for you to take your sweet time
and all. Look, you want sacrifices, blood rituals? You want our
souls
, for chrissakes? I’m not doing
anything with mine–it’s
yours
.
You hear me? Come and take
all
our
souls–all except Beatrice’s, of course, because she’s such a perfect
angel, as everybody knows in the entire universe by now since she’s probably
told them herself personally. Phillip and I, on the other hand, don’t give a
fuck. We’re already yours. But if there’s something you want us to do, then
you’ve got to tell us. OK? Are we getting through to you guys? Now, we’re going
to be quiet again for a while, but that doesn’t mean we’re like suckers or
something. That doesn’t mean we’re going to sit here forever. I’m sorry to be
sounding so impatient and all, but I’m starting to feel a little bit used, if
you want to know the goddamn truth. So look, whenever you’re ready, you let us
know, OK? We’ll sit here nice and quiet, and you take your time and think about
it. Then, if you want, you contact us, OK?”
So
we sat in the darkness, and Rodney hummed, and Beatrice fell asleep, snoring
slightly. It seemed a night like all the others, chemicals in my pocket, this
strange house of Rodney’s around me, Ethel downstairs with her doubts and
unsteady aluminum cane, while back at home Dad was being steadily dissolved by
the universe of rushing darkness and Mom watched color TV. Again I descended
through the earth’s dark layers into a subterranean world where strange
prehistoric skeletons etched the dense basalt walls; broken human bones and
teeth lay strewn about like discarded toys in a cannibals’ kindergarten. I was
expecting to find the dead down here, spirits with scores to settle, or vast
shapeless things without thoughts, things that shifted and turned. Perhaps it
wasn’t the afterlife at all. Perhaps it was the pre-life. Or perhaps it was
just nothing and nowhere, where abstract beings lay around waiting for things
that never happened. Non-life, anti-life. Proto-death, death in life. I was
moving through a convoluted passage which seemed only dimly familiar. Death. I’d
never encountered it before, not even in my imagination. Death was in these
passages I had until now blithely elided in both my texts and my dreams. Death
was permanent. Death didn’t move or change. I felt an ominous presence in the
darkness around me. Dead. Voiceless. Pitiless. Lucid. Hard. Death was matter,
death was pure mass. Death might even be better, I was beginning to suspect. Death
was real, while life by contrast seemed little more than a presumption,
something broken which rattled and would not last. I was moving into the
lightless heart of something I had never seen. It was filled with shapes and
presences, but you could not see or touch them. Instead they elicited a buried
radar from my skull and sinuses and teeth. The world of death was simple. There
was no more thinking or being thought down here. There was no more fear or
suffering or hate. Ever since I could remember I had been trying to discover my
own Way in life, that journey I would make in the world alone. Perhaps I had
been looking in the wrong place all along. Perhaps this was my true path down
here. Something cold passed by me. Everything was growing misty and damp as I
waded into the mud that grew deeper and marshier. It grasped my ankles, calves,
thighs. It made sucking sounds against my skin. I realized I wasn’t wearing any
clothes. I felt very cold all of a sudden, as if all the cold shapes passing me
in the cavern were now gathering around, pressing closer against me, untextured
and weightless and dull.
“It’s
the same slow dream,” Mom’s voice said, loud and real in this underworld like
the voice of the Mom who, I understood now, was dead forever. “You, me, Dad,
our home back in Bel Air. It’s a beautiful big house that’s waiting for us,
baby. It has a big pool and a big yard.”
“This
is the history of motion,” I said. “You and me, Mom. The history of motion.”
“There’s
nothing for you down here, Phillip.”
“I
want to stay.”
“You
wouldn’t like it. You’d catch cold. I wouldn’t always be around, and you’d be
frightened. You’d wonder where I was. After a while, you’d start to resent me.”
“I
resent you now.”
“You’ve
spent too much of your life alone, baby. That’s my fault. I never helped you
become properly acclimated to the world. There’s a real world in which we all
have to live together. That means we have to make concessions for the benefit
of other people. That means we simply can’t have everything exactly the way we
want it all the time. This life you’re living inside yourself is just a dream. A
dream of you, me, and your father which doesn’t work. Or maybe it works too
well.”
“I’ve
decided I’m going to do it.” I could not disguise the lift of triumph in my
voice. “Rodney’s going to help. Rodney and I are going to do it together.”
“Then
do it, baby. At least you’ll be functioning. At least you’ll be making some
impression out there, instead of just down here inside your own mind. Live in
the world, baby. That’s all I ever meant for you to learn, and you never did.
It’s my fault. I can’t blame you. It’s my fault entirely.”
“Is
Pedro down here?” I asked. I had felt another cold shape approach me. I was
filled with either fear or hatred. Something burned in me, some impalpable
fuel. “Is that Pedro with you?”
“Of
course not, baby. Pedro’s upstairs with you. Pedro’s out there in the real
world with you.”
“Pedro?”
Tears were forming in my eyes, cold, freezing, emerging from some secret part
of me. “Pedro? Is that you? Pedro? Are you out there? This is me. This is Phillip.”
“If
you’re going to do it,” Mom’s voice said, “then you better do it now. Stop beating
around the bush, baby. If you’re going to kill your father, then kill him
tonight. Kill him tonight and get on with your life.”
It
was Pedro out there, but Mom was hiding him from me. It was Pedro. His
multitudinous arms came up around me, icy and damp and formless and thick. It
was Pedro. Pedro was dead and waiting for me. For me. Pedro as waiting for me.
“WHY
DON’T YOU go kill everybody while you’re at it? But start with the men. Kill
all the men, you guys, and then kill each other. Then get back to me in a few
thousand years. We might have something going then. We might be on our way
towards some practical, permanent solution to things.”
“If
you’re not going to help, Beatrice, just put a lid on it, OK?” Rodney was
selecting a cord of rope from a cabinet drawer. We were standing in Rodney’s
basement in the cold fluid light of a naked overhead bulb. I was on my knees going
through my steel toolbox. The lid of the case was open, displaying cold
gleaming tools in red steel compartments.
“I’ll
tell you what.
I’ll
help.” Beatrice
was sitting atop Ethel’s Maytag dryer. She held a lit cigarette, and was
gesturing it with dramatic disregard just like Greta Garbo. “We’ll buy us some
machine guns, some Uzis, and some army issue bazookas. Then we’ll go down to
the shopping mall and start blowing everybody’s goddamn head off. OK? That’ll
teach them all a good lesson or two, won’t it? I can hardly wait. I really
can’t wait another minute.”
“Do
we need these?”
Rodney
showed me a rusty pair of gardening clippers.
I
thought for a moment. “Sure,” I said. “Why not.”
“Look,
we’ll get us some hand grenades. We’ll start lobbing these big hand grenades
into B. Dalton’s and the May Co. We’ll blow the fuckers to kingdom
come–that’s what we’ll do. We’ll be just like Dirty Harry. We’ll be just
like John Wayne. Sure, some innocent lives will be lost, but there’s nothing we
can do about that. If you’re going to fight evil, ma’am, then sometimes you
just gotta be a little evil yourself. We’ll detonate the goddamn mall, that’s
what we’ll do. Save ourselves the trouble of going in there. Then we can move
on to the Ford dealership. Cost Plus. The Warehouse. City Hall. We’ll teach all
those liberal phonies what real suffering’s all about, won’t we, guys? Sure,
they can all
talk
about peace and
love and brotherhood, but when it comes right down to getting things done,
well, that’s where
we’ll
move in. Whistling
our national anthem and spraying bloody death wherever we go, because we’re
realists
. We want peace too, but we
don’t have any liberal bullshit illusions about how it’s gotta be achieved. War’s
hell, but sometimes it’s just goddamn necessary if peace is to be preserved. I’ll
meet you guys in the car. I’m going to go take a long piss in the alley.”
Beatrice flicked her cigarette and it arced across the dim garage, crashing
against Ethel’s Toyota Corolla in a shower of sparks. “Bring beer. Afterwards
we’ll go down to the whorehouse and get ourselves properly laid.” Beatrice
stared at my toolbox with a weird inanition.
Rodney
stacked a long extension cord beside the toolbox, in case the rope was not
enough. We stood there for a moment looking at the gray steel box.
“Next
stop, the Middle East,” Beatrice said. Her voice was clipped and mechanical.
Peace through strength. Wealth through poverty. Love through death. Once we’ve
taught those Palestinians a lesson they’ll never forget, we’ll build this
humongous Kmart. Then we’ll move on to take care of those fucking Chinese. We
won’t even try to set up any provisional government or anything. We’ll just
kill all the fucking Chinese. God, how I hate them. God how I hate those
goddamn Chinese.”
Rodney’s
hands rested on his hips. His expression seemed momentarily to approve of our
preparations. Then, as if approval in any form was for Rodney a sort of lapse,
he scowled bitterly. He reached to his shirt pocket for his cigarettes, offered
me one, and shrugged in Beatrice’s general direction.”
“She
thinks this is all some sort of game,” he said. “She thinks this is all just
some big har-de-har laugh or something.”