by Josh Delman
I'm a crazy college student who likes to write things. I eat peanut butter out of the jar with a spoon. I've really been appreciating bananas recently. I'm going to start telling people that when they ask me "what's new?"
If you're interested, there's an RSS feed. For your auditory pleasure: my Last.fm. Some jd87 highlights: Live at Westgate, Haikus, Pt. 1.
This site might be a blog, it might be a a repository for fiction, or it might be something else altogether. Please enjoy.
2009: January / February / March / April / May / June / July / August / September
© 2009 and beyond
Contact me.
Dr. Belvedere's 2,340th Thursday FICTION #
“There are humans out there who are black boxes. Whose internal psychology is completely impregnable, completely closed off not only to the world but to themselves. These people do not understand their own ability to function; they simply do. And in these men and women we see our roots as animals, as animated flesh and blood and meat and bone, as objects guided by forces beyond our own control. But their lives, most likely, are dearly happy ones. For in their lack of awareness is a kind of self-satisfaction that only the completely absorbed can achieve. It is a bliss born of ignorance, it is a beauty in simplicity.” – Steven Gregory Belvedere, Ph. D, p. 301-302, The Underlying Psychology of Man, 3rd ed., 2008, Oxford University Press.
“Are you ready for this?” said Dr. Belvedere.
He readied a syringe. He removed its light-blue protective cap, drew in about 100 ccs of a clear liquid, and then flicked its side with his index finger to get any air bubbles out as he test-squirted some of the clear liquid out the tip. He felt a pleasant thumping at his temples as if he were wearing a warm helmet. Then he took the needle and watched it penetrate the soft skin of subject #42, who barely squirmed as the plunger sunk down and the clear liquid mixed with subject #42’s blood.
Dr. Belvedere placed the syringe on a shiny silver rack next to subject #42’s bed. He thought to himself, “Oh, baby,” and then imagined himself doing a jig from subject #42’s perspective. He walked over to the sink and washed his hands with pink soap, which he’d ordered from a medical supply company in China because they had the best smelling stuff. He walked out the subject’s room and into a poorly lit hallway. He’d almost slammed the door to the subject’s room in the process, but reached his hand out and grabbed the stainless steel knob right before the latch hit the strikeplate.
This was the worst part of the day for everybody. They would have to go over that week’s subjects, including a full discussion of any issues that had arisen during the day’s work, and it would be long and laborious. Evil took many forms, and it sometimes manifested itself as the End-of-Day Discussion at the lab. So Dr. Belvedere walked down the hallway and opened a wooden door at the end of the hall, whose creaky hinges sounded not unlike the cackle of your garden-variety witch. Plus it was Dr. Belvedere’s birthday, and he wanted to go home to see his wife and kids, who all had brown hair and made Dr. Belvedere feel happy.
Behind the door was a group of highly trained men and women whose time was extremely valuable. They were sitting in something akin to a dungeon, which was what people called it: a dungeon. The walls surrounding them were cobblestone, irregularly shaped rocks of dull color, piled atop one another with a lime mortar. The smell was undoubtedly mold and musk. Upon entering the dungeon, officially the “Sub-Basement of the Schermerhorn Building at Columbia University,” one got the sense that the place did not belong to the human beings who only occasionally inhabited it, but rather to the expansive collection of bacterial molds and fungi that coated its walls and ceilings and lent the air its musky charm. (There was, in fact, a drain grill embedded in the ground at the center of the room, so that every couple months the walls could be power-washed, but the wash would only be temporary, as the molds thrived under the damp and dark conditions.) There were no windows. But, yes, it was hellaciously dungeonesque down there, and so it was decided, by committee, that there ought to be some nice lighting to remind themselves that there was still a world above where people lived and breathed. The original plan was to rip out some of the walls and design an elaborate system of mirrors, beginning with one outside the building, so that sunlight could be piped into the room. They decided it wasn’t worth it when the budget skyrocketed and Dr. Melki, the only woman among them, pointed out that they usually met after dark. So there was recessed lighting installed underneath a makeshift pine ceiling, illuminating the walls with soft cones of incandescence.
“I shall bring to your attention, gentlemen,” Dr. Belvedere said. He had a clear view of the room from his position at the head of the table. He looked around and took note: there were six men and a woman, each wearing a white lab coat, several other men wearing denim jumpsuits, and a man wearing a three-piece suit with a hideous mauve tie at the opposite end of the table. Then, clearing his breath: “And ladies, excuse me. I shall bring to your attention subject #1958.”
“Now hold on a minute,” another doctor spoke. This was Dr. Rexmore, a real fuckwit of an M.D., who had a penchant for interruption, and was usually concerned with all things inane. “There is a small bureaucratic matter which I believe should be addressed before we discuss today’s subjects. Due to the seemingly undesirable nature of this conversation in and of itself, I will do my absolute very best to keep it brief.”
There was a collective releasing of breath and the room warmed up.
“What is it?” Dr. Belvedere said.
“There is the matter of the reports,” Dr. Rexmore said.
“Yes, yes, the reports. What about them?” Dr. Belvedere used his most indignant voice. He didn’t like getting mad at people.
“Well, and I’m sure most of us here would agree,” Dr. Rexmore began to say, letting his eyes make contact with every other person in the room for a brief moment, and then continued, “that, well, they’re simply unreadable!” Dr. Rexmore, too, sounded indignant, although more genuine, less put on.
Dr. Melki’s coarse feminine voice sounded off. “Dr. Rexmore, we can see your jugular.”
This was ignored because Dr. Melki had the sharpest, most caustic wit among them. She also knew the sizes of their penises.
“What do you mean? That’s absurd bullshit,” Dr. Belvedere said. “Stop wasting our time, doctor. I looked at them last night and they read fine.”
“Me too,” another doctor said, maybe Dr. Wallsworth or Dr. Englewood. The two of them couldn’t be trusted to pay attention, and the shorter one was picking at an ingrown hair on his forearm.
“I also have read the reports,” said Dr. Malpani, an Indian doctor with an unstylish mustache. His accent was almost unnoticeable, but it was drawn out by the presence of the Americans in the room.
“These reports, gentlemen, and ladies, I’m sorry, Dr. Melki, are unreadable. Do you see this?” He took out a stack of papers – more like a ream, actually – and slammed it on the Formica surface, a faint cloud of dust rising from the table.
“See what?” said Dr. Belvedere.
“Printed in a sans-serif font.”
“A what?” Dr. Belvedere said. He flashed Dr. Rexmore the strongest look of contempt he could muster.
“A sans-serif font. One without the fine cross-strokes at the top and bottom of a letter.”
“Are you serious?” Dr. Belvedere said, now staring at Dr. Rexmore.
“Quite.”
“And your recommendation?”
“That we re-print the documents using a serifed font, which would be, no doubt, easier on the eyes. Especially in print format.”
Dr. Belvedere pressed his index and middle finger to the side of his neck under his jaw and checked his pulse. He didn’t think about the fact that all the other doctors in the room would know what he was doing. He also forgot about that pesky positive feedback loop, in which checking your pulse in a state of high tension can lead to an increase in blood pressure and thus heart rate, which meant that simply checking your pulse could trigger a panic attack. There was no time for something like that – efficiency was of the utmost importance. The collective agitation level in the room was increasing at a slow but steady rate.
“Your recommendation has been noted, Dr. Rexmore,” Dr. Belvedere said. “Now, if we can proceed, Dr. Rexmore?”
“Go ahead,” Dr. Rexmore said. He smiled.
Dr. Belvedere went on to describe the experiments performed earlier in the day using a PowerPoint presentation and a Levitra-branded laser pen, which he had received in the mail from Bayer, Inc. In the middle of the presentation, he felt a vibration creeping up his leg. He checked his cell phone, but it was off. After the presentation was complete, the doctors walked to another room, which had a view of an experiment room behind a two-way mirror.
On the dark side of the two-way mirror, Dr. Belvedere was nothing more than a shadow. He was elevated about fifty feet above the experiment room, where he could watch everything and take notes. It was his job to oversee the experiments and make sure they were performed according to plan; every detail was planned meticulously, and any deviation from that plan could mean disaster in terms of generating results that were scientifically sound. Then he’d be chewed out by his supervisor who seemed to get off on chewing people out. The room he was in was barely lit. Dr. Belvedere couldn’t make out the freckles on his arms. He stood at the two-way mirror and faced a row of doctors sitting in plush seats, which had pop-out footrests. Only two of the doctors were using the footrests. Dr. Belvedere turned from the window to face his colleagues, who were visibly anxious. Maybe they were frightened, maybe they were excited. Nobody really knew, but if they had, they’d probably adjust their facial expressions accordingly. You didn’t want to express too much emotion down here, but asynchrony in mood and affect could also spell disaster on a deeper level.
Down below, five naked humans, all male, were shuffled into a concrete-walled room about eight feet square by a few of the denim jumpsuit people. Their bodies were covered with brown circular sensors, which resembled human nipples. Around each subject’s left wrist was a blue tag bracelet. The floor they were standing on resembled a checkerboard – an alternating pattern of black and white squares, with a slightly raised silver grid between the squares. There were huge, five-foot-wide fans installed in the ceilings, like the ones you see in the ceilings of movie theaters. They functioned as Sound Conditioners by filling the air with a narcotic whooshing, which had the added benefit of blocking out the sounds of screams. Thin wires ran from the nipple-like sensors on each body to the input of a dedicated research server in the corner of the room. The room was lit by a harsh fluorescent light that gave the subjects’ skin a purple hue.
“Gentlemen,” Dr. Belvedere said, “here are the final subjects of the day.” It was all clinical. On the walls were five lights, each with a button beneath it. “Today’s subjects have not been given any instructions. They are in a room whose floor is electrically charged. The standard voltage is sub-lethal, approximately one hundred and fifty volts. They will be shocked every twenty seconds, unless—”
“This is fucking awesome,” said Dr. Rexmore.
Dr. Belvedere audibly cleared his throat. This was his pet project, and Dr. Rexmore was ruining it.
“Unless subject #1958 presses the correct button,” Dr. Belvedere said. “In which case they won’t be shocked. But we will measure the anticipation of the shock as well as the path the electricity takes through the body using sensors placed in various locations on the body. We will vary the shocking schedule to see how quickly the subjects can adjust.”
“They look like nipples,” Dr. Rexmore said.
“Dr. Rexmore, if you would please be quiet,” said Dr. Belvedere. “Let’s begin.”
Dr. Belvedere pushed a green button on the wall, which lit up a little red light in the experimentation room and signaled a low-frequency tone that sounded like the buzzing of an alarm clock. In the room, the subjects looked at each other’s faces. They had known what they were getting into when they signed up for this, but being there was a totally different thing. The first shock came and the subjects screamed. They scrambled to the wall with the buttons and pushed them repeatedly. Another shock came. A few of them jumped and screamed again. One of them said something that sounded like, “What the fuck are we doing wrong?” They tried pressing other buttons. They looked at each other in anticipation of the shock, but it didn’t come this time.
Dr. Rexmore looked on from his plush seat in the observation room, grinning. Dr. Belvedere noticed this and couldn’t help but feel that Dr. Rexmore’s grin was inappropriate. Dr. Belvedere pictured himself meeting and shaking hands with Barack Obama as he looked down through the two-way mirror. He saw one of the subjects scratching himself violently, peeling off some of the sensors.
“Stop the experiment,” Dr. Belvedere said. He walked over to the panel on the wall and pushed a red button, which made the green button pop out. He ran out of the observation room, jumped down a flight of stairs, and opened up the door to the experimentation room. He had never gone in there before. The room was cold and smelled like burning flesh.
“Subject number one nine five eight,” he said. “You have to stop scratching.” He picked the nipple sensors off the ground. Curly hairs were stuck to the sticky side of the sensors.
“I don’t want to do this anymore,” subject #1958 said.
“You agreed to do this experiment. You’re getting paid handsomely,” Dr. Belvedere said.
“I want to go home.”
“I’m sorry,” Dr. Belvedere said. Subject #1958 tried to open the door, but it was locked from the inside. Dr. Belvedere grabbed his wrist and looked at the tag. It read: Subject #1958, Goldman, A.
“Come on now, Mr. Goldman,” Dr. Belvedere said. Goldman sighed.
Dr. Belvedere had the power to completely dissociate himself from reality, sort of an internal defense mechanism. It wasn’t a skill he’d consciously developed, though he’d become aware of it as he found himself visiting dense forests with towering trees, beaches with pink sand and Barbicide-colored swells, lands he’d never been to. One favorite was to picture himself floating above Manhattan in a glass cube that was invisible to everyone else. He believed that he was escaping the second-by-second tedium of his work by forming mental postcards. He did not care to think about it. There was a certain amount of money he needed to live comfortably, and he believed that the experiments carried out in the lab were of utmost importance to the future of the human race. There was no doubting this.
He took the sensors and re-affixed them to Goldman’s skin, then went back upstairs.
Dr. Belvedere poked his head into the observation room. “I have to go,” he said. Dr. Belvedere felt his leg buzzing. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone. No new messages, no voicemails, no missed calls.
Dr. Belvedere rode the lift up to the ground level. It was a counterweighted black cage, an old school elevator. He was often afraid that one day it would just break and he’d plummet to his death, right there. He would spend the entire elevator ride imagining the scenario. Sometimes, he found this a thrill. The idea that he could be seconds away from his death was adrenally exciting in ways that even, say, skiing at maximum velocity down a double diamond or skydiving out of a parachute could simply not match. There was something about the slow creep of the cage, the way it resembled an old man rising from a chair. If he went, how would he go? – would it be an explosion, a giant gaseous ball of fire? Or would the cage simply collapse under its own weight, trapping him inside? That would be a much slower death, that of starvation, and that did not seem like a noble way to die. With an explosion, you become one with nature. Your insides become outsides.
He walked out of the building and into the December night. The sudden change from heat to cold shocked his whole body. Usually, you couldn’t see the stars in the city, though it was hard to deny the beauty of the city illuminated, especially when viewed from above, and its grid pattern was not unlike the checkerboard floor of the Schermerhorn basement. But tonight there was a heavy snow falling on the previous week’s blizzard, which had left a few feet of dirty, black, impacted snow piled up at the curb, pushed aside by snowplows. It was more like a crust, actually, as if the city itself was a living thing and had this icy black discharge. Dr. Belvedere hated seeing that dirty snow. But he loved the way the virgin snow looked on the ground, before it was soiled by cars and feet, when the snow molded to the shape of the ground and you could tell which way the wind was blowing by looking at the shape of the white hills it formed, like the dunes of a desert. The snow was falling from low hanging clouds, normally gray, but which tonight trapped in and diffused the light from the city, giving the sky a pink sheen. In this moment the city seemed to calm down for a bit. Maybe it wasn’t sleeping, just taking a nap. Things were quiet. Was it that the falling snow absorbed all the sound – passively transferring the harsh energies of car horns and jackhammers and drunken ramblings to white nothingness? Did everyone decide celebrate its arrival in whispered voices? Maybe it was just that people stayed inside, desired to be warm and comfortable in the face of the harsh blizzard air – which could cut your skin like a frozen knife – and so New York City on this night sounded like an empty room occupied only by an oscillating fan.
Dr. Belvedere walked from the Schermerhorn building to a garage nearby on 118th Street. He’d forgotten where he’d parked his car. He felt another vibration in his leg. This time he actually had a phone call, though it was from a number he didn’t recognize. The area code was 304, which was West Virginia. He picked up the phone and said, “Hello?”
“Hi,” a voice on the other end said.
“Who is this?” Dr. Belvedere said.
From his right pocket he removed the remote for his car, crossing his left hand over the front of his jacket, because he was holding the phone with his right. He pressed the ‘lock’ button to get his car to honk its horn, but he didn’t hear anything. “Is somebody there?” Dr. Belvedere began to suspect that his family was throwing a surprise birthday party for him, and that they were calling his cell phone to somehow distract him or at least figure out where he was so that they could know when to turn out the lights and say “Surprise!”
Dr. Belvedere pressed the remote to the bottom of his chin with his left hand, then tried the button again. This was a trick that his son taught him, actually – it turned out that you could turn your head into a giant antenna. The cushy fluid in between your brain and your skull could conduct electricity and carry the signal. Your head as a point of radiation. The animated logo for RKO Radio Pictures. Dr. Belvedere pictured himself from outside his body and saw his head emitting jagged white bolts whose light seared his mind’s eye, as if he were actually seeing it, actually feeling the searing pain, so that he had to consciously avoid thinking of it. The man on the other end didn’t answer Dr. Belvedere, so he collapsed his phone and put it in his pocket. He pushed the button again, and finally he heard a honk come from his car. He got into his car, a black BMW X5 SUV, and pressed the ‘Engine Start’ button.
He drove his car up a few blocks and then made a right onto 125th Street. He drove over the Triborough Bridge and onto Long Island. He felt relieved when he got there. It was nine and his wife was probably worrying about him. He felt the reciprocal need to worry, as in to worry about her worrying, and even though he found it had no point, he worried anyway, and continued driving east towards his house in Brookville.
There was a lot on his mind, but he felt like he couldn’t really focus on any one particular thing. He kept sniffing at the air as if to reset his sense of smell. He couldn’t tell if the burning flesh smell was stuck in his brain or his nose. He blew his nose with a tissue that he pulled out of the center console. He looked at it afterwards and realized he’d already blown his nose with that very tissue. He was nearly home, on Route 107, where there were no streetlights, and only one lane for travel in either direction. No one was out because the ground was covered in snow, covering the yellow road lines, and hadn’t yet been plowed. Snow was still falling heavily. He felt his phone vibrating in his pocket again, and he went to his pocket to grab it. When he looked up, he saw a deer in the middle of the road. He slammed on the brakes, but the black ice underneath his car had its own intentions. The anti-lock brake system went into action, pumping the brakes for him. It wasn’t enough. The ice was too slippery, and the car was too big. He didn’t know why but he turned the wheel and watched it turn as he spun out, his car pirouetting on the ice, yet remaining in a straight-line path down the road. From above, you’d think the spinning was beautiful, as if planned in advance, the tires of the car fixed and tight, wheel askew, no grip whatsoever, the world beyond the windshield blurring into a swirl of white snow and brown trees. Would he hit a tree? That wouldn’t be a good way to go. And he’d miss out on his surprise party. In that moment he thought of the face of his wife and children, his two little brown-haired boys, wearing party-cones on their heads and noisemakers in their mouths and if he had maybe another moment to really stop and think about everything he might have felt something, but instead he just saw their faces smiling but they were smiling too hard, like forced smiles, too many teeth showing, eyes neutral, and before he had a chance to really think about it everything faded.
When he came to, he saw the front of his car was embedded in a pile of dark snow piled up at the edge of the road. He put his car in reverse, backed out of the spot, and drove home. When he got there, the lights were all dark. He took out his cell phone and dialed his house, expecting his wife to pick up, but there was no answer. The street was lined with cars, and though not a religious man, Dr. Belvedere crossed himself, thanking all major deities that he hadn’t been on the street with all the cars on it when he was spinning around. He wasn’t sure if he was in shock or not. He opened the door and he heard it: “Surprise!” The lights flicked on and there was his family, standing there, waiting for him just as he’d pictured in his head, smiles only slightly less feigned.
***
Under a Chemical Sky FICTION #
The three of them had been at the beach for nearly an hour, tossing a frisbee and running in the sand. Greg quit early, citing his asthma, and then spent twenty or thirty minutes squeezing the sand underneath his toes. He had a weird thing for sticking things in the vestigially webbed spaces between his toes: blankets, the edges of rugs, pillows, his fingers: something about it relaxed him, made him feel comfortable in his human skin.
They had smuggled with them a small conical joint. Their first lighter didn’t work, and they didn’t feel like walking back to the car to find the other one, so Jason took off his glasses and recalled out loud some theory about reflection and refraction from the optics portion of his remedial physics class, then focused the light at the twisted tip of the J. He watched in puerile glee as the tip ignited, and the paper began to slowly combust and hiss smoke.
Greg watched as Alex punched Jason in the shoulder. He wasn’t sure if Alex was joking or not – if he wasn’t, the reason for the punch was probably that Alex was there to lie in the sun and smoke marijuana, not to listen to Jason give an impromptu and surely quasi-fictional lecture on optics.
Greg’s whole existence on earth had felt rather meaningless in a religious or cosmic way. What was he here for – what was his purpose here on earth? – and these sorts of thoughts flew through his head at superluminal speeds, way too quickly to grab on to and hold for a second and really think about. He so dearly wanted to hold on to one of these thoughts, and his inability to do so while sober filled him with a kind of self-conscious dread that sometimes worsened after smoking. He was reluctant to say anything, lest he be ridiculed by his friends, who he considered to be much more intelligent and articulate.
Then for a while they just sat on their beach towels, watching the blue-green waves rush in and out. The whooshing noise was cyclic and almost narcotically calming. Greg had to consciously blink his eyes every once in a while. Propeller planes droned overhead like mechanical cicadas, signaling the beginning of summer.
It can be hard to maintain silence sometimes, but thirty minutes had gone by without any of them saying a word to each other.
The three of them had recently graduated from college, all different majors and schools, and barely kept in touch while they were away. Their one common bond was a love for the buds of the pungent green Cannibis sativa, but none of them had direct, conscious knowledge of that fact. They didn’t really know why they kept hanging out. It was just something to do, to idly pass through the hours.
“It’s really too bad,” Jason said. His chin rested on a genuflected knee while he used his right index finger to poke holes in the sand. The wet sand was better for poking holes in, Jason was probably thinking, as the more dirt-like particles in the sand formed a sort of sloshy mud that had structural fortitude.
“What’s too bad?”
“I don’t understand what you mean.”
“Huh?”
“Too bad – you just said something about too bad.”
“No I didn’t.”
They sat there a bit more until a little nude boy ran across the sand in front of them.
“Someone should teach that kid some manners,” Greg said. He was determined to make a difference. There were times when he felt like he had no effect on the world, that he was more a passive observer than an active participant. His perception of a lack-of-will stretched to every human experience imaginable: he never picked what movie everyone was seeing, or what the family was having for dinner. In 2004, he voted for John Kerry. His life up to that point could be summarized as a struggle to merely push things around.
“Ha ha,” Jason said. He was staring up into the sun and then closing his eyes, watching the neon of the burned-in circular afterimage glow and then fade out of his vision.
“What’s in his hands?” Jason asked. The boy had picked up something gelatin, a milky blob with dangling tentacles.
“It’s a fucking jellyfish! A man-o-war!”
“That’s bullshit, man. They don’t live around here.”
“Hey Greg, you better get over there. You might have to piss on the kid if the jellyfish stings him.”
“No, I’m serious,” Greg said. The boy was jumping up and down, kicking up sand. He wore a single-toothed smile on his face like it was the best day of his life.
Greg got up and followed the boy across the beach. He stared down at the sand but tried to keep the boy in sight. In his mind, he rehearsed what he’d tell the woman: that she was wrong to let her son simply parade himself around totally naked, despite the child’s age; that she was an example – no! – a paragon of bad parenting. Greg was planning a full-scale coup on this woman who he had never met, so word choice seemed important. He wanted to make an example of her. But everything just felt off. The tide was rising, and Greg could hear the waves crashing on the beach with hostile intensity. He turned back briefly to look at his two friends, who were arguing intently about something inane. See, Greg thought, this kind of parenting is what leads to our idle conversation, our pointless bantering. There must be some kind of discipline. Greg considered his whole life during that walk, and arrived at the sordid conclusion that he had been raised by fools.
For five minutes he walked like this, keeping a careful distance so that he could see the boy’s interaction with his mother. He couldn’t make out their conversation from far away, but he could see with complete clarity the jellyfish’s tentacles swaying gently in the wind.
The boy’s mother was a blonde woman with some kind of white retro 50s glasses. She appeared utterly oblivious to the world around her, and the world seemed to acknowledge this fact.
“Excuse me,” Greg said. Nothing.
“I said, excuse me,” he said again.
The woman said nothing, and this angered Greg. How could a person have such horrible manners? It only made sense, after all, that the child would act that way, given her mother’s sensibilities. But sometimes people need to be put in their place, Greg thought: sometimes their behaviors and proclivities sway so far from the norm that it takes an outside force, a benevolent agent of good, to correct them. For effect, Greg folded his arms, right over left. He could not think of a time he had been more deliberate in his body language, in fact.
“Miss,” he said. Finally, she looked up. Greg saw now that her body was clearly that of a young mother’s. For some reason he had expected one of those old, wrinkly hag types. The woman placed a single finger on the bridge of her glasses, lowered them, and then slowly tilted her head up from her book (a Danielle Steele or Nelson DeMille paperback – he saw a gold-plated name but only for a blurry second) to look at Greg. The sun hung low in the sky, straight out at the horizon, and a beady sweat was forming on his forehead.
“Yes?”
“Well, listen, my friends and I are sitting over there, and we happened to have noticed your little boy running across here without any pants on, and I think that you know, it’s adorable in a way,” Greg started to say, his mouth betraying his carefully planned monologue.
“What?”
“Look, I just think that you shouldn’t be letting your kid run around like that. Especially picking up jellyfish. They could sting him.” Greg could hear his voice rising in pitch as he spoke, the way his father’s would when he had to teach Greg a lesson.
“Really? That’s what you think?” The woman’s voice was strained and sarcastic.
“Y-yes. And, let me tell you, those s-stings hurt.” Greg had trouble composing his thoughts now. He felt like he was communicating on a different level, that somehow his thoughts and actions were directly perpendicular to everybody else’s.
“Go away.” Was she simply being irrational, or did she really want him to go away?
“Now, listen.”
“Fuck you,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“I said fuck you, get out of here and leave us alone.”
“Look, lady –”
“No, you look. What makes you think you can tell me what I can do to my kid, you little shit?”
“I just –”
“You have no right to tell me what to do. And as you can see, he’s just fine.” The boy was giggling, grabbing on to the loose parts of the mother’s oversized Walk for Cancer ’98 t-shirt. For a moment it seemed like everything really was alright.
“You’re a shitty mother, lady.”
“What? What! You little shit!” She seemed genuinely affected, her face cycling through shades of red, finally settling on a thoroughly embarrassed crimson. “Don’t curse in front of my kid!” She covered her boy’s ears in reflex.
“I’ll do whatever the fuck I want!”
The woman said nothing. She tilted her head back down the ground and fought back tears with sniffles. The boy was still playing with his jellyfish.
“Alright, alright,” Greg said. He walked back to his friends and looked across the water. The sun was falling steadily at the horizon, a disc of yellow-red that blasted the clouds pink. Streaks of purple, too, lay like strips of paper-mâché across the expansive dome above them. He could hear Jason in the distance: “I don’t know man, I stopped really liking Floyd after we graduated.” Greg sat down and resolved to build a castle of sand. ♦
***
Shiny-Winged Aluminum, First Go FICTION #
A twenty-thousand pound hunk of aerodynamically shaped, shiny winged aluminum soars upwards through the sky, scorching and twisting the air behind it, carrying within one hundred and ninety-nine passengers, two pilots (one, a really, a co-pilot), and a dozen flight attendants, all human. Seat 25A, a window, commences conversation with 25B, the middle seat, as the craft reaches what’s commonly known as “cruising altitude,” awkward passive-aggressive elbow-placing competitions not yet played out:
“I believe it’s customary, I mean, that’s my belief – it’s my belief that the middle seat ought to get both arm rests to herself.”
“That’s kind of you,” 25B says. She gets comfortable in her seat as a full-body chill runs from the back of her neck through the terminus of her spine. “But I think that it’s possible, and it really depends on who’s sitting where, you know, I really think it’s possible that there can be two elbows on the same arm rest.”
25A nods in surprised approval; the arm-rest thing was just an opener. He wasn’t expecting an intelligent, cogent response, one that was both morally sound and could be seen, he thought, as counter-flirtation – but it was a damn good response, that response. And she demonstrates her theory by placing her own left elbow on the front part of the left arm rest, then seizes 25A’s right elbow and puts it on the back half. QED.
“Amazing,” 25A says. “Simple.”
He goes on to tell her that he feels much more comfortable opening up to strangers than to people he knows. And he can actually run through a mental list, he says, of his friends, and in doing so realize that he is probably closest and most specific in personal detail with his newest acquaintances, and almost cryptically vague with his oldest friends. The reasons are myriad, but they basically revolve around his self-perception as a complete phony, a faker, and that strangers usually don’t realize that he’s faking. Of course, he doesn’t tell her this. He tells her something about working as a car salesmen way, way back, and how he couldn’t help but be painfully honest with the customers, and then uncovers a small Ziploc bag from his suitcase containing five or six small three-oz. bottles of variously colored liquids. One looks milky-white and swirly. A couple others are a Barbicide-colored, a deep pool blue. 25B’s hair is not a deep pool blue; it’s more like a brown, neatly tied into some kind of bun at the back. A fairly conservative hairstyle, if you asked 25A.
25B looks around. She counts fifty-five rows of seats, horizontally packed. The starboard side has three seats next to each other: a window, middle, and aisle. The port side has just the two: window and aisle. Some of the seats are empty, but there is no apparent design to the empty seat/occupied seat layout. This is frustrating to several flight attendants, who wish that everyone was just bunched up in the front. Especially frustrated is Jenny Fitzgerald, who is more upset about the lack of any apparent pattern than the fact that she has to mush her cart around.
“I’d end up telling them that they could get a better deal at a different dealer,” 25A says. Everyone bounces up and down a little bit in their seats. Must’ve hit an air pocket. 25A looks over his shoulder; 26A is sound asleep, despite the violent takeoff. It sounded as if rusted metallic objects were angrily throwing themselves at one another then. 25A personally thought that it didn’t bode well, but then they successfully reached cruising altitude – that time when everyone on the plane hears a soothing ding and the seat-belt sign turns off and the plane levels out and evens itself (well, not quite – the pilots take care of that), and everyone collectively exhales.
25B responds in kind, telling him about her boyfriend – a real “jerk and a half.” 25A carefully picks up on little phrases like this during her spiel, focusing more of his attention on her impossibly intense blue eyes, which reflect tiny dots of overhead light. She tells him of a depressed man, a person who appears to darken the air around him, if only through his utter inability to feel anything remotely close to joy. But what to make of a soul like this one?
“Do you think he wants to hurt you? To be so depressed, to sulk on purpose?”
“I think he wants the attention.”
“But does he want you?”
The question floats in the air, a reality that nobody wants to face right now. 25B looks out her window and sees absolutely nothing identifiable, except maybe a small white thing somewhere out there, but she’s not quite sure. Her pre-flight ritual involves baking and then eating a small batch of brownies with marijuana. She hasn’t been on a flight sober in years. She takes a certain pleasure watching everyone else freak out about the historical significance of this particular flight. Not 20 minutes earlier, a flight attendant, Jenny Fitz-something, had wrestled a carry-on bag into the overhead compartment. 25B feels like the overhead compartments are like a negative-matter zone. She’s still a bit superstitious. She thinks maybe the bags disappear when the door is closed and they reappear when the doors are opened. This kind of thinking, which is the sole reason for the existence of games like “peek-a-boo,” is supposed to recede into the deepest parts of the brain around age 2.
25A goes on to say that not only does he feel more comfortable talking to strangers, but that he feels most comfortable talking to 25B, as in the young woman sitting right next to him. This type of sincerity is discomforting to most. Even if people really feel this way – and we’re not quite sure whether or not 25A is sincere, his self-perceived phoniness hindering his own ability to say anything without a slight zest of sarcasm – not everyone is equipped to handle it. People are trained at a young age to present themselves, as in warp themselves, bending and jimmy-rigging their personalities into effective, personable personas, and this sort of need to limit oneself for the benefit of others perpetuates simply because of the fact that everyone else is doing it. So then the question becomes, 25A thinks, how honest should I be? 25A leans in closer to 25B now (he had, only 5 minutes before takeoff, began chewing a thin slice of Extra gum, peppermint flavored, but spit it out shortly after, the gum having lost its initial orgasm of invigorating bluish-white mint flavor, 25A resolving to chew the remainder of the 24-pack over the duration of the flight as needed) and can’t help but wonder if there is perhaps some unintended hostility in his voice, if only because he needs to speak louder because of the persistent hum of the engine.
The quad-jet engines, a late-aught custom design, are a distant hum inside the fuselage, though the hum is quite persistent and spread over a wide area of the spectrum, say 30 to 3000 Hz; the hum is right in that meaty part of the spectrum where human voices reside, so that everyone has to speak a little louder to be heard, and passengers have to turn up the volume on their iPods so they can hear the snare drums clearly. There are also vibrating subfrequencies within the distant hum so that there is a slow but consistent ooeeeeemmmmmmmm crescendoing in and out every couple seconds that can actually be felt and resolves in a few passengers’ loss of sphincter control.
25B tells 25A that she admires honesty in a man, and reveals in a sort of sexy way that nothing turns her on more than honesty. All types of honesty, she says: honesty in friendship, honesty in business, honesty in relationships, honesty about being dishonest. 25A starts to think that 25B looks vaguely domestic. He can see in her face where wrinkles might some day appear. Her smile is not overly-toothed, correctly proportioned, and looks like one of those post-op pictures that dental surgeons hang in their office. No, no, no, 25A says. You have no idea the extent of my honesty. His face is deadly serious when he says this – completely affectless, like a wax figure. 25B makes a noise like she’s about to shoot a booger out of her nose and then starts laughing. This guy, who’s so serious that he can’t help but be serious about everything, cannot be taken seriously.
“It’s almost pathological. I can’t help but be honest about a lot of things,” 25A says. There’s a low grumble that sounds like a 20,000 ton hunk of aluminum with an empty stomach. People on the plane are starting to freak out a little bit, but 25B keeps laughing. Her mouth is open wide and her uvula is bouncing up in down in the back of her mouth, but barely any air escapes; in the hum of the plane, her cackle is silent.
The seats they are sitting in were constructed in the late-aughts, maybe 2008 or 2009, given shape by a new type of squishy off-white polyurethane foam that the California state government later ruled to be unconstitutional because of its propensity to violently burst into flames without warning. The seats are upholstered in dark blue leather with a red-and-white ‘AA’ insignia on the headrest. Something like five hundred cows raised and nurtured on flat Midwestern farms were ritualistically killed for the covering of these seats. Five hundred cows, standing stoically on green fields, cumulus clouds hanging high overhead, completely unaware of their grand purpose, their role in the creation of super-comfortable, ultra-luxurious seats, so that frontier tourists may comfortably rest their rotund cellulose deposits. It’s all very patriotic and American. 14D actually said this, while boarding, to his wife. There is nothing better or more appropriate, 14D had said to his wife – a shortish woman with an excessively large bottom, who was obviously a prime consumer for such seats – than the Right to Travel for long periods of time in a comfortable chair. So they sat.
14D, now sitting in his chair with his back straight, letting his body sink in to the leather-wrapped flammable foam, tells the female flight attendant passing by that he would like a Phizzo, no ice.
“I ran out of Phizzo in this cart. Is Pepsi okay?”
Is Pepsi okay? Of course not. Pepsi is not okay. And had Coca-Cola been a possible option, it too would not be O.K. There’s a reason why Phizzo has claimed significant portions of both Coca-Cola’s and Pepsi’s respective market shares, despite their brand longevity in the cola market. There is a reason why Pepsi beats out Coca-Cola in blind consumer taste tests, yet remains at the bottom of surveyed Americans’ cola preferences year after year. There is a damn good reason why Phizzo is now #1. Whereas Coca-Cola and Pepsi aim for consistency in taste throughout the Drinking Experience, Phizzo aims for change-whilst-drinking. Whereas Coca-cola and Pepsi eschew the “Shake Well” text familiar on drinks like O.J. and milk for practical purposes involving carbonation and exploding liquids, Phizzo has much cooler reasons for eschewance. In fact, the very idea of serving Phizzo in any other drinking container other than the original manufactured container seems ridiculous because of Phizzo’s dedication to a complete Drinking Experience, which would not be but for the ingenious Taste Engineers at Phizzo, Inc.
14D makes this all clear to his wife, who halfway through 14D’s rant decided to stop paying attention and pick at a hangnail on her left thumb, which continues to progressively worsen because of all the incessant picking. Not to be outdone in the revolting habit department, however, is 39A, who insists that this flight is supposed to be full, and that something is particularly shady about all the empty seats; he’s picking at a scab on his left knee, right at the fleshy part of his knee below the cap. “This is a landmark flight,” he says. “And it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. No one in their right mind is going to give something like this up.”
39’s B and C, then, start making up stories about the missing passengers; a flight this long is an opportune time to exercise one’s imagination. The window view, after all, gets boring above a certain height, when the fuzzy, diffracting upper atmosphere starts to blend things together in a soupy blue haze. One of the potential passengers, according to 39C, had terminal cancer, despite planning on making the flight, and died the day before today. Another potential passenger, 39B alleges, was sitting on the toilet just a week before the flight, minding his or her own business (sex not determined – but this p.p. was definitely doing a #2) and 39B, telling the story, says, “You think you might know where this one is going – a la Elvis – but actually, he’s just sitting there on the porcelain throne – the John, the crapper, the hole, the pot, the potty, the latrine, the shit-collector – anyway, you get what I’m saying, and the and an errant baseball goes flying through the bathroom window and smashes the window into a million pieces, and the baseball has enough momentum to keep going and strike the guy right in the head, and it cracks his skull open and the protective liquid around his brain, the meninges I think they’re called, start leaking out, and he also coats the wall in a spray of explosive diarrhea.”
40C isn’t enjoying this. He just feels despair. He feels a deep pit in his stomach, like he’s falling, even though he’s just sitting with a rather contented look on his face. If he shifts his body even a couple degrees to the left or right, the sensation of falling gets so intense and real-feeling that he has to literally grab hold of something, close his eyes, and simulate right there on the plane the feeling of being absolutely still. Really, there’s hardly anything that can be done about the falling feeling. He’s tried equalizing, as in equalizing the pressure in his ears, by opening his mouth wide and pushing his lower jaw forward, which sometimes has the added effect of not only unpopping his ears but also setting off a fleshy-sounding crack in his ear, and 40C is not sure whether or not that’s a good thing. Sometimes he chews gum and swallows, as per his mother’s recommendation some twenty years hence.
The little kid in the seat next to him is reciting, in sotto voice, what sounds to 40C to be a chronological list of every McDonnell DC-10 plane crash. 40C feels his forehead with the back of his right hand; when he pulls the hand away, it’s coated in salty sweat. The flight isn’t very bumpy, but that’s not helping 40C. It feels like the temperature is rising maybe .1 degree Celsius every 5 minutes. You can really get stuck in your head on a flight like this. The fuselage is boring and unadorned. Nothing to plainly observe, so the mind must make its own sense of the vast blankness. Place its own order on disorderliness. There are maybe eighty other people on this thing, 40C thinks, and yet he feels a sense of loneliness, as if he shares absolutely nothing in common with anybody else on the plane. Anybody else in the whole entire fucking universe! He pines for visitation by extraterrestrial life; maybe they would “get” him. Understand where he’s coming from, you know? Because when he was a little kid, 40C loved flying. It was a delight. Then, later in life, a certain twisted reality sunk in. 40C’s read the statistics. They don’t help. 40C can’t help but think that he’s always going to be the 1/10th of a percent. He wonders about whether or not his life means anything. It’s a brutal line of thought that is sometimes worth pursuing but seldom has any short-term benefits. He wonders whether having won a contest means anything to his life. When other people won contests in which winners are seemingly chosen at complete random, like a raffle or something, he always felt like it wasn’t so random, like there was some kind of overarching hand guiding the numbers. Maybe that’s why he’s headed towards that glowing white ball – the greyish, pockmarked chunk of rock that every rock on earth wishes it were a part of, its shiny glare reflecting on the surface of the cockpit’s only window.
“You ever fly this route before?” the pilot asks his copilot, speaking into his headset. There’s a little switch coming off of his headset, a set of Bose over-the-ear cans, that lets him switch between infra-aircraft and air-ground communication. Their voices sound tinny and distant over the radio.
“No.”
“She’s a good’n.”
“Should be.”
The pilot flips the switch.
“Ground control, this is six seven two two one niner, releasing second stage now.” The cockpit is illuminated only by the electronic displays, which have the advantage over standard mechanical displays because of their informational triage; only the important stuff is displayed. The pilot can cue up which instruments he needs when he wants them – a sort of informational triage. t can get quite overwhelming with the altitude, the barometric pressure, the vertical speed, the navigational information, etc. and allows for full Situational Awareness. The pilot flips a red cover and pushes a button underneath and something large and cylindrical drops off the aircraft.
“Feels lighter.”
“How you think these people can afford this kinda shit?”
“What shit?”
“This shit. Costs big money to send a bird to the Great Rock in the Sky.”
“Oh, you don’t know?”
“Didn’t tell me.”
“There was a contest. Phizzo.”
“Phizzo?”
“Phizzo. The soft drink.”
“Phizzo. I prefer Coke.”
“Me too.”
“They had one of those under the cap dealies.”
“Shit man, I never look at those. Always toss the cap.”
The pilot flips his headset switch. “Ground control, vector set.”
He hears back from ground control: “You’re cleared for landing on runway bravo charlie echo.”
The co-pilot: “That’s not us, is it?”
“No. Must be another flight. They’re all asses and elbows up there.”
Jenny Fitzgerald opens the door and pokes her pompadoured head in. “The P.A. isn’t working. I’ll have to use yours.”
“Uh, okay,” the pilot says, who turns around and eyes the woman up and down. Jenny’s breasts are large and almost comically proportioned to the rest of her body. She picks up a blue phone and speaks emphatically: “Attention passengers, attention passengers.” She expects to hear her own voice on the speakers in the fuselage, but nothing comes out. “I said: attention.” Still nothing. “Attention passengers: go to fucking hell. Eat shit. I repeat, eat shit.” She blows a stream of air out of the side of her mouth. “Well this is annoying,” she says. “The thing’s broken.”
“It is?” Either the pilot or the co-pilot says this; both of their voices are the same monotone. Jenny isn’t sure whether or not these two are related. She suspects that every pilot is related, somehow.
“Yes. It is. And I need you to make an announcement about bumps. Some of the passengers are wondering what’s going on.”
They say nothing, their eyes fixed on the window in front of them.
“I said they’re wondering what’s going on.”
“Are they?” His tone is non-professionally flirtatious. It’s pretty standard among pilots to treat flight attendants like garbage.
“Yes!”
“Okay, okay.” The two possibly related gentlemen start laughing.
“Alright,” the pilot says, drawing in a large breath. He breathes meditatively for a few seconds. Then, in his standard monotone voice: “Okay I’m ready.”
He flips a different switch on the console in front of him and speaks into his headset: “Attention passengers, this is your captain speaking. Despite the fact that we are currently travelling through a vacuum, this flight is subject to the same kind of bumps that you’d expect on a standard commercial flight. We just want to let you know that this is perfectly one-hundred percent normal. Thank you.”
40C grips his arm-rest tight now, his knuckles whitening. He tries to open his mouth to equalize, but something’s wrong. It’s not moving. 40C doesn’t know why. He focuses all of his conscious attention on trying to open his jaw, but nothing happens. Doesn’t feel stuck, though. It’s as if his brain’s forgotten that there’s even a jaw there. He wonders, on behalf of all of humanity, about how we tell our arms and legs to do things. He can think about lifting his arm without actually lifting it. But doing it is as easy as, well, just doing it. It’s like the muscles in his jaw just won’t do it.
15 seats ahead, 25’s A and B are still talking to each other.
“What are you saying,” 25B says, now about 5 to 10 percent annoyed. She wishes that she could take back her whole conversation with this airplane stranger. At first she was intrigued, and the arm-rest thing was slightly interesting, in the way that kids in her university classes would say that something was “interesting” – as in worth twenty to thirty seconds of devoted mental flexing, and that’s it. But she can’t help but think that 25A’s simply playing an angle, manipulating her, carefully calculating responses, a robot that might fail a Turing test. 25A feels her pushing back and responds accordingly.
“I’m saying that I prefer honesty as well, but that most people would prefer a lie to the truth.”
“The whole P.T. Barnum thing.”
“Yeah,” 25A says, his chest rising and then falling, “that.”
“Okay,” 25B says. “But how do I know that everything you’re saying right now isn’t a lie? How am I supposed to know that everything you’re saying about truth and honesty isn’t just something you tell people on airplanes to get into their pants?” She’s a clever one, this 25B.
“You overestimate me,” 25A says. “I have no ulterior motives.”
“Right, but how am I supposed to know that? How do I know what you’re saying isn’t a complete lie?”
“Well, geez.” 25 rubs a little mole on his left arm with his right hand. “How do you know that everything isn’t just one big lie? How do you know we’re really this flight right now? I mean, you know where we’re headed. Doesn’t that sound like fiction to you?”
“It does, it does.”
“Well it’s not. We’re here and we’re flying there!” 25A says, and then there’s a significant bump as 25A points out the window. Everyone jostles around a bit. A couple passengers wonder how gravity is working if they’re out in space, but 40C is not. He’s positively reeling now. He feels like he’s being violently shaken around. He pictures himself as a single molecule of vermouth in James Bond’s martini, bouncing off the walls of an aluminum shaker. The kid in the seat next to him (whose mother is sound asleep, drool hanging daintily from the corner of her mouth) pulls an old grey mobile entertainment device out of his backpack. The kid flips a little grey switch (a darker grey) at the top of the device and a second later it emits an emaciated du-ding. Then there’s the sound of falling blocks and a computerized, robotic sounding version of some obscure Russian tune. The kid is clearly good at the game; he won’t stop playing. The Russian music repeating over and over again gives 40C a wicked headache. 40C’s head feels like it’s being repeatedly dropped from the rooftop of a very tall building. He looks out the window, for some kind of solace, and the desolate vacuum of space stares back, wallowing in its dark splendor. At the corner of the window a small white speck appears. 40C scratches the window, thinking that the speck was on the window the whole time, and that he had just now noticed it – but he realizes he is mistaken after he glides the tip of his thumbnail across the outer edge of the window for the third or fourth time. He wants to get out of his body and just be without feeling everything: the peculiar weight of false gravity, the rising temperature, the itchy feeling in the exact center of his back that he can’t seem to reach. He had gotten up shortly after take-off to go to the bathroom and take advantage of the unique properties of the low pressure fuselage; it seems that airborne bathrooms are good places for popping pimples. He stared at his lumpy nose in the mirror and sighed, and then pinched out a few little white pus worms. He collected them with his right thumb and forefinger and then rubbed them together and his mouth started to water.
14D, meanwhile, is relishing all of the bumps. He enjoys the bumps. He thinks that Americans are entitled to both luxury and an exhilarating ride. He tells his wife this, and she looks at him with furrowed eyebrows and her face seems to be saying something like, “just shut the fuck up until we fucking get there.” But 14D’s thinking about Phizzo. “Briefly,” he says to his wife, “The oft-noted reason why Pepsi used to win blind taste tests before the introduction of Phizzo to the American marketplace.” It is sweeter than Coca-Cola. Briefly, the reason why Coca-Cola remained on top, despite Pepsi’s constant annoying-little-brother-type nagging that it was better tasting, before Phizzo’s introduction to the American marketplace: it is not as sweet as Coca-cola. “In a one-off taste test,” 14D says, his eyes lit with a sort of greedy pride. An image of Gordon Gekko comes to mind. Bespoke suits and hair that’s permanently wet. “Consumers prefer the sweeter drink.” But in terms of long-term, grocery-store purchases, they prefer the less sweet drink. Phizzo takes advantage of the properties of liquids of different densities within the same container; much like oil and water, the Three Stages of Phizzo remain separated and distinct. Upon first taste of Phizzo, one enjoys a burst of pure saccharine goodness, the very smell of which is said to activate certain regions in the brain responsible for feelings of nostalgia and recovering of very old memories; this is the First Stage, which makes up the top layer of Phizzo and fills the first 27% of the unconventional, upside-down looking frosted plastic container that makes people say “Wow, that’s Phizzy!™” The Second Stage, which makes up about 70% of the drink, is a less sweet, more full-bodied flavor, tinged with bits of cinnamon and caramel and salt and [TRADE SECRETS REMOVED] and would fit in heartily well with any meal, and which may induce gleeful hiccupping after each thirst-quenching sip. (Phizzo may or may not, in the future, market the Second Stage in pure form as its own solitary drink – called “P2O” – which would be much more like the conventional colas.) Finally, the Third Stage, which makes up approximately 3% of the drink, is sort of a watered down version of S2, and is regarded by most consumers to be some kind of ‘bottom-of-the-barrel’-type leftover, much like the last sip of a beer – but it actually may or may not contain carefully engineered isomers of S2 flavor-compounds that are responsible for an undeniable hankerin’ for more Phizzo.
40C contemplates. Why him? Why was he chosen? Sure, sure, the bottles were randomly distributed to different convenience stores and groceries stores throughout the contiguous U.S.A. (Alaskans and Hawaiians simply having never been introduced to Phizzo) – but randomness allows for strange coincidences: like what if all the winners were in one state? They couldn’t have something like that happen. No, it couldn’t be truly random: in the pre-boarding area, when 40C could still move his jaw, he spoke to some of his fellow passengers. They told him they were scared, that they had never done this before. He tried to reassure them in his most fatherly voice that everything would be okay, that they would be hitting one-thousand yard drives and slam dunking on ten foot baskets in no time. And he took note of their accents: a bunch of New Yorkers, someone from Boston; he even heard the distinct Pittsburghean yinz. There seemed to be some kind of order to it all. But all this thinking starts to get to 40C. Plus there’s the white speck outside, which seems to grow larger each time 40C looks away and then back out the window. Everything feels weird to 40C now. It’s weird that he’s sitting on this plane. It’s weird that he is here, and not somewhere else. It’s weird that he could reason things out, imagine things in his head, without moving a single muscle on his body. It was enough to drive a guy like 40C fucking bonkers. He still couldn’t move his jaw.
“I think I may have figured out the reason,” 25A says. “I think I may have figured out the reason, I think it’s the reason, at least – I think I may have figured out the reason why I have to be so honest. It’s because I have these two voices in my head, you know? One of them is just like this constant unfiltered stream of information, like a firehose just bursting through my head. The other one is like the adaptive, outward appearance: what I should say to people. It’s cool and calculated. But sometimes they just become one, and the firehose takes over.”
“The firehose.”
“Yeah, it takes over.”
“So which one am I talking to now? The firehose or the… the other one?”
25A didn’t really know. That was probably the problem – it was that he wasn’t sure if what he was telling was the truth, even when he thought he was.
“Probably the firehose.”
“So could I ask you anything right now, and you’d tell me?”
“I guess.”
“So tell me a secret.”
“Whoa, whoa – it doesn’t work that easy. It’s gotta be more specific than that.”
“What do you want to do when we get there?”
“When we get there. Hmm. I guess I haven’t thought about it.” 25A pauses and looks out the window. Among the nothingness are the stars and a white thing that looks like it’s flying towards the ship.
“What do you mean? There’s so much to do!” Her eyes beam with incredulity.
“You’re right. You’re right. Man, I can’t believe I didn’t think about it more.”
“Well, I can help you decide. You know, there’s the Apollo 11 landing site, and.”
“And?” 25A tries to shake 25B out of her gaze, her eyes fixed in a focus beyond the little rounded window. 25A, meanwhile, carefully drinks the first 27% of his Phizzo.
“Yeah well, supposedly, the winners of the Phizzo contest get chosen at random.”
“Supposedly?”
“Supposedly.”
“Why supposedly?”
“Supposedly because I bet we could find something in common between all of these people.”
“Yeah? Wouldn’t be that all hard. Start with this: they’re all homo sapiens.”
“Shittin’ me?”
“No shit.”
“I’m talking way more specific than that.”
“What, you mean like they all have a flat-grey Volvo or something?”
“Something like that.”
Waves of electromagnetic radiation ripple through a vacuum, passing through the infinitesimal spaces between electrons, and resonate harshly in our pilot’s headset: “You are clear for landing.”
“What the heck,” the co-pilot says.
“I don’t know. Something must be wrong up there.”
“Oh, shit.”
“What?”
“What the hell is that?”
“What?”
“That.”
“What?”
“Look out the window.”
“Oh. Looks like a white… thing.”
“We need to report this.”
25A pours the Barbicide-looking liquid into his drink, catalyzing a chemical reaction within the bottle of Phizzo, which seems to have been designed for this kind of thing. The bottle’s plastic swells; the embossed and stylized PHIZZO on the side fills out out, making a crunchy noise.
All 40C can think about, though, is that he’s acutely aware of the fact that everybody was breathing in other people’s exhalation, a noxious concoction of carbon dioxide and the discreetly-belched gaseous remnants of the morning’s breakfast (bacon-egg-and-cheese sandwiches, Venezuelan coffee, orange juice – acidic breakfasts lead to heartburn and gassy stomachs before lunch), and holding that thought in his mind causes his eye to twitch uncontrollably at unpredictable intervals. It’s nearly time to land now. Everything on the plane sort of slows down. The pilot and co-pilot argue. There’s an ionic, charged feeling to the air, like the minutes before a thunderstorm. And the shiny winged aluminum moves ever forward, surrounded by white globular objects. ♦
***
Some thoughts on an orange cup FICTION #
The orange cup sat in front of me, a motionless, unconscious object. The cup was perfectly content sitting there. It expressed no feelings of discontent or unease. It refrained completely from engaging in awkward small talk. It just gently sat there, barely even oscillating, hardly even vibrating. The cup had no intentions. It was perfectly intentionless. It’s a perfect thing, really, to neither want nor be wanted. But that’s the business of objects, not of living men.
Objects are also in the business of having tendencies. They are guided by forces beyond their control, and they move along lines as if moved by willful things. Picture the raindrop on the window. It can be still. It can be self-contained, insular, content in itself, the drop clinging to the window not out of desperation or hope, but simply by its tendency. Then the wind will blow or another drop, moving on its own path, will collide with that first drop. The drop will follow a path down the window, not quite straight, leaving a trace of its path behind, bending slightly as it reaches tiny imperfections in the deceivingly smooth surface of the glass. As it falls, the drop builds in speed, moving quicker towards the ground, where it will finally rest and take form as a circular puddle. You tell me what caused the drop to do that. You may say it was gravity, and that is fine, but to attribute nothing to the drop itself seems to rob of it of something that is equally imaginative and useful. It is easy to say that mere objects have neither will nor agency. But it would be a lie to say that objects have no tendencies, and in that quality alone they seem to have their own lives.
The cup was itself sitting upon a windowsill, whose window opened up west towards the city, and let gentle bars of sunlight that escaped past the leaves on the trees and rested on my red pillows. ♦
***
Mr. President FICTION #
Steve could hear the tiny feet scrambling on the hardwood floor upstairs. In his left ear, he heard a faint ringing. The sound of the feet grew louder as Steve walked over to the carpeted steps leading upstairs. Mr. President managed his way down the steps awkwardly, carefully making sure to land on at least one foot before moving on to the next step, his metal tags clanking into each other with each movement. The clanking of the tags reminded Steve of his father, who wore his keys on his belt, and they would make the same kind of noise as Mr. President’s collar.
Mr. President was panting heavily by the time he reached the bottom. His tail wagged continuously and unconditionally. Mr. President, that tiny black Scottish terrier, would be a terrible guard dog, Steve thought.
(dedicated to J. Malina) ♦
***
Excised Paragraph From a Longer Story Currently Known As "Shiny-Winged Aluminum" FICTION #
40C feels despair. He does not feel like he’s at the absolute bottom of a dark hole smacked on the side of the planet – no, that analogy’s not right. It’s more like being on the edge of a black hole, a giant, incommensurably massive body, warping the space around it and sucking everything inside, so that neither energy nor matter can escape. He had once been able to dream lucidly, commanding a fantasy world with the sheer will of thought alone, but now his dreams were dark and unpredictable: grey landscapes inhabited by dying trees, sand made of the ground-up skeletons of his friends and family, a vast black and white desert where he was not a player but a mere observer. He would see himself unclothed, laying supine on a beach where the water had long since evaporated, the ground left behind in its wake dried over and cracked. He would float over the scene as an observer, a ghostly disembodiment, and witness himself seizing, his body convulsing and spastically flexing his arms and legs so that they were stretched out at obtuse angles to his body, his head skinless, the top of his neck showing the uneven edges of something hastily torn; and the pupils of his eyes were rolled back into his skull so that they were white and devoid of expression, but his face itself was strained, the sinewy muscles scrunched up and his jaw tight and fixed, and all his teeth were showing, lipless and horrifying. The only color 40C could remember seeing in his dreams was the rich hemoglobin-red of the blood that slowly dripped out of his mouth. And then there was the constant falling sensation, as if he were forever being sucked down into the earth and there was absolutely nothing, nothing he could possibly think of or say, no kind of special technique he could perform, even after hours and hours of dream counseling and keeping a journal of his dreams and telling himself to remember his dreams before he went to sleep and speaking to Jungian therapists and taking Ambien and melatonin and diphenhydramine and valerian root and Lunesta, nothing he could do to wake himself up or convince himself that it all wasn’t real, and for a while, every day he’d wake up in a tepid pool of his own sweat, absolutely fearing sleep. After a while he became a willful insomniac. ♦
***
A Free-Association Car Ride FICTION #
I can see now, from staring intently at the lines on the road, that we are increasing speed. Yellow dashes zoom by and when we reach a speed like this, they start to blur into one continuous line. I am sitting behind the driver’s seat of a 1994 Volvo station wagon, which my parents say is presently the safest car on the market. They have read these things in thick, heavy magazines with crisp pages that tear easily. Apparently, the thicker the magazine, the more trustworthy it is. They had some other magazines that told them to buy other cars. But they realized, from trusting the thick magazines, that these other cars do not have side curtain airbags and ABS (anti-lock brakes, from the German Antiblockiersystem – and I’ve read in a semi-thick magazine that the Germans, despite some ugly history, are quite excellent engineers.) My little brother is sitting in the backseat as well, but he’s asleep. His head is titled gently down and he is loosely gripping a juicebox in his left hand. The straw, which juts straight out of the box and then bends at a nearly perfect right angle, still has a ~one cm long bit of juice suspended at the mouth-end of the straw, not dripping onto my brother’s lap, but through some kind of physics I don’t understand, is just staying there. He, my brother, is nine. I am five years older than him. I have been on this planet for five years more than him. I have just learned that we are on the third planet from the sun.
Now I understand why there is a show called “Third Rock From the Sun.” I file these piece of knowledge away, somewhere, and something in my head shifts. My cloudy understanding of reality becomes a little less shrouded.
“Oliver, give me the chips,” my dad says. I look around for the bag, I look around for the bag.
“Steven, you’ve been eating chips the whole way,” says my mom. I think that I’m not supposed to like one of my parents more than the other, but right now I definitely like my dad more. He seems more fun right now or something. “Just give him a couple chips, Oliver.”
I reach into the bag and grab a couple chips. I’ve realized that it’s very hard to reach into a bag of chips without hearing that scrunching noise that plastic bags make. My dad, presumably cued by the scrunching, removes his right hand from the steering wheel and extends it backwards towards me, palm up, as if he were balancing a big pizza. I place the chips on his hand. He wraps his hairy fingers around them and puts them all into his mouth at once, crunching them loudly. He cocks his head towards my mom, chewing with his mouth open. She laughs.
“Keep your eyes on the road, honey,” she says.
“Owwww!”
I don’t know what’s just happened, but in the brief moment before my dad starts explaining why he just said ‘owwww’ and actually saying ‘owwww,’ I reason that he has either a) chewed one of the chips in an awkward way, such that one of sharp corners of the chip (they are Doritos) has lodged into his hard palate, or b) he did not chew one of the chips well enough, and swallowing it hurt because, again with those sharp corners, one of the sharp corners of the chip rubbed against the inside of his esophagus. Because of the way he was chewing them, you know, with his mouth open, I think that it’s probably choice A.
“What’s wrong?” my mom asks.
“I swallowed a big chip,” he says. Choice B!
“That’s what you get for chewing with your mouth open,” my mom says.
“Honey, can you pull over soon?”
“Now?” he says. “But we’re making such good time. I can’t stop now.”
“Well, I don’t understand why it matters when we stop,” she says. “If we’re making good time, I mean,” she says, then pauses. Her mouth his still open and her chest is – she’s holding her breath, waiting for the thought to come to her waiting for the rest of the sentence to take form and there’s something inside of her on the tip of her tongue and she just can’t get it out, and –
“Honey, Oliver, what I do I mean?”
“You mean that it doesn’t matter when we stop if we’re making good time because at some point we’ll have to stop anyway, we’ll have to stop anyway and the amount of time it takes us to stop would be the same if we stop now or if we stop later.”
“Would you listen to the mouth on that kid,” my dad says. “I’m raising a genius!”
This makes me feel good. When my dad calls me a genius, I mean. I’m not really sure what it means to be one, but I’ve heard that Albert Einstein was one. So was Isaac Newton, they say. I don’t like Fig Newtons, but my dad does. Yes, yes, yes! I’ve definitely read that Newton was a genius, definitely definitely read that, in a big thick textbook that they gave to us in class. Know is a funny word. It looks funny and it sounds like no. The more I say the word know, the more inclined I am to say no when someone asks me if I know what “know” means.
“What?” my mom says. She rotates her body at her hip, turning towards me.
“What did you just say?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“I thought you said something,” she says, turning forward again.
I’m not sure where we are, but it looks very pretty outside. I do know for sure, I’m absolutely sure that, we are definitely heading west; the sun is setting in front of us. After all, I can see the sun – they’ll be no denying that. It’s hanging low in the sky, filling the sky with fire, its pure energy creating wavy lines in the air.
“I’m bored,” I say.
“Do a crossword puzzle,” my mom says.
“Or a brain teaser,” my dad says.
“Read that book.”
“We’ve got a couple magazines up here.”
“Did you bring your Walkman, Oliver?”
“Try going to sleep.”
None of the options seem appealing. More often than not, these “activities” are just distractions. Looking out the window, however, affords me temporary moments of enlightenment. I see something and make the connection in my head, and then I am aware. I am aware now, for example, that those grayish, red-splattered furry spots on the road are not moles, like the ones on my Uncle Morty’s neck (now you tell me! – why does the hair growing out of a mole get so thick and dark?) – they are dead raccoons. I am aware that my second grade teacher, Mrs. Potato Head, once called me “mouth” because I talked too much in class. In fact, one day in that class, I was reading my textbook and drawing in the margins. Using a pencil, I formed a Necker cube, a classic doodle in which two squares are drawn one over the other with one square up and to the right (or up and to the left, or down and to the left, or down to the right) so that connecting their corners made something that was like a 2D projection of a cube. But it didn't look right. The problem was that one of the squares was more like a lopsided rectangle, and the annoying non-cubishness of this cube was bothering me so I flipped my pencil around and rubbed with the (what colors are erasers anyway? I want to call it Pepto-Bismol, but I feel like erasers are so common, even more common than Pepto-Bismol, so that if the color of erasers really was identical with that of Pepto-Bismol we would have to start calling the color of Pepto-Bismol "eraser") eraser, deep into the paper, and I leaned in real close to the paper so that the tip of my nose was about an inch above the page and slightly to the left of the cube and I erased and erased, and the smell of the little pink eraser bits were smokey and spicy, and I believe that they were the direct cause of my sudden craving for bacon. I blew away some of the bits and realized that I had started erasing a little past the cube to some of the printed words in the textbook. And the words were faded, so I erased more. And I erased a whole paragraph right out of my textbook. I had erased history. What if there was a nuclear explosion or some kind of crazy flesh-eating virus epidemic and everyone had to hole up in rusty underground bunkers? And they, the survivors, stay in these bunkers for years and years to the point where they develop a new rusty underground bunker language and rusty underground bunker culture and rituals, and even the most classically religious of them forget the first commandment and start worshipping giant rusted iron statues? And anyway, the whole point of this is to say, what if they had eventually gotten out and come upon my textbook and it was the only book of record they could find and entire paragraphs would be missing! If I had started erasing some European history they might not ever know about the Defenestration of Prague! Knowledge erased – it might as well have never happened. And I could imagine two of these underground bunker people, their skin now almost bleached white due to the lack a need for melanin and a strange genetic mutation somewhere down the germ line, examining carefully the pages of my textbook. They'd be wearing bright neon clothes made out of nylon and spandex. If they were smart, one of them would say, look, a historical artifact from another era of human existence on this fragile planet. And they would have a good laugh. "Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!" Yes yes, if there's one thing you can count on these future-humanoids having, it's hearty laughs. It's the only thing that could keep them sane in their little rusty bunker rooms.
I am still sitting in the back of the car. I look right, at my brother again. The sun has retreated and it is dark out. What is it with dusk? You realize it’s getting darker, and then before you know it, you are exposed. Above your head is a vast sweep of black, and it is speckled with white shimmering bits. ♦
***
TV commercial volume #
Bill would turn down volume on TV ads:
Currently, TV ads can't be louder than the loudest peak in a show, said David Perry, the chairman of the broadcast production committee of the American Association of Advertising Agencies in New York. Ads often seem louder to viewers, he added, because a program's volume peak rarely comes just before an ad.There's hardly an argument to stop this from happening. Loud commercials are one of the most annoying parts of the TV experience - especially if you're one of those people who have a compulsion to judge a commercial's effectiveness and/or annoyingness.
***
The Tetris Effect #
I have recently got back into playing Tetris and Tetris DX1 on my Game Boy. I play with the original Game Boy -- there's something very satisfying about its weight and size, like it's perfectly made for my hands, and about the simplicity of the game itself; it requires just the directional pad and one button.
I'm reading now about the Tetris Effect, which is basically the tendency to mentally rearrange objects in real life so that they fit together nicely. What I'm experiencing now though, after about a solid week of playing every day, is that my mind is idly playing Tetris games in my head2. I'm seeing falling blocks and rotating them as they fall. All of scenarios I "see" with my third eye are very satisfying in a puzzle-solving type way, i.e. a 4-block line falling in for a Tetris. I seem to find it more satisfying, though, when an L-shaped piece drops in somewhere for a triple (3 lines cleared).
See also Bastard Tetris which uses a super-evil algorithm to take a look at your current block situation and give you the worst possible piece.
1. The difference between the main gameplay mode ("Marathon," in which the blocks keep falling until you run out of room) with regard to Tetris vs. Tetris DX is that in DX, you have a an extra couple hundred milliseconds to move and or rotate a piece once it touches the ground. This amounts to two advantages: one is that you're able to move a piece if you dropped it quick and made a mistake, as I am prone to do, and two is that you have a little bit more time to think about where you'll put the next piece. I average about 100 lines on Tetris and 200 on Tetris DX, so the change is significant.↩
2. Though I'm not experiencing the Tetris Effect, I have experienced something similar for Grand Theft Auto -- as in seeing cars and trying to find their videogame counterparts, as well as thinking about the quickest way I can get somewhere by driving over pedestrians and over medians and on grass. But I don't devote as much time to video game playing as I used to, for the benefit of society.↩
***
Reverse Psychology FICTION #
So, I go to my therapist. He says his current methods aren't working, so he's going to try something else. He lays down on the couch, and asks me to ask him about his mother. So I say, "What technique is this, doc?" And he says, "Reverse psychology."
So I say, "No, no, doc, I think you have that wrong."
"Do I?" he says. "I think you're right."
So then I think about it. "Wait. Maybe you're right." ♦
***
Lost season finale tonight #
The two part season finale for Lost airs tonight at 9pm EST. I'm a huge fan of the show, and there's a lot at stake in tonight's episode. It's called "The Incident" -- and most fans of Lost will remember the first mentioning of The Incident during the early part of season 2, when Jack and Locke first entered the Swan (known previously as 'the hatch') and watched the Orientation Video.
I have some predictions for tonight's episode, and I'll throw them down here for posterity, but I'm not making any guarantees: I'm just a fan, and I didn't come up with some crazy theory to explain every event on the show. I'm just going off what I know to be true regarding tonight's episodes. That said: in the official LOST Podcast, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, the two head writers1 remarked that the season 5 ending would be reminiscent of the season 1 ending/cliffhanger, which if you don't remember was the opening of the hatch – but they don't go in until the following season. So my guess is we're either gonna be left hanging regarding what/who Jacob is, or we're going to see some new base on the island but not enter it.
Another awful prediction: The Incident is going to result in the death of the Losties who time traveled to 1977. (Yikes!) Certain characters seem to have the ability to change the past, while others do not; my guess is that Desmond is going to play a much bigger role in season 6 than he did in season 5.
1. A lot of people think J.J. Abrams is still head honcho at Lost - turns out he stopped working on the show sometime during the early part of Season 2. All the best episodes were written by Damon Lindelof (the showrunner) and Carlton Cuse. ↩
***
Relentless Raining FICTION #
It had been raining relentlessly, maybe five days straight, and the whole thing had a very palpable air of expectancy. It all seemed to be building up to something. Most people sat in their homes, afraid to go outside, fearful that the rain would make their cars slide around freely, randomly, like a slick ice cube on a table. Or maybe the rain would make their kids ill, or worse yet, completely transform them; the children would go outside wearing some kind of brand new, shiny outfit, and when they came back in they’d be dirty and there would be grime underneath their fingernails and their hair would be tussled and unkempt, and they’d speak foreign tongues and hack all the living room furniture to bits with axes. Plus, there was the lightning and thunder – the kind of thunder that rattles your brain in your skull, the kind that wakes you up in the middle of the night, all hot and wet, and makes you pray for forgiveness. Even the telephone poles were freaking out. ♦
***
Review: A Student's Guide to Cognitive Neuroscience #
The book: A Student's Guide to Cognitive Neuroscience by Jamie Ward1.
A review of any cognitive neuroscience textbook is likely to use a lot of esoteric or unfamiliar terminology – there is, of course, some requisite background knowledge required for devouring such a book. You will be surprised to find that none of that language will find its way into this review. There will be no talk of Ramon y Cajal's neuron doctrine, nor the center-surround structure of ganglion and lateral geniculate nucleus cells; no mention of parietal neglect, nor a discussion of early-attention vs. late-attention models. This is because I was unable to read a single damn page of this thing.
I want to focus on one thing only, and that is the olfactory nightmare in which the pages of this book are absolutely drenched. The book smells like shit.
Not actual "shit," per se - "shit" in this context (and often in a similar context, i.e. one where a person refers to the smell of something as "like shit," or "like ass," etc.) simply means awful, terrible, cringe-worthy, vomit-inducing -- smelling so bad that if you smelled the smell all the time, even the most persuasive crisis hotline operator would have a hard time convincing you not to kill yourself.
The book smells like used fryer grease. Have you ever smelled the back of McDonald's? I mean like, you drive around to the back, where the vents shoot out a noxious, airborne form of the thick yellowy grease that your french fries were cooked in. Have you ever gone to the McDonald's on the U.S.S. Intrepid2? Well, that's exactly what this book smells like. Every page. The smell is practically baked in. And it's totally inappropriate.
My score: Zero out of Eighty-Seven (0/87).
1. This will be the first of many book reviews to come -- so stay tuned. ↩
2. U.S.S. Intrepid: An Essex-class aircraft carrier built during World War II, now open for tourism, permanently parked in the Hudson River. A climactic scene in "National Treasure" occurs here, but I'll spare you a full description and just tell you that it involves Nicholas Cage. ↩
***
The David Foster Wallace Audio Project #
In before Kottke gets it: The David Foster Wallace Audio Project, a collection of mp3s of David Foster Wallace's voice. There's also a picture of DFW which looks like it was taken when he was in college.
Really, though, it's him reading his stuff, giving interviews, as well as some other people delivering heartfelt eulogies. The question is: who's bold enough to do an audiobook of Infinite Jest? (An idea: Have a bunch of nice folks from all around the internet read portions of it and post it online. It might be a nice tribute.)
***
Wii injuries #
Doctors are seeing increases in strains and swelling of knees and shoulders from overuse of the Nintendo Wii:
Dr. John Sperling, a physician at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., called the aches and pains a sign of the times. “It’s a syndrome of injuries and people presenting with complaints that we couldn’t have imagined three years ago,” he said.
***
Time Cube #
The Time Cube has been around for a while. It's worth checking out again:
EARTH HAS 4 CORNER
SIMULTANEOUS 4-DAY
TIME CUBE
IN ONLY 24 HOUR ROTATION.
4 Corner TIME, CUBES EARTH.
An interview with Gene Ray, the Wisest Human (he owns thewisesthuman.com) on the short lived TechTV show Unscrewed with Martin Sargent*. I love the matter-of-face way Mr. Ray says "they're just paperweights."
*A show which I recall to be mildly entertaining, a little childish. It came on usually when I was about to go to sleep, which means I often fell asleep with the TV on, but missing over half the episode.
***
"Corporation" fragment, circa 2007 FICTION #
I work for a large corporation. A very large corporation, in fact, located in Seattle, that specializes in overcharging for a commodity so addictive that overeager businessmen and college students alike are willing to shell out six dollars a day for twelve ounces of it – so addictive that they would probably have it intravenously injected if they could. Ten years ago, to the day, I also once spent three days in Los Angeles smoking hash out of an apple and mainlining Jack Daniels in the back of a rust colored Chevelle, so you can understand why a business meeting full of executives droning on about “corporate identity” would leave me bored. And when I’m bored, and I block out the endless monotony of my “esteemed colleagues” practically massaging each other’s prostates with their sycophantic ranting, my ability to observe what other people are doing increases dramatically. I notice how Steve, vice president of marketing, fidgets with his Montblanc Starwalker every time someone mentions the word “money.” ♦
***
Join Or Die #
Join or Die is a series of paintings by Justine Lai:
In Join Or Die, I paint myself having sex with the Presidents of the United States in chronological order.I rather enjoy these paintings (for their artistic value). She blows Lincoln!
By the way, if you didn't know already, "Join or Die" was a political cartoon by Ben Franklin. According to Wikipedia, Franklin's original intentions were to unite the colonies against a possible French attack, but later the phrase was used for (duh) the American Revolution.
***
We started traveling west on I-70 (fragments of a journey) FICTION #
We started traveling west on I-70 and we didn’t stop until Ted fell asleep at the wheel. He was drinking quite heavily, if I recall correctly, but his driving shift was mostly a straight shoot (and we planned this accordingly, given Ted’s love for Mezcal) so his actual driving abilities weren’t the issue. It was that Ted was practically narcoleptic until I leaned over and pushed his leg into the break pedal while steering us off the road from the passenger seat. We’d traveled one thousand, three hundred and twenty-eight miles through Missouri and some of the more geometrically boring states, like Kansas and Colorado, finally exhausted by a full day of driving and fighting and a brutal fucking stop (that will be further expounded upon later) in Denver. We stayed at Motel 8 in Monroe, UT.
The conversation in the car had been manic, as the flat and featureless roads of the Midwest tend to pry at that mental door of insanity. Around 700 miles in, in the middle of my driving shift, Ted and Varun started thinking every word “just didn’t sound right” or something like that. Post, post, post, Varun was mumbling, repeating it like a mantra. He had written the word down on a piece of paper over and over again, with a blue felt-tip pen, in different sizes and shapes and all different lettering — did I mention Varun is the lead designer at some font company in Silicon Valley? — and the two of them just couldn’t understand how a word like post could be spelled like that. I think it’s something about the “st” that was getting to them. I just turned up the radio and tried not to let it get to me, because I knew if the madness spread we’d have to pull over and cut our day short.
The next day I woke up when my cell phone started vibrating. I burped out a raspy hello — the first utterances after waking always sound a bit like you’ve been smoking cigarettes all night, even if you haven’t been.
“Hey maaaaaaaaaaan,” the voice said. “Guess where I am?”
“Who is this?”
“It’s Maaaaaaaaaary,” Maaaaaaaaaary said. “Guess where I am!”
“Wal-Mart?”
“No way,” Ma(10x)ry said. “I’m in Amsterdaaaaaaaaaaaam!”
I hung up the phone. Amsterdam? They were maybe six hours ahead of us. She had probably already had showered, had breakfast — and I was in no state to communicate with someone like that. I did need to get Ted and Varun out of bed soon; we had to hit the fucking road. Ted was sleeping on the floor, but as I wound up to kick him in the side, he sprung up and blurted out “we need to hit the fucking road, hard!” There was now a majority and quorum. Ted and I packed the car, then we both kicked Varun awake and we took off. Our vehicle was a semi-reliable, Clinton-era Nissan Maxima, a glossy black box with a custom sound system that was so powerful the subwoofer’s vibrations could induce severe nausea. It was useful when we had to blast music just to stay awake during long night stretches, or drink lots of coffee (though this route was often avoided because of its diuretic properties — we didn’t want to stop every 30 minutes for a tinkle), or else take some of Varun’s Adderall, which in case you didn’t know is usually prescribed for attention deficit (hyperactivity) disorder and is basically speed with some other potent psychostimulants thrown in.
Surely everyone has a different reaction to the drug, but they all fall in a similar class: your brain feels like it’s been shocked with 100,000 volts of pure focused electricity. Your efficiency increases; new neural connections form at a quicker rate. This drug brings you closer to the image of God than He could have ever hoped for. At least these are the things you are willing to claim when you are on a drug that makes your mind work like a Swiss watch, with all the gears in line with each other, everything in sync and spinning, each part unaware of what its neighbor does, but still churning away indefinitely for the greater good.
The sky that day was the most brilliant blue I had ever seen. I stuck my head out the window somewhere on I-15 — we had started going north towards Salt Lake City when I-70 just ended and we hit one of those serious road forks in the middle of nowhere with two big signs pointing in either direction where someone has to say, alright, which way do we go? And Ted and Varun and I collectively know the answer before the question is even asked, because without a definite goal in mind, the idea is push as far as you can before you hit your own limits. So we went north. ♦
***
A.J. Gentleman's assessment of scientific progress #
Among the yellowed pages of my books,
I search for knowledge, universal truth,
Laws of nature, not divine, reasoned forth
From one generation’s fruitful tolling
Temporary enlightenment sought and found
- A.J. Gentleman
***
