Mixtape for the Apocalypse Page 11

  “Your collection of online photos,” he said. “Your child pornography. It’s lucky we don’t turn you in to the police. ‘Cept that it’s obvious that a fuckup like you isn’t producing the shit; you’re just enjoying it.”

  “The girls?” I asked, catching on. “Oh, no, you don’t understand—they send those to me all the time. I never asked them for it. I’m not getting off on it; it’s artistic. It’s an aesthetic thing. It’s nothing. It’s a just a silly Internet thing. They’re comics fans. They don’t turn me on. They’re in high school.”

  “Oh, I know. And don’t try to justify it to me. I don’t want to know. I just think it’s sick and it’s stupid. And we want you out of here.”

  “Is that the royal ‘we’?” I said, and I got up and got my shit. I walked downstairs with my heart singing. Oh well, there goes my Internet account. Like I care. Like the Internet didn’t lose its appeal for me as soon as I was employed there. It’s just like the rest of the world. It’s another cosmos inside this one, of it, not separate from it—it’s just as stupid, just less ugly, most of the time.

  But fuck, what about Lise’s birthday? Oh, shit.

  Time to ding.

  I came into the apartment and took off my nice clean jeans, my cardigan, and my T-shirt, and crawled back into Lise’s bed. I thought to myself, firing up the half-smoked bowl still in the pipe, that I should have gone into Pronto and told Lise about being fired, but it was too late now. Outside it began to drizzle. Perfect. I fell into a peaceful, blissful, calm, undrugged sleep for the first time in ages.

  “. . . What are you doing here? Squire, are you sick?”

  Lise was shaking me. It was dark outside. I blinked at her. “Uh, no, no, I was just taking a nap,” I mumbled.

  She hadn’t changed out of her yellow work shirt. She didn’t take it off now. She sat in the chair opposite the bed and lit a cigarette, and began unlacing her boots. “I was gonna run to the store,” she said, exhaling. “You want to come?”

  “Uh, no, not really.”

  “You want anything?”

  “I got fired,” I said.

  She blinked at me, put her cigarette down, and kept unlacing her boots. “Why?”

  “They um . . .” I’d never told her about Juba. It really just didn’t seem relevant. The pictures honestly didn’t turn me on, but . . . they were so intimate. I never told anybody about them. They were just dumb kids having fun with being transgressive. And yet I’d never told anybody. There was no way out of this; I had been doomed before I even began. I felt the cold water trickling over me again, but this time, I felt like crying. “They just . . .”

  “C’mon. You’re coming to the store with me. Get up; put your clothes on. Put on a sweater; it’s kind of cold out there.”

  Together we walked out of the warm, dim cocoon of the apartment into the dark, cold, rainy courtyard, and onto the street with its noise of cars. The disorientation was severe. She walked a few paces ahead of me, on the way to the store, then turned and faced me. “So what’re you gonna do now?” she asked. She took my hand.

  I took a deep breath. “Take it easy for a little while,” I said, sighing it all out. “Relax. Think about what next. Get my resume together.”

  “Good idea,” she said.

  “I paid rent, at least.”

  “That you did.” She squeezed my hand.

  “And I have plenty for next month, as long as I don’t spend my whole paycheck on clothes.”

  “Oh, just spend a little of it. You need a new pair of pants; I didn’t want to say anything, but I am really sick of black jeans. And you could use a new sweater.”

  I felt so much better. I kissed her. “Let’s get a really good dinner tonight,” I said. “I’ll cook.”

  I made her filet of sole in brown butter and toasted crumpets with marmalade, and we had vanilla ice cream with Kahlua for dessert. And then we took the bottle of Kahlua into the bathroom with us and had a very long, hot bath together. We didn’t speak. We only needed the warm waves of understanding lapping against our skins for an hour or so. We went to bed early and we didn’t have sex, just lay together, gently falling asleep.

  For the first few days of my unemployment, times were great. I slept in, took my time, made espresso drinks, watched TV, cooked myself and Lise lovely suppers, and sketched my new ideas. A new character was taking form—a superhero, a self-parody, almost. I had been drawing Cabby for so many years, it was hard not to draw him; but every time I saw those round blank eyes and that psychedelic soft-serve swirl of hair, I would simply deface the drawing and see what came out. I showed my new sketches to Lise, but she wouldn’t really respond to it; she seemed preoccupied. I didn’t care. I was in a free-floating haze of pleasure. The journal has nothing from these days, but I remember them because they were so nice, the same way I remember the details of a week spent in England when I was eight years old. Some good memories just stick.

  One weekday, the week afterward, I really wanted a sandwich from the bar downstairs from Link-Up. I don’t know why. Pure perversity, perhaps, or the force of habit. hard to retrain the taste buds. I was downtown anyway, at Art Store, browsing for new papers, and I figured that nobody would be there, as it was a little early for lunch. I got my usual place at the back of the place and held up the menu as a signal to the wait staff.

  The front door opened and Moll Malone walked in, her hair frosted with the thick mist outside. I thought about hiding behind the menu, but I just stared at her, and she walked over and sat down. I wanted to warn her that her back was to the door, that it wasn’t safe for her to sit there, but I couldn’t speak. “Squire?” she asked softly, cautiously.

  “Howdy,” I said, setting my menu down.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I was hungry,” I said.

  “It’s a bar. Who goes to a bar to eat? Oh, wait, never mind.” The waiter came. I ordered a falafel sandwich and a shot of gin. Moll got a Caesar salad and a Diet Pepsi. We looked at each other. “I miss you already,” she admitted.

  “Really? I thought everyone there hated me.”

  “Not everyone. Not me.” She smiled.

  “Yeah, but who does? I mean, how did they find those files? That was my computer.”

  “It’s the company’s computer.”

  “I didn’t do anything wrong,” I insisted. “I never asked for that stuff. They sent them to me. Nobody was hurt. For Christ’s sake, they’re just teenage girls with a fucking digital camera.”

  “You should have thrown them away,” Moll mumbled.

  I shook my head. “I told her to stop sending them.”

  “You could have set her address to bounce.”

  I grimaced. “We’re . . . I kind of . . . we’re kind of friends now,” I mumbled. “She wants to study art in college, too, so I kind of counseled her . . .”

  Moll sighed. “What I think is really sick is . . .”

  “What? What do you think is really sick, Molly Malone?” I snapped.

  The waiter brought our drinks.

  Moll was swallowing hard. I sipped my gin, regret almost making me gag. “Randy and Dave were messing around with your computer while you weren’t there,” she said, defiantly. “They went through all your files. E-mails, too. They printed them out and showed them to Trace; showed him your computer. All while you weren’t here. And I’m sure they were looking for nudie pictures. They’ve got plenty of their own saved on their own hard drives. Just that yours are better.”

  I smirked. “That’s why I didn’t throw them away. She’s just a kid, but she’s a really good photographer. I told her to study Man Ray and then get back to me.”

  She smirked too.

  We clinked glasses.

  “I’m thinking of quitting, myself,” she sighed. “I can’t take much more of this shit. I’m really sick of Randy and Dave. I’m sick of Trace. I think I might go back to school; become a vet.”

  I told her she’d be good at that. We ate and talked about
inconsequential things. I did not talk about myself, or what I’d be doing next, because I didn’t know and I didn’t want to fuck it up by conjecturing about it. When we were done, we exchanged phone numbers and promised to keep in touch. As soon as I was on the street, I dropped her business card into the first wastebasket I saw and watched it get soaked by a thickening rain. It would be better if she cut off all association with me.

  The Mighty 10-10, 12:43 p.m.

  Lise’s birthday. Hooray! She’s in the shower. I’m making coffee. We’re going to the movies and then we’re going for a drink at the Rolling Pin. I feel shitty about it, but I really almost don’t care that it’s Lise’s birthday. I’m just so not in the mood to be festive and attentive. I got up early this morning—too early—and just doodled. Total useless doodling. Pages and pages of text—lettering—as though I were studying for a typesetting class. But it was just letters, just the alphabet, Lorem ipsum and the Quick Brown Fox. But I can’t seem to stop writing today. It hurts not to. It hurts my brain.

  2:30 p.m.

  Bathroom, Broadway theater. I just don’t care about this movie. Lise has wanted to see it for a long time, but I can’t remember why; she’s just sitting there, beside me, barely breathing, almost dead. I can remember the commercials for this movie, but I don’t know who’s in it—certainly not Tim Roth or Isabella Rossellini, that’s for sure. Clean, sculpted Hollywood types in this one. Complicated, possibly romantic plot. I could give a rat’s ass. I hate romance.

  Someone has scratched into the paint in the stall, “I suck cock.” There’s something about that that’s touching to me. No phone number, no forwarding address, just that defiant, bold statement. It was the only release the poor fucker had. He’d never admitted that to anyone before. Or maybe he didn’t; he just wanted to. I make art for people like that. Those people with something horrible and unspeakable inside that they can’t confess to anyone, ever, but will kill them if they don’t get it out somehow. That’s how I make art.

  7:18 p.m.

  FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK. Fuck. Eff. Blah.

  Well, that about tears it, doesn’t it?

  Lise just had to “pop by Pronto to see how things were going,” on her day off of all things—how we Americans worship the workplace!—and she just happened to step over the threshold into a huge “SURPRISE!” and balloons and a cake and party favors and all that gagging rot. And she fell for it like a redwood. “No way!” and “You guys rock!” and “I had no fucking idea!” which makes me want to fucking puke, since she wouldn’t be flipping out if indeed she had known—so she did want to go to Pronto just to see “how things were going.” How sick is that? Who is this person? What’s the matter with this picture?! And then when I don’t seem thrilled, she tells me that we can go drink at the Rolling Pin anytime, but this was her birthday, and nobody had ever surprised her before, and if I needed to, I could just go home and she wouldn’t mind and she wouldn’t take it personally. And I looked around at all those shining Pronto faces and I showed them all my teeth and went out and got back on the bus. I can’t believe how much my life sucks right now. I can’t even believe it.

  On the other hand, of course. You’re a piece of shit, Michael Squire, and you know this. Everybody knows this.

  I’m eating a previously frozen national brand “pizza” and watching Jeopardy! on my girlfriend’s birthday while she parties down with a bunch of husky boys with callused hands and does the Cabbage Patch to the Spice Girls with her manager. I might as well go to sleep soon, and if I’m lucky, I’ll stay that way.

  11 October, 5:10 p.m.

  Raining outside, still. It started last night and has kept up pouring hard ever since. The gutters are choked with wet leaves and flooding, creating reservoirs of black water that each car carves into a voluptuous wake. In the yellow light of the Leatherworks sign it looks like an arc of fire in the dusk. At least it does right now.

  I had a terrible dream this morning that shook the hell out of me. I lay there stunned for a long time after I woke up, wondering how my own mind could betray me like that. But I’ve thought it through, and I am now prepared to give an analysis.

  In the dream, I was on a skateboard, which I haven’t done since I was an adolescent jerkoff (like so many kids, I was a snotty rebel, unable to admit that I craved acceptance, and would throw away my Megadeth: Kill ‘Em All T-shirt forever just to be able to go to the middle school dance). I wore big, shiny, new Air Jordans with super-thick, untied laces and floppy tongues; shoes that I wanted when I was that age, but never acquired in real life. I was skating down Hawthorne in the middle of the day, but there was nobody else around, no people and no cars.

  At the corner of 39th and Hawthorne, I paused for a stoplight (Why? There was nobody else in sight—stupid). Suddenly there were a couple of cars that drove by way too fast. They crashed into each other with a big sound of crashing glass and screaming metal—it sounds like a cheesy exaggeration, but how other way to describe it? It was like a woman’s scream, like a thousand bottles being smashed at once. I’ve relived this in nightmares again and again since I was little. There is almost no way to imagine the brutal orchestra of sound it creates—it’s easy to see why J.G. Ballard thought about it as highly sexual . . . It’d be so intense to a benumbed populace, right? The memory has never been sexualized for me—for me it’s far more primal—the animal, mammal, sense of pure adrenaline. Some jock would probably think it was fun. That shit isn’t fun.

  So the cars crash into each other and people are flung from the cars, etc., into the street. Suddenly I’m surrounded by people, the way 39th and Hawthorne usually is, and everyone’s looking at the wreckage skidding to a halt in front of the Washington Mutual bank. I find myself skating up to the wreckage, determined to turn my rush of adrenaline into energy to help people. Of course in real life I’m not really able to do this. Few people are. Once in a while I am actually useful in a crisis—I once got into a fight with the school bully and knocked out one of his front teeth, and I was the one who picked up the tooth and rushed it to the school nurse so that they could put it back in. That guy never picked on me again.

  There was a middle-aged woman lying on the road with her skull cracked open. I got closer, steeling myself against the gruesome sights, but instead of blood and brains, her smashed head was oozing this weird beige gooey stuff. Only upon closer inspection did I discover it was oatmeal.

  “Oatmeal?” I said out loud. Nice smelling oatmeal, too, with cinnamon and maple. I started to laugh. On the other side of the car a little girl was badly mashed by a car door, but she smelled really good, and I started getting hungry. When I went even closer, wondering if I should taste the oatmeal, I saw that none of the people involved in the accident were real, but instead they were highly realistic mannequins or something, made out of something that looked kind of like papier-maché.

  I turned around and skated home as fast as I could, and instead of the Barton Apartments on Belmont, it was my mother’s place, complete with the bookstore on the ground level. I ran up through the apartment door into the house, and my mother was there, drinking tea and doing a crossword puzzle. I was so relieved to see her and see that she was alive and real that I hugged and kissed her and held her desperately for a minute. She couldn’t figure out what the big idea was, so I explained to her what I’d just seen—the wreck, the oatmeal, all of it. She told me that it was just a nightmare and that it wasn’t real, but she didn’t laugh at me or tell me I was crazy or anything. She got up to put on more tea and then she slipped and fell down, hitting her head on the linoleum. I ran over to see if she was all right, but she was dead, her head broken open. Inside of it, she was full of ashes—fine ashes like cigarette ash, post-cremation ash. Now that she was dead, I could see that she was made out of papier-maché, too.

  I got furiously angry. What a cheat! I went out into the street and grabbed a shovel and started bashing in the heads of every person that came near me. All of them dropped and revealed their artificial nat
ure. Everyone was like that. They were all made of paper and full of oatmeal and ashes. Every person on earth had been replaced by their exact duplicates, made out of waste products. I didn’t know how I’d missed it, but none of them had been real all along. I was the only real one—or was I?

  I ran back into the bathroom and began bashing my head against the tiles until I felt my skull begin to give way, and looked into the mirror to see if I was fake and full of oatmeal. Instead, my face was all bloody, and there was a big dent in the side of my head. I could see pale brains peeking through masses of black and bloody hair. At first I was delighted—I was real after all! Then I thought, oooops, uh-oh, well . . . oops. And now I was going to die. I was going to die any second.

  Needless to say, I woke up at that point. It took me a long time to shake the feeling it gave me—I had to take a long hot bath, drink a pot of coffee, a couple of shots of whiskey, cigarettes lit butt to butt. Even now I’m petrified by it. I mean, it was so funny sometimes, and it made so much sense; it was so real that all of this—the Formica kitchen table, the black-and-white checkerboard tile, the yellow sign and the splash and whir as the cars go by outside—seems fake, like a billboard looks like a photograph until you’re close to it. I’ve determined at this point that the dream’s meaning was one of the following:

  1) I’m going to commit suicide.

  2) There are two distinct classes of people on the planet. They are divided into THEM and ME. Am I the actual mutant? Am I really as abnormal as I seem? They will win. There’s no doubt about that. I can’t take care of the whole world myself when I have only the power of one person. Is there any point in fighting an unwinnable battle? Why not just gently, gracefully, obligingly, lay down my sword and extend my hand in fealty?

  3) It was an internal message from me to myself, about self-understanding, and thenceforth, developing greater understanding of others. I, of course, am flesh and blood. In the dream, I died for the emotional worth of that. I wanted to be human. Yet, every other being I saw around me was sham, a mock-up, hollow husks filled with the detritus of modern civilization—packaged oatmeal, cigarette ash, two sides of the same coin. I am the only one of my kind, and I just killed myself. Good work, stupid.