Based on Letters to a Dreamer, the unfinished novel by Allison Jaggers
Part ONE
Joltin' Joe Has Left and Gone Away
Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? / Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
Here we have her: a tangle of limbs; a sneering, dismissive face; an upturned nose; a pair of cracked lips painfully contorted into a frown; a mind assaulted by an army of neuroses. All carried along by vague, unprovable notions. The caricature of an age.
The Sun boasted its immortality, the trees fanned themselves, the sidewalk cooked a car-hit rodent, the cicadas screeched, the metal beasts rolled down their asphalt, and Brooke's sweat nearly rendered her shirt transparent. Her fault for wearing white on such a dreadfully hot day, perhaps, and she had nobody to blame but the infinite, shapeless mass of fate, but still she felt cheated, as if God had resurrected himself in the human consciousness, taken a moment from curing sick kids and helping college football players, looked down at little Brooke on her cracked sidewalk, laughed, and brightened the Sun just for her.
Brooke knew the idea absurd. She didn't believe in a God, and so she contented herself with blaming the gaseous mass millions and millions of miles away for her minor mortal discomfort, for lathering her with a thin layer of salty sweat, for the brutish looks she received from passersby.
At first she thought it the typical gawking of the post-pubescent lad, the so-called sex-engrossed cadet that bounces about suburbia in his too-tight tee, shining his fluorescent teeth at any he sees in the hope his crunched face and shaved head might impress. These looks she was used to and could cope with. But then she noticed the peeks of an older woman, a rancid lady whose frayed hair complimented her crinkled brow and fiery eyes. A woman with one foot in Hell, as far as Brooke was concerned. Her look was dismissed, with more difficulty, as the negative review of a woman jealous of lost youth. But then another, and another…
Brooke was forced to dismiss each look with an increasingly improbable excuse. The lads continued to be sex-crazed maniacs, their libidos greater than their sense; the old men regular Humberts; the old ladies jealous of her perk; the children innocently curious, etc. etc. In this fashion she ignored the looks of nearly everyone she passed, completely unaware they didn't look at her with lust, envy, etc., but with disgust, for Brooke's mind was honed inwards at the expense of everything else, hygiene notwithstanding.
In the mind of Thales our grand Sun, our mother star, might inspire wonder, a deep admiration of its astounding power, its overwhelming physical and symbolic strength, perhaps a vague fear of its ability to colonize our craggy rock's remotest regions. Maybe he would contemplate the paradoxical nature of a being that allows humans to see but blinds them for looking, the contradiction inherent in giving life and trying so hard to scorch everything that lives. In Brooke the Sun inspired an angry sigh she directed vaguely towards it. Objective reality noted no reaction, but Brooke swore the fucker brightened further, contorting its entire face into a broad smile, its mouth a tangle of yellow teeth.
Brooke and her roommate, the inexplicably named Lacey Davenport, lived in Potomac Hall, a standard new-fish affair located on the southeastern side of a sprawling campus surrounding a freeway the administration had promised they'd never cross. In the constant expansion of decaying Rome's so-called higher education this mid-tier university jumped the 81st with all the vigor of the white-man's manifest destiny. All exists for the great snake to consume if only it can unhinge its jaw, etc. etc., so on and so forth. You've heard it all before, I'm sure.
Brooke would have preferred to live in the English countryside, in a pretty wooden house from another century. But she'd grown up in a dilapidated brick one from her own. A modern home built after the war, when the government still financed such projects. Some blond boy and his sweetheart were responsible for its construction, and the first half of their burgeoning family's story was set there, but times slowed and they were forced to move. Then the place was bought by an enterprising Mrs., Brooke's mother, the determined daughter of a lethargic Italian forced off his ass by hisfather, forced off his ass by Mussolini and his petty fascists. Brooke's mother wasn't a woman to be trifled with, and under her iron fist the home flourished, it's exterior kept handsome and its interior kept clean.
But she died and her husband, taking up the mantle of his father in law, ran the house into the ground in every sense but the literal. During Brooke's turbulent puberty that hefty mass was her constant companion, forever stuck to his recliner, his pizza stained tee stuck to his chest, television remote in hand and wearing the carpet for shoes.
As old Boney had done one wrong, this beer soaked fool had done one right: paying for his daughter's education. And so Brooke left as shattered and broken as everyone her age, towards the green hands and gilded promises of her motherland's faux-intelligentsia.
Lacey Davenport, thin, brown haired, and entirely fictional -I assure you- had attempted to write a novel. It was a laborious task, and towards that pursuit she'd liquified herself and then, once a mush, carefully poured herself onto the work, spilling over it, seeping deep into the pages until she and the book were inseparable. She'd sent it to a publisher, a smaller, more feminist oriented group she thought might appreciate its ideas. They responded curtly, saying they had no interest in publishing her novel. They'd called her prose "mannish," which distressed Lacey, seeing as how she was a woman.
So it was with Lacey in this mood that Brooke entered the dorm, stomping up the stairs to announce her presence. She took her time with her lanky ascendence, savoring the carefully maintained temperature, stretching her limbs at random as if someone was watching and interested.
Lacey, who'd just returned from a jaunt about the gardens, thought she'd go back to her room and sulk. She'd considered giving up prose entirely. Should she turn to verse? Her novel was airtight, she was sure of it. The entire thing a gorgeously wrent meditation on the male gaze. It was perfect. Mulvey would roll in her grave if she learned of this affront, Lacey thought.
But deeper, beyond the voice within her mind, another being lurked, one for whom words were unnecessary, a shadowy creature that communicated in concepts. It was transferring doubt. And the doubt spilled from her subconscious into her conscious and then the voice joined its ghostly cousin in its constant advertisement. Mulvey isn't dead, it whispered.
"Ach mein Gott!" Lacey exclaimed upon seeing Brooke kick open the stairwell door and enter their hall. Poor Lacey was ripped from her mullings and pushed into a rancid reality that contained her half-naked, braless, sweating roommate strutting down the hall. "Brooke, what demon hath possessed your better sense‽"
"What troubles you, Lace?" said Brooke, spreading her cracked lips into a Cheshire smile and stretching her entire form, revealing much anatomy in need of a shave. "Can't cope with the female form?"
"When's the last time you showered?"
Brooke shrugged as she came to their door. After swiping her card she kicked the door open in the same manner she intended to kick down the patriarchy. She entered with her hands positioned behind her head and walking bow-legged, like some absurd Japanese caricature of an American gunman.
Brooke enjoyed making Lacey uncomfortable. She enjoyed making everyone uncomfortable. She thought herself a renegade, the antithesis of the valued. In a society that valued cleanliness, she sought filth. In a society that valued chastity, she sought defilement. Etc. and etc., forever and forever, always deconstructing, always the embodiment of the marginalized, always marching forward, perhaps the only remainder of the grand old New Left that seemed to have collapsed in on itself at some unknown point in the past. Perhaps she was just a cracked shell, washed ashore when, as they say, that doomed counter-culture reached its highest point and began to recede and love was monetized again.
This is what Lacey lived with. This is what checking random selection on the roommate form had gotten her. Some sort of pseudo-anarchist for whom even Marx and Engels were too mainstream to warrant a read -not to mention too dense-. Brooke didn't need a bra because bras were hot and uncomfortable and her breasts weren't large enough to require one -they were, actually, but that was a fact she ignored-. She didn't think her hair dirty, so she didn't wash it.
"Please, Brooke, you smell horrible," pleaded Lacey, following her roommate into their room. "How are you not miserable?"
While Brooke's state wasn't incongruous with her greater persona, it was further than she usually went. Lacey thought her filth incarnate, but that was because college's first week had thrown her into a frenzy and she'd reacted… atypically. Her disgusting ways weren't usually apparent to those who stayed outside her interior. She was relatively attractive in the traditional sense, and her anti-shower bouts rarely extended past two or three days, so only those that were invited inside knew the full extent of her degeneracy, the dangerous truth behind a suggestive but hardly fully descriptive blasé exterior.
In fact, her interior was so frightfully filthy that several romantic pursuits had dropped pretense entirely and fled. These evacuations -accomplishments, for the modern male will tolerate astounding degradation when his mind has delegated the task of thought elsewhere- only enhanced her determination to pursue the verminous.
Lacey, for whom cleanliness was an indication of virtue, had suggested on several occasions that her roommate remedy her squalor lest she be forever in want of respectable companionship. Having said all this, Lacey turned inward, bolting shut her door, covering herself in blankets, and reading books with few pictures and fewer conversations. Essentially, doing everything she could to avoid finding respectable companionship herself.
Entering the room, Lacey was bombarded on every front. Her every sense overwhelmed within moments, her mind accosted by a room full of noise. It had gotten worse, believe it or not. While her half felt comfortably lived in, Brooke's was just so fucking loud. Every crevice revealed another half eaten tin of mystery fish, another bowl of festering ramen, another fork caked in an unknown grime. Dirty underwear spread at random, old books abused beyond normal wear and tear screamed for death's merciful embrace. The corpses of neglected electronics sat like cicada shells, hollow and empty upon rough, barky trees. The room could have been described in many ways, but Lacey preferred loud, for stepping within it produced within her mind a single, uninterrupted scream, both originated from within and without, the sounds of sensory assault mingling with inward exclamations of disgust. How, how could that fetid girl have made such a mess of things in only a week‽
One might think Brooke's half of the room a display of chaos, but in the randomness there was order. An agent of the former had come and, paradoxically, imposed on the room the latter. Everything that could be wrong, was. The entire process boiled down to a single algorithm, a methodical process that accounted for the darkest recesses of the human psyche, our fears, our worries, and, most importantly, our primal disgusts.
Brooke had arrived at something transcendental and she knew it. Lacey had to brace to enter her own room. She spent as much time out of it as possible, elongating every meal, studying in the library, walking at random, whatever she had to do. In this Brooke took pride. For all her faults she despised facades, despised the effort people went through to prepare themselves for others. Performance art, she thought, all of it, but not for art's sake, for vanity's. And how grotesque the depths of human vanity! Far worse than any crumby plate or fly covered soup bowl she could muster.
Lacey climbed onto her lofted bed and set to reading, trying to ignore the smell, wondering if anybody had read the numerous complaints she'd sent to everyone she could get a hold of.
Brooke, on the other hand, shot immediately for the corner, for the cleanest object in her realm, a decently constructed rig that sat proudly on a hardy oak desk. It seemed a king, if, for no other reason, than because it wasn't covered in shit.
Rousing the beast, Brooke stretched again, resembling, in many ways, an alley cat. Having removed her flip flops, the bottoms of her feet became visible. They were as brown as her desk. Her monitors fired up slowly, then all at once, the hard, blue light filling her entire face, engulfing her features until it soaked itself into her pores and took hold of her mind. Lacey though it like a camera's flash, a violent surge of light capturing a single moment in time. But this light never receded. It continued its occupation until her pale roommate had ceased to be a person, until she'd become a marble statue under a savage auteur's deconstructive gaze.
Bashful Lacey though her roommate's bed the filthiest object in the room, for it had already met four people, including its owner. It isn't hard for us to understand why Brooke's overt sexuality bothered our protagonist, but for Lacey, blessed with much less information, the subject remained a labyrinth, and she, not as brave as Perseus, gave it a wide berth.
For your sake, reader, I shall attempt to explain why the cum-stained sheets might have upset Lacey far beyond what a typical college freshman might find disgusting in such an object.
Lacey was one of the many poor souls for whom sexuality represented a problem. Many a fledgling romantic see their preferred gender/s as a sort of salvation. One young man I spoke to recently emphatically claimed that "pussy" was "the only thing worth living for." While I might disagree with that young man's phrasing, we shouldn't discount his idea as anything unique. This idea isn't specific to the sex-consumed Don Juans or those ubiquitous little women whose moto seems to be eat, pray, and marry before you're thirty. Many a young lad sees the modern female as something to be conquered. To them the virgin America is a chaste land of unbridled purity, simply waiting to be harshly penetrated by their raging cock. Even the more discerning individual, even those who understand that America had many people for whom conquest represented a problem, even they might believe sexuality, romance, etc., to be Godly pursuits, the ultimate expression of slouching evolution's climactic culmination, a transcendental experience beyond any other worldly pleasure.
For Lacey, this idea was a plague. Sexuality was far from anything certain. Her paralysis when facing it was far beyond what the average young lad might feel when, on an otherwise unassuming day they feel a frenzied tingling they haven't the means to express, the words to describe, or the knowledge to understand. Beyond even what the average young lass might feel when at some unspecified age begins a monthly ritual of varying pain and embarrassment. A ritual so integrally part of her it cannot be rejected, but also full of everything she hates. A visitation whose arrival brings anger and annoyance and whose retardation brings outright panic.
What I mean is this: Lacey enjoyed the Wizard of Oz, and she'd always found a kindred spirit in Judy Garland, but she was destined to be much friendlier with Dorothy than she, at this point in her life, realized.
"Even the narrator is buying into that bullshit," Brooke was saying, shoving potato chips into her mouth. Her hands were covered in salt and despite the four fans she'd positioned around her, facing inwards like Kurtz's severed heads, she still smelt of wet sweat. "Like, what the fuck does he mean by 'in need of a shave?' Is there something beyond society telling me that I need to shave?"
Lacey couldn't take it. She'd never been unfriendly to the Cause. She'd labored for it just as much as any her age -which is to say, not a lot- and supported those that did more. Silently, perhaps, standing from the sidelines and nodding in approval as the heavy hitters rushed through the breach, but even just silent support was surely better than silent opposition?
Perhaps it didn't matter, as millions of aborted fascists can attest. Ideology without action is smoke without a source. Useless, annoying, and easily removed. She'd written her novel, of course, but nobody real had read it, save for that insufferable AJ who'd left her and gone away, that useless boy, running off to Clemson to continue his heedless gallivanting, to forget about her.
Brooke was still talking, and while Lacey agreed with what she said, she found it tiresome to hear.
"It's this weird idea that to be beautiful one must be this and that. That one must be thin, that one must be clean. I don't know about you, but I reject it."
Her fingers smeared chip grease across her mouse as she took to clicking, having not even the decency to lick her fingers before handling the tiny corded rodent.
Lacey rose and grabbed her wallet, keys, and other personables in a single swift motion.
"I'm going for another walk."
In a fit of passionate originality the administration named the center of campus the Quad. It was nothing more than a shaven grass field, but those occupying it gave it the appearance of a city center or a mating ground. The students hustled about, Dora the Explorer backpacks, worn ironically, tossing about on their backs. There had been a time when jackets were required. Did she miss that?
A collection of feminists stood nearby, their feet planted firmly on the grass, conquering, if nothing else, that little expanse of soil. All colors of hair possible and several not fought to push from the periphery of the group to the center while the apparent leader stood atop a wooden crate and vomited her wisdom into their midst. Brooke had attended a meeting, just one, the first, seeking forever to further the Cause, but her display hadn't been appreciated.
In a savage frenzy, overcome by the pagan sensibilities of her long forgotten ancestors, she'd smeared blood under her eyes -one can imagine where said blood came from- and danced about to Morricone's Navajo Joe.
The group hadn't stood for that, and something resembling a civil war had commenced, a brutal clash in which Brooke and her few supporters fell to the sword of the vehement cultural crusaders. Whether Urban and his posse's fervent deus vult differed significantly from these women's cries of cultural appropriation, it didn't matter.
Brooke argued that it couldn't be considered cultural appropriation, since she was dancing to a song written by an Italian, and was, herself, Italian. This was airtight, and so the conversation shifted as to whether the original song and its accompanying film were examples of cultural appropriation.
It was with no great leap that a raging debate began regarding Burt Reynolds, with particular emphasis on how "Cherokee" he was allowed to consider himself. Brooke had effectively distracted her foes, and her display might have been forgotten entirely, had her natural impulse for conflict not flared.
"Ya'll are a bunch of neo-Nazis, doing nothing to serve the Cause. In fact, you're actively distracting from it!"
This sealed her fate. Diatribe after diatribe slammed against her, ricocheting off a steadfast layer of delusional self-righteousness. At one point she even spread her arms, as if Samson, as if Jesus, though she'd never cared for Jesus, and regarded the impregnation of Mary as a rape -comparing the episode to Leda's encounter with a certain lustful swan had gotten her kicked out of several churches-.
The others said that she was distracting from the Cause, and that she, in her grotesque embracement of Cubocci's "second trail of tears," was actually a sort of Uncle Tom.
Now Brooke wouldn't stand for this, and she erupted into a final climax before the revolutionary guard outright chased her off.
Had the grand old New Left gone the way of God? Had the streets they'd worn down opened up and swallowed them up? Had the campuses they'd occupied stood steadfast as they faded away? Had the march finally ended and left only a carcass and a half-rotten, drug-burnt brain?
The birds screamed, the stores set up for Halloween, the students still in class sat hazy eyed and bored, paying fifty two dollars per hour for the privilege.
Lacey crossed a Japanese bridge with some local flavor-legend and set her eyes on a point in the distance. Removed from the rest of the campus, amidst the great oaks and pines that had stood since the beginning of time itself, under a gently weeping willow and a cherry blossom, was a gazebo.
The Universal story is one of entropy, and this lonely structure was no exception. From the moment it was born it had begun to die, and had become one of those old structures that only exists because nobody has the energy to knock them down. Dark wood lined with columns of the Greek sort, perhaps recalling a peak; the entire dreadful thing was covered in leaves and spider webs long abandoned by their creators. Occasionally one might catch a fly, and the tiny insect, its brain just developed enough to know it was about to die, would struggle and kick and then lie still, waiting as the empty sky slowly descended upon it, crushing it under its great weight. Even Atlas, his muscles strained, his veins threatening to burst from his skin, his feet sinking into the ground, can't hold the world for long. Eventually his bones will crack and shatter and then he'll be crushed.
There was a letter under the gazebo's rotting bench. Her eyes just barely caught it, sticking its head out for a peek at its dilapidated home's new visitor. Careful not to hurt the faded creature, she lifted it from its hiding place and noted the inscription on the front.
To Whatever Woman Finds This…
Opening the envelope with fanatical patience, she removed the letter inside, sat on the rotting bench, and began to read.
To Whatever Woman Finds This,
You have found one of my favorite places in the world, tucked away in the quietest haven this campus has to offer. I come here when I can, writing or singing, thinking or meditating. But never working. This is a place for peace and love. Please keep it that way. In the spirit of love, if you find yourself falling for this place as much as I have, please respond to this letter. Address it to "The Dreamer." Detail what you wish for me to call you. I hope that maybe this place will be where I fall in love. If you are not interested, please return this letter to its spot. I check it daily. If you are interested, and you love this place and the serenity it provides… then you are already a beautiful woman, who I would gladly get to know. Here's one secret of mine to begin this correspondence: no one knows I'm doing this or that I ever come here. This is my hidden world, and while you may start here, I hope you won't always stay here.
Yours,
The Dreamer
Lacey took the letter and left.
Several years ago Lacey formulated a theory regarding "Mrs. Robinson." She equated the departure of Joe DiMaggio to the departure of God. She thought it poignant, and it spoke to her on a deeply personal level. She told it to her old friend, AJ, who said he'd never seen The Graduate and hardly cared for either Simon or Garfunkel. He was surprised to learn about Dustin Hoffman's involvement, and couldn't understand how Dustin could play a young man, seeing as how he was an old man. It was as if Dustin Hoffman existed only as an old man, or maybe as a representation of an old man, and had never so much as considered being a young man.
Part TWO
The Centre Cannot Hold
The falcon cannot hear the falconer.
What ethereal hand penned that delicate letter? What naive soul? Did they remain on this blighted star or had they gone to the next? Lacey didn't know, though she would have been surprised to learn of its genesis and how intermingled its author would be to events fast approaching.
Her dear friend, AJ, whose initials are utterly unique and in no way a subtle nod to another person, had gone off to Clemson at the behest of his mother. As everyone knows, Clemsoners adore the so-called "Greek life." The eternal brother and sisterhood of a dozen and a half powdered post-teens. The legacy of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates and Hesiod and Homer and even poor, old, dead Achilles.
Throughout highschool AJ told Lacey she needed to come out of her shell, so to speak, to emerge from dreadful solitude and jump face first into the hedgehog's erect barbs.
"Won't people think I'm just paying for my friends?" Lacey asked him.
"No, of course not," said AJ, laughing. "Besides, isn't that sort of thing illegal?"
Lacey hit his shoulder and he hit hers.
"I think joining a sorority would be good for you," he said, his smile fading as he grew serious.
Poor Maz mightn't have impacted history had it not been for the perceived deviancy of his only friend's latest sexual conquest. He was not destined for greatness. He wasn't destined for anything. His only desire, as it was with many of that spurned age's youths, was to read Rimbaud and jack off, in that order. Had it not been for that particular girl he would have hung himself quietly one afternoon, leaving in his wake an empty glass and a third rate poem explaining nothing.
He thought her a banshee, and couldn't understand why his dear friend tolerated her, though he had his suspicions. This description wouldn't have upset her as much as one might think. A bombat in every sense, she reveled in the sort of grotesque flamboyance only possessed by those who've successfully thrown off the relics of an old morality and fully embraced the hedonistic absurdities of a dull, buzzing contemporaneity. She hit the drinks hard, the bong harder, and the boys hardest, and while Maz's friend, a certain JaMarius R. Minority, thought her his conquest, the reverse was equally true.
Comparisons, when pondering her character, might be made to our Brooke, and they wouldn't be amiss, though a few key differences exist and shouldn't be forgotten. Our Italian dismissed facade, dogma, and ideology based on, ironically, a principle of opposition to such things, whereas this new character's dismissal was based on simple convenience. Brooke ran rampant among the lads because she thought it unbecoming and sought to embody the antithetical. That she enjoyed it was, to her, only barely relevant. Whereas JaMarius' latest romp did so because it was enjoyable, and would have continued to do so even if society became inverted and the lock most opened became the lock most treasured. We can imagine her among the free lovers, larking about, hardly aware, whereas Brooke, among the same folk, would look around and think the disorganized mass just as abhorrent as those they lazily opposed. She would, in her typical fashion, overcorrect, becoming a happy housewife within the week.
We should also note that while Brooke may seem less sincere, our new character embodied this new-wave hedonism for reasons she didn't understand and hadn't considered. Brooke was a canvas, and her eccentricities various paints thrown upon her, whereas this new character was a puddle of paint spilt accidentally on the floor of some failed artist's studio. This may explain why JaMarius, the notable philanderer, was so unusually stuck on her, because he felt like a bucket who'd lost his paint.
This strange creature was Lizzie Zeitgeister, daughter of Henry Zeitgeister, a boring man who, in the American fashion, made too much money and died before he was ready in a house he was determined to become big enough to fill. His doctors thought the smoking would be the first thing to get him, but it was, in fact, the red meat. It was horrible for him, his wife used to say, ironically dying earlier than him face down in their pool.
She was one to talk, Henry had laughed, watching men wheel her away, feeling no need to change from his purple shower robe for the occasion. More vermouth than blood in that bitch, he imagined, unaware of why she'd been drinking in the first place.
He died several days later, clutching his chest and screaming for his maid. He'd panicked, as many do, and thought that going outside would somehow relieve the culmination of a lifetime's overconfidence in his corporeal form.
While his late wife had attempted to preserve her earthly vessel, turning only to dirty martinis when she was certain she'd rather die than live, Henry thought life a carnival and wanted to partake in every cheap carnival game. From booth to booth, poor wife and daughter in tow, he sauntered, his cheap Hawaiian shirt stuck to his bulging gut and his fat face squinting at every underpaid carny who just wanted to get through the night.
"Sell me on this game," he'd say to the kids, because Henry Zeitgeister was a businessman, and he hadn't time for wimps. And maybe a few would launch into a spiel, telling him of all the wonderful prizes he could win, but most would just stare, directing their stubby faces towards his fat one and honing onto him with their aggressively blank expressions until he moved away, grumbling.
Henry was a bastard, a representation more than a person, and though he had the money to play every game at every carnival on Earth, he'd make the kids working there sell themselves, always judging them in his own tired way. He'd considered writing a book because he thought himself a master, fancied himself a regular Carnegie -both Andrew and Dale- and because he'd never read Gaddis.
Nobody cared when he died, not a soul. His maid found him sprawled on the floor in his half-buttoned Hawaiian shirt that made him look more like an unemployed cinematographer than an unemployed billionaire. He'd made it halfway to his pool, as if he'd had a sudden change of heart and wanted to join his wife, when in reality his heart had sent his mind into a diseased frenzy, telling him, urging him, begging him. "Get outside, it will all be okay if you can just get outside." The maid found him and thought it comical, and while she eventually called 911, it wasn't before she'd helped herself to some of the food Henry was always afraid she'd steal.
The papers ran a piece, assigning a young woman who'd just gone through a nasty divorce. This woman, a print journalist to the dreary end, having entered the industry because she thought it where the real journalism happened -she was right-, had lofty ideas of charging once more into the breach, arm in arm with her beloved vocation. She was aware print was dying, but thought there a sort of glory to be had in dying with it. She fancied herself a regular Butch Cassidy, rushing into a hail of Bolivian bullets with a smile on her face. The reality was different, of course. Print was dying, but not quickly, not with dignity. It grabbed and clawed at even the vaguest scent of money, selling its body to anyone that would bid. A drowning man in an underwater cave, as she'd once described it to her then-husband. A drowning man who swims from air pocket to air pocket, sticking his face into the crevices and sucking for all his life, prolonging the inevitable. He should, she'd said, just sink into the dark blue and allow the water to overtake him. Painful for a moment, yes, but a small price to pay for an eternity of peace. Her then-husband said that sounded like something his brother had put in his suicide note, which shut her up pretty much immediately.
This reporter searched for details on Henry, trying to find what he'd done, what he'd been proud of, what his legacy entailed. She couldn't find more than minor details on his estranged daughter and his dead wife. The only thing he'd done, she concluded, was make a lot of money, and so that's what she wrote. It was a long piece, thousands of words over her limit, several brutal diatribes wrapped into a direct attack at dead Henry and an indirect attack at her dying paper. She ended with the line, "Zeitgeister made a shitload of money, but nobody liked him, and now he's dead."
Her piece was not published, and she was dismissed shortly after.
Henry's entire fortune went to his daughter, Lizzie. He thought her a deviant, and she agreed, and he would have disowned her entirely if that hadn't meant giving his money to someone else. And so the money stayed with the Zeitgeisters. Henry hadn't accrued the entire fortune, though he'd expanded it. Lizzie had no such ambitions, and the moment it fell under her name it had effectively reached its zenith.
When Lizzie was a child she'd internalized her father's love of Hawaiian shirts, because she became a cinematographer, more specifically a cinematographer and an editor. She'd bought a place in California, thinking it the center of American film -how unfortunate that she was right-, and because she intended to make it big. But she lacked talent and work ethic and like so many failed cinematographers turned to churning out shitty half-productions. That she got work at all was because she was desirable to young directors for her expensive cameras and lenses.
She cared for fashion but didn't think herself attractive and so she abandoned herself and set her focus on others, ensuring that every insufferably allegorical film she made included costumes of the utmost ostentation. Her cinematography followed suit and most directors were forced to dismiss her at great cost and inconvenience. One director, a timid but brilliant young woman, the only director of any real skill Lizzie had collaborated with, sought to reinstate the legacy of the greatest French auteurs -primarily Rohmer-. This young woman had a cinematographer, but hired Lizzie as an editor. We can imagine her dismay when Lizzie, acting well beyond her authority, set the entire short-film to Boléro and began releasing copies online before she was noticed, stopped, and fired, all at great cost and inconvenience.
How did JaMarius, who carried himself like the comic relief, and Maz, who was just waiting for Grace Slick to die so he'd have something else to be sad about, gotten accepted into a fraternity?
Who knows? Perhaps it's another one of those unsolvable mysteries that becomes more frequent as the world spins out of control, another absurdity on the scorched, dead grass forever under the gaze of the Sun. The gyre unwinds and in a single moment reaches its zenith, exploding with the force of mechanical worms bursting from a clock.
JaMarius hid in the only place he knew he'd never be found, within himself, layering himself with sheets of sarcasm, ingratitude, sass, and irony that ensured nothing he ever said was taken seriously. He could speak freely, a luxury rarely possessed, and if he ever went too far, got too real, or probed too deep, he could retreat with speed, claiming the entire thing a joke, perhaps a piece of clever self-deprecation, maybe another jet-black jest from the king of jokesters himself.
"You know what you should do?" he was saying to Maz, both of them lounging on separate dirty couches, Roman elites brought so horribly low by the insummermountable passage of time.
JaMarius was sipping from a can, while Maz, who drank but could no longer get drunk on beer, sipped sugar laden fizz from a bottle. JaMarius had given him a beer hours earlier, but he'd ignored it and now it was spilled on the carpet.
JaMarius continued. "You should come out with me tonight. Got a lot of good stuff at my places, you know? Not hard to have a good time."
"That's not a bad idea," said Maz, who meant it. "But…"
"Come on, man. You wanna sit drinking alone all night? What are you looking for, in all those bottles?"
"More booze," was Maz's drilled reply. "What are you looking for?"
"A good time, cuz," said JaMarius. "You watch too many movies, you know? You think I'm running around like some kinda Raoul Duke motherfucker. Things aren't that intense, it's nothing you couldn't handle. And besides, you wanna leave, at any time, you tell me, and we're gone."
JaMarius owned a ratty old car he claimed he liked. Said he found expensive cars bourgeois and wouldn't stand to own one. The truth was that he couldn't.
And so Maz and JaMarius found themselves cruising about the lonely streets at some unGodly hour in the morning. It was one of those dreary Sunday mornings, just after the quicker drugs have worn off, still recovering from the prior night's festivities, but just before the Sun imposed harsh realities on those more comfortable in the night. The phantoms about were those for whom the Sun's rays illuminated an unswallowable truth.
JaMarius' car didn't cut through the hanging tenebrous like the gilded red cars he so desired that smashed their way through every layer of the infinite darkness in a histrionic but ultimately meaningless display against the shadowy half of cosmic Natura. His car travelled within the darkness. It was swallowed by it, comforted by it.
The duo cruised, drunk beyond reason, swerving slightly from side to side, riding more on top of the yellow lines than beside them. Their progress was slow, almost painfully so, though one can hardly fault JaMarius, for while his drunken jaunt was anything but responsible, at least a globule of sense remained, compelling him to journey alongside the turtles, lest the shadows swallow him too completely. Whether or not this would be enough to save him, nobody could say.
JaMarius' smile was brighter than his rolling wreck's murky headlights. The two beams seemed to dissipate into the darkness without even a fight, dying the moment they were deployed. An entire army sent on some glorious campaign only to march into a forgotten forest and never return.
Maz turned the dial until a nostalgic jockey entered their car like a ghost from the darkness, whispering sweet lies into their ears.
"Sex, drugs, and rock n' roll," he cooed. "Seems we've forgotten how to do the third one. Let's see if I can remind you."
Maz thought it fitting that it was Grace Slick herself who responded to his call. Leaning back into the duct-taped seat, the mean smell of marijuana wafting upwards from his shirt, he closed his eyes. He was unable to completely lose the image of the marching Romans, their forced pace pushing them ever closer to their marshy annihilation. There was a moment, for each of those who fell, a moment they crossed the Rhine and never returned. A moment they stepped over the border of civilization and into the savage forest to be eaten alive, have their necks snapped, their hands nailed, their throats slit. Why such sympathy for the Romans, whose empire rested on the skulls of the destitute? Why none for Arminius, who was smarter and braver -if not as loyal- than Varus could ever hope to be, and who fell to death in a way just as tragic?
"What a bunch of hacks," said JaMarius, speaking about the music. "They think they can rip off Ravel and nobody will notice?"
He reached for the dial but Maz swatted away his hand.
"Don't, man, I love this song."
"At least it's short," grumbled JaMarius, who preferred Morrison.
Maz's brain was muddled. He seemed to lurch in and out of reality, the rest of the time occupying a haze in between, a strange, jumbled representation displayed solely for his pleasure. All the horrible bits absent. His mother used to remove the pickles whenever he ordered a sandwich and they'd messed up the order.
One man, drunker than they, stumbled along the sidewalk and cheered as they drove past. Hardly a part of this reality, thought Maz. That ethereal figure, who existed only under the yellow streetlights, would fade away by morning. Just another phantom lurking about the void.
JaMarius' phone was ringing. His expression darkened as he answered it, finding on the other end an angry Lizzie. She'd been called a name and wished to be consoled.
The song was reaching its climax as JaMarius, headstrong and annoyed, began to argue with his girlfriend who had sex because she enjoyed it, and didn't, like Brooke, enjoy the names that came with such promiscuity.
"Just don't worry about them," said JaMarius, running a stop sign.
Maz couldn't hear the response. The car's swerving had increased, but he was too far gone to notice that either. The song ended and a worse one replaced it. He closed his eyes again, having forgotten already what the dormouse said.
Grace Slick is still alive, Maz's brain whispered. Why are you so upset? She's not dead.
Then where is she? he replied. Then why do I miss her?
DEAR FRIENDS,
It is with a heavy heart that I inform all of you of the deaths of two of our beloved students. Maz Henderson and JaMarious R. Minority passed away early yesterday morning when a tree smashed into their vehicle. Two cherished students, one of whom was an African American, these boys both had strong academic records, including the semi-regular attending of class. JaMarius was a member of several clubs, and both boys were proud members of Phi Kappa Alpha, one of our many beloved fraternities. It is difficult for such a tragedy to occur just before the new semester begins, but please remember that all resources, including campus counseling, are available to all students. Please utilize these resources if you feel you need them.
Deborah Billingsley
Dean of Students
Sent from my iPhone
JaMarius' parents, both of whom were lawyers, saw to it that the tree was sued until it couldn't afford to pay its alimony, but even these baseless lawsuits couldn't comfort the bereaved, and so began the long, childless existence that had haunted their dreams since JaMarius' birth.
The school's administration, thinking it should do something but not sure what, baked a cake and postponed rush, pushing it back a week. The cake lay uneaten on a conference room table until the janitor threw it into a dumpster, and rush, despite the protests of most of the Greeks, who'd hated JaMarius and not known Maz, sat motionless for another week, the tension building until it finally exploded in a vainglorious parade of wedges and straps.
Lacey had filled out the recruitment form several days before rush began. On her bed, her legs crossed, trying to decide what version of herself to display. What trait was more important to the Lacey they wanted? Loyalty or compassion? Did it matter?
Flies buzzed around, they'd long ago invaded the space. Their low buzz grew in intensity as she stared at the form. They were like tiny airplanes buzzing around, engaged in a hopelessly tiny dogfight. Tiny bullets filled the air as they battled for superiority, battled for the ability to bomb the crusty plates and smelly bowls.
She had found a place where she could be on her own. Maybe a sorority could be fun. Maybe it could give her a home, a family.
Lacey, like so many, had watched as the nuclear family finally fulfilled its purpose and exploded into a glorious, magnificent, remarkable atomic plume, one that reached into the depths of the sky, a dagger into heaven's heart. It had been filled with so many things. For her, valium. For Brooke, who had taken several Adderalls and was using her increased productivity to sit, her knees pressed against her chest, her legs brought into her T-shirt, wide eyed and amazed as she listened to Lou Reed, it was death and her father's cheap beer.
And why shouldn't she shoot heroin? The mustached faces stood around her, the eternal magi, stone faced and staring, the pale unsatisfied ones. The Death Wish, they said, exhibits itself most prominently…
What had Janis thought when she lay, bug eyed and alone at the foot of some dirty hotel bed as the moments darted past? As the flower children, one by one, their minds expanded, turned to see the magi watching their bestial rituals with savage indifference…
Adderall wasn't all Brooke had up her sleeve, or surging through her veins, and so Lacey took her leave, closing her laptop and muttering a pointed "humph," though her target, who was gesticulating at nobody in particular, didn't seem to notice.
Maz, or what remained of Maz, would have been surprised to see some sweet girl, looking over her shoulder at every turn, slink up to his gazebo with his letter, the one he'd written so long ago and forgotten about, sitting snugly in her backpack. In addition, she had a much newer letter printed in handsome 12 point and placed neatly into a creamy envelope, this one clenched in her hands. Thinking it audacious but feeling emboldened by her recent doings, her decision to respond to this letter, her decision to rush a sorority, her vague promise to "come out of her shell," as AJ put it, as if she was beautiful, naked Venus, Lacey pressed her red lips to the envelope before she hid it, leaving on it the bright mark of her hopes and dreams.
She departed from the gazebo a new person. A couple gave her a brief fright, but she realized they weren't of consequence, just some strutting slut and her beau. What can they do to me? she thought as she slunk away. She watched the blonde lad nearly pick up the girl and carry her to the gazebo, both of them laughing. Dread set itself in her stomach. Her confidence faltered and she felt ashamed of her snap judgement. Who was she to think this girl a slut?
Confident the duo wouldn't notice her well-hidden envelope, she pushed them from her mind and slid through the forest. Summer, as it tended to, wouldn't die without a fight, and in its manic death-throes the dirtiest season let loose one final plume of sticky flame far into the sky. It wasn't a dry heat, the sort Lacey thought she could stand, but a dirty, tarry one, the sort of heat that reminded her of napalm, of far-off radio-voices urging planes to dump Hell across the jungle.
This dreadful imagery contrasted with the images she sought to conjure. In her mind the Dreamer would saunter up to the gazebo, looking more Fabio than human, reach down and retrieve the letter with a smile. After pressing his lips to the mark left by hers, he'd rip open the envelope in a flurry and remove the letter, that savage warrior reduced to a puddle of tears as he read it through, made childish in the presence of her flowing prose, sitting alone on the rotting benches while the wind caressed his flower laden mane. Was he a flower child?
The intrusive thoughts bombarded the walls of her mind. They were always present, always fighting her for control, always seeking to enter the peaceful city and slaughter the inhabitants. The poor souls in Troy, Jerusalem, Xiangyang, Baghdad…
She tried to find the gazebo amidst this chaos, amidst the flames. The letter left by her tender Dreamer indicated within him a beauty she could not define but so desperately sought. A beauty that had so far eluded her. A beauty that had sent her inwards, so far inwards… This was what the poets had written about. This was what they had been telling her. She could see them, lining the halls as she marched past, arm in arm with her Dreamer. They clapped and smiled, nodding, glad she finally understood what they had wasted so many lines describing. That single transcendental illumination, her soul fulfilling its desire, her heart fulfilling its function, every inch of her mortal form brought, for just that moment, into the realm of the gods.
The thoughts hanging at the periphery became more desperate as she was engulfed more and more by her fantasy. Flakes of gold begin to hover around her, her entire body radiated a soft light and she rose for a moment above the ground. A thin robe was pressed to her body. She was naked besides it but she didn't care. Her bare feet tickled the tops of the grass as she hovered overhead. Her hair had come undone, pulled from its ponytail until it floated gently about her head. It was as if she'd submerged in a great vat of cool water. Perhaps she lay in a kind pond, surrounded by floating petals that stared at the starry sky like searchlights, illuminating the various constellations, her brothers and sisters in immortality.
The thoughts had found an in. Images of the cold Ophelia burst into her mind. Flashbangs exploded and her senses failed her as the thoughts came surging in. She screamed until her voice cracked and her soul broke but nobody heard. Her tender Fabio turned to her, his mane still covered in flowers, and frowned. He looked past her, his eyes focused on some unknown point a thousand miles away, some unknown tragedy, some poor flower child with a knife to their throat, some poor flower child with a gun in their mouth.
It was too late for poor Lacey, her vision had been ruined. The demons sat upon the city spires and crackled. Erebus spread his arms and descended upon the scene, crushing finally the entire fantasy, thrusting Lacey out of her own mind back into the world around her, a hot, steamy world stuck in a perpetual twilight, its Sun hanging motionless in the final stages of its daily descent. She'd come onto a road, one of the thousands that crisscrossed a once untamed continent. It was a smaller road that ran past tired shops and their tireder employees, neither of whom it stopped to acknowledge. The cars on it were of the same sort, and cared about their surroundings just as much. They had more important things to attend to, namely the person or persons within them.
Lacey had come to the Quad, stepping on the grass, feeling like Columbus, a stranger in a strange land. But she didn't want to subjugate. She was just so tired. Fabio wasn't anywhere to be found and while retreating into reality had dismissed the demons, it was impossible to remove the doubt they carried with them. The Dreamer would find her letter stupid. Surely he would. What if he never found it at all? What if, as Lou Reed had said, he was a she?
A large group had gathered in the center of the Quad, much like how Brooke's feminists had gathered earlier. But these people were not feminists, or, at least, not all of them. They were a large group, nearly a hundred strong, and motley. Lacey thought herself too far away to be molested, and so she stood and watched. All of different ages, seemingly from all different backgrounds. A few students were strewn throughout the mass, but the majority were too old and too grungy to be the aspiring petty bourgeoisie.
Their apparent leader, a tall, older woman, wore shorts and a buttoned shirt -all khaki-, knee high socks, and an honest to God pith helmet. On her belt she had holstered some kind of pistol. She was talking to the assembly, but Lacey couldn't make out what she said.
Someone should tell that old bat the Scramble's over, thought Lacey, but then she felt bad, for the woman wouldn't have liked being called an old bat and the Scramble wasn't really over.
This woman was named Dora Chesterfield, though she preferred to be called Mrs. Chesterfield, a holdover from her forty years teaching dead Latin to grubby high schoolers. She was a feeble woman in body, but hardy in spirit, and it was through her efforts that this crowd had gathered.
So intense was Lacey's intrigue that she, despite her better judgement, approached the group. It wasn't long until she came to stand among them, finding them much less organized than she'd initially thought
From a distance they appeared a monolith, having formed a neat circle around the elevated Chesterfield -she stood upon a rusty footstool-. Up close they were a jumbled mess of disjointed parts, all of them fidgeting endlessly, half of them having broken the circle to inch closer to the footstool, seemingly for no reason other than to be closer to the exasperated Chesterfield, who tried incessantly to get the company to quiet.
Every time one person would cease their garble another would begin and Mrs. Chesterfield would be forced to switch her attention to them, swiveling around on her footstool to locate the guilty party. The poor old woman looked like a spinning top. If she'd extended her arms she might have flown off.
"What's going on?" Lacey asked someone once she'd pushed her way into the crowd.
"Fisheries," was the reply. It came from a large man with little hair and a sweat-drenched polo that clung to his bulging tits. He was eating a corn dog, and seemed unconcerned that more of the golden batter had settled around his mouth than in it.
"Fisheries?"
"Ya."
Lacey didn't know what he was talking about, and said as much, which produced in the man a bubbling annoyance. He endeavored to explain, though he didn't think to put down his corn dog while doing so, which forced Lacey to turn away, her mind flashing to images of a certain roommate.
"They're trying to nationalize the fisheries."
"Who is 'they?'"
The man didn't know. Shrugging his shoulders, he turned back to Chesterfield, who'd finally succeeded in getting the company quiet enough to sustain a speech.
"Everyone, please," she pleaded. "We are wasting precious time."
Nobody spoke. Someone in the back of the crowd sucked a drink through a straw.
"Okay, thank you. Now, we've all gathered here for the same reason…"
It became apparent seconds into Chesterfield's speech that Lacey had fallen in with a cult. Not a malicious cult, and one slightly less typical than your average Heaven's Gate, transcendence seeking, punch sucking personality disciples lurking around the dark corners of the Internet. These people were a protest movement, or something like one, mustered to protest what appeared to be a bill seeking to nationalize America's fisheries.
Why they'd gathered in her college campus was as much a mystery to Lacey as it was to Chesterfield herself.
They were a loud bunch, and Chesterfield had an exceedingly difficult time getting through her speech. They yelled a lot, almost entirely about trivialities that seemed comically stupid. Most of them had horrible fashion sense, their dress just slightly less grotesque than Brooke's usual attire, and a frightening number of them were overweight, about two thirds of the lot, with at least one third inordinately so.
They'd stopped, apparently at some restaurant, before they'd gathered, because most of them had gotten hold of soft drinks they sipped from paper cups. Several of them had children, and every few minutes one of the youngest would break into tears and saggy faced mothers or fathers would begin their hopeless whispering, their light shaking. Their eyes would plead with the tiny beings, begging them to stop their incomprehensible diatribes. Their noses would go to the child's diaper, their hands would pat against its tiny back, their voice would continue to whisper delicate reassurance into its uncomprehending ear. Finally, having tried everything, they would accept the untenable nature of their child's repine and shore themselves like a soldier under artillery, an infinitely small soul head down in some ditch, waiting for the world to stop exploding around them.
One woman in particular, an older woman with a tired face and frazzled, wiry hair, seemed particularly unable to cope with her baby's cryptic protests. She, like so many of those soldiers in their holes, turned to the sweet kiss of tarry tobacco, pulling a cheap cigarette from a pack she kept in her jeans and lighting it up, the small flame from her lighter grabbing the screaming child's attention for the brief moment it existed. His screams resumed when the flame was extinguished, and the woman, her cigarette lit, began to smoke, sucking in the tobacco like a fiend and blowing it out like a chimney. It seemed, to the concerned folk feet away, that she was purposefully directing the soot into her child's eyes. The child detected it, too, because at once he stopped crying, his face softening into the picture of innocence, closer to Wordsworth's vision of youth than this frazzled woman's. His wide eyes sucked in the smoke and he shut them in pain and panic. His eyes now burning, he began his crying anew.
"Honey, don't do that to the poor darling," whispered a grandmotherly figure just to her right. "Let me hold him, at least, if you must…"
This samaritan reached for the child, but his mother jerked him away in a single, harsh motion, jostling the child as she did so. The same image burned itself into the minds of everyone nearby, that of the child's tiny brain bumping around in its massive head, brain cells knocked free like leaves from a tree.
"Don't you touch me," the mother hissed, as if it were her the samaritan had wanted to hold.
"Please, it's horrible for him…"
"Don't you tell me how to raise my child." She blew a plume of smoke into the samaritan's face before turning away.
Several others offered looks of condolence, both to the samaritan and to the child, but nobody did more.
The baby, as if overcome by a premonition, increased his wail. Looking into his future, he saw what horror it held. He realized the smoke surrounding him would not fade, realized that it wouldn't be gone the next morning, next week, next month. He'd suffer his entire life because of the cruel woman that held him in her arms and proclaimed divine right to destroy him.
"The government thinks they can run our fisheries better than we can," Chesterfield was saying. "I don't know about any of you…"
Lacey had heard enough. This horrible group interested her no longer. She pushed her way out of the crowd, fighting past the mammoths held together by tight belts and sweaty jeans, past a cliche suburban lad who whispered obscenities to his snickering friends, past the entire motley collection until she burst from their confines, burst from the stifling camaraderie Chesterfield was so loudly forcing upon them.
"We need to work together on this. We have a real shot…"
Lacey thought they hadn't a shot of anything. Their entire facade was held together by the paper thin promise of some vague future wealth, the strange idea that because they stood upon the Quad, and looked at the ex-Latin teacher on a footstool, they were one. A disjointed collection of bickering bodies who'd killed verse and sought now to kill again. It seemed as if they'd tried eating until they exploded and, finding that impossible, directed their explosive tendencies outward, deciding that if they couldn't blow up themselves they'd blow up everyone else. They were motivated, that was for sure, motivated towards something. The strangest mix of lethargy and determination that ever stalked the land. But what exactly they were determined to do, whether it be protesting a bill seeking to nationalize the fisheries, or slouch into Bethlehem, nobody knew. The collection had been imbued with far more power than their ilk deserved, the result of a mere geographical fluke, Lacey thought. Their intentions were something everyone feared.
Dear Dreamer,
I found your letter, and have decided I will share this place with you, a place away from everything. I'm just starting out here but already I feel overwhelmed by this massive school. I don't mind this place, but there is something about your gazebo that I can't shake. Some special quality the rest of this place seems to lack. If someone out there feels the same, then I owe it to myself to at least talk to them.
You shared a secret with me, so I shall share one with you. I'm dreadfully shy, and have trouble making friends. My best -and only- friend went off to Clemson, and I'm not sure what I'll do without him. So, in an attempt to force myself into the social landscape, I'm rushing a sorority. Am I insane? Do you think I'm paying for my friends, like some people say? I just don't know.
You need something to call me, don't you? In that case, please call me the Wanderer. Never getting too close or meaning to be anywhere. Maybe I'll wander into you one day and not even know it. Maybe I'll cross the bridge and see you there at the gazebo. Who knows?
Yours,
The Wanderer
Chesterfield and her posse made quite the racket as they marched through campus and boarded several buses whose drivers had been reading dirty magazines and smoking, leaning against a bike rack behind the psychology building. Grumbling as their patrons approached, the drivers tossed their cigarettes into the manicured grass and mounted the vehicles along with the passengers. The beasts sputtered and spat, spitting up puffs of soot in their attempts to start. Finally they were ready, and the three buses pulled out of the parking lot in single file, dominating the tiny road they lumbered down. As soon as they arrived they were gone, gone from the campus, gone from the town, gone from the world, as far as Lacey was concerned, who had observed the spectacle from a distance as she milled about.
She wandered around the Quad until the Sun faded and the yellow streetlights sprung up to take its place, happy to fulfill their purpose, if not self-conscious that they weren't as good as the original. Her wanderings led her to a large wooden sign, gilded with fiberboard and replete with flyers, most shredded beyond their original form, many outdated. Several had never been comprehensible to begin with. But one, the largest, most recent, and most central, struck her. It was a large, neon green sheet of construction paper adorned with the pictures of two boys, one black, the other white, each smiling, one sheepishly, one brazenly. Under their pictures were their names, Maz Henderson and JaMarius R. Minority. A large RIP dominated the upper half of the affair. The poster made Lacey nauseous. So classless, so tactless was its entire construction. To think that a human being in possession of enough faculties to write Latin characters had composed, created, and displayed this horrific piece. It mortified her. There was nothing comforting about this poster, nothing that honored the memories of the two dumb bastards whose own drunkenness and debauchery had caused their timely demise and lost a tree her alimony. It didn't matter that Mrs. Tree was a lecher and used Mr. Tree's alimony to buy handbags she didn't realize were fake. The fact that somebody was acknowledging these two byegotten lads, hanging their likeness in public as if to remind the world of their stupidity, and then, to make matters worse, implying they had gone to a better place instead of rotting mangled in the tacky coffins their parents had procured for them was downright offensive to our agitated Lacey. In a flurry of motion her limbs propelled her body forward with such suddenness she was almost thrown off them. She trotted away, her cheeks burning with indignation. But towards what?
She didn't want to go back to her room. She didn't think it proper to go back to the gazebo. She hadn't any idea where to go, and so she went nowhere.
Brooke had brought back a young man whose legal name was Bradley, but who preferred his nom de plume, The Cockster, bestowed upon him by his brothers in arms. They thought him an idol, an epic hero without the accompanying flaw. His name was closely related to its use in the common vernacular of that strange time and place, for the Cockster was a hunter, a cougar hunter, he claimed, and his "safaris" were frequent and fruitful.
The Cockster had thought he'd hit the jackpot with his recent conquest. Allow me to paint the picture as he saw it. Brooke was the sort of sex-crazed wild-child anyone calling himself the Cockster would bewail as non-existent. She was somewhere between the manic pixie dream girl that only exists in the minds of forty year old screenwriters and the elusive "bro" tier young woman who spends all her time weathering accusations of falsity. She's not really into sports, you see…
The Cockster saw Brooke after her romp with the feminists, which meant she was half-naked with blood smeared under her eyes -the Cockster mistook this for paint- and leaves strewn about her tangled hair. This gave her, incidentally, the appearance of a demonic flower child, one of the psychedelic queens gone mad and savage, trading their guitars for a bow and war-whooping their way to the nearest white-man's caravan. This sort of self-aware savagery is, for the modern male, extremely enticing.
There is a vast, misguided assumption on the part of the so-called tender sex that chastity is valued at the level that it once was. While there are undoubtedly those who believe the untarnished female to be the best female, an equally number of the male sex think this new fangled, period blood covered savage woman to be far more attractive than the puritanical Beth or Amy, the little women from eras past. To account for the so-called slut shaming that exists in droves from apparently every crevice of society, including these progressive lads, we only need to visit any area still accurately described as a boy's club. A quick jaunt about these landscapes, a mere peep into their culture, will reveal that slut shaming is not the proper word, but that general shaming, mindless and aimless, directed at anything and everything, is more appropriate.
For the Cockster the image of Brooke stomping around the Quad, her mind reeling from a very recent hit of some narcotic, reminded him of Raquel Welch in her deer-skin bikini. He, like a caveman of that particular time, was urged into a prowl.
"Seducing" Brooke, as he intended to later relate it to his mates, was much easier than he'd expected. He hadn't any idea why, but he accepted victory where he found it, took her to a dining hall, and watched with a vulgar fascination as she scarfed down three sausage pizzas and two hot dogs.
It was nearly midnight by the time they left, and the Cockster told Brooke he'd like to see her room, for he was curious. She smiled a drunk smile that hid a myriad of wretched intentions. You and I, understanding this cruel twist of fate, cannot help but feel for the Cockster, who should have stuck to Mrs. Robinson, for nothing could have prepared him for the degeneracy that mocked his middle-class sensibilities when Brooke opened her door and the smell struck him.
Had the Cockster been a lesser man he would have fled then and there, but as he was a trooper he deigned to overcome. Brooke led him inside and, his resolve melting like the cheese sandwich sitting atop her machine's keyboard, the orange cheese slices slinking between the T and G, intermingling with the inner-machinations of that poor peripheral, he nearly vomited. But still he trooped on, going as far as to climb into Brooke's bed. She'd turned on a lamp, which illuminated for him the true nature of this harpy's nest, but still that tiny soldier trooped on.
It was his pride that had gotten him this far. He refused to admit that it was he who'd been bamboozled, refused to acknowledge that in this complex game he'd finally become the victim, the one who'd lost, the one taken advantage of, the one spread apart and defiled. But he was being defiled. There wasn't any other way to put it. This was a fact he suppressed until, while Brooke was fiddling with his belt-buckle, he accepted it all at once. Pushing the girl away, he grabbed his shirt and struggled to put it back on.
"What's wrong?" Brooke cooed.
"I… I forgot… I have something…" stuttered the routed Cockster. This commotion had stirred another lifeform, one the Cockster hadn't noticed but Brooke absolutely had. She sat up in a haze -occupying the cleaner bed opposite Brooke and the conquered Cockster- and, having rubbed her eyes for a good few seconds, stared in amazement at the ritual unfolding before her.
"What the fuck?" were the only words she could locate.
The Cockster, brought further into his dejection by this new development, endeavored to explain his presence.
"I… I had no idea someone else…"
"Brooke, what the fuck?" said Lacey again, ignoring the Cockster entirely, for she knew this wasn't his doing.
"What's wrong, Lace?" asked Brooke. "Can't handle a little female sexuality?"
"This is fucking wrong," the Cockster exclaimed as he managed to free himself from the siren's grasp. He jumped from the bed, his hair frazzled, his belt buckle still half undone, his socks and shoes thrown into some corner of the filth, and gave Lacey a profoundly apologetic look.
"I'm so sorry," he muttered as he left, leaving his poor shoes and socks behind.
Brooke, deciding she was tired, turned off the lamp and fell onto her back. Leaves still occupied her hair.
"What a little bitch," was all she had to say of the Cockster, who had, just seconds earlier, startled a pair of meandering girls as he darted out of the dorm and into the darkness, barefoot and terrified.
This event upset Lacey, but not as much as it should have, for she had expected such a thing to happen eventually. What upset her far more happened after the room had calmed -as much as anything bearing the stench of decay can really calm- and she and Brooke had fallen asleep. Brooke fell asleep first, and, despite her raucous snoring, Lacey soon followed. It was here that Lacey's agony manifested itself freely. The demons, the intrusive thoughts kept at bay during the light of day by Lacey's constant vigilance and timely procured distractions now ran a perverse fiesta through the grubby streets of Lacey's mind. The dreams -she dreamt often, and vividly- were what one can expect of any bashful girl attempting to enter into one of the more savage social landscapes known. She dreamt of smiling sorority girls, plastered in makeup and raised above her by heels of heights she couldn't manage. She dreamt of flubbing lines, flubbing answers.
"What, in your opinion, is the most serious issue our society needs to deal with, today?" was one sorority sister's wordy inquiry. Lacey was stricken dumb and deaf by this simple query and her response was:
"The nationalization of America's fisheries."
"Oh," said the girl, her eyes darting back and forth, scanning Lacey, burning her into her brain. Before, Lacey had been someone of no significance, now she was someone to remember. "How… interesting."
This sort of cliche interaction, lifted straight from the B-movies that Lacey and AJ had laughed at into the dead of night, played on repeat for several hours of her slumber. Of course, she didn't recall all of these moments, and so the actual time occupied in the Hell of a wild mind seemed to her much shorter, but the gist of these episodes wasn't something she would forget.
These scenarios transitioned to the sort of dreams we all know and fear. She'd forgotten her reading and was made a fool of in class. She'd forgotten a class entirely. She'd lost a textbook and with it hundreds of her parent's dollars -getting them each to contribute any amount had been a chore, for they constantly argued that the other should have to pull their weight, and Lacey was sent from household to household in an effort to convince both of them of the other's financial fidelity. This was the case with textbooks and everything else that required monetary consideration-. These dreams are discomforting, but common, and so she could dismiss them as just that, a known nuance of the human experience, a shared fear that unites us all, a struggle both under and over-graduates must weather -non graduates have their own hurdles, debatably worse-.
The next dream, however, was of a much more sinister sort. It was sinister for the same reason that one dealing with the stresses of combat has such difficulty in comprehending the world they once occupied. Seeing the randies romp about their outdoor malls, not a care in the world, while one suffers in solitude, recalling images of friends and enemies alike devoured by a machine whose off-switch was long ago smashed to bits, human beings, supposed brothers in our common fears and worries, tearing each other to shreds like dogs loosed on a fox; this destroys that individual. It is not that these traumas cannot be overcome, it is that the individual experiencing them has to look at every passerby knowing that person does not struggle so. There are others, of course, but they are few and far between, and it is often at our most needy that we isolate ourselves the most dogmatically. In this way the shell shocked post-warrior suffers in agonizing solitude. Lacey felt this sense in its most brutal fashion. When she'd walk down the street and see the little women and their faithful beaus she couldn't imagine for a moment that any turbulence accompanied their combination. Perhaps the specifics of the combination were doubted, the faithfulness of the partner, the general affinity, the harmony of habits, etc. and etc., but what was never doubted was the framework that supported such an institution. This problem was, at the very best, a far away acknowledged abstraction in the minds of most, understood to be the sort of thing that Foucault and the other Continentals yelled endlessly about and seemed to die because of. It was never understood as anything more than just that, a vague abstraction. The idea that something so fundamentally understood could be, in this poor, solitary figure so horribly doubted never occurred to the good old boys or the little women or any of the other figures that flew past. Again, Lacey was not alone in her struggle, there was an entire alphabet soup of individuals ready and waiting to support this tired soldier, to take her in their arms, to reassure her that she was not unique, that this struggle was not hers alone to bear, that it wasn't something to be overcome but something to be embraced.
But we can not blame Lacey for feeling alone in this matter, for anyone who has experienced this pain will confirm there is a frightening moment when the perceived deviant in question looks for too long at someone they shouldn't and thinks something about them they wish they hadn't. How easily accepted these thoughts are varies radically, but in Lacey, who regarded these -and many others- as intrusive, such an acceptance was doomed to slouch languidly towards Bethlehem, arriving, if ever, much later than scheduled.
One wonders why the Second Coming is being invoked in this manner, why a traditionally perverse poem would be referred to in discussing the acceptance of an integral part of one's soul. That, my confused reader, is for you to parse. Perhaps in this strange mystery you can feel but a modicum of the turmoil that gripped our protag's soul.
The dream Lacey had was this: she was lying in her bed, as she was in reality, when Brooke came rising into view, floating like some demon at the foot of her bed. Her arms were limp at her side and she was all but completely naked, only the stained panties poorly concealing her wild bush adorning her cadaveric form. The leaves in her hair had been replaced with flowers, and on her face, the one part of her in any way animate, was a stretched smile. This smile was so genuine and assured that Lacey forgot at once the natural fears that assault the human mind when reminded of our own mortality, and she welcomed the creature into her bed.
Things progressed in that sudden and baffling fashion until Lacey realized that this naked Brooke was atop her, her legs positioned on either side of her thighs. Brooke's legs were impossibly smooth. She never shaved, they couldn't be that smooth. Her hands were pressed against the sheets, each just inches from Lacey's head. Her breasts and hair hung down, arms, breasts, and hair surrounding Lacey's face completely, walling them into a world where the demons could not get. Brooke's lips moved downwards and connected with Lacey's.
Waking in a sweat, Lacey's eyes sat wide open for the longest time, staring at the sleeping Brooke, sprawled on her sheets in half of her clothes, her entire body reeking of filth. Finally, riddled with at least three kinds of guilt, Lacey fell back to sleep. The dreams continued until the windows, those treacherous bastards, let the light stream inwards, heralding another day full of illumination.
Deduction said nothing of the matter, but all of Lacey's induction, as it had informed her of the sun's likely reemergence, told her that these dreams, these feelings, these suspicions, would not cease, but continue as they had in spurts for years, hanging, like so many troublesome things, just on the periphery, jeering and catcalling, ruining what could have been a perfectly good first day of sorority recruitment.
While the girls gathered on the street, lined in their careful alphabetical order, dressed casually but not not too casually, the Sun beat down. Always beating down… What should have been a monument to human vanity, the inexplicable hubris of a species aware of its incoming demise, its unconquerable mortality, served more as a conversation starter for the scorched heads and sweating brows that resided under it.
"It's so fucking hot," remarked one of the girls, fanning herself with a Japanese hand fan she'd gotten on her latest Asiatic tour, a romp about the post-colonies that included every major destination on that continent. She found them hot, dreadful, and savage, not to mention alien, and so she'd fled at the first opportunity, grabbing in her haste only this pretty little fan.
It was serving its purpose well, but not well enough, for still this girl complained.
"Like… why do they have to make us wait outside?"
This sort of speech, or any sort of speech that implied fault in the sororities, their nature, or their methods, was viewed as exceedingly dangerous by the others, and this girl took on the role of the unaware pariah, fanning herself in solitude while thinking herself surrounded by agreeable compatriots.
Lacey, who was positioned, by nature of the alphabetical ordering, near the front, was too nervous to give this girl much consideration. She'd caught, from a few of the girls positioned in front of her, hushed whispers regarding some article on this very subject, written for the sole purpose of preparing the fussy rushee for this stage in the ritual. Lacey hadn't read any such articles. The very idea of prepping for something designed to reveal one's own nature seemed to her basely absurd. And yet the articles existed, in droves, hanging maliciously at the other end of the clickbait links her ad-blocker reasonably denied her. Had she, in her sensibility, hampered her own chances of success? Did she really need to know those nine outrageous things that happened on America's Next Top Model? Were the hot singles in her area as sex-starved as their provocative poses suggested? Had she been tricked?
Even if she'd seen the links to these articles, even if she'd actively searched for them, she wouldn't have been able to read them in good faith. She still thought them absurd, and couldn't imagine what fucked up mind would produce such hackery and go to sleep at night. Like the half-dime hacks of old; the poor, dead writers whose true names might not even be known, leaving in their wake only a collection of Deadwood Dicks and Calamity Janes. These articles seemed too stupid to exist, and yet they did. They'd jumped up, quiet by accident, like life itself from the primordial soup, and continued to wreak havoc on idiots everywhere. Wear this, not that. No this, not that. Lacey felt some vague anger bubbling within her, but she was able to suppress it, for she wasn't unreasonable. She was not so revolutionary as to let the Cause hinder her genuine attempts to break into the social landscape and, as they'd put it at the various sorority meetings she'd already attended, "experience college to the fullest."
There was, however, someone in the mix who could not repress her fanaticism. This radical creature thought herself profound when, preceded by agitated whispers and accompanied by looks ranging from amazeballs to disgust, she'd sauntered onto the scene in nothing but a flimsy bikini from which she threatened to burst. This individual was, of course, Brooke, and to complete the costume she'd acquired heels of an unreasonable height and a sash that read: Miss Multiverse. Her hair was washed and combed, giving it a remarkably luscious sheen, and her makeup perfectly done. Who had completed that Herculean task none of the girls knew, though Brooke, who'd found an in with the school's small film department, hadn't needed to look far for aspiring makeup artists and costumers to assist her with such a display.
Her legs were shaved, her body washed and tanned, and, as if a cruel joke meant for Lacey alone, a single flower, a white anemone, sat in her hair, positioned just above her right ear.
For her coup de grace Brooke had, on the registration form, ranked honesty as her most valued trait.
The first day of recruitment went worse than Lacey'd hoped but better than she'd expected. She'd put on her best smile for each of the houses, for each of the girls, and trooped through all the skits and cheering and clapping and banshee shrieking and laughing and talking. She'd remained both polite and reasonable, avoided Brooke, and said nothing about fisheries.
So it was with a dull satisfaction that she ventured across the Quad. Observing the pretty grass and handsome brick buildings put her in an even better mood, and seized by her baser desires she veered off course halfway through her journey, heading away from her room and instead to the red bridge that led to the gazebo.
The bridge was unused as usual, and nobody seemed to sulk about the forest. Amidst the God-rays peeking through the gaps in the leafery overhead she approached the gazebo, her stomach having swelled with something between anticipation and derision. Simultaneously chiding her naive hope but succumbing completely to it. The last ten meters of her journey saw her give in completely, and she, despite herself, did a little spin. Having recovered from the foolish display she glanced around, confirming again her solitude.
Solitude from humans, that is, for other, more reliable species, inhabited this bustling forest. All of them, from the birds on their perches to the worms burrowing underground, seemed to urge her onwards, seemed put in their exact places for the sole purpose of witnessing her moment of transcendence, her ultimate triumph, the single moment that would justify all her struggles, the moment that would sweep her away, ensuring that she would have to struggle with the world no longer, ensuring that her mortal form, brimming with golden light and walking through a world of fleshy pink, would exceed the requirement for this plane and move to the next, that place incomprehensible to the loners of the Earth's crevices, incomprehensible to the miserable, the career seekers or the settlers. This was where life's truth was held. She knew it. The forest creatures knew it. They'd gathered around and cheered her forward. It all felt like one of those old princess films, or perhaps one of those shojos she'd die swearing she didn't watch. She felt like Utena, like Oscar. Each step was a bitter battle, for it occupied precious time she could be spending transcended, but by and by she came to the gazebo. Her cheeks were alight, her eyes burnt in anticipation and as she looked a final wave of doubt washed over her.
There, stuffed into the hiding spot, was an envelope.
Lacey grabbed it and, confirming again and again her solitude, she sat on the bench, tore through the letter's delicate shell, pulled out the sheet of loose leaf and began devouring the words, rendered in a lovely, flowing cursive.
Dear Wanderer,
Thank you so much for responding to my letter. It's been so long since I'd left that last one that I thought nobody would ever find it. I'm also glad that you found my special place. Perhaps we will see each other here someday. Please, tell me more about yourself. What are your interests? What are your hobbies? What are your hopes? What are your dreams? I want to know as much about you as possible. I'm sorry this letter couldn't be longer, but I am very busy. Please, leave me a letter as soon as you get this one. Hopefully we'll develop a regular correspondence.
Always yours,
The Dreamer
Lacey survived the first few rounds of sorority recruitment. Brooke did not.
Part THREE
Hot Tramp, I Love You So!
You've got your mother in a whirl
She's not sure if you're a boy or a girl.
MAZ HENDERSON
Maz Henderson, age 21, passed away violently early Sunday morning, August 21st, 2016, in his friend's mangled car. He was born February 18th, 1995, in Bakersville, to Jerry and Marilyn (Westmore) Henderson. He was a 2014 graduate of Jefferson Davis High School. This poor lad was not merry being. He was a fourth-rate child from a third-rate family. His father was an engineer but not a happy one and his mother, an aggressive woman, worked with hedge funds. Maz never learned exactly what she did, he just knew she took pride in her salary, which he despised, partly because he was jealous she found satisfaction in worldly things and partly because she falsely believed he could love her regardless. Maz's psyche was shattered; he was schizophrenic in the metaphorical sense and depressed in the literal. His mother, who taught his three sisters all the tricks they'd need to succeed in a hostile world, thought him uniquely broken, and coddled him because of it. But here was her great error. She believed that she could return home, still wearing her suit and heels; cast away her vocation's rancid scent; and be a mother. Maz thought her absurd. How outrageous this idea, that she could lead two separate lives. She was convinced neither would affect the other, but Maz, even in the earliest days of his hapless budding, knew that his mother wasn't a mother, but a predator, a demon who, for several hours a day, would yell and shout and accrue wealth as if an automaton with that singular function. Shedding her suit, changing into dirty sweatpants, letting her greying hair fall around her head until it surrounded her throat, kissing her husband and lecturing her daughters over a table filled with fatty take-out; these things couldn't separate her from the vast machine that Maz, another aimless radical, so despised. This machine's steely limbs had penetrated even his most cherished refuge while he'd still resided within it. He always swore he remembered drowning in that primordial soup and hearing, from just beyond her stretched skin, that demon screeching about numbers and deftly separating the people attached to them.
This was Maz. This was the Maz who despised his mother and didn't know his father. This was the being who resented the world with a fury beyond logic, something cold numbers can't describe. In his death we witness the soft extinguishment of another frenzied id; blaming, always blaming…
JAMARIUS R. MINORITY
JaMarius R. Minority, age 21, passed away violently early Sunday morning, August 21st, 2016, in his mangled car. He was born April 20th, 1995, in Slatersville, to Roger and Sheryl (Brown) Minority. He was a proud 2014 graduate of H. H. Holmes High School. From a young age he had an acute sense of being the comic relief character, and sought to remain that way, understanding that it gave him a powerful invulnerability. As the token black man in many scenarios, JaMarius avoided the scrutiny that often accompanies protagonists. One may wonder what mysteries, what insights, lay beyond this poor boy's ever present facade, but now that death has stolen this character from us, the true nature of his sprawling mind we shall never know. One can guess, of course, that this boy had more to offer than he ever gave. Supposedly intelligent, it was perhaps his greatest failing to so thoroughly dull himself with every narcotic under the sun. Here we see the product of a deranged, neurotic society, one for whom bright flashes and ultra-speed represent the pinnacle of human progress. One cannot know what JaMarius, had he avoided the roller coaster of uppers and downers, could have done. Like the flash of a late night advertisement JaMarius' life went by, but perhaps, behind this outward display of force, there was a tiny being begging for help.
Whether or not there is a God, JaMarius is with him now.
Dear Dreamer,
I'm so glad you responded to my letter! Your original one was so old, I was afraid you'd forgotten about it. When, if you don't mind me asking, did you originally hide it?
You want to know about me, and so I'll tell you, though I certainly am nervous in doing so. I hope you won't find me stupid. My interests are various, I suppose, but I enjoy more than anything writing. Prose and poetry, I enjoy it all. I wrote a novel, but it wasn't very good. A publisher called its prose "mannish," which, as you can imagine, distressed me greatly. Some of my dreams are tied to this hobby. I'd like to be published, of course, and liked to be praised. I wanted to help the Cause, but I've begun to think the Cause either doesn't want or doesn't need my help. Other than that, I don't really know. I'd like to make some friends at this new place. As I said before, I am rushing a sorority. The first round of recruitment went by okay, although my roommate, who is a total spaz, nearly ruined it. I managed to avoid her, though, and all the negative implications that come with her. I think I did okay, but I can't really know. I survived the second round just fine as well, but everyone knows that is the easy part. It's the later rounds that will determine whether I get into a good house or not. As for what sororities I like, I think Alpha Delta Pi is my favorite one thus far.
I'll check back here regularly, so please keep responding. I'm really enjoying reading your letters.
Sincerely,
The Wanderer
Time passed. Lacey and the Dreamer kept a regular correspondence. It was a one sided correspondence, in which Lacey poured into her letters her soul, and the Dreamer did little but suck it up. His (or her) responses were curt, short, written without passion or intensity, whereas Lacey's were written with the fervor that accompanied her novel-sessions, a fever-driven struggle between herself and her soul in which she wrote with the intensity of a girl at the edge of death, a girl for whom words were the world, a girl who knows the paragraphs she writes will be her last.
Lacey explained her novel to the Dreamer. She was humble, of course, for in humility there is safety. But she was terribly proud of her work, and wished to be praised. She included within her letters chapters, excerpts, and descriptions from her work. She included long-winded analysis, explanation of her style and purpose, and diatribes against all forms but her own. Hers was a novel seeking to subvert the male-gaze. She wrote within the Mulveyian tradition, whatever that means, and in this she took immense pride. The publisher's comment regarding her prose was quickly forgotten amidst the Dreamer's steady support.
I'm really enjoying reading the novel. Please keep sending me parts. Lacey never noticed how vague the Dreamer's praise was, how unsubstantial. It is typical of her type, that is, a fundamentally vain creature (read: a human) so starved for attention, to cast aside any reason that may cast doubt on their worth. In this way Lacey ignored whatever warnings sounded deep within her, as a sex-starved beautiful one might with a shifty-eyed date. The Dreamer never again achieved the strength, the intensity, the passion poured into their first letter, but this, too, Lacey ignored.
Lacey ignobled herself in the Dreamer's eyes with the authorial deprecation all too typical of her ilk. She dismissed her novel as a secondary passion, or not a passion at all.
Just something I threw together were her words. For the Dreamer to understand the hours of labor, the introspection, the crying and the bursts of melancholy that went into that work would have been utterly impossible. It is something nobody but those who partake can truly understand. Or even begin to understand. But still the Dreamer offered comfort and support, if not of the briefer sort.
And here began another suspicion, one that would occupy Lacey for the better part of the weeks to come, one that cast her unwillingly into the dark forest of doubt surrounding her feeble mind. But this time it felt different. So different from when, in her bed, she'd dreamt of Brooke, or when, innumerable times, the intrusive thoughts mugged her as she walked down the street. Whereas the past had seen every sideways glance a thing of danger, every high-heeled creature she passed a high-powered peril, the present found the thoughts of this sort contained by the Dreamer. And who better to bear them?
True, Lacey was not happy that the brutal curiosity that plagued her fractured psyche would accompany the thoughts of her happy Dreamer, but she knew that in the Dreamer's appropriation of them there was hope.
What was it that convinced her of the Dreamer's gender? Perhaps the handwriting of the odd loose-leaf letter she received. Perhaps the type of language she occasionally used. Perhaps it was a vague quality within Lacey herself, something the authors of the past would have flatly called feminine intuition. Whatever it was, Lacey was certain it led her correctly. The Dreamer was a woman, she must be. And more than that, the Dreamer was her woman. That she must be, too.
Having taken on something resembling a form, the Dreamer became even dearer. And the letters kept coming, as regular as the grand pulsars so far up in space. This surprised Lacey, for she wasn't used to such dependability. Every trip to the gazebo was accompanied by doubt, and every one was met with joy. Slowly her confidence in the Dreamer's regularity expanded until it had reached its wonderful zenith, coming to rest within Lacey as genuine human trust. Trust that, every few days -this was the rate to which their correspondence soon fell- whatever she had left would have been taken, read, considered, and responded to.
Even Lacey's schoolwork saw improvement. While she was never a problem-student, the sort of academic deviant that runs rampant through the halls of lower education, disrupting students and migraining teachers, she was never so enamored with the scholarly drudge through which the American student must wade. But now she threw herself at her work with unbridled success. Granted, the difficulty of Lacey's work was something the prodigious students of her hyper-speed age would have scoffed at, but in her steady accomplishments she took immense pride. This was the sort of honest work that Conrad adored, and Lacey began to see his points. Gradually her fashion fell from showy to natural. The clothes she'd stuffed herself into transitioned from tight dresses to loose dresses, from tight jeans to loose sweats, and so on and so forth. Her hair saw less attention, and so did her face. But here again she was content.
Even Brooke had calmed. She still pumped herself full of Adderall and listened to Lou Reed for hours on repeat, but her cleanliness seemed to have increased. She took semi-regular showers, generally kept her trash near the trash cans, and even did laundry from time to time. Her romps with the lads became less frequent and more and more removed from Lacey's living space. Perhaps Brooke thought she'd made her point and wanted to move on to someone else. Whatever point it was, Lacey had gotten certainly gotten it.
Yes, Lacey had begun coming into her own.
Even the pain of being rejected from the sorority world couldn't hamper Lacey for long. But it was a pain.
The sisters on the stage counted down and the mass of girls opened their individual envelopes all at once. The words on the page struck Lacey as unfortunate. A cacophony of shrieks rose around her. In a moment the entire room thundered with everything between cries of joy and cries of anger and embarrassment.
But this social rejection seemed so petty when Lacey tiptoed to her gazebo later that day. Orange clouds were overtaken by another starless night. She stared into the darkness beyond the treetops, ashamed with her species for drowning out the heavens with their city lights. Then she felt ashamed with herself.
Gradually the tranquility of the place overcame her and she came to feel a great peace. The anger, embarrassment, and resentment poured from her until she was dry.
Some blonde boy and his girlfriend were sulking about the woods some distance away. They seemed drunk. The girl was giggling uncontrollably, and the boy was desperately trying to get her under control.
They eventually left, or appeared to leave, and Lacey, having placed her most recent letter in its proper spot, snuck away.
The trio of buses had taken Mrs. Chesterfield's group as far as Midville, halfway to Washington. It was her intent to complete the journey by sailing through the waterways that crisscross this nation like veins; on her late-husband's personal steamer. She'd paid arms and legs and organs and whatever else to have the media present for the arrival of the vessel. It was her belief that her party would attract more attention if they made a spectacle of themselves, so she'd bid the vultures come and watch her and her company embark. She estimated it would take them four days to arrive in Washington, giving them two days to protest the bill.
But the journey itself wouldn't be for waste, not if the senators saw the broadcast, not if they knew she and her comrades were coming. It was this sort of pressure, the idea that at any moment a mob might descend upon you, that keeps a democracy in line.
So it was that Chesterfield stood with ninety nine other persons and several television reporters upon an isolated dock situated on the forgotten bank of some unnamed waterway, five miles out of Midville. The majority of her company, feverish and delusional from the late summer heat, had searched for shade and, finding none, plopped themselves down on the scorched wood, at that point determined to just ignore the blazing Sun. These people did not deal well with heat. The television reporters and their cameramen, being cold-blooded and therefore perfectly suited to this swelter, weaved their way throughout the sprawled masses, pointing their oversized cameras into the faces of the lethargic creatures. Some of the people had taken to fanning themselves with whatever they could find, cheap magazines and sheets of mail coupons for most of them. Chesterfield wanted to scold them for their lethargy, after all, how were they to show the nation the importance of their cause if they couldn't bother standing upright?
"You all look like a bunch of slugs in a frying pan," she wanted to say. "What if the Romans sailing up the Thames saw you now? To think you've inherited their legacy, their flame…"
But she said nothing to her comatose company, for she was much angrier with the few of them that hadn't descended to passivity. They were a group of lads leaning over the dock's rusty metal railing, their faces reflected in the murky, green water below.
"You lot are going to go tumbling in, and then what are you going to do?" she said to them, her arms akimbo, the shadow created by her pith helmet stretching across her wrinkled face.
"Uh… climb out," laughed one the boys, a brunette, the son of a man lying face down on the dock several meters away, his chest and back soaked, the Sun burning the back of his neck. His shirt displayed a proud bald eagle but the man's position meant the eagle's fierce glare was directed through the dock's cracks and into the murky water below.
Chesterfield wisely disengaged the lads before her anger boiled over and sent her into a rage. Had she been aware that just moments earlier the boys had been comparing her to a certain Dark Helmet in one of the better Spaceballs scenes, she mightn't have been able to restrain herself.
The boys kept to their whooping and hollering while the rest of the mass continued to lounge. Chesterfield had begun strutting about, slowly and methodically -for she could maintain no other speed- as if on inspection. She imagined herself the leader of a great legion preparing for a forced march towards the savage periphery. Roads newly built, armor freshly shined, swords deviously sharp. This was the invigoration she needed.
"Where's that old lady?" somebody complained.
The words cut Chesterfield but she tried to hide it and turned to this individual, a life-sized doll lying like a dried out starfish on the dock, her various hair-modifications jutting from her pinched head in all directions. They looked like a liquid. Like a bloodstain. Some of her red and pink strands had actually fallen through the dock's cracks and hung, stupefied, unsure of what exactly to do.
"Are you asking for me?" said Chesterfield, fully aware she was, fully aware that most of the company didn't know her actual name.
"When are we leaving?" groaned the creature.
"She'll be here shortly, be patient."
But patience was not these people's strong suit. In fact, the entirety of them wouldn't have been able to, even if they had stood around in a circle and squeezed and squeezed until their entire essence had conglomerated in the center, produce a teaspoon of the stuff.
But by and by the steamer did arrive, at first just a speck but growing larger every second. Hissing towards them at a steady pace, moving through the water, no… moving atop the water, almost like a gentle duck, hardly disturbing the gentle ecosystem around it, gliding just above as if to consider even the most timid tadpole's comfort and happiness.
Chesterfield, for the first time since she'd taken command of the company, contorted her old face into a smile. The pride forming within her bubbled over and foamed out of her pores and she couldn't help but say,
"There she is, the PS Aurelius, the finest paddle steamer this river's ever seen."
"It looks kinda shitty," someone said.
Chesterfield had to remove herself from their presence entirely. She stepped over the sprawled bodies, disappointed to see that few people had noticed the old boat. Even those advanced in age, who she thought might appreciate such an artifact, lay sprawled with the indifference of a lazy teen. One man, a chubby fellow in a T-shirt touting some pop band, seemed to have noticed the ship, as he was one of the few individuals sitting upright.
"She's a beauty, isn't she?" Chesterfield asked him.
He turned his head slowly to address her, as if even this minor effort strained him. His entire face, minus what was covered by a hideous pair of wrap around sunglasses, was burnt brutal red. The skin on his cheeks had nearly fallen off, so flaky had it become, and his forehead, comically oversized, had turned a seared brown. Despite this, the man made no attempt to move his face out of the sun, no attempt to protect his face with sunscreen; he couldn't so much as find a hat.
"Not really," said the man.
Chesterfield moved off the dock entirely and into the dying grass beside it. This was a long grass and, like everything else in that scorched landscape, burnt through, turned a feeble tan by the Sun's relentless assault. She was a solitary figure against immensity, staring down the unconquerable human fate, long since preceded by those who could understand and abandoned by those who couldn't.
She did her best to collect her thoughts and cool her temper. They don't understand, she thought, and that's okay. Not everyone must. Let them lounge about. They're like cats, not a care in the world… but lacking all ambition, too. A downside to every upside.
She turned her gaze to the ship and was startled and upset to see it had hardly progressed. This was not for lack of trying. The paddles spun for everything they were worth, the entirety of the ship's complex internality forcing them around and around, urging them to continue, whispering to them the consequences if they stopped.
But it was exhausting work for a being of such age. The cameramen -for they were all men- had turned their cameras towards that sorry spectacle. The entire thing nearly sent Chesterfield into a tear-soaked fit. She wanted to rush in front of those infernal devices that seemed to record everything but the truth. She wanted to scream in the grand old steamer's defense. Maybe screw steamers are better. Maybe steamers themselves are outdated. But does that mean there is no place in this world for her paddle steamer?
No, damn it. It was a hero in a crisis, calm while everything around it fell to pieces, cool while everything around it burned. In its progress, however slow, there was hope.
The spotless river-split plain, seemingly taken from another dimension in which God forgot to populate the land with features, offered nothing to obstruct her view, and so she was able to watch the old girl's entire arduous trek.
How boring they must find this, though Chesterfield. This upset her. For it was boring. The ship, struggling so hard against even this weak river, presented a pathetic picture of the past. Was this all that remained of the once grand steamers that dominated the Mississippi? What had come of the grand triremes that swarmed the Channel when Claudius set loose his hounds on the unsuspecting Britons?
"Come on everyone," Chesterfield said, having made her way back onto the dock. Every step was a struggle and she felt the weight of the Sun pressing her into the earth. Not yet… "Everyone get up or we'll leave without you."
One of the boys had fallen into the river. He'd gone tumbling right over the rail while the other boys stood, sweating and baking and laughing, their eyes steamy red with laughter and heat. Not one helped the boy splashing about below them. He wasn't a strong swimmer, that much was obvious, but Chesterfield did nothing, for she thought drowning would serve him right. She might have held another opinion had she known the specifics, for this lad wasn't acquainted with the gentlemen that had so angered her. He was from a more tender group, having gone to the railing to admire the steamer, the only one who had. The brutes had pushed him.
It was just as Chesterfield saw the captain waving to her that the boat's engine panicked and launched upwards its innards. A Vesuvian blast. A single, sudden explosion of black smoke and orange flame. The vessel was engulfed, the captain and crew incinerated. Smoke was thrown into the air and debris soon followed, spinning wildly as it soared through the vastness. Fiery tentacles stretched out to retrieve the debris, as if in a laughable attempt to reassemble the ship before the majority of it sunk. The first explosion was not the last, and several more sent additional arches of fire into the sky. The Sun, thinking this display cute, chuckled, glad for the entertainment.
"Fuck!" screamed the humans, thinking it much more serious. The heat and the force of the blast hit them. The majority of the company and the newsmen went tumbling off their feet in a mix of surprise and terror. More blasts sounded off as other sections of the ship, their cause a lost one, plunged their tantōs into their guts and screamed.
All at once the blasts reached their terrible climax. The fiery tentacles reaching into the sky recoiled in horror at what they found and the debris came raining onto the river, dock, and banks. Chesterfield put her hands over her helmet in a panic as the chunks fell upon her. She sustained a thick coat of ash and wood chippings. Several of her company sustained much worse. A particularly large piece of metal struck the boy in the river, knocking him unconscious and sending him sinking slowly to a quiet death.
The plume of smoke continued rising into the sky, but not as hurriedly, having settled on a gentler pace. With the situation apparently stabilized, Chesterfield felt comfortable rising from her fetal position. She moved her arms off her helmet and, with greater difficulty than ever, stood up. Her boat was a flaming corpse, struggling to stay atop the water. A viking funeral's man of honor.
So it was that the once mighty PS Aurelius sat barely afloat on a tired river in the middle of nowhere at all. It hadn't been the savages that overcame noble Marcus. It hadn't been Nature. It had been its own complex construction.
As Chesterfield watched, barely perceiving the groans of her paralyzed company around her, she was struck by just how hot her steamer's final moments must have been.
Part FOUR
Free They Must Remain
Do you think God stays in heaven because He too, lives in fear of what He's created?
Was there a person behind the Lacey that sauntered into her English class on no particular day and, wringing out her umbrella, took her seat, pulled out her book and laptop, and sat awaiting the arrival of the professor? Who was this creature, we wonder, that wore oversized sunglasses, kept her hair tied back, and hadn't bothered to dress beyond sweats in half a week? Is this what Lacey had become as the dull comfort set in? Or is this what Lacey had always been?
At any rate, she'd arrived early, and, being not the only one to do so, thought to turn around and strike up a conversation with the person behind her. This person was, of course, Joseph, who had arrived just before her and been about to partake in a similar activity. He was pleased that she'd initiated the discussion and, being no thespian, couldn't help but display it on his skinny, expressive face. This boy was the sort of lad for whom emotions seemed to exist on the outside more so than anywhere else. His features morphed like a computer screen whenever he felt something, and they could be read just as easily. His smile was bright when he displayed it, and this was something he did often, but there was, perhaps, a demonic streak about him that repelled those who could detect it. The sort of skinny, pleasant face that hides something more, though nobody could understand what exactly it was. Not emotion, as we've already established. He was nebulous, though Lacey wasn't the sort that was able to tell. She knew him as a face, a goofy boy that sat behind her and occasionally answered the professor's inquiries with long-winded deviations the rest of the class could barely tolerate. But she didn't care that his detours took them, often, into the depths of entirely separate texts. He spoke with an expressiveness, a genuine flare of care that gallivanted this liberated woman.
Lacey had had enough of facade, having delved into the heart of absurdity and emerged a Marlow, not a Kurtz. She boarded with the embodiment of the Cause gone astray, the blood soaked, self-described amazonian that tries upon the patience of even the most faithful allies. She'd seen, in her regular written correspondences, a person who seemed above it all, and had, she believed, learned to let herself loose, learned that perhaps Brooke's dogmatic lifestyle pathetically disguised by a fast-paced hedonism was more puritanical than she'd originally thought. This new Lacey was more eastern than western, this new Lacey Yukino at home, this new Lacey the modern human supposedly in touch with her primalities.
So it was that she spoke with Joseph, who smiled at each of her inquiries the sort of genuine smile that one might get from a child, someone who hasn't yet learned how to or why to lie. After each smile he would begin his response. Slowly spoken, the boy would work through his answers, letting them fall from his mouth at their own pace, as opposed to pushing them out. His Southern drawl only enhanced this effect, and by the end of his second answer Lacey thought this lad, whom she knew but hadn't yet had the pleasure of verbal correspondence, a perfect gentlemen.
"You liking the book?" was Lacey's natural first question. She'd taken their assigned novel from her pack and placed it before her on the table. Hers was a ratty copy, published years ago when it was still valued and purchased by her at a greatly reduced price from a second hand bookshop that couldn't possibly have turned a profit. But Joseph's copy, sitting before him in a similar fashion to hers, was pristine, its spine untarnished by late nights spent propped open on the chest of its slumbering reader, its cover art as dazzling as the day it was conceived, its pages pressed neatly together in their tight formation, having yet to face the enemy's musketry.
"It's not too bad," was Joseph's initial, elusive response. He fell into thought, bringing his hand to his mouth, rubbing his fingers on his chin. His stubble felt like velcro. It was a feeling he enjoyed. "Masuta is a bit full of himself," Joseph continued, judging the waters, studying Lacey's face to see how she reacted.
It was with something between a chuckle and a snort. Her face contorted into a sly smile.
"Just a bit…" was her answer. Then, "You like his prose?"
"I never had much of an eye for prose," Joseph said. "I can't really judge."
Lacey arched her head to see another few students stumbling in. They looked drunk. One of them was whispering to the other. He burst out laughing. The sound roused another student, an impossibly skinny girl in the corner, from her reading. It was another book for perhaps another class, something in Italian.
"Some of these people," whispered Joseph.
"I'm with you," said Lacey, who smiled again.
Was this our Lacey whose pointed nose crinkled as Joseph rolled his eyes jokingly at the pair? Was this our Lacey whose coquettish demeanor had inspired in Joseph the confidence to ask,
"So, we're having a party tonight, a semi-formal sorta thing… I'm gonna grab a bite to eat with some friends before it, and I think they all have dates. You… maybe wanna go with me?"
This question struck Lacey as patently absurd. It was the last question she'd thought Joseph, her classmate, the Southern boy who sat behind her, would ask. It sent her into a plummet.
Did she have for the frat's any ill will? Were they to blame that she'd gotten rejected by their sisters? Of course not, and yet she couldn't stop from making the connection. Surely this party would be populated with the same girls that had denied her entry into the social landscape, that had sent her wounded and routed back into her shell. Despite her Dreamer, despite her happiness, it was with difficulty that she reemerged, and it was with extreme restraint and perhaps some slight condescension towards their entire institution. Hadn't it been Greek doctors that had foolishly killed Byron? She wasn't entirely sure, but she decided it had been. Of course, we know this reason false, a diversion created by a delusional mind hard set against coming to terms with itself.
She recalled her father, his wide eyes reflecting the fuzzy images flashing before him, his greasy combover the only part of that mass visible from overtop his recliner. The images before him had worked him into a fuss, but he hadn't the stamina to go and do anything about it, and so he contented himself with yelling at the television. The fuzzy figures on the screen wore their rainbow garb and chanted their chants and marched past her outraged father without giving him a second glance. But Lacey, in another room in the house, was subject to every attack that slob lobbed at the screen. To those fuzzy figures Lacey could not connect. She felt nothing but, at best, a dull indifference, at worst a dull hate. How could they anger her father so?
As she aged she became aware of her father's shortcomings, but her attitude towards those fuzzy rainbow souls was not something she could easily change. Were they the last of the flower children? Or had they collapsed like everyone else? Where they just another long haired, big cig smoking, wrinkled dead dude struggling to fill a baggy tie-dye? Or where they something else?
As Lacey looked at Joseph images of the most vulgar sexual sort rushed through the streets of her mind with impunity. Looting and squealing and ever upping their intensity until they extended beyond possible. Every fiber of her being begged her to be excited, but her mind would not waver. And so she remained placid and dull while the silence lengthened and Joseph's smile turned to a dead expression of doubt.
She thought herself like General Mack, like Custer. Run around by a superior something until she was exhausted and done. She thought that maybe she'd make a final stand. Would she capitulate? Would she surrender like Mack or die like Custer?
"Sounds like fun," she said to Joseph, whose happiness surged back into his face.
Joseph was five minutes late to picking up Lacey, something he was very apologetic over. The darkness had already descended over the November landscape when the duo set out, Joseph in his semi-formal trousers and blazer, Lacey in her semi-formaler dress and flats. She'd done her hair up in what she thought was a classical fashion, meant to compliment her classical nose and light freckles. But of these things she wasn't sure. At any rate, she'd prepared, and Joseph, who'd rarely saw her without her hair tossed into a bandanna or ponytail, complimented her grandly, and thought himself a regular stud for finding such a fine accomplice at such late notice.
One has to admire Joseph, for the threat of rejection hangs always over the campaigning male. That he thought more of his friend's reactions to his pretty date than his date herself isn't something that should hinder our admiration of his courage, though one might argue it should hinder our respect.
The land had taken on a mythical quality and Lacey began feeling herself separated. She was a third party watching as the dolled up her and the beaming Joseph made their way under the orange streetlights towards some cheap, college town restaurant that relied entirely on their young clientele's undeveloped culinary taste.
"Again, you look very nice," said Joseph.
"Thanks," said Lacey, becoming tired with his praise of her facade. Trying to steer away his attention, she said, "Who are these friends of yours?"
"Oh, just a couple of guys from the frat," said Joseph.
Lacey's stomach turned at the term, but she restrained herself heroically. That she was attending a party with the Greeks was enough, but must he remind her off it at every turn?
By and by they came to restaurant row, that strange place that exists in all American towns, the little strip of nostalgic storefronts that advertise the best -or most popular- dining in town. Their row was rather restrained, through no less sure of itself, and it had turned its neon lights towards the street with something like a vengeance. The entire street, from the bar on the corner nearly overflowing with sweaty bodies, to the higher class seafood place on the opposite corner, filled with retired gentlemen and ladies eating supper far too late for their tastes, picking at their salmon and tilapia and sending vague looks of disapproval outwards at an interval of one or two bites per look. It wasn't late, but the students had already begun their paganistic Friday revelry in full, downing the cheapest piss they could come across in their eternal pursuit to "get slammed." To an outside observer the entire strange affair might seem as incomprehensible as the cultures on the Internet's best hidden image-boards, though to those present it made perfect sense. Of course it made sense! What was there to question? The institutions these children had leapt into with such a passion were sustained by Godly degree.
One wonders what might happen if, on one random day, the inebriating qualities of alcohol and other narcotics were transferred to the unassuming monkfish. Would these people that sped from pregame to pregame pile themselves into the first Japanese restaurant they could find and stuff the grilled fish into their mouths with the fervor of one lost in a desert having come across a fountain of Bacchus' own brew? Yes, they would.
Joseph seemed to know a number of those souls that wandered about the lowlight. Where exactly they were going, Lacey wasn't sure. She swore one of them had wandered in a perfect circle, perhaps the most perfect circle an imperfect humanity had ever created. She shivered as if given a moment's glance into Hades' foggy fields, and pulled her tiny jacket over her cleavage, wishing she'd forgone the dress entirely and stuffed herself into her sweatpants and pullover.
They finally arrived at the restaurant, a cheap construction staffed by busty waitresses and a single, cold eyed manager. The place was nearly as dark as the outside, and stuffed. It boasted too many televisions -all tuned to different channels- and couldn't decide if it wanted to be a bar or a grill. In its utter indecision it shrugged its shoulders and contented itself in being the bastard child of both, clearly the child of each parent but unacknowledged by either as their own or as the other's.
Joseph's friends had already arrived. They'd taken a table in the far back corner of the place, where they sat, beers undrunk and sweating before them. Someone had ordered a basket of french fries. They'd been smothered in cajun, but it seemed like nobody was eating them but the single boy, who, with regularity approaching a pulsar, would reach out and grab a single fry and stick it into his mouth.
There weren't enough chairs for the lot of them, so Lacey and Joseph had to struggle to find unused ones. Joseph found one first, took it, stuck it at the end of the table, and sat, falling into the conversation as if he'd been there for its conception. Lacey struggled for minutes more, pushing her way through the busty waitresses that deftly rushed through the crowd, pushing her way through the red-nosed students that stumbled towards the restrooms, pushing her way through the unassuming students who, as if in the privacy of their homes, stood in the middle of the restaurant and fiddled with their phones, completely unaware of just how absurd they looked and of just how inconvenient their assumed positions really were. Lacey's cheeks burned, she was sure her entire face had turned as red as the cajun, but still she fought onwards, stumbling through the crowd until finally she came across an abandoned chair. Pulling the chair through the crowd was the sort of task Sisyphus would find particularly hopeless, and through the entirety of it she wished terribly that she was somewhere else.
It was incomprehensible that these people made a habit of this nonsense. Stuffing themselves into a sweaty, third rate restaurant that smelled of cheap beer, undercooked burgers, and forgotten onion rings fermenting on abandoned tables. Stumbling, bright red and overdressed, our protagonist finally made it to the table to find she'd been all but forgotten.
"Hey Lacey," said Joseph, seeing her. "There you are."
There wasn't space for her chair near Joseph, so she was forced to set up camp at the opposite end of the table. The restaurant's roar drowned out whatever conversation Joseph's end was involved in. Lacey hesitantly struck up with those at her own, a dreadfully pale boy dressed in all black with his face in his phone and a larger, black girl dressed in creamy white. Her hair was cut short, and she had a scar running from her right temple to her right cheek. But her face was in that vague category we call "approachable," and she was smiling, so Lacey thought she'd start with her.
"Lacey," she said, holding out her hand.
"Zuri," said the girl, somehow making her smile even larger as she shook. The roar nearly ate up her answer.
"You said Zuri?"
"Yup," said Zuri. "And that lump is Amaury." She pointed to the pale boy. If he heard her, he made no indication.
"You with Joseph?" asked Zuri.
"What?" said Lacey, leaning closer.
"Are you with Joseph?"
"Oh yeah," said Lacey. She smelled liquor on Zuri's breath.
Zuri glanced across the table at Joseph. Even at that relatively short distance the darkness seemed to swallow him up. He was moving his mouth, but neither Zuri nor Lacey could make out what he said. He threw his head back and laughed.
"So, what do you do?" asked Zuri.
"Huh?"
"What do you do? You know, what do you like to do?"
"Oh…"
Lacey had grown up in a world overwhelmed by insincerity; drowned in it. Looking at Zuri with her kind face, her short hair, her scar, her smile, Lacey had no idea if she really cared.
The televisions, forever adding their own noise to the roar, had begun talking about drunk driving. Pictures of somber Maz and goofy JaMarius flashed on the screen. But JaMarius wasn't goofy. JaMarius had never been goofy. JaMarius was fractured and now he was dead.
"I write," Lacey said.
"Yeah, like what?"
"Novels, mostly."
The boy who ate the fries remained center table, staring straight ahead, picking forever at the seemingly infinite basket of cajun covered fries. This was his singular function, and it was one he carried out with the utmost devotion. One by one by one they went into his mouth. A girl said something and Joseph nearly burst into a frenzy. Sputtering out laughs in gasps, his eyes dripping tears.
Another couple had entered the restaurant, some girl and some guy. The guy wore an eyepatch. His arm was around the girl. She wore long sleeves and was smiling.
A waitress knocked into someone on his phone and went tumbling over. Three or four plates smashed down around them, but the phone didn't notice. Some younger men, tatted up, their hair cut short, got up to help the waitress. They'd been watching the television.
"Yo, Amaury, what's up faggot?"
Amaury looked up from his screen. His expression changed to surprise and then happiness, but removed from his screen's glow it appeared to darken.
"Hey, Odi, what's up, man? And Tele M, how you losers doing?"
Tele M was sighing, trying to appear unaffiliated with Odi. The girl with the smile had taken a recently abandoned booth near the front. The guy had gone to the restroom. She was looking at her phone.
"You going to the party?" asked Odi.
"Yeah man, I'll be there," said Amaury. "Better than this place."
Lacey was struck by the horrible revelation that none of these people were real.
It had been raining in Washington earlier that day when the nearly unanimous decision was made to nationalize America's fisheries. This decision, so long in the making, came to fruition sandwiched between a decision on whether or not to take Florida from the Spanish -halfway through the debate it was realized we already had and the discussion changed to whether or not we should give it back- and a bill regarding a digital gambling epidemic.
Chesterfield, who'd yet to hear the news, sat in a hotel room overlooking 13th Street. She'd arrived that morning with ten of her initial one hundred.
The Washingtonians had mustered in force despite the rain. They ran about the street far below her, their umbrellas barely shielding them from the downpour. The deluge covered the cracked streets and sidewalks, sending the people slipping and the cars sliding. Chesterfield thought them like an army of tiny water-lilies amidst a flooded world. Having spread themselves to the will of the pouring sky; each drowning in his own way.
As the prescriptivist, forever enamored with his dead Latin, will say, the modern age brought with it the rape of many a dictionary. Lacey, a proper linguist and devout descriptivist, thought their complaints absurd, though she couldn't help but take offense when Joseph and his party decided to sally from their "dinner." Lacey's usual issue with the term was that she prefered for the role "supper," -she thought it more homely- and wished that dinner had never replaced supper, lunch replaced dinner, and snack replaced lunch. However, a good little descriptivist as she was, she'd long ago abandoned this crusade. No, her complaint stemmed from the fact that dinner, as far as she knew, required food, and she hadn't had so much as a bite. None of them had, save for that mechanical lad who'd eaten the entire basket of french fries and drunk several glasses of cheap beer and was now lurching about the street.
Joseph looked at Lacey through the darkness.
"You wanna go the party?" he asked.
She shivered. A group of boys stampeded down the sidewalk. Their yells made their way to Lacey and her group, but she couldn't make out what they said.
Some of those who'd been inside the restaurant, specifically the one they called Odi, came rushing out. He seemed to nearly leap. It was as if the building had spat him out. He wasn't wearing a shirt. He ran down the street with his friend, Tele M, sober and annoyed, hot on his heels.
"We can go if you want," said Lacey. She wondered what Brooke was doing. Would she be in the dorm room? What if Lacey just started running? What if she just turned and sprinted into the darkness and never stopped? What if she ran all the way to her gazebo and let its loneliness swallow her until she and it and her shadowy Dreamer had become everything and nothing.
The pleasures of the body are oh so overrated. Why not embalm yourself alive? Why not light yourself on fire? Why not drink the hemlock. A few steps about the room and the coldness would take your heart and then you'd die a good death and wouldn't have to live anymore a bad life.
Had her Dreamer done these things?
"Unless… you want to do something else?" prompted Joseph.
Lacey looked at him with an expression of exasperation that shook him to his core.
"Let's just go to the party," she said, feeling like a bitch and hating it.
The party was a blare and a blur. Joseph pumped Lacey full of drinks but the drunker she got the more obstinate to his desires she came. Through the first three drinks he had disgusted her, but around the fifth or sixth he exhausted her.
At some point the beers stopped coming and then so did Joseph. Where had that pleasant faced lad with the slow Southern drawl and the wide smile gone? Had he existed to begin with?
The volume of the party was overwhelming. The bodies stuffed too tight. Lacey's mind conjured a hazy image of her and another girl pressed together in her bed, shored against the world under her covers, their bodies close in a way that allowed them to feel each other's heartbeats, feel each other's breaths. She whispered to Lacey throughout the night. Her voice escaped from between the cracks in her teeth. It surrounded Lacey like the smoke from a post-coital cigarette puffed by the black and white faces in those films nobody watched. But this wasn't like that and that girl wasn't real.
Through the cramped but infinite space of the party Lacey wandered for what seemed like hours, from representation to representation, taking all manner of whatever she found until she'd fried her brain, until she'd burned herself out of her own mind. With even her own mind under foreign control the being we call Lacey floated about nebulosity, her soul too exhausted to cry, her essence barely alive enough to die.
What, I wonder, is the current state of the city? One recalls, in Conrad's day, it being a place of mud, rain, and soot. Then it grew louder. Thundering machines, beating forever their war-drums, sounding off in perfect time, all the time. Then it got bright, dominating the sprawling suburbia that clung to its breast in both sight and sound, raging furiously like a flickering lamp, destroying for miles around any view of the stars. And it is roughly here that it resides. But where will it go next?
JaMarius and Maz, before they'd ran into a tree, had lived in one of those great suburban forests just outside one of the many great beacons of the West. They'd both been born in small towns and, when their parents decided to move inwards, trudged, quite unwillingly, from the hazy periphery and into the blinding center. If there was one truth for this unlikely duo it was this: the death of the suburbia that swallowed up the flower children could not come quickly enough.
JaMarius' den, as he called it, was a grey, unfinished basement where he and Maz could drink in peace. The sort of basement his caricature of a father claimed he would finish but never did. In between barbeques and off-hand sports talk that old man would glance at the basement's porch and remark that one day he was gonna "fix that bitch up." JaMarius would have fought him about it if the boy thought his father's promises anything to trust.
The place suited Maz even more than JaMarius. Two ratty couches, stained with ketchup, mustard, and God knows what else sat before a tiny television, the curved type with two antennae jutting from its top. It didn't work, but JaMarius thought it hilarious that the "boob-tube" served as the support for his computer monitor. The monitor was attached to a box some feet away and in the dusty, dull blue light JaMarius and Maz spent endless hours, each boy draped on their respective couch like forgotten overcoats, JaMarius with a two dollar mouse and a ten dollar keyboard lying on his chest. Bowls of dusty snacks usually accompanied these long sessions and, as they often spilled and nobody ever cleaned the room, the floor was by and by covered in all manner of greasy fat. Chips, Cheetos, and everything else stomped into the brown carpet like tiny people lost in a great forest.
The only other resident of this forgotten crevice was a rat they called Urban, after their favorite pope, the only one that, as they put it, "gave the Arabs what they deserved." They'd semi-affectionately named that group of people the "scimitar sluts" and saw to it, whenever a grand strategy game beamed at them from their monitor, that Jerusalem was retaken for the true faith, the Turks driven back onto their own continent, and the Nile secured. Their understanding of history was hazy, but through these activities and others they'd pass hours.
One late night -they thought it was night, time did not exist in that space- the pair was watching some network hackery on JaMarius' sorta legal cable setup when on the screen began flashing commercials.
"I'm gonna take a piss, you need anything?" asked JaMarius, rousing himself from the couch like a great, slumbering giant rising from beneath a hill that'd formed overtop him.
"A drink, I guess," said Maz, his mind somewhere distant.
"Preference?" said JaMarius as he headed for the downstairs bathroom, a barebones affair just decent enough to have a door.
Maz waved away the question, indicating that anything from the beer-fridge would suffice. JaMarius shrugged as he disappeared beyond the reach of the monitor's dull blue light.
A girl was dancing on the monitor. Some tramp from another time. She didn't exist.
"Save up to 75% on our sexiest BRAS, PANTIES, and INTIMATES! You won't want to miss our BIGGEST sale of the year! Both our classic and seasonal lines are on sale now ; there's something here for everyone and every time!"
Maz's world collapsed into itself. What had been long rising had finally converged, the gyre unwound, the real transformed into the mythical. With his face frozen in a single expression he turned slowly until the monitor was out of his periphery and came to dominate his vision. The tramp was gone. She didn't matter. She'd been replaced with a sobbing woman, her hair cut haphazardly, staring at the meaningless, beautiful, burning dots that dominated the sky above her.
This couldn't be right. Something had gone terribly wrong. The fiction broke and Maz stared beyond the page and for a brief moment his epiphany extended beyond even the facades that existed in the world supposedly beyond him.
How many late nights had it taken to birth this obvious truth? The greasy grind and his thousand hackneyed phrases expressing what? Guilt, remorse, longing? For what? For whom? Was there a crying girl for whom this sad lad was willing to die? Was there a country for whom he was willing to kill? Or was there never more than a blank page? Sitting with eyes red in the still hours of however many cold mornings. Shapeless. Black. Each day, as the night-owl knows, is different. But each night is fundamentally the same. He was destroying himself. And for what? Why? The juices leaked from Maz's head until he was hollow and dry.
JaMarius, returning, tossed this vainglorious being a beer, but Maz rejected it, going only as far as to catch it, open it, take a sip, and set it on the carpet, where it would remain unmolested until a wayward foot painted the carpet with its innards.
A confused couch-stain thought he could do it alone! The audacity! It would have been an action deserving of a medal, if it hadn't been so stupid.
The network was playing a late-night drama, the kind of cult classic you either loved or ignored. It was about a pregnant woman struggling to find meaning within herself.
Maz's eyes were wet but JaMarius wasn't impressed. He didn't sympathize with the Cause.
"Is this all women can write about?" he quipped once the drama had ended and the director's name appeared sheepishly on the screen. "You know what I mean?"
He took the final sip from his beer, burped, and looked expectantly to Maz.
"You know what I mean?" he asked again. "Why are they always whining about being pregnant?"
"Why are blacks always whining about getting shot?" spat Maz, the ferocity of his rebuttal surprising even him.
The mellow credit music was the only sound in the basement. Maz's eyes burned wet and red. JaMarius, angry but unsure of what to do, focused his attention on the credits, watching as they marched past so unassumingly. As if they thought they didn't have the right to follow their own creation.
"I'm sorry," Maz said.
"It's fine," said JaMarius.
"Really," said Maz, sensing his friend hadn't meant it. "I'm sorry."
"It's fine," said JaMarius, and then, "I'm sorry, too."
The silence, save for the music, resumed, but this was a comfortable one. The impact of both remarks faded until things were as they had been.
Some other drama came on. By and by Maz, for reasons unknown even to him, ventured to ask, "JaMarius?"
"Yeah?"
"Are we bohemians?"
"What?" said JaMarius, looking around the room, at the monitor, then back at Maz. "No, course not. We typical."
In her post-euphoric, acid-soaked haze Lacey wandered the upper hall of the house. She pushed away from the now meagre crowd and came to stand before a cracked door on the dusky hall's forgotten end.
Inside, barely illuminated by the bitter glow of a flickering lamp were three prototypical lads, the vanguard of a dying species, the old guard, the good old boys… or what remained. Their flesh fitted neatly into their graphic tees. Their disproportionate calves hung lazily off the beds on which they sat. Their day old shaves needing renewing, and Lacy thought she should dismiss them entirely, and would have, had it not been for a single phrase uttered by the blonde one.
"…gazebo," he'd said. Lacey looked behind her. The hall descended slowly into the darkness as it progressed. The yellow light above her was the only source of illumination. It seemed like a streetlamp, part of and no protection against a vast urbanity that had spread, without her knowledge or consent, across the whole of creation. Despite the forever-blaring lights of the modern metropolis it is fundamentally a place of darkness or, at the very least, a place of false light, a neon sign advertising a cheap motel, attracting forgotten souls and cheap cars more duct tape than metal.
Having confirmed that nobody was there to see her doing so, she crept to the crack and tactically positioned an open ear.
"She thinks it's a girl," the blonde boy was saying, his comrades squealing with delight at the statement.
"That's fucking crazy, dude. How long have you been doing this?"
Inching closer, Lacey stuck her eye to the crack. Her soul shrieked as she noticed the blonde one was holding several envelopes, each touched with a kiss.
"For, like, weeks now. I was with Christine and we saw this letter stuck under the bench -he held up Lacey's first letter- and we're like, we have to do this. You know? Like, we have a moral obligation to do this. It's too fucking funny not to…"
Lacey could listen no longer. She saw it all. The poor soul that had left the original letter. Who knows what had happened to him? Her falling for a distant hope. This blonde boy and his Christine finding her letter and, in a brutal flash of inspiration, deciding to make her their latest conquest. She'd been penetrated utterly. Vlad himself, ever threatened by the Turks, couldn't have done worse. She hung limp and lifeless. If this is what was beyond the curtain, were all of her revelations for naught?
The beasts laughed their garish laughs, but in the dark and drugged haze she could only hear a distant roar.
She was in another time. The sound of a fortress soaring overhead. A single plane. The Americans sent them daily. Scouting. It was understandable, of course, now that they had air superiority. Why shouldn't they see to their new cities?
In a moment the hall was alight. A single bomb cracked the world's teeth on a sidewalk, grabbed its bloody head, tore apart its eyelids, and demanded it watch. Lacey couldn't escape the light, it covered the hallway completely. She tried to turn away, to close her eyes, but the flash was all encompassing. A moment in time etched forever in the collective conscious of everyone and everything. The ultimate culmination. The great reversal. The great betrayal. Science reaching into the void and pulling out its id, snarling and biting. Atomic ash rained around her.
She would have cried, but the light had long ago melted her eyes. Pushing deeper, it scorched her brain.
Too much for this poor girl. Too much for anyone.
She left the house and looked to the vast, empty sky. Her cheeks burned and at that moment she knew the good old boys died along with Joltin' Joe, the radio star, the flower children, the left, the psychedelic queens, and all the rest. Lying in a shapeless desert, one arm outstretched, rotting as the Sun smiled, its mouth a tangle of yellow teeth.