Fifteen. Then
Classes ended in the fragrance of autumn and all the exams passed. The only piece I really cared about was an essay for my Vietnam class.
“How are you, GI Joe?” Vietnam disc jockey Hanoi Hannah asked. “It seems to me that most of you are poorly informed about the going of the war. Nothing is more confusing than to be maimed for life without the faintest idea of what's going on.”
I moved back into the Railway Campus on Memorial Day, but I don’t think anyone who was staying there remembered. I stepped curiously through the wooden and majestic marble lobby that had so impressed me on my arrival.
What I didn’t expect was for the dorm to feel so different. It was all now so foreign and distant, much farther packed away in the expanses of my mind than the short few months since I had left. There were no more cheerful hellos. You had chosen your friends. I hadn’t been around like I promised.
The skyline was covered in a thick haze of smog, the spire a shapeless purple form in the distance. It made everyone on the road look as if they were stumbling out of a dream. Sleeting rain poured over the city in billowing sheets. All the while the words of the Tokyo Rose drifted through my head. It hurt to think it had all been said in 1967.
I headed over to Flat 56. That night there was a party. Of course. In the back there was a flash of black. Morgan’s six foot frame was rocking.
“Stupid bitch,” he moaned, holding his head. His bottle was nearly empty.
Adam appeared, all stiff and no neck, his trenchcoat swirling around him. “No one’s seen Jack,” he said before I could ask.
A stripper with a meth habit and gashes in her face was running round shoving pop top cans of bourbon and coke into all available hands. “It’s my birthday!” she cried, wobbling on pin legs. “Everyone is drinking! Everyone is coming to see me dance!”
Adam seemed nervous, as if he were about to do something terrible. His face ticked with a nervous twitch that turned his lip up every second time he talked.
“You must do something other than read stories,” he insisted.
“I read philosophy too,” I said.
“Philosophy is useless. What is its purpose? It can always be argued back and forth. There’s no end. You have a problem and a philosopher waxes about it for centuries.” I thought about Descartes. He had a point.
“Now technology – that is effective. I like engineering because it’s about solutions. Problems are set, designed and solved.”
“It’s aspirational,” I explained. “Take Plato’s Republic.” I outlined the basic premise.
He shook his head. “To solve real problems you need engineering – and something I like to call the Smash-Test Principle. Things need to get blown up in order to work later. If everything is going sweet, none of the hidden flaws and vulnerabilities get exposed.”
Ben held up a sack filled with white pills. “Why don’t you stay awhile?”
“What’s that?” I blinked at the bag.
“I ordered them from China. They only cost cents.”
“What’s in them?” He had to have hundreds.
“How am I supposed to know? I’m not a chemist.”
“Haven’t your heard? They're banning the pills from stores.” Adam sighed. It's the end of an era. Then his lips slid into a smile. “I’m going to make millions!”
“I thought you hated pills.”
“I distribute them.” Adam drew a box, as if the word was suspended in mid-air. “I certainly don’t take any.”
“You know, I’ve been thinking about money,” Adam said as a lightning bolt blazed across the sky. “We’re socially indoctrinated to think that it’s the product of hard work, but it’s not. Money isn’t about hard work. It’s all about getting around the system. It’s about opportunity. Fuck, it’s about exploitation. My old man slaved away, he vowed, but I won’t. I’m getting my own.”
“No philosopher is going to save the world,” Adam insisted. “Liberal arts degrees are nothing but a bunch of people arguing in armchairs,” he scoffed. “It doesn’t affect the world. What does an art degree do? How can a book make the world better?”
The thought that he didn’t know appalled me. “You’ll know when you read the right one.”
“You know what the world is about? Survival of the fittest. You take what you can. I learned something about how money works. For every dollar of printed money there are thousands in circulation. The only reason the whole thing hasn’t fallen apart is because no one has noticed!” He shook his head. “I’ve got to set up my own island nation,” Adam said slowly, his eyes and lips parting moist, “so I’m safe when everything collapses.”
“You can’t sell that,” I said to Adam.
“Why not? I’m innocent until proven guilty.” He considered this for a moment. “And if I’m proven guilty, then I’ll lie.”
“But it makes people forget.”
“What’s there to remember? The island is almost destroyed. Kids are running each over in cars. Babies are dying at the hands of their parents. The dolphins are dying too,” he sneered. “What’s left of them, that is.”
“Hey Adam,” Morgan said nervously. “Say less, get away with –“
“Oh, that’s right,” Adam interrupted. “We’re not supposed to talk about it. Right? We’re not supposed to talk about the killings. We’re not supposed to talk about the guns and all the kids who walk into the sea.”
“There you are!” Nick said, flipping open a mirror once he saw me. “Where have you been? You missed EVERYTHING.”
“But it’s only Friday!” Morgan pointed out. “We still have tomorrow.”
There was that word again. Tomorrow. But what did it matter? Another day passes. A weekend, a weekday, God knows how many have been – it’s really just another day, isn’t it.
Adam glared at the tower. “Look at it. They used to light it up at night. The city can’t even afford to light one tower anymore.” He let out a short laugh. “It’s a sign of everything.”
Figures half hung out the windows and lingered in the shadows. Voices swirled around, hurried past with streams of feathers and gloves.
“My pill isn’t working,” one of them said, desperate.
“Just take more. How many more do you want?”
“Three!” The boy called out from across the room. Ben tossed him the bag.
“I wouldn’t take that many,” Adam warned.
“Are you studying pharmacology in university?” The boy glared up underneath a furrowed brow. “Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.” Then he grinned. “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” And down it went.
As the pills came up through the overmind eyes rolled into the backs of heads. Tongues poked out from teeth, chests rose and sighed.
“Let’s face it.” Adam’s eyes dropped low. “The world as we know it is coming to an end. I’m talking about the superorganism – how the human race as a species moves. We are nothing but a virus.”
One girl sank onto the floor, tears streaking down her face. “It’s so pretty,” she over and over repeated.
“Your country may be bigger, but no one can escape it. The earth is shaking. The oceans are toxic.”
Ben was turning a unique shade of green. He stumbled back and slowly lowered his gangly limb one by one over a bed. “I feel… really nauseous. I feel like I’ve been poisoned.”
Nick clutched my wrist. “Now that you’re here, everything feels right again.” His eyes closed and his body shuddered. The ride was coming up, strong and hard. ‘It’s all coming back, it’s all coming back, I can feel it.” He smiled up at me in a pleasant haze, his body trembling in a warm rush. I had the sad feeling I would never see him again.
“Why do you have to leave?”
“I must return before the fall,” I explained.
Nick frowned. “You mean autumn?”
“I want to be in New York!” The girl next to h
im insisted. “Everything’s happening there.”
“I hate it here.” Adam stood at the balcony, hands gripped. He glared at the volcano in the harbor. “Nothing good will ever come this place. We’re not special. We’re just BEHIND. Same old everything. No intellectuals – just man against the elements. And the elements are winning. Where does that leave us? We could get blown to bits and no one would even notice.”
“I can’t remember your name.” Someone said to their friend.
“I can’t remember your name either.” I reminded them.
“At least in America you count for something,” Adam insisted. “America may be an enemy of the world, but at least it is a player. We are nothing.”
“Help.” Ben was alert again. He stood stone cold in the center of Flat 56.
Adam swiveled his head back to Ben “What do you want?”
Ben’s eyes didn’t move.
Adam reached for his arm. “Do you want some water?”
Ben shook his head.
Morgan reached for him. “He just needs human contact.”
Ben stepped back. “NO.”
“What do you want then?”
Ben’s hands began fluttering in front of his chest. “Four, seven, one one one for the rig, rig, rig-rig-rig-rig…”
“Oh my God.” Adam sucked in his breath. “He flipped.”
His fingers crawled in air and snapped back at his chest as if ribbons were tied to his wrists. His head jerked and seized this way and that. "Hi. Hi. Hi."
Oh, to be a Savant! The supreme Savant! Let him die in his leaping through unheard-of and unnamable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin on the horizons where the other collapsed!
“He needs air,” Morgan decided. “Take him for a walk, Adam.”
“He can’t go outside just looking like that.” Chewing at nothing, jaw slack.
Someone found sunglasses and a baseball hat.
Morgan put them on lopsided, then stood back. “I think he could pass for retarded, eh?" Morgan grinned, then frowned, looking at his work.
"I think he'll get arrested, man. I don't know if it's a good idea.”
"No, he could totally pass for retarded." Someone else offered up. "’Hey, this is my retarded cousin. He goes with me everywhere.’ What's the worst that could happen?"
"He could get arrested and put under observation for seven days."
"Okay, maybe he's not fit for a walk then." Morgan said, disappointedly, taking the sunglasses off. We sat Ben back down. An unfamiliar ringtone sang out across the room. Adam picked it up. “It’s his parents.” We looked at each other. “Let’s not answer that.”
"Alcohol. It’ll knock him right out." Morgan sprinted to the kitchen.
Nick started to moved towards the balcony, but quickly retreated his steps. “The photo wall!” He grabbed my arm. “Come see photos of all the parties we’ve thrown.”
"Here you go, Ben, drink this… Drink this… Good boy! Damn, man, you just downed four double shots! Well done, mate!"
Five minutes later vomit trickled down his face.
“It was worth it.” Ben mumbled.
Adam burst out laughing. "Oh, you think so? Well, I'm glad you're having a good time in there, wherever you are."
Someone escorted Ben out the door.
“Jesus. That set me back.” Adam collapsed, exhausted. "I could really use some methylone right now.”
I found myself with Nick in front of the world’s biggest collage. It stretched across three brown boards. Photos stacked on top of one another with coloured pushpins and the occasional noise control notice. Nick blew smoke rings around his favorite shots, most of which consisted of him in fabulous outfits. There were lingerie shots, rock star poses, cartoon parties, pirate parties, burlesque shows. “And here’s Sanj, and Karl…” and a million other people I didn’t know… “and here’s Jack’s son…” Then Nick stopped abrupt.
I turned my head to face him slow. “Jack has a son?” I looked back at the photo. He must have been at least eight. I couldn’t imagine Jack having a son, let alone a fully grown child.
“Don’t tell him I told you,” Nick begged. “He may not want you to know.”
I crossed my arms. “Why?” Nick merely shrugged. “Huh. Isn’t that guy just full of surprises.”
“You don’t even know the half of it.” Then Nick laughed. “But then again, neither do I. That’s what makes him such a fun guy.”
I wondered what it would be like to have a father like Jack. Maybe his son would grow up to be a businessman, the most conservative person on the block, always running from his past just like his old man.
“He’ll be one of these kids that lashes out and kills their parents,” Adam insisted. “We are betting on it. Seriously. We have a pool going – ‘At which age is this kid going to lash out and kill Jack?’” We have another pool going too – ‘At which age is he going to be institutionalized.” I turned to the door, tears streaming from my eyes.
The girl at the door gasped. “Don’t be sad, angel.”
“I’m no one’s angel,” I bitterly said.
back
part three
the fall