“And you?”
“You really don’t remember?”
When you’ve known someone as long as I’ve known Alan, you can spot a lot of punch in few words.
“I’m sorry, Alan. I don’t.”
He nods, but I know disappointment when I see it. “Marvel has offices in LA,” he says. “There’s an internship I want, but I have to be eighteen and a student at an accredited university. Figured UCLA was the perfect scenario. It puts me out there, plus Val is going. Just made sense.”
I climb out of his bed, sit on the floor in front of the TV; Alan follows suit.
“Noah.”
“I’m going to say some things now. And they’re going to sound weird, but I really need you to listen,” and Alan says, “Okay,” and I dive in. I start with the Longmire party, my conversation with Circuit, and the ensuing trek to his house where he may or may not have hypnotized me, and how everything went to shit from there: his neighbor’s bizarre story about finding God in a cave, the shape-shifting dog, the recurring dream, Mom’s scar, the Friends-to-Seinfeld thing, Val’s social-media switchover, and eventually I get to Alan’s own shift in allegiance from DC to Marvel.
He doesn’t say anything at first, which I appreciate. No platitudes, no false comforts, just the two of us sitting on the floor of his bedroom surrounded by Marvel, listening to Agent Smith explain the history of the Matrix to a bound-up Morpheus.
“Too bad they butchered two and three,” says Alan.
“What?”
He points to the TV. “Reloaded and Revolutions. Talk about anticlimactic.”
“Yeah.”
“Trinity’s fucking badass, though.”
“Yeah.”
“Have you told Val?”
“No.”
Alan runs both hands across his face, sort of gives his whole head a shake. I’ve seen this move before, usually when we’re doing homework together and he’s trying to figure out how an airplane traveling from point A to point B in eight hours can travel from B to A in seven.
“Okay,” he says. “My thirteenth birthday.”
“What about it?”
“Let’s figure this shit out. Where were we on my thirteenth birthday?”
Every year since I moved to Iverton, Alan and I have spent our birthdays together. I go through a revolving door of themed parties and trips to the zoo and trips to . . . “The Discount.”
“And what movie did we see?” asks Alan.
That night was etched in my brain because Alan literally walked into the theater in a Batman costume. He’d wanted me to go as Robin, but I didn’t because I was worried we’d see someone we knew. I remember getting there and regretting how much I cared what other people thought.
“Dark Knight Rises.”
Alan’s eyes change, but I can’t tell if he’s surprised or what. “Okay, follow-up. After the movie, we walked outside and you said . . . what?”
That day was the beginning of our Joker Debate Camp, and who we believed was the better Joker. “I said I liked the movie, but it wasn’t my favorite, because I liked the Joker. You said something about Heath Ledger’s performance, I said, Yeah, but I meant Jack Nicholson, at which point we started, you know . . . that argument.”
“Noah.”
“What.”
“The only Batman I’ve seen is the one with George Clooney. Put me off all the others, actually.”
In the silence between us, Neo and Trinity are in the middle of rescuing Morpheus from the clutches of Agent Smith.
I look right at Alan, and I’m almost afraid to ask. “Your thirteenth birthday. Where were we?”
“We went to the theater, but . . .”
“What?”
“It was for The Amazing Spider-Man. My second time seeing it, your first.”
“And after we walked out of the theater, what did I say?”
“Some bullshit about Garfield’s Spidey being superior to Tobey Maguire’s.”
“Alan.”
“What.”
“The only Spider-Man I’ve seen was animated.”
It’s quiet for a second, and then a thought occurs to me. “The scar on my mom’s face. Do you know where it came from? Or how she got it?”
“No,” says Alan. “She’s had it for years. I just figured . . . I don’t know, like an accident in her youth or something.”
Neo and Agent Smith and Trinity and tons of topflight sequences I normally love but currently don’t give two shits about.
“This is weird,” says Alan.
“Weird is a word, I guess.”
“Look. Okay. Okay, look. Everything’s going to be okay.”
“Yeah? Do you possess magical powers of which I’m unaware, something to rearrange the order of the universe so everything makes sense?”
“Let’s try looking at this a different way.”
“Which way is that?”
“Instead of focusing on what’s changed,” says Alan, “let’s look at what hasn’t, and figure out why.”
“Okay.”
“So what’s the same?”
“Nothing.”
“Noah.”
“Actually—okay, yeah. My sister.” And so far, it’s true. Since the party, she’s literally the only person in my life who is exactly the same.
“Okay, good.”
“Steady as ever,” I say. “Obsessed with Audrey Hepburn, talks like a middle-aged socialite, dresses like a cracked-out American Girl doll.”
“Okay, what else?”
I try to think, but all I can see is the room in my dreams: the person in the corner, the colors, the letters coming out of the walls . . .
“My Strange Fascinations,” I say.
“Your what?”
“You mentioned that video where the lady ages in slow motion.”
“What about it?” asks Alan.
“So I have these . . . mild . . . obsessions, I guess. Like, a list of things I can’t explain but can’t stop thinking about. There are four of them, and that video is one.”
“What are the other three?”
“There’s this photograph of a guy. I found it on the floor at school.”
“Oh, cool, you have one of those too?”
“But for real. Remember last year when Pontius Pilot performed after our magazine fundraiser?”
“The Magazine Mega Gala.”
“Right. And then after, Parish came and spoke to our—”
“Who?”
“Philip Parish. Pontius Pilot’s real name.”
Alan chuckles. “I forgot that was his name.”
“Right, but you remember him speaking to our class?”
“Yeah,” says Alan, but he can’t stop giggling. “I don’t know why it’s so funny. I just don’t see him as a Philip.”
“What can I do to help get you past this?”
He shakes his head, takes a breath. “Continue.”
“So anyway, he’s in our classroom, talking about his writing process, when he kind of freaks out a little.”
“I remember this. He walked out of class right in the middle of his thing.”
“Right. But not before dropping a photo out of his notebook, which I picked up on my way out.”
“What’s the photo?”
“It’s just this guy—sort of smiling, maybe? But on the back there’s this inscription that says, The sun is too bright. Love, A.”
“Who’s A?”
“No idea. But that’s my second Strange Fascination. Then there’s Old Man Goiter, this old man with—”
“Let me guess.”
“Right. But he walks the same stretch of road every day, and there’s just something about him, like in a previous life we were friends or something. Or no, you know what it’s like? I
t’s like a time-travel movie, where you see a person who feels familiar, and then at the end of the movie you find out you are that person.”
“You do like to walk.”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“So what’s the fourth one?” asks Alan.
“Okay, so you’ve read Mila Henry—”
“I mean, not like you, but like a normal person.”
“But you know her trademark sketches, right? At the top of each chapter?”
“I love those.”
I nod. “So this one sketch in Year of Me, Chapter Seventeen, is different from the others.”
“In what way?”
“I don’t know, it’s, like, a different style or something. But how it differs really isn’t the point. The point is, why? Just that one out of all those sketches? Seems like it must mean something. Anyway, that’s it. Those are my Strange Fascinations.”
“That phrase sounds familiar.”
“It’s Bowie,” I say. “A lyric in ‘Changes.’ Also the name of his biography.”
“Well, if I’m in your shoes, I go that way.”
“What do you mean?”
Alan watches The Matrix while he talks. “It’s like variables and constants, right? You’ve got a million things changing, and you can’t chase them all. But you just listed five things that haven’t changed.”
“Four.”
“Plus your sister. If I’m you, I investigate that shit if for no other reason than because it’s doable.”
Every once in a while Alan offers these little nuggets of wisdom, which inevitably leads me to think: Perhaps I don’t give him enough credit. Perhaps Alan is more of a subtle sage, a man whose acumen only masquerades as nonsense and is not itself nonsensical.
“You think Neo and Agent Smith ever get it on?” he asks.
Then again, perhaps not.
I say, “I don’t see Agent Smith having much of a sexual appetite. Not sure how he’d have time, what with practicing his enunciation.”
“Bet he gets plenty of action as Elrond, Lord of Rivendell.”
“Your brain is literally in your balls, isn’t it?”
“I guess some of us can’t acknowledge something as being hot without wanting to have sex with it,” says Alan.
“Elrond is an elf, you know.”
“Correction. He’s a lord elf. Plus, the ears.”
We watch the movie in silence for a second; Trinity kisses Neo, which, naturally, brings him back to life. Been a while since I’ve seen the movie. Sort of forgot he died.
Alan reaches over to his nightstand, opens the drawer, and pulls out a sketch pad and pencil.
“What are you drawing?”
“You’ll see,” he says.
Alan’s sketches put mine to shame, but then I’m not really an artist so much as a diagram enthusiast. He works fast, and a couple of minutes later, he hands over the sketch pad. At first glance I think it must be some superhero from a comic I haven’t heard of—the character is muscly in that prototypical caped-crusader way—but he’s dressed like me, full-on Navy Bowie, and he has my hair and eyes. In big block letters across the top of the page, it reads HYPNOTIK.
“All these characters have kick-ass names,” says Alan, pointing to the TV. “Neo, Trinity, Morpheus, Tank. They’re not superheroes, exactly, but they have heightened awareness, special abilities, and whatnot.”
I stare at his sketch and try to think of something to say, but all I can come up with is, “It’s good. You misspelled hypnotic.”
Alan smiles. “Like Philip said, purposeful misspellings help your brand.”
I hand the sketch pad back, all, “It’s really good,” while avoiding eye contact by pretending to watch the movie.
“Noah.”
“What do you want me to say, Alan. I appreciate your trying to help.” I leave it at that, and because I do appreciate him, I don’t say the rest of what I’m thinking: I don’t need a brand. I don’t have heightened awareness, and I don’t have special abilities.
“Hey,” he says, and as so often happens, I could swear he’s reading my mind. “Most people feel stuck in the world, Noah. You’re the only one I know who came unstuck.”
In On the Road, near the end of the chapter where Dean and Carlo sit on a bed and talk through the night, the narrator, a guy named Sal, tells them to “stop the machine.” I can’t be sure what Kerouac meant by that, if maybe Sal just wanted his friends to shut up already and go to sleep. But it sure reminded me of exiting the robot. Either way, I couldn’t help thinking Dean and Carlo were lucky to have a friend like that.
35 → that sadness feels heavier suspended in midair
All the mighty colors of creation now, my dream: the luminous prism. It’s like the room is a petri dish, and the colors are bacteria, and I hang there helplessly watching them join and multiply, join and multiply, breeding as greedily as their colors are bright. And then come the letters, and Abraham with his silent barking by the bed, and the person in the corner who is soaked to the bone, whose face I will never know, and the letters take shape, the unconscious and conscious in harmony, a total cluster of oblivion.
Come into the light, She said.
And for a fraction of a second I do. I open my eyes, see a room, a blurry figure—and it’s over.
* * *
I wake up in a cold sweat, the first inkling of a morning sun through my window.
Every night for over two weeks, the same dream, the same sweat. You’d think I’d be used to it by now, but each time feels newer than the one before, as if the dream is rendered in reverse, its resolution sharper and more radiant with each passing night.
A list. That’s what I need.
Something about making lists, ranking things from start to finish in alphabetical order, chronological order, auto-biographical, topical, logical order is, for me, as endorphin-producing as a good run for most people, borderline orgasmic, which I know how that sounds, but look: I like lists, and I don’t care what anyone thinks about it.
I roll out of bed, sit at my desk in boxer briefs only, open my computer, and go.
WTF HAPPENED.
An Elegant List of Theories, by Noah Oakman
My brain is broken. (Simultaneously explains everything and nothing at all.)
My life is reality TV, and I am its unsuspecting star.
I’ve never existed as anything other than a character in a novel. (See #1.)
Without knowing it, I have stumbled into a black hole and am living in a parallel universe.
Thing is, I can juggle a thousand theories as to how I got here, but figuring that out won’t keep Val and Alan from LA. Alan was right: there are too many variables to go chasing every possibility. I need to focus on the constants right now: my Strange Fascinations, and Penny.
So, a new list:
WTF DO I DO NOW.
An Elegant List of Action Items, by Noah Oakman
Make contact with the Fading Girl.
Make contact with OMG.
Confront Philip Parish about the photograph.
Google the shit out of Mila Henry’s sketches.
Consider spending time with Penny.
Investigate that shit, Alan said yesterday.
Okay, then.
Start from the top.
36 → harmjoy
There are over eight thousand comments under the Fading Girl video. Mostly, it’s mild stuff like, lady has a lot of time on her hands, ha. Or this one from a user named SquareRootOfBro_6 (because apparently five other bros had already square-rooted themselves): WTF LMFAO SMH.
SquareRootOfBro_6 is capable of feeling many abbreviated sentiments at once.
And, of course, scatterings of bitterness pepper the comments section with that spec
ial brand of enthusiastic vitriol only the anonymity of the Internet provides. For example: Someone tell this ugly bitch no one cares about her fucking life.
I once heard someone compare the Internet to a playground, which seems pretty accurate. Go there in the light of day. Hang with your friends for a while, learn some shit, and go home. Much as you might want to, you can’t cook or work or go to the bathroom on the playground. Inevitably, someone else is going to do some cool trick that you can’t, and so now you feel like shit; or worse, they try to do a cool trick, fail, and you feel better about yourself. And really, there are only so many times you can swing a swing or go down the same slide before you start looking for ways to fuck it all up.
I know what Val said about the benefits of the Internet, and she’s right. All I’m saying is, I could do with a little less schaden and a little more freude.
I scroll the cursor over the box that says Add a public comment, and my heart picks up. I’ve never written in the comments section of anything, so this is a big moment for me. I begin a message, then get scared I might accidentally hit enter before I’m done, at which point I close out the browser altogether, open up a Word document, and draft away.
Think concise, effective, friendly. . . .
Hi there. I’m Noah. I’m not a stalker or anything, but I’ve watched your video a few hundred times and was wondering where you live.
Delete. Start over.
Hi-ya!
Nope.
Every night before I fall asleep . . .
Delete, start over, delete, until I come up with something I don’t hate: Hi! Really enjoyed your video. I have a quick question. If you get a moment, would you mind emailing me at
[email protected]? Thanks!
It’s a little more exclamatory than I like, but such is the way of society.
Five minutes later I have a
[email protected] account, and I’m back on YouTube, having copied my draft over from Word. I hold my breath as I post the comment, stare at its place under the Fading Girl video the way I imagine a parent might watch their young kid on the playground: proud, excited, scared shitless.