Ziggy, Stardust and Me

by James Brandon

  “Maybe you should get dressed?”

  “What?”

  “CLOTHES?” I pull at my shirt.

  “Why bother?” He winks and gyrates, and I swallow some barf.

  I lift the strand. “Where do you want these?”

  “Dance with me—” He claps his hands and pulls me toward him.

  “Oh. No, I’ll—”

  “Put those down and dance with me, son.”

  “No, no, I should just—”

  “Come on, man. Loosen the hell up.” He grabs the lights, slinging them over his shoulders. “You’re always so damned serious. Dance. It’s good for you.” He flaps his arms. I think he’s doing the Funky Chicken but I can’t be sure. His thin blond hair’s spiked up; his furry body jiggles; his mouth hangs open. With the lights wrapped around him he looks like he’s being electrocuted. “Why aren’t you dancin’?” He flings my arms to the sky. “That’s it, son. Helps clear your mind. You gotta let go, man. Let go of all that crap in there . . .” THWACK. He slaps my forehead and closes his eyes and travels to a fake galaxy far, far away.

  Well, I like when he’s happy, and I’ve learned a few moves from Soul Train, so I bounce my knees and shimmy back and forth and close my eyes and—

  Together we walk the Soul Train line . . .

  “Name’s Cheetah. Uh-huh. I’m the new cat in town. Here to show you a few boss boogies to take your prom date to the starverse of make-believe. Can you dig?”

  “Hey yo, daddio,” Charlene squeals. “You the finest man I ever did see. Where’d you learn those moves, babay?” I become a man possessed: sh-boogying—uh uh uh—on the dance floor, circle forming around me, clapping, screaming, ding-donging,

  Ding-donging,

  Ding-dong,

  DING-DONG.

  Oh no. The cops. Record skips. Dad’s at the door. I dart to the stereo, twist the knob down, and dash up the stairs just before he opens it.

  They are not cops. No, they are . . . not exactly sure what. I see a pair of wet rats standing on their hind legs dressed up like a girl and boy. She’s in a red-and-gold Dairy Queen uniform, skinnier than me, with a big bowl of hair dripping down her tiny head and too much makeup smeared on her pinched face.

  Her friend squirms behind her in a stained T-shirt and faded Cardinals mesh cap: a thicker boy-version of her, with a creepy, lopsided smirk like the Joker’s. Must be high or something.

  “Hey hey hey, Heather,” Dad says. “Welcome, baby!”

  “Robert-Bobert, you’re in your underwear!” And, boy, if that’s not the funniest thing she’s ever seen in her life, I’d hate to be around for whatever is. Oh man, that laugh. I think my ears are bleeding.

  “Who’s this?” Dad asks, shaking her friend’s paw.

  “My brother. Hal. Remember him? It’s okay he came, right?”

  “Oh, right on! Yeahyeahyeah. Hey, man. Sorry, I would’ve at least put on some pants.” Dad laughs.

  “Nice to meet ya.” Hal walks in. More like slithers. Yup, definitely high. He sees me and waves. I wave back and bolt.

  Have fun, kids! Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!

  I slam my door, dig through my satchel, grab the first library-borrowed book I find—Carl Sagan’s The Cosmic Connection—and crawl into my closet. I switch the light on. Say hello to Mom and Friends. With my headphones secure, I flip on Ziggy, wrap myself in one of Grandma’s crocheted afghans, and disappear . . . sort of.

  Because all the while, I try to navigate the thought-storm that’s been ripping me to shreds this entire time: Dr. Evelyn’s lying, Starla’s leaving, and Web’s, well, Web’s everything.

  12.

  Saturday, May 26, 1973

  IT’S FINALLY SATURDAY and I’m on the beach at Creve Coeur Lake, now convinced I have entered some bizarro parallel universe, and waiting for a unicorn or maybe a merman with wings to come charging out of the water.

  Never thought I’d see this place again.

  My nerves are so jangled I’m walking around like a creature from Night of the Living Dead. Feel like one, too.

  Web wasn’t at school the past two days. Maybe he’s sick. Or went back home. Or officially decided that yes indeed I am a Looney Tune and he needs to stay as far away from me as possible. Still, I don’t know how to get ahold of him, so I came here to wait. In case he does show up.

  I see:

  1) A few boats floating in the water and silhouettes of men with thinly arched fishing poles

  2) A cliff in the distance with a trickling waterfall

  3) A trailer park village on the other side of the lake covered with strewn-about toys and trash, and

  4) Behind me, a row of shanties on stilts made out of papier-mâché that I’m pretty sure will be blown to bits if I sneeze. They look condemned. I think they are.

  I park Stingraymobile against a big rock protruding from the sand, sling my satchel over my shoulder, and plop down. The lake breezes through me: a mixture of crisp air and fish stink. I close my eyes, feel the sun ignite my nerves, and let each ray detonate a new thought. I shouldn’t be here. KAZAM. I can’t trust myself yet. SHBLAM. I’m still sick. CRRRACK. I know. I’ll spend the next three months in my closet and have Dad slide me a tray of bread and water under the door every day until Starla gets back. KAPOW. God.

  Even church this morning was weird. Starla was quiet the entire time, working on the finishing touches of her Prom Suit. (“It’s not a dress,” she said. “I refuse to bow to the pressures of the patriarchy any longer.”) (Turns out this is also why she’s going to prom tonight with Lindsey and that group of girls.)

  Seriously, what am I going to do when she goes away—

  A shadow moves across the sun; I squint my eyes open.

  “God, Web, you look like one of Sagan’s effing starfolk,” I say. OUT LOUD. AGAIN. What is happening to me? Used to be: thought, ponder, thought, silence. Now it’s: thought—KABLOOEY out of my mouth.

  He does, though. In that book I’m reading, Carl Sagan says we’re all starfolk and we’ll one day colonize black holes. I think he must’ve met Web when he got the idea. He stands above me, a perfect halo around his head, shirtless and glimmering like every pore in his body is hatching a firefly, his hair sticking to his skin. Also? Who knew there was such a thing as a twenty-four-pack set of abs. Jesus.

  All this time, by the way, sharp stabs keep pricking my veins. Effing Evelyn side effects. I knew I shouldn’t have come back here.

  He’s still standing. Not moving, not saying anything. Then FINALLY: “What were you doing?”

  “Huh?”

  “Just now. You were mumbling and making Batman sounds.”

  Wait. I was. “Oh, uh . . .” Can’t even think my way out of this one. No one’s ever seen me do that.

  “It’s cool. I get stuck in my head a lot, too,” he says.

  “Yeah?”

  “My dad showed me a trick once. Kinda like that mapmaker one you taught me. Wanna hear it?”

  “Sure.”

  “So each thought is like an invisible string, right? Grab one like this—” He acts like he’s pulling a long string from his forehead. “Then blow it in the wind and watch it float away. Keep doing that till your mind’s clear. Works every time.” He laughs, then hikes up his jeans, and plops down next to me.

  He smells like a boy who’s been playing outside all day.

  I haven’t moved. I think I’ve turned to stone, I can’t be sure.

  I’m thinking I’d really like to be one of his thoughtstrings and be blown far, far away, when he says, “So this is better, right?”

  “What?”

  “You know, not sitting in a classroom. Or on a toilet.”

  I laugh. “Yeah. Guess it is.” I’m staring forward, but I know he’s looking at me: My wrists and thighs are afire. This is never going to work. We can
never be friends. “So, where have you been? You weren’t in school and—”

  “Didn’t feel good.”

  “Oh. Well, I’m glad you’re okay now . . .”

  “Yeah. I was beginning to wonder if you were ever going to show,” he says.

  “I was beginning to wonder if I made our whole conversation up.”

  “Happens to me all the time.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, man. But that’s half the fun of life, right? Trying to figure out what’s real and what isn’t. You cold or somethin’?”

  “Huh?”

  “Your wrists. You keep rubbing them together.”

  “I do?” Dammit. Caught again. “No, it’s just—”

  “Here. Let me warm you up.” His hands wrap around mine. A volt sweeps through me.

  “OW!” Like a frigging live wire, this one. I pull my hands away, tuck them under my knees.

  “Sorry, man. You okay? I thought you were cold. I didn’t mean—”

  “I’m fine. It just—it happens sometimes. Never mind.”

  “Oh—”

  “So is this your place or something?” I ask, grasping any thoughtstring I can.

  “My place?”

  “The assignment.”

  “No. Not really.”

  I laugh. “Then why are we here?”

  “Don’t know. First place I could think of, I guess.”

  “Ah. Okay.”

  He looks down, feet burrowing in the sand. He’s lying, but I don’t pry, mostly because I don’t want to be pried. So I face the water and: whoa. The sun, now a blazing fireball sitting on the edge of the lake, silk-screens the clouds like a Warhol.

  “Wow,” I say.

  “What?”

  “That.” I don’t blink. Because this is the painting I want to live in forever. I’m lost, surfing the light waves in my mind, caught in the swells, when:

  “Hey, you hear me?”

  “Huh?” He’s standing now, hand stretched inches from mine.

  “Come on, let’s go.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Just come on, jeez!” And somehow he’s wrestled my hands free and pulled me up in one fell swoop. This time his hand doesn’t electrocute me. It melds into mine. And we’re sprinting across the beach, until we stop at the base of the cliff.

  “Looks like she’s crying again,” he says.

  But before I can say “Who?” he’s thrown himself against the rock, his hands suctioning upupup the side.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Come on, man! There’s a better view up here.”

  “Up there? Are you crazy?” Panic’s rising in my voice, stomach’s rising in my mouth.

  He looks down. Already he’s somehow six feet above me splayed against the rock, his eyes brimming with wildfire. “Yeah, I am,” he says. “And so are you. Come on.” And—thwoop thwoop thwoop—he continues to climb.

  “Wait. Stop. It’s so steep. What if we don’t make it what if we fall what if we die what if we—”

  “What if aliens come down and take us away in their ship,” he yells.

  What? No. A logical answer in other situations, maybe, but not this one.

  “Seriously STOP.”

  “Seriously TRUST ME.” He looks back down.

  I think I’ve turned into stone again. Scratch that, I know I have. I can’t move.

  His eyes sink into mine. “Trust me,” he says again.

  Okay, there is no explaining the next series of events except to say that perhaps aliens did come down and beam me up, because in the next second: slick rock against my palm, steel-toed Chucks locked in a crevice, satchel flopping on my back, I’m climbing. Seriously, climbing. Even though my brain decided to stay behind.

  “Yeah, man, that’s it, good. Keep going. You can do it—”

  He’s still talking but I can’t hear. Because how in Ziggy’s name did I end up on the side of a freaking cliff at Creve Coeur Freaking Lake? I don’t know. Keep charging forward. Eyes lasered in on the soles of his bare feet, palms licked with sweat and slime so I cannot tell where my hands end and the rock begins. I cannot tell what I am right now.

  Yes I can.

  I am part of the Fantastic Four. I am the Thing! Rock bursts through my skin. Lungs expand with so many extra gulps of air I choke on the freedom. As I clamber up I feel more invincible, more unstoppable, the Combatant Rock Climber of—

  My foot slips from under me.

  “Sh-boogie shit!” I scream, just in time to see Web hurl himself up. My skin skids across the rock. Hands claw. Legs scramble. “HELP!”

  Web peeks over, eyes grow so wide they consume me. “Hold on, man, I got you!” He extends his arm to latch onto mine. “You’re not that far. Don’t look down, just look into my eyes.”

  I do. And KER-THWOOP, he swings me over the edge.

  Web: flying backward.

  Me: clawing forward, nails digging into moss and dirt. I flip onto my back.

  And burst into tears.

  “Oh, hey, man, you okay?” Web crawls over to me.

  “I don’t—mean to—sorry, I don’t cry—I never cry, I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry . . .” I say through my sobs. I can’t stop it. What is happening to me?

  “S’okay, man, just let it out. I get it. I get it . . .” It sounds like a lullaby, which makes me cry even harder for some reason. He doesn’t make a move toward me. I am glad for this: He somehow knows to leave me alone.

  I turn onto my stomach, bury my face in the dirt.

  Carl Sagan says black holes may be “apertures to an elsewhen.” Plunging down one, we’d reemerge in another epoch of time. So I grab a black crayon in my mind and furiously squiggle a black hole, to disappear into another epoch of time.

  13.

  IT’S POSSIBLE I DID disappear. I can’t be certain. I lie on my stomach for another one thousand nine hundred and seventy-three years until I stop crying.

  Here’s the thing: The last time I really cried was when IT happened. That was four years ago. Dr. Evelyn has always warned me about this moment: “You can’t hold it in forever,” she’d say. “Eventually the dam’s gotta burst.”

  I’m not sure why NOW of all frigging times my brain decides it’s time for the dam to burst, but it’s done. And the only reason I stop and flip back over is because I’ve inhaled so much dirt there’s a severe dust storm tornadoing through my lungs.

  I reach into my satchel, pull out PeterPaulandMary—poofpoof . . . poof poof—two extra for good measure—wipe my face, and sit up.

  Web sits cross-legged, staring into what’s now become a Van Gogh swirl of setting-sun oranges and pinks and reds and yellows.

  I do not know what to say. I do not know what to feel. It’s a megastorm of embarrassment and relief that won’t stop billowing through me. And at any second I might start crying again. “I’m . . . sorry—”

  “Don’t,” he says.

  “Don’t?”

  “Don’t say sorry again, man.”

  “Oh, I just didn’t—”

  “No. You just did. You felt It.”

  “What?”

  “The Great Mystery. Happens when you face your fears. You were cracked open, man. It’s a beautiful thing.”

  Oh. Well, I got a million more fears where that came from, I think. And I swear he’s flipped some switch in my brain to hear my thoughts because the next second he’s laughing.

  “What?” I ask.

  “Your face. It’s streaked in mud.”

  “Oh. Oh God—” I start scrubbing it off.

  “Don’t do that,” he says, holding my hands. “It’s kinda cool . . .”

  “Oh . . . I . . .”

  He stares, tracing my face like I do with Starla. “Wow . . .” he whisper
s.

  “What?”

  “Your eyes, I’ve never noticed them before, they’re—”

  “Oh. Yeah,” I say, jerking my hands back. I plop them in my lap. “Different colors, I know. It’s supposed to be hereditary, but no one else in my family has it, and it’s weird because my mom and dad have blue eyes, so I’ve always wondered where the brown one came from and always hated it because of course it’s just one more thing for the Apes to make fun of.”

  “Whoa,” he says.

  Seriously, just whoa. “David Bowie has them, too.”

  “Far-out.”

  “Yeah.”

  His eyes meld with mine and—I do not notice the stinging sensation zipping through my veins . . . I do NOT . . . “You’re right,” I say, my voice quaking. “The view’s way better up here.”

  “Yeah . . . isn’t it?” He looks away and I sink into my skin again.

  Boy, is it. The view, I mean. Like sitting in the middle of a kaleidoscope.

  “Broken heart,” he says.

  “What?”

  “The lake. It’s the shape of a broken heart.”

  “Really?” I sit up on my knees to see.

  “Yeah. Some American Indian chick jumped over this cliff because of some white man—of course—breaking her heart.”

  “For real?”

  “It caused the split in the lake.”

  “Where?” I’m looking, but can’t see.

  “There.” I follow his point, still can’t see.

  “Where?”

  He holds my arm, points it at this barely visible crack in the middle, a darker shade of blue that curves to the edge of infinity.

  “There,” he whispers in my ear.

  “Oh . . . I . . . see it . . . wow.”

  “They say this waterfall only appears when she’s crying, her ghost jumping off the cliff over and over in this kind of never-ending anguish.”

  His voice prickles my skin. “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “We American Indians love your legends.” He falls back on the grass, laughing.