In any case, McNiff has no problem picking up the check.
Neither do I, apparently.
I have the paper out, the pen out. Lisa Beagleman’s got to sign if I’m going to get my miserable twenty-four hundred dollars and I am not walking out of this shitshow without my twenty-four hundred dollars. Everyone is glaring at me, even the baristas. I’m the bad guy, I’m the scum of the earth. Well, you know what? I’ve got a signed contract. She asked for this. She went through the assessment. She paid her money. I kept up my end. Am I always going to be the good guy in life? No. Learned that ages ago.
“You’re still here?” says super-dad David.
I don’t move. “Sign.”
* * *
—
Wet white flakes flying at my windshield. Slush world changed to snow world while I was inside. December in the suburbs of Chicago, where am I even? Schaumburg or Palatine or purgatory, swinging out of the parking lot, blasting down the avenue, onto the highway, like a criminal getaway minus the charm. Lugging the Books of the Dead out of the Starbucks, nobody asking “Can I give you a hand with that?”—everyone knew what had happened, they’d seen similar scenes before. But it had never happened to me. Lisa Beagleman screaming me out the door. Shouldn’t have told her. Too eager. Like a chump franchisee. Like some asshole who’d just earned his license, who rents his Books of the Dead by the week. And to think I’d been one of the first ones.
It’s death-dark and I’m driving around in a shaken-up snow globe. Two lights come blazing out of the blackness, zoom past, another idiot stupid enough to be driving in a slushy shrieking blizzard. But I had to get out of there. Not just out of the Starbucks. Out of the parking lot. Out of town. Out of that whole world. Lisa Beagleman and super-dad David, turning the crowd against me. Won’t be doing business in there again.
She’ll call headquarters. She’ll make a complaint.
Ron Wolper.
Oh, Christ.
But that’s what you wanted, wasn’t it, Wolper? For me to be more aggressive? To push that sale? Oh no, don’t blame Wolper, it’s you, you knew it was a dick move even while you were doing it, you didn’t listen to your own judgment. Because be honest: you would’ve held back, you wouldn’t have told her if you’d liked her. But from the minute you saw Lisa Beagleman you didn’t like her. She didn’t like you either. Natural enemies. Who would win. Well, I won. She’s the one crying. I got my percentage.
Dick, dick, dick.
This blizzard is something else. Dumb being out here. The flying white streaking by in the blackness swallowing up the car, like I’m blasting through hyperspace. Brutal wind. Car hard to handle, the wobbly way it takes the curves. Well, you said you wanted a white Christmas…You say that every year. Weaving, almost fishtailing. Careful what you ask for. Home still miles away, why in such a hurry to get there? Nobody’s waiting for you. Complain if there’s no snow in December it doesn’t feel like the holidays; complain if there is snow in December it’s too much to handle—digging your car out in the morning, hours of traffic—
I hit the skid.
Fly off the road.
* * *
—
A car crash doesn’t feel the way you think it’ll feel. Or it didn’t for me. Not enough time for panic, for freaking out, not enough time for your body to catch up to what’s happening, for your brain to zap the right chemicals out to the right muscles—when I hit the skid and fly off the road, I am calm, I do everything correctly, I keep control as much as possible, try to minimize the damage, even as I think in a resigned way, This is it. Now I’m dead.
Crumpled in a snowy ditch. Car totaled.
Then the rush comes, the useless adrenaline.
All the emotion I should’ve felt, too late.
MY NAME
The kid who was my roommate at eighth grade physics summer camp was Renard Jankowski, and—well, it’s physics summer camp, right? It’s going to attract a certain type of kid. We were all nerds. I use that word in its damning original sense. None of us identified as such. It was 1987.
The “camp” wasn’t real camp, no bonfires or canoeing, no forest hikes, but basically just more school, a way for the college to turn a profit in summer using its deserted dormitories and cheap labor pool of grad student instructors. Renard and I shared one of those cinder block, linoleum-tiled dorm rooms. When I arrived with my stuff on the steamy first day, Renard was lying on the top bunk as if he’d always been living there, reading something from the shoeboxes of 1970s science fiction paperbacks he’d brought from home. Renard spent the summer plowing through those boxes, book after book, though I never saw him get enthusiastic about anything he read. Whenever I read a book that I loved, I always had to urge everyone else to “read this! You have to.” And if I hated a book, I’d rant to everyone about how crappy it was—but Renard Jankowski read without comment, steadily, passionlessly, paperback after paperback, like a cow indifferently masticating its cud.
Renard’s daily outfit was one of his many black souvenir T-shirts from various national parks, with something like an eagle or a grizzly on it, tucked into dark blue jeans with a belt with a big elaborate country-music-singer buckle. He had an oxlike build and straight dark hair and a little bit of a mustache and the kind of tinted sunglasses that are supposed to work as normal glasses indoors and turn into sunglasses outdoors, but in practice were always semidark. When I came into our dorm room that first day Renard didn’t say a word. He ignored my hellos. I unpacked my stuff in silence, puzzled and almost angry. Maybe there was something wrong with him. But then, after an hour of quiet, Renard began talking to me as if we’d always known each other. His literal first words to me were, “So, anyway…”
* * *
—
There was a particular science fiction author I loved. An Englishman who had only written a handful of funny sci-fi books. A writer you wouldn’t find in Renard’s box, because Renard had zero sense of humor, but I loved this author—not just for his goofy best sellers but for his big personality. He made for a garrulous interview, lived a fascinating life, was a world traveler, was generous with his money, was an early adopter of new technologies, and was curious about everything, the kind of author whose tossed-off ideas were better than epics other writers had sweated over for years, whose throwaway jokes turned out to make better predictions about the future than the prophecies of earnest futurists. Anyway, one of this author’s unfinished stories (he had so many, he seemed to workshop them aloud in interviews) was about a character who had forgotten something crucial that had happened in his life. So this character jumps off a cliff on the theory that on the way down, while his life is passing before his eyes, he’d remember that important thing he’d forgotten, the thing that would show him the real meaning of his life.
As for what’d happen to him when he inevitably hit the ground? Well, he’d solve that problem when he came to it.
The author died before he could write that story.
But as my car is flying off the highway, as I’m crashing into the snowy ditch—here’s my story.
* * *
—
Renard and I became friends. Maybe that’s the real reason all of our parents sent us to gifted-kids camp—so we could meet people who were our own speed. Not just intellectually but, for lack of a better term, philosophically. One night, as we were sweating in our bunk beds that humid July, Renard asked me what I thought happened after you died.
“I guess you just switch off,” I said. “Like a computer.”
“Do you really think that?”
“I don’t know. What do you think happens?”
Renard didn’t speak for a long time. I thought maybe he had fallen asleep. But then, after a while, Renard said, clearly and deliberately, “After you die you will be staring down that tunnel of red circles at the end of a Looney Tunes cartoon. And you will hear a voice that’s like Porky Pig trying to
say that’s all, folks! but he’s stuttering so much he can’t even get past the first word. And that Looney Tunes ending music keeps repeating, too. But then you realize it’s not Porky Pig’s voice, it’s somebody else’s. And then you notice that the words superimposed on the tunnel don’t spell out that’s all, folks! like they’re supposed to. They spell out something else, but the letters are backward, and you’re trying to figure out what the backward letters are saying, but you don’t want to, because you know it will be a nightmare word, but that nightmare word is also the secret of the universe, and it’s right in front of you now, it’s in your face, you can finally read the secret of the universe, but that voice is babbling at you, and the music is playing again and again, and that’s what you must sit through, for all eternity.”
Try talking like that all the time. See where it gets you. How weird do you have to be to be bullied at physics camp? Renard was that weird and I was his roommate. One night after dinner we returned to our dorm room to discover that both our beds had been pissed on by the other boys, and shaving cream was smeared all over our stuff. Renard sighed and began cleaning up the mess without complaint. I was furious for revenge. Renard took it with a quiet shrug.
“Why don’t you get mad?” I said.
“No point.”
Scrub scrub scrub.
I said, “Renard. Your books all got pissed on.”
“Throw them out.”
“Really?”
“I don’t want piss-smelling books.”
“But maybe some of them are still good.”
“Just throw them all out.”
This felt wrong to me. I thought Renard loved those books. He was letting them go with zero emotion.
I held one up. “What’s this one about?”
“It is about an artificially intelligent prison planet that doesn’t have any prisoners. So the planet manufactures its own prisoners. Then it tortures them until they die.”
“Oh.”
“The prison planet devours those prisoners and recycles them to make a new generation of prisoners. One prisoner escapes, hero’s journey, et cetera.”
“Did you like it?”
“Uh.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s a metaphor for the universe, I guess.”
“Was it good?”
Renard shrugged.
“What?”
“I don’t know. Define ‘good.’ ”
In retrospect, that physics camp let us all run wild. Nowadays you couldn’t get away with running a kids’ program that lax. In the mornings a rotating cast of instructors taught us seminars and did labs with us, but in the afternoons and evenings we were more or less free to work on our own weird projects. The social contract seemed to be that parents were looking for a place to dump their clever-but-not-outdoorsy offspring for July and August, the university was happy to take their money, and as children of the eighties we were used to filling up hours of unprogrammed time on our own.
One night Renard asked me in the dark, “What are you afraid of?”
* * *
—
When I was a kid I was afraid of the Beatles.
To me their voices sounded mechanical and insinuating, their music shaggy and wrong. My older sisters had an LP of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and its cover was unnerving to me. It was too busy, its collage of dozens of famous people seemingly pasted in from various universes, and the four hairy men in brightly colored circus-military uniforms looked smug and gleeful and threatening. My sisters played Sgt. Pepper all the time, on the little gray portable record player they got for Christmas. It sounded devilish to me. I remember one day, hanging out with my sisters in the basement—I was probably four or five years old and was rolling myself around the carpeted floor on a wheeled ottoman—I saw that record lying on the carpet and sensed that this was my opportunity, the moment that I could take action, and so in a blind rush I rolled my ottoman right over Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, cracking it into pieces, and then it was like I was floating, I felt this incredible surge of well-being, and even though my sisters were screaming at me now, I was relieved I’d never have to listen to that music again, I was certain that I had done a righteous act.
For me the eighties meant a time of clean lines. Top 40 music sounded cleanly synthetic. Eight-bit computer games were constructed of sharp, neon pixels. Movies and TV shows got taken out of the hands of weird hippies and put in the hands of pros who knew how to please. Things that were meandering, bearded, shaggy, bloated, natural, organic: out. Things that were straightforward, lean, engineered: in. This was good. I hated the druggy, ugly seventies, or my child’s-eye impression of it. Charles Manson looked like a Beatle to me. As a child, I felt like the devil walked the land in the seventies, because when I’d overhear adults talking seventies stuff, or see it in newspapers, it’d be about serial killers, or hundreds of people committing suicide using Kool-Aid or whatever, or drugged-up soldiers massacring villages, or Andy Warhol ghouls lurking in discos. Why were they acting like that? I felt lucky to come of age after America had flushed all that gnarly viciousness out of its system and bequeathed to me a world that was clean and safe and reasonable. I’m older now and realize that Sgt. Pepper is a fine album, and of course all kinds of worthwhile things happened in the seventies—and yes, I’m aware that I sound like I had been some weird reactionary child who read the National Review instead of Garfield, but I wasn’t, not really, because just remember, a child has no political context, only an impressionable imagination, and to be fair, when Bob Dylan is demanding at you over the radio that “Everybody must get stoned,” it frankly sounds scary to a child, especially with Dylan’s apparent nasal delight in the idea, with the creepily wheezing old-time harmonica, and you vaguely know that being “stoned” has to do with drugs, and you know drugs are bad, but Bob Dylan is so maniacally insistent about it, why is he so invested in everybody getting stoned? Especially when he goes on to say, “They’ll stone you when you” do this and that—what does that even mean? If you don’t get yourself stoned on Bob Dylan’s fucking schedule, he’ll send somebody to do it to you? These are your big heroes of the seventies—shaggy weirdos like Cheech and Chong, Bob Dylan, and the Beatles? You know who’d be a better hero? Pac-Man! Here’s a hard-working guy who clocks in every day without complaint, who plays by the rules, and if a ghost kills him, he doesn’t protest the system, man, he just gets himself born again.
I didn’t say that to Renard in so many words. But when Renard asked me, “What are you afraid of?” it would’ve been stupid to say “I’m afraid of heights” or “I get nervous about public speaking.” I wanted to say something particularly true about me so I said something similar to the above about not liking the Beatles and how I had broken my sisters’ record on purpose.
To my surprise, Renard felt the same way. He said that music on the radio sometimes freaked him out, too, but for him it was the sleek, artificial eighties anthems that were haunted; to Renard those songs sounded reptilian, sinister, metallic; he remembered one time, late at night in bed listening to the radio, when Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer” came on, he had felt a chill at the lyric about seeing a deadhead sticker on a Cadillac. Renard had no idea what a “deadhead sticker” was but it had sounded to him like a satanic emblem—and since the sticker was displayed on a Cadillac, that implied that even the wealthy were in on the satanism, that society’s spiritual corruption went all the way to the top. Renard had also imagined the “little voice inside my head” referred to an actual voice that broke into the singer’s consciousness, hissing behind his ear, Don’t look back, you can never look back. So the question is, should you obey this demon voice or defy it? Should you actually look back? But wait, what if it’s a deliberate taunt, what if the voice’s intention is to goad you into looking back? In that case, you really mustn’t look back, right? Like how Indiana Jones
tells Marion not to look when they open the lost ark? Because maybe the deadhead sticker wants to do something worse than melt your face off, it wants to infect the world with its evil, and if you did turn around to look at the deadhead sticker on the Cadillac it would find its way into you, it would place its evil in you.
So don’t look back.
Renard and I understood each other.
* * *
—
Not long after physics camp was over, I found out that lyric wasn’t what Renard and I thought at all. “The Boys of Summer” wasn’t about wealthy satanists with cryptic death glyphs on their expensive cars. It was about lame middle-aged nostalgia, and the “deadhead sticker” merely referred to a decal for the band the Grateful Dead. But that discovery didn’t make it any less creepy because the name “Grateful Dead” was still disingenuously ghoulish, and their music was still noodley seventies garbage, and everyone in that band still looked like scary bearded drug men—basically just another bunch of fucking Mansons.
Renard and I made a theory together, a theory we half pretended with each other was true, and that I still sometimes think of when I hear shitty classic rock on the radio: that something vast and invisible and evil permeated America, an unseen presence that sprawled across every state and dwelled in every person, and that this entity was always trying to speak, that it was always attempting to announce itself, and thus it sought out and used the biggest megaphone it could find, manifesting its voice in Top 40 music—though it could only manage to speak in spurts and starts, in disconnected phrases across songs, across decades. Nevertheless, its demon phrases were repeated infinitely and everywhere through that inescapable classic rock radio, the voice of a vast invisible thing who was going to do awful things to all of us, a voice who in fact relished telling us exactly the tortures it planned to inflict on us, a voice who demanded to be heard, and that was the terrifying thing, it was all out in the open, you could turn on the radio at any time, and sometimes the sinister thing would speak to you directly.
Dare to Know Page 3
