The Future Won't Be Long

by Jarett Kobek

  The first act of destruction was visited upon the band shell, crushed into nothingness. They’d painted over Billie Holiday two years after I moved to the city, but I imagined that she went to dust with strains of “Strange Fruit” on her crudely rendered lips.

  A key component of the park’s transformation was the establishment of a constant police presence. Tompkins Square was under guard twenty-four hours of each day. But this was the East Village. The first few months were pure show. Cops making a general demonstration of force for media and the mayor, followed by the inevitable diminishing of resources and interest.

  Breaches appeared along the chain-linked perimeter. These entrances did not appeal to the anarchists. Sneaking into the park offered no political theater. Why bother if you lacked an audience?

  Adeline and Geoffrois scrambled through a hole along 7th Street. I crouched down and went inside, hoping that I wouldn’t snag my clothes.

  Geoffrois stumbled off. I was looking for the empty space where the band shell had been. Passing through the rubble, I considered it a lesson in controlling dissent. Create symbolic distractions for the vocal contingents fixated on imagery. Then destroy the symbol. Ignore the content.

  Geoffrois and Adeline ran beneath the brick portico near 10th Street, stopping beside a monument that looked like an oversized headstone. Its purpose had been vandalized away. Graffiti rendered the inscriptions illegible. Its water spout, a lion’s head, had been broken off and stolen. The basin blown apart by fireworks.

  —This is the most mystical object in New York, said Geoffrois. It was erected in memory of a disaster, of the General Slocum. A passenger ship that caught fire. One thousand dead. That’s the cover story, a lie designed to hide occulted knowledge. This stele sits at the intersection of at least five different ley lines that power the city’s economic energies. This is the heart of all New York’s money!

  —Why does it look like shit? I asked.

  —The secrets of ages were with the keepers of flame. When Churchill extinguished the flames, the knowledge was forgotten. Only the adept can know the truth. If this memorial disappears, then so too disappears the whole of New York’s economic prowess. Good-bye, Wall Street. Good-bye, Dow Jones Industrial Average. This is why squirrels and birds congregate at its base. They sense its power. Animals are mental states. I’ve personally inhabited the body of a bird and my eyes were seeing through its eyes. I saw my double and I was not dead.

  He ran from us, toward Avenue A.

  —Isn’t he simply fascinating? asked Adeline.

  —I can say with honesty that I am amazed.

  I could’ve been writing. I could’ve been giving my boyfriend the time. Instead I was chasing a necromancer through an abandoned park.

  I’d spent too much of my life in New York, too much time interacting with its street people, with its lunatics, its mad ones, its charlatans, its would-be revolutionaries. I remember when I could be held rapt by any street preacher with a grievance against Ronald Reagan. But I knew now that none of it amounted to anything. It was all substance abuse, underlying emotional problems, and enforced commitment at Bellevue.

  I found them beneath the graffiti-covered canopy of the Temperance Fountain, the word CHARITY above them, the zinc statue with her missing arms like the crippled goddess of a forgotten pantheon. Geoffrois stood over the fountain, hands extended, fingers spread. Beneath thick hooded eyelids, his eyes rolled white.

  —He’s about to cast a spell, whispered Adeline. He needs absolute concentration.

  —A spell? Really?

  —Don’t concern yourself, she whispered. Nothing happens. Nothing ever happens. It’s about the psychological transformation of the self.

  Geoffrois grunted and threw his arms up over his head. He spread his legs and thrust back his head, assuming the shape of an X. He shouted. I worried about the volume. After all, we were surrounded by the cops.

  He lowered his arms over the bowl.

  —Body of fire, body of light, he said. This is how we can describe the astral body. Egyptian gods live in the astral plane. We can also find symbols and alchemists there. With the body of light, we can travel anywhere. Everything is possible. Spirit of fire, remember! Gibil, spirit of fire, remember! Gibra, spirit of flames, remember! Oh god of fire, mighty son of Anu, the most terrifying among your brothers, show yourself! Appear, oh god of fire, Gibil in all your majesty and devour all of my enemies! Appear, oh god of fire, Girra in all your might and burn the sorcerers that persecute me! GIBIL GASHRU UMUNA YANDURU TUSHTE YESH SHIR ILLANINU MA YALKI! GISHBAR IA ZI IA IA ZI DINGIR GIR A KANPA! Appear, son of the enflamed disk of Anu!

  I took my leave. Neither Adeline nor Geoffrois paid me a lick of attention. I traversed the empty lunar landscape and escaped back to Earth through a hole in the fence.

  No police saw me. No one saw me.

  MAY 1992

  Baby Goes to Erik’s Hometown

  Erik asked me to visit his hometown. I wanted to shout, No, absolutely not, not now, not ever!

  —Honey, said Erik, you can meet my mother.

  My beau begged. I resisted. He demanded. I refused. The barometric pressure dropped. A storm grew on the horizon. So I agreed. I said we’d do it. I’d acquiesce. I’d visit Narberth, Pennsylvania.

  We picked a weekend in mid-May, after semester’s end. Which was also the end of my time at New York University. Graduation loomed.

  I kept this momentous event on the sly, avoiding conversations about its possible meaning, adamant in my refusal to attend the ceremony. I had no taste for the flavor of tiny American piety of the commencement address.

  And mine was to be no typical ceremony.

  Three weeks prior to graduation, a septuagenarian resident of Yonkers named Stella G. Maychick lost control of her Oldsmobile Delta 88 and crashed through the western entrance of Washington Square Park. Mrs. Maychick injured twenty-seven and killed five. One of the deceased was a sophomore at NYU, his bleeding body crushed atop the graves of twenty thousand.

  The university always scheduled its commencements in Washington Square. There was no time to find a new location. Hallowed ground newly made, the site of a student’s tragic demise.

  I imagined Dr. L. Jay Oliva, our university president, offering a speech rife with the stupidities and reassurances that make unwelcome appearances at every funeral, any tragedy, all unexpected deaths. Always remember. Better place. Never forget. Honored friends. Trusted memories. Carry on.

  Complete and total horseshit. Only time salves the wounds of loss. Year after year until failing synapses dull away the pain.

  My last few nights as a student were spent writing a paper on Don Quixote and another examining Etruscan images of Lucretia. With these minor works completed, a sense of finality washed over my frame. I’d spent four years in the womb of NYU. There was no going back. Time to be reborn.

  That Friday, Erik and I navigated the labyrinth of the Port Authority, climbing aboard a dingy Greyhound bus on the lower level. I hadn’t been on a bus since my arrival in New York. I hadn’t been outside of the boroughs in almost four years.

  I’d decided to embrace the trip and the suburban weekend. Our relationship needed the time. Neutral space away from New York was an absolute requirement. It had become clear that I’d have to level with Erik about my literary output.

  He knew nothing of the stories, of the publication credits, nothing about the endless span of effort.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to tell him, but I was embarrassed that there was a thing in my life that mattered. I was ashamed that I’d done anything. Faced with the flaws in my writing, and the atrocious aesthetics of science fiction digests, I’d never mentioned my relative achievements.

  By the fifth published story, it was easier to pretend as if it was happening to another person.

  The pretense was now impossible. I’d met with Parker Bric
kley, the squeaks of his childlike telephone voice leaving me unprepared to encounter a middle-aged bearded behemoth trapped in the clutches of male-pattern baldness.

  He insisted that we lunch upstairs at Sardi’s. The portraiture was grotesque, but I loved Parker. Instantly. He was the most obscene man that I have ever met.

  —I don’t fucking know why it fucking happened, said Parker, but something about the way you scribble gets my dick throbbing. You’re a fucking faggot, so you probably think you’ve mapped out the whole territory of cock. You’d be surprised about the secret knowledge of the straight pervert. Reading your stuff is like rubbing an eight ball under my foreskin and paying six prostitutes to seek the powder. Johnny fucking Cyberseed, like shitting myself in pleasure. I loved it. I’ve got literary clients, but only science fiction floods my erectile vessels. I’d trade five Jane Smileys for one of you. So please don’t tease me. Please don’t say that you’re the kind of girl who lets a man buy dinner and then won’t hike up her skirt. I want to see that big ass and those tender thighs. Tell me about the sweet treasures of your pussy. Tell me that you have a fucking manuscript. Give me something, buddy, give me a juicy piece to take back to William Morris and ram up their shit-stained asses.

  A novel meant commitment. A novel was permanent. A novel couldn’t be taken back. A novel couldn’t be ignored. A novel was the past made perpetual future.

  —Yes, I said. I have a manuscript. I finished in March.

  —Fucking beautiful, said Parker. I’m going to piss Champagne on every woman that I meet and tell them it’s Hindoo holy water from the sacred Ganges. Here’s the thing, Baby. It isn’t just that you’re a good writer. It’s not that you’re an East Village prodigy. It’s not even that you’re young. It’s that you’ve got all of that and you’ve got those looks. You’re one beautiful queer. You’re the full package. You’re enough to turn me faggot. We’ll suck and rim each other until the sun goes supernova. I can mint a million off your looks. Throw in the writing, and blamo!, okay, now we’re neck deep in the churning brine of wall-to-wall pussy, now our scrotums have retracted into the pleasure centers of our own bodies. Now all systems are fucking go. Now we’re relieving the vital center.

  I took the manuscript from my backpack and passed it across the table.

  Parker called the next day. He loved it. He told me not to change a word.

  He’d decided to push the book upon multiple editors with whom he had a personal relationship, playing the heavy. We had to find the right home, he said. He wanted someone who could look beyond genre trappings.

  Three weeks before graduation, Parker called again and, like Apollonius of Tyana, he preached holy wisdom.

  —Harcourt, Brace and fucking Company. Michael Kandel wants you. You should be honored. This is the man who translates Stanislaw Lem. He’ll publish you in hardback. These people smell the meat on your bones. They want to eat. They want to drink your marrow. The advance ain’t stellar, but it’s better than anyone else would get. Trust me, Baby. You’ve got a one-way ticket on the Brickley express. I’m like true love and nuclear war. You can never prepare for Parker. I don’t stop until every hole is fucked and puddles of my kids dribble on the linoleum. We’ve got a lot of work over the next few months. Welcome to the big leagues, boy-o, welcome to the hot-shit hotshot misery of dealing with editors and copyeditors and book buyers and designers. You better go outside and get a good look at your little patch of the East Village. You better take it in, because nothing will ever be the same. And when you’re old and I’m a fucking corpse rotted out with worms, you had better fucking remember my name. You had better remember that it was Parker Brickley who gave you this bleak gift.

  I signed the contract at Parker’s office in the West 50s. I didn’t tell a soul. Not even Adeline.

  Later, in that same office, he handed me my advance check. I stared at the paper. It is impossible to understand the true and full occult nature of publishing. If you intuit how to pull the levers, people pay you to engage in your basest fantasies, in madness. Your depravity goes out. The cash comes in.

  Two drunks boarded the Greyhound bus. They started talking about being on parole, about who they knew on parole, about who’d gone back inside. I stood up and asked them if they couldn’t talk a little lower. They apologized. I sat back beside Erik.

  —I hate asking people to be quiet, I said.

  —I’m amazed that you did at all, he said. I’d be so scared.

  —What’s the worst that can happen?

  We disembarked at the Philadelphia Greyhound terminal, a bland institutional building filled with the poor and the bewildered, all of who bore a resemblance to the wreckage of the Port Authority. I wondered if this same scene wasn’t playing out in bus stations all across the country, with the same actors simultaneously appearing in each location.

  Philadelphia was limited to exiting the bus station and walking across the street to a subway entrance. Mystified by a transit system not under the MTA’s control, I followed Erik’s lead. He shepherded us onto the commuter rail.

  The city disappeared behind us, the train making its way into the late afternoon of green suburbs. I suffered nausea beneath the fluorescent lighting.

  When we arrived at Narberth, the sky was dark. We stepped away from the station and entered the dead emptiness of Main Street U.S.A.

  —It’s a short walk, said Erik.

  *

  Erik had neglected to mention that his mother had no idea of his sexual longing for men. This tidbit of negligence was revealed only on the front steps of his childhood home.

  He said that we’d have to pretend, which meant no touching, that she was uncomfortable with hetero displays of affection, let alone the blooming of queer flowers. We could share his bed but we’d pretend that I was sleeping on the floor. His door had a lock.

  Erik rang the doorbell, then knocked and called for his mother.

  —Don’t you have a key? I asked.

  —Ordinarily, yes. But the locks were changed last month.

  The house was a wooden frame two bedroom. His mother’s room was right beside his own, a thin plaster wall away. Adios, my dreams of sweet suburban sex.

  We still managed to go down on each other. I was a quiet lover. Erik was different. He always came loud, wailing like Cathy’s wraith chasing Heathcliff back to the Grange. So our coupling tested his powers of will. An area in which he could have taken lessons from Patrick Geoffrois.

  On Saturday morning, we woke with the sun, hot light slashing across the bed. I heard Erik’s mom in the kitchen.

  —Is she making breakfast? I asked.

  —I’m sure, he said. She loves feeding people.

  She’d manufactured a feast. Eggs, pancakes, fruit, toast, cereal. I hadn’t eaten so well in years. I stuffed my face, watching Erik and his mother, feeling sweet on the both of them. She delighted in him. I wondered, really, why he hadn’t told her about his pleasure in the company of other men.

  —I saw that you slept on the floor, she said. Why’d you go and do that? Don’t you know the couch folds out?

  —Baby’s got a bad back, said Erik. He always sleeps on a hard surface.

  —It’s true, I said. Back in New York, I sleep on a wooden board. Anything too soft and I’m a goddamn cripple for the rest of the day.

  —Please don’t swear, said his mother. It’s vulgar and I don’t like hearing it in my house.

  *

  Erik called his high school best friend, a woman named Liz. He invited her over. The idea gave me the jitters, fearful of an evening with someone that I didn’t know. But we didn’t have a car and Narberth was a two-horse town.

  Liz arrived around 8 pm. She rushed inside, hugging Erik, her face scrunched into bliss. All I could think was, Does every fag have their Adeline? Or was she his Regina?

  Erik’s mother hugged Liz. They gabbed for the better part of a
n hour. Liz spoke about her life, about everything that’d happened in the last year. She talked about being a mother. Her son was three years old. The father was long gone. She lived at home. When Erik had called, her parents were so thrilled to hear his voice that they volunteered to babysit.

  We took our leave. Liz’s car was parked in front, an old Ford Maverick from the 1970s. My father had owned the same model, in lime green, before the transmission fell out. He’d given the car up for scrap.

  I crawled into the backseat, adrift in a sea of wrappers from Wendy’s and Burger King.

  —Sorry about all of that, she said. But with a kid, you know.

  —Sure, I said.

  —I haven’t even seen your boy, said Erik. Why don’t we go see him?

  —God, no, she said. There’s a party in Ardmore. I never get out anymore.

  *

  Then there was the time when Liz, Erik and I went to a party in Ardmore. The party was held in a decrepit Victorian house that sat alone on a prime piece of land. Erik and Liz abandoned me as soon as we were inside.

  I wandered, examining the faces. People are the same the world over. The obvious mental cases, the jocks, the alcoholics, the madly promiscuous, the wallflowers. They could be plucked from Pennsylvania and put down in Arizona. No one would notice any difference.

  Everyone was old. Not geriatric, not even middle aged, but older than I expected. They were five years older than me, at least, and they were acting like teenagers. Making out for the benefit of an audience, smoking from comically oversized bongs, chugging beer from kegs.

  Life had stained them, they’d been pummeled by the disappointments of their scant years, as if they knew their injuries would never mend. As if there was nothing but long decades spilling out. As if there’d been an unspoken group decision that the future could be confronted only through a descent into the banality of petite nihilism.