John Dies at the End

by David Wong

  The crowd muttered its indifference. Head hammered the drums for the intro to “Camel Holocaust.” I slung the guitar around and got ready to rock.

  Suddenly, my whole body wrenched in a display of unbearable pain, knees buckling. My hands shot to my head and I collapsed to the stage, screaming like a wounded animal. I scraped the guitar strings to throw out some painful, spastic feedback on my way down. The crowd gasped, watching as I flew into a series of exaggerated convulsions, then finally lay still.

  Munch rushed over, studied me like a paramedic. I lay there like a dead man. He touched my neck, then stood and turned to the mic.

  “He’s dead, ladies and gentlemen.”

  A rustling, drunken panic in the crowd.

  “Wait. Please, please. Everyone. Pay attention. Just calm down.”

  He waited for quiet.

  “Now,” he said. “We have a whole show to do. Is there anyone here who knows how to sing and play guitar?”

  A tall man stepped out of the crowd, a head of curly long hair like a deflated afro. This was John. He wore an orange T-shirt with a black stenciled stamp bearing the logo of VISTA PINES FACILITY FOR THE CRIMINALLY INSANE. The last two words had been crossed out with a black Magic Marker and the words NOT INSAN were scrawled crazily over it. The whole shirt, logo and all, was John’s handiwork.

  “Well,” John said, in a fake Southern accent, “I reckon I can play a little.”

  Kelly, according to script, invited him onto the stage. John pried the guitar out of my dead hands while Head and Wally dragged me carelessly off into the grass. John picked up the instrument and tore into the “Camel Holocaust” intro. Three-Arm Sally began every single show this way.

  “ I knew a man

  No, I made that part up

  Hair! Hair! Haaairrr!

  Camel Holocaust! Camel Holocaust!”

  That whole bit was something John had come up with, the man having a terrible habit of carrying out his drunken 3:00 A.M. ideas even after daylight and sobriety came. It was always 3:00 A.M. for John.

  I turned onto my back and stared into the night sky. That’s what I remember, from that last moment of real peace in my life. The rain had ended hours ago, the stars freshly cleaned and polished against their black velvet background. The music thrummed through the ground and the cool moisture of the grass soaked up through my sweatshirt as I gazed into the twinkling jewels of infinity, all spit-shined by God’s shirtsleeve. And then the dog barked and everything turned to goat shit.

  It was rusty red, maybe an Irish setter or a red Labrador or a . . . Scottish rust-dog. I don’t know my dogs. Ten feet of thin chain trailed off its collar. Bounding around the partygoers, a bundle of manic canine energy, drunk on the first freedom of its life.

  It squatted and peed on the grass, ran over to another spot and peed there, too. Marking this whole new world as its territory. It came toward me at a trot, the chain hissing through the grass behind it. It sniffed around my shoes, decided I was dead, I guess, and began snuffling around my pockets to see if I had died with any beef jerky on me.

  It recoiled when I reached up to pet it, a catty “don’t touch the hair” look on its face.

  A brass tag, on its collar.

  Etched with a message.

  I’M MOLLY.

  PLEASE RETURN ME TO . . .

  . . . with an address in Undisclosed listed below. At least seven miles from home. I wondered how long it had taken the animal to etch that tag.

  The dog, having nothing else to gain from our relationship, trotted away. I followed it, deciding on the spot that I would load up the dog and return it to the owners, who were probably worried sick about it. Probably a family with a little girl, crying her eyes out waiting for it to come back.

  Or, a couple of sorority girls dealing with their grief through a series of erotic massages . . .

  It’s hard to look cool chasing after a dog, especially since I sort of run like a girl anyway. The dog pitched annoyed glances back my way as I trotted after it, picking up speed each time. I wound up taking a circuitous path all the way to the other side of the field, where I heard something that turned my guts cold.

  A shriek. High-pitched, almost a whistle. Only two creatures on God’s Earth can make that sound: African Grey Parrots and fifteen-year-old female humans. I spun around, moved toward the commotion. The dog seemed to eye me carefully, then ran off in the other direction. I looked around—

  Ah. Giggling now. There was a bundle of girls, away from the stage, huddled with their backs to the band. They were surrounding a black guy with dreadlocks, an overcoat. He had one of those Rastafarian berets on his head, definitely going for a look, wanting the attention. Two of the girls had their hands over their mouths, eyes bulging, screaming for the guy to do it again, do it again. From the reaction I figured I had just encountered the most dreaded of all partygoers: the amateur magician.

  “Oh my gawd!” said the nearest girl. “That guy just levitated!”

  One girl looked pale, on the verge of tears. Another threw up her hands and walked away, head shaking.

  Gullibility is a knife at the throat of civilization.

  “How high?” I asked blandly.

  The Jamaican turned his gaze on me, trying to pull off the piercing stare of the exotic voodoo priest. It was an expression that was supposed to make me hear theremin music in my head.

  “You gotta love the skeptic, mon,” the guy said in a rubber accent that was part Jamaican, part Irish and part pirate.

  “Show him! Show him!” screeched a couple of the girls.

  I’m not sure why I feel the need to rain on this kind of parade. I like to think I’m standing up for skepticism but in reality I was probably just pissed that this guy was going to have sex tonight and I wasn’t.

  “What, about six inches above the grass, right?” I asked him. “Balducci levitation? Made famous by magic hack David Blaine in his television special? All you need is some strong ankles and a little acting, right?”

  And a stupid, drunken audience . . .

  His gaze froze on me. I had a familiar, nervous sensation, one that goes all the way back to elementary school. It’s the simultaneous realization that I may have talked my way into another fistfight, and that I had not spent any time learning to fight since the last one. In a town where Friday night bar brawls make the Undisclosed emergency room look like the aftermath of a Third World election, sometimes it’s better for smart-asses like me to just keep walking.

  Then, he broke out in a big, white, toothy smile. A charmer.

  “Let’s see . . . what can I do to impress Mr. Skeptic Mon? Ah, lookee there. You didn’t wash behind your ears, did ya?”

  I let out a loud, theatrical sigh as he reached out to the side of my head, presumably to pull out a shiny quarter from behind my ear. But when he pulled back his hand, he was holding, not a coin, but a long, wriggling black centipede. He let it dangle over his fist, turning his hand over as it crawled around and around. One of the girls squealed.

  He pinched it between thumb and forefinger, held the wriggling thing up for everyone to see. I noticed for the first time he had a few layers of first-aid tape wrapped around his other hand. He passed this hand in front of the bug and in a blink, the centipede was gone. The girls gasped.

  “Well, the bug was a nice touch,” I said, glancing at my watch.

  “You wanna know where it went, mon?”

  “No.” I wasn’t feeling well all of a sudden. This guy was giving me an odd feeling in my gut. “But, you know, don’t get me wrong. I am one entertained son of a bitch.”

  “I got other talents, you know.”

  “Yeah, but I bet all your really good tricks are back at your apartment, right? And you’d be happy to show them to me, if only I were sixteen and female?”

  “Do you dream, mon? I interpret dreams for beer.”

  That’s the town of Undisclosed in a nutshell. This run-down half city with more weirdos per capita than you’ll find any
where outside of San Francisco. We should have that printed on the green population sign coming into town: WELCOME TO [UNDISCLOSED]. DREAMS INTERPRETED FOR BEER.

  I said, “Well, I don’t have any beer so I guess I’m outta luck.”

  “I tell you what, Mr. Skeptic Mon. I’ll do it just like Daniel in the Old Testament. I’ll tell you the last dream you had, then I’ll break down its meaning for you. But if I’m right, you gotta buy me a beer. Okay, mon?”

  “Sure. I mean, you’ve obviously been blessed with supernatural gifts. What better way to use them than to fish for free beers at parties.” I craned my head around, and thought I saw the dog trotting around a tent where somebody was selling corn dogs. I told my feet to turn and walk after it. I commanded my mouth to tell this guy “never mind.” Neither responded.

  I knew that absolutely nothing good could possibly come from this encounter and, somehow, that a whole lot of bad could come instead. But my feet were planted.

  “You had a dream early this morning, in the middle of the thunderstorm.”

  I looked him in the eye.

  Pfft. Lucky guess . . .

  “In the dream, you were back with your girl Tina . . .”

  Whoa, how’d he know—

  “—and you come home, and she’s there with a big honkin’ pile of dynamite. One of those big cartoon plunger detonators, ready to blow. You ask her what she’s doin’ and she says ‘this’ and shoves down the handle and,” he spread his hands in the air, “boom. Your eyes snapped open. The explosion in your dream became the clap of thunder outside your window. So tell me, mon. Am I close?”

  Ho. Lee. She. It.

  He smiled. All eyes were on me, the naked shock on my face. A girl whispered, “Oh my God . . .”

  There is no feeling I hate as much as speechlessness in the face of another man. I mumbled something.

  One of the girls muttered, “Was he right? He was right, wasn’t he?”

  A raven-haired girl next to her wearing raccoon eye shadow suddenly looked like she had been drained by a vampire. The group had unconsciously taken a step or two backward, as if there was some kind of safe distance at which the world would start making sense again.

  “The look on his face tells me I was right,” he said, through a grin. “Wouldn’t you say, girls? But wait, there’s more.”

  I wanted to walk away. Up on the pallet stage behind me John was tearing away the solo that marks the end of “Camel Holocaust,” rapping some impromptu lyrics, all over the cacophonous drums of Head “the entire show is one big drum solo in my mind” Feingold, and the band’s thunderous triple-threat bass. I’ve been to a lot of concerts, everything from garage bands to Pearl Jam. Maybe my opinion is biased, but I would have to say that Three-Arm Sally is the shittiest band I’ve ever heard.

  “You can guess the meaning of the dream, mon. The girl layin’ in wait for you, ready to wreck your world again. But the dream be tryin’ to tell you somethin’ else, too. The dream be tryin’ to warn you, givin’ you a demonstration.”

  “Okay, okay, okay,” I said, holding up my hands. “You made a lucky guess, somebody probably told you about—”

  “You see, you gotta be brave to ask yourself the scary questions. How did your mind, David, know the thunder was coming?”

  Thunder? What? Get away from this guy, man. Get away get away—

  “What? You’re full of—”

  “The thunder came right as she hit the detonator in your dream. Your mind started the dream thirty seconds before the thunderclap. How did it know the thunder would be coming at that moment, to coincide with the explosion at the end?”

  Because it’s a poor sort of memory that only works backward, I thought, crazily. Holy shit I’m quoting Alice in Wonderland. This is the worst fucking party ever.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. This, this is bullshit.” I was looking everywhere but at the Jamaican, suddenly terrified that I’d see him floating a foot off the grass. The girls were tittering to each other in amazement, a story to tell in the hallway Monday. Screw them. Screw everybody. But the bastard just wouldn’t stop talking.

  “We’ve all had those dreams, mon. You dream you’re on a game show, on TV wearin’ nothing but a jockstrap. At the exact moment the game show buzzer goes off to tell you you’ve lost, the telephone buzzes in real life. A call your mind couldn’t have known was coming. You see, time is an ocean, not a garden hose. Space is a puff of smoke, a wisp of cloud. Your mind is a—”

  “—What ever. Whatever.”

  I turned away, shaking my head, my mouth dry.

  Walk away, walk away. This ain’t right, you know it. You want no part of this guy.

  Onstage, John was now crooning the slow, mournful dirge that was “Gay Superman.”

  “The camel of despair

  soars, strapped to his jet pack

  of haunted memories . . .”

  “Want me to tell you where your daddy really was when you were in the hospital with that broken leg?” he said to my back. This stopped me, my guts turning to ice again. “Want me to tell you the name of your soul mate? Or how she’ll die?”

  “Stop, or I’ll tell you how you’ll die”—that’s what I wanted to say but didn’t.

  I walked away, forcing the steps. It was that jarring sensation of unreality, like the first time you see the road go spinning around your windshield in the middle of a car crash. I was actually dizzy, unsteady on my feet.

  “Do you want to know when the first nuclear bomb will go off on American soil? And which city?”

  I almost launched myself at the guy. But, once again a probable trip to the hospital was avoided by physical cowardice. This guy could probably kick my ass even without magical powers. I was so wired at this point I had the insane urge to punch one of those girls instead. Probably lose that fight, too.

  “You know what, mon, why don’t you take your fake Jamaican accent and get back on the boat to Fake Jamaica,” is another thing it would have been cool to say, had I thought of it. Instead I sort of mumbled and made a dismissive motion with my hand as I stumbled into the crowd, acting like the conversation failed to hold my interest.

  “Hey!” he shouted after me. “You owe me a beer, mon! Hey!”

  Gypsies and psychics and Tarot readers have a hundred generations of practice at their art. And practice is all it is. Cold reading, wishful thinking, deductive reasoning. Throw out some general statement that could apply to any person on this Earth—

  “I’m sensing that something is troubling you.”

  “You’re amazing! Yes, it’s my husband . . .”

  —and the mark tells you the rest. But the fake Jamaican had no way of knowing what he knew. No possible way. I watched my shoes mash through the weeds. This man had just ruptured the thin fabric of all I believed to be—

  I walked right into a girl, broadsided her, felled her like a tree. I saw, to my horror, that it was Jennifer Lopez.

  YOU KNOW HOW to tell if you’ve been single too long? When you help a girl to her feet and get a rush of excitement for the two seconds you hold her hand on the way up.

  “Jeez, sorry,” I said as Jennifer picked up her beer bottle. “I was walking away from, uh, you know, voodoo. Thing. Flying voodoo man.”

  She was in denim shorts and a tank top, hair in a ponytail. I guess I should point out that this was not the famous Jennifer Lopez, but rather a local girl I was fond of who happened to have that same name. I guess it would have made a better story if it turned out to be the singer/actress and if you want to picture J. Lo whenever I mention this girl, feel free, even though my Jennifer only looked like the famous one when she was walking away from you.

  She worked as a cashier at Home Depot these days and I made it a point to show up in her lane buying the manliest items in the store. In my apartment I now had an ax, three bags of cement mix and three different crowbars. On the last visit I bought a ten-pound sledgehammer and, looking disappointed, asked her if they had a bigger one. She didn’t
answer, not even to count back my change.

  As she brushed grass clippings off her butt I felt the intense urge to reach over and help her. I managed to restrain myself.

  Holy crap, there is no mood-changing substance on Earth like testosterone.

  “I’m really, really sorry. You okay?”

  “Yeah. Spilled my Zima a little, but . . .”

  “What are you doin’ here?”

  “Just, you know. Party.” She gestured vaguely with her hand at the crowd and music. “Well, good seein’ ya . . .”

  She’s walking away! Say something!

  “I’m, uh, here with the band,” I said, following her while using the most casual, non-following stride I had in my walking repertoire. She glanced up at the band, then back at me.

  “You know they started playing without you, right?”

  “No, I don’t, like, play an instrument or anything. I’m just . . . well, you saw me at the beginning there. I was the guy that fell down and died.”

  “Well, I just got here.” She walked a little faster.

  She’s getting away! Tackle her!

  “Well,” I said after her, “I’ll see you around.”

  She didn’t answer, and I watched her walk away. Intently.

  She met up with some blond kid in droopy pants, a sideways ball cap and a band T-shirt. The whole sequence depressed me so much I didn’t think about the floating Jamaican again until . . .

  THREE HOURS LATER, John and the crew were packing their scratched equipment into a white van with the words FAT JACKSON’S FLAP WAGON spray-painted on the side. That was the name of the band before they changed it a few months ago.

  “Dave!” said John. “Look! Can you believe how much sweat I have on this shirt?”

  “That’s . . . somethin’,” I said.