I channeled all my chakras into those puppy dog eyes and amped the voltage up to eleven.
“For Christ’s sake,” said Tegan. “Fine.”
She relaxed her muscles, leaned her head back, and closed her eyes. The words poured out of her.
“I hope it was worth it. I hope that needle was the child you wanted. I hope it fills that thing inside of you. That empty place. You have one of those? I do. You should know. You made it. You shoveled it out with your own bare hands. You filled it with poison so nothing could ever grow there. So I hope that needle was the child you wanted. I hope it fills that thing inside of you. Take it, and shove it up your ass.”
Tegan opened her eyes.
“I call that one, ‘Fuck You, Bitch,’” she said.
“Oh,” I said. “I like it.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“No, it was really good. It has personality.”
“It has personality,” said Tegan, attempting to mimic my voice, but making it approximately one hundred percent stupider. Perhaps this was an excerpt from Cliff: The Movie, in which the titular role is played by Sesame Street’s very own Mr. Snuffleupagus. (He was the only candidate big enough and hairy enough to fit the role.) “Man, that’s just a nice way of saying it sucks.”
Tegan lowered her head, crossed her legs, and shoved her hands in her lap.
“Wanna see a picture of her?” she asked.
“Who?”
“The Queen of England,” she said. “My mom, dumb-ass!”
“Oh. Yeah, sure.”
Tegan pulled out her phone, navigating the menu with her finger. She didn’t have to scroll far. She scooted her butt right up next to mine, leaned into me, and angled the phone screen for me to see—a young woman with cat eyeliner and sharp ebony hair done in a beehive. She was either going for the ’60s or Amy Winehouse. A sleeveless dress exposed slender, tattooed arms and a pink bundle in her arms.
A baby.
Tegan.
“She looks happy, doesn’t she?” said Tegan.
She did look happy. She wasn’t smiling per se, but there was something serene—almost spiritual—in her gaze.
“This is what I hope for,” said Tegan. “This woman right here. I don’t know who she is, but she’s definitely not the junkie who up and leaves her own child. I want this woman back in my life—whoever she is.”
I nodded, but it was a ghost of a response. Because as I stared at this woman, this mother, cradling newborn Tegan in her arms, I realized something.
I had seen her before.
It was at Guns n’ More. I tagged along with Shane on one of his random excursions. He had a mild obsession with firearms, so this wasn’t a particularly unusual visit for him. Tegan’s mom was working the register. They seemed to know each other, complete with inside jokes that I didn’t get. Except Shane didn’t call her Bernadette.
What did he call her?
The last lines of Shane’s journal flashed across the retinas of my mind:
That was right about the time I heard about this cokehead, Birdy, who will do anything for her next hit. She works at Guns n’ More.
I told her that maybe I’d be able to get her some for the right price.
Holy shit. Tegan’s mom gave Shane the gun that he used to kill himself! How was I just now making this connection?
I looked at Tegan. At the pain she was feeling. There was no way I could tell her this. Not now, at least.
I decided it was time to take this thing to Phase 2.
“Wanna watch a movie?” I blurted out.
Tegan blinked and looked at me. “What?”
I responded by grabbing my backpack, unzipping it, and removing the portable DVD player and 2001: A Space Odyssey for her to see.
“It was Shane’s favorite movie,” I explained. When Tegan didn’t respond right away, I immediately felt kind of stupid and backtracked. “But it’s an old movie, and this is a gross, old building, so I totally understand if you don’t want to—”
“I would love to,” said Tegan.
I met her gaze. Everything in there said that she meant it.
We set up camp on the concrete lip—“camp” being the portable DVD player, and the DVD itself. What better place to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey than under the stars? They weren’t visible yet, but the sun had completely receded, shedding afterglow like a fluorescent shadow. Resting our backs against the wall, we leaned into each other with the DVD player propped on my lap.
I inserted the movie in the disk tray, pushed it in, and pressed Play.
On the surface, 2001: A Space Odyssey is an allegory of evolution and technology. And the message it conveys about both is slightly troubling.
The film is broken into three deliberately labeled parts.
THE DAWN OF MAN
This first part, beginning in the African desert, 4,000,000 BC, chronicles a tribe of ape-men as they encounter a towering black rectangle that has mysteriously appeared in their midst—the Monolith. This encounter marks an evolutionary stepping-stone. One of the ape-men discovers the first tool—the first weapon—when he happens upon the femur bone of a dead animal.
He bludgeons another ape-man to death.
In victory, he tosses the bone in the air, and suddenly, that bone becomes a spaceship and we are millions of years in the future in space. A group of scientists has discovered a Monolith on the moon, identical to the one the ape-men encountered.
Only this one is sending a signal somewhere.
JUPITER MISSION
Five astronauts—three in hypersleep—are on a top secret mission to Jupiter. It’s so secret, in fact, that no one really knows the purpose of their mission. No one except for the ship’s artificially intelligent supercomputer, HAL 9000. Unfortunately, HAL is faulty. First, he errs in predicting ship malfunctions. Then, when he senses mutiny from the crew, he becomes lethal. What follows is essentially a slasher movie in space. HAL succeeds in killing four of the five crew members. The fifth and final member—Dr. David Bowman—deactivates HAL’s core processor.
JUPITER AND BEYOND THE INFINITE
This is when things get weird. Bowman discovers the purpose of the mission. That signal the Monolith on the moon was sending? It was directed at Jupiter where yet another Monolith is detected, orbiting the planet.
Bowman takes a space pod and goes in for a closer look.
What happens next could best be described as an acid trip. It appears that Bowman has been pulled into some sort of psychedelic wormhole—lights and colors, shapes and symbols, ejaculating from the Prism of the Universe in an electric neon glow. We witness the birth of worlds, stars, and galaxies. Drift across alien landscapes.
Suddenly, Bowman finds himself in a neoclassic-style bedroom. Time becomes a shadow as Bowman sees—and then becomes—older versions of himself.
Middle-aged.
An old man.
Lying on his deathbed.
And then he becomes something else.
“A space baby?!” said Tegan. She stared at the miniature screen, slack-jawed, as the end credits scrolled. Then she looked at me. “He turned into a giant, floating SPACE BABY?”
That was, in a sense, what Bowman had become—a glowing fetus of questionable size, encased in a transparent orb, drifting alongside planet Earth, as if observing it.
According to Shane and the vast 2001 mythos, this “giant floating space baby” had a name: the Star Child. But I felt stupid to point this out to Tegan. So instead, I shrugged.
“Or something,” I said.
“I dunno, man. I can handle some weird shit. But I can’t handle no effin’ space baby.”
“Why not?”
“Why not? He’s a space baby! What’s that even supposed to mean?”
I bit my lip contemplatively. Again, the surface-level interpretation seemed to be a cautionary tale about evolution and technology. That whether it was a bone or a sentient supercomputer, technology in desperate hands resulted in violence and death. The tru
ly disturbing thing was that both the ape-man and HAL 9000 became capable of killing because they had evolved into something more human than what they previously were.
But then there was Bowman—a human—who became something else. He overcame death, yes. But had he overcome something far greater?
I thought of what Hideo said. His crazy words were Plinko chips bouncing down the pegs of my mind to the center of my consciousness—plink, plink, plink!
It’s about evolution.
It’s about what’s next for mankind.
It’s about transcendence.
Becoming God.
Or, at least, becoming more than man.
“We’re meant to become more than what we are,” I said.
“More than what we are?” Tegan seemed to test the words on her tongue. Then her face scrunched, rejecting the taste. “What does that mean?”
What did that mean? Even I didn’t know.
I walked Tegan home after the movie. Made the trek home, alone and on foot, in the breathlessness of night. By the time I reached Arcadia Park, most of the trailers had their lights out. Only a select few were still lit, the insomniacs and the jobless, serving to light my shadowy path.
And then I froze—a solid twenty feet from my house—because there was something on my doorstep. Again.
It wasn’t a journal though. Not even close. It was big, and human shaped, and alive.
“Hey,” said Aaron.
He was just sitting there, hands on his knees, chilling.
I let out the longest breath of my life. My hand was on my chest like I was going to give the Pledge of Allegiance of the century.
“Jesus Harvey Christ!” I said. “What are you doing?”
“Sorry.” Aaron bumbled to his feet. His awkwardness was on point. “I should have called first. I just didn’t know what to say.”
Didn’t know what to say? After my last encounter with Aaron, there wasn’t a thing he left unsaid.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
The sad look on my face probably said way too much.
Aaron sighed. “Look. I said a lot of things the other day that I shouldn’t have said. Shitty, horrible things. I wish I could take it all back. It’s just…I was in a bad place. The fight with Lacey was bad. Being cut from the football team was bad. Being told I can’t do anything physically risky again—possibly ever—was bad. Is bad. I’m still trying to wrap my brain around that one. But still—none of that compared to realizing the List might be bullshit. It made me realize that the List—of all things!—is the closest I’ve ever come to having a purpose. And suddenly, that purpose was taken from me, and I didn’t even know what was real anymore, and I…Anyway. I’m sorry. I was a dick.”
“You were a dick,” I said.
Aaron’s pursed his lips solemnly.
“A rock-hard dick,” I said.
The corners of his mouth formed a smile.
“Ejaculating with all sorts of dick moves,” I said.
Aaron laughed. “I’ve missed your jokes, man.”
“I missed you,” I said—probably a little too intensely. But I meant it.
“I missed you too, Cliff.”
We were silent for a moment. In that moment, I felt an itch on the back of my tongue. It wormed its way out of my mouth.
“I need to show you something.”
“Show me something?” said Aaron. “What?”
“I could tell you,” I said, “but I think it’d be better if you saw it for yourself.”
I pulled off my backpack, unzipped it, and shuffled through the contents. Beneath the textbooks and notebooks, the portable DVD player and 2001: A Space Odyssey, I unearthed a small black journal. I handed it to Aaron.
“Read this,” I said.
“What is it?”
“Just read it.”
It wasn’t until seconds later that I realized I had tasked Aaron to read a handwritten journal in a barely lit trailer park in the middle of the goddamn night. But Aaron didn’t take my request lightly. He pulled his phone out, held the lit screen over the first page of the journal, and read. His eyes widened at Property of Shane Hubbard. From there, his eyes were like the phases of the moon, growing wider and wider until they were complete circles.
“What is this?” said Aaron.
“Did you finish reading?” I asked.
“No, but—”
“Keep reading.”
Aaron took a large bite of his bottom lip and kept reading. Turned the page. I watched his eyes, bouncing from side to side like synchronized Ping-Pong balls. At last, he blinked.
“Did you read it?” I asked.
Aaron looked at me with a cloudy gaze, like someone in the fluttery moments of waking, struggling to separate dream from reality. “Where did this come from? Have you had this all along?”
“What? No. Are you kidding me, Aaron? I told you about this.”
“Mmmmmmmhhh, no.” Aaron shook his head, lips compressed. “You definitely never told me this. I would remember that conversation: Hey, Aaron, did you know that HAL was actually my brother and his secret girlfriend?”
“I tried to tell you, dick-skin. But you went all It always comes back to Shane, doesn’t it? on me.” My Aaron impersonation was spot-on.
Aaron’s eyes swelled as the pieces clicked together. “Shit. That’s what you were saying?”
My mouth flattened into the straightest line ever formed. “Yes, Aaron. That is what I was saying.”
“So…where did it come from?”
“That’s a great question. I have no idea.”
“You don’t?”
“It just showed up on my doorstep.”
Aaron blinked incredulously. “It just showed up.”
“Yes.”
“On your doorstep.”
“Yes.”
“Meaning that Hal needs to be found…and possibly stopped.”
“Reminds you of something, doesn’t it?”
“Holy shit,” said Aaron. His already big eyes got even bigger. “The List isn’t bullshit!”
“Hells yeah, it isn’t!”
“I’m not crazy!”
“Well, that’s debatable.”
Aaron punched me in the shoulder, but he was smiling—so much, so hard, so intensely, it was contagious. Had more people been in the immediate vicinity, it would have been a pandemic. But as it was, only I was infected.
I was practically smiling myself to death.
The first thing you realize when you hit rock bottom is that there’s actually no such thing as rock bottom. Rock bottom indicates that there is a limit to the shit that can happen to a person, and once you hit that limit, then the Magic Shit Gnomes who are employed by the Shit Distribution Factory of Life have to push a button that ceases shit production.
But that’s just silly.
What Aaron and I had experienced was merely a synchronized low. We shared the same destiny, after all. The beautiful thing was how much room there was to go up!
One thing, however, was abundantly clear. In order to move forward with the List, we had to have our shit together.
Aaron had to have his shit together.
Just to be clear, Aaron came to this conclusion of his own volition. That’s why, directly after school, we drove to Lacey’s house.
I was there for emotional support. And to make sure that Aaron didn’t wuss out.
When Aaron shut the engine off, the silence was vast and heavy—like the entire Pacific Ocean, perceived from the bottom of the Marianas Trench. Seriously, the pressure should have killed us. Aaron appeared to be dying, at least. His jaw was tense, his throat was constricted, and his complexion was cadaverous. He looked anemic at best.
“We don’t have to do this,” I said.
“We don’t,” said Aaron. “I do.”
Aaron exited the car, walked stiffly up to the door, and knocked.
Lacey answered.
Now I had fully intended to give Aaron his privacy
while he made impossible amends with his past. But now that he was face-to-face with his greatest fear, and Lacey looked like she had opened the door to Satan, I was just too damn curious.
I manually rolled down my window—just a crack.
I couldn’t hear everything Aaron said, but I caught enough of the highlights to compose an informative bullet-point list:
• I’m sorry.
• I’ve been the absolute worst to you.
• I don’t know how to undo all the hurt I’ve caused you—I probably can’t—but I want you to know that I hate myself for what I did.
• I don’t expect you to forgive me, but I hope you—
That was as far as Aaron got on the fourth bullet point before Lacey assaulted him in a fierce hug.
It was in that moment that I realized something about human beings: We always care. Even when we don’t care, or we don’t want to care, or we’ve been broken beyond the capability of caring…
We always do. It’s our ultimate infallibility.
Aaron got permission from Mr. and Mrs. Zimmerman for me to stay the night again. We were going to figure the shit out of this List.
So naturally, we kicked things off with the continuation of our Tarantino marathon.
Aaron and I breezed through Jackie Brown. And because the night was young, and we were unstoppable, and Quentin Tarantino was life, we popped in Kill Bill Vol. 1.
The film opened to a black frame and labored breathing. And then a man’s voice:
“Do you find me sadistic?”
The camera panned to Uma Thurman—aka the Bride—lying bloody on the floor after receiving a severe spaghetti-western-style ass-kicking. A powerful hand with a handkerchief entered the scene, wiping her face. An Old Testament god, merciful and vengeful. A name was sewn on the corner of the handkerchief—the titular Bill.
“Best. Revenge film. Ever,” I said.
“Tru dat, broseph,” said Aaron.
“I bet I could fry an egg on your head about now, if I wanted to,” said Bill.
“You know, the Bride has a List too,” I said, observationally. “Or she will. Shortly. After this bastard tries to kill her and fails catastrophically.”
Aaron rolled his eyes. “Yeah, okay, man.”
Neanderthal Opens the Door to the Universe Page 20
