American Spirit: A Novel (29 page)

Coda

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, around the ghost of a campfire in desperate need of being restoked, Matthew and Tic Tac sit just a few feet from the rig in chairs still damp and chilled from Yellowstone’s cruel overnight lows; Matthew notices the burn on top of Tic Tac’s hand and speaks up.

“Sorry your hand got burnt. Man… last night was amazing. It’s all pretty big, life, and, I don’t know… forces and… all of that. I’m still not sure what happened when Modoch was doing his thing up there.”

“Well, I’ll tell what the fuck was
supposed
to happen. I soaked a paper sack down with lighter fluid and put the block off an old chain saw in it. Then I cracked two traffic flares and poured the powder inside, put cordite in there, just wrapped it around the block and tied it off—which was
kind of a dipshit move on my part, since the load already had three sources of ignition. Anyway, what was supposed to fucking happen was, I would light the paper sack, it would ignite, I would wait for a count of, say, ten, until the magnesium in that block started to fucking go, and then I would chuck a big fucking white fireball into the sky so Modoch had his reply from the Great Spirit. But what happened was, I held the thing for a count of ten, the top of my hand got real motherfucking warm, and about four seconds later I realized I’m some fucking genius who runs into the woods in the middle of the night and sets his own Goddamn hand on fire. So the burn really comes on, I scream and throw the stupid bag, and it goes out in the air. So now what’s supposed to be this big-ass ball of white light is just some paper sack full of engine parts and shit, tumbling its sorry ass down that big rock face. Then it stops and just kind of lays there, like the Great Spirit is just some asshole who throws a sack of trash into the woods anytime he likes what he hears.”

“Right, well, but then…”

“But then, nothing. But then I’m standing back there with what’s left of a cold beer, pouring the fucking thing all over my hand, screaming my ass off.”

“It eventually caught, though. That’s what I wanted to tell you; there was eventually a big white flame from it,” Matthew tries to reassure him.

“Well, I wouldn’t know, because at that point I’m dancing around with my hand between my legs wondering why the fuck me and Daryl—or Motrin or whatever the fuck I’m supposed
to call him now—aren’t just sleeping on federal land under a tarp or table like usual; like we do every summer, instead of being mixed up with magical mystery bus and the fucking weekly medicine man show.”

“I really liked it. I think you guys are kind of on to something. At least you’re doing something good and trying to be a little better each day.” And as Matthew is saying this, Tic Tac seems to soften a little, staring down at the ashes at his feet in the fire pit.

“Well, I will say, that when it works right, it’s a pretty fucking sweet thing. It’s one of the few times I can feel a little… faith about things; feel like maybe I don’t know everything, and maybe there’s something bigger out there that does.”

“Yeah!” Matthew agrees maybe too enthusiastically.

“Even though I’m the guy setting off the fireworks and shit that’s supposed to be the bigger thing. So, I guess I’m kind of the guy behind the puppet show curtain who’s starting to believe in puppets.”

Modoch and Tim make their way out of the rig after a night’s sleep; drag a couple of chairs over to the ash pit. Tim points sleepily to the edge of the burn, to the remnants of a trout skin that didn’t get tossed all the way in.

“That’s the kind of shit that brings bears. Like when that guy had fucking bacon grease all over the place. And then a bear comes, and then I have to come out and handle it, and that’s when shit goes south like it did and I have rangers on my back. That’s the kind of thing that starts it; that right there.” Nobody really acknowledges the trout skin or makes
a move to kick it under the ashes or anything. To Modoch and Tic Tac, parklife is a lot of things, but it’s not a world where one has to swing Formica tabletops from an RV’s impromptu arsenal at bears who would be on their way anyway after a minute or two of sniffing around. Late-morning small talk commences around a fire barely smoldering with a few orange hot spots in the cool gray of it. The head is up and racing now, and it issues the subtext of manly talk in foreign film subtitles on the lower third of the screen in this moment of three men talking.

“You gotta worry less about bears,” Tic Tac says.

WE ARE HERE AND GONE IN A FLASH.

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO PREVENT.

“The bear market in lower Manhattan, the bear in lower Montana. Fuck ’em both, they’re dealing with a white-hot laser; my plane, bitches, and it looks like we’re gonna be in the Hudson. La-ser beam,” Tim says, pointing to his forehead with three syllabic jabs.

FEAR HAS GOVERNED ME. I GET BY ON LUCK.

IT IS TERRIFYING.

Matthew laughs gamely, giving Tim a sporting nod.

I AM TERRIFIED, TOO. MAYBE I STOPPED GROWING AT AGE NINE.

Tic Tac thinks about what Tim said, regards Tim, Matthew, and Modoch/Crazy Daryl Acid, shaking his head upon
the survey of his surroundings and says, “I can’t imagine any of you motherfuckers would know how to focus a laser beam if you did have access to one.”

I CAN’T IMAGINE ANY OF YOU MOTHERFUCKERS WOULD KNOW HOW TO FOCUS A LASER BEAM IF YOU HAD ONE.

The conversation recedes and the subtitles fade. Tim mashes a nest for his coffee mug into a small, orange hot spot in the ashes of last night’s fire in order to warm it up—even though it was made in a microwave oven, in a kitchen of finished dark cherry wood and stainless steel parked just feet away. In the silence, Matthew’s head issues the standard litany of questions, but today, for some reason, there are answers. A new system! The system seems to be this: Issue answers to the questions, no matter how convenient, if only for the sake of having some.

Q:
How long can one continue to run?

A:
A lifetime if that’s what one wants.

Q:
Why do we continue to struggle?

A:
Because the least likely of days are wrought with small pleasures; moments or sights so small and sublime, accidentally hard-won, unpredictably forged, these pleasures and ideas and surprise endings. And on the days none of that occurs, there are the comforts of sex or loneliness, and cigarettes, and documentaries about the willy-nilly distribution of genius and the deadly rigors it comes with. If nothing else, the struggle is punctuated with billionaire idiots on television and the folly of singing contests packed with heartbreaking simpletons trying
to impress wealthy, faded pop stars, and magazines loaded up with cultural bankruptcy, all of it making one aware of the practically Greek or biblical myth we’re living in. To witness it at all is reason enough to continue on, really.

Q:
Will Tim just live here now, far from Wall Street, stuck between arrested development and a half-assed spiritual quest choreographed by two shoplifting hop-ons?

A:
No, he won’t. He will come to realize the music he has to face isn’t half as ominous as he thinks it is, he’ll face it, he’ll return to making a killing managing a medium-sized fund or maybe demote himself to being one of those who grift the barely solvent out of what little money they have by charging them for get-rich seminars in shitty hotel conference rooms in the broken, recessive cities they live in.

Q:
What will become of Modoch and Tic Tac and men like that?

A:
They are probably ghosts to begin with, having more fun in the real world than the mortals stuck in it.

Q:
Is Tim thinking the same kind of stuff at this very moment?

Tim farts, takes one beat, and says, “Woops, it’s about to smell like a Lehman Brothers ETF; hold your breath and count to ten, Chie… CHAMP.”

A:
Probably not.

Canyon to Canyon

D
AYS AND NIGHTS
go past the road and snakes its way south and west from Slough to Lamar to Yellowstone. Eventually, way back at town, the hook drops the Taurus and releases Matthew from the talon of this gang and groove. Night comes on like a summer breakup song far away from the highway Matthew is taking out of Montana and into Idaho. Somewhere way southwest of here, in California, in the Hollywood Hills, Tatiana’s house is reasonably packed for a party. The guests move in circles, like fish in schools. The first circle, the inner circle, they are a mix of faces one recognizes from movies and they’re schooled up with people one won’t recognize but for their money and clear influence over the people in movies. The next circle out from that, the circle generally to the outside of those faces, those are the
people who one recognizes but can’t quite place; day-players and bit parts in too many movies, maybe insult comics that seem to run on an endless loop on cable; roasts and prank shows that flicker in the background of daily living, often with the word
Mute
appearing in the lower-right corner of the screen; maybe in apartments where people are talking or in bars that have a TV hanging from the ceiling. Then there’s the circle outside of that, and those are the Remember When people—one has to look past the Hollywood hippie hair and weight to see the face that was on screens of varying size, say, a decade or so ago. All of the people in the first circle, the inner circle, they want to be loved—but what they don’t realize is that it’s hard for people to love you when you’re everywhere at once. The people in the next circle, they want to be missed; missed because they aren’t on screen long enough; missed so much that people demand to see more of them on the screen, but what they don’t realize is that nobody can miss you when you’re always popping up even if it’s just to say three lines—nobody can miss you until you’re gone. And the people in the far outside circle, the Remember When people, they want to be invited back into either of the other two circles, but what they don’t realize is that you can’t be invited when you keep asking if you can come.

All of these circles are in orbit around a fire pit out back, and ambling through a mess and maze of Tatiana’s inconspicuous wealth, they’re cornered (circle one) or breezing through (circles two and three) big lo-fi rooms that sprawl in a lazy meander; rooms that spill like a shallow waterfall of
bittersweet molasses taking years to settle over different levels and lips of canyon ledge. One level of the deck out back has been built to allow two big trees to continue growing up through it. There’s a gigantic solid table that was once a barn in Montauk or the teak casualty of a violent storm in former Burma, a ton if it weighs an ounce, as big as the swimming pool it points to, a long, skinny, dark horizon pool made to look more like a dark mirage, or brook, or long and narrow cold-water eddy. The table plants a long, thick, precise footprint that starts from the inside of the glass-and-redwood living room and lies right through doors built to close around it. Past the doors, the table continues on, like a long, skinny state, out onto a main section of deck that looks like the kind of place a coyote, or mountain lion, or the ghost of Jim Morrison might be spotted sneaking around if one were to stay up all night alone, smoking cigarettes in the warm Southern California air of jasmine, waiting for it to happen.

The anchors of the inner circle tonight are a gaggle of cute twenty-three-year-old guys with twenty-eight-inch waists who are Tatiana’s only foot left in the business of managing people instead of managing things. They are the vampires that have provided the commission on royalties that basically bought this house and probably the apartment in New York; dangerous vampires safe enough for ten or thirty or a hundred million girls to fall in love with on tiny screens dragged around in their backpacks and pockets or on whatever big screens girls still make their way to, from Sunrise Mall to Sunset Boulevard, from Venice to Venice, from Paris
to Lake Perris, and anywhere in between. On screen, this knot of cute mall-gothic bipedal leeches look for host bodies that will serve as the next blood meal, but at Tatiana’s house with another summer smash hit in front of them, they are the most polite and timid guests; the cautious current winners of the biggest West Coast lottery.

“You guys good? Everything okay?” she asks through the smile, eyes, lips, life-and-death curves, and corduroy-clad hips, all somehow turned beautifully big sister or mom in a moment like this, which bleeds them of their speed and danger and they reply all over each other.

“Hey!”

“Oh, yeah, thanks for… thanks.”

“Yeah, this is all so… yeah…”

And as twilight heads quietly into the night, there’s some talk with a man named Neil about making sure the boys are staying out of the sun and pale before the upcoming rounds to promote the new installment of the franchise. Neil is a man who looks naked not sitting in a black Range Rover; a man who looks unsure as to whether he’s talking to Tatiana or the little dipshit hands-free blue-flash-dead-tooth-jaw-squawk thing clipped to his ear. He’s dark, tall, thin, receding, and determined to never get old, or at least die trying to make time stand still for every client he needs to keep young. Maybe Tatiana is not the manager of this lot, but the impression is that she’s there in circle one, not recognizable, and so clearly has some piece of them some way or the other. Maybe she sold the film rights, maybe she licensed the merchandise,
maybe she owns the words
blood
and
vampire
and is paid a dime every time someone speaks them, but it’s something. One of the vampires is drinking from a coffee mug that says,
When the angry jerking about and spitting stops, the serenity starts.
This seems perfect for a vampire, assuming there’s some struggle in getting a host body to forfeit a blood meal. Neil, the tall, dark guy who looks like he’s running toward money and away from death, talks to Tatiana. Tatiana looks like she’d rather run away from money and toward death because of this.