Channel Blue (28 page)

Since that day, he’d rarely worn a hat, let alone a mask.

Normally, memories such as these made it impossible for him to enjoy his homecoming. Today, however, they amused him. After all, they were all part of a long-running comedy. And when your show is coming to the end of its run, what else can you do but replay the unforgettable moments?

His parents were shocked to see him, beyond the fact that he was shoeless and drunk and hadn’t bothered to let them know he was coming. They naturally suspected that some terrible predicament had motivated his arrival, which of course was true. But Perry presented the visit as a lark, a spur-of-the-moment chance to catch up with his family. ‘Life is too short to be out of touch,’ he was shocked to hear himself say.

There were no surprises: His mother wept and smothered him in a wet embrace, his father smiled and disappeared into the garage where a fence post on the lathe needed attention. But again, none of this bothered Perry. He felt strangely non-judgemental of his parents. For the first time in his life, he saw them for who they were without taking their eccentricities personally. In fact, he found himself rather enjoying his mother’s operatic emotionality and his father’s autistic-like remoteness, as if his parents were characters in a familiar play. Because he no longer nursed any expectations of satisfactory interactions with them, he actually engaged in enjoyable small talk with his mother and profound conversations with his father.

He accepted everything completely because nothing was going to get any better – this was the way it was going to be.

The Earth’s final days wound down in a happy haze. While the ‘situation in the Middle East’ continued to spiral out of control – the Russian army had invaded Pakistan, God knows why – Perry slept ten hours a day and let his mother stuff him with comfort food. No flies, blue or otherwise, buzzed around him, and no suspicious strangers asked for his help. He walked alone through brilliant orange leaves and read a dusty volume of Herodotus he found on a bookshelf in the living room. He stood in his parents’ kitchen with a long sharp knife and sliced a Pink Lady apple, purchased from a nearby farm stand.
It might be the last thing I’ll ever eat
, he thought, sliding cool tart wedges into his mouth. It was like nothing he’d ever tasted before, this ultimate apple. Every bite might be his last, so every bite became the best bite ever.

Maybe this was what it took to be happy, he thought one morning, sitting in the backyard watching a crow soar above the brown razed cornfields. If only he’d spent more of his life with the world about to end.

One evening, Perry wandered into town and stopped at a bar for a beer. Darlene Brickton took his order. Tall and blonde, Darlene had been the hottest girl in his high school class and, to Perry’s eyes, hadn’t change that much. It was as if the high school cheerleader had been freeze-dried into a barmaid – she had lost the succulence of her quintessence but was still ravishing.

They struck up a pleasant conversation, which would have been impossible if Perry hadn’t known the world was ending. Even after all these years, he would’ve been too intimidated. No longer. Darlene didn’t remember him, of course, but like most popular people, took it on faith that Perry had known her. She told him that she’d been married twice – no kids ‘thank God’ – and was back in town, working at the bar until she figured out the next step. ‘That’s something no one has to worry about,’ Perry wanted to say, but couldn’t work out how to say it without sounding like a hippy, a nut or a creep.

Darlene talked about watching all her friends from school become their parents ‘without so much as a fight’. She didn’t want that happening to her.

‘You know what?’ Perry said. ‘I know this for a fact: it’s not going to happen.’ Darlene smiled at him, touched by his confidence. Of course, he didn’t go on to tell her that no one was going to have a chance to turn into anything other than space dust.

After Darlene had brought him a couple beers, the second one on the house ‘for old times’ sake’, Mitch Thalmer entered the bar. Back in high school, Mitch had been the quarterback of the Titans and the scourge of students like Perry, whom Mitch made a point of torturing when he wasn’t busy enjoying the fruits of his immense popularity.

Perry winced involuntarily, thinking of the slaps across the face dealt during the daily re-enactment of
Lord of the Flies
that was called ‘gym’, now known to Perry as Channel Blue’s worst show ever. He and Mitch had definitely done their parts to entertain the galaxy.

Perry was inordinately pleased to see that Mitch was now fat and bald, not to mention drunk. The former football star coerced a beer from the bartender and swigged it while turning his broad sweaty face up to the TV. He demanded that the channel be switched to sports, and Darlene had to explain, several times, that even the sports networks were tuned into the escalating crisis in the Middle East.

‘Who cares about that?’ Mitch said loudly enough for everyone in the bar to hear. ‘I hope they all kill each other. It doesn’t affect me any.’

‘That’s true,’ Perry said, amazed to find himself speaking his thoughts aloud. ‘You’re a piece of shit now. In a few days, you’ll just be a dead piece of shit.’

Mitch’s head pivoted to Perry’s table and the drunk man’s legs, as if on automatic pilot, staggered towards it while the large hands at his sides curled into squab-sized fists. He shuffled to a stop in front of Perry’s chair, breathing audibly through his nose. ‘What the fuck did you just say?’

Perry was more than happy to repeat himself. Exhibiting quick reflexes for so drunk and fat a man, Mitch pulled one hulking fist back and hit Perry squarely in the mouth. For a moment, Perry did nothing. In fact, other than the blood oozing from his upper lip, his expression barely changed. Then, very deliberately, he stood and stared at Mitch, who towered over him.

And he smiled.

It turns out that knowledge of the world’s imminent demise gives you a decided advantage in a bar fight. So much of fighting turns on the fear, or lack thereof, that results from that first punch. When Perry, his lip bleeding, smiled at Mitch, the large man had lost the fight, even though Perry hadn’t thrown a punch. In fact, it was Mitch who threw the second punch as well, but was so discombobulated by Perry’s reaction to his first that he swung wildly and missed. Before he could regain his balance, Perry gave him a shove and Mitch fell, banging his head on the foot of a barstool.

It really wasn’t clear how much of the former quarterback there was until he lay knocked out on the floor, sprawled like a vast continent on a dark-green sea of linoleum. Patrons were forced to circumnavigate Mitch to buy a drink or use the toilet. Eventually, the bartender revived him with a splash of cold water. Perry helped lift the large dazed man and get him into a cab.

‘Thank you,’ Darlene said. ‘He’s been coming in here and driving me crazy for weeks. Maybe this’ll give him pause.’ Whenever someone used the phrase ‘give him pause’, Perry thought about someone being given paws. In this case, he imagined Mitch Thalmer in the back of the cab with large cat paws, which made him smile. Darlene interpreted this smile as more proof that Perry was the coolest guy in the world and invited him to walk her to her car.

Later that night, Perry found himself on Darlene Brickton’s couch, passionately making out with the former cheerleader. He vacillated between intense desire and great awe that the subject of so many fantasies was now literally (yes,
literally
) in his grasp. But when he gingerly swept a hand up under her blouse, she pulled back. ‘So... it must be nice, living in LA,’ she said.

‘It’s not that great,’ Perry said. He leaned forward to resume their explorations, but she continued to speak, confounding him.

‘When you were out there, did you hear about this guy they’re calling “The Buddy”?’

Perry wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly. ‘The what?’

‘“The Buddy”. I guess he was a homeless man who preached in some park in Los Angeles and started this whole religion. He told people that the Earth is being watched by aliens who’ve become sick of us, because we’re so selfish and violent. We have to become better people or they’ll destroy the planet. That’s supposedly what all this stuff in the Middle East is about.’ Perry stared at her with complete disbelief, which Darlene took as a judgement of her credibility. ‘I know, it sounds completely crazy. But after I heard about it on the radio, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.’

‘Huh,’ Perry said. ‘That is weird.’ He kissed her on the lips, but she now seemed distracted.
Great
, he thought. Somehow he’d managed to cock-block himself.

‘This is his picture.’ Darlene pulled a folded piece of paper from her jeans pocket and handed it to Perry. Perry unfolded it and saw a printout of a photo taken from a distance in St Jude’s Park. Perry’s face had been blown up into a jumble of pixels, which someone had then gone about Photo-shopping into something resembling a human. In the process, they’d turned Perry’s thinning hair into a flowing mane and his five-o’clock shadow into a beard. The photo didn’t resemble Perry so much as a young, demented Santa Claus.

Perry refolded the paper. ‘What happened to Buddy?’

‘They call him
The Buddy
,’ Darlene said. ‘It’s a sign of respect, I guess.’

Perry was yet again annoyed by the religious movement he’d inadvertently created. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘What happened to the Buddy?’

‘After he preached for two days, the police came and took him away. When his followers went to get him out of jail, he’d completely disappeared. They say the aliens didn’t like him telling the people on Earth what they were doing so they took him away.’

‘Do you actually believe all this?’

Darlene shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I’ve been reading about Buddyism on the internet and in some ways it makes complete sense. I mean, I don’t know if I believe in aliens and all that, but when I think about watching all the things that we do from outer space, it makes you want to become a better person.’

‘You know what I think?’ Perry said, setting aside his picture.

‘What?’

‘I think that if the Buddy were here, he’d want us to love each other and take care of each other right here, right now.’

Darlene smiled with recognition. ‘I think you’re right.’

‘It’s about living in the moment,’ Perry said, kissing her.

‘Yes,’ Darlene replied, kissing him back, once more com-pletely engaged. ‘Why not spend more time loving each other—’

‘It totally makes sense,’ Perry said between gasps of air. Darlene’s right hand reached down towards his crotch. ‘I love the Buddy!’ he blurted.

The next morning, when Perry woke up in a strange bed next to the hottest girl in the school, he thought for a moment that the world had ended and he was in heaven. Then he remembered the events of the previous night and was so filled with happiness that he couldn’t sleep anymore. He was even thrilled to have created a new religion, especially the fact that it was a religion that seemingly encouraged beautiful women to have sex with less attractive men. That was definitely something he could believe in. Careful not to wake Darlene, he dressed and slipped out of her parents’ house.

The morning was warm and he took a leisurely walk home, reflecting on his great turn of luck since Earth had begun its death throes. If Thomas Wolfe had gone home again with the knowledge that aliens would soon be ending the world, he would’ve found it not only possible but deeply gratifying. Perry had finally been able to become the cool, contented guy he knew himself to be deep inside simply by not caring anymore. It was that easy.

When he strolled through the front door of his parents’ house around noon, his mother hugged him and Perry didn’t even mind the intense guilt infliction that immediately resulted from his night away.

‘A girl came by to talk to you,’ she said, ‘and I didn’t even know when to tell her you’d be back.’

Perry frowned. ‘When did she come by?’

‘Just a few minutes ago. She said it was important so I told her she could wait. She’s out back.’

Perry sighed. Maybe he’d been too cavalier, leaving Darlene without so much as a note. How could she know that there wasn’t any point? He should apologise. He went out the back door and saw her standing at the edge of the property, gazing at the razed cornfields across the road. But as he neared her, he couldn’t help noticing that the girl wasn’t Darlene.

Amanda Mundo was standing in his parents’ garden.

They stood for a moment in silence, surveying the dead corn. ‘Looks like the world
will
have to end before I get rid of you,’ he said in a not-unfriendly way.

Amanda smiled at him. ‘Have fun last night?’

He felt the blood rush to his face. In all his end-of-the-world exultation, he’d forgotten that their cameras could still find him. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘she and I knew each other at school and—’

‘Save your breath,’ Amanda interrupted. ‘That’s not why I’m here.’

Perry couldn’t help feel disheartened by her seeming lack of jealousy. He also couldn’t help but be irritated by how happy he felt to see her. ‘I’m sorry about the way I stormed off the other day,’ he said. ‘I know you’re not as bad as the rest of them, but you were there and got all the blame.’

‘That’s not why I’m here either,’ she said. ‘I’m here because we have to get the show back on track.’

Just like that, the cool contentment Perry had cultivated since coming home gave way to irritation and anxiety. He took a deep breath, trying to regain his equilibrium. ‘We already had this conversation. There’s no point.’

‘There is now,’ Amanda said. ‘We’re doing the show.’

Perry took two steps away from her. ‘No, we aren’t. I don’t know where your glass elevator is, but go ahead, get back in it and tell Elvis and Marty and whoever else that it ain’t gonna happen!’

‘I don’t work for them anymore,’ Amanda said. ‘I quit the channel.’

Perry frowned suspiciously. ‘That doesn’t make any sense. You love your job.’

She took a slip of paper out of her pocket and handed it to Perry. ‘I had to fly here on an
airplane
. Full of Earthles. Economy. Would I put myself through that if I still worked for the channel?’