Future Imperfect (7 page)

“I’m Negative Woman.”

“Who?”

“From
Doom Patrol
. Comic book. She has to wear bandages, otherwise this black energy spirit can fly out of her body and wreak havoc.”

“I never read
Doom Patrol
.”

“From the sixties. What do you read?”

“Usually new stuff. Recent stuff. Really, I’m more into the art.”

“Oh. One of those.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, most people read comics for the story lines. The characters. They’re like soap operas, only with big pecs and fancy suits and the ability to shoot electricity from fingertips. Then there are the people into the indie zines that are just like these examinations of human failing and stuff. And there are people like you. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing at all,” she says, and I don’t believe a word of it. She adds, “Personally, I like the most messed-up characters. The ones with demons. With secret powers that they can barely control.”

“You that way? Have some sort of energy being inside you just itching to get out and tear the world apart?”

Vaux’s bandage face registers nothing. “Aren’t we all like that? All of us with this powerful person inside that we can hardly control but can’t ever really let out. The consequences would be too great.”

I shrug. “I’m not sure I do.”

Vaux laughs. “You just might have lost contact with him. Or her.”

“Her?”

Vaux laughs again. “Why not? Maybe you’ve got some out-of-control bitch deep inside you. Some hellacious chick who’s just rearing to break out and break hearts and bring the world to tears.”

“I don’t think I do.”

“That’s lame, Ade. Come on, be clever with me for a few minutes.”

I take another sip of my girl drink. “Technically,” I say, “I’m a superhero.”

“Technically?”

“Yeah. Totally. I can see—”

We’re interrupted when Paige struts in. “Hey, guess who she is?” I ask.

Paige looks Vaux over, says, “The Question?”

Vaux shakes her head.

“Uh, some evil Charleston mummy character?”

“Nope.”

“That one mummy from Marvel Boy?”

“Negative Woman.”

Paige’s face lights up. “Ooh, an obscure one.
Doom Patrol
, right? What was her name again?”

“Valentina Vostok.”

“Damn, that’s good.”

They talk comics for twenty minutes. Bouncing from
The New Mutants
(“Is Wolfsbane the shit or what?”) to
Avengers
(“A baby with Vision?
Huh?
”). I stand there transfixed. A butterfly pegged to a specimen board. They move on to school. Friends. Parents. Watching Vauxhall is like watching a mime. Her movements carry so much more weight since I can’t see her face.

Paige asks about her name. I find myself leaning in. Physically trying to move myself close so I can hear every word even though the party in the background isn’t that loud. I’m only an observer here.

A very biased one.

This story, I’ve been filling in the blanks of it ever since my first zit.

Vaux says, “My parent’s named me Vauxhall Renee Rodolfo because they were told it was a strong name. They were told that giving a baby a strong name ensures that she will grow up to be a powerful woman like Sojourner Truth or Isadora Duncan. These women were powerhouses. They were revolutionaries. My parents were told this by their guru. They always insisted that my name is the strongest name they could find. Dad said, ‘It’s the
v
and the
xh
combo. Those sounds, they’re like jumping into a lake of ice. You hear those sounds, and you wake up. That’s real.’ Bunch of New Age bullshit, if you ask me.”

Paige laughs. “Hippies, huh? Mine too. Named me after an actress.”

I say, “Hippies are so deluded.”

Vaux continues like she’s lecturing us. Only she doesn’t talk down and keeps it simple. Part of me thinks her lines sound rehearsed. There’s something very Jimi about it.

Vaux says, “My parents decided early that their daughter would stand out. They decided this the night they were married. At least that’s what they’ve told me. What they say is that they were married on a cliff overlooking the Pacific in Baja. The stars were out and there was a man with a ukulele. There was a rabbi and a Buddhist monk. After the brief ceremony, they jumped off the cliff hand in hand and swam naked while the wedding party rained daisies down on them. As they swam they kissed and talked and my dad said, ‘We will have a daughter. She will be incredible and have an incredible name.’”

“That’s cool,” I blurt.

“The word comes from Faulke’s Hall. Faulke de Breaute was the captain of King John’s mercenaries. Over time the word changed to Foxhall. And then finally to Vauxhall. Great example of how a word grows and letters migrate over time. How the
f
and
l
in flutterby switched places with the
b
and changed the word to
butterfly.
How the
day’s eye
became the
daisy
. Mutation. Evolution. My mother once told me that the evolution of a word gives it its strength. That means it’s tested. Proven. She said, ‘Your name’s migrated along the alphabet. It’s grown and now, now it’s your name. The last and final step to perfect balanced energy.’ Said, ‘You can tell the glow of someone influential a mile away. It radiates, darling.’ You believe that?”

“Serious New Age shit.” Paige shakes her head.

Vaux says, “Before Dad died, yeah. After, Mom got goofy.”

“Sounds like mine,” I say. “Dad too. He lives in another dimension.”

“Like
The Twilight Zone
?”

“No. Like really. He’s in a coma.”

“Sounds bad,” Vaux says. I can imagine her grimacing under the wraps. “I’m sorry. That must be really hard.”

“I’m not sure if it is. We relate to each other the way trees or rocks or clouds relate to each other. Just sharing the same place. My mom thinks he’s still in there, like trapped in a shell. Says she can talk to him and in his nothing to her he speaks volumes.”

Vaux, under all her bandages, gives a look. A tilt of the head that suggest either she’s confused or that she’s feeling sorry for me. I’m guessing it’s something more remote. Maybe even understanding.

Paige says, “Welcome to Ade’s whole life.”

Vaux laughs and I want desperately to pull the bandages off her face. Just to see her expressions while she speaks.

I want to see her lips move.

Her cheeks flush.

The chat group in the kitchen breaks up when a mob of frat guys from DU suddenly appears and raids the coolers.

Vauxhall stays in the kitchen talking. I go take a piss but then, when I get back to the kitchen, I can’t find her and so I wind up in the living room on a couch talking to someone I don’t think I’ve ever seen before about football. I know nothing about football. But he assumes I do because he’s heard about my head injuries.

This guy, beer in his goatee, says, “I’ve just been assuming, you know. That’s jacked up if it wasn’t from like rushing a lineman and shit.”

I don’t correct him.

Goatee guy gives me another beer and we stop talking after that and I just sit there, in a drunken daze, and people-watch. I think I see my ex, Belle, but maybe it isn’t her. Paige passes by and waves.

I’m not sure if it’s what I’ve been drinking, but I don’t want to get up. I want to stay right here and watch for my girl. I’m doing exactly what my mother always told me to do if I ever got lost in a department store. Just stay where you are. Just hang tight and wait. And again I’m playing through the rest of the night, planning my next moves, getting a bit sweaty thinking about when exactly we’ll hold hands, when exactly we’ll kiss, and what it will feel like to touch her.

To really touch her.

I’m daydreaming on the couch long enough to watch two people pass out and then, finally, I see Vauxhall again.

Thing is she’s stumbling upstairs with Ryan Mar.

FOUR

Ryan’s a guy I’ve seen in the halls maybe twice.

He plays basketball and wears red Converse shoes. They’re making their way upstairs, Ryan laughing with his hand on Vauxhall’s ass.

Her arm around his waist.

Her mouth whispering things into his ear.

And then they’re gone.

For two seconds I think maybe it’s just a prank. That or she’s giving Ryan a tour. That maybe they’re really just good friends from way back. But I’m not convincing myself.

I want to shout. To let her know that that’s not me.

That she’s got the wrong dude.

That, Wait, Hey! I’m over here.

What happens inside my stomach is something horrible.

Most of me screams out in tatters and my brain fizzles out into glitches.

I can’t breathe.

This is not supposed to happen.

I stumble out away from the couch and drop my beer on the carpet. The way I’m swaying, almost vomiting, everyone backing away from me must be thinking that I’m on something really gnarly. That maybe my drink was spiked.

This isn’t what I saw.

I find Paige in the garage talking on her cell. I tell her to hang up, that it’s urgent. I tell her that I need to her to take me home, that I need to crawl under my house. I say, “I just saw Vauxhall take Ryan Mar upstairs.”

When I say it I almost puke.

Paige frowns this sad frown and hugs me. “I was trying to tell you,” she says.

“You were telling me she was with Jimi,” I say. My voice all panic.

I’m getting angry. I’m burning up.

“I was trying to tell you that. And also—”

“That she’s a slut?”

I want to just fall down in a heap. Curl up. Die.

Paige just hugs me again. Says, “I don’t know, Ade. It doesn’t—”

I get a crazy feeling and storm out of the garage and push my way to the bathroom. And I do the only thing I can think of that will stop the pain raging in my gut: I smack my head hard as I can against the sink.

There is a crunch and it’s pretty deafening but nothing I haven’t heard before.

The feeling, it hurts. The pain is like a flash of rain that washes clear a street. It’s a shock of cold water and, honestly, it feels great.

Here is how it works, step-by-step: After my head hits, I fall back. I see the ceiling and the silly, ornate fan spinning lazy circles. I hit the floor, but it’s like falling into water. I just sink down into it and the light fades. There’s this cheesy-ass British TV show I saw once about some doctor dude who travels through time in like this blue telephone box and why it reminds me of what happens when I fall back into the floor is that the show opens with this pretty dope sequence of lights going down a tunnel to a sick synth riff. Leave out the synth riff, sadly, and keep the tunnel of psychedelic lights and you get a sense of what I’m seeing. And at the end of the tunnel? Well, it’s like a curtain going up. There’s like the swell of the symphony, only it’s totally a drug-induced sort of rush, and then I open up my eyes to some future scene.

Not too long ago it was me downtown base jumping.

Now, I see myself on a beach.

This is likely after college and it’s got that plastic sheen, that future fakiness.

I’m maybe in California, though I’ve only ever been there once when I was little, so it could be somewhere else. The sand is hot. My shoes are off. I’m in a wet suit. The ocean is wild, tossing up these enormous whitecaps. I can tell, just the way my chest is heaving and by tasting the salt water on my lips, that I’ve been in the water. I’m dry now, but judging by the fact that there’s a surfboard in the sand beside me I’m guessing I was in there getting crazy. The sun is so high, so distant, it’s like the earth has gone spinning off course.

This beach, it’s not Colorado but, of course, I think of the phone call from the phlegmy dude. In the future, I laugh to myself. Whatever happens that he was stressed about, it’s not that bad. If the dude’s really a seer he’s a super-sucky one.

Total crank.

Here, in the next decade, the warmth feels great. The sand too. But over the ocean there’s a storm. Really dark clouds and fingers of lightning. This is why the waves are so big, the surfing so good. And probably, just because I’m such a future badass extreme sportsman, I’ll bet I’m on this beach, at this very moment, just for these waves. Just for this storm.

These waves, my heart racing, I need to go back in.

I’m reaching over for my board when I notice the guy in the mask.

He’s tall, young. Wearing jeans and a green wifebeater. The mask, it’s one of those Mexican wrestler deals. Black with sequined flames around the eyes. Sequined white and red teeth around the mouth.

The guy says, “I thought I might see you here.”