Tabloid Dreams (10 page)

It is tempting now, to send Philip away and to accept this role. I have eyes to see and ears to hear. I know easily from the pages of the newspapers every day that there are men who do evil and would ask for my kiss and all that I would do is comply with their wishes. I have done this once and I could do it often again. I have kissed in anger and killed. But surely only the wicked can consciously do that, can turn this act of love into death. And what does that suggest about a God who has brought these things into the world? Not to kiss in anger but in tenderness, in the yearning for closeness and care, and from this to kill. Is that not more wicked still?

Philip sits down now in front of me. “I'm afraid too,” I say.

“That you will hurt me?”

“Yes. That. And another thing.”

“What is it?”

I see my father's face in me, rising above his pulpit. He was right. On earth, the father is the image of God.

“I hated my father,” I say.

“That frightens you?”

“Not exactly.”

“What, then?”

I say, “I'm afraid that God is as loveless as he was.”

He says, “Your father was not God.”

“God gave me this evil.”

“No. Not him. Did any of the men you kissed know the risk?”

“None of them.”

“I do.”

“Yes.”

Philip draws his face near to me. “Then kiss me,” he says.

“I want to kiss you. I want to. I want to touch.”

“I understand. Kiss me. I'm asking you.”

“We can stay here afterwards,” I say.

“Yes.”

“Will we be safe?”

“We will,” he says. “I'll fill the room with furniture. I am a carpenter.”

Then I kiss him.

“Doomsday Meteor
Is Coming”

So we settle in at this new place in Westwood called “Coffee, Beer and Irony” and it's a Saturday afternoon, there's practically a whole weekend left ahead of us. I'm thinking I could stay here the entire time. When you find a place with a TV over the bar and a lot of light and hazelnut coffee, which is my favorite, and beer the color of Evian, you can almost think that the world isn't so bad after all. And the place even has tables with umbrellas out in the back, away from all the traffic. The Zima Garden. And I've got forty-two hours before I have to put on my suit and tie and go out and tread water for a while. I say I “have to” do that, but I choose to. It's a choice I make. I'm in my Converse high-tops today and that's me, but I'm no slacker. Not that anybody is pushing me to be. Tolerance is the word. Even Janis doesn't get after me about the job. She understands, in a certain way. The thing that's happening between us on this otherwise-should-be-fine Saturday afternoon isn't about my job, exactly.

She's across the room at a table with Peggy Sue and Liza. I'm at the bar with Justin and Seth. I look over at her and she's beautiful, my Janis Joplin-Hendrix Jones. Razored tangerine hair and six rings in her face and the poutiest, softest lips in the world with one of the rings through the lower one. I'm just beginning to suspect that I'm going to lose her. But what I don't know is if that's a real big thing for me or not. And all the while I'm sitting here looking at her, I have no idea that the end of the world is on the way.

Though I'm about to learn. We have our Zimas, the three of us guys, and I lift mine and I'm looking out the front window through it, watching the passing cars swim in my beer like tropical fish, and Justin says, “The world will be okay when all the rivers and lakes look like Zima,” and Seth says, “Who are we kidding?” This stops Justin and he nods his head. Like yes. He hadn't thought of that point.

“Kidding about what?” I say, a black Firebird convertible billowing through my drink like a manta ray.

“That the rivers will ever run full of crystal clear malt liquor,” Seth says.

“Don't tell me it's so,” I say. “Where did we lose our idealism?”

“I left it in my other genes,” Justin says.

So we all clink our bottles and drink to whatever that was. Meanwhile, the bartender is flipping channels and cursing because the UCLA game is blacked out. “They're just playing over at the goddamn Coliseum and we can't see it,” he says.

Then he's got the Saturday rerun of
Inside Scoop,
and Justin says “Stop. There might be something on Madonna.” So the bartender leaves it and goes about his business and my attention is drifting, back to Janis. I look over my shoulder and I catch her eyes sliding away from me and she leans toward Peggy Sue and they talk low.

It's about my nipple, I figure. Well,
our
nipples, actually, one of Janis's and one of mine. She wants me to get my left nipple pierced, the one over my heart, and she wants to do the same, and that would mean we were joined at the nipple, or something. More than that, I guess, but I'm not sure what I think about this particular gesture. I'm resisting it, and this is what's happening between Janis and me to make this Saturday go bad. It's kind of a big deal, somehow, the question of our two nipples, until I turn my face back and I look up at the TV.

There's a guy on who's the editor of a newspaper called
Real World Weekly.
He's a forty-something, a Double-Us, from the look of him, and he's got an air about him, like he's from the CIA or somewhere and he knows things that other people don't. I've seen his paper at the supermarkets and we always go “Cool” around it and laugh that in-between laugh, that sort-of-with-it, sort-of-against-it kind of laugh, that I'm-going-to-take-this-as-real, I'm-going-to-stand-away-from-this kind of laugh, and that always feels good, one of those laughs, because it tucks you away in a sweet little quiet nowhere. So Justin and Seth are starting up like that already, but for some reason, I'm seeing this guy like through a real clear glass of beer.

He says that a meteor about a mile and a half wide is on a collision course with the planet Earth and it will arrive in about a year, though the scientists are all keeping quiet about this so as not to start a panic, so it could be any minute, ­really, or perhaps not for two years or so, but not much more. But when it hits Earth it will be like a fifty-million-megaton bomb and, to make a long story short, it will end all life as we know it on this planet.

Yeah, right. This is how you find out. Looking for the UCLA game while everybody's drinking beer and it's on a regularly scheduled show, and on a
rerun,
even, and nobody's paying attention and CNN doesn't have the story and never will.

Justin says, “This can be a unifying thing, you know? Bring all the earth together.”

And Seth says, “No. We'll all kill each other before it even gets here. Every store will be looted. The justice system breaks down if all the maximum sentences are two years.”

Like they don't believe it. I hear them and I'm thinking I should be throwing in some comment like that, but for some reason I don't. I sit here and my face has gotten real hot real fast and everything is seizing up in my chest and there's still enough in me of the guy in the Converses to step back and think, Hey, this is pretty weird, but it keeps going on in my body just the same.

The
Inside Scoop
people are asking the editor some tough questions now, I think, though I'm not concentrating very much on that. I'm already feeling that thing out there, hearing a static in my head like it's the solar wind peeling off it, if meteors have solar wind. Then the editor is looking right at me, at everybody in this bar, and he says, “It's real,” and I know it is.

Justin says, “These are the guys who found out about that talking waterbed in Encino.”

“I heard about that,” Seth says. “That's true.”

“True you heard about it?” Justin asks, seeking a clarification that I'm having trouble taking an interest in at the moment.

“I have to take a leak,” I say just to get away for a little while and I put my Zima down and drop off the stool and my legs are having trouble holding me up, though I haven't even finished one drink, I'm still sober. I wobble off toward the back of the place and I'm drawing near to Janis and she looks up from her two friends.

“Linus,” she says to me, “you look awful.”

I'm feeling awful, too, and I sink into the empty chair at the table, next to Janis, and I'm trying to find a way to say this without it being taken wrong.

“Janis,” I say. “The world's going to end, probably sooner rather than later, but in two years max.”

Peggy Sue says, “My dad says I got to move out of the house in two years or else. So this is good. I won't have to find an apartment.”

“I'm serious,” I say. “There's a meteor.” I stop. There's a lot of reasons to doubt me.

Liza says, “I'm going skydiving with Justin next weekend.”

I'm not sure if she's trying to say something relevant here, maybe something about facing death, or if she's just changing the subject.

I look at Janis and she's studying me. She has a row of wrinkles between her eyebrows and she's touching the ring in her lower lip with the point of her tongue, something she does when she's thinking. “I'm serious,” I say, lowering my voice and leaning toward Janis, like this is just for her.

Peggy Sue says, “Linus, you just have to do this nipple-piercing thing, you and Janis, it is so cool and so romantic.”

All of a sudden I am very aware indeed of my nipples. And my chest as a whole, in light of this mile-and-a-half-wide ball of rock. And the top of my head and the soles of my feet. Something is happening to me and I'm starting to pant.

“What is it?” Janis says, also low, also bending near. I'd like to take her by the arm and walk her away from this table, maybe out into the sun, then I think, No. No. Not outside. Get under the table, for Christ's sake. But I don't have the strength for any movement at all at the moment, so I just try to control my breath, like a cowboy trying to jump up into the saddle of a moving horse.

Somewhere nearby a crowd is cheering. It sounds like a big crowd, but the sound is small. I think, That's how the meteor must look to those scientists. A very big thing but it looks small. And what I'm hearing is a portable radio nearby tuned to the UCLA game. I imagine the crowd all suddenly looking up and they make a great collective gasp.

“Let's take a little walk,” Janis says.

I try to stand up. It's okay. One hand braced on the table, then the back of the chair, and my legs are working for the moment. She touches my arm, on a bare place, near my wrist, and her hand is impossibly soft. We move off.

She says, “Is it that you can't see us together?”

“No. I'm seeing
everybody
breaking up,” I say.

“You have nothing pierced,” she says. “This would be such a sweet thing for me.”

“Like a virgin,” I say.

“Yes,” she says. “You are.” And she puts her arm around my waist. I feel her bones there, her ulna, or her radius, whichever, what the hell good was all that education anyway, I think, with no world left. And her fragile bones: how simply, how completely, Janis would disappear. And all of us. I stop. We are in the middle of tables. People are all around. My face grows hot again, quickly. This woman smiling. That man dabbing at his mouth with his napkin. What a sad gesture, trying to keep himself clean while his death rushes to him, very near. Any day, perhaps.

“You're crying,” Janis says.

“I've got something in my eye,” I say, and I draw away from her. Her arm slides off me, but something remains, a shadow of her. I stumble on, down a passage, past a pay phone, a woman talking there, whispering into the phone, a man on the other end, no doubt, and they think they will marry and have children but there will be no more children, never again. I push into the men's room and into a stall and I slip the bolt and I back up against the wall and then I turn and lean my head into the wedge of the corner.

I don't know all that much about death. My dad's mother died, but I was very little, maybe about four, and I don't ­really remember her. I don't even remember whatever talk there was about Nana going to heaven to be with God, though there must have been some of that. Yes I do remember something. I grew up in Seattle. My dad works at Boeing. I think I had a picture in my head of Nana flying off to heaven in a 747 made by my dad. Which shows you what a little kid knows. If you've earned heaven, you should do better than airline food on the way. And they still had smoking sections back then. And the idea of God depending on my dad to get His souls to Him: no wonder I'm so unprepared for this moment. And there aren't enough jets in the world for all of us. That's a thing that makes me push my head harder into this wall. No seats. No room. Sold out.

I'm still crying, I realize. I dig at my eyes with the heels of my hands. I try to think about the bright side. The budget deficit will disappear. The whole national debt will be forgiven. Discrimination will end. All the handguns will fall silent. You don't have to go out and burn up your days working at meaningless things. You don't have to slowly drip your days away trying to do nothing. And you and Madonna will share a very intense moment.

I'm not sure I'm doing better, but my eyes are dry. I pull my head out of the corner and it feels like my skull has been compressed. I cover my temples with my palms and I worry, for a moment, that I've caused permanent damage to my brain. But that's another worry that instantly loses its bite.

I go out of the restroom and the pay phone is idle, and I stop there for a moment. I think about who I should call, just in case this happens to be the last day in the life of planet Earth, if the meteor is slipping past the moon even now and due on Earth in four minutes. My mom and dad, for instance. But the last time we talked, we actually got through about a five-minute conversation without an argument, and that would be a nice way to end it. And I think of Janis. I suddenly want to be with her. Even if she won't believe me, I'll be beside her when the thing itself, grown white hot from its plunge through the atmosphere, appears in the sky and persuades everyone. I'll hold her. You knew, she'll say, and I'll just hold her closer. I hurry now.

But she's not there. The table where she was is empty. Justin and Seth are gone too. Suddenly, it feels like death. One moment you're here and the next you're not. The meteor will take everyone in the world, but right now it's Justin and Seth and Liza and Peggy Sue. And Janis. Their sudden absence makes my legs go weak again and I think about falling down. But then I hear my name.

I turn and Janis is standing in the door to the Zima Garden. She motions for me, and I move toward her, a little bit pissed, for some reason. I realize what it is about parents when their child wanders off and then is found and the parents are happy, but mad too. Here. Take this whack. I was afraid you'd been harmed. That whole funny thing.

I get to Janis and she has her head cocked a little to the left. All her rings are visible—the three in her right ear, the two in her right nostril and the one in her lip, off-center to the right. She's a right-brain person, she always says. Emotional. Well, I've reached a point where I put on a suit and tie five days a week, but I'm emotional too.

She says, “Is your eye okay?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Good,” she says, and right away she slides off again. “If you do this thing,” she says, “you can always know who you are even under your dress shirt and suit coat.” She taps me on the left nipple, very lightly.