The Cloud of Unknowing (16 page)

The bus station in St. Louis, where they have an hour-long layover, is a shock after the cinderblock bunkers and temporary sheds they've seen in the last couple of days. It has a high, vaulted ceiling supported by ornate columns. Isaac guesses it's a decommissioned bank. They walk around with their heads craned, looking at the art deco clocks and milk-glass chandeliers. On the ground level, though, all is bus station squalor. A sawhorse blocks the entrance to the men's room. A bum inventories an overflowing trashcan next to the shuttered newsstand. The candy machine has been emptied of everything but gum. Kitty is content to refill her club soda bottle at the drinking fountain and snack on some peanut butter and bread they got earlier that day in Springfield, Missouri, but Isaac needs cigarettes. She gets back on the bus and reads her book while he goes out looking for a convenience store. She knows about Gary Gilmore, so she knows where the story goes. The book runs on inevitability rather than suspense—from frustration, greed, loneliness to murder, trial, firing squad. She finds it almost unbearable, but she's gotten sucked in anyhow. She wants to reach back there and knock Gilmore off the path he's on.

Where, she wonders, is Isaac? Finally, he gets on the bus and sits down. He stares at the seat in front of him. Kitty asks if he found a store, and he grunts in response. It's obvious that something has happened, but she doesn't know him well enough to coax it out of him. They're silent as the bus crosses
the Mississippi, past East St. Louis, into the moonless Illinois night. Kitty sees a road marker for Historical Route 66. She thinks of pointing it out, but Isaac is still staring at the seat back, so she says nothing.

After a while they turn east on Interstate 70, leaving Route 66 behind. The bus stops in Effingham for a twenty minute break. Kitty, grasping for conversation, asks Isaac if he's going outside to smoke.

“No, I am not going outside to smoke, because I don't have any
smokes
,” he says.

“You didn't get cigarettes in St. Louis?”

Finally it comes out. Before he even got two blocks from the station in St. Louis, Isaac was mugged for his wallet and all the money he had left after he bought his bus ticket.

“Oh my God, Isaac. Did he have a gun?”

“He had something under his sweatshirt. Maybe it was just his hand, I don't know.”

“Why didn't you say anything?”

“What am I supposed to say? I'm a big pussy?”

“What are you gonna do? Can you call someone?” Kitty asks, and then realizes Isaac hasn't made any plans beyond getting off the bus in Cherry Hill or wherever he's getting off the bus. She isn't sure anyone in his family even knows he's on his way home. “Can you call your father?”

He doesn't answer.

“Your mother?”

He snorts.

“Well, don't worry. I have enough money for both of us,” she says, and she understands now that they are not parting ways in Harrisburg. Isaac will come with her, or she will go with him, and she'll make him see that nothing is inevitable.

Garbage Head

Isaac went north on 42nd Street, conscious of walking through tangible air. Out of the shower for fifteen minutes and already his clothes were stuck to him. Coppery light vibrated on every reflective surface. The heat that muffled all other sounds somehow amplified the hum of insects in the drooping boughs of the old maples. Hummm, hummm. He heard a mocking reference in the call and response. Isaac this, Isaac that, the insects said.

He'd been on a floor-sanding crew for a few months, saving up money for his own wheels. He'd managed to put aside three hundred fifty dollars toward a red Aerostar he had his eye on, but his days were a hamster wheel: go to work, pick up a stromboli on the way home, eat half of the stromboli for supper, eat the other half for breakfast, go to work again. Today was Saturday, though—payday—so he forced himself out the door and headed up to the Snakehouse to see Poison Idea and get drunk. He had a right.

The sun had dropped below the onion domes and dunce caps of Victorian West Philly. He crossed Walnut Street, leaving behind long blocks of front porches and window grates and entering a zone of drive-by commerce. 7-Eleven, Pep Boys. The aroma of kung pao chicken hung in the wet air. From 38th and Lancaster he could see that there was already a small crowd outside the Snakehouse. He veered diagonally across Lancaster to the liquor store and bought himself a forty, slipping the last wilted bill in his wallet through the little plastic window. He patted the untouched wad of payday twenties in his front pocket, just to be sure, and squared his shoulders to face the people.

Of course the first person he saw was Kitty's friend Lisa, sitting on the curb. Seeing her put him in danger of thinking about Kitty, which, if he wanted to do that he would have picked up a stromboli and stayed home. To make matters worse, Lisa was talking to a beautiful, creamy-skinned girl—Linda? Leena? Lola?—one of those witchypoo girls he always saw around West Philly barefoot, in velvet elf dresses, smelling like hippie candles. He didn't want to risk making eye contact with either of them, so he ducked into the vacant lot next to the liquor store.

Isaac sat down on a truck tire and straightened out his legs. His knees ached from squatting with the edging sander. He drank his forty as fast as he could, in gulps that outpaced the garbagey taste of the malt liquor, and waited for full darkness. While he waited, he thought about the Aerostar. It had AC. Also plush velour seats and power windows. He'd seen it parked at the gas station on Baltimore Ave with a for-sale sign in the back window and talked to the mechanic who was selling it. He was pretty sure he could get it for less than the nine hundred the guy was asking. He let himself imagine loading tools in the back: his own sander and edger, a chop saw and a top-nailer, a good compressor. Sam, his boss, had a full-size van. The way Isaac figured, a minivan was the ideal work truck: comfortable, civilized, easy on the gas. Take out the bench seats and you could fit a sheet of plywood in the back. Best of all, minivans were despised by your average goon and therefore stealth. He'd been telling people about minivans forever. No one listened to him. After a while he heard the first band start up inside. He stopped off for another forty and crossed the street. Lisa and the witchypoo girl were gone, thank God.

The Snakehouse was actually a compound of two connected buildings. To get to the warehouse where the bands played,
you passed through a storefront gallery. People were lined up against the back wall, faces in shadow, sweat-glazed arms and legs lit in flashes by the streetlight coming through the big front windows. An industrial floor fan moved the air around. Isaac forked over his dollars and got his hand stamped and plunged into the sweltering cave next door.

The warehouse was still nearly empty—just a few guys holding paper bags, standing around at the far end of the room. On the low plywood stage, a skinny kid lunged in tight circles, croaking satanically into a mic he held in a white-knuckle grip. The sound coming out of him seemed to have nothing to do with his body. He reminded Isaac of a ventriloquist's dummy. Again and again, he narrowly avoided colliding with a contrastingly large and immobile kid grinding away at a guitar that hung almost to his knees. His face was hidden behind a curtain of hair. These guys were okay. The logo on the kick drum was amateurish: the letters “G.F.A,” snared in a spider web. Isaac could definitely help them out there.

The back door was propped open, and when Isaac's eyes adjusted he saw a silhouette in the doorway and recognized the cones of Bozo the Clown hair. It was Greg—Craig? Shit, he was terrible with names. A Snakehouse regular. He and whoever he was talking to were huddling in a furtive way that set off Isaac's drug radar.

“Hey, Greg!” He yelled to be heard over the satanic croaking as he approached the drug huddle. “Gimme some of that! What is it?”

Greg and his friend exchanged a look and Greg leaned in close to Isaac's ear. “NNDM,” he yelled.

“What?”

“MNDN.”

“
What
is it?”

“NNDN.”

“Whatever. Gimme it.”

The three went back out to Lancaster Ave and around the corner to Greg's friend's car. The guy started explaining about the MNMN. He said it was a compound he and his partner had just invented. They were Penn students or chemists or something. It was cool, actually, what he was saying. If you came up with a new molecule that the government didn't know about, it wasn't technically illegal.

“What do you do, snort it?”

A few minutes later, Isaac was back in the cave watching the first band break down their equipment. He didn't feel much of anything. Maybe a little jittery. It had, if possible, gotten hotter in the warehouse, so he stepped out the back door to wait it out between sets. Behind the buildings that made up the Snakehouse, the storefront gallery and the warehouse, were the ruins of another warehouse. Gutted by fire and exposed to the elements, it had grown over with city flora. It was like a courtyard. Isaac leaned against the remnants of a brick wall and breathed in the sour perfume of the ghetto palms. Kitty called them “trees of heaven.”

This was his favorite part of the Snakehouse complex. If he could get over his shyness and penetrate the scene, he'd transform this place. He would make thrones out of the rubble, and an amphitheater of scary organic shapes like Gaudí. He would paint the back wall white and project movies, and he would be the king of it out here. He wondered if Lisa had seen him, or if she'd said anything about him to the other Snakehouse people. He thought now that she
had
seen him. He was sure she'd looked at him without
looking
at him.

Maybe he hadn't done enough of that MMMM. He took out the bindle and snorted half of what was left. There was a warm, spreading sensation, like right after you piss your pants, but he felt it all over his body. It was interesting, but it only
lasted for a minute, so he snorted the rest and sank into the deep shadow of the warehouse.

A slow, kicking beat pulled him back to the surface, and then a single bass note in the key of dirge. And then a guitar riff that traveled like a slow, sludgy current on wire, twisting into the shapes of letters. HDR? FDR? D.R.I., G.F.A., MMND, MDM. He followed the sound back into the cave, which was filled now with smoke and fleshy flesh and sulphurous light. It was hotter than ever. He felt a splash on his neck. Looking up, he became transfixed by the condensation pooling on the pipe above him until, suddenly and irrevocably, it occurred to him that he might have puked all over himself. He tried to get closer to the light coming from the stage so he could see if it was true. He searched for an opening in the wall of meat, then gave up and fought his way back in the other direction and through the door to the gallery, gulping for air as he burst out onto Lancaster Ave, but finding only warm gel. There was no puke on him.

He went back across the street to the vacant lot and sat on his truck tire and stared at the throbbing halo around the streetlight. The climate on Lancaster Ave had achieved a reptilian kind of homeostasis with the climate in his skull. After a while, he realized that the music had stopped. He got up, too quickly, and his stomach heaved. A flume of malt liquor splattered the weeds and the tire and the brick wall. He stood for a while, bent over, feeling suddenly clammy, and when he looked up, the halo around the streetlight had disappeared. Whatever that shit was that he'd snorted, it seemed to be out of his system. What a rip-off. He decided to get another forty and walk home.

A bum stood in front of the liquor store. Hot as it was, he was wearing a colorless windbreaker, zipped all the way up to his chin. He looked familiar. Something about the way he was hopping from foot to foot. His thin ankles poked out of orthopedic-looking shoes.

Of course, it was Eddie. Isaac hadn't recognized him at first, because he knew him from the deli on Chester, near his house. Eddie was like part of the street furniture, as fixed to his spot as a mailbox or a streetlight. Once, he'd shown Eddie his sketchbook, and ever since, the guy acted like he was in love with him or something.

“Hello, Picasso!” Eddie's face opened up into a gummy smile when he saw Isaac.

It occurred to Isaac that he'd been followed. “What are you doing here, Eddie?” he said.

“What am I doing here? This my old stomping grounds. What are
you
doing here, blessed boy?”

“Right now I'm going to buy myself some beer.” Eddie kept on moistly beaming at him. “Aw hell, you want a forty? My treat, buddy. I just got paid.”

“You don't have to give me nothing. I ain't ask you for nothing,” said Eddie.

“I know,” said Isaac, “I want to.”

He went inside and asked for two Olde Englishes.

“You gotta take it someplace else though,” said the cashier.

Isaac reached in his front pocket. Instead of the roll of twenties, he pulled out a wad of Kleenex.

“Fuck.”

He tried his other pockets, and then his wallet. No, his roll was gone. “Forget it,” he said. He walked out, past Eddie, and west on Lancaster.

“Hey! Picasso!” Eddie called after him.

“Sorry, Eddie,” Isaac yelled without turning around.

Six fucking days on his knees, scraping and edging and sucking in polyurethane fumes. Apparently he'd done all that for free, like the fucking slave that he was. His stomach heaved again, but there was nothing in it. Yuppie bitch telling Sam to “make sure those guys don't go in my kitchen.” Drinking out
of the fucking hose like a dog. With what he'd had in his pocket he could have paid for the Aerostar.