The End As I Know It Page 24

  “It’s not the most delicately prepared Asian cuisine I’ve had.”

  “I can tell I’m gonna have more, too, that’s the pathetic thing.”

  She leans back on the bed, her shirt sliding up to expose an enticing slice of midriff. A pang of longing makes me look away. I start to take a refill of shrimp lo mein, then reconsider.

  “Just gonna hop online for a sec.” I dig out my computer, plug it into the phone line, look up an access number in this area code, connect.

  After some amount of time, I hear chewing above and behind me. I look up to see Paige holding a spring roll, looking over my shoulder.

  “Learning anything interesting?” She takes a bite, sending greasy shards to the carpet. I flip the laptop shut.

  “Sorry!” Paige takes a step back. “Didn’t mean to be nosy.”

  “No, I’m not—I’m annoyed with myself, that’s all. I’m not supposed to be doing this anymore. How long was I on?”

  “I don’t know, twenty minutes?”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah, and you got, like, this totally intense look on your face. Like you’re searching for something in there.”

  “I guess I am, maybe.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, some sign of what’ll really happen. Like peering into the tea leaves.”

  “Reading entrails.”

  “Again with the pork stomach.”

  She finishes the spring roll, frowns at her glistening fingertips. “When I was a kid and I’d start to worry about some particular bad thing happening—I don’t know, my dad dying in a plane crash, or a tornado smashing our house…I was petrified of tornadoes when we moved to Texas. So what I’d do is draw a bunch of pictures of it. Because I guess my line of thinking was, like, OK, let’s say this thing does happen, and here I have all these really detailed drawings of it that I did weeks ago—that would make me some sort of a prophet, right? I mean, I would have basically predicted the future. And I knew nobody could predict the future. So therefore if I drew the pictures, it wouldn’t happen.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Weird, right? But it always made me less afraid.”

  “Unfortunately, I can’t draw.”

  “Hold on a second.” Paige reaches into her pocket with her clean hand and pulls out her room key. “Here, give me yours so I can get back in.”

  I point to the key on the dresser. She grabs it and rushes out. Maybe the Chinese food wasn’t sitting so well. I start to clean up the remnants of the meal, carefully placing containers into the wastebasket to avoid a flood of sticky seasoned liquid.

  Two minutes later Paige lets herself back in, carrying a sketchpad and a lunchbox-sized tin.

  “You ready?”

  “Ready for what? I thought you went to the bathroom.”

  “We’re drawing.”

  “Drawing? Oh. No, Paige, this isn’t—”

  “Come on, dude, it works, I’m telling you.” She jumps onto the bed and maneuvers herself into a cross-legged position with the pad in front of her. “So let’s hear it. What do you think might happen?”

  “Listen, Paige, I appreciate it. Really. But it seems sort of stupid.”

  She opens the tin, revealing a jumble of Conté crayons. “Look, if we’re smart we’ll stay up and digest all that food for a while before we try to sleep. Right? So humor me.” She clatters the crayons around in the box and pulls out a deep red one.

  I guess there are worse ways to spend an evening. “All right, I might as well read you this thing I wrote.” I reopen the laptop. “If you insist.”

  “I do.”

  “This drawing thing, you still do it to this day?”

  “Not since I was ten. Why?”

  “Just curious.” I find my archived copy of “One Raccoon’s Prognosis” and double-click. “Well, you asked for it.”

  I proceed to recite my magnum opus. The fall of Rome laid bare in 10,000 words or less. We’ll be here all night if I emote, so I keep my voice dispassionate, my delivery rapid and steady. Even so, it takes a while to get through the thing. I look toward the bed a few times and see Paige listening intently, making an occasional note on the pad.

  “‘I know how hard it is to face—believe me, I know—but your survival may depend on facing it. Good luck.’”

  “That it?” Paige says after I’ve been silent for a few seconds.

  “That’s it.” My mouth is bone dry from talking so long and from the sodium-rich food, and I guzzle half a can of lukewarm Diet Coke.

  “All right, just give me a few minutes.”

  “You really don’t have to do this, you know. Maybe just reading it out loud was—”

  “Shh. Artist at work.”

  She starts drawing, bent over the paper, making rapid strokes with the crayon—this is a monochromatic production, evidently—and sometimes smearing the page with her fingers, which soon redden thoroughly. Oblivious to my unchaste gaze, she finishes with one sheet, rips it off, and immediately starts in on another. After four or five more sheets, she blinks, stretches her hunched back, and looks up at me.

  “How’d I do?”

  I go over to look. She can draw, I’ll say that. They’re rough sketches composed of quick, fluid lines, only partly fleshed out and shaded, but each page contains a vivid little vignette yanked straight from my nightmares by way of the Prognosis. A mob of desperate customers storming a bank. A family shivering as they abandon their car in massive gridlocked traffic. Fire, looting, the National Guard.

  “Wow. These are great.”

  “Thanks.” Paige watches me as I examine the supposedly fear-allaying pages.

  “So…what now?”

  “I can do a couple more.”

  “No, no, please.”

  “Feel any better?”

  “Um…”

  She slides off the bed and wipes some of the red off her fingers with a napkin. “Yeah, maybe it only works on ten-year-olds. But wait, we didn’t do the most important part.” She grabs the pages, reaches into a pocket of her jacket, and takes out her sleek silver cigarette lighter. I follow her into the bathroom.

  “Wait, wait, you didn’t mention burning them. You sure you did this when you were ten?”

  “Take the battery out of that, will you?” She points to the smoke detector.

  “Can’t I just keep them? What if you’re famous someday?”

  “Stop undermining the ritual.”

  I stand on the toilet seat to reach the smoke detector. After it’s disabled, Paige hands me the lighter and the sheets of paper. “Go for it.”

  I take one last look at the drawings, then square their corners and light one corner of the stack. I look to Paige to see if I’m following proper procedure. She nods approvingly. I watch the fire consume the paper until it starts to singe my knuckles, then toss the flaming pile into the bathtub. The burning pigment gives off an earthy, not unpleasant smell.

  We watch Paige’s handiwork burn down to scraps and embers.

  “Feeling any catharsis yet?” she says.

  “I’m working on it.”

  “Hey, it was worth a try.” She turns on the water in the tub.

  “This was all very nice of you.”

  The tiny conflagration doused, Paige reaches for the faucet again. And then I know what I have to do.

  “Wait,” I say. I flip the drain-stopper switch.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Shh.” I wait for the tub to fill a few inches. The charred remains of the pages swirl and dissolve.

  I go back to the room, pull the AC adapter and phone cord out of my computer, grab the machine, and bring it into the bathroom. Paige starts to say something but bites her tongue.

  I hold the laptop out over the tub and let go.

  “Oh, shit! Randall!” A splash, a faint electric sizzle. Machine sinks, bubbles rise.

  “I can’t believe you did that!” Paige’s eyes are wide, incredulous, but maybe also a little admiring. “How much did that thi
ng cost you?”

  I start to laugh.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “I’m just thinking of the guy I bought it from.” The look on FlockWatcher’s face if he could see his souped-up pride and joy lifeless in the tub. So much of my time, so many hours of agonized investigation, wrapped up in that fucking piece of machinery, in the virtual world it represents. And however stupid I’ll feel about this useless gesture in five minutes, right now it gives me deep satisfaction to see the thing down there, waterlogged, short-circuited, ruined forever. I don’t know about catharsis, but at least I’m laughing.

  chapter 15

  394

  Days

  “Sir?” The woman behind me in line at Mail Boxes Etc. points politely toward the desk. “I think you’re next.” Actually, she’s in front of me, because I’m standing backwards in line so I can keep a nervous eye out the window for anyone trying to interfere with my double-parked car. Searched for parking for twenty minutes before giving up. Since I dropped Paige off on Saturday, this is the first time I’ve driven into Manhattan, and hopefully the last. I’ll stick with the ample parking lot at the LaGuardia Best Western.

  The cashier takes my name and locates my boxes, reuniting me at last with the belongings I left in California. The boxes seem to have held up fine, not that I’d have been heartbroken to find them smashed. Three contain clothes, one has my second-string puppets, and the other two hold the remnants of my former life. Letters, notebooks, photos, floppy disks, a handful of books and tapes and CDs, the arrowheads from Uncle Frank. Have to remember to call Bonnie and thank her for taking care of the shipping. I’m sure she expected me to send for the stuff sooner, but this is the first time since San Francisco that I’ve been in one place long enough to receive the shipment. Except for when I was at Nicole’s, recuperating from my face-plant, and that didn’t feel like an opportune moment.

  This store also rents computer time, and I feel the pull of the machines, calling me to go online and check in with the Y2K world. My illegal parking spot takes the decision out of my hands this time, but I fight this urge a dozen times a day, whenever I walk by a Kinko’s or a library or an Internet café. So far I’m winning.

  I’ve settled into a routine of taking the bus from the airport to midtown, then walking around aimlessly for hours on end, doing my best to think about nothing. And then, in the evening, checking out various live music venues, in pursuit of this crazy notion: I might like to try entertaining people older than eight years old, and without a piece of talking felt on my hand. Tonight’s my New York City debut at an open-mike night at a club in TriBeCa, and Paige has promised to show up with some friends. It’ll be good to see her again. Even though we’d temporarily had our fill of each other by the time we limped our weary way into the city late Saturday night, I had trouble adjusting to her sudden absence after two solid days in the car together.

  I hustle my boxes outside and toss them into the back seat, escaping ten seconds ahead of an approaching meter maid. Now to make the drive back to Queens, unload the boxes, and rehearse a little for tonight in my room at the Best Western. Which isn’t a bad little place. Really, I don’t know why Paige is so down on airport motels.

  “Can you feel the rage inside of me?

  Can you feel the rage, my love?”

  Since you asked, I think I can. I wouldn’t have pegged the unassuming slacker onstage for much pent-up aggression, but this song casts him in a whole new light. The music is incongruously mellow, Indigo Girls with a male lead, and he doesn’t sing with much energy, but it’s always the quiet ones that get you. Could definitely see him sniping from a clock tower on the evening news. The woman playing rhythm guitar and singing harmony, apparently his girlfriend, rocks slowly from side to side and stares at the singer, a laserlike look of the utmost artistic respect. This trio is pretty tight, talented instrumentalists with nice voices. If only they wrote songs that sucked less, they might have something. Anyway, their twenty minutes are almost up.

  “Are you next?” Rafael asks.

  “One more first, I think,” I say softly. Rafael and Graham and Paige have been talking at close to normal volume throughout the evening, drawing a handful of hostile glares from the friends and family of open-mike night’s other performers, but that goes with the territory. When you impose a two-drink minimum on your patrons, you lose shushing privileges.

  I look around the bar. Most of the earlier performers are still here. Some good examples of the standard types who show up to play at these things. Over there we have Poetess Who Just Got a Guitar. Can’t really play it yet, and her lyrics are smart but obviously written for the printed page, unsingable consonants galore. There’s Jam Band Boy, the frat dude in a baseball cap, his originals indistinguishable from his Dave Matthews and Blues Traveler covers. And then there’s me, the Prewar Plucker. There’s one of us in the crowd at every acoustic club, the young preservationists, spiritual sons of Alan Lomax and John Hammond, nostalgic for a time we never lived through. I remember the whole rogues gallery from too many open-mike evenings at a dozen interchangeable New England venues. Nothing’s changed in the years since I last made the scene. You put your name on the list, psych yourself up, sweat out an hour or two suffering through the other acts, and then nobody pays much attention to your performance except whatever friends you’ve shanghaied into coming, plus the occasional creepy old dude who really dug your stuff, man.

  I watch the guy about to go on (Sensitive Male, Politicized Type, would be my guess) pace nervously back and forth beside the bar, smoke a cigarette, sip club soda. My own butterflies are minimal. Because after all, what do I have to lose? True, I do have a strong adolescent desire to impress Paige. But she’s already seen me do giraffe voices for a toddler and take a piss on the shoulder of a Kentucky highway in broad daylight, so the playing-it-cool ship has pretty much sailed.

  The trio finishes its set. Rafael and Graham applaud enthusiastically, overcompensating for their inattention to the music. Paige knows Rafael from high school, and Rafael knows Graham from Hoboken, where they lived before they moved out of their apartment in order to occupy the Brooklyn loft space Paige was telling me about. Rafael is a wiry guy, average height, could be any of a half-dozen ethnicities with his light-cocoa skin and shaved head. Outwardly he’s the polar opposite of Graham, who’s a tall, beefy roadie type, his paleness accentuated by tattoos and jet-black hair. But in speech patterns and mannerisms they’re practically twins.

  Onstage, Mr. Sensitivity, who says his name is Chuck, kicks things off with a song “inspired by all the horrible school shootings we had this past spring,” sung from—how original—the perspective of one of the teenage shooters.

  “Maybe if someone had tried to see the real me

  I wouldn’t be here now

  Holding a shotgun

  Look ma I got one

  Carrying out my vow.”

  Paige grabs my arm. “Know who this song reminds me of? Uncle Victor.”

  Chuck concludes with a sardonic ditty that really sticks it to sneaker manufacturers, and then I’m up.

  I feel slightly naked onstage with just the guitar, no recourse to puppetry. But on the upside, I don’t have to sing about frogs or endear myself to second-graders. In fact, I can drop the ingratiating banter altogether.

  “Good evening. My name is Randall. Thanks for having me.” And right into a song.

  “Hang me, oh hang me

  I’ll be dead and gone

  Hang me, oh hang me

  I’ll be dead and gone

  Wouldn’t mind the hangin’

  But the layin’ in the grave so long, poor boy

  I’ve been all around this world.”

  And more in the same vein. Old songs of tragedy and despair, dark stuff that suits my mood and the century’s dying days. “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.” “James Alley Blues.” “The Butcher’s Boy.”

  “He went upstairs to give her hope

  But found h
er hanging from a rope.”

  All this talk of hanging garners polite applause. To an audience reared on rock and rap, even the bleakest blues and folk plays as unobtrusive background. But Paige and the boys have been listening attentively, so that’s something. I close with one of Rick’s favorites, “Good Liquor Gonna Carry Me Down,” which draws whoops of affirmation from some budding alcoholics sitting at the bar.

  “Thanks. You’ve been great. Have a good night.” I hand center stage over to a college-age Ani DiFranco wannabe, throw my guitar in its case, and return to our table.

  “Hey! Great job,” Paige says.

  “Yeah, nice set,” Rafael says.

  “Very cool,” Graham says.

  First time in quite a while that my postshow compliments haven’t included the phrases “so funny” and “really cute.” I buy a round of drinks.

  “So Randall, how are you doing with things?” Paige asks quietly while the other two are watching Ani Jr. bang out her first song.

  “Millennium things, you mean?”

  “Or whatever, yeah.”

  “Not too bad. Haven’t touched a computer since I gave mine its bath.”

  “I still think we should’ve taken it with us.”

  “Who knows what kind of voltage that thing had? I wasn’t about to reach in there.”

  “Feeling decent, though? Glad you came here?”

  “New York here, or this bar here?”

  “Either.”

  “Yes. Both.”

  “Good. I’m glad. Hey, listen, tomorrow night this old friend of my dad’s is having a cocktail party. He’s a millionaire, and he lives right on the park, so it ought to be nice. You want to come?”

  “Really? Sure, I’d love to.”