Cryptopolis and other st.., p.20
Cryptopolis and Other Stories, page 20
“Don’t blame your wife,” the Gorilla said, not taking his eye off the book. “I willed the bullets away with my mind. It’s amazing what nonlinear thinking can accomplish. See?” He held out his massive palm, in the middle of which lay six .22 caliber bullets.
“You son of a bitch, give those back to me!”
“I’m afraid not.” He tossed the bullets out the window.
The Iron Mask clenched his fists and sprang forward. He tried to push me out of the way, apparently not expecting me to punch him in the gut. As he doubled over, I slammed my knee into his testicles. He fell to the floor and curled up into the fetal position. I was more than a little surprised. The “special” ingredients within the Iron Mask’s concoction packed an impressive wallop.
[Memo to driver: we would like our hero to address the audience with a soliloquy of approximately 400 words at some point during the trip. Thank you.]
The atmosphere in the bus grew tense. I could feel a multitude of eyes glaring at me. I found myself studying the other passengers in detail. For the first time I realized how many of them were in constant, irreversible pain. The old woman, the rapper, the married couple, the eagle-man, even the gibbering things in the back. Not one of them was free of pain. They had been born into it, their crippled flesh would hobble through life infested with it, they would die choking on it, the ash-like fragments (the physical manifestation of pain itself) foaming up out of their mouths like the remnants of a volcanic eruption… followed by a long stretch of nothing until the next incarnation when the pain would begin again. Even worse than before.
“Don’t worry,” the Gorilla said cheerfully while turning a page in his book. “It can be transcended. All it takes is tapping into one’s full potential. That’s why I came on this little trip: to find my true Self before it’s too late, before I have to make that final excursion into the Great Beyond we all must face in the end.” He held up the little red book. I scanned the title: 101 Things to Do Before You Kick Off.
“How strange,” I heard myself saying. “Where did you get that book?”
“I pilfered it from the Royal Institute of International Affairs. That’s why I had to leave England so quickly. Oh, believe me, they have quite a lot of interesting tomes tucked safely away inside the Institute walls, quite a lot indeed.”
Since the Iron Mask was still writhing on the floor, I decided to take his seat. “May I see it?” I said, holding out my palm.
The Gorilla seemed reluctant at first, then relented: “Oh, all right. But do give it back, please. I’ll no doubt be in need of its contents soon.”
I flipped the book open to a random page. The first passage I stumbled across read as follows: “In order to divorce oneself from the pain of a particularly traumatic memory, one must relive the experience in its entirety.”
I glanced up from the page and stared off into space, giving the words time to settle into my mind. “I wonder if that’s true,” I mumbled softly, to no one in particular.
“Oh, of course it’s true,” the Gorilla said.
I jumped at the sound of his voice; I hadn’t been expecting a response. “How do you even know what I’m talking about?” I glanced down at the book, then pressed the open pages to my chest. “You don’t know what sentence I just read, do you?”
“Oh, dear me, no, not at all. However, if I did, I’d simply tell you this: It’s very important to distinguish between an event and the memory of that event. It’s been scientifically ascertained that the physical effects of emotional trauma last for a maximum of twelve minutes. That’s all. Any pain we experience after that has little more substance than a shadow, as with an amputee who insists he can still feel his limbs. In order to transcend the lingering effects of a painful memory, we must learn to disassociate the primary stimulus (nearly drowning in a swimming pool as a child, for example) from the present stimulus (taking a bath, perhaps). To overcome such phobias, one must live through the primary experience again, confront it in such excruciating detail that it loses its power over one’s subconscious. Uh, but that’s just a guess on my part.” The Gorilla pulled out a copy of The Sun newspaper from beneath his seat and began doing the crossword puzzle.
“But wait a second,” I said. “I’m not like these other people.” I gestured toward the other passengers. “I don’t have any traumatic experiences. I’m not in any serious pain, not really.”
“Is that so?” The Gorilla sounded skeptical.
“Of course, it’s ‘so’!”
From the iron mask on the floor, between clenched teeth, emerged a groan followed by three words: “What about Elizabeth?”
“Elizabeth?” I said. “Wh—what do you…?”
… lying motionless on a white carpet, her face drenched in blood, her open eyes black as night and staring right through me into another world…
… perhaps this one…
Yes, of course. Elizabeth.
[Memo to driver: re: theatre of alienation. How would Bertolt Brecht stage the following scene?]
I lowered myself to the floor, sat beside the Iron Mask. I crossed my legs under me and allowed the pent-up words to pour into the air. “The migraines began… when I was twelve, when my mother died. My father remarried only a month later. What disturbed me the most was how much nicer my new mother was. She showered me with kindness, whereas my real mother was something of a tyrant… so much so that I spent my adolescent years wishing her dead. I guess I got my wish, huh?
“My stepmom was so fucking nice I couldn’t stand it anymore. On my thirteenth birthday I ran away from home, got mixed up in marijuana, alcohol, heroin (never speed, never needed it), prostitution, rock ‘n’ roll, blah blah blah. Didn’t stop me from getting an education, though. I’d read all the great philosophers before I was seventeen. Nietzsche was my favorite. And the Marquis de Sade, of course. I think I shared a lot in common with the fat old fellow. Pain was the measuring stick I used to judge any experience, no matter what it was: sex, crime, music, food. And love? You can bet that any girl who genuinely loved me got the ol’ heave-ho within a couple of months. I can’t name how many commitments I’ve broken. And all for what? To run off with some whore who’d usually end up sticking a shiv in my back the first time I let my guard down? I think I’ve spent my life running away from… well, from love, I guess. Is that why I hated Elizabeth so much? Is that why I did what I did when she insisted I marry her? Is that why I pushed her just a little too hard, just enough to slam her head into that coffee table, just enough to… to…” I could see it all over again. The blood. “To get her away from me, to…” The blood. There was so little of it and yet—she wasn’t moving. She wasn’t moving at all. Yes, yes that was the moment. That was when I first saw the curtain, hovering like a ghost over her prostrate body. The apparition scared me so much I… “I didn’t think. I just got the hell out of there. I swung the duffel bag over my shoulder and ran… onto this bus. Jesus, I don’t think I’ve ever run so quickly before. Except… except when I… ran away from… home.”
For the first time in my life, I felt tears moistening my cheeks. Before I knew it, I was on my hands and knees sobbing into the gum-and-Pepsi-stained floor. I’m not sure how long that lasted. Too long, probably. I’ve been told I never know when to quit being maudlin.
[Memo to driver: please allow for a brief silence here. This is not a suggestion.]
Abruptly, the sound of applause. Every passenger on the bus was clapping, including the Man in the Iron Mask. He was laughing too. In between his guffaws he said: “Aw, don’t let this nonsense worry you, kid. Women are scum. If I cried over every bitch I put in the hospital, I’d have enough tears to fill the L.A. River. Look at my old lady. Before I left on this little trip, I had to drop her off at the Emergency Room—where she belongs. You can’t trust anybody, kid. Not your girlfriend, not the government, not the Good Humor Man. Just get used to it.”
The Gorilla yawned. “My, aren’t we pessimistic today.”
“Why the hell shouldn’t I be? This son of a bitch just kicked me in the nuts! What did I do to deserve that?”
The Gorilla rolled his eyes, then shifted his considerable weight toward me. Holding his index finger in the air, he said, “Keep in mind, young sir, there’s always a new day dawning.”
The Iron Mask rose to his feet and leaned into the Gorilla’s furry face. “What is this, a musical? You know what’s going on inside this bus as well I do! Spare us the Pollyanna crap, okay? Why don’t you go talk to the fucking driver if everything’s so goddamn optimistic!”
The Gorilla didn’t respond this time; he just retreated behind his crossword puzzle. Seeing him do this made me uneasy. My respect for him dwindled.
Once again, I found myself glancing at that curtain, that strange curtain…
The Iron Mask, following my gaze, laughed hysterically. “You know where we’re going don’t you, kid? Sure, you do. Hee. We’re all going to the same place. In the end. In the end. If you’re lucky, you’ll get to see your Elizabeth again soon.”
The Gorilla snatched his book out of my hand. He closed his eyes and clutched it to his massive chest like a mother with her newborn child. He was chanting something, I don’t know what. It sounded like a prayer.
I glanced back at the passengers. Focused on the kid with the NO FEAR t-shirt. Yes, that sounded like a good idea. No fear.
I stood up. I approached the curtain…
“No!” the Gorilla screamed. “Just leave it alone!”
The Iron Mask tried to drown him out: “Go for it, kid! Let’s get to the truth. Let’s see the little man behind the fucking curtain! Do it, kid, do it!”
I didn’t need any encouragement from the Iron Mask. I pulled the curtain aside with a violent jerk, and at that instant
[Memo to driver: turn the lights directly upon the audience. Blind them.]
the searing light of the world beyond the windshield subsumed my vision. There was nothing outside. No reptiles, no tumbleweeds, no cacti, no highway, no desert, no mountains, no sky. No Earth. No Elizabeth. In that final second before I lost my vision, I saw the driver’s face in the polished rearview mirror.
He had no eyes.
The Loser
Ernesto walked the wheel through his hands, jackknifing into the fast lane, as the sound of the helicopter drew nearer. The blades sliced through smog-filled air, so damn close, as if the pilot were planning to land on the roof of the van. Behind him police sirens wailed. On either side of the speeding van, cars slowed down and pulled away from him, frightened. That gave him a little bit of satisfaction—just a little bit. Few people in this life had ever been afraid of him.
The 405 was a crazy obstacle course of glass and metal death machines, all of them pissed off and frustrated that their ride home from some pitiful job in an office somewhere in downtown L.A. was being disrupted by a kid in a stolen vehicle. Were they listening to the news reports on the radio? Did they know his name?
An asshole in an SUV cut in front of him, trying to play hero. Son of a bitch. Ernesto didn’t slow down; he sped up. Fuck, why should he care? The van wasn’t even his. He scraped the side of the SUV, ripping off the asshole’s sideview mirror with a shrieking, crippling collision. He got so close, he could see the look of confused terror in the face of the beefy white dude behind the wheel. Fuck you, cowboy. That’s a mighty bad moustache you’ve got there. Have fun fixing the entire right side of your gas guzzler, shithead.
Jesus. At least that was satisfying. The cars ahead of him parted like the Red Sea in that cheesy old Charlton Heston movie his grandmother forced him to watch every Easter.
I guess they didn’t want their precious cars destroyed like shithead’s back there. Good thinking. That should make things a little easier for me.
He’d watched crazy scenes like this a billion times on the news. You couldn’t get through a week of L.A. TV without some jackball losing his shit over an unfaithful girlfriend or some useless crap like that; suddenly, the dude freaks out on the freeway, lashes out on some stranger while deadlocked around LAX, then caps it off by leading the CHP on an insane chase all over the South Bay before getting his tires blown out by metal spikes laid down on the concrete. Inevitably, the dude would be dragged out of his own car by some joyboys with loaded .38s and a couple of hard-ons and his balls ripped to shreds by the canine corps. All for what? ‘Cause somebody flipped him off on the freeway? ’Cause his bitch wouldn’t suck him off the night before? Ernesto always thought those dudes were chumps.
Never in a million years did he imagine he would become one of them. This had not been a good day, oh not at all.
But now that he was trapped in this situation, he was determined not to end up like all the others. What did he have to lose?
Think, Ernesto, think. There has to be some way out of this…
He thought about the dead body jostling around in the back seat. He thought about the revolver, the one with only five bullets in the chamber, sliding back and forth across the dash. He thought about his girlfriend, who finally agreed to have sex with him for the first time the night before. He’d never had sex before. God, he’d been wanting to fuck that bitch since he was fifteen. He’d been dating her for two years. He deserved her cherry, after all that time and money he invested in her. And she agreed, and she took her panties off for him, and they fucked in the back seat of his brother’s beat-up Oldsmobile. It only lasted a few seconds, but what the hell. At least he wasn’t a virgin anymore. At least he could die knowing that.
Man, Ernesto, what the fuck are you thinking? You’re not gonna die. Think… think about the dude’s wallet, the one you slipped in your pocket… think about the cards… the cards…
Ernesto knew exactly where he had to go. It wasn’t that far from here. They wouldn’t be expecting it at all.
Ernesto took a deep breath and stepped on the gas, increased his speed all the way up to 90… 100… 110…
He reached out for the dash, flipped on the radio, expecting to hear a news broadcast prominently discussing his background, interviews with his friends and family, but there was nothing. Was it too soon? Not a big enough story? Perhaps tomorrow… after he was dead…
Fuck you, Ernesto. You’re not going to die. You’re not going to—
Ernesto slammed on the horn, pulled the van to the right, swerved around a teetering truck carrying flammable substances that just barely got out of his way. Hell, that would’ve been interesting. Five or six pigs behind him would’ve been caught in that blow-up. Would’ve been nice. A dead pig is a good pig. But that ain’t worth him dying too, no way. Not when he could live instead. A free man…
Suddenly, he jackknifed to the left, took the Torrance off-ramp, barreled onto Crenshaw Boulevard, slammed into the side of an orange Volkswagen Bug and sent it careening into a station wagon filled with screaming kids, burned rubber past the Mobil oil refinery, the one that was always exploding and releasing poisonous gas into the air. Ernesto hated Torrance. He and his friends used to take a bus down to Torrance just to mug people. A few wallets later, they’d hop back onto the bus and return to their own neighborhood in Wilmington. The two cities weren’t that far apart, and yet they were like two different worlds. Parts of Torrance looked like a white man’s paradise, little gingerbread houses and white picket fences, yapping dogs in the front yard, a fat dude with a moustache barbecuing meat on a grill for the kiddies, and pleasant noxious fumes polluting their air. Oh, well. The price you have to pay to live in paradise. He always got treated like shit when he went to Torrance, so when he and Julio got old enough to steal, Ernesto said to him, “Fuck Wilmington. Nobody here’s got money. Let’s go to Torrance instead. You got ninety cents for the bus?” Between the two of ’em they scraped up the money. And it was the best ninety cents they’d spent in their life. They came back with a hundred and fifty bucks.
Ernesto spent his share on food. There wasn’t much of it at home, not these days, ever since Mom lost her day job…
Mom. He was never gonna see her again. He knew that now.
What the fuck? It was probably better that way. He’d never been nothin’ more than a burden to her. She’d be glad to see him go.
He turned up the radio as he sped through a red light. No mention of him at all. Were they totally incompetent? Wasn’t he a hazard to public safety? Didn’t they have to warn somebody?
The news was all cluttered up with trivia from the Middle East. Israel was bombing Lebanon again. 180 Lebanese dead. What the fuck did that mean to him? He switched the radio to some music.
She Wants Revenge blasted out of the speakers as he swerved onto Torrance Boulevard. “I want to fucking tear you apart!” Goddamn he hated that song, but it was better than silence. As he made the curve, just barely avoiding some young white chick pushing a stroller into the crosswalk, the loaded revolver shot off the dash and slammed into the car door. “Oh, shit!” he shouted. The gun slid onto the carpet between the door and the driver’s seat; he couldn’t see it anymore. Ernesto’s heart was beating in his throat. It felt like it was going to burst out of his chest. He didn’t want to see that damn piece of metal ever again. He was scared of it. Jesus, he was so glad it hadn’t gone off accidentally when it hit the door.
Forget it. Don’t think about it… about the first time he ever laid eyes on the damn thing… about anything that had happened today… just keep going…
Ernesto woke up feeling pretty good. He was a man now. Margarita had spread her legs for him last night. Worked out perfectly. He’d remembered to pull out and ejaculate on her stomach, just like his older brother told him to do. “If you’re havin’ sex with that bitch, you better pull your dick out before you come ’cause you don’t want to get that cunt pregnant with a gash gremlin. Got it?” He could always rely on his brother to tell him what he needed to know, straight from the hip. What would he do without his big brother?
