Eleven Twenty-Three, page 4
When we left the airport today, Tara and Hajime and I had an early, frantically conversational lunch at a Jewish sandwich shop near Church Street in Orlando. I went outside three times to smoke a cigarette, but it kept getting drops of rain on it and burning out. Hajime asked us lots of questions, about China, about the Chinese, about teaching and money and how the food was and our collective stomach flu experiences while living abroad. Tara asked him lots of questions back, about Hajime’s sister Mitsuko and her now-husband Mark Conet, about Jasmine’s new boyfriend Michael, about drug experiences and the weather and how the art and surveillance cameras were going.
“Why aren’t you talking, bro?” Hajime asked me as he finished his club sandwich. “Is it that post-travel anxiety thing?”
“Kind of,” I said. “Sorry.”
Not much time passed before Hajime and Tara launched into their usual mealtime political debates. Tara pointed out that at least with the attacks on September 11, assuming Hajime’s inside job theory was even true, the men behind the atrocity had accountability to attend to. The deaths appeared to be reduced as much as possible. The tragedy was then played off as a terrorist plot hatched by angry foreign extremists, and in the end Americans only wound up loving their nation more for it.
“Well, for a while, anyway,” Hajime threw in.
Tara posited that at least in America, there was a veil to hide the ugly truth from the world that day, and because of that veil, there has been an unprecedented show of brotherhood and a unified, fervent xenophobia ever since. It’s like Woodstock, if Woodstock was backed by oil barons and war profiteers and instead of dancing in the mud, attendees splashed around in their own middle class blood.
“But this domestic past-tense event is very different from the situation in Myanmar,” Tara said. “It’s a nowhere country unpronounceable by most and unidentifiable on a map by others. The entire infrastructure there is collapsing under an oppressive military junta that gobbles up eighty-nine percent of the annual GDP every year, and virtually nothing is done by the world at large. Innocent people, among them Buddhist monks whose only crime is marching in peaceful protest along the streets of Yangon, are unabashedly executed every day. The Karen, Shan, and Karenni minority groups are systematically slaughtered, but there’s no Don Cheadle movie to bring American attention to it, so they’ll more than likely be forgotten before ever being remembered in the first place.
“Starving children, sweat shops, slave labor, human trafficking, rape used as a weapon—”
“Sounds like a party,” Hajime laughed. “And I do like my parties.”
“If you weren’t such a lame post-millennium Weatherman wannabe, you’d care more about this, Hajime.”
“Nice history drop, Sunshine,” I said, my interest briefly piqued.
“Burma is a veritable buffet line of human rights violations, and what’s most important to remember is that these atrocities are not footnotes of the distant past or even the byproducts of yet another blasé coup d’etat, but preventable terrors transpiring right here in the present moment.”
I sipped my drink and thought about the briefcase in Hajime’s trunk.
“Hajime, you’ll never un-bomb the Towers,” my girlfriend insisted. “However, you can do something for the Burmese now, and should.”
“But what economic interests do we have there?” he asked, sipping from a bottle of green tea. “My point is that Myanmar or Burma or whatever you want to call it definitely needs somebody’s help, but unless they’re willing to be raped of all their natural resources and turned into another Starbucks location, they’re better off getting their help elsewhere—from the United Nations and a little aid from the International Court of Justice, maybe? Besides, America definitely has enough shit on its mind right now. You do realize that our economy is destined to crash in the next, say, eleven months, right? At most. Capitalism as we know it will never see 2009.”
I stifled a yawn and escaped before they asked me to choose a side. It was actually refreshing though to hear Hajime get passionate about some tragedy other than Myanmar, as I had been hearing Tara blathering on about Tatmadaw and slaughtered villagers for the past five months and was ready for a new cause to shrug off.
After lunch, Hajime drove us the hour-and-a-half back to Lilly’s End. Once on A1A I stared at signs for Daytona and Cocoa Beach, for surf shops and roadside curios and an attraction featuring the Florida skunk ape. Then we were heading over the St. John’s River, through marshlands and thick woods. The rain finally stopped and the sun peeked out from behind retreating gray clouds. Two jets soared high above our heads, leaving long thick vapor trails in a crisscross pattern before disappearing silently into the atmosphere.
When we came to the old gas station that had burnt down two summers ago, I knew we were home, and I lit a cigarette in symbolic salutation.
The End was as we had left it: in a deep, rainy slumber. The matching granite fountains downtown were turned off. There were ragged holes in some of the awnings at the store entrances from a minor hurricane that swept through in October. Old couples slouched along Main Street, eyeing us contemptuously. I waved to one of the sleepy-eyed town cops in his wrinkled sand-colored uniform when we passed him and Andre, the owner of Bill’s Burgers, chatting on the sidewalk bordering Massachusetts Avenue and Courtney Park. When we drove by Kennedy High School and the muddy P.E. field, I glimpsed permanently tanned beach girls (I thought one of them was Olivia for a split second, until I realized she would never be caught dead out there on a rainy football field), afraid to sit down on the wet bleachers. There were slimy guys kicking a disgusting soccer ball back and forth. Then there were rows and rows of houses without yards, complexes of condos and half-finished hotels that bore the names of the animals or flowers or shells or indigenous peoples that were dislocated in order for the structures to be built in their honor.
According to Hajime, the population of Lilly’s End still hovered somewhere around three thousand, four or five now that it was winter and all the dissipating, elderly New Englanders had migrated south to wreak havoc.
I saw sandwich shops and pizza parlors with pseudo-ethnic names on the doors; boutiques that catered to old women with missing eyebrows and too much make-up; surf shops and beachwear stores that would be out of business before February; Coquina Shores, my mother’s apartment complex, where by now she was most likely already on her first glass and in the middle of watching some random show on Real TV while doting on her cats but hating everything else; and on the north side of town, just before making our turn toward Tara’s house, we passed the dug up pit where the post office was scheduled to be erected, now covered in huge blue tarps and marked with orange NO TRESPASSING signs. We had seen and half-dismissed from memory everything the town had to offer in less time than it took for me to finish my cigarette. Beyond the immolated gas station on the southern tip, there were only mangroves and marshland, stingrays and coarse-sand beaches. Just past the post office at the other end, fishy docks and a pier where one of Tara’s friends was once raped, and where a man named Abraham Tyson penned the town name a long time ago.
Tara told Hajime the story about the briefcase. I simply nodded to most of her regaling and added, “I know, it’s crazy,” and then, “No, that’s really what happened,” when appropriate.
“So what now then?” he asked, pulling me out of the trance I was undergoing.
“What do you mean?” I said, lighting another cigarette and rolling down the window.
“I mean, what are you going to do with the briefcase he stuffed into your bag?”
“Yeah, Layne,” Tara echoed. “What are you going to do now?”
I considered the question for a moment.
“Well, I guess I’m going to call the police and tell them what happened. This guy Scott, or whatever his real name is, would have had to break into our bags somewhere in San Francisco. Either that or paid someone off to plant the case in there. Our luggage was tagged with all of our information, you know. It could have been done.”
“You’re going to call the police and just give them the briefcase?” Hajime asked incredulously. “You mean you don’t want to know what’s inside it at least a little bit?”
“No, I don’t. For all we know it may be a bomb or something.”
“I don’t think so,” Tara said. “Remember what you told me back in Shanghai, Layne? You said that he would never be able to get a bomb past airport security. Remember? So maybe Hajime is right. Maybe you should open it. I have to admit, I am more than a tad bit curious.”
“There’s no—fucking—way,” I said, inhaling furiously on my cigarette. “If it’s not a bomb, it could very well be full of some kind of, like, exotic flesh-eating bacteria or nuclear secrets or something. I could be getting set up to unwittingly play a role in some terrorist plot, Tara. Whatever it is, all radical political statements aside, tomorrow morning I’m turning it into the police and calling the airline and forgetting about it. That’s it.”
“Tomorrow morning?” Hajime asked. “Isn’t your dad’s funeral tomorrow morning?”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, after the funeral I’m going to, anyway.”
Hajime dropped us off at the old yellow house Tara and her friends had leased amid four or five more hugs. He promised that he’d see us tonight, since he was having our friends over anyway and they couldn’t wait to see us, which I kind of thought was at least in part a lie. I told him that we would try to make it, that Tara and I had dinner with our respective families at seven and it would have to be later, and asked if Mitsuko would be there.
“It’s tentative,” he said. “But the rest of them are a definite. Have you ever heard of Bohemian Grove? No? Well then I’ve got to tell you about it tonight.”
And then he left.
Tara and I carried our bags inside her empty house. I held my duffel bag with great unease, and quickly placed it in the tiny garage out back while Tara made calls to her family. Before I left the duffel and its contents in the dark, I unzipped it and contemplated the briefcase tucked away inside for a long time. Finally, I reached down and tried to open it, but predictably, it was locked. Then I held the unlatched handcuff in my palm, fingering the steel as if it would somehow provide me with an answer. Instead I became queasy and quickly snatched up my duffel, left the briefcase on the floor, and vacated the garage without looking back. Tara and I both showered. I made a call on Julie’s phone to my mother to confirm that we were home and that I would be at her condo by seven, and then had my cell turned back on by the phone company. I went outside to the back yard, pulled off the blue tarp, and revved up my Accord to make sure it was still running. Julie (not Miranda, though) promised to drive it and Tara’s Cavalier around every once in a while to keep the battery from dying. It gurgled smoke from the muffler and shimmied and shook before finally kicking to life and running hesitantly, which was enough for me at that point. I finally went inside the droopy yellow house and Tara and I had sleepy welcome home sex and passed out on her bed.
I thought of Mitsuko when we did it.
“Sunshine,” I say into Tara’s ear as she struggles to awake. “I’ve got to get ready for my mom’s. Do you hear me right now?”
“I’m…getting there,” she whispers, and rolls away from me again. “I’m in the middle of a happy dream, sweetie. Come back in fifteen minutes.”
“You’ve got to get ready for your parents’ dinner too. Wake up.”
“But I’m dreaming still…”
“What are you dreaming?” I ask, sitting up beside her and lighting a cigarette. I glance out through the blinds and realize that the traffic light outside already means nothing to me.
Three minutes pass before Tara says anything.
“I don’t remember anymore what the last one was, the happy one,” she coos. “I’m in the middle of something else now.”
“Well better to wake up now while the next dream is just beginning, right? Wake up, Sunshine.”
“Now I’m dreaming that I’m standing behind a man…He looks like Mr. Scott, in a way…I’m standing behind a man like Mr. Scott who’s typing something out on a computer…and now I’m looking over his shoulder…Hold on…I’m reading what it is he’s writing…”
“And pray tell: what does it say, creepy girlfriend?” I ask, snickering to myself.
Tara has been working on her lucid dreaming now for months, since before we left. After watching Waking Life one night with Jasmine and Julie, Tara suddenly became very interested in controlling and learning from the secret lives carried out in her sleep. She went to Barnes & Noble and picked up books on the subject. She read about the symbolism of the subconscious. She browsed through multiple articles on Wikipedia. She brought Saint Birgitta’s holy visions and Richard D. James’s unnerving lucid dream-inspired music on the album drucQks into daily conversation. Soon after, I was pretending to listen as Tara read from her dream journal on a regular basis. Not long before the flight East, she awoke with a start and regaled me with a dream in which she was able to fly over the End and shrink herself down to the size of a molecule in an anthill before transforming herself into the living pain of my blackened lungs and into her sister Chloe’s sniffling, wounded soul, lost among the ghosts of a million waiters and cashiers.
She never had much luck with it in Suzhou, though. In fact, with the exception of the recent nightmares involving her mother, Tara could never recall a single emission from the night before while we were living there. I told her it was because in Communist China, dreams have you while they are sleeping, but I knew the plain and simple truth: my girlfriend has always dreamed in American, whether she admits it or not, and no amount of her Internet research or soap box lamentations will ever change that.
Tara suddenly tosses from one side to the other and moans fitfully. She takes in two large gasps and clenches her eyes shut even tighter.
“He’s a writer, Layne. Mr. Scott isn’t a courier…He’s a writer.”
“And what is it that he’s writing, Tara?” I ask, not laughing anymore.
“He’s—he’s writing out our deaths,” she whimpers. “He’s killing us all. Layne—he’s killing us all!”
I quickly stub my cigarette out in the ashtray and grab Tara gently by the shoulders. I shake her, but she keeps moaning and tossing her head from side to side, as if refusing to wake from her nightmare. I shake her even harder, and her eyes flutter open and she goes limp in my arms and I let go of my girlfriend and stand back, waiting for it to end.
06:57:00 PM
I hide everything but my eyes and forehead underneath the covers in bed, watching Tara as she smokes marijuana from a small pipe while getting ready for dinner. Outside, everything is a shade of blue. The world is bathed in whispering azure shadows and nebulous cobalt moonlight, the early winter evening engulfing Lilly’s End. I keep glancing down at the darkness below my waist and wiggle my toes to make sure they are there. Tara’s pot smoke tiptoes toward me and I cough at it and think about the nightmare she was having earlier.
He was writing out our deaths.
“Your cough is cute,” my girlfriend says.
“So is your ass,” I say, slipping completely under the covers.
“I love you, Sunshine. You do indeed make me happy when skies are gray.”
“Yeah, well, you’ll never know, dear, how much I love you,” I sing-whisper, suddenly sliding the sheets down and exposing my bristly face and sagging eyes to the soft light of the bedroom.
I smile at Tara, who is wearing black pants this evening and a blood-red sweater. She pouts her lips at the mirror above the armoire and inspects her mascara. She sprays perfume and slips on those stupid little earrings I hate.
“Please don’t take my Sunshine away,” she mouths silently, but I catch it in the reflection and am inexplicably moved. I blow her a kiss. She snatches it and pretends to eat it, giggling.
“I’m nervous about dinner with my mother,” I say finally.
“Because of your father?”
“Yeah. I’m not really sure how she’s taking it. We didn’t talk long on the phone when she told me about it. She didn’t seem too shaken up, but then again it’s my mother and I’m clueless every time I’m around her. She’s the Queen of Displacement and I’m the Prince of Apathy.”
“Your mother hates your father, Layne. You know this. I’m not being a bitch, but you’d think she would be overjoyed at the fact that the man who left her and her son alone and destitute would suffer an untimely death. Um, like, wouldn’t you?”
“It’s complicated, Tara.”
“It always is,” she mutters. “So anyway, what do you think of that dream I had earlier?”
“It was…pretty intense?”
“Do you think it means something? Do you think it was precognitive somehow?”
I ignore her questions and grab the remote from off the floor next to the bed. I turn on the TV and switch it to the station guide on Channel 99. I reset my watch—which until now has been set to the all-country-inclusive Beijing time—to the exact hour, minute, and second that is displayed on the television screen. Then I flip through the channels until I find a random news broadcast. A semi-Spanish female reporter is describing some kind of poor weather making its way down to us in Florida, and she jokes uneasily that it may be “a wet and cold Christmas season” before I mute the channel and turn back to Tara.
“It was just a dream,” I say carefully, feeling like the topic was long ago exhausted. “It’s been a long day. Honestly, I’m more impressed with the fact that you could narrate it to me than I am the dream itself. You’re getting pretty good at that lucid dreaming thing of yours. In this time zone, anyway.”
