Thomas was obsessed with the slightly super-human. He was indifferent to thoughts of being able to fly, but the idea of jumping just ten feet in the air filled him with an aching, sweet longing, like one thinking about an early love, or a first kiss beneath a damp gazebo.
Thomas had never been in love. Ten years ago he had tried, but Chloe Ray had proved nothing like what he expected as a lover. She liked him, which was nice, but she was not one to wait through the long night, languishing by a rainy window for her rescuer to return. Such girls would never have been attracted to someone as shy, soft-spoken, and uncombative-looking as Thomas. He would have no less, though, and no more.
So now he stood, devotedly alone, in an apartment on a hill just above the pointed, ozone stained Capitol Records building. He walked to his work every day at Kinko’s, and returned every day as the dusk was falling, having more or less forgotten the last eight hours. He had an education, and could have gotten a better job, but with his modest needs, and his ability to selectively erase and skip over portions of time, he didn’t see the need for it.
In college Thomas had been a student of biology. He studied spiders, sharks, bees, fleas, and other creatures that were capable of more than they should be. He was never a true scientist, though, since he did it all with the vague idea of furthering his own experience of the slightly super-human.
As he walked along Franklin one evening, past the ivy-covered and massive faÁade of the Church of Scientology and the Gelson’s parking lot, he closed his eyes, listening for the sound of cars and footsteps and trying to train himself to recognize trucks by the hot breaths of air they pushed before them.
It was just getting dark. He opened the door of his apartment, bare except for a television, a stool, and a single table, upon which stood a bottle of water and a newish computer. He turned on the TV, pressed play on the DVD player, and an old episode of Star Trek appeared. Thomas found the mute button on the remote, then sat on the floor cross- legged and closed his eyes. He tried to watch the show, through shut lids, to discern what was going on by the varying intensity of the heat on his face, signifying light and dark.
The apartment’s one small window was now black with the night. The silence, but for the unbroken shushing of cars, was absolute. Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock cast their fluctuating light against the far wall. When the episode cut to an exterior shot and outer space filled the screen, the room would go dark, and Thomas could tell that the scene had changed.
The light increased momentarily and he thought, ‘now they’re sending down a landing party,’ a few minutes passed and he thought, ‘now everyone who isn’t a regular is going to die.’ He sat quite still, thinking about the sense organs of tiger sharks and thinking about his own future. If not for the future then what was all this? He imagined that at some indefinite point, maybe next month, maybe in five years, he would break through some invisible barrier, and the slightly super-human abilities he knew lay buried within him would become demonstrable.
He imagined that now the captain was being held prisoner by a semi-omnipotent alien, perhaps in a castle on a world that simulated an allegorical earthly paradise. The heat changed very subtly, the alternating redness and blackness on the insides of his eyelids. Now the captain and Mr. Spock would have escaped, he would be placing a call to Scotty on the ship. After a while Thomas tried to guess which episode it was (he had shuffled the DVD’s). Was it “The Gamesters of Triskelion?” No, no, the magnetic fields seemed to say otherwise. He began to see strange formations like nebulae, or galaxies, as happens when you hold your eyes closed for a long time. “The Conscience of the King?” No, there was this faint bluish tinge, just detectable. He stuck out his hand close to where the TV was. It had to be “Who Mourns for Adonais.”
All afterimages having passed, the red spots on his eyelids began to seem like spiders, or shafts of lightning. He studied them, till they seemed some infinite loop, which would carry its viewer beyond the physical world entirely, a self-sufficing darkness that went on and on, a complexity in which a soul could drown as a man drowns in water. He opened his eyes.
He had been wrong. From the matte painting in the background depicting the lithium mine on Rigel 12, from William Shatner’s youthful appearance and the fact that his phaser was elongated and held with two hands, Thomas could tell the episode was “Where No Man Has Gone Before.”
The sense of shame he felt was mitigated by the fact that the episodes, after all, used much of the same studio sets, and there was no way he could discern dialogue. He did a hundred push-ups, forty pull-ups on the bar strung across the doorway to his bedroom, then cooked himself dinner. As the sad pasta made itself into a wreath he took some pleasure in imagining there was someone else he was cooking for. Yes, it was their anniversary, and he promised Elisabeth he would make her a nice dinner followed by a trip to the theater, for which they would both wear white gloves and hire a taxicab.
He poured the contents of an old jar of red sauce over the heap on his plate, covering it with diced chives. Yes, she sat across from him now, idly and vexedly wondering when he would propose marriage. She was afraid her first youth was slipping her by, but of course he would always assure her that was not the case, that she was as beautiful at 29 as she had been at 20.
Thomas ate his pasta with a peaceful, cow-like gusto. He watched an old episode of Saturday Night live on comedy central, though it was Friday night, and then went to sleep.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the city… No, but really, Johnny was walking across the unlit parking lot when he saw his girlfriend’s car coming to a halt in front of thrift-aid. The red neon sign was flickering on and off. He stopped to watch for a second, feeling rather drunk and rather bitter. After all, here he was with Ted, a shaved-headed moron who thought the nickname T-dog was cool, and Eliza had gone off to her cousin’s bar mitzvah, which of course Johnny wouldn’t want to go to. “It’s not like you really want to drink cranberry juice with my Nana,” she’d said, and he had no choice but to agree. But now the car, and she stepped out.
On a sudden impulse, he stepped behind a pillar, and pulled Ted with him. ‘What the fuck?’ And sure enough, not one but two bodies got out of the grey car. One was Eliza; the other was a guy, a guy, some dipshit with dyed black hair and a Thrice sweater. Johnny spat, twisted his baseball cap around, and came out from behind the pillar. He walked quickly up to his girlfriend, Ted following.
“Hey, hey what the fuck is this?” he shouted. Eliza turned, looking pale and confused.
Johnny pointed at the guy. “Who the fuck are you? What are you doing with my girlfriend?”
Ted walked up with his arms swinging, trying to make it look like he had muscles. Johnny felt frustrated, and as if everything around him were suffocatingly hot, the neon signs, the parking lot, the trash. He shoved emo-boy up against the car, an elbow at his throat.
“Stop it,” Eliza said, predictably. Of course, he knew she’d been cheating on him, and was almost glad he now had proof, but there was something particularly insulting in the fact that it had to be this skinny faggot wearing girls’ pants and converse. At least if she had done it with a man… but this character barely even qualified as a boy.
“I swear I haven’t done anything. I’m totally gay,” he said, the coward.
“Fag!” Ted yelled irrelevantly, a dumb smile on his face. Johnny wanted to punch him.
“Let me go!” the boy said. Eliza came over to him, was pulling on his sleeve, trying to get him to calm down.
“Relax, there is nothing going on, you’re just drunk.” But he shoved her away roughly. His face was hot, Ted was laughing at something, and he had the sensation that if he could just beat to death this disgusting black-haired milksop he could somehow retroactively erase his existence, and life would be wonderful again, she would love him again, more than anyone else, and it would be just the two of them…
But Ted stomped up to the car, brushing his bald head with his palm and said in a dumb voice, “Hey Johnny, let’s fuck this guy up. Come on, I’ll stick a crow-bar up his ass.”
“Shut the fuck up!” Johnny yelled, and seemed to turn emotional all of a sudden. “You’re a prick, Ted.” He let the boy go and walked away, towards his large, black pickup truck on the other side of the thrift-aid building.
“Fine,” Eliza shouted after him. She had been quiet when he was close enough to hit her. “We’re through then, okay? Finished. I’m leaving.” He raised his middle finger to the sky and vanished behind a scattering of old dumpsters.
The next day was a Saturday, and Thomas always felt at a loss for things to do on Saturdays. He woke up after a vaguely disturbing dream, which he couldn’t remember, wondering how it was that a man could live in the world without a single person he could even call an acquaintance. The thought bothered him, but he put it out of his mind by stretching, doing sit-ups, and turning on the television. In the morning light the room had an amber, almost brownish tinge to it and swarms of dust motes floated in rays that fell like pleats from the window.
He flipped through the channels idly, hearing the shrill voices of commercials, and at length decided to put in a star trek DVD. He watched The Gamesters of Triskelion, in which Captain Kirk is forced to wear a bondage outfit and wrestle with muscular, greased- up aliens, some male, some female, for the pleasure of disembodied brains who gamble over the matches. He sat back (cross-legged) in a kind of dreamy, self-devouring silence all through the episode. It seemed unbearably cruel just then that he had no one to speak to, that there were no voices in the room but his own and those of the TV. But this is the way things were.
After the episode he stretched, did two-hundred more push-ups, and masturbated. Thomas was trying to keep in mind the girls in the X-Men comics, the sci-fi porn he had downloaded yesterday, or at the very least the green-skinned dancing aliens from the bar scene in The Menagerie, but something else kept creeping in, something disturbing and unsettling which nevertheless he admitted by hints and insinuations. But no, that would never do. He remembered the first time, the disturbing thing, how he had gone to his mother for comfort and the spanking she’d given him. He remembered his father, with sideburns and a turned-down mustache, his absent eyes gazing around the room in long circles. His mother’s hand was cold, at first, and then it was warm.
As dusk began to color in the windowpanes he felt himself alone again. He had watched three episodes of Star Trek, hopped on each foot one thousand times, read four issues of Detective comics, and thrown darts at the dartboard above his bed 964 times. Now he sat on the old armchair in his living room, refusing to turn any lights on, staring at the black TV screen. He felt that the universe was being especially harsh to him today. It seemed to him that he was like a stranded mariner, alone in a tiny boat on a vast and unquiet sea. There above was the sky, massed with dark and multilayered storm clouds on one side and a no-less threatening calm on the other, there the old moon, held between the horns of the new, and below, the swirling sea, alternately gray and white under the cutting of the wind.
The masts, broken, no gas in the engine, he thought. And eventually his gloomy meditations gave way to a dull boredom and he gave up pondering the spiritual implications of his aloneness. Instead he counted the little points of white stucco on the ceiling and tried to imagine patterns out of them. The only one he saw was a monstrous face, with hollow eyes, goat’s horns and a beard.
Johnny drove around for a while in circles, listening to “Bitches Ain’t Shit,” now and then pounding his fist on the dashboard. He stopped again at the thrift-aid on La Brea, where last night he had found out for sure what he’d always suspected, and bought a handle of Wild Turkey. He drove to Ted’s house to drink it, and to play Soul Caliber II. Ted had a couple of whores over and was drinking beer on his couch. Johnny introduced himself to the girls, one of whom he vaguely thought he knew, slapped the less-disgusting one on the ass, and began drinking. Then they watched ultimate fighting championship.
Thomas’ apartment was all dark but for the bluish glow that came in between the window-slats. He decided there was no use putting it off any longer, and so, sighing heavily, he turned the lights on in the kitchenette and put a frozen pizza in the oven. The anticipation of food put in him a simple, basic happiness, and as happens sometimes, in the smell of sauce and melting cheese everything took on a different connotation. He felt self-sufficient rather than merely solitary, and it seemed now that he was on an island, temporarily stranded, for sure, but certain to be rescued eventually.
After dinner his gloom returned. It was nine o’ clock, which meant still five hours before he would be able to sleep, he had reached all his exercise quotas, and was at a loss of what to do with himself. So he put on music, Xiu Xiu naturally, and paced about his room. The thought occurred to him to go for a walk, and the idea for some reason appealed to him greatly. There was a fancy hipster café/bar a few blocks from his apartment, a place populated by desultory hustlers, doomed screenwriters and overdressed, desperate women. He would go there.
He put on one of the knit sweaters he often wore, stared for some minutes at the mirror in the bathroom, and made an attempt at combing his hair. His hair was black, and naturally pretty straight, but for some reason it always curled forward at his temples, and in the front a strand fell over one eye.
There was a great glare from cars’ headlights and stores as he walked down the narrow sidewalk towards Tamarind. He tried closing his eyes (always developing, always preparing), and found that weeks of traversing these blocks while doing so had made him able to navigate pretty well. He stopped at a corner, waited for the sound of a stopped car (eight cylinder, twin exhaust) to rise and then fade away, and crossed when he heard no more.
When he opened his eyes on the next block he was passing a trendy Japanese restaurant, where a seemingly infinite number of couples sat facing each other over sake and talking in loud innuendoes. Everyone on this street talked loudly and walked much faster than Thomas did, and he saw that he was cutting through an incomprehensible current, that people looked at him with distrust and wonder, and that he had nothing to say to anyone. The parade of headlights and taillights only made him more anxious and more sad, and he thought again of the wide salt sea, which swallows men whole, and upon which he was adrift, of the lithium mines on Rigel 12 and the radiation belt at the periphery of the solar system.
Some ignoramus jostled him, and two blonde women walked indignantly past, hurrying, hurrying, though they both seemed drunk. He was without attraction. Didn’t these people understand anything of what was important? Did they even know about the lithium mines on Rigel 12? Of course not, he thought, they were ignorant drones, merely parts of a collective.
He remembered Chloe Ray. Since he’d broken up with her, his experience of women had been entirely theoretical. The idea of gender had been for him a matter of semantics, of grammar; the way in French a spoon was feminine and a fork masculine. And how had it become this way? Why had he broken up with her, nine years ago now?
Or, more directly, he thought, why did he throw up, that last time? Why had he suddenly been unable to bear it any more, that demanding, inscrutable chasm? He closed his eyes again, was suddenly in a world of footsteps, shushing tires and vague patterns of light and heat, a terrifying, hallucinatory place, but one somehow comforting as well. He didn’t open them until he got to the café.
Johnny left six messages on Eliza’s phone. The first three were angry, retributive, threatening. These were when he was sober, driving around and pounding things. The next three, increasingly incoherent, were lamentatory, elegiac, and finally entreating. He was getting drunk at Ted’s house, feeling disgusted by Ted and his flirting with the uglier of the two girls he’d brought over. She was a drunk, freckly redhead, clearly anorexic, who had a nose like a dead banana and whose limp arms gave no resistance to Ted’s gropings. For some reason Johnny felt a chill, a shudder run all through him, when he saw his ‘homie’ roughly trying to grab and knead the girl’s nonexistent boobs. He turned to the less disgusting one. Brown haired, brown skinned, she sat bored-looking on the arm of the couch chewing pink gum. Johnny drank some whisky out of the bottle and sat down on the floor, trying to see up the girl’s skirt. His keys made a tinkly sound when he sat on them, and the girl said something but he had no idea what.
He got a glimpse of the half-wit and the redhead, on the other side of the room, kissing now. He sniffed. He took out his cell phone and, stepping outside, called Eliza again. She didn’t answer, of course. That’s what girls do, he thought indignantly. They’re pussies, all of them. He felt as if he were stuck on some kind of conveyer belt, or pushed by a huge throng of people, towards some chewing, gaping mouth. Everything was inevitable and if he were trapped in a mad machine he felt the best way to deal with it was to get drunk and fuck up as much shit as possible. He was lost at sea, or rather, caught in the current of a giant river, on a tiny boat with neither an engine nor a paddle.
Back inside, he went up to the couch’s leg, which the dark girl straddled. “So,” he said drunkenly. He noticed she didn’t really have boobs either, at least not like a woman’s boobs. She had a white tank top on and a bondage belt. He decided to kiss her. He grabbed her by the shoulders and picked her up, then stuck his tongue in her mouth.
At first she resisted, but then, trembling slightly, she ceased and let herself be pulled in. Ted had told her his friend was a ‘crazy motherfucka. Demented. A killa.’ She’d been expecting some kind of Van Damme type in a leather trench coat and throwing-knives, not this vaguely droopy character with a stubbly beard (which scratched her painfully) and baggy, faded jeans. Still, she let him take her shirt off; he might have a gun or something.
But as he leaned her up against the wall, as the stucco pressed into her back and she tasted tobacco and whisky, she longed passionately to be anywhere else, or for a completely different kind of man to appear, the awaited hero, who would sweep her away from guys like this, old men whose names she didn’t know.
Johnny thought, ‘at least I’m getting laid,’ but he felt bitter, unsatisfied, and disgusted with himself. But suddenly he saw Ted out of the corner of his eye, and he seemed to be leering at him. Yes, he was smiling, laughing, smirking ironically, at him. ‘He’s laughing at me, the bastard,’ Johnny thought. And he realized, yes, he was sure of it now, that Ted had planned all this, just to make him look stupid. ‘The bastard,’ he thought, and it seemed that there was something conniving, catty even, about him, his wry, but dim-witted smile, his outrageous paws, grasping at the bones and saggy shapes of the poor anorexic redhead.
Johnny pulled away from the girl, leaving her leaning against the wall. There was a bad taste in his mouth and the room seemed unnecessarily hot. He yelled at Ted.
“Hey, hey I’m on to you,” he said. “You fucking backstabbing piece of shit!”
“Wha?” Ted shoved the redhead aside and looked dimly around, as if very stoned.
“You heard me!” Johnny raged. “I’m tired of your shit. You jealous fuck! You just want Eliza for yourself, that’s what it is.” Everything was clear to him now. He looked with a feeling of nausea at the dark skinned girl who now had her arms across her chest and was fiddling with her bra. “You’re just trying to make me look like an asshole,” he slurred, and poked a finger at Ted. “You want her for yourself. That’s what this is.”
Ted stared up dumbly up at him, then went back to making out with the redhead. Johnny felt a sudden disgust for the dark girl, Ted’s room and the smell of whisky and decided to leave. He slammed the front door, spat, lit up a cigarette, and got in his truck. He had a vague idea of going out to look for Eliza. Maybe he would apologize to her, or maybe smack her or warn her that Ted wanted her ass. His thoughts were muddled, and it seemed that it didn’t matter what he decided, as if he had no free will and were only being pushed along by something mysterious and huge, some inhuman dynamism.
Thomas sat alone at a table on the café’s terrace. An ungentle wind had just started blowing and the arcades above flapped annoyingly. He was thinking about Star Trek, and thinking about the X-Men, watching the people go by, arms entwined or alone or in sad or rowdy groups, and wishing fervently that he was part of a crew of some sort, a cast of regular characters who could always be counted on for witty repartee and charmingly predictable sexual tension.
He thought of the end of The Trouble with Tribbles, and felt almost at the point of tears. How they had all laughed, and William Shatner’s jolly, gratified expression, how his eyes sparkled and that one wave of light brown hair fell across his forehead…
To be fair, Thomas rather resembled a youthful William Shatner, except that his hair was black, and he had a stubbly beard, like that of a recently shipwrecked Robinson Crusoe. He was short, and inconspicuously muscular, and to girls, though he was objectively not bad looking, he presented a forbidding air of someone who would not want to talk to them, and who would not be fun to talk to in any case.
He felt washed up, like a trilobite shell, something fossilized and abandoned by the great surging wave of life. He thought of escape, but there was nowhere to escape to, and nothing to escape from. Strangely for him, he’d ordered an Irish coffee with a shot of Baileys, thinking maybe it would change something.
But now on the terrace the wind cut at the pages of newspapers and he stared off into space with a dreamy and absent look.
Where would she go? Johnny thought. He was driving around, numbly angry and watching the lights disappear behind the roof one after the other when an idea came to him. There was that bar in East Hollywood, he remembered, that played reggae music and that she’d always wanted to go to but that he’d said was too far away, or did he not like it because he thought it was a gay bar?
Unable to think of anything else he latched on to the idea with desperate firmness. Yes, she must be there, he thought. I will go there, and, passing the corner of sunset, he made a swift right turn without looking.
Thomas was staring at a couple, a man and a woman, near the end of the patio. They both had drinks. The girl was younger, and had her makeup done in large, glittery cat’s eyes. The guy, who faced away from him, he could see had a turned-down moustache and a way of extending his pinkie finger every time he made a point, in a refined and silly gesture. What does he remind me of? Thomas thought. And he stared after them with an amused and ironic smile, like someone from a Buddhist story who has achieved enlightenment by being hit over the head with a stick.
Johnny drove slowly up the street by the bar, looking for a place to park. The bar had a purplish faÁade, covered with bougainvillea and whimsical, mosaic designs. Out front was a patio full of scenesters and gay-looking intellectuals. As he pulled even with the place, staring drunkenly out the window, he saw someone staring back. Yes, he’s looking at me, Johnny thought, enraged. He’s laughing at me! Look at that, black hair, a sweater, he knows something. He’s been with her, too. Johnny grabbed the wheel tightly. She must be here with him right now, he thought, she must be using the bathroom and he’s here laughing at me! Fucking hilarious.
In the periphery of his sight he caught somebody backing up, leaving a parking space. And it was as if something had torn loose in him, some structure crumbled. He felt almost relieved to be angry, to be able to do something. He parked, lit a cigarette, inhaled sharply and got out.
Thomas was still staring at the strange couple, who reminded him so much of whom? Of whom? But the girl looked up and seemed to notice him. She quickly looked down and leaned her face on her palm. So he decided he’d better stop staring at them like a pervert. Glancing upward, he noticed a man walking with very purposeful strides up toward the café terrace.
It was a man with a stubbly beard, a shaved head, and keys hanging off his belt loop and making a jingle at every step. He wore baggy jeans, a wife-beater, and the oversized Roca-Wear sweatshirt that even he knew he was too old to pull off. Thomas gazed after him with a new sort of fascination. Suddenly the man stopped, and Thomas noticed with puzzlement that he seemed to be looking at him, to have stopped right in front of his table and taken the cigarette out of his mouth.
“What the fuck’re you looking at?” Johnny said.
“What?” Thomas looked up, blinked a couple of times.
“Are you deaf? I said, what the fuck-“ he spat, threw the cigarette end on the ground; he’d smoked the filter and now there was an awful taste in his mouth.
“No, no, I heard you I just…” Thomas put up a hand to quiet him, then got up from his chair. He was puzzled and trying to figure out what the situation might mean.
“You tryin’ to start shit, homie? Huh?” Johnny beat his chest with his fists, then came up very close to Thomas, looking down in his face and yelling incoherently. Then he shoved him, hard.
Thomas staggered back slightly and caught himself on a chair. There was something unreal about what was going on. Johnny walked up close to him again, arching his chest forward and thrusting his chin out, but Thomas didn’t quite believe it, that he was about to get into a fight over a vacant stare. The world suddenly appeared to him completely bizarre and at the same time — at the same time it was as if he didn’t believe in it but knew what had to happen in order for his own story to play out.
Johnny pounded his chest again. He stood on his tip-toes and kept trying to stare down at Thomas and bump into him, like a broken robot or an ape. It occurred to Thomas that he was about to hit him, and that this was a good opportunity, and so he stepped back and clocked him in the jaw. He instinctively swung forward with all his weight and his foot hit the ground just as Johnny fell back and tumbled over a chair. Somebody clapped, and somebody else muttered ‘oh shit.’ Thomas looked around and scratched the back of his neck modestly. He was surprised at how light he felt, and at how far the other guy had flown. Not knowing what else to do he went over to go help him up. He grabbed him by the shoulder and lifted, saying something softly like ‘uh, you okay?’
But Johnny, dizzy and mad, spat out a tooth and punched Thomas in the nose. He raised his hand to his face, noticed a trickle of blood, and wiped it on a napkin. He’d never been punched in the nose before, and it was an odd feeling, painful and interesting at the same time, like a book by Kafka. Johnny kept moaning something like ‘Aggot, aggoth, frucking aggot!” He came forward slowly.
A little offended, and a little hurt, Thomas did a skipping, sideways sort of step and hit him again, and Johnny fell backwards again. And because it was around, and because it fell so naturally to hand, Thomas picked up one of the metal chairs, swung it high and smashed it into the other’s head.
He put the chair down, rubbed his nose with a napkin, and looked at the man, whose name he didn’t know, and who lay on the ground like crumpled paper. Well, he thought, scratching his chin, and at the same time great conflicting waves of pride and fear jumped up in him.
Was this the invisible barrier, this here? Was what he’d just done slightly super-human? He knelt down, picked Johnny up, and put him in a chair, where he slowly began to move his head.
Thomas’s hands shook. He was vaguely conscious of people talking, cars going by, a bartender appearing, angry and flustered, with a wet rag. If only he had known, he thought, what kind of a man this was, whether he was particularly strong or tough, a good fighter or merely an ordinary guy, which would make Thomas no more than an ordinary guy as well for defeating him. It didn’t occur to him that he could have been drunk, or impaired, or otherwise less-than-normal.
If only I had remembered to close my eyes, Thomas thought, then I would know for sure. He was vexed with himself, began to feel like a fool, and the pride of having beaten someone up gradually faded. He heard someone say something about calling the cops, and he figured that was his cue to exit. Casting a last glance to see if the couple were still there (they weren’t) he left the café. He walked quickly home, and though he stumbled a few times he kept his eyes resolutely closed the whole way.