Proxy and Proviso

Any time now he'd hear the front door open, a twist of the elongated brass handle, short hard steps hitting the cultured marble floor, and then, his mind played and replayed in horror, his door would be flung open, a great wind would enter, confused images of his previous free life now reliquiae.

Hearing- now everything was much more precise. Greg's tight nostrils siphoning the axed air, a speedy fan whicking the smell out a window held up with silver strips of gaffer tape. Everything inanimate acquired a sort of somatic quality, Mark's subtle arrogance hidden under thick, black body-covering clothing and the way he was being drawn into the perpetually turning fan.

“Hrm,” Mark got up, readjusting the articulated frame of something in Adam's room, something beyond the fringes of his vision, not bothering to look.

“Aaaaalways high,” came Greg, who always said stupid things when he was stoned, usually about past experiences of being high. He had foolish smile.

Math and Law and Civics homework covered the dirty-white carpet where they sat, half-finished D&D character sheets and rough sketches of equipment mixed in. Each of them had cleared a little area to sit in, forming a loose triangle amid the paper and stats. Now Mark was making a path, slicing through to reach the corner dais, where stood a pad.

The pad, elevated to the height of a large lemon, a one-piece frame weighing about forty pounds with a layer of non-skid EVA foam on the bottom so that it sticks. It cost a large sum of money to ship.

Mark hits it, stepping up, flicking a red switch on the side of a fat cord. Narrow inlays light up, protected by prime-coloured panels of plexiglass, nice and high-res. He steps on a square, LEDs embedded in the white stripes that border each panel light on that particular number. And so it goes, arrows shooting up and off the screen as strange people and robots dance on top of a layer of strange, uniquely japanese images. DDR. Shock absorbing, waterworn plastic, crome-trimmed siding with a platina of tiny scratches made by sloppy Fed-ex deliverers.

Time, time, time. Quasi-realism of this quant sweet-sixteen. Has it been that long, already? Sixteen years, wow! The fuzzy scarlet wallpaper hadn't changed, he thinks, since the house was built, savaged ribbons of epoxy covering the areas hit or broken or in some way damaged that weren't already covered up with poster. Enough of this prolix, he though with sudden red anger, let's go out and do something! Yes, I never have done anything good or bad or out of the blue, he though, so I suppose this is as good a time as any.

He then realized he had been thinking for far longer than he was aware of. The window was torn wide open, fresh, citric spring air flowing in and making his barefeet frozen at their edges. Greg was smoking an ashy joint, and Mark, fat, breath rising and falling with his diaphragm, sweat cool in the mat of his black hair.

The room had always been at a very slight slant, leaning to the right, and standing now, he leans against his paint-flecked work desk as he attempts to focus muscle and sight.

“Guys... let's go outside.”

They do not object. Mark slamming some last steps into the game as they walk past the module, their footsteps on carpeted attic-floor sounding like running faucets. “Don't trip over the internet line...”

The house was mostly blindingly white plaster and apple-ply polished mahogany wood siding, complete with Big Mouth Billy Bass and Basement Bar set-up, corny bric-a-brac flooding shelves and bookcases full with anything except books.

Pizza is done when (a) it starts squeaking like damp firewood, and/or (b) when the breadcrumb scabs turn crispy brown and start falling off. And that is how it's done. So when Adam threw the microwavable pie in the zapper, switching to something by Jimmy Rogers on 93.3, he didn't try anything fancy or anything like that, but sat down with Greg and Mark at a cute little clean white plastic table with embroidered fabric place-mats grafted into its laminated surface, and let it burn and stew in its own fluids 'til he could smell it nicely. Low-maitenance cooking, he thought, pleased.

The table was fully stocked, Memories of Canton and Shanghai piled on rotating carousels of medieval spice. They sat on chairs with fake velvet cushons. A speedy beefed-up kitchen.

Mark and Greg seemed uneasy, so Adam spoke. “Whow, six bowls guys!”

“Intense.”

“Yeah, I mean, and we've got some left.” said Greg, into the conversation now.

A dog moved somewhere inside the house.

“Really? I thought we only had six Gs.” said Adam.

“Did you say cheese?” asked mark.

“Gs.”

“Cheese?”

“Gs. Grams. Gs.”

They all laughed.

“Yeah, Brian only had six, and I bought it all from him.,” said Greg, looking around with sky-blue eyes, deep ones, “But I brought some of my own supply. This stuff was Grown Under Lights.” He took out a small, oily-looking mesh zip, contents dark green and furry with crystals. He flips it up in the air, evergreen freefall, and lands in Mark's lap, who quickly regards it and passes it on to Adam.

“Awesome! Awesome!”

This weed is, in some very serious way, both the first and the last time Adam ever feels the sexual aspect of doing drugs with someone else and at the time consciously aware of it. Smoking it, later, he felt like a machine that could weld leaf-springs in a Milwaukee tractor factory. Cut from machine, welding, to Adam, watching Greg and Mark smoke from his very own pipe. Something happens in his brain and lower gut, which causes the machine to weld even harder.

They ate their pizza and drank their coke mostly in silence, hungry as they were, Mark especially devouring a large slab of coffee cake even though he was plenty full.

They piled their plates in the sink, looked eachother over and axed their bodies down. They would need a lighter and the weed zip and a one-two combinatoin of axe and visine at the ready just in case a cop stops them to chat.

Outside! An untrue and daily and largely invisible nature of an all-encompassing embrace of insecticide and weed-whacking. As to distinguish themselves from the hoi polloi of this small town suburb, the Roads' kept their garden, border bushes and lawn perpetually impeccable; not a dead leaf in sight, automatic sprinklers and spotty hired-hands on twenty-four-hour duty.

The night is hot, not-unpleasantly humid. They hear a car down a street, and then it is still. Not much light, save only the stars but no moon. Adam feels like he's in an old, black and white film-noir plus sax soundtrack, somehow, somwhere.

They walk down Main Street, past a peeling red fence and by a big magnetic-lettering sign adjascent to the church that claims: YOU ARE NOT AN ACCIDENT.

Someone gets the idea of lighting up right on the street, and he goes with it, not totally approving. They pass a house, an unknown to Adam. Red and black brick pattern. Beyond a dark outdoor vestibule for the entrance, at the far end, he can see soft blue curtains and frosted glass, and if he tilts his head- yes, an old, wooden (perhaps oak) TV set proped up on a steel tripod. Old people live here, probably. A woman. Maybe she has children? Grandkids?

The sky is full of stars. They cross this mini-park place, The Point, a hangout along a lake where kids came to make out and swim. Mark and Greg were in character, chattering brightly over the smouldering pipe. Weaving between run-down tables unpainted since the pioneer days at least, beneath a tree where a yesterday's Gazette flipped open to the advertisements.

Out in the lake there's two docks: kiddie, with NO DIVING painted in droopy yellow lettering, and then there's the mature dock, guarded by a moat of weeds eight meters out. He remembers taking swimming lessons here, red level it was, when they had to jump into the instructor's arms off the kid dock. He said something, a homebrew ryhme he came up with by combining lines from Alladin and The Goonies, and threw himself off. And then, suddenly, without warning of any kind, he felt sick with rage. Later that same instructor yelled at him in front of all the guys for taking some large steaming piss on the changeroom floor. That was years ago but... if it was done adroitly...

The three of them walk up smooth matte pavement road, winding around a parking lot and by a vacant baseball diamond. The sound of their shoes, sneakers, crunching pavement makes him think of insects and esoskeletons, twist of rusty wire over abdomen. He has no memories of the diamond, that is, he never played baseball. He once went to a Bluejays game, though. With a friend who he now doesn't know.

In a small alcove they stop, sitting on an unnaturally placed deadhead log jutting out the side of a wall of grass. He's passed the pipe, taking it with an invisible, nonexistent hand. He takes a long pull on the end, sucking it deep, deep down and exhaling right before his lungs explode.

Welding leaf-springs now, in Milwaukee.

Feels like the heat death of the universe.

“Back in the day I used to actually be a pitcher here.” says Greg, probably lying.

“Back in the day is such a awful phrase.” says Mark.

“Yeah, didn't it replace yesteryear or something?” asks Adam, leaning back on the log.

“Yeah, “ says Mark, refilling the bowl, “yesteryear is such a good word too.”

Greg brought headphones, and both Adam and Mark can hear a muffled Women From Tokyo pulse into the night. Solid song. Adam's got it on Window's Media Player, downloaded it seconds before the site went up in the white flames of an inverted whirlwind snow storm when glitch programs mutated and the Black Sabbath list that was tabbed suddenly disapeared. He never was good with computers, and he always seemed to hit URLs that installed bugs that Ad-Aware called critical.

Temperance. Control. Another hit? God, yes.

“Blood” Greg said, wiping something away from his arm. “Fucking corner of brick house”

Mark was laughing in his tubbiness, a high-frequency trip-fantastic laugh of, if it were, maniacal evil scientisit groove. An uneven, chipped yellow smile and what was the beginning of his dad's mustache. Large, round nostrils. “Matt, sole athlete in entire wide world, bleeding by building!”

“Shut up, you bastard.” One sleeve of his chic, modern sportswear shirt is black, even in the night.

“At least my last name isn't bullock!” Mark said, roaring with laughter, coughing out the words.

“At least I'm not a fatass. Go put on some deaderant, you smell like ass.”

Mark was a little more serious now. “We all smell.”

“You especially.”

It was time for something to happen. Adam jogs off over a hill, turning back and stumbling up slick grass razored with micrometer precision. All around is the lake, deep and black and very intimate, a boat, yacht, docked off about half a K 'round the bend.

Adam had never seen the boat in action.

Always docked. But now it stood there, apart from the scenery, seperate from the concrete woodland. It's locked onto the dock with some metal stuff, metal jaws and a long, partially submerged chain, coiled around a warped, old piece of wood heavy with water. Glow-in-the-dark stripes run parallel across the dock, for late-night runs, of course. How nice.

Greg and Mark go after him, climbing up to his spot and follow his line of vision to the yacht. He hears Mark gives an exaggerated yawn thing, a sort of wow, and Greg is just grinning. And standing there, Adam is thinking this might just be the greatest moment in his life. Or soon will be.

The ground's structural elements have lost their integrity, it seems, as they make their way across a soggy mini-marsh that's collapsing under their feet like a botched soufle. The owners of the yacht must have stole it from a rich passerby because they didn't seem to have enough money to buy, say, a door or even a padlock to prevent people like Adam and friends from stealing the gleaming sole money object of their muddy backyard.

Greg enthusiastically kicks in the little door and they all hop in, looking around and stepping on the plexiglass with very little care or concern. There are magazines in the small cabin, room enough for two. Pictures of Asian chicks and motorcycles. Fragments of wood and fishing gear are mixed with an inch-thick pool of brackish water, different things patched together with waxy silicon and duct tape are torn apart to reveal dusty cubbards mostly full of empty bear cans and twisted wire, wherein Greg finds twenty-eight ounces of Jack Daniel's.

Adam rallies his friends to the aft and makes them kick the boat off the flimsy dock out into the lake. The chain collapses, a long plunk, and bits and pieces fall off into the water. They're out. A steady motion, slicing through, he's never sailed or driven a boat before, feels wonderful.

To the east! The rooty woodshore slid by us, trails walked on one's own risk weaving in and out of view. Now the point was something Adam could cover with his hand. At the back, Mark and Greg are ruthlessly pillaging the boat, cracking rusted padlocks and upheaving plexiglass trapdoors to reveal bailing buckets and the occassional lucky find, usually in the form of alcohol.

I'm out! I'm getting out! Look at them, consuming alcohol with gusto, me, riding the waves and now set a course for life! This is the best. The best. But... behind me.... but-

Adam Childan thought, there is no answer. No understanding. Last winter play I was a french santa clause, fucked up two and lines and shit! In front of the school and the kindergardners with teeth full of blood just looked up onto the stage. Mom found cum-soaked underwear stashed under bed last week and now I think she talks to me less, called it a big mess she found. Fuck. Shouldn't have said those things when we were down at Mill-street, buying greasy Pizza, and now she doesn't even talk to me...?

Moisture shotguns his face in aterial spray, and suddenly, like a bolt of lightning, he has no idea where he might be going or why. A lethal astigmatism... black fur around periphery of vision...

He's standing on the grassy hill, staring at the twisted horizon through glazed eyes.

“What's up?” Asks Greg.

“Huh?” Adam turns around to face him.

“Why are you up here?”

He doesn't know.

He knew it couldn't be true. Only a flash impression of what could happen, one of the many paths. A better one. But it just wouldn't be a reality. He was always talking, walking, doing things, but inside he didn't notice anyone. His body was what moved, smiled and acted. He remained remote; aloof. He couldn't be it. And now...

He's picking at his desk, classmates walking between tables and talking, Greg sitting directly across the room and Mark looking nervous. He runs a hand through his hair, still a little damp from the shower, smelling of mint. His sagging papier-mache project is shaped like a choux pastry before him.

“Everything I guess is just proxy and proviso.”