Chapter 8
On Tuesday morning it was raining softly. Quentin woke up on his own initiative, and the big house was silent. Outside on the deck the mist sprayed into his face until the last trace of drowsiness was gone. Then he logged into his school account, and there was an email from Marcela --
"Quentin,
I hope that you are having a wonderful trip. I have made it to Santiago and it is very nice. Yesterday, I saw many old friends from school, and we went out to celebrate my return. Now today, Elena and myself will drive to the beach. It will be very nice to spend time with her, as it has been several months, and she keeps growing older at a very fast rate.
In other good news, I found out yesterday that I will be able to take Quiroga’s class after all! Apparently a couple of people dropped and since I was checking the site almost every chance I could, I was able to catch one of the openings. That alone is worth a drink or two when we get back together and it takes so much stress away, because I was not sure when the next opportunity would arrive to take that course.
What did you see on your trip? Did you visit Mount Rushmore? You told me that you probably couldn't check email until you arrived in Seattle. I hope that Seattle is nice, and that Kjell's family is treating you well.
I miss you and I look forward to seeing you soon. I wish you were here.
Marcela"
He tried to write her back, but none of the right words came to him and anything he wrote looked stupid. He gave up on it. It was after ten before everyone was awake, and they just drank coffee for breakfast.
Then they drove back into the city. Down to the sound. Then ambling around downtown and sitting in Pioneer Square. And finally walking throughout the art museum, a plan which Quentin neither supported nor opposed. Then they passed a photograph of Chief Seattle.
"They named this town after an Indian chief?" Alessandro asked in surprise.
"Seattle was one of the more, shall we say, acquiescent chiefs in the area." Carson said. "There were wars and disingenuous treaties in the cards for most of the other tribes, like the Nisqually, the Puyallop, and the Klickitat."
"Klickitat!" Kjell shrieked, throwing his hands in the air.
They passed a flat, simple painting depicting an old native whaling party. Seven Indians in a narrow canoe were braving the waves of the Pacific Ocean and the wrath of a menacing orca whale. One of them stood tall in the middle of the boat, with a harpoon raised in his hand.
"Look at that maniac," Carson said, pointing at the harpooner. "They had a very good tradition, however. The tribes around here always prayed for the spirits of the things they killed, even if they had to kill them."
Beyond that, they did surprisingly little for the situation. No great trips to the ocean. No tours of the neighborhoods that Carson haunted. Just a perfunctory circuit of the downtown area, looking up at the Space Needle from below.
"You don't want to go up there. It's just a tourist trap." Kjell said.
Olivia met them in Seattle towards the evening, begging what the plan was.
"A night of private debauchery on Mercer Island with our Prince Prospero, and you're the guest of honor." Kjell said.
"Does that mean you're paying for me?"
"You always have your priorities straight."
Back to the island they went, stopping at a fancy liquor store. Everyone went in and everyone came out with armfuls of alcohol and food. There was talk of grilling but it proved to be too wet to carry through with them, so Carson used the stove and grilled them untold numbers of bratwursts and sausages which they ate sitting out on the deck. About the time that they were finished, Carson stood up with the first drink in his hand and bombarded them with a soliloquy.
"To our visitors! I can't believe we've only known each other for five days, because really I feel like it's been three or four weeks as much as we've talked and done together, and if we don't see each other again, we'll always have the Badlands. That's all."
"This is Carson, sober." Olivia whispered into Quentin's ear.
They all dropped a shot when he was done talking, and it started from there. At first it was all jubilation for Quentin -- the shots and the people. Kjell passed some cheap cigars around as a final celebration of their accomplishments. They talked and had more drinks, tipped another shot, and it started to add up. The next thing he knew he was starting to wobble and his head was swinging. He leaned back in his metal chair and blinked rapidly, and then he stood up and walked around the deck in circles.
"You need another one my man." Carson said, measuring out a new glass of rum and coke for him.
Quentin crashed back down into his chair. He looked over at Olivia, and she smiled at him. Such a sweet smile. He looked at her even more hopefully. She smiled again, but she turned away and laughed with Kjell. Quentin started rambling.
"You don't even know what you have until the sun goes down."
"Quentin Ross, that's crazy talk." Kjell responded.
"Olivia, I like your shirt. It seems like everything else out here is green, why not wear a green shirt to go with it? You should have warned me when we were in Chicago, I would have brought one. I have a nice green polo shirt that would be extra fitting for this occasion."
"Thank you."
"I mean it though, can't you see? Your shirt is amazing. It's all so hard to explain right now."
The other four all turned and laughed at him, it seemed. He sensed a conspiracy was emerging to isolate him. He couldn't be sure how it was going to happen, but neither they nor he himself could predict what actions he would take. How could they not devise a plan against him under such abnormal circumstances?
A slug eased its way across the wood, close to his feet. There was a trail of slime behind it or whatever the substance actually was that slugs were coated with. He knew not. In the next five minutes it moved about an inch, and Quentin never took his eyes from it.
"What's the point of being alive and moving so slowly?" he wondered aloud.
"What do you mean?" Olivia asked.
"There's a slug in front of his feet." Alessandro said.
He could sense their inquisitive stares bearing down upon him. Their eyes were suddenly a front for some deeper, sinister force. Finally he looked up.
"Are you enjoying yourself?" Kjell asked, in his mocking tone that he could never seem to turn off under any circumstances.
"It's such an interesting thing. How do slugs survive in the wild?"
Alessandro the great, future scientist had the answer at his fingertips.
"They need substantial moisture, and only in highly specific environments with a lot of moisture do they really thrive. They have neither an endoskeleton or an exoskeleton, strangely enough, and on top of that they're all hermaphrodites. Try applying these traits to other animals!"
"Slugs were great when we were kids. We used to always pick them up and hide them under mom's pillow." Kjell said.
"You were a horrible child! No wonder your parents hated you." Olivia replied.
"I have no idea what you're talking about -- I'm their favorite."
"See?" Alessandro said. "While we've been talking the thing has moved another quarter of an inch."
Hermaphoditism -- such a small change to the physical body, and all of society would be altered beyond recognition. There wouldn't be these problems with Carson Karlsen or social status. Carson was inside it seemed and still the living obstacles had mounted, with him and her sitting there next to two other friends. But he stopped drinking and started to come back to his senses over the next thirty minutes. Meanwhile, Alessandro went back in the house to get the stash of marijuana.
"Did you see Carson in there?" Olivia asked when Alessandro emerged.
"Yes I did. He's just sitting at the kitchen table thinking. He was very friendly when I walked through, talking about the wide expanse of the future, the faces on our money, and so on. He made about as much sense as he usually does."
Olivia was already standing up, and she announced her i
ntention to take a walk before she smoked. And would anyone like to come with her?
That was the type of thing that Quentin was waiting for -- too drunk and too much of an outsider to suggest it himself. The other two said no, leaving him to say yes of course to the mademoiselle. Once in awhile, even real life was serendipitous.
They cut around the side of the house with Olivia pushing open the latch on a gate in the pitch dark. Purely through memory. When they passed her car she opened the door and rummaged through her glove compartment, leaning across the front seat, and emerged with something clasped in her left hand.
"You know, I forgot to bring this in earlier. I burned that Microphones album we were listening to out there. And here -- just a mix CD with some other stuff on it. Don't let Kjell monopolize the music on the drive back, you know? You will definitely regret it."
He inspected the CD in the dim light and it simply had the name of the band and album scribbled on with a black magic marker. He slid it into the pocket of his jacket as they started circling the block. The houses were all spaced widely, and he didn't see a single one that wasn't large and they went up and back down a gentle slope that rose toward the middle of the island. Olivia said all they had to do was stay on the same road and it would double back upon itself.
"So you're back in Seattle -- what now? What are you doing tomorrow?" he asked her.
"Absolutely nothing," she said, "I'm going to sit in my room and listen to music and read something fantastic. I don't yet know what that will be."
"Well, thanks for the CD. By the way, I think I'm completely in love with you."
Olivia laughed again with yet another meaning behind the gesture. Surprise was the last emotion on her face.
"Damn, you definitely know how to jump off a cliff."
"No I'm serious. You're like the most awesome girl I've ever met. I don't understand how you do it."
"I think I know a girl who'd be very infuriated to hear you say what you just said."
Presumably the implication was his real life. His relationship, whatever that meant. He didn't know the answer because language failed him. Moral principle had surfaced from Olivia when all else disappeared, disguising her disinterest in didactic terms. When he said nothing more for a few seconds she kept talking.
"I've heard about twenty-three guys say what you just said. It's two parts a blessing and one part a curse. Also, you have no fucking idea what you're saying."
"Maybe you're right."
They went around a curve in the street and ahead they could see the Karlsen driveway, and even a little bit of the house that wasn't hidden by the trees. Now it was only Alessandro outside in the back with a blunt-wrap. He whistled to himself and didn't notice either of them until they were very close to him, yet he betrayed no change of expression when they said hello.
"Everyone will be here in a second. The plan is to take another shot before we smoke this blunt. Won't you care to join us?"
"Fuck yeah, I never turn down weed." Olivia said.
Quentin took his own shot violently, before the others got outside, slamming his glass down on the metal table. He poured another one to replace it for when the real shots would begin. The table was circular and seemed almost to spin in a holographic way. The moon was blanketed by the clouds but a few little stars shone through between them. The brightest and luckiest stars of the universe they must have been. He supposed that what he'd said to Olivia had barely registered. That a week or two in the future she'd forget it all when the next guy said the same.
Alessandro was talking to her now, in a very relaxed and casual fashion, leaning back in his chair and crushing buds of weed inside the blunt paper. His easy familiarity was in such opposition to Quentin's manner of relating to her. Did they even see the world in the same colors? They had been around her for the same five days, seen the same person, and heard the same words, and why then were their reactions so diverse? How he'd made a mockery of himself while Alessandro had a pleasant conversation with a girl he would never see again. He was getting more and more intoxicated and had begun to slump down in his chair rather noticeably.
Kjell and Carson appeared out of the back door in the midst of some discussion and back to his right Alessandro put the finishing touches down on their blunt.
"Have you seen Coffee and Cigarettes yet? We might watch that later."
"How are we going to pay attention for two hours when Quentin can hardly even keep from falling out of his chair?"
"Quentin is living the premise. Are you blind?"
The blunt was passed to Carson with profuse thanks from its creator for the trip they had taken. A weird kind of chivalry perhaps? Some men are worthier of chivalry than most, but others not half as much. What made anyone think that Carson fit on a certain end of that spectrum? He had storytelling and rhetoric as his strengths, but then he had to if he was to live the charmed life. Even Kjell had that undercurrent, or was he projecting again? Not everyone's the same. Had Quentin forgot?
The blunt was kind of a needless way to smoke. Why did that suddenly become a good idea on their last night? Just a waste, and them drinking anyway, and the amount of marijuana inside of it was staggering. If someone could just find a cigarette lighter to go with one of those cherry blunts, they could really kick off on their own brain. It seemed they were now scrambling around, looking for one of those lighters, until Olivia quietly handed them one from her purse and laughed at them. It was a mocking laugh to say she knew she had one all along, but she'd rather watch Carson crawl around on the porch in a crescendo of panic.
Maybe she was just too old. She was born in 1979 and who knew the effect that had on everything? Damn it took her a long time to get out of college. He should have asked her more about that -- apparently she'd just taken off like Jane. But her taste in music was good so it must have come to something. She prized bands who prized in turn that elusive quality known as 'artistic freedom'. That was what she said. It meant that they didn't compromise to the studio label system, or something like that. Who cared about the actual words she said?
And that was it, her in front of him. He'd better enjoy it. Tomorrow it was over.
"... you'll never convince me that there weren't better times in the past..." Olivia was talking now.
"The system keeps improving itself in small but significant ways. Recently it's been just-in-time shipping which has helped even out the business cycle by facilitating better control of inventory overhang."
"Yeah but who gives a shit?" she said. "You think today is the best day that ever existed?"
"Maybe when we were in Barcelona or Berlin, two months ago, yes those days were likely better. But what do you gain by thinking in those terms?"
"January in Berlin? What an unusual, miserable time to go there, though I guess the weather doesn't have to be good for you to rave in a warehouse, right?" Alessandro said.
"All was dictated by the timing of Olivia's graduation. Everything doesn't always line up so perfectly."
Another phrase like that from Carson -- 'everything doesn't always line up so perfectly' -- and Quentin imagined himself pounding the words with his fist. Surely Olivia could only be more resolute in that secret decision of hers. And would anyone else give a shit, when it came down to it? Even Kjell. Would he have hard feelings? Were they even that close for brothers? So fuck it, he thought, summarizing his own attitude with a maximum of economy, avoiding unclear language that would only serve to make his own disposition less comprehensible, in an obfuscating way, and therefore less palatable to the Quentin Ross who sat in that moment on a metal chair on the other side of the universe from where he grew up and where he should have been. His night would be a damn sight simpler in the land of Santiago.
"Get up here and rip this. No sitting down!" Alessandro was waving the blunt at Quentin Ross again. He stood up and grabbed it with his teeth, sucking the smoke in and exhaling without even removing the burning talisman from the hand that provided it.
"He's
definitely fucked up."
"Do you think he should smoke that?"
"Smoking isn't his problem right now. He's had too much rum."
"More like too much fucking fun. Har harrrr!" Quentin shouted in imitation of the venerable Captain Morgan. He felt the mellow pull of the cannabis trying to bring him down. There was a part of him now that actually knew he was going over the edge, passing that certain point at which anything was bound to happen.
"Don't get too full of yourself now, sitting there, because I dig Marcela. Do you know that?" he slurred and staggered around, still not back in his chair.
"It's ok. Sit down buddy, we're not full of ourselves." Alessandro said. He put his arm around Quentin's shoulder and helped him sit back down in the chair -- only instead he found his way down to the floor of the deck within seconds.
"I'm an idiot though you know? I can't explain why right now, because I'm too much of idiot to do that even." Quentin was starting to fade in and out.
"This is Quentin's idea of socializing." Kjell explained.
"Get him some water. He needs water."
He reached a strange equilibrium in his state, far beneath the level of sobriety. There was ice water and it refreshed him, and he avoided the dismal fate of passing out on the deck in front of them all. Now he looked at Olivia from his horizontal perspective, and she still seemed friendly after all of that.
He didn't know what was going on at all, but then he was back in the house, fuzzy visions everywhere. Now he was on a couch, cards were being dealt, and he had none of them. Spades was not the game for five. When he perceived reality again, he was on the cold bathroom floor, with Alessandro talking to him. He said he was ok, and after he dry-heaved and the world became less hazy, there was a truth to it. The terrible sensation in his skull, the outright pain, was something he lacked escaping from until the sun was rightly back in the sky, but he was rational again. In his rationality he sensed that silence was the best redemption. Soporific silence.