Lurkers Read online

  I had of course seen George outside the restaurant. His days, so far as I was ever able to determine, were spent looking through the trashcans down at the mall and accepting loose change and halfeaten foodcourt meals from the middle class. In return, on occasion, he’d burst into convoluted tirades, often reading from an invisible bible which only he could see, which apart from alien deities and their rules for mankind also included heretofore unpublished testimonies about deital aliens and their interests in fooling, enslaving, and possibly eating those who didn’t follow the more commonly understood commandments of the novel.

  He did most of that here in the restaurant, too. He had something like an unusual form of Tourette’s, forcing him at random to dart his face ceilingward and erupt with thankalord every few minutes; other minutes, he’d seethe contemptuously at the sprinkler set into the acoustical tile above his favourite seat; the minutes not spoken for, he’d blurt out whatever random and incomprehensible series of syllables had slipped through the grate in his mind and fallen into the outbox of his speech centre.

  George wasn’t a novelty to me; I’d seen him before—and seen others like him—at other restaurants, over the years; thinking about it now: the others were all named George too; you probably know one of them, wherever you happen to live. In any case, I disregarded him and his sporadic outbursts for the moment and kept on typing.

  The thing I was working on was, among other things, doomed. Eventually, I abandoned it; and I’ll probably never go back and try it again. I do that a lot: of all the books I’ve written, I’ve published maybe ten percent. Not because the publishers disliked them—I never found that out—but because I lost interest, often even after they were finished, and exterminated them before they could taint my reputation. The best I can say about books like that is that they’re better than approximately anything you’ll read on the ’net, but not quite good enough to use as proof of that fact. Other writers—real writers, who do more than misspell uninspired slashfic online—will probably know what I’m talking about; the average slashficker, unable truly to relate, will still likely nod knowingly, fingers to chin, hmmming like a skeski with a slow leak.

  Which remains okay, since anything I write, good or bad, is meant initially to impress an audience of one: myself. And that percentage of my belles lettres which sucks like a starving plecostomus serves the minimal purpose, at least, of illustrating the sort of thing I shouldn’t do again. Edison once claimed that, instead of truly failing, he’d discovered a thousand ways not to build a lightbulb. Meaning I suppose that, in the end, he’d discovered a thousand and one ways to steal Tesla’s idea. Application notwithstanding: practise, they say, makes perfect.

  To the extent, as I’ve hinted, that perfection can in modern times include static text on implacable paper, which may not be the encompassing problem I’ve made it out to be: to some degree, any given thing will be subject to what I call the Jim Morrison Syndrome, in which the Lost Generation never heard of him, the Silent Generation regarded him as a damned hippy in need of a haircut, the BabyBoomers considered him a contemporary, GenerationX called him a visionary and a poet, and the Millennial Generation blink vacuously and ask who the hell was Jen Morrissey. Which is not to suggest that this new generation are clueless; arguably, they simply have a more realistic grasp of what’s important in the world.

  Which leads me to the stunning revelation, unto myself, that, for all practical purposes—or at least all philosophical ones—I’m functionally one of them: I dig their music and their hair; I tolerate their clothes and their slang; I recognise their paradox—that, while we could join the army while being prohibited from buying beer, they can be tried as adults while being prohibited from buying Grand Theft Auto. Generation Landslide: close the gap between’em; la-da-da-da-da. None of which might excuse these kids for their apparent fear of the printed word; but I can confess a certain empathy for those entertained by stupid, meaningless objects which move in silly ways, be them interactive flashgames, slinkies, or Paris Hilton.

  By way of contrast to the phalanx of characteristics I’ve just delineated, insofar as the arguable majority of The Kids Today is minimally tolerable, the minority which reaffirm my hunch that the future is doomed then arrived.

  The emo subset of the Millennial Opprobrium is not in and of itself a cataclysm; I do for example like the music; I know, because I also like Marilyn Manson, Trent Reznor, Alice Cooper, and Johann Sebastian Bach. What I don’t love is the meretricious lament these beings have for all things containing molecules: there’s simply something unidentifiably maniacal about being happy only while sad.

  Leslie rolled her eyes in hopeless prediction as they walked past our table, her cybernetic convergence to her straw nearing irrevocable completion; I paused, fingers poised clawlike above the keyboard, waiting to see whether I’d ever guess what I’d been about to write when my train of thought had been highjacked by the murder of mimes flocking by; to save you the suspense: I never did get it back.

  Strike that; that’s unfair: less people hate mimes, which wear less makeup, have more talent, and make less noise.

  The scenekids sat themselves at Table 74, where we were in 71 and George was in 75, their leader, the Alpha Penguin, striking out at a speed enviable by soundwaves to unscrew the lightbulb above their booth before making it clear to everyone within a mile radius how disturbed it was by the remaining lights as though altogether they held a candlepower to its iPhone.

  Jessica caught up to the scenekids and began to explain, slowly, as if to small children, if small children exhibited no aptitude for learning from explanations, the importance of waiting to be seated should any expectation of service exist thereafter; then she noticed George sitting in 75 and gave up entirely.

  ‘What can I get you to drink,’ she said to 74, making no effort to hide her boredom with them this far into the relationship.

  Two wanted coffee with scads of cream; one wanted Mister Pibb; the fourth asked for chocolate milk, causing Leslie to laugh, through her straw, very nearly voiding the proverbial warranty on my laptop before apologising and drying off the tabletop with her napkin.

  Apparently to celebrate their emotastic arrival, the XM feed faded out Billy Joel’s Piano Man and replaced it with Roundabout, by Yes: an instrumental powerballad some thirty-seven minutes in length and occasionally interrupted by a vocalistic arrogance emitting a noxious bombast regarding something including, and hopefully limited to, an area in and around the lake, making most reasonable organisms wish it would go well under the surface of the lake in question and take a rapid series of deep breaths. If memory serves, the song was eventually banned in the early nineties by an ACLU dreamteam working to outlaw the most cruel and unusual forms of torture, which also removed The Doobie Brothers’ Black Water and The Georgia Satellites’ Keep Your Hands to Yourself from Gitmo’s repertoire; but I could be wrong.

  ‘Thankalord!’ George erupted, unprompted by visible elements, causing the scenekids to jump in fright as one. Which was at once ironic and expected, I suppose. When the emo’s whole persona is developed around emotional extroversion, wearing its heart on the sleeve of its MCR shirt, fear being arguably an emotion itself, we can therefore assume that the scenekid is in nature little more than a panicky Chihuahua in application. Even if we can’t assume that—if it’s an unfair hypothesis—it still explains enough of the results to suggest at minimum something of a correlation.

  Personally, I don’t fully get it. Or, if I do, then what I understand fails to answer the larger questions it all raises. To explain this, however hastily: I had the same background the scenekids had: white in the suburbs, singular income nuclear family, two cars in the garage and a third in the driveway, a veritable Toys R Us in the basement, and everything else whimpered about in The Breakfast Club and Less Than Zero; the difference I suppose is that the activists of the world never successfully pressured me into feeling guilty about it. Also, that I’m good with My Chemical Romance and Panic at the Disco has l
ittle bearing, since only the scenekids misidentify those as emo bands.

  The scenekids now overaccentuating their sniggering, where laughter in primates—humans included—is a reaction to fear, George ignored them in favour of reproaching the sprinkler above his table through whatever psionic means he might have possessed. And I went back to the novel I never, as mentioned, managed to finish.

  THREE

  I replaced my watch recently. Well, maybe not recently in the common sense. But, since the watch I’d replaced was a Casio GShock DW5600C I’d bought in about 1987, the new one should remain newish for the next five years or so.

  Why I replaced the Casio at all is something of a funny story: its battery died, again, causing me to need a new CR2320, which has become rare enough that I couldn’t find one at Safeway. So I found one at OnlyBatteries.com and ordered it, waited for it, received it, and went to put it into the watch by unscrewing the four microscrews on the back with a tiny screwdriver I didn’t have.

  So I went to Checker Auto Parts, of all places, to get one of those. And, by the time I got back, with the screwdriver, to get the backplate off the watch, I’d lost the battery I’d ordered.

  Not wanting to order another online and wait a week to get it, I stabbed out to the nearest department store—Kohl’s—to see whether they’d have a CR2320 for me. They did in fact have one, but they also had a Columbia CL5055 for all of forty bucks, so I bought one of those too. Meaning that I now have a newish watch, an old watch, a screwdriver, and two CR2320s somewhere in the house; but I don’t care anymore.

  In any case, the newish watch, like the old one, beeps every hour; the newish watch, unlike the old one, beeps nearly loudly enough to shatter glass. And, for all newish watches are able to do, you can’t yet surf the ’net with them, and you can’t adjust the volume of the hourly chime. So, when my watch beeped at ten, the entire northern hemisphere heard it. Sorry if I knocked any planes out of the air.

  Now that the world outside had fully closed, a few more people had shuffled toward the corporate beacon above the restaurant and come inside. Behind Leslie, in 72, Ned Flanders and wife had dragged their kids [or, at the least, her kids] in for malts in what was becoming the middle of the night.

  Further back, in 73, was Chuck. Like George, Chuck was a fixture, if a mobile one; he could be found at other restaurants at other times, possibly throughout the known galaxy; and of course he knew—and probably still knows—approximately everyone on the planet; if Table 72 were the Flanders Family, Chuck was the Norm Peterson of the world.

  Sitting with Chuck, if without permission, was Hutch, who I think wanted to be Chuck, or Norm, or likeable, but wasn’t. The guy was a joiner in every sense: he’d walk in without expecting his own table, sit with anyone appearing to have an open seat [I’d learned to fill up my booth with a backpack next to me, on the inside, and my feet up on Leslie’s left upon the other seat, to prevent him from oozing in next to either of us], wedge his way into any conversation he lacked even the shallowest expertise about, and for all I know follow people home in the hopes of crashing on their sofa at the end of the night.

  The scenekids remained for the moment in 74; George of course was still in 75 and wasn’t likely to leave until the mall opened again the next day. And that was the entire row of booths along the window; from west to east: us, Flanders, Chuck and Hutch, the scenekids, and then George. Which didn’t fill the restaurant; as suggested, 71 through 75 being along the window, six more rows of five tables each, most of them segregated by partitions in the middle of the dining area—11 through 15, 21 through 25, 31 through 35, 41 through 45, 51 through 55, and 61 through 65—remained mostly empty, awaiting a huge wave of people who, having seen the restaurant’s adverts on television, might think that the happy, sunlit faces beaming above the massive portions of plastic perfection amidst a legion of servers grinning back and ensuring that nothing was wrong anywhere in the universe could all be found in this understaffed dive after dark. Although, to be honest, having on occasion sat in the place until noon, fifteen hours after I’d got there, while working on a given book, I can with authority deny that the happy republican eutopia depicted in the adverts actually happens when diurnally scheduled, either.

  Of which, this was never about: our crepuscular occupation of the joint couldn’t for the most part be considered indicative of the operations performed during the day by those who even as grownups were afraid of the dark. On which subject, things then began to get verbal.

  Jessica came out with the malts for Flanders in 72, setting them in place and asking by habit whether there was anything else she could get them.

  ‘Nope,’ Ned said cheerily, then saying nothing more.

  Jessica grinned and walked back toward the kitchen, slowing to grab my coffeepot and shake it before taking it with her to refill it back there.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, though she probably didn’t hear me. And I glanced over the laptop’s screen at the next table, largely by accident, in time to see Ned glancing at me; he smiled theistically at me—take that as you will.

  His next course of action was—and I couldn’t make this up—to lead his [or, at the least, his wife’s] kids in an extemporaneous prayer for the bounty of the malts the lord, and to a lesser if more visible degree the waitress, had provided.

  Now, to keep this all about me, I need to mention a couple of important points here. I’ve never to date believed in deities—any deities—and, by the definition of the word belief, I never will: belief is the pretension that a condition is true, despite a lack of supporting evidence; once the supporting evidence for the condition is published and reviewed, belief becomes redundant against knowledge. So, while deities remain unsupported by published, reviewed evidence, I can’t believe in them because that would be silly; if they’re ever supported by published, reviewed evidence, then I won’t believe in them because I’ll simply have ingested the fact that they’re real, and go back to ignoring them in general, just like I ignore the giant squid now that it’s been ameliorated from the mythical kraken to the factual Architeuthis dux; show me published, reviewed evidence supporting any credible hypothesis that A.dux is additionally Cthulhu the Great Old One, and I’ll make a note of that too.

  Not that lovecraftian krakens have much of anything to do with this story. What counts is that I don’t as a habit—or in fact ever in memory—happen to advertise my atheism, primarily because I don’t consider it more or less important than my adracoism—my lack of beliefs regarding dragons—which I also don’t bring up for the sole purpose of driving dracoists batshit with my implicit demand for supporting evidence.

  That said: on those occasions in which someone—theistic or not—brings the idea of deities up while talking to me, I’ll take that as permission to castrate the moron’s intellectually lazy arguments and leave the twit bleeding by the side of the debate, wishing that the democrats would come to its aid by lobbying to ban mean people in publicly accessible buildings.

  Meaning that, in fact, since I’d become something of a regular at this place and had on other nights got into the debates brought to me without my consent, and since Hutch was a joiner who possessed among other unfortunate traits an interest in recycling arguments he’d heard [if an inability to use them correctly] he, being not me, turned around in Chuck’s booth to berate Flanders for giving his bogeymen blowjobs in public.

  ‘Why do you people always have to makebelieve that shit outside your little churches,’ Hutch demanded loudly enough to disrupt all conversations [and the typing I was getting back to] in the restaurant. Leslie rolled her eyes again. Flanders, looking a little too shocked, turned to see Hutch’s fat, greasy face peripherally.

  ‘Makebelieve?’ Flanders asked, ‘What makes you think it’s makebelieve.’

  And here, on Wild Kingdom, we now see what happens when a prey animal mimics a predator only to find itself lost for words when required to think outside its script.

  ‘Well, because it’s not true!’ Hutch dec
ided.

  ‘Of course it’s true,’ Flanders said, ‘How else do you explain it? You really think you came from monkeys?’

  Next on Wild Kingdom: when prey animals spoofing predators attempt to attack other predators preemptively, when in fact those other predators are spoofs as well.

  Leslie was smirking; she knew—and for that matter shared—my thoughts on the matter of theism.

  ‘No,’ Hutch said, ‘because...uh...it’s not monkeys; it’s...ask him: he knows.’ And now Hutch was pointing at me.

  Flanders glanced at me, but remained focussed on Hutch. ‘So explain it. Explain how life could come from rocks.’

  ‘I dunno,’ Hutch said, frightened now, ‘ask him.’

  I saved what I wasn’t writing and clicked the laptop shut. Which in retrospect probably suggested to the psychotic state of Flanders that I wanted to talk to him. He turned back to face me, asking a stupid question I’d never heard before.

  ‘So, where do you see yourself in a thousand years?’

  I answered before I’d even processed the question: ‘Probably in management.’

  ‘Not Heaven or Hell?’

  ‘Or Valhalla or Hades,’ I added.

  He rolled his eyes. ‘Now you’re just being silly: no one believes in those things.’