Lurkers Page 8
‘I think I just gave up on it. Alien invasion thing. Which is actually kinda stupid. But it seemed like a good idea when I started it.’
‘I heard a bit of it before—whatever Leslie was reading before you made new friends.’
‘Yeah. If it’s relevant, I’d already spent half a page explaining the phonesystem—the hotline button that dweeb got hung up on.’
‘Made sense to me.’
‘It’s not just him though. I don’t really like the book that much. My readers would like it; but it’s not about that.’
‘It couldn’t be. If you don’t like it, it’s gonna fail.’
‘Pretty much. What I’m thinking is that I should just write something like, you know: this. Something practical and plausible. What happens in a restaurant in the middle of the night. “Clerks” in a diner—or even just “Diner”; “Scenes from a Mall” or “Saint Elmo’s Fire”. Half the stuff Billy Joel ever did—“Piano Man” was on the XM a few hours ago, for example—but in literary form. I could write something like that, I suppose.’
‘Not really what you usually do though, is it?’
‘Nope. But for no reason. I could do it. Although...do stories like those actually have a plot at all? Is there ever really an antagonist, apart maybe from the circumstance itself? I’m not sure my readers—or any readers, anymore—would go for a story lacking overblown badguys and heroes in dire circumstances.’
‘They wanna escape life by seeing something extreme,’ Chuck said.
‘Yeah. Though, then again, George alone...if that guy weren’t homeless...I heard about a guy making twenty thousand bucks a month uploading stuff to YouTubeDotCom recently.’
‘Two forty a year? Not bad.’
‘Yeah. And, if he’s selling his secret, I’m not aware of it; which itself adds credibility to the reports that he’s making it happen.’
‘Right. Anyone making more from selling a method than they make from the method itself doesn’t really need a method in the first place.’
‘Unless the method is Amway,’ I said.
‘Let’s hope not.’
‘So, as strange as George is, he should by all accounts be making millions with little more than a webcam.’
Chuck shrugged, finishing his cigarette. ‘Maybe he is.’
I thought about that for a second. ‘Maybe.’
‘I should probably go make sure Hutch hasn’t found a way to make pacificists wanna hurt him,’ Chuck said, reaching for the door.
‘You really worried about it?’
‘Nope,’ he said, going inside anyway.
I sat there for another minute, smoking my cigarette down to the filtre, looking up at the full moon and the lack of stars beyond. And at that moment—at 23.37 on Friday 7th August 2009—I abandoned the book about the insectile alien invasion in favour of something a little more realistic. Which was a funny thing to think at the time, given what I’d think a few hours later, at 6.08 the next morning, as the first rays of sunlight caught the settling dust.
Three hundred ninety-one minutes earlier, though, I tossed my cigarette into the carpark, got up, and went back inside.
And that concludes the backstory, I suppose—the real prologue, which no one reportedly ever reads. Fooled you: you’ve read it now. Neener.
Also, technically, the book is now finished, since I’d had to write it all nonlinear, starting from the next chapter, following my decision to write a book simply about that one random night at that one random restaurant. So, to reiterate....
I’m lying: it was the middle of summer—probably the middle of July.
Toldya I was lying. Which is good: now you’ll never know what to believe. In order to allow that anything you’re about to read could possibly have happened as described, it’s important to establish that I’m not entirely to be trusted: I’ve given you every fact you ever needed—that the names have been changed, here in this undisclosed major city, within an unnamed restaurant, on the night of Friday 7th August 2009—to solve my little mystery for yourself.
Some of you will already have figured it out, from this page alone or from various hints in earlier chapters. Keep reading anyway. That goes for those who haven’t yet figured it out too.
Turn the page: our story truly is about to begin....
NINE
I never had a chance to sit down before HippyGuy started making that horrible noise again: ‘What a surprise,’ he sang, supporting the lesserknown adage that sarcasm is the last bastion of the guy who’s not actually any good at it, ‘He smokes, too.’
‘Shouldn’t you be at Starbucks, complaining about some makebelieved corporate industrial complex capitalistic evil empire over a four-dollar pint of coffee?’ I asked.
He gave me one of those looks serving as the closest thing to evidence that he was smarter than I was. ‘No; because Starbucks is closed.’
I’ll leave it to You the Reader to guess what I didn’t bother saying next, since saying it would have been too easy.
Instead, at that point, The Refreshments’ Banditos happened to come across the XM, requiring the imbecile to start crooning along, more or less, to the lyrics, insofar as he could remember and/or predict what they actually were. Which reminded me immediately of a proposal by A Whitney Brown: that Walkmen should come with warning labels alerting people to the important fact that listening to the music through the headphones will not improve your ability to sing outside the headphones, where everyone else can hear you. I agree entirely; except that, warning labels being for pussies, we should replace them with capital punishment, and this new law should extend beyond Walkmen and iPods to all music anywhere ever. The moron made a painful effort to make eye contact with me as he nearly matched the key of the chorus: ‘Everybody knows...that the world is full of stupid people; but I’ve got the pistols...so I’ll take the pesos...that seems fair.’
The solo shorting him out, I played dumb, asking, ‘What sort of pistols.’
‘I haven’t really got any pistols: I don’t believe in guns. I suppose you do, though.’
‘I’ve seen guns,’ I said, ‘What’s to believe in.’
That, Lemmings and Germs, is how you set up a moron, and knock it down. To wit:
‘Whatever.’
And, in the background: ‘Thankalord!’ The inflexion being slightly different, the loose translation: George had finished his clam chowder and was now ready to beguile us again with his Tales from Altair IV. I suppose we all understood that at some level, and braced ourselves for the forthcoming staccato deluge of syllables and imagery, each in his own way, mine being to hit Enter a couple times and position my fingers above the laptop’s keyboard as though preparing to slam some Bach into a pipe organ the size of a shopping mall. And more cosmic justice: someone at XM XY.Z, The Cliché, must have been in a mood that night; Banditos faded out and was replaced by Korn’s entire, seven minute cover of Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall.
Abandoning the pipe organ, I cheated, simply hitting Record on my phone.
‘Beep,’ said George, ‘Beep. Beep. Wonk! The millipedes were climbing the walls.’
Daddy’s flown across the ocean
‘Potatoes, tomatoes, duck, duck, goose.’
Leaving just a memory
And now half ranting and half singing, to various melodies: ‘Earth behind them: drifting; falling.’
A snapshot in the family album
‘Floating weightless; coming home.’
Daddy, what else did ya leave for me
‘Says Major Tom.’
Daddy, wha’d ya leave behind for me
‘Floating in a tin can, high above the world.’
All in all it was just a brick in the wall
‘Do you believe they put a man on the moon.’
All in all it was all just bricks in the wall
‘And the cat’s in the cradle, and the silver spoon.’
We don’t need no education
‘Little boy blue and the ruby Tuesday.’
We don’t need no thought control
‘Monday, Monday: so good to me.’
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
‘I see a red door and I want it painted—’
Teachers: Leave them kids alone
‘Grey would be the colour, if I had a heart.’
Hey, Teachers: Leave us kids alone
‘Artichoke, potato, tomato. Wonk!’
All in all it’s just another brick in the wall
‘Millipedes and coffeespoons.’
All in all you’re just another brick in the wall
‘Afternoons and granfalloons.’
We don’t need no education
‘Thankalord: thy kingdom come.’
We don’t need no thought control
‘Thy will be done; thy ’roidrage fun.’
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
‘Thy artichoke heart blackhole sun.’
Teachers leave them kids alone
‘Wonk!’ And a dangerous grin.
Hey, Teachers: Leave those kids alone
‘Beep. Beep. Wonk!’
All in all you’re just another brick in the wall
‘Squish, squish; do it again.’
All in all you’re just another brick in the wall
‘We grew up and went to school; there were millipedes. Climb the walls; they have no bricks; watermelons watching me. The ducks and geese and repticons: beep, beep, beep, beep, squish. They come at night it’s always night the moon above the spoon below the danger grows with mistletoe the military doth bestow the towmissiles the SDI the eye in the sky the state it lies it’s no surprise just how time flies burger fries and shake the pies until they rise to semper fi but I decry we must defy the government the powers that be the heresy the tragedy the school of thought the discontent the sidewalk ends in wet cement.’
We as a restaurant, at this point, were bloody well transfixed. So it was probably a good thing that I was recording this, if not exactly filming his strange little scat rap.
‘And I don’t see no thought control no versatile rigmarole nor do I mean much to extol the process of the rhyme and role to indicate the magistrate and majesty of nine-eight-eight defenestrate the reprobate before the hate can replicate the Mesozoic oligarch escaping from Jurassic Park to slaughter maim destroy and tax the Earth as seen through parallax.’
I don’t need no arms around me
‘Arms race; save face; know your place within your race.’
I don’t need no drugs to calm me
‘See saw; hee haw; eat raw cole slaw.’
I have seen the writing on the wall
‘Night will come with Coke and rum with bubblegum a tidy sum.’
Don’t think I need anything at all
‘I wouldn’t mind another bowl of clam chowder, if I’m not imposing.’
No
‘Maybe.’
Don’t think I need anything at all
‘Goopy soup, and greasy fries, before my eyes, to my surprise; stop the lies, you fucking guys; apologise: for rising pies.’
All in all it was all just bricks in the wall
‘Reaganomics; repticonics.’
All in all you were all just bricks in the wall
‘Kill the little teapot, short and stout: chowder within and copper without. Say the magic word before proceeding; see the millipedes from floor to ceiling. Keeping us in cells like incarcerated felons as I watch the planet far beyond the ducks and watermelons.’
Goodbye cruel world
‘Below us.’
I’m leaving you today
‘Drifting; falling.’
Goodbye
‘Watching.’
Goodbye
‘Waiting.’
Goodbye
‘Coming home, alone; warning none; seeing all; as I fall toward the mall; hello, All.’
Goodbye, all you people
‘Food.’
There’s nothing you can say
‘Shu’p.’
To make me change my mind
‘I find.’
Goodbye
‘It’s time.’
So, that was weirdly fucking amazing. I’ve tried to guess how the punctuation, if any, would appear here in written form; playing the footage back, I’m still not sure I’ve got it right. But I’m pretty sure I’ve got the words he came up with, homonyms and mutterings notwithstanding. If not, maybe we can talk about AudioBooks at some point, securing the rights from Korn, Pink Floyd, or whatever entity controls the replication of the song itself; George’s contribution could I suppose just be the recording I got on my phone, or as close an approximation as anyone’s able to perform when it comes to reading the book in its entirety for the more illiterate listening mostly for the strange noises this novel might prove to make.
I can’t as a rule stand AudioBooks, in principle or in practise.
Maybe I should take a minute to explain that. See, I do this weird thing in proximity to a book: thinking. I know: it’s my fault; I just sometimes read something which makes me stop reading for a second and think about it. Whether that means that I’ve encountered a word I can’t define [as you can guess, that hasn’t happened in recent decades] forcing me to decide whether to derive its meaning from context or go look it up, or encountered an idea allowing me to wonder how the book ends [if I misguess that, I tend to remember it anyway and occasionally keep it in mind the next time I write a book], or whatever. When someone’s reading a book to me—which itself is redundant, since I personally know how to read—I’d have to pause the recording, at best, which action is far too good at interrupting my thought process; rewinding after I’ve figured something out is also annoying. So, on principle, I hate AudioBooks because I can read a book without them; in practise, I hate them because I can’t read a book with them. As for people expecting AudioBooks they can ‘read’ while driving: you already suck at driving, and probably suck at reading; let’s not combine those so you can drive your car into mine while missing out on punctuation and paragraph breaks, okay? Learn to read, or get a grownup to read to you at bedtime, when you can’t hurt anyone with your illiteracy.
‘Thankalord!’ George added. And I killed the recording to send to my server before I ran out of room on the phone.
George apparently done for the moment, the restaurant, to the extent that there was much of anyone in there at ten till midnight, returned to its meaningless mumbling and glassclinking for a bit. Leslie went back to her book for a couple seconds, but then stopped and looked at me.
‘You stopped typing,’ she said.
‘Yeah. Thinking.’
‘Does that mean I can read it now?’
‘What. Oh. Not really. I’m not working on that.’
She rolled her eyes. Leslie had been around long enough to see me start a couple books, get halfway through writing them out, and give up. Also, she’d been around long enough to know that asking whether I’d given up was a good way to get me to give up. If I’m thinking about abandoning a book already, and you accuse me of thinking about abandoning a book, I regard it as consensus and just let it go. Of course, rolling your eyes is approximately the same thing.
I explained: ‘I’m just not sure I can really write a book about an alien invasion, knowing how stupid that is.’
‘You’ve written books about other stupid things.’
‘Yeah; thanks.’
She laughed and sighed at the same time—this little huff she does. You’d have to know her. ‘I mean: you write fiction. Your whole job is to fool people into believing something stupid. Not that it’s stupid; I’m just using your word. The invasion thing isn’t actually stupid: it’s brilliant.’
‘It’s stupid. Not because aliens wouldn’t attack; it’s what animals do. But because they wouldn’t know about Earth in the first place. I know: Sagan had them catch Hitler’s broadcast out in space, which itself is really no different than my plotdevice of talkshows and things; but—’
‘That’s why it’s not stupid,’ she said, ‘I’m not even sure you’re wrong. When I see fat people dancing around on the Tyra Show like idiots, I wanna launch an invasion, and I’m from here.’
‘But you don’t. You don’t go as far as Manhattan to launch an attack. But aliens are gonna fly parsecs?’
‘I can’t win,’ she said, ‘I can’t fold space to New York and take out the building security, let alone the cops and the national guard and ultimately the army. If I could...well, whether I’d do it is its own thing.’
‘I’m also rethinking the army. The national guard are in place to defend against invaders from other countries. If there’s even a contingency plan for invaders from other starsystems, I’m not aware of it. They might just mobilise the real troops, legally or not, asking for forgiveness instead of permission.’
‘So fix that. You don’t even have to rewrite anything. You’ve done that before. The army stays out of it through Chapter—what, Seven? Because there’s this lack of precedent. You’ve got Arlington trying to persuade the president already; have that work. Have the president agree that he’s been thinking the same thing.’
I was shaking my head.
‘Okay,’ she said, ‘you’re right: it’s stupid. But...do you get that it’s because you see the stupidity that your books are so plausible? Most writers ignore the stupidity, or just don’t care. You see the stupidity, and find ways to make it unstupid. Yeah: if this happened, the army would get involved; why not. But, where most writers would just pretend the army could hop in and counterattack, you bother to consider the bureaucracy behind that sort of decision. They can’t just jump in and fight back; there’s process and procedure and Code Pink and other speedbumps. That’s why it’s a novel, not a short story: the plot’s the same—aliens attack—but you don’t just have the Earthlings jump up and return fire; you have them deliberate and—and—and, uh, develop a course of action. That gives you a hundred pages right there. You add factors: we came, we saw, we caused them to figure out what to do about us. And your book is eight hundred pages instead of eighty; and, however stupid the premise is, you make it plausible.’