Colin knew that song. There was nothing to say about it. “They should have beanies with beans on it, not smiley faces,” he said.
“Yeah. Anything but smiley faces.”
“When I see a smiley face I feel demented.”
“What if beans were alive and they all had smiley faces,” Dana said.
They talked some more like that. Dana seemed to move closer over time, then began to touch Colin’s shoulder sometimes. Colin didn’t know if this was flirting or what. He knew he didn’t know anything about motivation, the world, the future, the past, or human beings. He knew that Dana was marrying her boyfriend. Actually, he did know many things. But it was maybe too many, and he didn’t care. His knowledge was an indestructible machine, made of a million pieces of metal, and flying — a gigantic, gleaming, peripheral blur that Colin was not at all curious about.
A while ago, one night, Colin had eaten the universe, and from then on had felt black and spacey inside, had felt his heart, tiny and untwinkling, in some faraway center, white and tepid as a dot of Styrofoam.
Dana had changed her mind. She wanted now to see Leftover Crack. Would not do anything else, no matter what.
“I’m doing a film,” she shouted on the train. “I’m filming tomorrow. Want to be in it?”
Colin said, “What did you just say?” Then realized what she had said. Then the train started screeching and someone began to play a saxophone. Colin told himself to ask Dana about the film later. There was a building that was Colin’s future, a tall and glassy place that he’d have to enter, and if he didn’t fill it, he’d end up wandering the floors, wheeling around on an office chair, rolling his own body on the carpet, like a log. But then probably that’d be a lot easier. Him in his empty building. Harmless, mute. Irrelevant.
Dana shouted something but Colin couldn’t hear. He saw her mouth move in a laugh. “I’m going in there with white and green,” a little girl screamed, “and you’re going to choose green!” Dana took a paper from her pocket, gave it to Colin. A drawing of two whales; one with a fishhook in its mouth, a harpoon in its eye; the other with lipstick, squares for eyes — the saddest-looking whale Colin had ever seen — and a thought bubble:
I wish I could round these eyes
I don’t like myself but I think I like you
Give me a kiss and shred off my face
Give me a very square farewell look
Colin read it and nodded at Dana. She was blushing. She touched her face, grinned, shouted something, took back her paper. They got off the train in Red Hook, Brooklyn. It was very quiet here. Snow had come down from heaven, swirled about, absorbed all the smoke and dust — all the coppery, spray painted wooziness of a city — and then fallen, thwarted, to the black and coagulated ground, stopped on its way to hell. There was not a deli anywhere, and no buses. A police van was ahead.
“Show’s over,” a policeman in the van said. “Concert’s canceled.” Colin and Dana kept walking toward the venue, a bit quicker. “Turn around and go home,” the policeman said. “There’s nothing here for you two.”
Colin and Dana turned slowly around.
“Just kidding!” the policeman said. “Hey!”
As Colin and Dana walked by, the policeman smiled at Colin. Because of snow, they had to walk within touching distance of the van. All the cops inside, Colin saw, were distinctly different in body size. Maybe a dozen cops, all in jackets. “Have fun,” the policeman said.
The venue was Polish-owned, had an outside area where kids smoked and where three Polish women — a mom, her daughters — sold hot dogs, vegetarian hot dogs, chips, and an orange, potion-y drink, which was in a large punch bowl. A hundred or so kids were out here.
Colin thought of saying something. He hadn’t for a while. But he felt very calm, and a little dizzy; felt as if washed out by some sweet and anesthetic water, as he often did. Kids were moving in and out of shadows, being loud or elusive, eating chips or smoking. They were sad and pretty in their anguished and demonic colors, their piercings, their hands in their pockets. The bassist for Leftover Crack, Colin recognized, stood alone, eating a hot dog that was not vegetarian, drinking the orange drink.
Dana was looking at Colin. “I’m taking a vampire class,” she said. “We just watch vampire movies.”
Something black and warped was rippling through Colin’s head, little voids, and he couldn’t concentrate. Probably it was unacceptable to be distracted in this way, he knew, by nothing — by nothingness. It took him a minute or two to respond. “Is Bram Stoker a vampire?” he finally said.
“Bram Stoker,” Dana said. “Are you a vampire?”
“Yes,” Colin said. Leftover Crack’s bassist was looking down into his orange drink. “I was a cat when I was five, for Halloween. With a cape.” A cat from three to eleven, then a boy with a ghoul mask, then nothing. Halloween quickly became mostly for vandalism; no one dressed up anymore, just destroyed property, attacked one another openly and in teams. It was a different world back then. There were a thousand different worlds in the world, Colin knew. Each had a hundred thousand secrets locked-up in invisible steel rooms in the bright blue sky. Before bedtime, each night, you took a multiple-choice test based on those secrets. You never knew if you failed or what, and each morning you woke with the uncertainty of that. You also woke with a craving for new and requited love. The craving was unrelated to the uncertainty. Both were loyal only to their own causes. You yourself had no cause and seemed, at times, to be simply the effect of something. Fixed, unstoppable. Existing by momentum only, but pretending always otherwise.
“That’s good for five,” Dana said. She touched his elbow. “Colin, you were a vampire cat.”
“Look at the bassist.” Colin extended his arm straight out and pointed, startling himself in a dull and private way — he hadn’t meant to point like this. Some kids saw Colin pointing and looked. The bassist noticed and moved the hot dog down to his side, held it there like it wasn’t a hot dog, but something insurgent — a microphone or pipe bomb.
Dana laughed. “You’re embarrassing him!”
She slowly pulled Colin’s hand down.
“There aren’t enough songs against McDonald’s,” Colin said. “There should be a song called ‘Fuck McDonald’s.’ ” He felt suddenly excited, and looked directly into Dana’s face. He was not afraid. There was her face. At night, it would move through his vision, colorless and behind the eyes, like a phantom, floating bird — a hood of wings, folding away. “Do you think McDonald’s is objectively bad?”
“I think so,” Dana said. “Yeah; I agree with you.”
Colin looked away. Leftover Crack, he knew, had a song called “Fuck America”—it had begun to play in his head. It was catchy. It had rhyming couplets.
McDonald’s will bloom as the major competition
Between Jesus and the Devil for this government’s religion
People so caught up in the freedom that they see
While America’s fucking over every single country
Something Something Chorus Something
Fuck America
Fuck America
Fuck America
Fuck America
(Outro)
Dana was talking about if she were Bill Gates. “I’d do things about McDonald’s,” she was saying. “I’d end the McDonald’s corporation somehow. With Windows software.”