“Think about LJ,” Jed’s dad said to LJ’s mom. “Your daughter LJ. Your family.”
“It doesn’t matter,” LJ’s mom said. “That’s nothing, that’s nothingness. I don’t care. What does a nihilist do? That’s what I am, a nihilist. I don’t know things. There isn’t one thing out there that I know. Oh, now what. Now what! My car is shaking, my god, what kind of a car shakes. I’m going ninety, I’m slowing down.” She was only a little drunk. Actually, she had had just one beer. But she hadn’t slept. She hadn’t been sleeping at all.
“I’ll talk to you,” Jed’s dad said. He just didn’t want to be in a relationship. He wanted to live ethereally, intrinsically, not doing anything — like a plant. He just didn’t find people appealing anymore, not LJ’s mom at least. He liked the monosyllabic, deadpan type, he knew, the type that withdrew when angered, became quiet and a bit endearing in the face. LJ’s mom was melodramatic and threw things — large things — when angered. “Just park on the grass,” he said. “Slow down. I’ll come — pick you up. We’ll talk. What about your book?” He knew that he should talk smoother, use more conjunctions — not be so monotone, so funereal. He shouldn’t have brought up the book.
“Yeah, talk about my book!” LJ’s mom shouted. “When have you ever fucking wanted to talk about my book! Okay. Well then! I’m slowing down. Lewly J. Oh god, what am I doing? I won the lottery, moved to Florida. What will I do tomorrow? What will I do once I’m dead? What will happen to us?”
“It will—” He didn’t want to say that it would all be okay, that things would get better. Things would get worse, he knew. There would be old age, cancer, arthritis, global warming, tidal waves, acid rain — life was just a tiny, moonstruck thing, really, and the world was just a small, failed place. “We’ll go out,” he said. He was bad at optimism, at invigoration, at whatever this was right now. “You, me, Jed. LJ. We’ll go to the beach.”
“Yeah right!” LJ’s mom shouted. “The beach,” she screamed. “What bullshit! You think you’re so nice. Sitting at home or whatever.” She paused. She was crying now. “What have you sacrificed? What have you ever done for someone else? Why can’t you—”
Jed’s dad didn’t say anything — he knew she was maybe right, that if he tried hard enough, he could love her, and so why didn’t he? If you had to try hard in life not to hurt people, not to harm others, didn’t you also have to try hard to help people? To love people? Were there limits to this? Some threshold? Could you ever do enough? — and she cried a little and then hung up.
Later that night, she drove onto Jed’s dad’s yard and fell out of her car. Jed’s dad woke up and came outside. She was lying on the grass. She smelled of alcohol and perfume. “This is just a weird dream,” she was saying. “This is all just a weird dream.” She was rolling and she rolled onto the sidewalk, scraping herself, and then was stopped by the mailbox. Jed’s dad pulled her up and she fell back down. “Dream film doesn’t develop in the real world,” she shouted. She put her face into the grass.
“Yes it does,” Jed’s dad said. It seemed to him, then, true — it did develop in the real world, though maybe at a special store. It was 4 a.m.
“It doesn’t,” she said, a bit wanly. “This is … a weird dream.” People had their sprinklers on. The air was a bit misty, and there was a little fog.
“It’s not a dream,” Jed’s dad said. In his periphery, he could see things, vague and kind of buoyily floating about — mailboxes, garbage cans, recycling bins. It was trash night. “This is real,” he said. He looked for the moon, but saw only trees — the trees of his yard, other people’s yards; the leaves pale and spurned as freshwater shells. Something large had been flying about his face and he now slapped it blindly out of the air; against his open palm it made a tiny noise that stayed in his head, pinging there arhythmically, distortedly loud.
LJ’s mom had begun to put grass into her mouth. “I can do anything,” she said. “This is just a stupid dream.” She passed out, then woke up. She began quietly to cry. She looked up at Jed’s dad, opened her mouth, covered her mouth, crawled to a stand, and then ran away. In the morning, her car was still in Jed’s dad’s yard. The inside of the car was very clean. There was a pink bottle of perfume super-glued to the dashboard. Jed’s dad drove it back to her house and walked home. Many of the houses, he noticed, had “For Sale” signs up. Every house, it seemed. One house had been painted a deep, dark, transmogrified green. Another house looked really strange, somehow fundamentally different from all the others. A basketball was rolling down the middle of the street and a boy ran out of a house, picked it up, punted it into someone’s side yard. Jed’s dad began to run after that. As he ran, everything around his head quaked. He ran home.
School began. Jed was held back in the fourth grade, as planned. He didn’t see LJ anymore. She seemed always to be on some kind of fieldtrip. Her fifth-grade teacher encouragd his students to doodle in their textbooks, to talk to their textbooks, to talk back to their textbooks. Homework was mostly pun-orientated. One assignment, a fill-in-the-blank type thing, involved Rambo, Rimbaud, and a ram named Bo. “The world has come and gone,” LJ’s teacher said, quoting his own poetry. “Now is only what is left. A time for leaving, and for cake. The wash and foam of last things, we’ll float it out. We’ll eat fancy cake. We’ll be the wave that goes, and goes, and goes a little more, and then doesn’t go anymore.” Then he took the class on another fieldtrip.
Nationwide there was, at first, a time of increased lawmaking. Things were generally banned. There was no trust anywhere, and nothing was acceptable. A bill outlawing love was reportedly bring drafted. There was a law that, by accident, outlawed itself. Anything there was had a law for or against it. People, having paid fines for whatever infraction, went home, more inspired than outraged, and wrote their own laws, striving for originality and footnotes. “Laissez-faire,” they said stupidly. “Denouement.” Other things were said. As more things were said, people became gradually wittier. “Anarchy, apathy, and—” they said. “The three A’s.”
There was a general drift towards the arbitrary view, the solipsistic and apolitical.
Laws, then, began to be lifted. The drinking age was lowered, then gotten rid of. It became okay to break any of the smaller laws. A large region of the nation acquiesced to some ancient aphorism espousing playfulness. It was shown on TV how you might empty a package of Skittles plus all your prescription pills into a fanny pack and take one mystery pill every four to six hours. People grew amused. Cops covered their helmets and firearms — like guitars — with ironic stickers. “Mitochondria,” said the stickers. “Bernoulli’s law.” Helicopter pilots, having discovered that they could do tricks, took to the skies in waves, cityward from the suburbs, spinning, diving, circling tall buildings — enacting any scene from any movie. When a mistake in copyediting sent an oil liner to the Galapagos Islands, they left it there, crew and all, calling it innovative — a kind of achievement.
Still, it was not all fun and games. That was just the mainstream. More people, actually, were staying home, grim-faced and too well-read. More people were going to bed with a shooting sense of desperation. There were suicides in the night, feral screams from the wall-packed insides of houses. Wolves and bears and other animals, homeless and fed-up, began to use the streets, the sidewalks, the buildings — any kind of infrastructure. Families of possums moved onto front porches, chewed through to living rooms, and cut people off in their own hallways. August, September, many people simply ceased to exist, seemed to be there one day but not the next, but then there they were again, the day after, walking the dog, for an hour, after which they disappeared again, completely—murdered, some said, at last, as it was annoying, this back and forth of being there, not being there.