PART 3
27 FUN IS STUPID
Jared here, one year later
lock up your daughters. And your smutty magazines. And your sofa, for God's sake, because you never know, I may go and hump it like a Great Dane. Har bar. Listen to my friends and you'd think I was the world's biggest perv. Right. And take a look at them now, will youone year later: useless sacks of dung they are, slumped around Karen's fireplace watching an endless string of videos, the floor clogged with Kleenex boxes and margarine tubs overflowing with diamonds and emeralds, rings and gold bulliona parody of wealth.
Between tapes what do they do? They have money fights, lobbing and tossing Krugerrands, rubies and thousand-dollar bills at each other; at other times they make paper airplanes from prints by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein and shoot them into the fireplace.
During one particularly long lull between videos, I, Jared, slip to the side of the house and turn off the Honda gas generator Linus has rigged up. The power dies and triggers a clump of groans amid the clan. It's at this point I choose to appear outside the windowacross the lawna ball of white light. Wendy is the first to see me and she calls my name.
"Jared?"
"What's that, Wendy?" Megan asks.
"It's Jared. Look. He's back."
All eyes gaze rapt while I gavotte across the lawn in my old football uniform, the brown and whites.
In the silence I glow like a deep-sea creature, like a pale moon, and I flow several feet above the ground, and then scoot through the one unsmashed pane of the glass patio doors as though catching a fumbled ball. I walk across the room as though on an airport conveyor belt and out the other wall. Hamilton runs out to the car port but I'm not there.
Wendy lights candles and a few moments later I enter the room from the ceiling, stopping with my feet above the fireplace, where I introduce myself:
"Hey guys. It's meJared. Fucking AI'm so happy to see all of you."
"Jared?" Karen says.
"Hi, Karen. Hello everybody."
"Jared, what are you? Where are you? Are you ofokay?" asks Richard.
"I'm a ghost and I guess I'm blissed out, Richard. I'm high on life. It's the Hotel California. Yessiree."
"What are you doing here?" Megan asks, recognizing me from my old high school yearbook photo.
"I'm here to help you out," I say as I begin to dissolve through the floor.
"Wait!" Wendy shouts. "Don't go!"
I'm halfway through the floor: "Man, this floor feels good.""You can feel the floor?" Linus asks.
"What's heaven like?" Richard asks
"What happens when you die?" Pam asks.
"Show us a miracle, big boy" Hamilton says.
Only my head lies above the floor: "Oof!you should try this sometime. This floor beats Cheryl Anderson any day of the week."
"Jared!" Karen's shout is urgent.
"All of you," I say, "you're birds born without wings; you're bees who pollinate cut flowers. Don't pee yourselves. I'll return soon. Let's get weird."
It's the next day and Richard is growing impatient with Hamilton and Pam, dawdling as the two step out of the minivan, wobbly and silly.
"You go first, Barbara Hutton."
"No wayyyy, Mr. Hefner. You first."
"Pals call me Hef."
"Listen you two freaks, can we just step to it?"
Before them is a wide, faded tar piazza strewn with skeletons, cars parked at odd angles, and rusted shopping carts. Beyond this is the faded and ratty looking Save-On supermarket. Its glass doors are like gums without dentures.
"Ooh. Miss Thing needs a drinky."
"HamiltonI mean Heflet's get in and out as quickly as we can."
"Okay, okay, Richard. Don't cack your nappies."
"Richard," Karen says, "I'm going to stay out in the van. You three go in. I need some sun."
"You want anything special, Kare?"
"Yeah, cotton balls a hot oil treatment some licorice if it's still any good."
"Gotcha."
Karen sits alone in the minivan's front seat, sifting through CD's and enjoying a freakish heat wave warming the remains of the city. I, Jared, become manifest."Hi, Karen."
"Jared! Where are you?"
"Out here." She swivels to see me standing outside the door atop a rusted shopping cart on its side. I'm hard to see during the daylike gas flames against a blue sky.
"Jared, what's the deal here? I've got a thousand questions I want to ask you."
"Ask away, Karen. You look good. How are you feeling?"
"Crappy. But my arms are getting pretty strong. My legsthey're kind of going downhill now. They're deteriorating. I can only barely walk around the house and stuff. What about youdo ghosts have pain? I mean, do you hurt?"
"Not the way you do."
"No. I imagine not." She changes gears: "So cough up the truth, Jared, because I'm really mad at you or whoever did this to me. You deep-freezed me for seventeen years and left me with a puppet body. And who smashed in the patio door last year when everything started falling apart?"
"Actually, that was me at the door."
"You?"
"Apologies, Kare. I screwed upit was my first time back here. I was going to give a you a speech. I decided not toI was^too embarrassed about wrecking the door. It was just like the night I walked into Brian Alwin's parents' patio door in tenth grade. Duh. I went and helped Wendy instead. She got lost in the forest coming here from the dam.
"You scared the crap out of me."
"Heyit won't happen again. I've got good control of it nowmy astral presence, I mean." I do a double flip there and land atop the rusted shopping cart. "Sexy or what?"
" Ooh baby baby. Shit, Jared, tell me, what exactly is the point of everything that's happened? And why did / go into a coma? I can't explain anything. So maybe you can. Everybody treats me like I know the answers and that I won't tell them out of spite. I hate it."
"Well, Karen, youhow shall I say thisyou accidentally opened certain doors. You were taking all those diet pills and starving your-self. Your brain did somersaults; you saw things; you caught a glimpse of things to come."
"For that I lost my youth? And for that matter, how come I was the one selected for coma duty? Huh? Did I ask? Who decided?"
"Mellow out, KareI mean, if you remember the note you gave Richard, you yourself wanted to sleep for 'a thousand years,' and avoid the future. You chose this, not me or anybody else. Worse things could have happened. I mean, you could have died completely. You could have had brain death."
"So why am I awake now instead of sleeping another nine-hundred-eighty-three years?"
"You woke up from your coma because you'd be able to see the present through the eyes of the past. Without you there'd be no one to see the world as it turned out in contrast to your expectations. Your testimony was needed. Your testament."
"Jared, nothing ever turns out the way it was intended. Just look at me." Karen looks at her legs and grimaces. "Oh, God. This is so bizarre. This is not what I was expecting life to be like. Hey wait Jaredhow come it's you here and not anybody else? I want to see my parents."