“Yes. That. And another thing.”
“What is it?”
I see my father’s face in me, rising above his pulpit. He was right. On earth, the father is the image of God.
“I hated my father,” I say.
“That frightens you?”
“Not exactly.”
“What, then?”
I say, “I’m afraid that God is as loveless as he was.”
He says, “Your father was not God.”
“God gave me this evil.”
“No. Not him. Did any of the men you kissed know the risk?”
“None of them.”
“I do.”
“Yes.”
Philip draws his face near to me. “Then kiss me,” he says.
“I want to kiss you. I want to. I want to touch.”
“I understand. Kiss me. I’m asking you.”
“We can stay here afterwards,” I say.
“Yes.”
“Will we be safe?”
“We will,” he says. “I’ll fill the room with furniture. I am a carpenter.”
Then I kiss him.
“Doomsday Meteor Is Coming”
So we settle in at this new place in Westwood called “Coffee, Beer and Irony” and it’s a Saturday afternoon, there’s practically a whole weekend left ahead of us. I’m thinking I could stay here the entire time. When you find a place with a TV over the bar and a lot of light and hazelnut coffee, which is my favorite, and beer the color of Evian, you can almost think that the world isn’t so bad after all. And the place even has tables with umbrellas out in the back, away from all the traffic. The Zima Garden. And I’ve got forty-two hours before I have to put on my suit and tie and go out and tread water for a while. I say I “have to” do that, but I choose to. It’s a choice I make. I’m in my Converse high-tops today and that’s me, but I’m no slacker. Not that anybody is pushing me to be. Tolerance is the word. Even Janis doesn’t get after me about the job. She understands, in a certain way. The thing that’s happening between us on this otherwise-should-be-fine Saturday afternoon isn’t about my job, exactly.
She’s across the room at a table with Peggy Sue and Liza. I’m at the bar with Justin and Seth. I look over at her and she’s beautiful, my Janis Joplin-Hendrix Jones. Razored tangerine hair and six rings in her face and the poutiest, softest lips in the world with one of the rings through the lower one. I’m just beginning to suspect that I’m going to lose her. But what I don’t know is if that’s a real big thing for me or not. And all the while I’m sitting here looking at her, I have no idea that the end of the world is on the way.
Though I’m about to learn. We have our Zimas, the three of us guys, and I lift mine and I’m looking out the front window through it, watching the passing cars swim in my beer like tropical fish, and Justin says, “The world will be okay when all the rivers and lakes look like Zima,” and Seth says, “Who are we kidding?” This stops Justin and he nods his head. Like yes. He hadn’t thought of that point.
“Kidding about what?” I say, a black Firebird convertible billowing through my drink like a manta ray.
“That the rivers will ever run full of crystal clear malt liquor,” Seth says.
“Don’t tell me it’s so,” I say. “Where did we lose our idealism?”
“I left it in my other genes,” Justin says.
So we all clink our bottles and drink to whatever that was. Meanwhile, the bartender is flipping channels and cursing because the UCLA game is blacked out. “They’re just playing over at the goddamn Coliseum and we can’t see it,” he says.
Then he’s got the Saturday rerun of Inside Scoop, and Justin says “Stop. There might be something on Madonna.” So the bartender leaves it and goes about his business and my attention is drifting, back to Janis. I look over my shoulder and I catch her eyes sliding away from me and she leans toward Peggy Sue and they talk low.
It’s about my nipple, I figure. Well, our nipples, actually, one of Janis’s and one of mine. She wants me to get my left nipple pierced, the one over my heart, and she wants to do the same, and that would mean we were joined at the nipple, or something. More than that, I guess, but I’m not sure what I think about this particular gesture. I’m resisting it, and this is what’s happening between Janis and me to make this Saturday go bad. It’s kind of a big deal, somehow, the question of our two nipples, until I turn my face back and I look up at the TV.
There’s a guy on who’s the editor of a newspaper called Real World Weekly. He’s a forty-something, a Double-Us, from the look of him, and he’s got an air about him, like he’s from the CIA or somewhere and he knows things that other people don’t. I’ve seen his paper at the supermarkets and we always go “Cool” around it and laugh that in-between laugh, that sort-of-with-it, sort-of-against-it kind of laugh, that I’m-going-to-take-this-as-real, I’m-going-to-stand-away-from-this kind of laugh, and that always feels good, one of those laughs, because it tucks you away in a sweet little quiet nowhere. So Justin and Seth are starting up like that already, but for some reason, I’m seeing this guy like through a real clear glass of beer.
He says that a meteor about a mile and a half wide is on a collision course with the planet Earth and it will arrive in about a year, though the scientists are all keeping quiet about this so as not to start a panic, so it could be any minute, really, or perhaps not for two years or so, but not much more. But when it hits Earth it will be like a fifty-million-megaton bomb and, to make a long story short, it will end all life as we know it on this planet.
Yeah, right. This is how you find out. Looking for the UCLA game while everybody’s drinking beer and it’s on a regularly scheduled show, and on a rerun, even, and nobody’s paying attention and CNN doesn’t have the story and never will.
Justin says, “This can be a unifying thing, you know? Bring all the earth together.”
And Seth says, “No. We’ll all kill each other before it even gets here. Every store will be looted. The justice system breaks down if all the maximum sentences are two years.”
Like they don’t believe it. I hear them and I’m thinking I should be throwing in some comment like that, but for some reason I don’t. I sit here and my face has gotten real hot real fast and everything is seizing up in my chest and there’s still enough in me of the guy in the Converses to step back and think, Hey, this is pretty weird, but it keeps going on in my body just the same.
The Inside Scoop people are asking the editor some tough questions now, I think, though I’m not concentrating very much on that. I’m already feeling that thing out there, hearing a static in my head like it’s the solar wind peeling off it, if meteors have solar wind. Then the editor is looking right at me, at everybody in this bar, and he says, “It’s real,” and I know it is.
Justin says, “These are the guys who found out about that talking waterbed in Encino.”
“I heard about that,” Seth says. “That’s true.”
“True you heard about it?” Justin asks, seeking a clarification that I’m having trouble taking an interest in at the moment.
“I have to take a leak,” I say just to get away for a little while and I put my Zima down and drop off the stool and my legs are having trouble holding me up, though I haven’t even finished one drink, I’m still sober. I wobble off toward the back of the place and I’m drawing near to Janis and she looks up from her two friends.
“Linus,” she says to me, “you look awful.”
I’m feeling awful, too, and I sink into the empty chair at the table, next to Janis, and I’m trying to find a way to say this without it being taken wrong.
“Janis,” I say. “The world’s going to end, probably sooner rather than later, but in two years max.”