Semi-darkness always reigned in the Garage. The door was locked – one of the Three Main Rules. The first: ‘The door is always locked!’, the second: ‘You disturb nobody, nobody disturbs you’, and the third: ‘The garbage from the Garage can’t be taken out’. Certainly, in the third rule it was not talking about empty beer bottles, crumpled cigarette packs, boxes from pizza or packaging from condoms, but information, and in translation into the language of our ancestors it meant: ‘What happens in the Garage stays in the Garage’.
There were always five people living there, generally guys. Their dens were in the east part of the Garage separated from the ‘Central Station’ and the ‘Waiting Room’ by racks and a black tarpaulin curtain on which it was written in silver paint ‘Iron curtain’.
In the Waiting Room there was a bar, a gallery and a dance floor. In the Central Station there were compartments for couples who wanted to smoke grass in private or get on with something else. ‘Nirvana’ was the iron box with a door where those who got enough marks or ‘passed on the three paths’ could ‘fly’. The ‘Senior Flight Control Room’ was the personal apartments of the head garager, who, to my astonishment, was not the phlegmatic fat man Bach, but a puny, short, short-haired guy with an unpleasant, even angry, face called Pincher. It as Pincher who owned the computer which was giving out trouble. On it, Pincher had made some music clips of the Cure and mounted porno-videos filmed in Nirvana in his spare time.
The computer, by the way, appeared so-so – weak and carelessly looked after – the case was wet with beer and the screen splashed with goo whose origin I don’t even want to think about. But the machine was a working one, so I just rebooted the operating system, much to the rough delight of the garagers.
‘Look at you, pro!’ Frisbee tapped me on the shoulder, a thin smiling blonde of six foot. ‘Perhaps you could also fix the amplifier?’
‘Wait a moment, Fris. We didn’t even ask the man whether he has time for this,’ Pincher interrupted. Unlike the majority of garagers he rarely used slang. ‘Josh, what do you say?’
I looked at Neolani, who suddenly smiled at me. I was at a loss and just nodded, agreeing that I have time.
‘Does that mean you want to join us?’ Pincher asked bringing his face so close to mine I wanted to push away him.
‘I wa-want…”’
‘Initiation!’ the girl with green hair laughed loudly. She was called Pipe. ‘There will be an initiation! Bach, bring some cream!’
And everyone around – about ten of them – whooped with delight. Someone turned on Quadrophenia and the entire Garage was flooded with the Who’s guitar riffs. Pete Townsend ripped strings, Roger Daltrey wailed over the unfortunate destiny of Jimmy, and the garagers dragged me from the office of the flight controller to Central Station, pulled up a table and set me on it, all the while yelling raucously.
The music ceased. The lights went out completely.
‘Joshua Kold, worthless college boy, are you ready to change your life, expand your consciousness and learn the beauty of the inner world of the Great Beaver here, in our monastery of Chaos and Gloom?’ Pincher said in a solemn and rather ominous voice.
‘Y-yes…’ I answered quietly, but in the Garage there was suddenly total silence and I could hear the waves of the Severn River rolling onto the coast behind the iron wall of the hangar.
‘Do you agree with the Three Main Rules imprinted on the Big Wall opposite to you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you familiar with the Doctrine of Time?’
I shook my head ‘I just heard about it for the first time.’
‘Lani,’ Pincher turned his head towards my benefactor, ‘So you didn’t explain anything to him?’
‘Slipped,’ Neolani shrugged her shoulders. ‘Not enough time. You do it.’
‘So!” the voice of Pincher filled with epic force. ‘World governments by means of science lie to people about everything that surrounds them. The world is not such as it seems to all of us at all. And first of all this concerns time. They din into our ears that past, present and future exist. They do this so that all of us – all mankind – are slaves to time. We are forced to look back all the time at the past which allegedly contains the experiences endured in ancient times by previous generations. So we work, work hard all the time, and stoop for the sake of the future which will come after who knows how many years and allegedly will be light… It is a lie!’
‘A lie?’ I said, surprised.
‘Everything is a lie!’ Pincher confirmed. ‘To the last word.’
I looked at Neolani and she smiled with her contemptuous and haughty smile – the smile of the person who knows all.
‘Remember,’ Pincher summed up solemnly, ‘There is no Past. Absolutely. It has already passed, it was carried away back, absolutely back and therefore does not exist. I have said this phrase, and so it has already stopped existing, understand? That’s it, there is no past! Every second, each fraction of a second, the past disappears, melts like ice, evaporates into vapour, and is gone. So everything that was in it ceases to exist and has no value. All this experience, all these learned mistakes are nonsense and rubbish! Remember, Joshua, college-boy, others’ mistakes never taught anybody to do something. The free person learns from their own mistakes! Learns because there is no past. But there is no future either. It is absent for another reason – it hasn’t come yet.
Everybody today says you need to work hard and strive to bring the future we want but this is a double lie. The future can’t come, it can’t arrive because the moment it arrives, it becomes the unique condition of time which is the present. The present is that instant in which you live, in which you exist at present. Only the present is material and real. So live in the present! That is our motto! And now tell me, computer master with a chilly surname, do you want to spend the fleeting present working, sitting in stupid offices, for shares and transactions, for courts and reports?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Louder!”
‘No!”
‘Life is short!’ Pincher began to yell. ‘Learn yourself, learn the true world! Have fun! Create! Have a good time! Live in the present! Yeeha!!’
‘Live in the present! Yeeha!!’ the garagers shouted and began to leap in the air. Stroboscope lights flashed and dazzled. The music began again – this time the contemporary band Shadow Gallery, and Pincher ordered sharply:
‘Lani, on the table! Bach, cream!’
Neolani, still smiling, threw her jacket onto the floor, revealing a red crop top. She got up on to the table, crawled to the middle, sat down, and, coiling all her body, pulled off her crop top with a quick tug. There was nothing underneath! She lay down on her back.
My heart stopped, then was driven on in a beat, driven by the frantic pounding of the music.
‘Hey, hey!’ Pipe cried, twisting her shaggy green hair. ‘Why her, not me?”
‘Because I said so, baby!’ Pincher grinned. ‘Bach!”
The fat man approached Neolani and began to smother her erect breasts and their ringletted nipples with whipped cream from a barrel. When he had finished, the smiling ‘heavenly girl’ looked like a cake. Pincher pulled a bag of white powder from a pocket and strewed it over the cream.
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘Vanilla sugar!’ Bach answered and laughed loudly.
‘Eat!’ Pincher ordered me.
‘What?’
‘Lick! Eat! Guzzle! Guzzle!
‘Guzzle! Guzzle!! Guzzle!!!’ the garagers chanted.
I bent down over the table and, avoiding looking at Neolani’s smiling face, licked the cream, trying not to touch her skin with my tongue. For some reason it seemed to me that the white powder, surely ground tablets like amphetamine, must taste bitter, but that cream really did taste like vanilla.