THE BOTTOM OF THE OCEAN by Lonely Christopher

Pencil drove me to the airport and the left rearview mirror fell off his car on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway but it had been duct-taped on anyway and the little glassy reflective part of it was so broken you couldn’t see anything in it but then one of the tires came loose and fell off too and we saw it roll away from the vehicle and disappear between a white mini-van with newspaper over the windows and a giant truck attached to another giant truck. “You’re driving with three tires right now,” I told Pencil. We were both on a lot of speed. We drove on.

“This car handles fine with three tires,” Pencil said, “The fourth is sort of a luxury item.” We ignored the frightful rattling from under the hood. “I hope this doesn’t impair our chances at a clean break,” I said. Pencil was going to be my get-away driver. Walking into the airport was just a symbolic gesture. I hadn’t slept in a week, I was experiencing severe amphetamine psychosis, I looked unkempt and volatile, I had no form of identification on me whatever, I was not sure whether I had actually reserved a plane ticket, and I was carrying a suitcase full of prescription medication that didn’t belong to me, cheap gin, plus some seminal works in gender studies; I knew I wasn’t getting on a plane.

“We’ll be fine,” Pencil told me. “We’ll use the rocket boosters and leave everyone in the dust.” I thought that was a sound idea and it comforted me.

The airport was a sophisticated confinement center only accessible by way of tangled networks of overpasses and underpasses that were esoterically designated through a system of numbers and letters. “What number do I drive into? What letter?” Pencil asked. “I’m not sure,” I said. “What airline are you flying on?” he asked. “I don’t know,” I said. “Well,” Pencil said, “this way looks inviting.” We drove up a ramp marked with a letter I forget and parked on the sidewalk; I fell out of the car, already crying. “Five minutes,” Pencil screamed.

I dragged my fat suitcase inside: it was a monster, it was probably a bomb, it was over-packed and held together with black duct-tape and sandpaper. I saw a notice telling me irregular-sized luggage would be subject to an extra charge. I saw another notice telling me that liquids were only allowed through security if they were in containers no larger than three ounces and placed in opaque plastic bags. I didn’t want to deal with that so I pulled out all the nips of vodka I was carrying in my coat and drank them while I was waiting in line. There was a jolly red-faced family of tourists in front of me, obviously returning to Nebraska from their retarded abortion of a weekend vacation in the city. Once I was walking through Times Square and I heard a tourist wife say to her tourist husband, “This is crazy! You call this a vacation?” She meant that city life was too fast for her and it wasn’t relaxing at all to stand in the vortex of Times Square as people ran in every direction screaming and pissing in the streets. I almost took pity on her but then I kicked her in the face. Times Square is really crowded so you can get away with something like that, and also I can kick quite high. “Welcome to New York, you stupid cunt!” I yelled at her, and ran into the subway before her embarrassed husband could even react.

I was not distracted in the airport. I was very alert. I emanated nihilistic composure. The tourist family was calmly trying to obtain tickets for the flight to Nebraska when suddenly they were carried away by armed military officials and thrown on the ground and ravaged by trained dogs while questions were screamed at them in different languages from loudspeakers. “Next?” the woman at the desk called. I fell down and pretended a grand mal seizure. “Next!” the woman called. A pair of nuns stepped over me and approached the desk. When this happened I saw the underpants of one of the nuns. I saw the purple veins cascading down her inner thighs. I rolled out of line, trying to grasp my suitcase as I writhed in false agony, and slowly crawled toward the entrance.

Pencil was waiting for me in the car. When I jumped in he hit the rocket boosters and we sailed out of there at mach three or something. “Did you even get your ticket?” he asked me. “There was some stupid misunderstanding,” I told him. “The airline apologized and presented me with a gift basket but I gave it to a black person in a wheelchair and then some journalist took a picture--look for me in the Post tomorrow!”

We did more speed in the car because Pencil had invented a way to crush up and blow pills while driving using the plastic wrapper from a pack of cigarettes and a ballpoint pen.

“How are you going to get out of this interminable complex?” Pencil asked me. “Looks like I’ll have to train hop,” I sighed. Train hopping takes forever and is not glamorous like flying first class is, which is what I was going to do before I fucked everything up by being a drug addicted fuck-up. “That’s romantic,” he said. “The fuck you know?” I asked. “You just read about it in some stupid book about a guy who jacks off all the time and rides around on the back of a train kissing transient farm workers for bread or something.”

I sure did have a negative attitude, but once I jumped into the boxcar of that first train, westward bound, I was swept up in the freedom of movement and I embraced the expansive rural beauty of the land I traveled through, and sure it was hard, but I grew from the hardship, and along the way I met friends I’ll never forget--friends who stayed up late with me in the animal wilderness as we waited for our next train, laughing around a campfire as we cooked cans of beans for supper, friends who told me the stories of their lives, and inspired me, and really gave me a sense of perspective--and we may not have had everything we wanted from the world, but we were with each other, and most of all there was nobody telling us what to do, we were free, really free, and it was the first time in my life I realized I was capable of feeling like that, like I didn’t owe anyone anything, and the world still held some semblance of possibility for passionate minds and wandering spirits, and I felt as if I was experiencing the last gasp of the greatness of an authentic American existence, the one we read about in wistful books, and it was beautiful, and in the end, when I was sitting in a boxcar with Stinky Pete and Twister, nearing my final destination, a tear rolled out my eye because I finally understood what it was to be alive, and then at the station we were all arrested, accused of vague terroristic plotting, and I spent three weeks in jail before my parents finally bailed me out, but then I had to work at my dad’s golf course to pay him back for covering my court expenses, and the trial went on and on, and in the end I was sentenced to a month in jail followed by years of probation, and my lawyer told me how to skip town, but I was so lazy I just decided to kill myself, so one night I filled my coat pockets with rocks and I dove into the cold unforgiving lake behind my parents’ house, and there I died.

When I finally made it back to the city, everything had changed. A giant computer that lived in the gymnasium of a public school in Queens had been elected the first openly gay mayor and there were talks of some sort of machine revolt and also Pencil was dead. “What the fuck?” I asked. Pencil shrugged. He had done so much speed his heart exploded and I was jealous. Most of his stash had already been picked over by the cops who dragged away his body--the mice in his apartment got the rest. The mice were depraved, they tore through walls, they craved human flesh. I decided I needed a change.

Pencil and I walked over the Brooklyn Bridge in the rain and sat down in the stink of the river on the shore by the seaport. “We’re growing up, you know,” I told him. “We can’t fuck around like this forever, especially not in this political climate.” “It might change when the computer robots take over,” Pencil suggested. “For better or for worse, do you think?” I asked. Pencil shrugged. “It only gets worse,” he said.

“We’re practically adults now, I think,” I said. “What does that mean?” Pencil asked. “Um,” I said. We were silent as we watched a ferry plow away from the shore toward Staten Island; it suddenly blew up and debris flew everywhere, hitting the water and sinking. “There’s that,” Pencil said. “Out of all the people we admire,” I said, “I don’t think any of them were as fucked up as us at this age. Perhaps Rimbaud is the exception, but look what happened to him: he became a douchebag or a zeppelin or something boring.” Pencil shrugged.

I said, “We have a responsibility to ourselves, I think. I just don’t know what about.” We yawned together. We jumped into Pencil’s car. “I found this time travel device in the garbage outside of my apartment,” he told me and pointed to a mess of wires connected to a digital interface. “I haven’t tried it out yet because I’ve been sad.” I frowned, “People have all these expectations for tourism and time travel, like you have to be just in the right mood to do it, and you have to do really specific things or it won’t work out right and you’ll go home feeling like it was ruined. You know what? It shouldn’t be that way. I want to go to Belgium and be depressed as hell. I want to go to Haiti and get sick and almost die and then fall in love and get murdered. Let’s fucking go back in time, man.” So we did. We saw the Parisian unrest during May ‘68, passed out in a drinking game with Guy Debord, we checked out Caligula and thought he was boring and his name was stupid, we witnessed the birth of Christ and then fast-forwarded to the death of Christ, and also Saint Peter’s death, which was more entertaining because they crucified him upside-down, and somehow we ended up out of gas during the Franco-Prussian War and had to sail home on a frigate while working as kitchen boys.

“If you could be anyone who ever lived,” asked Pencil, “who would you be?” “Not Proust,” I said. “Are you sure?” he asked. “No,” I said. I coughed up blood. “I’d like to be...” the moldy old sea chef began, but we ignored him; he kept on talking but we weren’t listening we were just skinning potatoes. “I’d like to be the captain of this frigate so I wouldn’t have to work,” I said, talking over the chef. “I’d sit in my cabin all day overcome with monomania.” “Monomania about what?” asked Pencil. I couldn’t decide. The ship sank. We didn’t survive.

“This kind of stuff happens all the time,” I said. “We get so self-involved we forget whatever is bothering us from week to week isn’t important because our lives don’t mean anything in any sort of reasonable context.” Pencil said, “Yeah.” We might have as well been at the bottom of the ocean. We were.