Bermuda Shorts - James Patterson [26]
Agnes comes bursting out of the Conjecture Chamber with a vengeance. Her expertise is in urban planning, and if there’s one thing that can set her blood to boiling it’s shopping malls. She sees them as the perfect link between corporate television advertising and consumers, without the disturbing notion of community and social responsibility interfering with the exchange of funds from lower class to higher. You needn’t feel responsible for buying your shoes from the local retailer who is also your neighbor because there is no longer a local shoe retailer. And your neighbor? Screw him. You’ve never even met.
Cid unexpectedly takes a turn in the Conjecture Chamber wondering why it is so. Why do people frown on the solid urban brick dwellings built to last a century, downtown, where everything is convenient and you don’t even need a car, to the prefab claptrap pasteboard houses that cost twice as much?
Earl is eating it up. He launches a rant of his own. The opposite of love is not hate, but death. And into this loveless universe, the one Agnes’s ex-boyfriend has jettisoned her, and now all of us, into, the anxious citizens of the world will live in a music-less hateful ugly void that they so richly deserve.
I abandon them to their joyous nihilism to watch a hockey game on the bar’s television, keeping one ear on the conversation lest it turn carnivorous.
“Yes, you can take it with you!” is the subliminal corporate message being insidiously injected into our doped-up psyches. Alone and unloved, our culture has been driven to the edge of an abyss we are only dimly aware of. Why? Because the consciousness of the hive is stupefied and two dimensional.
Don’t tell Mom, the babysitter is dead.
Miller was right, we were nourished by great American poets and seers. He was one himself. But as I look around the room all I see are Earl, Agnes, Cid, and myself among the yuppie drones. Earlier post-World War II eras had their intellectual heroes. Ginsberg, and Kerouac, Adlai Stevenson, Bob Dylan, Dick Gregory, Gene McCarthy, Hunter Thompson, Rock’n’Roll. Now we look around and realize we have only each other. The field is barren. We have, for tonight at any rate, formed an inebreational Star Chamber in which Amanda would have felt right at home. We have broken on the wheel of our mutual anxieties the poor, guilty, overpaid slob from the Metro platform, who is just one of the many co-conspirators threatening to bring darkness down upon our life and times. For the remainder of the night the Conjecture Chamber door will remain open, and we enter and exit at will. Politics, mysticism, and human relations are played out upon its grand screen. We agree to recognize the possibility that a new dark age may well be upon us but at least we’ll not have to face it alone.
We break it up at five a.m. I stumble out of Earl’s place as delightfully pickled as a fellow can be. I remove the T-top from my Oldsmobile, fire up a cigar, pop a fresh brewski, and cruise home through the park. The tall lush trees of the Empire Capital undulate luxuriously in the cool springtime air. Amanda loved the T-top. She would designate me her charioteer, undo our seat belts, and curl up next to me on the bench seat, knees drawn up, her crazy hair whipping my face as we blazed through the summer night. Now, the angst, hubris, and delirium of the evening have already fallen from me like old skin. Amanda was killed four months ago, a few days after the New Year. She was jogging, wearing headphones. Got struck by a car. She carried no ID on her run, so she lay in a morgue for months as a Jane Doe until at last her parents found her. Two thousand