The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [65]
I’m not saying that I’m deep, I’m just saying I watch the dust, and I’m not stoned either, when I do it. Just observant. I’m concentrating on it, figuring out its mystery, its purpose for being here in the same universe with us.
When I tried to get Oscar to study the dust, he went: you’re so, like, Looney Tunes, Chloé. Jeez, dust. He was smiling when he said that, criticizing my dust interest. But you could tell that he didn’t get the profundity of dust at all. Poor guy. Well, some people can’t sing, either.
But what I’m saying is, I can get motivated when I have to. I can stop dust-meditating and get off my ass and get the job done. Which means that when I had to figure out the future, I took steps.
Oscar’s friends, these boy-men from his high school jock clique — Speedy and Ranger and Fats (who was not fat — where do guys get names like this?) — came by our apartment, grab-assing Oscar and demanding that he come out to play basketball, it being early summer, and the two of us, Oscar and me, not having to work at Jitters that day. Oscar! Hey, man, they said, first of all hollering up to our window, dude, you just gotta come shoot some hoop, dooooooode, Oscaaaaaaaar, we just gotta have another guy. Oscar hears the call of male needs, he barks his yes downward to them, so then he puts on his shorts and his Nikes and kisses me and gets his shoulders punched in the parking lot and his ass whapped and he is gone. Like poof, like a husband. Empty nest.
I had to figure out if Oscar and me had any prospects at all, as a couple, together. So there I was, me, Chloé, alone. But with the keys to Oscar’s ancient AMC Matador, and I sat there, and I’m like, I gotta find out the future from an expert. So I took some money and put it into my pockets and my shoes in case I got robbed, and I drove over to Ypsilanti, where the psychics are. You can’t do psychics off of TV. The TV psychics are mostly wrong, and way too expensive besides.
I had been reading my tarot cards on Oscar and wanted a second opinion. And I figured I’d need to take something of his, so I took a mungy sweat sock and his track team relay baton and one of his knives, which he had told me not to touch, but which I did touch, for his own good and mine too.
YOU GOTTA GO TO YPSILANTI to find out the future. Or Willow Run. See, what you do is, you leave the ho-hum middle-class environs of Ann Arbor and Pittsfield Township, and then you explore your way down the strip, past the used car lots and the Arby’s and the Dairy Queen, and then there’s Eastern Michigan University with its stiff-dick watertower (but there’s a brick condom on it — go see it for yourself if you think I’m kidding), and then downtown Ypsi, but then, when you get east of there, that’s when it turns really interesting and nasty over there in the Twilight Zone, that’s where the future-experts ply their trade.
I mean, most cities have got their own Twilight Zones, right? Where the old wrecked factories and warehouses live? ’Cause East Ypsi has got these ancient car assembly plants, these old humping kickass grounds of steel and scrapyards, and the scrapyards sort of find their way next to topless bars and tattoo parlors, and these freakazoidal video stores where you don’t want to know what or who they’re renting in there, and outside on the curb the underfed cats and dogs are staring at you and begging for puppy chow when you drive past, and then there’s razor wire around most of the warehouses, so you just know the karma’s really complicated there. It’s like the future has already happened, and it’s all past by now? Like that?
Anyway, you gotta drive over there on a sunny day. Otherwise it doesn’t work. You get bad head colds in your psyche if you go there on a cloudy day. Then your psyche sneezes your good karma out into the ozone layer, where, of course, it burns away.
And that’s how come I