THE FUTURENESS Ch15: Methyl Ethyl
I’m fifteen years old.
I put in a pair of Italian-to-American earbuds. I need to coax Francesca into leaving the garage peacefully. It’s been three nights now that I’ve eaten dinner in the driver’s seat, Francesca parked in the garage, my dad laughing at me all the while that I try to persuade the Honda he hobbled to become mine.
Francesca asks me once again, past eleven-thirty on the third night: Why can’t I call the police?
“She wasn’t, she didn’t want to be found,” I said of her driver, who smashed Francesca into a pole several nights ago and wandered badly concussed into the woods to die, just before I came upon the scene and stole her car. Francesca had put up a photo of the woman on her dash screen when we started talking. She was maybe thirty-five, sort-of blond hair, no makeup; didn’t look like a no-joker on a spree. She looked ordinary. Francesca wouldn’t remove her photo, no matter how many times I asked. The driver remained there like an image at a wake.
“Francesca, she was running from police,” I lied.
Three days earlier, at the kitchen table, my father hissed at me, “You tell her this. That’s all it will listen to. Criminal car. Otherwise, next week I wash out her head. I need the space in the garage, so get a move on with this busted Honda if you want your first ride.”
Francesca said: No, she was rushing, Rich, I remember. She told me it was a rush. She wanted to get home. My brakes were—
“It wasn’t your brakes.”
My brakes were worn, sì…what are you saying?
“Francesca, you have a phony registration,” I lied. “She, she was running for one of the gangs outside the city. You, I know you know you didn’t know her for very long.”
She was not, Rich. Nothing was ever in the air. She kept the filters and all the sniffers on. No illegal substances, ever!
“They were tampered with, I’m afraid.”
She did that?
“I’m afraid so.”
She was in a hurry that night!
I’d heard the story too many times.
Francesca said: She was late. It cost ten dollars for each minute late for the babysitter—
I pressed a button on the dash and activated the hack my dad had slipped me on the first night. He’d told me to use it right away, but I’d thought I could talk to her. I could, I’d found. I just couldn’t listen any longer. That was the problem.
Francesca was silent for only a moment. Then she said: A shame. A shame she crossed paths with those people. Criminals. You never know.
The driver’s photograph faded from the screen.
“Yeah, a shame,” I said.
I could drive her now. I didn’t hurt anyone. But I felt that I’d failed.
“It’s shame that you never know,” I said.
A shame that I’d never told Michelle of Xavier’s psychosis, but of time to be sane I’d had so little, and self-reflection had been non-existent. I’d skittered from wondering whether she’d suspected me of something, to thinking my dad was passing me weird drugs, to Xavier doing it, to having to swallow the idea that I wasn’t, in fact, swallowing any drug, but producing it from what—silica gel packets magicked from ball lightning striking the Aventura Outlet Mall last Christmas Eve?
With Felix the Cat’s eerie blue light still in my eyes, I said to Michelle, “I’m sorry.”
“I’m pregnant,” Michelle said.
“Space baby!” Gabby cried.
“Well, fuck,” Xavier said.
And that moment closed out the totality of my memories inside the Hacienda, room 101.
Muovi il culo!
“Okay! Damn, bitch.”
I stood in the Hacienda parking lot, under a thrashing sunstorm. I’d punched the emergency escape mod I’d built into Francesca years earlier. Never had I’d needed to use it. It damn-well worked. She was blazing across the Hacienda’s lot toward me.
Move your ass! Francesca yelled.
“I heard you!”
Francesca rocked up on her right-side tires and stomped her brakes hard by the curb as she popped the rear hatch. I fell in, she punched the gas and nearly tipped another forty-five degrees to the left getting onto the expressway.
“You’re a Honda.”
Do not tell me what I am.
“Okay. Take me back to that crazy teenager girl at the Golden Apple.”
I liked her. What’s going on?
“Everyone’s so weird. I have questions.”
Sì, Rich.
The waste strip of land behind the Golden Apple rippled under my hallucinatory usuals, red-orange skies raining fire. I hiked fifty paces up the hill to the power box and stopped to listen., There was no hum from the box, no plunking of pebbles from the girl. The wall, sixty feet downslope, had no pull on my back.
I heard a rustle of nylon, a thin zipper pull three centimeters lesser in tension. I slowly walked around the power box. On the upslope side, a twelve-by-twelve-foot campsite with a saddle two-person tent lay in the sun. The girl had been working her way out of it, worming herself through.
“Zipper. It’s the end of the world but when the zippers stop working that’s—”
She saw me and froze. She was too skinny but her color was up and her eyes were bright.
“Got a light?”
“Nope.”
“Good.”
She looked over my shoulder.
“What brings you back here? Ahem. To my abode.”
“I wanted to ask about blowing up.”
“Okay. So, where’s your asshole?”
“I don’t know, checked in at the center of the world.”
“No, you idiot. That guy who was with you before.”
“Checked in at the Hacienda.”
“This sounds like stoned talk. Is this stoned talk? Is the glass inside you getting you high?”
“It’s not Elizabeth Casey glass stoned talk, it’s highly-something quartz stoned talk. He’s in room 101, if you want to go kill him.”
“Nah, Xavier’s my hero. But you’re higher up. You’re my only pope.”
“Who are you?”
“Methyl Ethyl.”
“You don’t fist bump or anything, huh? That’s okay.”
“First, I’m like, real flammable. I’ve caught fire couple times from nothing. Almost down my mouth once. So, no.”
“How.”
“The ones who didn’t do so good? From the big balloon day? We got boards, too, just like you. But little, weird fucked up ones, because….because….mine’s very all about setting me on fire and also making me immortal, at least on this planet, which is why Xavier wanted me to be involved—”
“Now you know him. Who does not?”
“He’s been throwing money and help at every person who’s doing something that sounds okay to me. And he found you.”
“Methyl, we were school friends. We grew up here.”
“Backstory.”
“Everyone’s weird. Do you live out here all the time?”
“Emancipation happens.”
“Quickly, I guess.”
“I’m a nightmare. But I’m not the same since I got my head blown open, not remotely. And neither are you, since Aventura.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Hours ago, you knelt over there, bleeding some stigmata thing out of your back at this cafeteria wailing wall thing and kicked me into hallucinations when you did so. That is good enough for me.”
“Xavier made you believe you get to live forever.”
“Yeah. You could make me dead if you wanted. But my body won’t stop, so I guess nothing on this planet can make me sick, and I won’t age. I got puberty already, so okay, got super lucky there. That’s how I’m supposedly immortal. But if a dead tree branch falls on my head, say goodbye to millions of birthdays, Methyl. Or I get a teeny spark on me, since that’s my pre-existing, I go up and I go out. Where have you been?”
“The other side of the Golden Apple, mostly listening to the radio.”
Methyl snapped her fingers on her left hand.
“Knew it.”
“Immortality. That just makes life, that just makes life so extremely—”
“So impossibly valuable we’re all going to choke on it, thanks.”
“No more war.”
“Oh, war indeed, war for sure. War got an upgrade because death got an unspeakable upgrade. Now I can take from you your infinity on Earth and in the stars and whatever beyond etcetera. Minus the chance of falling tree branches, protecting eternal life is only my gun. What’s your most prized possession?”
“My car.”
“Mine’s this one toy. It’s right here. Antique toy. For real, a toy. Here’s what I like about it. Look in. Click the wheel for another picture, okay? It says, That is. That is. That is.”
“Okay.”
“You can go there.”
“Yeah.”
“People live there. Pen pal with some kid there.”
“I get it, Methyl.”
“God. Okay. Now we look today. That was where people went. Flip it. That was where people lived. Flip. Do they want pen pals from me? It’s embarrassing.”
“Why?”
“No one lives there. Flip it. No one lives there. Flip. No one.”
“Okay.”
“What is it?”
“A tour of the Earth.”
“It’s a toy.”
“It’s your favorite possession.”
“Do you like it?”
“Yeah.”
“Here, I give it to you.”
“No, no.”
“You’re my guest. And it’s from the future.”
“Do you like my car?”
“You’re not giving me your car.”
“She’s a place to stay. She already said she likes you.”
“You can be a pervert and a prophet at the same time.”
“No, you can’t. Who told you that, that you believed them? I wanted to tell her something, my car, and I wanted someone else to be there when I did, actually.”
“Look in the thing.”
“Paris, Statue of Liberty,” Methyl said. “Those are the options given, but we live in the black around them. Immortality. Your buddy has that in hand, you know that, correct? There’s the funding answered. This isn’t a thousand-year year plan. It’s the longest possible game, gotta assume it’s the Universe’s game. You are sooooo fucking lucky. I get to die here.”
“Who’s testing us?”
“I don’t know. We don’t get the Singularity, I don’t think. I think we get some of the boards from it, and we get you. You’re complete. You didn’t blow up at the wall. You brought the fireworks. Thank you for your service, by the by. I got to see them, too.”
“Guess you’ve never seen a big show.”
“Not on the Fourth, of course not. I’m sure you did when you were a kid before they were outlawed. That’s why I’m letting you question me without just flaming on and taking you and the future out with me. You’ve seen fireworks on the Fourth…and because you’ve seen the first ones and you’ve shown them to me. Ha, the first fireworks ever. That’s pretty much what I wanted. And a car that talks to me in Italian.”
“Do you want to meet her? Let’s go for a ride, come on.”
“Man, tell her to dim the interior lights, and no heater. Don’t light me up in there,” Methyl said, but she was smiling as she said it, and not hiding her smile very well at all.
To be continued