If we each had a female companion, maybe the situation would have ended differently. We would never have had the mutual disillusionment that would make the other brash and brave enough to talk about self-inflicted end times. Campbell had a girlfriend, but if Alyssa was someone else, a local girl, or someone more stable, maybe he would have felt better about his own career and then happier about life in general. Of course if he was always so full of smiles from his life both in and out of home, would that make me feel any better? Inevitably I would be making comparisons and when coming up short, I would become jealous, almost enraged. And then who knows what I would have done about it? Someone would then get hurt.
And if I was happy with someone on my arm, smiling at me whenever I smiled back, then Campbell would have felt the same towards me. If we can think the same thoughts, why not feel the same feelings? He would not be happy to see us especially if he had Alyssa in this alternative universe. She would still drink too much when we would go on dates together. Then she would begin the usual tirades and criticisms of the entire West Coast, as if every place that touches the Pacific Ocean is the same. Campbell would still be the peacemaker, and I know he would hate every moment of it, policing her movements and words.
Yet if we both had girlfriends, or even wives, there would still be the possibility we could both be mutually unhappy. I could have a woman living with me just like Alyssa, a twin of hers perhaps. In such a case Campbell and I would have had the same conversation and come to the same conclusion, that we were tired and what was tiring us was really life itself. We might even have had a similar epiphany, with physical positions switched, yet having the same layout, lighting, and music playing in the background and rising, rising to a crescendo like the universe's secret laughing behind us.
Strange now that it seems so inevitable again. I run possible universes in my mind and play scenes off these sanitary white walls and I keep coming to the same moment, a moment I cannot define clearly or map out the dialogue of. Yet I know the contours of the conversation, deciding to do something about our shared world weariness. But was it face to face, or more accurately head to head? I remember calling Campbell, when he was at home and I was at the park, wishing that he was there, playing for an audience, some symbol of success I could enjoy for a moment.
I remember calling Campbell and there was no one else around me. I remember telling him that, only I did not use the term people, or citizens, I told Campbell there were no witnesses around, and somehow he contemplated and knew what I meant even before I was sure of it myself. He told me he was alone, except he called it solitary confinement and said that escape was easier than the warden thought it was. I contemplated what he said too, and realized what he was hinting at. It was a delicate conversation. I told him that it felt like the times we were young and held each other while walking across the thin ice of a nearby pond or creek.
It was after the incident with Alyssa and the trash can and it was then that I suppose the preparations began. Neither of us tried to reassure the other. We had nothing more to give and we realized in our voices just how exhausted we were. Campbell had to hang up when Alyssa came in but told me that we would talk later. I stayed in the park and kept thinking of jumping over the railings ahead of me and go for a swim without any trunks on. The waves kept pounding and releasing bursts of salty mist over to me. The problem was the uncertainty of taking that route out. I might wash back up to the shore, with kelp over me, my lungs filled with salt water, but still breathing.
Campbell called me and I was still at the park, but it was night. Instead of staying in place I walked home with his voice coming in over my shoulder. It felt like having a parrot repeating what I was saying back to me, but in a much clearer, focused voice. I must have sounded the same for him, and between us one conversation passed between our mouths like a loop of tape, nothing new being said but everything somehow prerecorded and now being played. We could only go over it so many times though so I broke our equilibrium to tell him about work and how I had gotten in trouble last night.
There was something depressing about the bat mitzvah I had just worked that night. I was feeling alright before I got there but when I had set up in the area they were having their reception in, I started to feel uneasy. It was not anti-Semitism or feeling like a stranger in a strange land, I have worked plenty of karaoke jobs entertaining people of all faiths and non-faiths. There was just a feeling of heaviness as the evening began to slow down as each guest came in. Soon everyone was there and seated but the air was still and thick. I saw people moving but their movements were strange, as if taken one frame at a time, or like one step struck to one note in a dance. True many of the guests were elderly so I expected them to move that way, but even the young walked with a lethargic gait, it seemed that on what should have been a joyous day, everyone was in pain.
Gradually people began going through my catalogues, selecting songs, and then performing them. I was on cruise control mostly, delivering my usual speeches, introductions, before putting the song on. The music seemed to be working the same way too. One song came after another and the lyrics flashed up on the screen, with people singing along. I felt like I was in a pet store, stuck in the section with all the small birds screeching their tiny lungs out. No one who came up to sing seemed to have any other range. The voices were high pitched and never low, even if the song required a baritone. I know that they were all young girls, some not even teenagers yet, but not one male came on to break the cycle, or if one did he sang like a castrato, indistinguishable from the rest.
Then the songs started repeating. They were not just similar mass manufactured tunes churned out of the song mill for the pleasure of young girls in search of a pretty face to put on their walls and a smooth voice to fill their bedrooms, but were in fact the same exact songs. No matter how badly the music was butchered there was always applause after each round of off tune singing and lyric improvisation ended. The clapping only encouraged the kids to keep coming up and trying to do better than one another on the same song. No one wanted to try anything new. The karaoke became a competition even though there was no money on the line and no matter how good or bad the singing was the audience would react the same. Applause, applause, applause.
I came to the conclusion that if I had to hear Journey one more time, I was going to shoot someone, then myself. I decided then that I needed to calm down. If I snapped and started a spree not only would I be called a cowardly killer of the young, but everyone would think it was a hate crime as well, when all I was really angry about was the poor music choice. I should have expected it. Being in karaoke is always about hoping for the lesser of two evils, never about someone stumbling upon an hidden gem of a song that just happens to blow everyone away. I used to wonder what The Velvet Underground done for karaoke would sound like.
So I went into the men's room of the reception hall and when no one was around I lit up a joint. I knew it was wrong but I stood near an open window so the smoke would blow away and in case I had to suddenly toss it away. There was a moment of calm and peace away from the party even though the music still rolled into the bathroom under the door. With every hit I imagined a great big knot inside of me coming a little looser and I hoped that when I got to the end of the joint, I would untangle it altogether. Despite the cold and hard surfaces of the bathroom, it gave me a sense of comfort and security, instead of a womb I was in the next best thing, a safe.
But then one of the kids from the party came in, saw me smoking and ran away. I tossed the joint out the window and then looked out to make sure it landed away from any bushes or trees. The last thing I wanted to be accused of was being an attempted arsonist. I took a moment to myself, washed my hands and then looked at myself in the mirror. There was a knock on the men's room door and I was asked if everything was okay. I told them yes and the elders slowly came in. I suppose the smell was still lingering in the air and maybe my eyes were telltale bloodshot. No one wanted to make any trouble but they wanted me away from the children. I was told to pack up and leave. I made it halfway across the dance floor with everyone snaking around me in a giant conga line when I collapsed into a fetal position and started to laugh.
When I ended my story, my brother empathized with me instead of judging me or taking delight in my sorry attempt at a breakdown. I remember sitting in the stairwell of my apartment building and not caring if anyone overhead me. We talked some more and I had one great piece of insight that managed to move him. I did not say life was painful, or that it hurt or that it was even sad. I told him that despite everything we did to amuse ourselves, and perhaps because we were both charged with amusing others, that life is boring. The greatest waste of time, is time. For most people and especially for us, nothing ever happens. Campbell took a heavy breath but then he started laughing, and when he laughed, I laughed too.
"That's such a perfect way of saying it," he said to me.
There was a silence and then, yes, then it was I remember that he said after that, "I don't want to end up like mom and dad, weren't they happy all those years? And they had us to visit them. Who will visit us? Who will remember what we once looked like before we start to sag and melt?" I had no idea, but I did know that I never wanted to grow old like they did, and like so many others do. Not just the sicknesses bothered me, but the idea of a life where the sicknesses were the interesting thing, the only thing worth noticing and talking about.
Maybe if our genes were different, we would have had parents who aged better and we could have had more faith in time and its effect over us. How we got from talking about old age and our parents to choosing a stove and which painkillers to buy, that is the next great mystery. But I do know that when I ended the call and went into my room, I smiled at all my clutter, thinking, "I'm not going to have to worry about you very much longer!"
