Excerpts from Eden '99 "OH GOD"

Ubermensch

Excerpts from Eden 99. Ch. 15 Oh God 

Jillian 

Feel that? Ah, the weekend. From Friday afternoon to Sunday evening, I’m free for Just long enough to catch my breath. From Friday evening until Sunday evening when the tickling dread begins creeping up my spine and swelling with a growing intensity that inevitably leaves me dry heaving over my own toilet at around dawn on Monday morning, hours before I leave for school having slept very little the night before. The dread keeps me up all night with a tightening cramp in my stomach as if my rag wasn’t bad enough. I get around a day and a half, just long enough for me to remember who I was/am before it’s snatched away again in a torrent of dry heaves over hypersensitive toilet sensors flushing and splashing in my face. At times punctuated with an annoying, annoyed squeal from the next stall. And I fainted again the other day. I’m not sure exactly how long I was out for this time, only that I must have fallen harder on my face or hit something on the way down because when I came to my nose was bleeding and there was an almost imperceptible bruising on my cheek. Whatever is happening is getting worse. I’m growing more and more certain I legitimately like, might require medical attention. I don’t know why the idea petrifies me as much as anything else, the way everything prettifies me. Cripplingly. Then the diagnosis and wherever that might invariably lead. I don't want to know as much as I need to know, feel forced to confront this. It’s imperative that I find out. And what if it's something worse. Like psychological. My parents are way too uptight for therapy, for talking out their feelings. Bottle them up. Everything's fine. A facade. A remnant of a generation shell-shocked and uptight with PTSD. Maybe that’s the mindset that turned me into a stuck-up, superior snob. Was I cruel, was I self-centered, was I superficial, materialistic? I sure was, and proud of it.  Then, without warning, I went from being the most popular girl in one school to being the least popular in another. And being popular was important to me. Do I miss it? Being worshipped? Of course. The only thing I don’t miss are all of the annoying jealous bitches. Albeit, lately, what I miss most are people. Period. I don’t believe in karma but if there were such a thing as karma this would be a pretty clear omen. I knew exactly who I was and exactly what I was doing and I wasn’t ashamed of it. 

ALL I FEEL IS SHAME 

 Sometimes I wonder if this is what they mean when they say that someone is going through an awkward phase. Am I going through an awkward phase? Shall this too pass? Could it hurry its ass up a little? And how should I know for certain if this is an awkward phase when I’ve never experienced one? Bottom line, I’m too afraid to ask, seriously. 

 I miss long hours on the phone, flirting with cute boys that haven’t got a clue or a chance and then calling one or more of my girlfriends to have an even longer call about the call I just had with the cute boy that never stood a chance. Was he a creep? Did he miraculously pass or predictably fail?   Because it’s one thing to be the guy your mother warns you about, but you never want to be the guy the other girls warn each other about. Was he at least tolerable and what did he have to offer, honestly? And if by some higher power he had somehow proven himself worthy, was he now off limits to the other girls? Dibs? Or was he a square? A dork? A loser? A weirdo? A pervo? Lately, I feel like the weirdo and the loser in every room I enter but my own and maybe one other place in the world.  

It was so important for me to know that everyone knew who I was once. Known worldwide Famous, that was the day dream. The star that shined brightest. Now I see that there are only so few people that meant anything. One boy in particular, I thought was weird because I couldn’t see what he was trying to show me, infinite worlds inside of our own, worlds to find solace and take refuge in. I see it now. I didn’t see it then.   

He was cute enough. Passable. A potential pet project, perhaps. It was more like his confidence was different than any other boy I’d met. I wouldn’t even call it confidence exactly. I could rarely find the words. I wasn’t much of a reader.  It was as if there wasn’t anything he couldn’t outthink or thought he couldn’t outthink. As though he saw the world like a puzzle, with a kind of curiosity and the puzzle didn’t intimidate him, it intrigued him, even thrilled him. The girls called him a “brain.” I think back on him now as “Cerebral.”  

Did I just define confidence? Seriously, that’s not what I mean. 

It was more like a faith, a faith in himself. If faith is the absence of all doubt. If faith is all knowing. Faith with a capitol F. That’s what I never understood about the arguments between men of science and men of God. If there is some all-knowing God, wouldn’t he understand science and atoms and matter and gravity? And for all we know maybe that light described in the book of Genesis in the Bible, that light at the beginning that divided the darkness, was something like the big bang. If there was an all-knowing God, I imagine he would be a man of science.  God would have to be that smart or he would cease to be God.

Well, this brain felt as if he had faith in himself in the way people have faith in God. And they say faith can move mountains.  Jason carried himself as if he had faith in himself enough that if he were to ever encounter a mountain in the way of the thing he wanted, he would be able to think up some way to make a mountain move for him. Probably dynamite. A lot of it. 

That was like, his whole ‘tude toward everything, anyway. And it’s likely also how he somehow convinced me of meeting him at a bookstore. The bookstore that at least had a cafe where I could drink an ice latte and the first thing he says when I meet him at the table is, “Can you feel that? All those words; all that knowledge? It's electric. Countless voices shouting from across time? You can’t hear them? Something internal inside of them was screaming to be heard, to be made manifest. 

No. I couldn’t hear them and was this guy serious? Because he sounded serious. 

And I was like, I get it. You can read. You like to read. You read books. And then he left for so long I almost thought he’d ditched and I took my time flipping through an issue of Cosmo. glamour shots. Or YM. Or blah, blah, blah, blah, words. He got ghost for something like 45 minutes. I was collecting my things, about to leave when finally, he came back to the table juggling a stack of books that must’ve cost about as much as a pair of platform sketchers and he asked, “Were you sitting here this whole time?” Like, duh, where else would I be? And he bought me the Cosmo, claiming, “Print is not dying” a Cosmo I forgot while stoned in the backseat of some other boy’s car, who I called to pick me up. I can’t remember that boy’s name. But I remember the brain's name, Jason.   

Reading was boring. Reading was for inmates with too much time on their hands because they led boring lives. Reading was homework that I did to keep my parents from interfering with my life. I had nothing in common with Jason. The thing I would find about those inmates that I soon found was that they may start out doing it oh, pho, show, but they will walk away having learned something.  

Reading is mostly what I do these days, I’m on my way back from the library now, where I go after school on most Friday afternoons where I’m never around for long enough to cause a fainting spell or dry heaves. The library is my safe space. I rent dvd’s for a dollar a day. But that’s about as long as it takes to finish most books worth finishing. I even felt emboldened this Sunday afternoon, returning a copy of Clueless because Paul Rudd is a total stud and a copy of Emma because Jane Austen just gets it somehow. I stayed longer than usual, till closing, a part of me in no hurry of returning home. I haven’t been out after sunset in months.  

Then I’m on my way home, toward doom, because how can things get any worse and I see a flickering against the clouds in the distance, it looks like there’s a fire flaring from one of the houses in a neighborhood adjacent to mine. The smoke is a deep shade of grey and chemical and pungent even from here. Home is where I used to spend the least of my time. Not the house I currently reside in. Home was once basically where I went to sleep and change my clothes. My bedroom floor was basically my laundry basket. I was always stopping in and changing and rushing back out. My bathroom’s countertop (because yes, I had the master bedroom and still do) was a cluster of cosmetics and products and a blow dryer that was probably a fire hazard because I never bothered to unplug it, even knowing it just might burn my house down. Speed kills. I felt as if I stayed still too long, I might sink. But a person only has so much energy and there are only so many hours in a day. A person’s time and energy will inevitably fail them. Eventually everyone sinks. Some for longer and lower than others. Another use for my bedroom was to de-stress by vegging out in my PJs to the Titanic boxset and an ice-cream float spiked with whatever I could sneak from my parent’s stash. That was when my house in Washington felt like home. Even on days like that, there was always a friend around to entertain me and keep me company. I’d like to say I discovered the secret to a balanced life, but I feel like my boat capsized a few months prior, soon after arriving in what I once dreamed would be a paradise. All I saw in my head was a coconut tree like a tropical flag planted on a mound of white sand sprouting from the ocean. These days I mostly move wherever the current takes me because what other choice do I have? 

If my friends could see me now, I would hide from them. It’s the reason I never call them. There’s nothing to say. They likely think I’m a bitch that’s moved on and forgotten all about them and, honestly, I would prefer that to the truth at this point. I found Jason’s pager number somehow in my day planner and paged him to tell him I can hear them now, the words, the voices. I paged until the line disconnected. He wouldn't have recognized my number from another state anyway or maybe that’s what I tell myself. But Jason is who I imagine I’m talking to when discussing the books I’ve read.

Then it’s headlights and I’m launched backward, off my feet, into the air, the glare of a silver mustang on the candy apple hood blurring beneath me. I slam against the windshield that cracks and caves and I can’t fathom how much this is all going to hurt. I’m freaking and can already imagine myself recovering in a hospital. I tumble over the thundering candy apple red roof, then the trunk, the stabbing edge of a speeding spoiler and finally pulverizing pavement confirms your fears of a paralyzing pain. The noxious dual exhaust fumes are suffocating, and the sound of screeching tires terrifying, falling metal rattling and scraping concrete and finally a climactic crunch that causes even the ground beneath it to shutter, raining leaves that tumble past, carried by the wrecking force of the mustang’s collision.   

Then it’s bird’s eye view. 

I see myself sprawled out on my back in the middle of the crosswalk. My face and my hair are matted in my own gore. My entire face is coated red. A coincidental candy apple color. An entire pool of it is steadily flowing out of me. There’s someone kneeling over me, he’s telling me to hold on, to stay conscious, and because my eyes are still wide open, he thinks I can see him through them. 

“I want to believe. X-Files. Gillian Anderson. Gillian!  Your names Gillian,” He shouts, and I think “Oh God, if this guy is my only hope of rescue, I’m a gonner.  If I could speak, I’d ask him to please let go of my hand. Thanks but no. And, honestly, as mellow dramatic as this is going to sound, I wonder, “What if I don’t hold on? What happens then? What are my options here, exactly?” And just as the question occurs, I’m lifted up higher over the roof tops and trees and power lines and over the library and over the school and I notice sitting atop of K building, that girl with the purple hair and not so clever name “Violet.” And she’s seated, staring off at the flicking clouds and her legs are hanging over the edge of the roof and she’s contemplating smoking one last cigarette and she fights the nicotine fit because, oh God, she’s pregnant and she’s contemplating jumping because, Oh God, she’s seen Titanic too many times and she’s imagining herself as Kate Winslet hanging from the bow of the Titanic because it’s more romantic that way somehow.  

I continue, carried above the streets and streetlamps and traffic on the way toward my house and next door to my home there’s a basement identical to my own, only stuffed with bodies in huddles and rows and, oh God, the Techno. Is that what that constant vibrating beneath the tile in my kitchen is? I always assumed that the constant buzzing beneath my feet was somehow plumbing related. “Bad pipes.” I don’t know why that’s what I thought that’s what that was. This explains the cars parked on the lawn and ticketed for parking in front of complaining neighbor’s homes.  

And beneath the glow of a blacklight, there’s a boy a little older than myself, tossing and turning, and having a nightmare of some repressed memory about KLM building that invades his dreams with depressing thoughts and his eyes shoot wide to escape them and I swear he sees me and asks, “what?” 

He springs off the bed as I vanish into a swirling mist and a huddle of bodies yells, “Watch it, Fred!”  

And he says, “tell me you guys saw that girl floating over there” and the huddle laughs.