Chapter 2: A Beautiful Mystery

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2

Norman sits on the low stone wall edge of a large, elevated statue of a robed woman with a sword in the middle of Monument Square in Portland, Maine. He is tall, and sits with his legs crossed. His brown hair is shaggy and uncut. He just shaved (though having done so is false advertising, considering he is about to meet a date). A fuming cigarette adorns his long, slender fingers. Beneath his thick-framed black eyeglasses, though superb craftsmanship masks the fact, one of his bright green eyes is also made of glass. He gazes out across the square, his molars silently grinding against each other inside his mouth while he tours the contours of the backs of his crowded front teeth with his tongue (nervous tension vents, near constant). It is night, and there are few pedestrians.
In thinking, Norman thinks, I have just realized that my thoughts are not inherently words. He thinks these words in his mental voice-over-narration style, hearing them in his brain while his mouth is motionless and no actual sound emanates from him. They can be described with words, and often come already wearing words if I’m thinking about how I would say or write the thought, or just thinking voice-over-narration-style as I’m doing right now. But they also occur between words. I move from sentence to sentence, planning the next one in my mind with naked thought while I internally narrate using the current one. He begins to think in such a wordless manner about the very sentences he has just constructed. (He often falls back on such inner cognitive-sandbox absurdities when he is nervous.)

a Beautiful Mystery

“Norman?” the lovely, curly-haired young woman in dark colors who is approaching from around the edge of the monument asks him hesitantly.
Norman stands. “Laura,” he replies with a smile and a rush of nervousness that he quickly attempts to dispel with a single deep breath. His left hand shudders in his coat pocket as he holds his long orange leather coat tight to his slender frame. “It’s lovely to meet you,” he says.
“You too.” They don’t shake, eroticism somehow already the unacknowledged elephant in the scene (at least in Norman’s). She has a disarmingly sexy manner about her. She eyes his cigarette and retrieves one of her own from her black purse. Her shyly smiling eyes are briefly illuminated by her lighter’s flame as she glances to the side to light her cigarette away from the breeze. “Shall we get a table at Shay’s?” she asks, gesturing to some tables scattered at the edge of the square.
It is early September and the night air is that perfect invisible temperature. Norman loosens his gray scarf as they walk quietly side by side, step over a low chain and take two seats across from each other at an umbrella-covered table.
Laura leans back in her chair and exhales smoke, finally really looking at Norman, and he takes the moment to take in her visage as well. She has pale, lucid blue eyes and a mane of curly brown hair. The way her lips kiss her cigarette gives away a luscious sybarite peeking through the fibers of shyness. She wears a tight black velvet coat with big buttons and straps on the shoulders, and a charcoal skirt. On her wrist is the rhinestone cocktail bracelet she told him in her email she would be wearing. She sits very still, looking at him with a curious gravitas.
“How are you?” Norman asks her.
“So, how long have you lived in Cape Elizabeth?” Laura asks at the same time.
Norman begins speaking with his hands, facial expressions and sways of his neck before his words come. “Well, I just moved back out here from South Bend, Indiana about a month ago,” he explains, “but I lived here once before, for a year, about two years ago. I live with my sister Lee, in her basement. Lee and her husband and two kids.” Norman briefly feels a slight chill of shame that he mentally shrugs away.
“How old are her kids?” Laura asks him.
“Ten and twelve, both boys.”
“I see,” she says with a smile. A whorl of smoke dances in front of her face in a whimsical manner that Norman intuitively takes as a good omen.
“So where do you live?” Norman asks. His heart is racing.
“I live right over there,” Laura says, leaning around to point back across the square, “in the Metropolitan.”
“Ah, so this was a perfect meeting place for you. You must have just left your apartment mere minutes ago.”
“Exactly. I’m fresh out of the box,” she smiles.
“Nice.” Norman nods and looks down at his hands. He feels the weight of the things he said in the message that brought them together, a need to address them lest they smother the atmosphere of the evening. But Laura is very pretty, and he is a little nervous. “Things have been strange lately for me,” he says shyly to his hands. “Do things seem to be getting stranger and stranger lately for you?”
“Things are strange all over,” Laura says breathily, and with his gaze cast down at his own hands, Norman quickly regrets having missed getting to see her facial expression. Something about the way she pronounced the words was soft and sexy and he could sense somehow on his skin that she was looking at him when she said it, and that it was spoken through a mouth attempting to keep away a subtle smile. He looks up at her motionless gaze, which still holds that electric sub-surface smile. For whatever reason, Norman feels instantly haunted by the moment he missed, when she said “Things are strange all over,” very sexily while he was not looking at her, and while he looks at her face now, he imagines several different versions of how she may have looked in those moments.
A waiter leans out the door of Shay’s and curtly says, “You can’t smoke at our tables.” Norman and Laura both slowly begin to stand. Looking back inside he continues, “Yeah, if you just want to stand a few feet past the railing – that’ll work. Thanks.” He disappears back inside as Norman and Laura are both still scooting their chairs back under the table.
“That sucks,” Laura grumbles.
“You want to just walk around?” Norman offers, stepping over the small railing that separates the tables from the square.
“Do you want to walk to somewhere where we can have drinks and smoke outside?” Laura suggests. “I would love a drink. I don’t know about you.”
“Right on, yeah. I’m down for whatever.”
The two walk together down a side street, away from the square, toward the Old Port where the sidewalks get busier. Norman actively observes their surroundings, as Portland is still relatively new to him.
“There’s a place I know where we can sit outside at tables and smoke for real this time.”
“Yeah, fuck those guys,” Norman jokes. Laura smiles politely.
A man passes them on the sidewalk and Norman turns his head with a smirk, following the man with his gaze.
“Awesome,” he laughs after a few moments.
Laura looks over at him with an eyebrow raised and an intrigued smile. “What was awesome?”
“Did you not see that awesome guy?”
“No, I missed him.”
“Oh, my god, he had his cowboy hat just far enough back on his head so you could see the front of his mohawk, and he had the greatest look on his face. He was walking…” Norman mimics the man’s silly walk and great expression. “He was great.”
Laura laughs heartily, ending with a cute squeaking chuckle. “He sounds great.” She looks over her shoulder, grinning.
“Yeah, it’s too bad you missed him.”
“There’s kind of a tall, futuristic Buster Keaton-ish-ness to you, isn’t there?” Laura notes, eyeing him with a grin as they walk.
“Hmm,” Norman muses, smiling at what he imagines was a compliment but not entirely sure how to respond. “Thank you.”
“Yes,” she assures him, lightly touching the edge of his sleeve, “it was meant as a compliment.”
They walk a few moments in silence. Norman lightly touches the back of her jacket as they hurry across a crosswalk, intentionally trying to send a minor attraction spell of some psychic sort into her through the brief contact.
When their steps slow again as they reach the curb, Laura puts her hand to her chest and looks up at Norman, who is just beginning to say, “So, I’m developing a religion of awesomeness, sort of,” but he notices that she had been about to speak and trails off with an apologetic nod.
Laura cocks her head to the side with a smile. “You’re developing a religion? Well, you know the meaning of life, so why not, right? Thanks for telling me, by the way. Your theory of awesomeness has been on my mind ever since you messaged me.”
Norman chuckles at himself. “Mm, yeah.” He smiles absent mindedly into the air for a moment, thinking about words. “It’s sort of pulchrolatry, if you will.”
“Oh, I will,” Laura laughs with a cigarette between her teeth, then lights the cigarette. Upon exhale, she adds, “Pulchrology, did you say? Is that the study of beauty?”
Norman nods in recognition of her deciphering, and enunciates clearly, “Pulchrolatry, actually. The worship of beauty. But really that word doesn’t work, anyway, because beauty I think is innate, or might as well be. I mean, the way I see it, nothing is naturally imbued with the quality of beauty or ugliness; it’s all just given to the object by we who judge it, and really, insomuch as everything is a fundamental corner of everything and plays its own unique tiny part, I see no reason not to judge everything beautiful. Awesomeness is really what it’s all about, but I don’t know if there is a Latin word that best captures the colloquial meaning of awesome.”
“Couldn’t the same be said of awesomeness, though? Couldn’t you just judge everything awesome?”
“Well, I guess my personal distinction between the two words is that beauty is that quality that everything shares, that uniqueness, that essentialness, that sort of thing, and then awesomeness is a more subtle quality – a quality that I only give to things that seem particularly awesome, which naturally must be contextual. However, as it turns out, I do still seem to find awesome shit just about everywhere I look. The problem is, there’s also lame shit just about anywhere you want to look. Very fine line at times.”
Laura laughs. “Indeed.”
“Lame being, of course, in my lexicon, the antithesis of awesome.” He chuckles.
“Naturally. You want to grab a table?” They are approaching a corner pub down at the edge of the Old Port with outdoor seating under blue neon.
Norman inspects the tables as Laura wordlessly slips inside the building, which is visibly very busy inside its glass walls. The tables outside are all full except one, which Norman slowly steps toward, smoking his cigarette to the filter. He flicks it into the street and sits down.
A very thin, pretty woman in a black apron steps toward Norman holding a tray of drinks. “Hi,” she says, “can I get you anything?”
“A Jack and Coke, thanks.” Norman lights another cigarette.
“Pepsi alright?” The question is rhetorical, delivered as she is turning away.
Half a cigarette later, Laura returns from inside and sits down across from Norman with a wide, beautiful smile. He can’t help smiling back, and takes in the sight of her for a long moment. Her smile is wide and bright and her neck is long. She has a shy stiltedness to her movements, yet her intrinsic grace glows through in the delicate gestures of her fingers and eyes.
“So tell me about your book,” Laura says, placing a cigarette between her lips. “Hope you don’t mind if I chainsmoke.”
“Not at all. Yeah, the novel. Well, I wrote this novel last year – from December Two-thousand-three to December Two-thousand-four – called Under the Undertow.”
Laura raises an eyebrow and one side of her mouth. “Under the Undertow?”
“My original title was Gigantomachy, which is a term that refers to a battle between gods and giants.”
“Is that what the book is about?”
Norman smiles and considers for a moment. “Not literally, no.”
Laura gestures interest with her face.
“It’s – no, it’s not about giants and gods battling,” he explains, adjusting his position in his seat and gesturing again suddenly with his hands. “It’s about this guy and his daughter who are fleeing status quo society in similar ways at the same time, and they go through these corresponding odysseys and … it’s sort of a philosophical fiction type of thing, if that means anything – although I’m terrified of damning my work for mass appeal by dubbing it such.”
“It does,” Laura assures him. “The philosophical fiction part, at least. Why the title change?”
“That’s a very complicated story,” he half-mumbles. “But so I finished it in December and tried to send it to some various publishers and agents and such, but … I guess I got disheartened by the whole process. So. I’ve got a new novel I’m working on now, but I’ve been ‘working on it’,” (quotation marks Norman’s, made in the air with his fingers) “ever since I finished Gigantomachy and don’t feel like I would be able to explain any of it in any way, yet.”
“By Gigantomachy, do you mean Under the Undertow?” Laura asks with a smile.
Norman nods, “Right. I still interchange the titles sometimes.”
“Does it have a title, this new one?”
The waitress returns to their table with Norman’s drink.
“Thank you.”
“A Diet Coke?” Laura asks the waitress.
“Diet Pepsi?” the waitress interrogatively corrects. Laura nods.
Norman takes a sip of his drink, his eyes low, his body leaning on his left arm. He does not realize how much his height makes him slouch.
“What are your middle and last names?” he asks her.
“I am Laura Elaine Solscz-Pinkerton-Eyre,” she says with a confident smile in her eyes.
Norman squints and half-grins. “Which of those were middle names?”
“Only the second one, Elizabeth,” she replies. “The rest was my last name. It’s doubly hyphenated. My father’s side is Solscz. My mother’s maiden name was Pinkerton-Eyre. So they became the Solscz-Pinkerton-Eyres.”
“Wow. I don’t think I’ve met anyone who was double-hyphenated before.”
Laura laughs, maintaining an enchanting eye contact. After a moment’s pause she leans back in her chair and asks him, “Can I ask you something personal?”
“Sure,” says Norman.
“So, please don’t be offended if I’m mistaken, but – do you have a glass eye?”
Norman smiles to distract from the biting of the inside of his lower lip. He raises his hand to his mouth and nervously touches the pointy edges of his slightly askew front teeth with his thumb. Generally, having to answer questions about his glass eye is among his three most hated social situations, beside having to explain about skipping grades and being asked to explain a piece of his artwork. But he wants to be open with this woman. “Yeah,” he finally says with a nod. “I lost the original organic one when I was fourteen. But this one works just as well.”
“Really, you can see through it?”
“Oh yeah.” He takes a sip of his drink, then lights himself another cigarette. “Darkly,” he adds and shrugs, “but yeah.” He comically winks over the glass eye and instantly regrets it, because he knows winks are creepy.
Laura laughs, reaching across the table to touch her fingertips ever so briefly to his and says, “Oh my god, winks are the creepiest.”
Norman laughs, nodding. “Agreed. I realized that right as I was doing it.”
“Well, anyway, it looks very real.”
“My glass eye? It is real.”
“I mean it looks natural.” She eyes him closely. “It moves, doesn’t it, with your other eye?”
“Often,” Norman nods, sensing her attraction to him powerfully enough to feel comfortable gazing at her for several moments without looking away. Laura keeps her eyes on his as well, and for a while they silently look at each other. Her eyes are striking, beautiful. Her lips curl quixotically in reaction to each tiny change of the expression on his face, itself a translation from his inner world, and Norman is momentarily extremely intrigued by that.
“So I hardly know anything about you so far,” Norman notes, taking a sip of his drink. “I’ve been rambling on about myself.”
Laura leans forward, holding her cigarette away to the side. “I’m a mystery,” she says.
“A beautiful mystery.”
Laura smiles into Norman’s eyes and blushes a little, leaning back again. “You’re sweet,” she says. Though her body is motionless, Norman can subtly sense her writhing in her chair, as if her spirit is swimming in spirit money. He can feel from her vibe how the eye contact they are sharing is intoxicating to her, and why she seems to be letting herself hold that eye contact a little longer each time they share it.
Inwardly, Norman promises himself that the next time he has extended eye contact with Laura he will throw a little psychic lasso across the distance between them and then maybe he will try to send thoughts across like tight-rope walkers, and see if she reacts to them.
“Can I ask you something?” Laura asks him.
“Something other than that, you mean?” Norman jokes.
Laura acknowledges Norman’s joke with two moments of barely visible head shaking, then asks him, “What made you message me?” and looks him in the eye with a charming fragility.
“My own volition,” Norman replies. He looks down at the table between them, not letting his face express anything until he thinks about how to explain himself. “I, um,” he begins, “I’m not entirely sure. I came across your profile. You had that … that kissing-the-camera picture. And under ‘Who I’d Like To Meet’ you wrote, You. I just want to meet you.” Norman smiles to himself, then raises his gaze back up to meet Laura’s. “Well that was me. I didn’t know who you were, but, I wasn’t going to turn you down, you know? You seemed lovely. You seemed literate. And really, I just don’t know anyone here and I wanted to meet somebody cool. You seemed cool. And here I am, having met you slash meeting you, and … you are indeed cool. And lovely.” Laura’s soft laughter settles into a smile and a warm gaze that shyly flits away from time to time but consistently returns to Norman’s eye. “And although it may have sounded absurd and a bit over the top, I want you to know,” and for this bit of dialogue Norman makes sure to put on his most smolderingly restrained, sublimely charming face, “that everything I wrote in that message, I meant.”
Their eye contact is now electric and he remembers suddenly his plan for the thought lasso. “I mean,” he says to stall for a split second while he inwardly prepares the lasso (which is to say, thinks about it until he understands it), then he snaps his eyes onto hers and can’t keep a tiny, quivering bit of smile off the corner of his mouth, “I don’t know you,” and he casts the lasso across the divide, “but I have a strange sense about you; I have ever since I first came across your picture online,” and the lasso lands and is pulled taut – and she seems to come forward a few centimeters, leaning heavier on her arm. Gazing into her eyes, it feels as if he is falling into them. His mind is suddenly overwhelmed by an image of a grassy, hilly area and blue sky, and he says intuitively, before understanding why, “It’s like I knew you once when we were both cavemen.”
Laura’s eyes light up at the word cavemen. She sits up straight and recoils her neck a bit; she seems startled or intrigued.
“I’m being obtuse, I’m sorry,” Norman apologizes instinctively.
“No, it’s just – you’re going to think this is weird.” Her shyness has returned to the forefront within her body’s inner politics. She holds her cigarette close to her chest. “I had a dream last night about being a cavewoman, and you were there, and you were a caveman.”
“I know exactly what you’re talking about,” Norman exaggerates.
“Yeah…” The thumb of the hand Laura is smoking with idly spins a silver ring on her long ring finger. Norman’s eyes move down from her eyes to that ring.
He rubs his thumb against the same spot on his own ring finger. “I used to have a ring, this bat ring. Ring with a little … bat on it.” He mimes a bat over his right hand with his left. Laura smiles at the image. “I kept my familiar in there.” He grins inwardly, and after a few moments it escapes to his face as well.
“Your familiar?” Laura asks incredulously.
“Yeah, you know.” Norman chuckles to himself, always feeling self-conscious at first when he speaks to someone new about such things. “I experiment with the, sort of, interface of existence and what you can really do to your experience with your mind, and creating, like, spiritual pseudopods, and for a few months last year, over these past few years really, I spent a few thoughts every day on trying to build this,” he mimes with his hands in front of him, as if holding an invisible puppy, “this sort of spiritual pseudopod, this familiar entity. That I could, you know, maybe do things with or, maybe, like, communicate remotely with, even maybe on different planes or whatever. You know, who knows? It was an experiment. But I kept it in my bat ring. In my imagination I did, that is.” He shrugs. “And then I think I left that in Indiana when I moved. It’s not here; I didn’t bring it. I don’t know what happened to it.”
“Oh, that’s awful,” Laura coos with a smile. “You lost your familiar’s house.” Norman can’t tell if she is being sincere or mocking in her tone.
“Yes,” Norman agrees, sipping at his drink, “yes it is very sad. But really, what I think we all want to hear about for a while is you, because I still know nothing about you. Only that you’re a mystery.”
Their eyes meet, both coming in at the same moment and not expecting to find the other’s. Each starts to look away but sees the other starting to do the same and instead remains, and they do this jerking eye dance of almost looking away several times within the course of a moment, then both laugh at what they’ve just shared and fall into a comfortable eye contact.
Laura rests her chin on her knuckles, giving her smile a curious shape. “Who are you?” she asks him. “You’ve just come out of nowhere.”
“I’m Norman Newman,” he says carefully. He struggles to make his face express the genuineness behind his words without looking ridiculous as he adds, “And I am in love with you.” He holds his idiom with confidence and grace (knowing that it requires playing a part, but also that, after stripping away every layer of illusion, being anything is merely pretending).
Laura looks at him silently for a while. “You don’t even know me,” she finally says with an appropriately dramatic flourish to her cigarette smoking that indicates to Norman that she is accepting the casually epic character he is giving to these moments.
“That’s why I’m here,” he replies. “But all we’ve done so far is talk about me.”
She looks at him for a while longer, an intrigued smile barely kept off her lips. He sits trying to think of a good question that won’t sound trite while distracted by her loveliness.
“What’s your new book about?” she finally asks him.
“It’s about all this, actually,” Norman replies, indicating the scene they are sharing. “My great spiritual hero epic.”
“So will it be a memoir, or, like, fictionalization?”
“Both. To be honest, after my first novel became self aware I can’t seem to write anything that doesn’t end up twisting in on itself in a cyclone of meta, so I’ve given up fighting it, really. Anymore, I write a character and it seems the first thing he or she does is look up at me and go, ‘Wait, who are you? What’s going on? How did I get here? You can’t write me; what do you know?’”
Laura laughs.
Norman shrugs. “It’s silly.”
“It is silly, but it’s cool. It’s very interesting. It makes me think about my own life, and if I might just be some fictional character in a book somewhere, or just a fleeting thought in someone else’s mind.”
“Or your own, exactly,” Norman says with a smile, overjoyed that he is successfully communicating his ideas (it isn’t always so easy, nor he so eloquent – indeed, Norman cannot deny that the potency of communication, the web of synchronicities and the ease of existential motion within the scene he is sharing tonight with this woman all have the distinct metallic scent of destiny). He continues, “Because, really, these are issues which are becoming relatively pertinent as the distinction between ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ has to be given to things in our actual lives that we actually interact with – like the virtual environments on the internet and ideas of machine intelligence and our own imaginative musings and things like that. But how can you interact with something unreal? That makes no sense. I think everything can be said to be real as much as anything else; it’s just not all necessarily within view, you know, or of the same nature. Like, for instance, my friend Lou recently told me that Sony has patented the technology to simulate sensory experience in the brain using wireless ultrasound. If that ends up being the way we interact with our computers – just a visual display in our actual vision, and simulated touch, sound and sight in our brains, simulated emotions – then how is a simulated experience less real than a non-simulated experience, if both are just what you get from your brain, what you perceive, you know what I mean?”
“I think so,” Laura nods, frowning.
Norman touches his tongue momentarily to his left-upper wisdom tooth, and feels a hole in the side. He wonders about that for a moment, then shakes it out of his mind and says, “So even if you are a fictional entity in some book or movie-version-of-a-book or simsense-version-of-a-movie-version-of-a-book-that-is-based-on-reality or whatever, it makes no difference. You’re just you, wherever you are, here in this story, whatever it ends up being about. You see the world, you make your choices, you think about stuff, and that’s all you can do. But you get the unimaginable power to create yourself any way you want to be, to play the role of you however you see fit. But then again at the same time you’re also just this one thing, just this human or whatever you happen to be, this specific person. I don’t know. So I want my novel to begin with this whole revelation – the insignificance of the label of reality, the revelation that everything exists, that there is nothing that doesn’t exist, and that the engine of existence is choice and interaction – and then build from there and see where we can take our ideas. And of course, all of this is played off the fact that the fictionalized usses in the book would actually be fictional, and yet would exist in the Reader’s mind, as the Reader’s mental voice, making a connection there too…” He trails off, unable to tell if he is boring her or badly editing his thoughts.
“Interesting,” Laura says, nodding.
“Anyway.” Norman scratches an itch on his face.
“Did you just pluralize a plural? Is that what ‘usses’ was?”
“I did, and it was,” he grins.
“It’ll never sell,” Laura jokes. She waits a few moments before she adds, “You know what does sell?” just before Norman is about to ask her what she writes (her online profile vaguely mentioned it). Her gaze becomes like a thick beam of intoxicating sexiness.
“What?” he asks, dropping the aborted question from his mind in the light of her eyes.
“Romance,” she says with a sexy grin, then looks down at her cigarette. “Will there be any of that?”
He sees, for a split second in his mind’s eye, her naked body writhing so close to him that it is out of focus, hears in his mind’s ear her mellifluously moaning voice, and the warm confidence that they will soon be lovers fills his heart. Some barely-noticeable bit of data in the vision has the scent of genuine prophecy, of a different mnemonic character than fleeting fantasy, and this is something he has learned to notice and to trust.
“Oh of course,” Norman replies playfully, “it will be the most erotic novel ever written if I can come even close to accurately capturing the neverendingly blissful experience of fully, fearlessly being a living being (which, in my experience, is constantly arousing).” He laughs slightly with the hope of indicating his comment’s intended comedic nature, somewhat charmingly attempts to suppress the grin inside and glances for just a moment at Laura’s blue eyes. “But seriously, yeah, it’ll have to have an element of romance,” Norman continues, gradually feeling more comfortable and cool with his vision of her intimate flesh now in his mental inventory. “I mean, it’s the story. It’s this story. I try to make sure that nothing I do is lacking in romance. I don’t want a world without love.” He grins to himself, as he is secretly referencing a lyric from a song he wrote a few years earlier, from his first album, The World’s Original Man. “Even when I’m alone, I’m constantly charming and seducing myself. I mean, the book is really about love. Love of the world, love of self, love of that great metaphorical macro-entity I call the Reader – which refers to, potentially, all of future humanity, the unity of all those potential individual minds who could ever read the book based on these moments, or the meta-book that I don’t even write, but that is our experience and that somehow every other human being has subconscious access to through the zeitgeist. I’m using metaphors, of course, but there’s science to it, too. Even if just biologically, we have a certain genetic access to all the successes and failures, experiments and follies of our ancestors, from the beginning of … life, really. And, of course, the search for something like true love in the classic sense of it.”
Through the course of their conversation, Laura’s shyness has shed itself to reveal a woman with an enormous, gorgeous spirit that shines magnificently through every subtle mannerism, every glance of her eyes and curl of her lips. His intuitive vision of the two of them as cavepeople has remained with him through their conversation, and at this point he feels comfortable enough with her to calmly take her by the hand and lead her to bed. He wonders how she feels.
Laura is shaking her head, holding back a smile. “You are something else,” she says.
Norman smiles. “I still hardly know anything about you.”
“You can see through that glass eye, can’t you?” Laura asks him playfully.
“I don’t see how that would be possible.”
“I don’t see that stopping you.” She scans him with her eyes, holding back a charmed smile. The waitress passes by, having just dropped off a neighboring table’s drinks, and Laura stops her with a glance. “Excuse me, can I get that Diet Coke, please?”
“Oh yes, sorry, ma’am,” the waitress apologizes. Just before she disappears inside, she turns back around and reiterates, “Diet Pepsi okay?”
Laura nods politely in the woman’s direction.
“I feel preternaturally comfortable with you,” Norman remarks, stubbing out his cigarette. “I feel like we’ve been lovers before.” He moves his eyes up to her from the ashtray. “Forgive my forwardness. I don’t know. I feel like I’ve known you before.”
Laura bites her bottom lip, her eyes fixed on him.
Norman holds his fingers up to his lips as if holding a joint. “Do you smoke weed?”
Laura raises both eyebrows slowly and nods. “Why do you ask?”
“Well, I’ve got some, and I would love to continue this conversation while smoking it if you would be interested.”
The look on Laura’s face belies the debate going on in her head. She takes a recess from having to reply by retrieving and then lighting a new cigarette. It is a long moment, during which Norman feels the overwhelming presence of the uncertainty of her response, despite his intuitive confidence, until she exhales her first drag, looks into his glass eye and says, “Do you want to go to my apartment?”
“Sure,” Norman agrees with a biological rush of glee.
He stands and puts a ten dollar bill on the table. Hands in his long coat pockets, he extends an elbow for Laura to take in her hand as she stands. She picks up her purse and they walk off together back the way they came from Monument Square.
For a while they walk in silence, both introspecting over the suddenness of it all. Norman wonders what she is thinking, and feels briefly as if he can sense her thoughts on him. Other city dwellers pass them on the sidewalk, some silent and alone, staring forward, consumed by their own stories, some coupled, talking quietly to each other.
At a street corner where they have to wait for the light to change, a man pulls up in front of them in a car, yawning softly to himself (just barely audible to Norman and Laura through his open window) as he slowly turns right down a sidestreet. Something about the moment the moment makes them both laugh intermittently, like call and response, each continuing to laugh at the other’s continued laughter as they cross the street and continue walking.
Laura looks up at Norman; he can see her in his peripheral vision as he gazes ahead. “Where did you come from?” she asks him rhetorically.
He laughs and looks over at her, meeting her charmed gaze. He slows his walk, bringing them to a stop in front of a large window that glows yellow from the open dance studio inside. A tango class is in session. They both notice it at the same time. She takes his hand.
A silver-haired gentleman in a navy pea coat passes them and pauses just long enough to comment, “You two ought to be dancing. You would look good together,” then continues on.
Laura smiles to the man, who continues along away from them. She looks up at Norman, who has just noticed that she is holding his hand. It is as if natural forces of gravity and magnetism pull their faces together for a kiss. Laura’s lips take his hungrily into their midst and caress them softly, modestly shuddering but confident. The closeness of their two faces seems to create a tiny baby universe, a milieu where the only physical forces are thought and love, within which he is certain he can feel her thoughts (they are focused on the kiss and feathered with awe). He puts his free hand under her coat and the shirt beneath it, finding the warm, soft skin of her stomach. Her fingers flex, squeezing his knuckles together. Her tongue touches his teeth.
“Mmm,” Laura purrs, smiling as she pulls away, all beautiful blue eyes.
“Tell me about your book,” Norman requests. The two slowly begin walking again toward her building. “You’re writing one, right?”
“Well,” she says, softly holding his arm with both hands and looking up at the buildings of downtown Portland, “it’s a mystery, and it, too, is kind of half-memoir, half-fiction.”
“Isn’t everything?”
Laura smiles. “Perhaps,” she muses. “But, so, my protagonist is obviously fashioned after me, and she has to solve a mystery of some sort. But I haven’t figured out what the mystery is yet.”
“I guess that’s the mystery,” Norman jokes.
“My idea is that she is this fabulous, independently wealthy young woman who loves mysteries and wants more than anything to be a great sleuth, but she doesn’t know where to begin. So she puts out an add for a Watson and ends up hiring this kind of nerdy young guy who just takes the job to have a job, you know? And he gradually falls in love with her, even though she’s kind of crazy – eccentric, though, really, is all – and he invents mysteries to solve with her, sort of. That’s the idea so far, anyway.”
“That’s wonderful,” Norman laughs. “I totally dig that. Have you begun it?”
“Perhaps,” she smiles with almost arbitrary mystery. Laura stops and Norman stops a few paces ahead, turning around to face her and taking the moment to pull out a cigarette. “What on Earth?” she laughs.
He looks where she’s looking, which is inside the small shop they were passing – a tiny one-room record store in which a small crowd is gathered, sitting on the floor around a frantic man in an enormous tinfoil fish costume who is dancing/flailing while making some cacophonous kind of music by manipulating two turntables with his long, fin-like tinfoil arm extensions. Only his face and legs stick out of his costume. He turns away from the decks for a moment to gesture wildly with his fins in the air, then turns back and makes another series of grating, scratching sounds on the turntables with his dangly limbs. He dances about like a cartoon witch doctor.
“Awesome!” Norman declares exuberantly. He is astounded by the bizarre, staggeringly wonderful sight. “Word,” he can’t help but add as he and Laura stand closer together and both peer into the window at the performance.
“What is that he’s wearing?” Laura asks, laughing.
A plainly pretty girl with short black hair and dark eyes who is sitting among the crowd inside the record store catches Norman’s eye through the window, and though she looks away when his eye meets hers, she soon looks back at him and smiles when she finds his gaze still on her. They watch each other across the crowd and through the glass.
“I think he’s supposed to be a big fish,” Norman says without removing his eye from the girl. “See the fish eyes above his face, up on his hat?” Somehow in this girl’s glance he can see the universality of love, and he is reminded of the fact that there are millions of individual lovely girls with different stories, different things on their walls, different issues left over from childhood, each a unique potential love affair with its own taste of beauty and truth. And yet here he stands with this woman he has known for an hour or less, whom he has already kissed with passion, for whom he has already professed a sort of preemptive love. All love is true, he thinks, almost saying it aloud. “See, it’s a fish, I think,” he says, if only to keep himself from saying anything else. The girl inside glances at Laura, makes a cutely disapproving face at Norman with her eyes low and then returns her attention to the performance.
“He looks like an Aztec god or a Doctor Who alien,” Laura laughs.
“He’s the most badass person I have ever seen,” Norman declares. “Rarely do I find myself so moved by performance art, honestly, but this guy fucking rules. Look at him; he’s so manic and insane and … and, like, drenched in meaninglessness that becomes so over-the-top it almost becomes meaningful in this weird, beautiful anti-way.”
Norman and Laura continue their walk to her building as Norman continues to talk, gesturing with his hands. “See, shit like that just happening in some random tiny record store is the kind of shit that makes me believe that the Revolution could really happen, that this renaissance that I feel coming truly could be happening, maybe even already, honestly, in the dark corners of our society in towns like Portland, Maine, where no one will realize it was going on, and just how awesome it was, potentially for decades. Mm. It excites me. I love that guy. Sorry for rambling on there …”
“No, it’s cool,” Laura assures him, tugging on the sleeve of his jacket. “Just what kind of revolution are we talking about, here, though, I must ask?”
“Oh, you know about the Revolution,” Norman assures her with a little laugh, touching his knuckles to her arm for a moment. “It’s the one that supposedly will not be televised, which I think is partially untrue although it has probably already begun and I’m sure the news networks won’t catch on for some time.”
“So is this, like, that hipster revolution into a world where it’s like Burning Man all the time, everyone’s cool and we all just get along by sheer grooviness?”
Norman laughs for a long time at Laura’s description, but once he can form words again he agrees, “Yeah, exactly. That’s the one I’m talking about. You really described it perfectly, honestly. Because it is all about awesomeness. Nice Burning Man reference.”
“And you’re the prophet of this future religion of awesomeness,” Laura says, smiling. “I’m putting it all together.”
“Right on,” Norman laughs. He marvels inwardly at how perfectly this evening has turned out, and how uncanny their connection seems.
Laura stops and turns as they approach the doors of the Metropolitan, a high stone building among others along a block, across wide Congress Street from the huge Key Bank building at the east edge of Monument Square. “We’ll have to finish our cigarettes before we can go in. We can smoke in my apartment, but not on the way up.”
A small old woman slowly shuffles past between them, not even seeming to notice their presence. Norman and Laura step apart to make room for her, watching her pass with polite smiles.
“Cool, cool,” Norman replies, standing with his hands in his coat pockets, his cigarette held in his lips. He takes this moment once more to take in Laura’s visage. She stands smoking, watching him out of the corner of her eye as she softly sways back and forth. He finds himself amazed that his first encounter with this woman has led him here. He feels confident in this moment that Laura will end up wanting to have sex with him, and though there would be no more ideal end to his evening, he does not want to give her the wrong impression. He wants to see her again, and often. He senses, somehow, cosmic significance thrumming between them like a battery. Though he still knows hardly anything about her, he finds her mesmerizing, and for some reason he finds he can talk freely about his ideas, most of which he normally feels the need to withhold from anyone but his best friend Lou.
“Okay, I have a proposition,” Norman says, gathering courage up from the air like his heart is a magnet that he can turn on at will. “It is that you and I go up to your apartment and smoke some weed, smoke some cigarettes, continue to talk about cool shit and get to know each other, and then that we do not have sex, despite the fact that I think both of us maybe want to – we don’t even think about it yet – because I have been thinking about your comment about romance novels, how they’re what sells, and about sort of the nature of true love and why it is that romance novels sell, what it is that they represent, and it made me …”
“I will make you no promises,” Laura laughs softly, interrupting him as she tosses her cigarette to the side. She takes hold of the collar of his coat and kisses him on the lips, then walks with him, holding his coat, into the Metropolitan.
Through the course of their slow walk across the small, echoey vestibule to the elevator, Norman takes a moment to thank, in his mind, any being or force other than himself that might have had a hand in this evening’s sequence of events. Laura goes in front of him, walking stiff and primly while occasionally looking back at Norman to reveal the oceans of eager passion that come out only through her eyes and the sex-kitten smile that she successfully, if barely, is keeping off her lips.
When the elevator opens, she enters and turns to face him, to press for the third floor. Her eyes meet his as he approaches. She pushes the button and backs up slowly to the far wall while he moves close to her. The door closes behind him as they kiss, and the kiss holds for the short but generous eternity that it takes to get to the third floor. In that minute Norman feels desperately in love with this woman, and his kiss expresses that. Hers pushes back with equal passion, such that when the doors open on the third floor and Norman finally steps back away from her, her lips hungrily, instinctually pursue his as they retreat, then she clasps her fingertips to her mouth and closes her eyes, standing perfectly still as Norman backs toward the open elevator doors.
“Are you alright?” he asks.
Her eyes flash open to instant gleaming gorgeousness, expressing that she is just fine. She removes her hand to reveal a wild smile, the kind not found in captivity. She raises her chin a bit as she strides out past him, to the right, toward her door, unlocks it and goes right in, leaving it open.
Norman slowly approaches the door, his hands in his coat pockets, relishing how much he enjoys being involved in what seems to be the beginning of a new phase of his life, meeting this new woman (a potential new love, he already feels), seeing this new apartment where he can already tell he will be spending a great deal of time. He can smell the newness of everything. It has been some time since his personal milieu has felt fresh, innocent.
Laura’s apartment is at the corner of the building, consisting of one long main room with the door at one end and two big windows at the other, the room separated into two spaces by a square wooden arch that hugs the walls and ceiling in the middle. Along the left wall are first a closet, then a bathroom door, then an open doorway into the tiny kitchen, then another closet, a huge flatscreen TV and then the bedroom door. Along the right wall in the entry area are a pair of wide, ceiling-height bookshelves full of books, with a couple of large leather couches perpendicular to the wall, facing each other, in the space by the windows. The walls are covered with modern paintings and framed covers of old mystery novels. The hardwood floor is bare by the windows, and in the entry room covered by an ornate blood-and-cream Persian rug. Norman doffs his coat and drops it on top of Laura’s on a small antique chair to the right of the door.
He closes the door behind himself. “So, I don’t know about you,” he says toward the kitchen, into which she has momentarily disappeared, “but I would love to have a smoke. I have a little pipe of my own that I brought.” He scans the books on the wall of bookshelves, taking note that she is a collector (two long shelves dedicated to full catalogs of the works of Erle Stanley Gardener and P. G. Wodehouse), and also that she has a taste for the absurd (Joyce, Camus, Kafka, Beckett, Robbins [all, of course, staples of the libraries of his generation’s intelligentsia]). “Through the Looking Glass,” he whispers to himself when he sees said spine.
“We can use my pipe, if you want,” Laura says, peeking out through the doorway to the kitchen, “and we can smoke my weed. Do you want a drink? I don’t have much other than Diet Coke, unfortunately.”
“No thanks; I’m good. You have the same edition of Ulysses as I do. What is this painting above your desk here – the circles?”
“Ulysses is probably my all-around favorite book.” Laura finishes pouring herself a glass of Diet Coke and sets it down on the flat arm of one of the leather couches. “Oh, the circle painting? That was done by my friend Amos Doorie. He gave it to me. Have a seat. I’ll go gather my illicit materials.” She disappears into the bedroom for a moment while Norman sits and admires a huge crystal ashtray that sits on top of a small, modern wooden table between the couches. He retrieves a cigarette from his pack.
Laura returns with a large, purple glass Sherlock Holmes pipe and a small tin. She is also wearing a fur-collared brown button-up sweater which she must have put on in the bedroom.
“Nice sweater,” Norman comments. “I love your fuzzy mane.”
“Thank you,” Laura says as she sits down next to him on the couch and crosses her legs with a smile in his direction. She touches the collar of her sweater, and when she does it pushes it to the side, revealing a little gold whale on a necklace she is wearing.
“Did you just put that on?” he asks, reaching out instinctively to touch the whale where it hovers above her supersternal notch. “I love him.”
“No, I just put him on,” she says. “You like him?”
“We’re quick friends, he and I,” Norman nods, smiling, and lights his cigarette, entranced by the whale, certain now that all of this was somehow meant to unfold as it has. He thinks of Horselover Fat in the Philip K. Dick novel Valis opening his front door to a woman with a fish necklace and his world splitting apart (a fictionalization of a real event that happen to Dick).
“Could you light me one of those, cowboy?” she asks with a flutter of her eyelashes.
“You can have this one, cowgirl,” Norman says, taking a drag and then handing the cigarette to her as he exhales off to the side. He wonders if she is conscious of the Pulp Fiction reference they just collaborated on performing as he lights himself another.
Laura watches him while she smokes, the wicked grin inside her heart steadily escaping to her face more and more with each moment they share. She pushes a large bud of weed into the pipe and hands it to Norman.
“Thank you, darling.” Norman admires the pipe for a moment, then holds his lighter to its bowl and takes a large hit. He holds the smoke in his lungs as Laura takes the pipe and does the same, their eyes fixed on each other as if there is a taut thread between their pupils. White smoke trickles from Norman’s nose and then he begins to cough, releasing a large cloud into the air around them. When he has finally finished coughing, he finds the pipe in his hands again, Laura smiling, letting the smoke curl around her lips. She laughs at the end of the breath, casting an unexpected ring of smoke across the breach between them. Both Laura and Norman are startled by the perfect manner in which the smoke ring appears and sways and then dissipates, as if it was CG. Norman smokes again, then hands the pipe back to Laura.
“That was gorgeous,” she says. “It was magical.” She starts to laugh, her smile enormous and glowing. She has her feet curled up under her legs, leaning back away from Norman against the wall and the arm of the couch.
Norman turns his body to face her, sitting cross-legged. “It was,” he agrees with a chuckle. “It was almost cartoonish. It was so perfect and bizarre and unexpected. You know, that’s really a good description for everything in my life – fuck, in the whole world, right now. Cartoonish and absurd but sort of beautiful and funny in a tragic, macabre, magical Henry Miller kind of way. It all makes sense, really.”
Laura shakes her head. “None of it makes any sense,” she says with a cute smirk.
Norman smiles at her, nodding slowly, thinking. “It doesn’t really, you’re right,” he agrees. “Everything in the universe has a causal relationship with something else, and yet somehow it makes no sense at all. It is completely absurd and random. Like, this? Of all things? Of all possible ways things could be, ways that human beings could have arranged events, this? Fucking, Kurt Vonnegut and the massacres in Rwanda and Pepsi and Bang Bus and Bettie Davis and Paul Wolfowitz and Burning Man and Michael Jackson? If it weren’t in the encyclopedias I wouldn’t believe a shred of it.”
As she inhales from the pipe while he is speaking, Laura’s restrained laughter builds until she has one arm up over her face, slouching to the side and pressing herself against the back of the couch, quaking with laughter and coughing smoke. Norman puts a hand to her ribs. “You alright?” Laura removes her arm from her face and nods to him, smiling, sighing. Even in such a position she looks gorgeous.
As Norman begins to feel the effects of the weed he has smoked filling his veins with lightness and swirling his thoughts about in his brain, his messianic confidence begins to glow anew, as it always does so crisply in these first moments of getting high. He feels as if his spirit expands out past his body and his awareness of the myriad ways he can use that spirit fade back into his arsenal. Like he remembers why he’s here, almost. He knows from past experience that this feeling of his is also somehow intuitively visible to others on some subtle level, and that he is at his most socially potent and charismatic when he is feeling this way. It is something he can achieve at any point simply through faith in his own awesomeness, but weed lubricates the journey.
“This is my favorite part of getting stoned,” Norman says softly, letting his eyes smile unselfconsciously at Laura. “Just as it’s beginning to hit, when all you want to do is talk and listen to music and – you know, when everything is sort of heightened. Everything has more information in it, and the wheels in your mind are spinning smoothly and you can almost just … almost just see behind things.” Norman gestures with his hand in the air as if he is moving something to the side, to see behind it. “It’s as if in this state I really become aware of all my various parts, of all the extra shit I can do with my will, like my magical powers become available.”
“You know, the way your message read, I wondered if you’d be a real person or what,” Laura admits, shaking her head with a sublime smile of disbelief. “I’m a little shocked I replied to it at all, honestly. It’s fairly uncharacteristic of me. I could hardly believe that you might actually just be someone this beautiful. But I had a feeling it might be possible.”
“What a wonderful compliment. I’m flattered.”
“I think somehow you knew all this would happen.”
“I really didn’t know anything,” Norman says, though to himself in his mind he has to admit that he did, in fact, have a strong intuition that something like this could happen tonight with this woman he randomly messaged online, despite the apparent unlikelihood of it.
There is a brief pause in the conversation. Norman looks around Laura’s apartment, admiring the artwork on her walls.
“So, Norman,” Laura says through a smile and a sexy sway of her neck, “how is all of this going to end?”
Norman thinks for a moment, knowing he needs to respond with eloquence in some manner. When he can’t come up with any good words, he leans in and attempts an eloquent kiss. Where their two mouths press together, as their tongues touch softly in just the right sequence, he can almost see a tiny doorway opening up, like a wormhole in the middle of Laura’s apartment, with bright pinkish-white light beaming from the edges, and with all of his willpower, not even knowing what is on the other side, he struggles to fold up his entire reality and push it through that doorway, into the pink light beyond, believing it to be the light of pure/true love.
When he finds himself standing in what appears to be an Americanized Olympian temple, surrounded by massive gray Doric columns, Norman is stoned enough not to recognize at first that anything might be amiss. (Also, the small corner of him that does suspect the full reality of these surroundings finds them awesome enough not to sound the alarm right away.)
Surrounded by various angelic servants in bejeweled suits, the Man, that universal modern white male asshole who wants nothing more than his barcode on the inside of all our orifices, sits upon His opulent throne a mere dozen paces in front of Norman.
“Who is this, now?” the Man asks His shimmering yes-men collectively.
“He just came right in, sir,” a seraphic Suit behind Norman apologizes to its master. “We didn’t even see him coming.”
Norman grins broadly at the sight of it all and proclaims with hesitant joy (despite his nefarious company), “I believe I may have just enlightened in a kiss.”
“Rubbish,” the Man scoffs, “you’ve just blacked out again. Your body is down in the World, shaking like jello.”
“Who are you supposed to be?” Norman asks the Man. “What’s all this? Where are we having this discussion?”
“In your dying brain.”
Norman declares confidently and with a touch of smug pride in his own awesomeness, “I call bullshit.”
The Man leans forward in His throne and looks hard into Norman’s empty right eye. “Norman, pay very close attention. There’s no freedom from eternity. Your sentence will never be over. You are a fourth-dimensional event. You are a naturally-occurring phenomenon in a mortal universe, now. You are one blood cell of something that will die. I’m sorry if you think that you’re anything more. But you’ll have to get back in line.”
“I know you’re fallible and don’t know what you’re talking about. In fact, I know more than you do. That’s somehow intuitively clear to me.” Norman stands confidently and crosses his arms. Somewhere in the periphery of his awareness, Norman senses a thumbs-up.
“Brush this plant back into its hole,” the Man says with a sweep of His hand.
“What an asshole,” Norman exclaims, looking to one of the angelic servants for support but getting only vapid stoicism. He looks back to the Man. “You wouldn’t be communicating with me if I was just some plant to you. I demand that you recognize my equality!” Norman begins gesticulating wildly with his hands like a street rapper. “I can comprehend you and the complexity of this milieu, and I know that you’re just a small part of it all. Don’t try to break me against my own uncertainty. I am an enlightened human being, motherfucker; I know exactly what I’m seeing. Fuck your bullshit fearmongering, bitch. You’re just trying to make the World into Hell so you can have something to rule over. Fuck you! Bring your bullshit to bear against the forces of badass beauty and love and see where it gets you! You have no power that we don’t give you.”
Norman returns to his body like a sack being pulled over his head and then out of the resulting darkness slowly fading the light of Laura’s apartment. His brain awakens first, aware gradually that his body is slumped back and to the side, quaking seizure-like. As usual when returning to the world (be it waking from dreams or returning from trance), Norman feels the melancholy of the world overwhelm him, but the first image that fades back into his view is Laura’s sweetly concerned face, and his heart is instantly warmed again by her beauty and the compassion in her eyes. She softly strokes his shoulder, her other arm around the back of his neck, her lovely blue eyes watching his with concern. “Norman?” she asks hesitantly. “Are you okay?”
Through his body’s spasms he is able to lean his gaze over to meet hers and attempt a smile, though her facial response reflects the gruesome look his attempted smile must have achieved. It is after a few brief moments of this that he is finally able to speak.
“Forgive me, my dear,” his quaking voice says through the tremors, “I seem to be tripping out.”