Then she spoke carefully.
“I don’t want you to come with me.”
She didn’t want me to come with her. This was what I had to say
about that:
“Guhh…You… I mean, what? Guhh, wait…Sheee…I, uh…oof…”
What was this strange outburst? To deal with the shock of what
she said, my unconscious mind had turned my conscious mind off,
and my intelligence had fallen to the level of a lower primate. As if to
confirm my departure from the species, Charly looked at me as
somebody looks at a puppy with a broken leg.
“Jake, it’s not that I don’t love you. I do. This is just something
I have to do by myself. I need to get away from all these easy, nice,
familiar things and live a real life, at least for this year. I don’t know
anything else but this town, these people and their hang-ups. And
I’ve got their hang-ups too. Deep down I know that Disneyland isn’t
just in Anaheim. It’s pretty much everywhere around here. Nothing
means anything. Lives don’t move ahead here, and no one has any
idea what they want. Everything is possible, but nothing means
anything. I’m not even sure I know what that word ‘meaning’ even
means. And I’m sure no one else does because everyone is waiting for
someone else to tell them. I don’t want to be like that, Jake. I know
there’s something else out there. This isn’t the way humans are
supposed to live or act or feel, you know? Life in Los Angeles isn’t life
at all, it’s just a whitewashed and accelerated form of dying, like
getting cancer from eating too much saccharine. I need to free myself
from all the things that keep me here, and just leaving the geography
of it won’t cut it. I need to wipe my mind free of all this garbage and
look at the world through glasses that aren’t colored in any way, least
of all, rose. I’m going away for a year Jake, but I will be back for you,
I promise.” She looked at me curiously for a moment and added,
“Honey, why do you look so strange?”
At this point, I was incapable of processing anything she said.
But then, single-celled microbes have no sense of hearing anyway.
The de-evolution had continued unabated, and all I could do now
was stare numbly. Charly leaned over and held my pseudopod, while
my mitochondria churned inside me. Intracellular fluid was leaking
out of what used to be my eye sockets. As she held me, I felt my
amorphous shape mold to engulf her body. We wept together for a
long time in her bedroom that afternoon in March of that year. The
sky outside turned from white to gray, and from grey to black as we
BIG AMERICAN BREAKFAST
18
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