Eleven Twenty-Three (11 page)

And they have been appearing over our
heads—without warrant or explanation—for the last ten years.

“Well, what is the theory on these ‘chemical
trails?’” I asked Hajime once, very drunk and only slightly
interested.

“Chemtrails, Layne,” he said. “Well, there’re
a few theories, as there typically is with things like this…”

There have been various independent studies
to figure out just what comprises chemtrails, what their purpose is
in our skies, and to determine what it is that separates these
plumes of thick, potentially harmful man-made clouds from
contrails. It seems that with each new finding, there are three
times as many USAF debunking sessions and half a dozen articles in
Skeptic
.

Some vague “scientists” who purportedly
worked to solve the mystery of the chemtrails determined that they
were made up of gases and tiny elements that were poisonous to
humans, though the specific toxins involved remained largely
unspecified when I pursued the topic. One of my bored planning
period Google searches at school produced a list consisting of
aluminum, ammonia, and red blood cells, but this didn’t mean much
to me beyond being kind of gross. One theory, though, was that
these gases spread in the atmosphere and slowly made their way down
onto the populace below, creating sickness and slow, untraceable
death. Populations are controlled. The next phase begins. Hajime’s
favorite pariah of the Apocalypse, the New World Order, strengthens
its grip and furthers plans for global domination. Dark-suited men
crack crooked smiles as individualism slowly dies and an
all-powerful satanic police state assumes control.

Another theory suggests that the government
is somehow using the gases in chemtrails to further Cold War-era
mind control tactics and experiments with telepathy and remote
viewing. What this means exactly has been a source of contention
among weirdoes for some time. The star pupils in the chemically
induced ESP experiments might be used to predict Taliban activity,
or what the Dalai Lama is up to spiritually, or the location of a
nuclear reactor in North Korea. It may also be used to monitor
subversive thoughts the general public may be having, or to somehow
squelch any radical ideas that could slow down the Machine.
Populations are kept complacent, like docile cows chewing their cud
on the way to the abattoir.

But wait. There’s more.

Some posit that this is all part of some kind
of international weather control experiment. Others think it is
something as prosaic as an attempt to get better radio and cell
phone reception. But then there are darker theories put forth by
even darker paranoiacs that involve anything from a planned
Armageddon to secret deals with evil reptilian aliens from Draco to
some kind of bizarre occult activity involving Satan, chemical
exhaust, and coordinated flight patterns.

Hajime added a sidebar to this, one I found
interesting: there has never been a single sighting, not once in
the last ten years, of a chemtrail over China.

There may be a couple of reasons for this, he
explained. China may just not be involved in this secret activity,
whatever it is. Perhaps China’s chemtrails just don’t get reported.
But Hajime doesn’t think so. According to his theory—and if it
weren’t for the fact that this entire conversation was retarded,
I’d be inclined to agree with him—China is not involved in the
chemtrail phenomenon because it has been selected to be the global
center of politics, population, business, food production, and
manufacturing once the New World Order has conquered and
homogenized the planet.

“So what’s happening to Lilly’s End is in
actuality exhaust from chemtrails?” I ask Hajime now. “It’s what’s
making everyone sick?
This
is your theory?”

“Making us sick and who knows what else,
Layne,” he says, inhaling thoughtfully on his cigarette. “Maybe we
haven’t even seen the long-term effects of this shit. Maybe no one
in America has. But maybe it’s coming. We need to
do
something about it before it’s here, Layne.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I shrug, watching him blast a
long thin line of blue smoke from his mouth. I watch it slowly
disseminate into the air. “The only chemtrail I see at the moment
is the one coming from your mouth. I wonder what’s taking Tara so
long.”

“She has stories to tell and complaints to
file with dear old Mom and Dad. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“But I’m not.”

“Well good. Keep in that frame of mind.” He
takes a deep breath and looks around. “Layne, I wanted to ask you
something though.”

“No, I have yet to become a victim of the
chemtrail death squads, Hajime—”

“I’m being serious, man,” he interrupts,
eyeing me squarely with his small Asian eyes. He wipes long strands
of hair out of his face. “Have—have you, um—were you with Mitsuko
before you left for China?”

“Yeah,” I say without missing a beat, “I was
with her and Mark and you and Tara and Jasmine that night at your
house. It was the night we were drinking the Absinthe, and you felt
heavy and tried to come up with a way to live inside a house made
of tree bark. Remember?”

“
No
,” he says, shaking his head.
“That’s not what I meant. I meant, were you
with
Mitsuko
before you left? Did you sleep with her? Did you have sex with her?
That is what I am asking, Layne. It’s not a big deal, so you don’t
need to lie. I’m not mad or anything. I just wanted to know.”

I look out at the traffic light, which turns
from yellow to red before my eyes. A man waits patiently in the
confines of his SUV, and even from here, I can hear him begin to
cough. The light changes. I have nothing to pull my attention away
from this moment.

“Where did you get this information from,
man?” I finally ask. “Jasmine?”

“Mitsuko.”

I try to find something to say.

“
Mitsuko
told you that?” I ask,
knowing this has to be a trick. Mitsuko will hardly admit what
happened between us even to herself, let alone her brother. “She
told you we slept together?”

“Well…sort of. When I mentioned you coming
home a couple of days ago, she said you really bothered her.”

“So? Maybe I do. I tend to bother some
people.”

“It’s just been my experience that the people
who bother my sister the most are the ones she’s had sex with.
That’s my evidence, which I know is scant—but I just wanted to
know.”

“How would you feel about it if we did?”

“I already told you I wouldn’t care. This is
a small town, and it’s a beach town to boot. We’re all bound to
trip and fall into the hands of the wrong person eventually.
Melodrama must inevitably ensue. That’s what beach towns are for.
Didn’t you watch the
OC
?”

“California, here we come?”

“That’s the one. But anyway,
did
you
sleep with my sister?”

“
No
,” I answer. “That would be a
terrible mistake. I would never.”

Hajime stares me down for almost fifteen
seconds before nodding and taking in the neighborhood again. I
exhale, unsure how long it’s been since I last breathed.

“Good, Layne,” he finally says. “Because
actually, I
would
be a little irked if that were true, just
because it turns what’s already a primetime drama with our group
into a full-blown daily soap opera. That kind of bad business could
get a lot of people into a lot of unnecessary ill will. But maybe
you’re right. Maybe she just doesn’t like you. She’s a vile young
woman, at times.”

“You think so?” I ask. “I always thought she
was kind of nice.”

“You
definitely
haven’t slept with her
then, have you?”

We chit-chat about other things after he says
this, but inevitably it just leads back to Hajime’s
conspiracy-of-the-week, just like before we left. He asks if I have
noticed how often there are commercials on TV nowadays advertising
new drugs that will help us be normal again. He mentions nasal
decongestants and sleep aids and pills for sex and depression and
mood swings and restless legs and life’s endless barrage of minor
plagues and major hopelessness. He asks me if I have made the
connection between the planes in the sky above our heads that dump
the sickness down on us and the prescriptions and sprays and creams
that cure us thereafter. He asks me if I have noticed signs of a
total merge of business, government, and medicine.

He asks me if I am afraid for our future.

I shake my head no to all of his questions,
but it doesn’t matter. What we say out loud and what our faces
inadvertently confess are two different things.

Tara pulls up in her rickety Cavalier just as
Hajime is about to launch into a rant about what’s wrong with the
surveillance business since I have been gone.

“Listen,” I say under my breath, “I don’t
want to go too far tonight, man. I need to stay clearheaded for the
funeral tomorrow morning.”

“We’ll be good,” Hajime says. “Nothing too
heavy for the repatriated this evening.”

“And don’t mention the fight to Tara. It’s
more than likely a situation better discussed later, and not with a
head full of drugs or Ouija board-induced night terrors.”

Tara gets out of her car and begins heading
up the driveway toward us. She appears slightly less angry but edgy
and ready to inebriate herself.

“Maybe you should ask the Ouija board for
advice on your relationship,” he suggests.

“Maybe you should not be the weirdest person
I’ve ever met, Hajime.”

“Yeah, maybe,” he chuckles. “Hello there,
darling.”

“Hello, boys,” Tara says, nodding. Her
leaning eyes and frizzy strands of stray hair inform me that she
had too many glasses of sangria at her parents’ house. She stops at
the foot of the porch and takes a quick glance at both of us. “You
told him about the fight, didn’t you, Layne?”

After Hajime goes home to welcome the first
of his party guests, Tara steps inside her house to change shirts
and drink three glasses of tap-water. We don’t say much and I sit
on the couch looking at trinkets and framed archetypical
twenty-something girls’ photographs on the side tables and an
unopened tampon laying on the coffee table that Tara’s disgusting
roommate Miranda left behind in her menstrual wake.

I close my eyes and imagine seeing my father
that night, standing by an emergency exit door waiting for me to
ask him to come back, for me to say I am sorry. I open them and
imagine seeing Mitsuko standing half-nude in the doorway of this
house, picking at a zebra-print pair of lace panties while asking
me to come inside of her. Tara grabs her brown jacket from the arm
of the couch and looms over me as I systematically open and shut my
eyes in an effort to prolong the bizarre reverie.

“Julie’s Internet isn’t working,” she
says.

“Um…okay?”

“Neither is Miranda’s, Layne.”

“So their Internet servers are down,” I
mumble, sitting up. “Do you want me to notify the media?”

“You
can’t
notify the media. The
Internet’s down. I really wanted to check my e-mail and get rid of
that stupid picture you posted on Myspace of me petting that
two-legged dog in Qufu, too. It’s embarrassing.”

“I’m sure the Internet will go back up soon
and you’ll be able to go nuts, Sunshine. You can change your top
friends, write a blog, IM all those people you love but have never
met—the works. Don’t worry about it.”

I still see Mitsuko standing in the doorway,
her bra flung to the floor now, her panties slid just low enough on
her midriff to expose the faintest hint of dark pubic hair
below.

“Are you sure you want to go out tonight,
Layne?” Tara asks. “It may not be the best idea to travel halfway
around the world and then immediately do weird American things the
night before your dad’s funeral. We could just stay in, you
know.”

“And miss getting to see Jasmine’s new dumb
shit boyfriend at work? No, we’d regret that. Hajime told me he’s
pretty ridiculous.”

“Okay, we’ll go. But I just don’t want
anything bad to happen there.”

“I worry more about tomorrow than I do
tonight, sweetie. But do you want to go with me for coffee and tea
first? I’ll buy. I scanned the contents of you girls’ fridge
earlier, and you have approximately jack shit in there.”

Tara looks uneasily at the front door and
then back at me.

“What are you looking at by the door?” she
asks. “Layne?”

10:29:58 PM

The streets of town feel like they’re surging
with static electricity, as if the End were positioned in the
direct center of powerful ley lines. The wind builds and leaves
rustle along the empty sidewalks and back alleys like the marching
of a faceless enemy’s discordant feet in a gritty black and white
propaganda film. No one really sees you, but you notice them
quietly to yourself and make up the perfect stories to match their
every most insignificant movement. Oceans of rain and descending
temperatures and four months gone by carry back with them a certain
novelty, a nostalgia I’ve never experienced in Lilly’s End.

“Why is it always so cold at Hajime’s house?”
Tara asks. “Is it, like, a Japanese thing to keep it that cold in
your home? Do they run up their electric bills every summer on air
conditioning in Japan? It was the exact opposite for us when we got
to Suzhou. Remember?”

“I remember. But you’ll have to ask Hajime
about that one.”

A man in a trench coat stares at my car from
the second floor of an empty parking garage downtown as we pass.
Tara doesn’t spot him, but looks kind of troubled anyway. She may
still be perturbed over her questions on Japanese home temperature.
I turn on the radio and listen to some old Garbage song from the
Nineties, from the last whole century, but grow reminiscent and
depressed and flooded with terrible visions of briefcases and
ominous encounters with malicious couriers. I end up listening
semi-intently to
Coast to Coast
with George Noory instead.
The topic this evening: spirit mimics impersonating their human
doppelgangers, and what we the living can do to prevent being
replaced by these ghostly double agents. During the hourly news
update Tara and I are told that we are safer than ever before in
American history.