The Devoted (13 page)

“He’s not good,” Jolie says, and the words are so foreign from the realm of her mouth that her voice sounds nothing like hers at all.

My eyes open. She’s fresh from the shower, has an aura made of steam.

“What?” I ask her.

“I think he...”

She pauses. A pause so long that it has ambitions to become a stop.

“...might not be good.”

I think of Allison and Laura, running from the house.

A flame spikes upward within my being.

“What do you mean?” I ask her, and she sits down beside me on the floor.

****

It was a weekend that, for me, represented us in our prime.

I even recall liking Jed that weekend. Somehow, I was able to tuck in my envy and roll with him. I was in the backseat, behind the passenger seat, which means I was the one who Jed’s eyes kept going to as he spoke from behind the wheel.

Paul rode shotgun. Jolie to my left.

And Jed launched into one of his you’re-not-gonna-fucking-believe-this stories. That’s what Jed is like. His stories are better than yours. The friends he hears them from are cooler than yours, and certainly cooler than you. The guy’s got friends in prison, for Christ’s sake. He’s got access to a realm that you and me would piss our pants in.

Thing is, in real life, when somebody tells you they’re about to hit you with some colossal, mind-blowing story, they usually fail to. Maybe it’s funny in theory, or it has a good middle, but usually the goods don’t get delivered.

Jed – the motherfucker – is an exception to this rule. He gets launching, and despite everything in me, I actually sit up and get ready to listen. And when I do listen, I do so closely, hoping to memorize the details and rhythms for the sake of passing it on.

Which I’ll attempt to do right now.

I don’t recall where the fuck he got this thing from. I was stoned off my ass and Jolie’s thigh was showing from beneath her skirt. Which is not to say that I wasn’t listening, but that my brain somehow managed to lurch upright for the good parts.

Which were:

“There was a college class, somewhere in America,” said Jed.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

“A professor of, I think, philosophy. Maybe even literature, but it doesn’t matter. The point is, he taught the kids real hard, you know? He drove those kids. All year long, they got their faces dragged through the dirt.”

That made me laugh, not ‘cause it was funny, but ‘cause it was so unnecessarily intense, like Jed himself. (And my brain, right then, too. What was in that herb?)

“And when it came time for finals,” said Jed, “he made them study their fucking asses off. Gave them a reading list that would make you puke. Kept dropping little hints about what a fucking total disaster this test would be, and how low the odds were of any single one of them passing it.”

Michael I saw in the side-view mirror, a smile giving his face a lift.

“And those kids were scared. I mean they were studying all night. Not all of them, of course, but most of them. Balls to the wall. Getting together in groups. Doing whatever they could to ace all this material...”

“Come on, pal,” Michael says, his smile prohibiting any tension whatsoever. “You gotta get to the point or I’m gonna strangle you.”

We all laughed.

Jed said, “You strangle me, we all go off this fucking mountain.”

‘Cause we were heading north of Santa Barbara, to a cabin that The Leader kept God-knows-where with God-knows-what-money.

And leave it to Jed to dish snappy comebacks, which made all of us laugh even harder, looking over the lethal edge, Jed driving in the maniac way that ex-cons are supposed to, and me, Jolie, and Michael proving ourselves, unbeknownst to ourselves, to be perfect candidates for Ascension by way of our glee.

Ironic since Jed was the one driving.

This was, I want to say, about ten months ago.

So Jed wasn’t about to speed things up, but I did get the sense, when he continued, that he actually had been near to the point before Michael tried to get him moving.

“Come test day,” he said, “and everyone’s real, real nervous. Nobody has to say anything, ‘cause it’s too known: This is do or die. They’ve been through the whole universe...”

Michael shook his head, smile stretching.

“They had explored all the great philosophers, and tried to map the grid of the universe, and attempted to explain what mankind was about, and all grown close, and fallen in love with the teacher, and now it was time to put all that data to use.

“So the teacher’s got this look on his face, right?”
And when Jed says “right,” the word is loaded up with so much coolness that it becomes a contagion and makes you say (or at least mouth) “right,” as well.

He went, “He’s looking at all of them like he knows something they don’t. And these poor kids are shitting their pants. And the teacher passes out the test, which is on a single sheet of paper, and tells them all to keep their copies face-down till he tells them otherwise.”

“Was it blank?” Jolie asks, ‘cause that’s Jolie: She searches her decks for Jokers, all life long.

“No,” said Jed, “but that’s a good guess. Wasn’t blank. Anyway, everybody got their copy, and the teacher went up to the front of the room and crossed his arms, let them simmer a little more, and finally said, ‘Okay, turn your papers over...’

“Upon the page was no place to put your name, no place to put the date, no lines...just a single question...”

“Fuck,” said Michael.

I was in a trance.

“‘WHY?’” said Jed, and I’m pretty sure his ensuing chuckle was natural.

“The only word,” he said, “on the test was Why? And these guys had to harness all their knowledge to answer it.”

I couldn’t believe any of this. Dead or not, famous or not, Jed surely belonged in some kind of museum.

“So everybody starts to write down their answers, right?”

“Right,” said me and Jolie and Michael.

“And they’re going on and on for paragraphs. Throwing in every fucking thing they can remember. Religion, science, philosophy. Facts, theories, quotes, angles, arguments. They’re going for it. They’re covering all sides.

“It went on all period, and it was a special period, a couple hours, I think...”

Not casual enough to pass as nonfiction, but it did lend some depth to the mounting intensity.

“And in the end – guess what? Nearly every single kid in that class got an F.”

“No!” said Jolie, the injustice rattling her.

“Yes!” Jed smiled. Those eyes in the rear-view. “Only one dude managed to get a passing score, and that dude got an A.

“Can you guess what he said?”
We surely couldn’t. All our philosophy books had long been sealed shut, tucked away, and replaced by what The Leader told us.

“WHY NOT?!” Jed yelled, one finger aimed upward. “And that motherfucker walked out of there in two minutes. Got the A. ‘Why not?’”

For months thereafter, my brain would whisper:
He said “Why not?” and walked out of the room.

I’d be in the shower, be scraping tiles, and out of nowhere, inside, amid silence:
He said “Why not?” and walked out of the room.

Michael, however, wasn’t buying it. The truth of the tale, he didn’t much care about, but within moments, he began to pick at its simple poetry.

“That’s bullshit!” he said, his smile intact and operational.

Jed laughed. They were friendly, these two, and their debates tended to reach new heights when an audience was involved.

Smiling, too, Jolie and I ably fulfilled the role.

“Why is that bullshit?” Jed asked Michael.

“‘Cause it’s clever enough to paper over real thought, but you take away the paper and there ain’t much there.”

“Bro!” Jed yelled, instantly exasperated. “I give you a fucking story that encapsulates the essence of mankind, the essence...”

Michael smiled on.

“...of staying alive, of existing, of going forward, and you tell me it’s ‘papered over’? Whatever the fuck that means?”

“It means that ‘why not’ is a cop-out. ‘Why not’ sounds all
carpe diem
and shit, but that’s an unconscious way to live your life.”

“That’s the only way to live your life!”

Keep drumming.

“You’re never gonna find the answer,” Jed continued. “You’re never gonna crack the mystery. In the end, it’s gonna boil down to ‘might as well.’”

“Bullshit!” Michael was a notch too loud, even by the standards of sound entertainment. “You don’t have to crack the mystery. That’s not the fucking point. But you do have to engage with it. You do have to establish some kind of code, some kind of way to go about living your life.”

“You just walked right into that,” Jed yelled. Jolie and I sprang forward, laughing. “‘Why not’ is nothing if not a code.”

“But it’s a teenager’s code. It’s a code you get in a cereal box. Have you listened to what Master says?”

“Of course! Have YOU listened to what Master says? He never comes in for landing, that guy. It’s always open-ended. It’s a work in progress. We’re all engaged in an experiment.”

“Yet more things are to come,” said Michael. “He always hints at it. More is coming. Ascendant consciousness. Where there’s that, there has to be more than your fucking ‘why not.’”

It occurred to me, watching them, that even though their predominant motive was to be playful, they were like a microcosm of everything that’s wrong with the world. The fact that everywhere you go, no matter where you are geographically or historically, you come upon people that have certain systems, and, whether they intend to be or not, are the staunch and natural defenders of those systems.

The artist: “Where would we be without art?”

The doctor: “Where would we be without medicine?”

Scientist: “Where would we be...”

But none of these people want to take it all. The artist and the scientist throw sneers back and forth. They need each other, but they wag their dicks, and they don’t have to be male to do so.

Anyway, the “debate” rolled on: Why?/Why not?/Why?/Why not?

I spoke up only once. I said, “You know, Camus said the only real philosophical question is whether or not we should kill ourselves.”

The car went silent. Admittedly, I had gone too heavy. Jed’s rear-view eyes went searching for meaning. Then he said, “We know, Matthew. Master talks about that, like, every day.”

At which point all the weight was gone, and everybody laughed (and I pretended to).

And that’s why Jed is Jed and I am me: He tells you real fucking stories and I just repeat what I’ve heard.

****

They decided to put the premise before The Leader. When we got to the cabin, there were easily twenty people there, and the ghost of pot-just-smoked making its way up toward the ceiling. The Leader, He never indulged too much; He liked to stay sharper than the rest of us, even if only by an inch.

“Good,” Jed said when we walked in, “you’re smoking. That’ll help you help us.”

And I watched that fucking guy tell the whole college professor story again, probably with ninety-eight percent the same language, pauses, and turns of phrase, and still, despite my repeat exposure, I was near-to-entirely certain that I could never tell it even half that well.

Moreover, Jed got the entire room going: girls wanting to watch and hear him/guys wanting, generally, to become him. The Leader didn’t seem to mind; what use was a second in charge if he didn’t have weight to throw around?

At the end, Jed gave Michael like four seconds to stutter out his piece, after which they asked The Leader which side He was on.

But here’s what I knew that Jed never could: The Leader would never, ever take sides when given an equation such as that one. Was Jed fucking kidding? Like he’d said himself, The Leader was a movable piece. Never did a block of chessboard settle underneath Him for too long.

He proved my instincts within two seconds: “Why should one have to choose?” He asked.

“Because,” Jed said, quieter than he was in the car but no less forceful for it, “it’s a fundamental choice. It’s not thin or shallow. We’re talking about taking the questioning stance or the active stance.”

The Leader let out a gallant laugh. “Can an active person not be a questioner? Can a questioner not be active? I sense boxes.”

Everybody smiled.

The residue from their toke was sifting into me. I looked at Jolie and sensed a box myself. She knew me, smiled.

“No boxes!” Jed yelled, his own smile ensuring that we’d all be fine if the power were to suddenly go out. “Doesn’t have to be boxes. Can be leanings. Can be a preference.”

“Preferences lead to boxes.” The Leader shrugged.

“Am I not your second-in-command?” Jed asked, never one to shy away from some post-modern self-awareness.

“Certainly you are.”
“Okay, so somewhere in there, like it or not, worse or better, is the presence of preference.”