Tough Day for the Army (2 page)

“We're having a party.”

“Cool, when?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Nice. Who's coming?”

“Chelsea Stubbins and Lance Riggins and anyone else who wants to.”

Jürgen raised his eyebrows and whistled but didn't say anything else as Nelson finished with the paper and marker and went to the break room where he slapped the notice on the refrigerator using one of the many smiley-face magnets affixed to the surface. Lance Riggins and Chelsea Stubbins sat at a small circular table, sharing a Splenda-sweetened Sprite, Chelsea Stubbins's hands wrapped around the can, Lance Riggins's hands wrapped around Chelsea Stubbins's hands.

“We're having a party,” Nelson said, waving at his flyer. On it he'd drawn a crude heart with the initials
LR + CS
inside, plus the party information: time, place, hosts.

“What's the occasion?” Lance Riggins replied, releasing Chelsea Stubbins's hands and kicking back in his chair.

“For you, and her,” Nelson said, jerking his thumb at Chelsea Stubbins. For some reason he didn't want to say Chelsea's name. “You're the best couple ever, and me and Jürgen thought we should celebrate your example to the rest of us.”

Chelsea Stubbins's face pulled in on itself, and she went, “Awwww,” in a manner so perfectly sincere that to Nelson it seemed insincere, but he knew that Chelsea Stubbins was incapable of insincerity. Lance Riggins, on the other hand, was well acquainted with Nelson's hostility, with the kicks to the back of his chair as Nelson walked by, with the middle finger salute for no good reason, and so he might've been rightfully suspicious of Nelson's motives, but Lance Riggins was also extremely confident, had life by the short hairs, as Nelson's old man would say (though Lance Riggins would never be so crude), so he didn't particularly give a poop if Nelson was mocking him. The Nelsons of the world were flies off the backs of the Lance Rigginses. Lance Riggins smiled at Nelson. He always smiled at Nelson, and everyone else for that matter. That smile made no sense to Nelson, where it might come from, what it was rooted to. Nelson thought he might be able to boot Lance Riggins in the balls and he'd still smile about it.

“Wouldn't miss it,” Lance Riggins said. He shot forward in his chair, grabbed the can out of Chelsea Stubbins's grip, and drank the rest of it in two large swallows, his Adam's apple bobbing manfully up and down. Finished, he crushed the can in his fist and lobbed it for the recycling bin, turning his back with the can still midflight. The can glanced off the rim and skidded across the floor toward Nelson's feet.

Chelsea Stubbins yelled “Hey,” to Lance Riggins's retreating form, but he never broke stride on his way back to his cubicle. Nelson stared down at the can as Chelsea Stubbins plucked it from the ground and tossed it into the bin in a flawless motion.

“Nice shot,” Nelson said, and Chelsea Stubbins smiled at him and Nelson felt like he'd been tasered.

That all happened on Friday, so on Saturday, the day of the party, Nelson spent his time on two things.

One was looking in the mirror and willing his face to change into some different, more Lance Riggins–esque shape. He was fresh out of the shower, enjoying how the Utah air dried him all by itself. The acne had cleared up, at least, but he could still see purple ghosts of the worst eruptions. His father had named one that cropped up on his forehead junior year. “Here comes Vesuvius,” he'd say. “And look, it brought Nelson with him,” and then he'd laugh like he was the fucking funniest dickhead on the planet.

Nineteen years old and Nelson still didn't need to shave, save a couple of long boys that cropped out of his neck, but despite his boyish face, he felt as though he had the capacity for love of someone much older and wiser, and that love was for Chelsea Stubbins. He flexed his chest muscles in the mirror. Not terrible, physical condition–wise, and he was a hell of a snowboarder, but he was no Lance Riggins in the overall-human-being category. Judging from the stock he came from, he never would be.

Nelson looked down at his deodorant, the ingredient list, and damn if Jürgen wasn't right, “Aluminum Zirconium Tetrachlorohydrex.” Jürgen was smart and also trustworthy about these things, so Nelson sniffed his pits, which at least for the moment smelled good from the vanilla-scented bodywash, and tossed the deodorant in the garbage. He pulled his favorite hoodie over his head and stuffed his phone in his sock. They were doing amazing things with prosthetic limbs, but as of yet the balls were irreplaceable, and he wasn't going to live without his phone.

One thing Nelson did not spend his time doing was reading up on Mormonism, because he'd already done that a couple weeks earlier to see if it was something he could get on board with for the sake of Chelsea Stubbins, but that was a definitive no-go. Nelson considered himself spiritual, and though he had some general suspicions about God/religion of the organized variety, he wasn't quite ready to go full atheist. But this Mormon business was such transparent bullshit, a bridge he could not cross, even for Chelsea Stubbins. This Joseph Smith character reminded Nelson of one of his and Jürgen's buddies from back home, Stinkfinger, who did not care for the pot but loved the mushrooms, and when he was peaking could be very convincing about seeing shit like his past lives or the true color of Nelson's aura, or the twin that Bobby Longkiss had eaten in the womb, living inside Bobby's body. Once or twice Stinkfinger gave Nelson the shivers with that shit, but afterwards, with a clearer head, Nelson looked at the guy who got his nickname because he claimed he was the first in school to get to third base and walked around telling everyone to sniff his finger. It was Jürgen who called him out, declaring that Stinkfinger (who had been Daniel up to that moment) had just rubbed his finger around the inside of a tuna can, and Nelson went and retrieved just-about-to-become-Stinkfinger's brown lunch bag out of the trash and brandished the evidence above his head for all to see, and that was that. Stinkfinger was then, and forever, full of shit.

Like this Joseph Smith with his visions, a direct pipeline from God, messages coming direct, like through one of those pneumatic tubes at the bank drive-thru, one of which just happened to be a thumbs-up on plural marriage, because how awesome that God wants you to bang multiple broads who are also totally subservient in the sack and otherwise? Now, Nelson had grown up in Vermont, where there were plenty of liberals, his father being one of the few exceptions. Nelson had been conditioned not to mind if a chick didn't shave her legs, or even her pits, and as far back as middle school, he'd learned about the patriarchal hegemony, the cultural reign of the phallocracy, and could sniff out white male privilege when he saw it.

It bothered him to think that Chelsea Stubbins bought into this horseshit, but Nelson figured it was rooted in the cloistered life— born, raised, surrounded by Mormons. We are who we are with, he figured. He was an exception, he was sure, nothing like his father, the close-minded, reactionary, abusive asshole, but for the most part environment rules, nurture over nature. Once Nelson was able to remove Chelsea Stubbins from the atmosphere of Provo, which was indeed his plan, the Mormonism would fade, like a tan starved of sun.

The other thing Nelson did in preparation for the party was bake. Chocolate brownies with walnuts. Peanut butter cookies with deep fudge swirls and brickle. Rice Krispie treats. All laced with hash. Lots and lots of hash. Nelson had spent the better part of his most recent Survey Circle, Inc., paycheck on hash, which can be acquired anywhere, including Provo, Utah. Jürgen sat in the living room rooting against BYU basketball, occasionally asking if Nelson was sure he wanted to do that.

“Why wouldn't I?”

“Because these kids don't do drugs like we do drugs. They don't do drugs at all.”

“That's the point.”

“I don't follow.”

Nelson removed the latest batch from the oven and began flipping the cookies to the counter for cooling. “It's time for them to snap out of it, to have their minds altered, to realize that things are not always as they seem.”

“That's probably illegal,” Jürgen replied.

“If truth is a crime, then lock me up,” Nelson said.

There'd been a plan, but then things stopped going according to it. The first thing that went wrong was the number of people who showed up. The Survey Circle, Inc., work crew came in bunches and drank Nelson and Jürgen's uncaffeinated soda and ate their salty snacks and even danced in the middle of the small living room to Jürgen's iPod mix of house music. Eventually the salty snacks ran out, and someone went looking through the cupboards and found Nelson's stash of psychotropic baked goods and promptly dug in.

The second thing that went wrong is that seeing this, Nelson had an immediate attack of conscience about these nice people who had been speaking to him in friendly fashions and enjoying Jürgen's music being dosed by him and his hash-laced brownies/cookies/Krispies. However, he knew he could not tell these nice people that the delicious treats were “special,” because then when Chelsea Stubbins arrived, they would warn her and she would not partake, so thinking quickly but probably foolishly, he made a joke out of grabbing the brownie/cookie/Krispie out of each individual's hand, shouting, “Cookie monster!” and then shoving them in his own mouth. This got a lot of laughs, and some people started taking a brownie/cookie/ Krispie just to see Nelson do it again.

I am taking a tremendous amount of drugs
, Nelson thought while he was doing this, which would spur him to the bathroom to purge, after which he would come out only to find that even more people were eating the treats, rinse and repeat, until one of the times he came out of the bathroom and found himself face to face with Jürgen, who gripped him by both shoulders and said, “You are tripping balls, my friend.”

“I am tripping balls,” Nelson replied, nodding. Jürgen pinched Nelson's wrist between this thumb and two forefingers, counting his pulse. He tilted Nelson's head back to grab the light and looked closely into each pupil one at a time.

“You're OK,” Jürgen said. “But no more.”

Nelson nodded.

“This is,” Jürgen said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder at the increasingly strange scene behind him, “what it will be.”

Nelson nodded again, and tears filled his eyes. He hugged Jürgen and wept into his best friend's shoulder. “I love you so much, man.”

Jürgen squeezed back. “Love you too, dude. Now, I gotta go do something about this.”

Nelson watched Jürgen go back into the living room, where he turned off the music and in his best cruise director voice asked, “Who wants to watch a movie?” To which just about everyone, at least those that weren't already completely engrossed in studying the lines on the backs of their hands, cheered.

“Get comfy, friends,” Jürgen said, and then he grabbed his and Nelson's bootleg copy of
Koyaanisqatsi
, which they liked to break out for special hallucinogenic occasions. “I think you're going to enjoy this,” he said, sliding it into the DVD player. When the Philip Glass score kicked in, jaws dropped and eyes saucered, and Nelson saw Jür-gen grin and give a big thumbs-up.

This was the moment when Lance Riggins and Chelsea Stubbins decided to show up.

It's hard to say if this was the third bad thing or not.

Lance Riggins walked through the apartment door chest out, like he expected a hale and hearty greeting, but his friends were piled like puppies in front of the big screen, their minds being blown by video of an imploding building and the surround sound. One or two of them might have been openly weeping at the beauty of the whole thing, which was the point after all. Chelsea Stubbins edged in behind Lance, peeking around his arm. Nelson saw the golden blond of her hair against her navy-blue parka.

“What's going on here?” Lance said.

Jürgen stepped forward. “They're having a religious experience,” he said. “Here, let me take your coats, and help yourselves to the brownies.”

Chelsea Stubbins slung her parka over her arm and shook her long hair free and Nelson could see little static lightning bolts arc from strand to strand.

I am tripping balls
, he thought. Lance Riggins handed his coat to Jürgen and took a big bite of one of the brownies. “Good stuff.”

“Indeed,” Jürgen replied. “And for the lady?”

Chelsea Stubbins held up her hand in defense. “I'm not one for sweets,” she said.

Nelson's spirit sank to his shoes. He watched Jürgen try again, and receive a second demurral. Nelson couldn't bear it anymore, so he did the final bad thing and went outside to the balcony, the cold air sucking the breath from his lungs to the point they hurt, and then he looked up at the stars.

Whoa
, he said to himself.
I am tripping balls.
Vermont had lots and lots of stars, but Utah, somehow, had more. Maybe it was the altitude of Provo or the lack of humidity or the limited light pollution, but from Nelson's balcony, it looked like there were more stars than there was darkness, so the whole firmament was like snow on the television, and that's when Nelson had the visions.

It wasn't clear if the stars were plunging toward him or he was zooming into space, but either way, Nelson was among them. They were impossibly bright, but he, Nelson, could look directly at them. They were impossibly hot, but he, Nelson, could touch them.

Joseph Smith also had visions, which he called revelations because he was founding a religion. While touching the stars, Nelson realized that Joseph Smith might not have been a con man or crazy, but instead might have been tripping balls on some kind of native wacky weed, and this started to change Nelson's perspective on the man, in that Joseph Smith and Nelson had something important in common, namely that they were both capable of traveling in space without a rocket ship. That's got to be an exclusive club.