Future Imperfect (10 page)

Another concussion.

Another vision.

Actually the same vision. I’m back on the California beach with the storm crashing against the sky and the waves getting higher and higher as the sun glows dimmer and dimmer. Again, there’s a surfboard at my side. Again, the wet suit. Again, the salt water taste on my lips. It’s like I’m starting over again.

And what’s really crazy is I’ve never had this happen before. Of the barrels of visions I’ve had, I’ve never seen the same thing twice. Sure, I’ve been in the same place before but never at exactly the same time. What’s going on here makes no sense.

My feet in the sand, I’m assuming that wires were crossed.

Or maybe this isn’t the future but a memory of the last vision.

Maybe I’m not unconscious enough to throw my mind forward.

I grab my surfboard and stand up. Start walking to the waves. And as my toes hit the cold water, I start thinking that maybe this is different. The guy in the mask last time said that he expected me here. Maybe I try to surf these storm waves all the time. Maybe this is just another of one of my yearly trips to the coast.

But then again, maybe not.

Sitting across from me, on a big red towel, his head angled down, his eyes burning the air between us, is the masked man. He’s here, again, only this time the Mexican wrestler mask is red with flames all around it. He’s staring me down and with his index finger on his right hand, he’s motioning me over.

I walk to the edge of his towel and sit in the sand. What makes him stand out this time isn’t the mask so much as it’s the white suit he’s wearing. The guy is sitting cross-legged, he is filing his nails.

“Back again, huh?” I ask.

The man says, “Actually, I’d say you’re back again.”

“You’ve been waiting?”

“Not long. I had a feeling you’d be back and so I came ’round to see.”

I look up and down the beach. It’s lined with surfers watching the clouds and the waves. The sand is being whipped up down near a pier and it blows in little funnels. The sky is getting really dark.

“Cutting to the chase,” I say with my again deeper voice. “What exactly is it that you came here to see me for? Is there some sort of problem?”

“Yes.” The masked guy’s eyes narrow. “Big problem.”

“And?”

The suited wrestler pauses. “That’s the thing, you’re just not ready to hear what I have to say. And I don’t mean the you that’s here on this beach, I mean the real you. The kid you. See that storm?” The man looks over his shoulder at the black broccoli clouds.

“Couldn’t miss it.”

“The closer that storm gets, the more sense this will all make. I’m guessing that when it’s right on top of us, truth’s going to just spill right out and you’ll be ready to understand it all.”

My throat tightens. I’m confused. “Is this the future?”

“Yes, but I’m not in your future.”

“You’re not? Then…?”

“Ade, I’m in your mind.”

There is a flash like lightning’s hit the water near us but when the brightness of it fades away I’m no longer on the beach. I’m back in my car and the sun is scorching down. It’s flattening the whole world out.

Back to now. Return to regular programming.

I’m confused.

This future that I’ve seen now more than once, which is, in itself, totally bizarre and inexplicable, has got me shaken. Who is this guy with the mask? Isn’t he in the future? It certainly looks like he is. Could he really be in my head? I hope not. And how? That’s just fucked up. Maybe I’m dreaming him? Maybe in the near future I spend a lot of time on a beach tripping.

Fact is: I need to stop stressing and just enjoy the Buzz.

One thing I’ve learned after doing this so many times, after seeing what comes next so many times, is that no matter how strange the future seems, it pales in comparison to the present. This masked dude, whatever. This joker, I’m already over it.

And I need the Buzz so badly right now.

EIGHT

Sucks that I’m snapped out of it too soon by someone knocking on the windshield.

It’s my ex-girlfriend. Angry, I lean forward and my broken nose just lets loose like a faucet. Belle’s seen this before. Plenty of times.

She’s sitting on the hood of my car smoking a cigarette and wearing the very same outfit she wore when I first met her. The leather boots. Black skirt. White dress shirt. She’s got her blond hair slicked back and if it weren’t for the hastily applied makeup and the scars on her arms she’d be perfect for a sexy temp or a trampy accountant.

Belle watches me intently, takes a long drag, and then says, “Pop the trunk.”

I do, though the Buzz has my head fogged and I almost pass out reaching down for the trunk pop lever. Belle slips off the hood and comes back with my emergency med kit. She slips into the passenger seat and opens the box and pulls out some gauze and white tape and pours a little hydrogen peroxide onto the gauze. “Lean back,” she says. I do. She wipes my forehead and I can hear the peroxide foaming up over my left eye. Belle’s face very close to mine, her breath cool on my forehead, she says, quietly, “You didn’t say anything.”

“About what?” I ask, feeling a loose tooth with my tongue.

“About the girl,” Belle says. “It’s kind of a big deal, right?”

“Oh, right. Right.”

“I got a text. Everyone’s talking. Why didn’t you think to call me?”

I just shake my head.

“It’s six in the morning, Belle. On a Saturday. What the hell are you doing here?”

Belle smiles. “I followed you home from the party.”

“You were at Oscar’s? I didn’t see you.”

Belle laughs, more to herself than to me. “Yeah, what else is new.”

What Belle isn’t saying and what her eyes are is that she’s monumentally jealous. This is what I thought she was dreading. My fault, really, first time we ever hooked up I told Belle about my vision. I told her about the girl and it made Belle a bit crazy. Totally understandable. Frankly, it was pretty lame of me to mention it at all and not a bit surprising that every time we were together, at the movies or at Piggies at the Tivoli or at Paris on the Platte or INXS, she was always looking over her shoulder for the girl with brown hair and green eyes. The girl I told her way too much about.

Of course, I was looking for the girl too. We’d be making out in those leather chairs at the Cherry Creek Mall beneath the cylindrical elevators and I’d be hardly into it because my heart was racing thinking I’d seen my vision girl step into The Sharper Image. I can’t even tell you how many times I’d pause our conversations to chase after a shadow, how many times I canceled our dates or forgot to show up because I was sure, so freaking sure, that Vauxhall would appear at any minute.

Who in their right mind could put up with that?

Amazingly, she did. For a while she seemed okay with it. Honestly, it was like Belle was just that happy to be with me, just that happy to have found someone she could really bond with even if it was temporary. To be fair, when I wasn’t distracted, things were decent. We did have some nice conversations. We laughed a ton. Made out well together.

Then, October, Belle split. Shocking thing was that it wasn’t because of my future fascination, wasn’t even because of my being an emotional retard, it was something even I didn’t expect.

But right now what I thought was jealousy at first has grown into a whole different sort of animal. Far nastier. Far crueler. Right now, her face in my face, Belle says, “Funny name, Vauxhall. Is that foreign?”

I say, “I hear it’s a neighborhood in London.”

“Okay. So this is it, right?”

“I … I’m not really sure—”

Belle leans in and then tapes a folded piece of gauze on my head with the white tape. When she finishes, she takes a penlight from the kit and shines it in my eyes, one at a time. Then she sits back and says, “Of course this is it, Ade. The future never lies. You told me that.”

I shrug.

Belle says, “If I could charge you for the number of times I’ve bandaged your ass up, I could buy myself a new car. I’d be even richer if I got a dime for every single time I told you that you were sick. And dangerous. And messed up. You know that? That you are, right? Wonder if your new girlfriend knows?”

I say, “You’re just jealous.”

“Please. You’re an addict.”

“That what you think of me?”

“That’s what everyone thinks of you, Ade. Everyone but this new girl. She’ll come around soon enough. Seriously, I feel sorry for Vauxhall. Unless she likes being neglected and watching her boyfriend beat the shit out of himself for some impossible high, then she’s in for a lonely time.”

Fact is: Belle didn’t leave me because I was waiting for someone else. No, she left me because the future I was waiting for didn’t show up.

October and we were downtown walking the mall. It was one of those fall days when it feels like it’s about to snow, when the air is pregnant with frost. We had hot chocolate and were reading books at the Tattered Cover. She was acting distant. I asked her if there was a problem and she led me upstairs over to the self-help section, where there was a couch. She sat me down and laid it all out simple: “Nothing you’ve seen, not your vision girl or any of the other future stuff you’ve knocked yourself out for, has happened. I’ve got to tell you, Ade, you’re the lamest psychic I’ve ever met.”

I told her I wasn’t a psychic.

“Divinator, prognosticator, whatever. You suck.”

And it hurt. It hurt most because of what she said next: “It didn’t bother me that you were always drooling over your doodles and notes about some girl that you’ll probably never actually see and it didn’t bother me that you’re always passed out or barely there, what bothered me was that it was for nothing. You live the life of a rock star but you can’t sing, you can’t play guitar, hell, you’re not even a keyboardist. You suck, Ade, and I’m done wasting my time. I’m going to find the real deal.”

Today, in my car, she lights a smoke and repacks the emergency kit.

I ask her not to smoke. “Gives me a headache,” I say.

She laughs at that and then gets out and stomps out her cigarette the way she’d stomp out a spider. “This is pretty monumental, Ade. I’m shocked—”

“Yeah. Crazy, right?”

“Crazy.” And she says it like the word’s stuck to her tongue. Like it’s caramel.

And then she leans in and kisses me on the cheek. Then she puts a finger to her lips. She fakes embarrassment. “Can I still do that?”

When we were dating Belle was very conscious of kissing me. Any chance she could, any moment my mouth was free, her lips were on mine. Halfway through a conversation, my mouth full of food, trying to yawn, and Belle’s lips were on mine. Being in public not only didn’t matter, it spurred her on. On the leather chairs at the Cherry Creek Mall with moms pushing strollers past us fast. In the back of the movie theater with people shushing us, whispering, “Can you keep it down?” I’ll admit I wasn’t just sitting there letting it happen. My hands were everywhere. An hour with Belle left me exhausted, my lips chapped, my hands aching. There were times I’d get home at night and find my face smeared with makeup, lipstick smudges like slashes across my cheeks. I would find bruises in the oddest places, bruises that looked like fingerprints behind my knee, on my collarbone. And the hickies. Good God, the hickies.

Right now, literally crashed out in my car, I ignore Belle’s comment, her kiss, and walk her over to her ancient Accord. She gets in and rolls the window down, says, “It’s a good thing I follow you around all the time, isn’t it? Otherwise the cops would be all over you.”

“You should really just transfer to Mantlo.”

“Just to be closer to you, right?”

“Of course.”

After we broke up Belle basically vanished. I’d see her at parties here and there and the part of me that was still pissed at her would ask her stupid things like, “So did you find your messiah yet?” She’d pretty much ignore me. Act as though I was being too immature. Also she was drunker and higher than ever. People were whispering things about designer drugs, about hard drugs. Not a month later and she was showing up at odd times wearing all manner of trendy clothes and wiping her nose all the time. She’d berate me with stories about the artists and designers and hackers and drug dealers she was circulating with. “You can’t even believe the lofts these people inhabit,” she’d say. “It’s sick, bird!” Soon she had an older man at her beck and call, it was rumored he drove a Benz and was a banker, but none of us ever saw him. Certainly did keep her knee-deep in gifts, though.

The end of last summer, after all the brawls and the bruises and the incident at the bowling alley, I got in kind of a weird place. After July, after meeting Borgo, I cooled my jets briefly. Focused on something else for a few weeks. Focused on Belle. End of August I saw her at a pizza joint with her dad and she looked so different. She was trashy and brilliant at the same time, like a million-dollar gutter punk. After I’d finished dinner I hung around until she left and then I followed her. Creepy, yes, but necessary. Kind of I missed Belle. I needed to know what was going on.

I trailed her like a true detective.