Our Kingdom of Dust (11 page)

“No, sweetheart. But good luck with that, too.”

I ran out of the park, stopping only to pick up a lizard who was seconds away from being snatched from the sidewalk by a dive-bombing crow. I kissed its little head and it latched onto my lower lip. The son of a bitch wouldn’t let go. So I ran the rest of the way with the lizard on my lip.

“Hi, Charles,” I said as I ran through the lobby, and smiled, the lizard still dangling from my lip.

Charles shook his head. “You got problems, son,” he said as I bolted into the elevator.

When I got into the room I went to the wet bar’s mirror and gently pulled the lizard off my lip. I cupped him in my hand and set him outside on the balcony to sun himself, and then came back inside and popped open my laptop. I spent hours reading everything I could about the Xanadu cult and watching news footage of the fire on YouTube. There were a few clips where a little girl who looked like Lisa was shown running out of the house, alone, into the arms of a SWAT officer. It had to be her. I watched it over and over. The footage was heartbreaking.

But even worse were the reports from a few of the others who’d escaped before the fire. They all said that the leader of the cult, who I guess was Lisa’s dad, was having sex with kids as young as ten. Was there really someone sick enough to have sex with his own ten year old daughter? Despite my newfound love of life, I had no problem admitting that a fiery death wasn’t nearly bad enough for such an asshole.

Once I felt I had an emotional grasp on the whole thing, I decided to call her. Predictably, it went to voicemail.

“Hey, Lisa, it’s Blaine,” I said.

I hated leaving voice messages. Was anyone actually good at talking to a faceless machine? EPCOT Center should have had an exhibit about how to leave decent voicemails.

“Um, I got your number from Theresa Skywalker.” I paused. “I didn’t cum on her tits, I just ran into her at MGM. Anyway, I’m really worried about you getting off of The Dust. She told me about the Xanadu house, and… well, that’s some fucked up shit. At the very least, can you call me back and let me know you’re okay? I know that sounds really selfish considering what you’re probably going through right now, but… you know I care for you. A lot. Which, considering we’ve only known each other for a few days is kinda odd, but it seemed like you felt the same way, and…. Shit, this is turning into one of those disastrous voice messages like they always have in stupid romantic comedies and cheesy sitcoms. Okay, well, anyway, call me back at this number if you want to talk. I…. Okay, bye.”

That was awful. I pressed the pound key and told it not to send the message.

Should I tell her I loved her? We’d spent less than twenty-four hours together. Seemed more than weird to tell someone I knew less than a day that I loved them. But… maybe that’s what she needed? Shit, I didn’t know what to say.

But I knew somebody who did.

I ran downstairs to the lobby.

“Charles!” I yelled.

He came through the front sliding doors, looking dapper as ever, leading a family of six to the check-in desk.

I waited, shuffling around like I had to pee, as he gave them his full attention. He bent down and gave all of the kids pins, saluted the parents, and finally turned towards me.

“You’re so good at this job,” I said. “I really admire that.”

“Thank you, kind sir!” he said. “Now, what can I do you for?”

“Charles, you’re maybe the only person who can help me here.” I lowered my voice. “Lisa, the girl who used to be with Jay, left him and is quitting The Dust.”

Charles smiled and firmly pushed me towards the elevator.

“Let me show you to your floor, Mr. McKinnon!”

We stepped into the elevator and he did his same trick with the key.

“This better be good, Mr. McKinnon. You can’t be talking to me about The Dust while I’m on the job!”

“Shit, sorry. Yeah, that was really inconsiderate,” I said. “But I didn’t know who else to talk to. You’ve been there, you know what it feels like to get off the stuff. See, this girl, Lisa, I think I’m in love with her. I mean, we’ve only known each other for a few days, but I think she left Jay because of me, but now she won’t call me back because she’s detoxing from The Dust, and I tried to leave her a message but I didn’t know if I should tell her I loved her because I didn’t know what the detox was like, and if she’d really like it or really hate it if she knew….” I took a deep breath. “If she knew that I was in love with her.”

Charles stared at me. The alarm started going off, and he released the key and pushed the button for the fifth floor. The elevator rose.

“Mr. McKinnon, do you truly love this girl? Or are you just maybe just high on the idea of loving her? Because if you’re just high on the idea, well, now that’d be one more junkie in her life feeding off a reality that doesn’t exist. And I don’t see how that’d be of much help to her, regardless of how much she’d probably like to hear that someone out there truly loves her.”

It felt like someone had sucker punched me.

The elevator door opened, and I stepped out.

“Tell her you’re there for her if she needs you, son. If I’d had someone telling me that when I was coming off The Dust, well, maybe I’d still have that statue of mine.”

The door closed.

I went back to my room and dialed Lisa’s number.

“Lisa, it’s Blaine. I want you to know that I’m here for you. If you need anything, anything at all, let me know. Hope you’re okay. Bye.”

I hung up, letting the message go through. Charles was right. That was totally the way to go. I couldn’t be telling someone I loved them when I’d never been in love before. I didn’t know what the hell love was. But it probably wasn’t what I was feeling now. What I felt now seemed more like… well, like a drug, just like Charles said.

Damn, that old man was smart.

Chapter 17

Lisa never did call me back. Eventually I stopped checking my phone every minute, no longer worried I’d missed a call.

But then about two weeks later I did get a call, one that I’d sorta hoped I wouldn’t receive. It was Jay.

“Hey, Blaine,” he said.

“Hey, Jay. What’s going on, buddy?”

“I’m in a bit of a pickle here, and it looks like I need to leave my house. I haven’t paid the mortgage for a few months, and they’re finally evicting me.”

“Damn, dude. What can I do?”

“Could you help me move all of my memorabilia into storage? Anything left in the house is going to be taken by the bank tomorrow.”

“Yeah, absolutely,” I said. “You wanna come pick me up now?”

Silence.

“Jay? I’m here at The Beach Club. Come pick me up!”

“I don’t have the limo anymore, Blaine.”

“Oh.”

“I lost the job the day after I was arrested, as expected.”

“Um, okay. Look, that’s cool. I’ll get a cab to Home Depot, rent one of their trucks, and….” I stopped, realizing what I was saying.

My parents. Fucking hell.

“Blaine?”

“Yeah. Sorry. Yeah, I’ll get one of their trucks and drive over to your house. We’ll get it all in one trip and drive it to a storage place. No problem. See you in a few hours?”

“Thanks, Blaine. You’re a good friend.”

“You bet,” I said. Little did he know that I was less a good friend than I was a big sack of guilt. I still felt like this was all my fault.

I caught a cab out front of The Beach Club, and told the driver to bring me to the nearest Home Depot. I rented a truck, got behind the wheel, and stared at the interior of the cab.

This truck had killed my parents. Well, not this truck, but one like it. And not really the truck itself, but the dumbass driving the truck.

I turned the key, stepped on the gas, and jerked backwards, immediately hearing a screeching of tires, a blaring horn, and yelling.

Holy fuck, I’d already killed someone.

I opened the door and looked back only to see a douchebag in a red Miata speed off, shaking his fist at me. I hadn’t seen him because he was doing nearly sixty down the crowded parking lot aisle.

“Slow down, asshole!” I yelled, as he tore through the lot, the gust from his car nearly knocking over an old lady.

Why were all dudes who drove Miatas either gay (nothing wrong with that), or ‘roided out douchebag gym rats (definitely something wrong with that)?

I got back into the truck, now all jacked up on adrenaline, slowly pulled out of the parking spot, and started driving.

I completely freaked as I started braking at the first red light I hit.

“This must have been the same view that guy had right before he slammed into my parents’ car,” I thought frantically. “Everything seems okay, and then all of a sudden you’re on top of the car in front of you, and a lady is decapitated and a man is bleeding to death and cursing about monorails.”

But the brakes worked as they were supposed to, and I came to a full and complete stop.

I’d never even met the guy who was driving the truck. I wondered what his life ended up being like, and if he still thought about my parents? Had he been able to deal with the guilt, or had he turned to something like The Dust?

I hoped not.

Because I was quickly coming to understand that bad shit happened to everyone, and a lot of it was stuff we didn’t have any control over. Just random tragedy, doled out to any unlucky sucker who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And maybe it was how we dealt with getting shit on by the universe that revealed the type of person we were deep inside? If that was the case, I was a big fucking pussy straight to the core, because I kept running away whenever I drew the short straw….

I put my philosophical musings aside as I turned the truck into Jay’s subdivision. Driving up to his house, I was shocked to see nearly all of his belongings lined up neatly on his driveway. He was standing watch over them, sleeveless shirt tucked into jean shorts, as usual. I pulled the truck alongside the curb so the back lined up with the end of his driveway. I jumped out of the cab and greeted him.

“You ready for some heavy lifting, fatty?” I said, smacking him on the shoulder. He wasn’t amused.

“Please be careful with it all, Blaine. I don’t know what I’d do if even a single piece was damaged. These things,” he said, waving his arms around the boxes, “they’re my life. Each one is a piece of me.”

“C’mon, Jay. The
Little Mermaid
soap dish is a piece of you?” I said, laughing.

He didn’t smile.

“Okay,” I said. “Fair enough.”

We spent the next five hours carefully loading all of Jay’s possessions into the truck. There were some really heavy things that were difficult to load, like the bar and the Mutoscope viewer, but really it was a job that should have taken an hour. Unfortunately, he slowed the whole process down immensely by being extremely anal about the placement of the boxes, triple-checking that every box was fully balanced and wasn’t crushing anything beneath. 

Nevertheless, despite his best efforts, we’d just about finished loading the truck when he accidentally backed into column of boxes, causing one to fall from about four feet up. I heard something break. Jay freaked out, tore open the box, and pulled out a piece of a shattered coffee mug. It was the EPCOT Center mug that I’d been drinking from the morning after my unfortunate airport arrival.

He just sat there, staring at the broken mug. Then he started crying, sobbing uncontrollably. I didn’t know what to do.

“Hey, it’s cool, Jay. I’ve seen those on eBay for like twenty bucks. We can get another one by next week.”

No response. He ended up sitting in that truck for an hour, crying over a goddamned coffee mug. I mean, I felt bad, but it was just all sorts of crazy.

“I’ll be in the house if you need me,” I said.

It was weird seeing his place looking like a normal house. What had once been a magical museum had reverted back to a regular Florida rancher. It was depressing.

He’d left any non-Disney furniture behind, although a lot of it had obviously been stripped of various customizations he’d made. The feet on pretty much everything, for example, from his bed to his armoire to his kitchen table, used to be yellow plastic Mickey feet. Those had all been removed. The doors on his entertainment center had been custom made from two different colors of wood, the darker wood in the middle forming a Mickey head. The doors had been taken off their hinges. Every light switch plate was gone, because they’d all been Disney-themed. The handles on all of the sinks, which had been white Mickey hands, had been removed. Toilet paper holders, all gone. Custom-painted toilet seats? Gone. He’d even removed the non-slip pads in the bathtub because they were Little Mermaid-shaped rubber stickers of some sort. Craziest of all, a large section of tiles which had been custom painted with a
Mickey Mouse Club
logo was missing from his foyer. He’d actually removed ceramic tiles from the floor! I couldn’t even imagine how long that had taken him to do without breaking any of them. Or maybe he had broken them and then sat there crying about it for a day.

I went out to his garage, which I’d never been in before. It had a really odd smell to it, like sweet chemicals. There were different types of gas tanks in one corner, and industrial-sized buckets of really random stuff, like bleach and baking soda. Obviously this was his Dust lab.

And sure enough, sitting on a workbench was the only Disney item left in the entire house: a replica of The Queen’s dagger-through-the-heart box from
Snow White
. I walked over and opened it. Inside was a small notepad, and nothing else. I picked it up and turned to the first page. All that was written were the words “Pixie Dust Recipe”.

“Please put that down, Blaine,” said Jay.

I spun around to see him standing in the garage doorway. He walked over, grabbed the notepad, and threw it back into the box.

“Sorry, Jay. I was just doing a final check of the house, and it looked like you’d accidentally left this behind.”

“How much did you see?” he asked, slightly frantic. “Did you see the secret ingredient?”

“No, dude. Just the first page.”

He stared at me. I shrugged.

“Okay,” he said, grabbing the box from the shelf. “Trust me, Blaine. There are some things it’s best you didn’t know.” He shook the box. “This is one of them.”

“Jay, I know all about The Dust.”

“No. No, you have no idea. The secret ingredient? The one I can’t get anymore because it’s too expensive? It’s horrible. It’s the most disgusting thing, Blaine. You don’t want to know. I have to carry the guilt around with me every second of my life, and there’s no reason for anyone else to have to share that burden. If any of them knew what they’d been taking, what The Dust was made of…. Blaine, I truly believe they’d all kill themselves.”

“Christ, Jay.” I shook my head.

“That’s why I’ve never done it. I wish I could. Maybe if I did The Dust I wouldn’t need to keep all that stuff out there.” He motioned to the truck wearily, and then sat on a bucket of bleach.

“You know, there’s probably a million dollars worth of memorabilia in that truck? And I can’t even bring myself to sell a ten dollar faucet handle! I understand I’m not right in the head, but that doesn’t change anything. It’s just that each trinket, each collectible, no matter how big or small, has some memory attached to it. And selling it would be like destroying that memory. They’re all little pieces of my life.”

“Dude, just go to therapy. Charles said it worked great for him.”

He shook his head.

“You should really get back in touch with your dad, too,” I continued, undeterred. “Having that whole situation hanging over your head can’t be healthy.”

“My dad is dead.”

“No, he’s not.”

“I don’t want to talk about him.”

“That’s my point. That right there is a perfect reason why you need to go to therapy.”

“Blaine, I don’t have the money for therapy, and even if I did… well, I’d spend it on the ingredient for The Dust and then buy some more Disney stuff.”

“That’s great, Jay. So you tell me that, and now I feel like an ass for giving you three hundred the other day. You know I can’t give you any more cash now, right?”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Okay, fair enough.”

I looked at him, sitting on a bleach bucket, all down and out and feeling sorry for himself. He’d helped me more than a few times. I still owed him. Plus, he was my friend.

“I tell you what I can do for you, though,” I said. “I can give you a place to crash until you get back on your feet.”

“At The Beach Club?” he said, and smiled for the first time that day.

“Yeah, man, living it up in style at The Beach Club! And since you’re my guest you’ll have full access to the Concierge Lounge, so you can eat and drink all you want there.”

“Wow, really?!”

“Really,” I said.

I paused, frowning.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Can you do one favor for me in return?” I asked. “Can you give Charles his statue back?”

His face contorted. He didn’t speak for a while.

“I don’t think so,” he said, finally. “Not right now, anyway. Maybe once everything calms down and I’m feeling a little better. But not now.”

“Dude, I’m asking you for one favor! It’s not even your goddamned statue! You basically stole it from Charles. How could that possibly have any good memories associated with it?”

He dropped his head down and wrapped his hands around the back of his neck.

“Jay!” I said. “What the hell?”

“It was Lisa’s favorite piece in the whole house!” he said, jerking his head back up. “She used to lay in our bed, staring at it for hours on the nightstand. She said that Castle was her dream home.”

“Ah, whatever, dude. You should’ve just bought her a playset or something. Did she know that it you’d fucking stolen it from somebody?”

 “She didn’t know I took it from Charles, no. I didn’t have the heart to tell her. She said it was like a carrot on a stick that motivated her not to fall back into her old lifestyle, and to stay normal and stable enough to someday have her own home, her own castle.”

“Damn,” I said. “What does that mean, ‘her old lifestyle’?”

“Those tattoos didn’t just magically appear, Blaine. She had a completely different life when she was a teenager, before she started working at Disney. She’s been through some wild times.”

“Yeah. Theresa Skywalker told me about the Xanadu cult. That’s some fucked up shit.”

“But that wasn’t anywhere near the end of it. She bounced from foster home to foster home, was abused multiple times, and then ran away and was homeless for a while, and…. And then she got it together. I don’t know what pushed her to do it, but she got a GED, saved up some money, and started taking care of herself. Got a job as a handler at The Magic Kingdom, eventually auditioned for a Face Character role, and, well, you know the rest.”