Small Axe Books

Tristan never did get used to Christa. Barely a week went by when she wasn’t wearing some new outfit, talking about some new band or book she was reading, or just coming up with some new theory about society and the universe. The new alone had appeal for her, viewing constancy as death. “Boredom,” she would say, “is a form of control. Every time work or school imposes a routine on you it’s trying to kill you inside. By the time you’re in your twenties, you’re hardly better than a zombie. You’ve already been condemned–and condemned yourself–to living death and corporate slavery. Scientists call the disorder `suburbia. . . .’”

Her words rang in Tristan’s ears months after she said them, pounding like his headache as he lay hungover on Awol’s sofa. The sun had risen too early, streaks of it criss-crossing his face like white hot prison bars, filtering through the Venetian blinds. He turned his face to the wall, but ten minutes of restless fidgeting and nausea convinced him how useless it was to attempt falling back to sleep.

Awol’s apartment hurt his eyes. The Chinese reds and golds and oranges were disgustingly vivid. The smoked mirror doubled the piercing sunlight. The angular, sticky furniture reminded him of some dentist’s office drowning in elevator music. He shot up to a sitting position and felt his entire upper body collapse into his stomach.

Nyota slept peacefully on the other wing of the sofa, her arm dangling off the edge. Phil slept on the floor under the Charles Manson poster, his head atop his crumpled leather jacket, a girl Tristan didn’t know in his arms, a guy he didn’t know in hers. Tristan didn’t remember coming in, but focusing on the night’s events, hazy scenes of car chases and graffiti and Awol’s bathroom, made him too sick to bother trying.

Awol slumped on the floor against a beat up lazy-boy, a television flickering before his half-moon eyes early morning cartoons. A pint of tequila lay half finished on a pile of papers and address books beside him, the telephone not far away, off the hook. Dingo perched at the edge of the sofa, slowly flipping through a comic book (he called them “graphic novels”).

“Whatcha readin’?” Tristan asked with an uncomfortable stretch.

“Vampire Lestat,” he said without looking away.

“What time is it?”

“Early. About six.”

“Been up long?”

“Haven’t slept. Dozed a little. Didn’t dream or nothin’.”

Tristan staggered to the bathroom, avoiding the dried pinkish puddle which just missed the toilet. He looked in the mirror and strained hard to recognize his face. A bottle of Advil sat on a shelf behind the mirror, and Tristan downed about five, cupping his hands to the faucet.

“When’s everybody waking up?” he called.

“Real soon if ya don’t shut up.”

He staggered back into the living room, keeping his voice low. “Why’s the phone off the hook?”

“Probably coz someone was using it, doc.”

Tristan sighed and sat down, rubbing his temples and cursing the empty fifth of vodka on the table.

“Y’know Dingo, nobody’s up in the whole world besides me and you.”

“It’s `you and me,’ not `me and you.’ They probably don’t wanna wake up. Then they’d hafta figure out what to do.”

“You think it really was Christa who wrote that word on the wall last night?”

“Who the hell else would? Only trick is finding out what she meant by it.”

“Well, that’s pretty obvious, I’d think. She meant leaving society behind. That must be what she meant when she said `it’s over’ on my machine.”

“Okay, Sherlock. If she left society, where did she go? The moon?”

“It can’t be that hard, man. She either went to some commune somewhere, or into the city. Maybe she went to her brother’s. . . Wait, wasn’t she into that Zendik farm ‘zine?”

“That’s not her scene, doc. Too many hippies. Old hippies, at that.”

“What about the city?”

“That’s more likely. But the city’s a big place.”

Nyota stirred. Dingo and Tristan hushed their rising volume and continued their conversation, meandering between where Christa might have gone and how she might have gotten there. They didn’t speculate as to why she left. They both knew the many answers to that.

Their strained whispers grew louder again, and Nyota’s eyes opened. She pushed herself into a sitting position and stared blankly for a moment. Then she smiled drowsily and stretched her arms wide, her underarm hair black and shaggy against her honey brown skin.

“Hey guys,” she yawned.

“Hey,” they said.

“How are you?”

Dingo answered a terse “okay;” Tristan complained of his hangover. Nyota preached to him about the evils of alcohol and for the thirty-seventh time since he met her exhorted him to ditch the stuff forever in favor of the sweet leaf. “Be clean,” she said all singsong. “Be green.”

A buzzer went off, a piercing high-pitched alarm which woke them up all over again. Phil and his friends stirred uncomfortably. Awol didn’t move.

“Awol!” Nyota called. “Awol!”

Awol’s half-moon lids flickered open. He sprang up and slammed the alarm off, then hovered there a moment, weighing the comfort of the lazyboy with his forgotten reason for setting the alarm. Resolved, he waddled to the bathroom, stepping over Phil and the others who gratefully sunk back into their comas.

Nyota rose and walked to the phone. She clicked it back to life and dialed her father’s voice mail. As she made up an appropriate lie as to her whereabouts, she flipped through the pile of papers and address books under Awol’s tequila. She came across a list in Awol’s scrawl of numbers and addresses marked CHRISTA–LEADS. Most were crossed out.

Awol emerged from the bathroom.

“Who puked on the floor?!” he demanded.

“Who didn’t puke on the floor?” Nyota laughed. “You guys had quite a party last night.”

“Yeah, well it’s over now.”

He took the phone and the list out of Nyota’s hands and began dialing the remainder of the numbers. Nyota shrugged and returned to the sofa, exchanging small talk with Tristan, both discussing their planless summer, their shitty mall jobs, and Christa. Dingo read his book.

The girl who was with Phil and the other guy woke up. She untangled herself from their arms and staggered to the bathroom. Her stirring woke Phil, who sat up and blinked for a minute or two, then fell back to the floor, fluffing his jacket-made-pillow. Awol asked the phone to hang on while he nudged Phil with his foot.

“Wake up, man,” he commanded. “We gotta get going. There’s coffee in the kitchen.”

The thought of caffeine persuaded Phil to sit again, much more effectively than Awol’s foot. Tristan and Nyota also perked up at the word “coffee,” feeling a little cheated that Awol had neglected to mention it sooner. In a minute and a half, everyone in the apartment saved Dingo was huddled around the coffee maker filled to capacity with coffee luke warm after sitting the night. They shoved mugs of it in the microwave, downing the piping hot results and burning their tongues.

“We’re gonna have to go,” Awol said, reiterating his cryptic urgency.

“Where to?” Tristan asked.

“I’ll explain as we go.”

“Look,” the girl who was with Phil said, “We’ll have to stop by my aunt’s house. I need to get clothes.”

The immediate destination thus decided, though the ultimate one still shrouded behind Awol’s inscrutable eyes, they grabbed their things and left the apartment, piling into Awol’s van parked in the tow zone outside his building.

Awol remembered when he first met Sarah, years before she transfered to St. Anthony’s. She leaned against the wall of his high school, in the courtyard near the lunchroom doors, one combat-booted foot in the dust, the other halfway up the bricks. Her knee pointed white and naked through a hole in her jeans (not the pre-ripped pre-faded kind so fashionably worn but the dark patchy blue of old hand me downs) clinging tightly to chicken-scrawny legs. She wore a leather jacket that looked like it had been stitched from the upholstery of an abandoned car from the 70s, with tears and holes and spraypainted symbols, red and green, cryptic messages and bandnames scrawled in white out. It hung loose and open in the December wind, despite her near bare torso scarred by many small cuts, many resembling characters or words. She drew a cigarette to her lips with two skull-ringed fingers, turning to the side to exhale, her bleach-blonde mohawk striking against the bricks.

Awol, a fellow freshman at the time, approached her and asked her why she looked like that. She took a deep drag on her cigarette and shot him a piercing look through grey, mascara-smeared eyes.

“All my life, people told me I was ugly,” she said. “So I decided to make myself ugly.”

That image hung in Awol’s mind and dominated it, superimposing itself on that of Phil and his girlfriend for the day in the rearview. He watched her kiss Phil, then turn to kiss the other guy, then back again, and he thought of Sarah in the psych ward of that awful hospital, a million miles away. Would she mind? he asked himself, then chastised himself for meddling in affairs not his business.

Phil’s friend lived in one of those ancient, onefloor houses dating back before the stripmall sprawl of suburbia existed, back when the whole area was farmland. The farms had long since been sold to contractors to make subdivisions of ticky tacky two-floor boxes, differing only in color and number. This house remained, a relic of rustic poverty, all white-washed brick and peeling black shingles, laying just off the main road in the foresty frontier between towns, unclaimed by either. Awol parked in the lawn.

“Is your aunt home, Keri?” Phil asked the girl.

“Jackie? Yeah, probably. She don’t leave much.”

They went around the side as there was no front door. Jackie, a fortyish woman with long greying black hair falling loose and split ended on bone thin shoulders, sat on the cement step by a screen door that swung open and closed in the breeze. A man in a Harley shirt and old jeans sat beside her. They had been up all night, by the look of them, their eyes glazed and heavy. They passed a beer between them and slowly added cigarette butts to a pile on the ground. Jackie looked up and smiled, offering a cigarette to Keri, who took it without a word and walked past, the others following.

The house was warm and still, a radio blaring classic rock somewhere distant, a black and white TV turned low to a weather report. The worn wood floors were a mess of old newspapers and cat-toys. The cats themselves were not far away, two litters of them easily, a few dogs here and there obsessed with bones and the heat.

“Where can we talk?” Awol asked in a hushed voice.

“Here’s fine,” Keri said collapsing on a sofa. “Jackie’s cool.”

“Yeah,” Phil agreed and went to the washroom. Tristan sat on the sofa beside Keri, who was already enmeshed in the other guy. Dingo sat on some pillows in the corner and played with one of the dogs, hissing cat-like as he pulled a bone out of its mouth. Nyota sat on the wicker chair and crossed her legs in a half-lotus.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“I was gonna wait for Phil,” Awol said, “But I guess he’ll catch up.”

He eyed the porch warily, the thought of someone unknown adult listening making him nervous. He doubted he would get most of the room’s attention again, though, so he spoke on in a voice still hushed.

“Christa could only be in one of a few places. Either she went up to her brother’s place in the city, or she’s just hanging around up there, maybe around Belmont. She might also be at her Grandma’s place, down in Central Illinois.”

“What about Anarres?” Tristan cut in. “That’s what she said on the wall last night. If she meant a place away from everything, that’s not gonna be her grandma’s house.”

“Or the city,” Nyota said. “You think she might’ve gone to a commune or something?”

“That’s what Tris was saying before,” Dingo shook his head. “Christa’s not gonna go live on some farm with a bunch of old hippies.”

“Hey man,” Keri said, pulling away from the guy, “Lay off the hippies. Some of ‘em are cool.”

“Jackie’s cool. She’s the only one. Besides her, name one hippie who’s not some drugged out pacifist loser.”

“Look,” Awol said, “let’s have our counterculture arguments later, okay? It happens that Christa might’ve gone to a number of places like that. She talked about it a lot. I’ve narrowed it down to a possible five places, judging by distance and the ‘zines she read.”

He pulled out a map from his jacket and unfolded it. A red marker line meandered the highways of the Tri-state area, leading north, then south, then trailing off to the west.

“Looks like a road trip,” Nyota said.

“Yeah,” Awol said flatly. “Who’s with me?”

A silence fell on the room, the distant classic rock station louder somehow. Everyone missed Christa. Everyone wanted to know where she was. But trekking out for god-knew-how-long in Awol’s van to god-knew-where . . .

“Well I can’t do it,” the guy who hung on Keri said. “I mean, I like Christa and all, but it’s not like I know her all that well. Besides, my parents would freak if I just took off for weeks lookin’ for some girl who could be anywhere.”

“Yeah,” Keri agreed. “I couldn’t go either. Not for weeks and shit. Sorry man.”

Keri and the guy went back to kissing, and Awol felt suddenly sick looking at them. He turned away.

“Would it really be for weeks?” Nyota asked.

“Hard to say,” Awol said. “It could be only a couple of days. Of course, it could be a week or two. It could take all summer.”

Nyota looked down at the floor, catching two kittens wrestling over a piece of string. She pictured her father and mother, both lawyers and both already disapproving of her dread-locks and her hippie clothes and her white boyfriends and her “uncollegiate attitude.” She pictured their reaction to her trekking out in an unstable vehicle with a bunch of kids they quite rightly thought were on drugs. “They’d never let me back in,” she thought, seeing an ivory door slam shut in her face.

Tristan saw his dad, sprawled out in his bed in the afternoon, screaming and crying in his sleep at a hundred mob hit men and CIA agents in his nightmares. Then he saw Christa’s face, pictured it without the mane of hair that framed it, saw her hitching rides with monstrous men who saw twisted opportunities in her helplessness.

“Fuck yeah! I’ll go!”

Phil stood in the doorframe, having heard most of the conversation from the john. Awol looked at Phil relieved, but changed his expression when he saw Phil’s. He looked nervous, more than usual, and seemed like he regretted just yelling assent. He thought about Christa and he thought about leaving. Then he thought about Sarah in the hospital, who he was barred from seeing. What if she got out when he was gone? What about their plans to run away together and go out west?

Awol breathed hard, his face tense and his eyes a little glossy. “Fuck you all!” he felt like shouting. Instead, he spoke softly, in a tone more harsh than any screaming.

“I’ll go by myself if I have to. If I catch up with Christa, I’ll be sure to say you all had really good excuses for not coming along.”

He turned and walked out. Jackie and her friend still sat on the stoop, the pile of cigarette butts on the ground having grown a little since they went in.

“Nice jacket, man,” the guy called after Awol, eying his motorcycle leather draping one shoulder. “You ride?”

Awol stopped. “No. I drive.”

“Is that your van out there, honey?” Jackie asked, offering him a cigarette.

“Yeah.”

“It’s big! Must be great for road trips.”

Awol took the cigarette and smiled bitterly.

“I hope so.”