J. Lennon - See You in Paradise

“I got us some stuff,” Weber said.

“I can see that,” I replied.

“It’s all for our special day.”

Sandy said, “I still don’t see what’s so special about it.”

“Everything,” Weber said, taking her hands. “Everything about it is very special.” I caught a glimpse of Sandy rolling her eyes.

They turned, walked out the door, and headed for the mountain. But after a moment, Weber came back. He hurried over to me and laid his hands on my shoulders. Even through my oxford shirt I could feel how damp they were.

“I won’t be the same when I come back. You need to understand that, roomie.”

“Okay …”

“Old John Weber will be no more.” His face appeared beatific, or perhaps just flushed. “You won’t be able to count on my advice — new John Weber might be beyond all that. So I just want to tell you now — you need to change, too.”

“Do I?”

“Put it all behind you. The trains and stuff. All your internet groups. Find purpose for your life. That’s all.” He lifted his hands and brought them down on my shoulders a second time, perhaps a bit too heartily.

“Did you look on my computer?” I asked him.

But he only shook his head, his real head, the less intelligent of the two. “So long,” he said and marched out.

Here’s what had happened the night before: I strolled into the fishing and hunting shop right before it closed and asked Ruperta if she’d let me take her out to dinner. She said yes. We got into her car and drove east around Mount Peak, and then south behind its much more impressive twin, Mount Clark. Eventually we came to the large log structure that housed Pappy’s Best Steaks Ever Grill, where, if you had the money and, more importantly, the desire, you could walk around back and pick out, from a meadow, which grass-fed steer you wished to devour that night. They would slaughter it on the spot, and when you were through eating, they would load the leftover butchered cuts, wrapped in white paper and packed into cardboard boxes, onto the back of your pickup truck.

We did not choose that option, though. Ruperta had some prime rib, and I ordered barbecued chicken.

“You’re not going all hippie vegetarian on me, are you?” she asked.

“Chicken’s not a vegetable,” I argued.

“It’s close.”

We didn’t say much during the meal. Afterward we drove out to the all-night shooting range, and I watched Ruperta spray a man-shaped target with hot lead underneath the arc lights. I was impressed — she was very good. When she was through we sat in the car and made out, and she lay her fat little hand on my crotch.

“Is this real?” she quipped.

“Ha ha.”

“You should know I slept with my boss a couple of times.”

“Oh,” I said. I had assumed, of course, that she would go seeking amorous companionship, but it was hard to imagine it actually happening. I felt very small.

She frowned and removed her hand. “Hmm. Just like old times.”

And so all this was on my mind as I sat and watched through the kitchen window as Weber and Sandy scaled the mountain. Now, I am not big on epiphanies. But as their bunched, indistinguishably hairy calves vanished from the frame, I felt a bottomless hole open up in the floor of my soul, and I knew with sickening certainty that, if I did not leave this place immediately, I was going to die here. John Weber would marry his weathered nymph, and they would keep me, like a son or drooling pet, in this hideous little clapboard prison. Or worse yet, Sandy would decline to wed, and then Weber and I would be alone. One way or another, I would never escape Weber. His avidity was more powerful than my aversion. He had a life force — he had joie de vivre. All I had was a collection of train books and an intimidating ex-girlfriend.

Maybe he was right about me.

I went to Weber’s room and pawed, once again, through his possessions. I had my own things, of course, mementoes of an unremarkable life, stored away in boxes and crates in the closet, but they didn’t interest me. I knew Weber’s better than mine. The head still stood on its pedestal, gazing out at the mountain’s cheesy face, and was I imagining it, or did it look a little smugger these days, a little more smarmy, a little more glib? I don’t know what made me do what I did next — some uncharacteristic upwelling of personality, maybe — but I dropped the packet of state-themed postcards I was holding, took three steps across the room, and mashed in Weber’s nose with my thumb. I gasped, as if having just watched someone else do it. The face was ruined, of course; the jolly ape Weber had always secretly resembled was revealed in all its glory, with my whorled print in the center of it.

That was that. I was gone. I would leave it all behind. I ran to the bedroom; snatched up my wallet, an extra pair of eyeglasses, and my only pair of clean socks; and bolted for the door, shouldering on my coat as I went.

I made it to the middle of the gravel lot before I changed my mind. The air was chill, the sun was nowhere to be found, and I had already lost heart. I couldn’t just leave. I couldn’t just start over. What had I been thinking? I was not that kind of man; rather, I was the kind of man who endured, ignored, and took his lumps. Perhaps I could mound the nose back into shape. I turned, drew a deep breath, and took one step back toward the door.

There was a rumbling. Thunder, I surmised — or a big rig passing on the freeway. But I could feel it in my stomach, in my bowels, and I knew that this was something else, a new sound, low and terrible.

A moment later, dozens of animals, their patchy fur standing on end, came pouring around the sides of our building — squirrels, deer and elk, grouse and chukars, a mountain cat and a lone galloping moose — and streamed past me as if I were a rock or tree. I did not understand what it was I was seeing. The animals fled, the rumble grew in intensity, and I looked up to see an avalanche, a white wave fast approaching, scouring the mountain clean: a million little boulders, ten years of Sisyphean teenage ambition loosed from the tyranny of the text. The BEAVERS sign, ruined, and on the rampage.

A hundred lifetimes might have passed in those awful moments, as the stones screamed down the rock face — a hundred of my lifetime, anyway, which might as well have been lived in a second, for all the good it had done anyone — and buried our lousy little shack of a home. Buried is the wrong word, perhaps. Annihilated is more like it. Our apartment unit, all of the apartment units, were crushed. The wave stopped at my feet, half-surrounding me in an implausible arc of apparent magnetic repulsion, and I stood there, blinking at the dusty ruins.

Of course there would be lawsuits, lots of them. There would be resignations, elections, excuses, exhortations. The landlord would flee. The Open Space Committee would be formed. The high school would change the name of its mascot. And, in time, the crushed bodies of Weber and his girl would be discovered in the rubble, and upon her broken finger an engagement ring would be found. This last, of course, is the detail that would be best remembered: a love so strong, it brought down a mountain.

My own life, though, would never be so romantic. I would merely shack back up with Ruperta, regain my potency, and happily resign myself to life as a kept man. When a heart attack claimed her lovesick employer, she would buy the business for a song and open three more across the state. She would become mildly famous throughout the region for her amusing television ads in which she lured white-tail deer with a come-hither glance. And when, in a rare exhibition of initiative, I proposed marriage to her, she would respond by driving us to the courthouse to get it over with.