Дэвид Митчелл - Utopia Avenue

Nobody else is up. He puts on his shoes and socks, uses the bathroom and does not pee diamonds. He drinks a mug of water, takes an apple from a crystal bowl, writes a note on a phone memo saying, Jerry, I leave you not quite the same as you found me. Cheers, Dean – PS I borrowed an apple , and slips it under Jerry’s door. The air on the elevated porch is crisp and cool. The trees across Ashbury Street break Dean’s heart. He can’t say why. Chayton is on his rocking chair, reading the New Yorker . ‘Another beautiful morning,’ says the confirmed Indian. ‘It may rain later.’

‘Thanks for minding me yesterday.’

Chayton makes an it’s-nothing face.

‘Where’s that cat o’ yours?’

‘That cat is no man’s cat. She comes, she goes.’

Dean goes down a few steps, then turns. ‘Can yer walk to Turk and Hyde from here?’

Chayton illustrates his directions with his vertical palm. ‘Go down Haight Street, all the way to Market. Carry on straight. Hyde is six blocks on your left. Turk’s four blocks up. Forty minutes.’

‘’Ppreciate it.’

‘Be seeing you soon.’

The sunny side of Haight Street is too bright, so Dean crosses to the shady side where his eyeballs work better. The neighbourhood puts him in mind of the morning after an epic unauthorised house-party. Slip off before the bills fall due . Few humans are about. Overturned bins spill their trashy guts into the gutter. Crows and mangy dogs bicker over the spoils. He bites the borrowed apple. It’s golden and zesty, like an apple from a myth. Dean passes what looks like a bingo hall, but is in fact a church. He wonders if it’s the church in The Mamas and the Papas’ ‘California Dreamin’’, and remembers that he can now phone Cass Elliot and just ask her.

Three or four blocks later, the hippie vibe gives way to humdrum frontages. A hilly park rears up where birds Dean can’t name sing in trees he can’t name. He prefers the world in its shabbier clothes, he decides. My trip was a revelation , he thinks, but yer can’t live in a revelation. He knows Griff and Elf are going to quiz him about his acid trip; and knows he won’t be able to convey a thousandth of it in words. It’s like trying to perform a symphony with a skiffle group. Dean remembers the skeleton band. A few sketchy fragments of the Music of Creation are near, he’s sure … tantalisingly near …

But it wouldn’t sound like it did. A teenage couple are asleep under a ragged blanket on a park bench under a tree that mutters to itself. Twins in a womb . Dean thinks of Kenny and Floss and hopes the couple are here as the epilogue of a magical night, and not because they have nowhere else to go. He hears a tram – called a ‘streetcar’ – up ahead, and thinks of a milk-float making its way up Peacock Street in Gravesend. Ray’ll be home now, after a nine-hour shift at the engineering plant. Dean arrives at an intersection. A sign says ‘MARKET STREET’. A café is opening, right by the streetcar stop. It’s cool and shady and Dean thinks, Why not?

He goes in, sits by the open window and orders a coffee from a waitress in her forties whose name-badge says, ‘I’m Gloria!’ America loves exclamation marks . He tries to summon up the names and faces of the waitresses he worked with at the Etna Café. He’s forgotten them. One worried about him, that January night he had nowhere to sleep. She wanted to let him sleep on her floor, but was afraid of her landlady. The night Utopia Avenue began.

Dean takes Allen Klein’s business card out of his wallet. He holds one corner in the flame of his lighter and incinerates it in the ashtray. It burns purplishly. He’s not sure what his logic is, but it feels right. We’re a band. When the card is gone, Dean feels as if a heavy weight has been removed. Out on Market Street, two vans stop for a red light. The side of the front van is emblazoned with the slogan, ‘ THE BEST TV RENTALS IN TOWN’. The second reads, ‘L&H MOVERS – ACROSS THE PLANET!’ A few seconds later, another van stops in the nearest lane, half-eclipsing the two behind. Its side-panel reads THIRD STREET DRY CLEANERS, the four words stacked one above the next. The alignment and position of the vans is such that, at Dean’s eye-level, a phrase is spelled out: THE – THIRD – PLANET. Dean takes out his notebook from his jacket and writes it down. ‘The Third Planet’. By the time he’s finished, the vans have departed. Behind the bar, steam is being blasted through his ground coffee beans …

… and here is his coffee, served in a big blue bowl, like poets and philosophers drink it in Paris, Dean imagines. He takes a sip. The temperature’s just right. He slurps up a third of the cup and holds it in his mouth, letting the coffee work its magic. Dean swallows, and all his tangled thinking about his possible son comes unknotted. I’ll assume Arthur’s my son. I’ll pay his mother maintenance. Every month, no pissing about. Enough so they don’t have to scrimp ’ n’ save. We won’t get married, ’cause her ’n’ me both deserve to find someone we love, but we’ll aim at friendly relations. In a couple o’ years, when Arthur’s a walking, talking boy and not a blobby baby, I’ll invite Amanda ’n’ him to Gravesend to meet Nan Moss and the aunts. They’ll know if he’s my son or not. Even I’ll know by then, I reckon. If it’s a yes, I’ll shunt my life around so Arthur knows I’m his dad. I’ll teach him how to fish on the pier up past the old fort. If it’s a no, I’ll offer to be Arthur’s godfather, and I’ll still teach him how to fish. Dean opens his eyes.

‘That should work,’ he murmurs to himself.

‘How’s your coffee?’ asks Gloria the waitress.

Dean knows he’s supposed to just say, ‘Fine’, but he decides to be Jasper for a moment. ‘Let’s see. Temperature: warm, not scalding. Taste …’ Dean sips. ‘Good blend, nicely toasted, smooth, not bitter. It’s bloody perfect. The danger is that all future coffees sort o’ pale in comparison. But who knows? Maybe it’ll usher in the dawn of a new Coffee Age. Only time will tell. And that, Gloria, if I may use yer name, I’m Dean by the way, that is how my coffee is. Thank yer for asking.’

‘Wow. My gosh. Glad to hear it. I’ll tell Pedro. He made it. So, um … that’ll be thirty cents, then, when you’re ready.’

‘Rightio.’ She thinks yer too stoned to pay. He puts a dollar on the table. ‘Keep the change. You ’n’ Pedro.’

Her anxiety vanishes. ‘Are you sure?’

‘It’s yours. And Pedro’s.’

‘Thank you.’ The dollar vanishes into her apron.

‘It’s a big day. I …’ say it ‘… am going to be a dad.’

‘Congratulations, Dean! When’s the baby due?’

‘Three months ago.’

Gloria’s confused. ‘So, he’s already born?’

‘Yeah. Bit of a long story. His name’s Arthur. It’s new territory for me, but …’ Dean thinks of the pilgrim on the Eight of Cups. ‘Life’s a journey, don’t yer think?’

The waitress looks out at Market Street, thinks of other times, and looks back. ‘It should be. The best of luck with Arthur. You helped make him, but he’ll make a man of you.’

Dean passes not-yet-open shops, boarded-up shops, low offices, a building site, a plot of wasteland, a depot. Nothing to write home about . Every twenty or thirty paces a tree is losing its leaves to the warm wind. Traffic stampedes between the intersections of Market Street. Motorbikes swerve between the bigger beasts. A truck is pulled up outside a butcher’s. Carcasses hang on racks. Dean inhales the breath of the abattoir. A force that is not him runs through him, like the current in the streetcars’ overhead cable. What if ley-lines aren’t total bollocks? The buildings grow as downtown approaches. Dean finds Hyde Street and remembers Chayton’s instructions. Now I know where I am . Where Hyde crosses Turk Street, that’s the studio. Dean checks his watch. The band will be at the studio in thirty minutes or so. I’ll be there in fifteen . Carry on up to Sutter Street, and there’s the hotel. He’ll have time for a shower. I’d better: I’m hot ’n’ sweaty ’n’ stinking. He passes the Opera House, a big heavy building you might find in Haymarket or Kensington Gardens, with columns and Georgian windows. Hyde Street slopes uphill. It’s not a posh district. Dean passes a pawn shop with steel mesh over the windows. A down-at-heel laundromat. Not launderette. ‘TENDERLOIN GIRLIE SHOW’. A parking lot where a rusty sedan has no wheels. Brambles twist out of cracks. A bundled figure is slumped in a doorway. A biro-on-cardboard sign says, ‘I BEEN DOING THIS SHIT FOR 20 YEARS.’ Poverty in California looks as miserable as poverty anywhere. He puts fifty cents into the man’s hand. Grimy fingers close. He has red eyes and he says, ‘That all you got?’ At the corner of Eddy Street, a shop is open: Eddy Turk’s General & Liquor.