Charles Bock - Beautiful Children

Kenny stared over at the sedan, its engine idling with barely contained power. After a long moment, embossed lips smiled tightly in return.

“Hey,” he said, addressing Newell casually, almost absently. “What are you doing later?”

“Dickfuck. Why?”

“I thought, dunno, we could — a movie? Maybe just drive around. Hang or whatever. I mean, it still won't be anything, but, you know, something.”

Newell's freckles turned a deeper color, and it looked as if his face were glowing, lit from inside. “For reals?” Newell asked. “Dude. Aww. You rule. ”

“I have to get my aunt from work. Figure I'll come by between seven and eight—”

The bleat that interrupted them was short, and sharp, and scattered small black birds from their lamppost perch. “I gotta go,” Newell said. After pounding Kenny's hand with his fist, he took off, a spark in his stride now, this coherent, optimistic agility. His shorts were slipping but he did nothing to stop them. Before disappearing into the backseat, he quickly looked back and over his shoulder. Cupping a hand to his mouth, he called, “Don't wuss out.”

The sky that afternoon was perfect and blue and stretched endlessly in all directions, and it was as if the day's brightness and intensity brought each detail into a crystalline focus: the onetime franchise diner from an era of ice cream socials; the massive main lot, just a bit more than half-filled, most of the cars showing themselves as white, gray, light blue, or some other color the sun could not ruin. Kenny stood there for endless seconds, letting the last shouts ( “Yeaah boiiey! You the man!” ) fade. He dutifully watched the sedan disappear into traffic, brushed a stray coagulation of hair from his eyes, felt the sun wide across the middle of his forehead and in a sharper crease between his eyes; he felt anonymous, a loneliness gripping him, this sense of intense emptiness — rooted in his stomach, it spread outward, threatening to swallow him whole. At the same time, Kenny felt something else: the small and penetrating type of failure that comes exclusively when a person must face a question, the answer of which terrifies him.

Kenny's hands were clammy; and he realized that at some point during his conversation with Newell, he had rolled his drawings up into a tight scroll. He dropped to one knee now, and pain flared where he made contact with the sidewalk, and he began smoothing out the damp pieces of paper. Then he wiped his hands on his T-shirt. His head ducked; simultaneously, his arm raised. A quick whiff. Of all days to forget deodorant.

A few months before the World Trade Center was attacked, an angry man of Arabic descent told a librarian in Hamburg, Germany, Thousands will be dead and you will think of me. This warning reminded Bing Beiderbixxe of one issued from that high school parking lot— You don't want to be at school today. I'm telling you because I like you. And that line never failed to lead Bing back to something he'd read in one of his favorite novels: Beckett is the last major writer to shape the way we think and see. After him, the major works involve midair explosions and crumbling buildings. This is the new tragic narrative.

He did not know what, if anything, any of it meant, if those examples weren't just cases where coincidence and human nature created overlapping similarities. Lots of times, the conclusion a person makes tells you more about how they think, as opposed to revealing any kind of grand scheme. After all, someone steps on a butterfly, that doesn't mean he caused an earthquake halfway across the world. Only, this was not butterflies and this was not earthquakes.

Bing Beiderbixxe was now three months shy of his twenty-fifth birthday and nowhere near the finished and mature person he wanted to be; yet he honestly could claim he was working on it, evolving, taking the slow and arduous baby steps that were mandatory for the transition from self-consciousness to self-awareness, coming into the distance necessary to have some perspective on his past, all that self-help shit. Problem was, at the same time, he was slaving away on an undertaking that just wasn't succeeding, a project that, no matter how good an idea it might have been, just wasn't getting through. Two weekends of each month in a storefront in some strip mall, wasting his afternoons at fold-out autograph tables, sitting beneath too bright halogen lights and dealing with obsessive types who believed that maybe one day his autograph on the first issue of this failing comic book would be worth something, four hours at a time, making small talk with college kids who had little else to do, staring at primitive drawings made by young men who thought his job was glamorous, slugoids who for whatever reason wanted his career, wanted to be Bing — which they were more than welcome to be, only then Bing would have to figure out what the hell else he was going to do.

Bing smiled big and pretty. “No,” he said, “of course I don't mind personalizing the greeting. To whom do I make this out?”

Searching for his pen, he made light of his forgetfulness, then scribbled out yet another signature, and asked, What's it like living here in Vegas?

Shy teenagers shrugged and said they'd grown up here, they didn't have anything to compare Las Vegas to. Know-it-alls looked at Bing like he was batshit crazy, as if he'd asked them what it was like to live in Crapsville, North Dakota.

Whatever they said, Bing listened. However strangely they acted, he responded with practiced sincerity and understanding and the momentary pretense of thought. Beiderbixxe the Curious. Bing the Attentive. A final sip of his Big Slam. Another bite of a high-protein energy bar that tasted like a combination of chocolate and chalk.

Surely life had to hold more than this! Rock and movie stars got nubile groupies in thong underwear, after all. Rappers traveled with posses of Uzi-toting steel-fanged homies. Even young women with acoustic guitars and songs of female teen angst didn't do so badly, attracting younger women with glandular problems and metal lunch boxes stuffed with dead white roses. But your friendly neighborhood comic book illustrator? All he got were these long-haired mongoloids, lurking in the background, trying to summon the intestinal fortitude to approach him. How the Bingster yearned to break free of labels and limitations! How much more than a simple illustrator he knew himself to be: a scholar and a gentleman, a chronicler of metaphysical conundrums, and a devotee of historical arcana. Did the surrounding flotsam have the slightest idea that Der Bingelot not only had built, but maintained and governed, his own virtual Roman empire? That he was now proficient in JavaScript, HTML, C++, and rudimentary bump mapping? That after only two months on free weights, he had lost five pounds while increasing his arm-curl workout by ten?

And did any of his so-called fans, in any way, shape or form, know which burlesque house was nearest his motel?

The espadrille eased down onto the gas pedal, moved to the brake, and did the same thing, the sedan inching ahead. Lorraine stared forward, without energy. In front of her, a blood-red pickup sat high on raised tires, its gleaming bumper festooned with stickers. One announced that freedom was not free. Another promoted 92.3 KOMP as the rock of Las Vegas. Especially eye-catching was the sketchy outline of a spike-haired boy — he had a devilish look, and was urinating, in an arcing stream, onto the name of a foreign automaker.

Ahead a bit and to the left, some poor bastard was standing in front of a raised hood, waving through black-and-white billows. But he wasn't responsible for all the gridlock. It was a gruesome scene, spanning all four lanes in each direction, with rows of brake lights and blinkers washed out by the sun, and an oppressive glare reflecting off hoods and windows. Even the air along the road was gray and dingy and gross, for pollutants had collected for months without any rainfall to wash them away. Median foliage, fortified by so much carbon dioxide, was in full bloom and covered in soot, with the weaker, newer branches buckling beneath layers of dirt. Mobile calls constantly juxtaposed and faded. Kerosene mirages were not uncommon.