Code Junkie

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

"Was your grandpa always the crazy prophet fisherman from Jaws?"

There was a reason I did not open up to my friends.

"No, Ted. I don't even know him. He died a long time ago. A few years after I was born, I think. He was never in the picture. He gave our family military health benefits and a handful of good stories and antiques. Mom and dad refuse to talk about him and grandma's dead. But I do remember him, very, very loosely."

"Oh," Ted says. "I'm sorry."

"It's nothing. Don't worry."

"You know we're just concerned, dude. We just don't want to see another... incident happen, you know?"

I think of my car at the bottom of the lake.

"Yes, I know."

Jerry was scraping at the bottom of his ceramic bowl with his fork. He had ordered oatmeal and was simply not content to move onto the latter portion of his breakfast. The waitress watched, amused, from behind the diner's bar section. Some people get pet dogs to attract the opposite sex. They had an adorable being of a lesser intelligence around to make small talk over and watch in joyful stupidity. We had Jerry.

Jerry and Ted begin talking about something that was going on at work and I place Sal's manuscript on the table. The Yellowed King. I can see that this is some word play on a weird fiction classic. I cannot remember the original's exact name and I would not be bothered to lie about having read it, but I know it exists. The first page after the title is a list of characters. There are a handful of names with far too many vowels and syllables and I roll my eyes at Sal's character creation. But the three main characters are named Virgil, the Poet, and the Lover. Everyone else is a bastardization of some Roman-sounding name, or a type of salad dressing.

The world he paints is beautiful, I must admit. Rolling hills of golden wheat and vegetation, and things beyond our normalcy. Forests full of sparkling wood and twilighted charm. Purple skies and thorned shrubbery that does not pierce the flesh. Wonder, beauty. Sal is obviously the narrator of the character Virgil. He is all knowing, all telling, and all fabulous. He knows everything there is to know about the Poet and his Lover. The Lover is a blundering fool, star-crossed and confused. The Poet is relatively knowing and callous. The Lover is not keen to the Poet's underhanded doings. Jerry sneezes loudly and snot-rockets onto the table.

"Ahhhhhhh..." he whines and clutches a hand to his nose, rising and exiting the table and retreating to the bathroom.

Apparently, he was not as stupid as we had believed and may have actually known that the waitress was eying him up. He knew he was under the microscope and he fucking blew it.

I am half-reading and half-seeing how quickly I can get through these pages. It is formatted properly and is not difficult, but you know I was never really one for theatre. A page I am passing over catches my eye and I turn back. There on top is a simple statement: THE FAMILY BUSINESS AND THE ROYAL BLOOD. Oh, Salvatore. I wonder if he is a stoner. He is a bit more finessed and better-dressing than the old hippies I know of in the area, but I know far too many almost-millionaires who partake in the same pastime. The Poet is holding his Lover in his arms and is crying, sobbing into open wounds and blood. From an omnipotent distance, Virgil is bowing his head and writing on a length of parchment, stating his sympathies for the two, poor bastards, writing concurrently to the tragic scene, accounting for it in its entirety. His thoughts ebb through the narrative as the Lover's blood seeps through the Poet's fingers. Virgil is miles away, in a tower half-submerged in a swamp. He describes himself as wearing sodden clothes and his skin is damp with decay. The pale glow of his only remaining candle is dying.

He knows this because Sal knows this, he writes this because Sal wrote it. Virgil gives a hint of helplessness, the curse of knowing all but being contained within a mortal body that is truly incapable of being a savior. Not only that, but he is far too away from the actual scene. He is a mystic, after all, visible of sight, yet incapable of action. I cannot discern the actual tragedy at hand, I had only skimmed the play up until this point. The Poet slowly lowers the body of his Lover and stands. I expect him, per Sal's dramatic tendencies, to shout towards the heavens, to curse whoever did this, but instead, he looks down and sighs. Even through the text of an aging hipster old man, I can feel the gravity of this scene and the emotions it carries. The Poet's lips flatten into an almost smile and he holds out his hands to be cleansed in this newly manifested rain, as they are outside. He sits down, dead leaves and dirt all around him, and sits in a meditative pose. Snarling creatures begin to surround him from far away. They are rapidly descending upon his location. He sits, his palms towards the sky, content in the rain, and simply says, "I am ready to go."

The act ends at the closure of this scene. There are only a few pages left of the play, so I wonder exactly what this means, where is he going, who are the creatures that are closing on him – then the waitress drops a handful of silverware two tables down and bends over to retrieve them. This is as much of a sight that I need to be distracted from the old man's writing.

Jerry comes back to the table, embarrassed, his nose red from the friction of cleaning himself, and connects the dots of my eyes to this waitress' backside.

"You're a pig," he sits down, as if I hurt his honor. As if they were destined to get married, have a dozen hideous children, and to retire in Deptford.

"She dropped the forks," I offer.

"And the sky is blue. And you are a pig," Jerry deadpans.

"Will there be anything else this morning?" the waitress popped up.

Ted and I shook our heads and reached for our wallets. My eyes shot towards the waitress' nametag and I read "Mildred" – I mentally dry heaved at the name, but any social nausea was about to be blown away by what our Jerry did.

"Oh, no thanks, Millie," Jerry said, without a stutter. Without a hint of anxiety. Without staring at her chest the entire time. He made a pet name out of her nametag. "Everything was wonderful."

By the vengeful gods, by Carl Sagan and every driven scientist, by every kid who ever took apart the remote control just to see how his world worked, by the very nature of the universe alone, I was astounded. As she left to retrieve the bill, Ted and I stared, dumbfounded at our boy.

"What?" Jerry asked, obviously proud. "She helped me out when I had my accident (referring to his hasty retreat to the bathroom that we had not paid enough attention to). You two dinks were too mean to bother to help me."

Ted clapped him on the shoulder. We paid the tab and left. There was a phone number on the receipt for Jerry.