Bent Highway
Chapter Twenty: Living Room
Door chimes morphed into Kraftwerk-esque electronica, underpinned by a pulsing bass and a stick hitting the edge of a snare. If I was about to die, at least it was going to be to a beat. Figures walked out of the glowing walls, in perfect time with the music. Two, maybe three dozen, all males, all different ages. A few of them looked similar to my grunge wearing guide. No, correction, they didn’t look similar—they were exact replicas. I scanned the room. A group of kids with short haircuts, more teens next to them, and then a group of twenty-year olds.
“Who are they?”
“I think you know.” He unbuttoned the top two buttons of his plaid shirt, and then did them up again. I used to do that in my teen years, like a nervous tic with clothes, never sure of the exact button positioning.
The figures got closer, making a large half-circle around me. The music shifted, a chorus of “ooos”, and a R and B riff slid into the room. Necks moved in unison, feet tapped in rhythm. This was some groovy shit. There were lots of Adidas in various shades, the twenty-year olds wore heavy black Doc Martens—steel-toed, I could be sure of that. I wore them all through my—I stopped the thought.
“What is this place?”
My head had started to swim in recognition. A t-shirt with baseball sleeves from Blue Oyster Cult, a pair of painter’s pants, an International Harvester hat, long hair sprouting out the sides like a spider-plant gone wrong. Fuck. It was a living photo album.
“Why?” It’s all that came to me, so I asked it again. “Why?”
“Damned if I know,” my guide said. “Pretty cool fucking music though, ‘eh?”
Another shift, hard guitars slamming power chords, another bass dotting the background with bullets of sound, feedback and screaming vocals over it all.
Now everybody was dancing this weird swinging arm sort of way. I let it sink in that I’d finally gone insane. Fine. We all gotta go some time.
“C’mon. We need to keep going.” No doubt my guide was also me somewhere in the teen years.
“What? Where?” I asked me.
The teenage grunge me tugged at my sleeve, and the dancers parted to create a direct path to a door outlined in blood red. The group hummed together the same sound.
“Mmmmmmm.”
I followed into the doorway, which slid open as we reached it.
“Hang on,” he, I, said.
“To what?”
“Your mind.” He laughed.
This time the sound didn’t come from music but from row after row of small figures crawling across the floor. They weren’t crying, or doing those baby coos that babies do, they were all murmuring. I looked back to the room we had just left, the door had already slid across.
“Those were all me. At different ages.”
Teenage me nodded.
“And these are me. As a baby.” The murmurs went up a third of a note, perfect infant harmony. “But why so many?”
“These are the in-betweeners.”
“The what?”
“It seems like going into a room where you meet yourself at every age, well, you wanna take that slow. That’s how it was for me when I did it.” Teenage me took a deep sniff. “Shit, I didn’t even know all those old guys.”
“Wait. When you did this?" I asked.
“Yeah. I think we all did. I don’t know. If I think too hard on it my head starts to hurt. And then my balls.”
“Why do your balls hurt?”
“It’s all connected. Shit, I thought I got smarter when I get older. I guess you’re proof that I don’t.”
“Thanks.”
“Whatever. Anyway, now we’re in the place where they show all the other ages. I guess they like to start with these little yard apes.”
“Who is they?”
“Damned if I know. Oh, wait, watch that back wall.”
A section of wall lifted behind the room full of crawling babies. Another group of figures, many dressed like the ones in the previous room, were crowded in close to each other. There had to be several hundred. A pain started at the back of my skull.
“And again.” Teenage me pointed a finger over the heads of the crowd. When the other wall lifted, I thought it revealed an odd wallpaper, multi-coloured tiny men, boys and children in a pattern, with windows of white showing through. It wasn’t wall paper.
“How?” I swallowed hard, my head throbbed. Dammit, my balls started to hurt, too.
He must have seen me grab my groin, as teenage me gave a knowing nod.
“How many rooms?” I asked through the pain.
The teenager shrugged.
“I didn’t have this many,” he said. “Still kinda fucks you up, doesn’t it?”
Something flashed in my mind.
“Wait. You’ve brought me here, so someone brought you. Who took you here when you came? Someone older than you—I mean me?” My brain threatened to jump out of my ears and kick me in the crotch. “Or someone younger?”
“Huh? Oh, neither. It was some other guy. I don’t remember much of it, or how it happened. He just walked me into a room. Things are bit messed up in my head. I think that was the point.”
I looked across the room, trying to see over the heads, the white had all but disappeared.
“They are all me?” I asked.
“Every one of them.” I replied. "At different times. Every single time, actually. Every moment."
I fell down on one knee and stared into a baby me. The kid’s eyes widened and he opened his mouth.
“Trippy, dude,” he said. It came out in that baby accent, and was more like, “Twippy, dood.”
“I don’t know what this means.” I said to the baby me, who stuck out his tongue at me and blew a raspberry. “I need to get out of here. I have to find Walt, and Chalk Girl.”
“Oh, I’d forget about those two. You won’t be seeing them again. Ever.” The teenager’s voice had dropped about an octave. He must have been from when my voice was changing during puberty.
“Why should I forget about them?”
“Oh look, I think another door opened. Have a gander,” he said in a deep voice.
Impossibly, the room in front of me became more crowded. I had a distant memory of being in Jamaica in a gutted out mini-van that they used as public transport. When I’d got on, the vehicle was already jammed full. I was squished in next to a three-hundred pound bald man who smelled like jerk chicken and sewage. The van spun through the city, a man hung out the open door and beckoned new riders. Each time we stopped, I thought there was no way they’d get another body into the van. And somehow they did. And another. And another.
“Why should I forget about them?” I asked again.
“Because now that I finally have you, they’re both as good as dead. It's about time I got rid of that sanctimonious walking pituitary disorder.”
I didn’t talk like that.
“Walt?”
The pain in my head was explosive. The dam was about to break and the valley would be flooded. All the villagers would die. Poor bastards wouldn’t know what hit them. White spots formed in the corner of my vision. I braced myself against the floor and cranked my head back to the teenage me. Even through the blurred vision, I made out the thick black fro.
Damned if he wasn’t slurping a lime Big Gulp. And wearing my plaid shirt. Oh shit.
“Nighty-night asshole.”
The light inside my head went off.
This had a feel like the end of 2001 Space Odyssey, all the times melded...
It created a fractal imagery in my head. It's the best!