jd87: Under a Chemical Sky

by Josh Delman

I'm a crazy college student who likes to write things. I eat peanut butter out of the jar with a spoon. I've really been appreciating bananas recently. I'm going to start telling people that when they ask me "what's new?"

If you're interested, there's an RSS feed. For your auditory pleasure: my Last.fm. Some jd87 highlights: Live at Westgate, Haikus, Pt. 1.

This site might be a blog, it might be a a repository for fiction, or it might be something else altogether. Please enjoy.

2009: January / February / March / April / May / June / July / August / September

Under a Chemical Sky FICTION

The three of them had been at the beach for nearly an hour, tossing a frisbee and running in the sand. Greg quit early, citing his asthma, and then spent twenty or thirty minutes squeezing the sand underneath his toes. He had a weird thing for sticking things in the vestigially webbed spaces between his toes: blankets, the edges of rugs, pillows, his fingers: something about it relaxed him, made him feel comfortable in his human skin.

They had smuggled with them a small conical joint. Their first lighter didn’t work, and they didn’t feel like walking back to the car to find the other one, so Jason took off his glasses and recalled out loud some theory about reflection and refraction from the optics portion of his remedial physics class, then focused the light at the twisted tip of the J. He watched in puerile glee as the tip ignited, and the paper began to slowly combust and hiss smoke.

Greg watched as Alex punched Jason in the shoulder. He wasn’t sure if Alex was joking or not – if he wasn’t, the reason for the punch was probably that Alex was there to lie in the sun and smoke marijuana, not to listen to Jason give an impromptu and surely quasi-fictional lecture on optics.

Greg’s whole existence on earth had felt rather meaningless in a religious or cosmic way. What was he here for – what was his purpose here on earth? – and these sorts of thoughts flew through his head at superluminal speeds, way too quickly to grab on to and hold for a second and really think about. He so dearly wanted to hold on to one of these thoughts, and his inability to do so while sober filled him with a kind of self-conscious dread that sometimes worsened after smoking. He was reluctant to say anything, lest he be ridiculed by his friends, who he considered to be much more intelligent and articulate.

Then for a while they just sat on their beach towels, watching the blue-green waves rush in and out. The whooshing noise was cyclic and almost narcotically calming. Greg had to consciously blink his eyes every once in a while. Propeller planes droned overhead like mechanical cicadas, signaling the beginning of summer.

It can be hard to maintain silence sometimes, but thirty minutes had gone by without any of them saying a word to each other.

The three of them had recently graduated from college, all different majors and schools, and barely kept in touch while they were away. Their one common bond was a love for the buds of the pungent green Cannibis sativa, but none of them had direct, conscious knowledge of that fact. They didn’t really know why they kept hanging out. It was just something to do, to idly pass through the hours.

“It’s really too bad,” Jason said. His chin rested on a genuflected knee while he used his right index finger to poke holes in the sand. The wet sand was better for poking holes in, Jason was probably thinking, as the more dirt-like particles in the sand formed a sort of sloshy mud that had structural fortitude.

“What’s too bad?”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“Huh?”

“Too bad – you just said something about too bad.”

“No I didn’t.”

They sat there a bit more until a little nude boy ran across the sand in front of them.

“Someone should teach that kid some manners,” Greg said. He was determined to make a difference. There were times when he felt like he had no effect on the world, that he was more a passive observer than an active participant. His perception of a lack-of-will stretched to every human experience imaginable: he never picked what movie everyone was seeing, or what the family was having for dinner. In 2004, he voted for John Kerry. His life up to that point could be summarized as a struggle to merely push things around.

“Ha ha,” Jason said. He was staring up into the sun and then closing his eyes, watching the neon of the burned-in circular afterimage glow and then fade out of his vision.

“What’s in his hands?” Jason asked. The boy had picked up something gelatin, a milky blob with dangling tentacles.

“It’s a fucking jellyfish! A man-o-war!”

“That’s bullshit, man. They don’t live around here.”

“Hey Greg, you better get over there. You might have to piss on the kid if the jellyfish stings him.”

“No, I’m serious,” Greg said. The boy was jumping up and down, kicking up sand. He wore a single-toothed smile on his face like it was the best day of his life.

Greg got up and followed the boy across the beach. He stared down at the sand but tried to keep the boy in sight. In his mind, he rehearsed what he’d tell the woman: that she was wrong to let her son simply parade himself around totally naked, despite the child’s age; that she was an example – no! – a paragon of bad parenting. Greg was planning a full-scale coup on this woman who he had never met, so word choice seemed important. He wanted to make an example of her. But everything just felt off. The tide was rising, and Greg could hear the waves crashing on the beach with hostile intensity. He turned back briefly to look at his two friends, who were arguing intently about something inane. See, Greg thought, this kind of parenting is what leads to our idle conversation, our pointless bantering. There must be some kind of discipline. Greg considered his whole life during that walk, and arrived at the sordid conclusion that he had been raised by fools.

For five minutes he walked like this, keeping a careful distance so that he could see the boy’s interaction with his mother. He couldn’t make out their conversation from far away, but he could see with complete clarity the jellyfish’s tentacles swaying gently in the wind.

The boy’s mother was a blonde woman with some kind of white retro 50s glasses. She appeared utterly oblivious to the world around her, and the world seemed to acknowledge this fact.

“Excuse me,” Greg said. Nothing.

“I said, excuse me,” he said again.

The woman said nothing, and this angered Greg. How could a person have such horrible manners? It only made sense, after all, that the child would act that way, given her mother’s sensibilities. But sometimes people need to be put in their place, Greg thought: sometimes their behaviors and proclivities sway so far from the norm that it takes an outside force, a benevolent agent of good, to correct them. For effect, Greg folded his arms, right over left. He could not think of a time he had been more deliberate in his body language, in fact.

“Miss,” he said. Finally, she looked up. Greg saw now that her body was clearly that of a young mother’s. For some reason he had expected one of those old, wrinkly hag types. The woman placed a single finger on the bridge of her glasses, lowered them, and then slowly tilted her head up from her book (a Danielle Steele or Nelson DeMille paperback – he saw a gold-plated name but only for a blurry second) to look at Greg. The sun hung low in the sky, straight out at the horizon, and a beady sweat was forming on his forehead.

“Yes?”

“Well, listen, my friends and I are sitting over there, and we happened to have noticed your little boy running across here without any pants on, and I think that you know, it’s adorable in a way,” Greg started to say, his mouth betraying his carefully planned monologue.

“What?”

“Look, I just think that you shouldn’t be letting your kid run around like that. Especially picking up jellyfish. They could sting him.” Greg could hear his voice rising in pitch as he spoke, the way his father’s would when he had to teach Greg a lesson.

“Really? That’s what you think?” The woman’s voice was strained and sarcastic.

“Y-yes. And, let me tell you, those s-stings hurt.” Greg had trouble composing his thoughts now. He felt like he was communicating on a different level, that somehow his thoughts and actions were directly perpendicular to everybody else’s.

“Go away.” Was she simply being irrational, or did she really want him to go away?

“Now, listen.”

“Fuck you,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“I said fuck you, get out of here and leave us alone.”

“Look, lady –”

“No, you look. What makes you think you can tell me what I can do to my kid, you little shit?”

“I just –”

“You have no right to tell me what to do. And as you can see, he’s just fine.” The boy was giggling, grabbing on to the loose parts of the mother’s oversized Walk for Cancer ’98 t-shirt. For a moment it seemed like everything really was alright.

“You’re a shitty mother, lady.”

“What? What! You little shit!” She seemed genuinely affected, her face cycling through shades of red, finally settling on a thoroughly embarrassed crimson. “Don’t curse in front of my kid!” She covered her boy’s ears in reflex.

“I’ll do whatever the fuck I want!”

The woman said nothing. She tilted her head back down the ground and fought back tears with sniffles. The boy was still playing with his jellyfish.

“Alright, alright,” Greg said. He walked back to his friends and looked across the water. The sun was falling steadily at the horizon, a disc of yellow-red that blasted the clouds pink. Streaks of purple, too, lay like strips of paper-mâché across the expansive dome above them. He could hear Jason in the distance: “I don’t know man, I stopped really liking Floyd after we graduated.” Greg sat down and resolved to build a castle of sand. ♦

September 28, 2009

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