2

Sounded pretty determined, didn’t I? I chickened out.

I have another platonic date with Ava. I’m lucky she’ll see me at all, but for all I know, maybe she’ll warm up. Maybe I’ll just have to win her the hard, old fashioned way. Reality bowls and rolling back notwithstanding, I couldn’t face her with hairy nose warts. I know that sounds terrible, but what do you expect from a guy who comes from layers where the people are prettier than the people here.

Oh, yea, my name. Ralph. Ralph Ebe. That’s what it was, anyway, before the layer when I became summa cum laude. My diploma went on to read Rudolph Eber. I was Rudolph for quite a while, through several layers. Like when I met Ana. Now it’s changed again. That’s one of the things that does change regarding me. My name—always some slight variation. But I feel like Ralph Ebe because the lettering has generally hovered about all the same letters all of my slippery life. Rudolph Eber, Raul Hebert, Ralston Evans, Alfred Baier, Roddy Eden, and Ralph Ede—these names interspersed among many others, often recurring in different layers.

“Call me Ralph, then,” I had finally told Ana when I had first met her on the beach last layer, before I knew her as Ava. I had introduced myself as Rudolph, my current name at the time, but she never could take the name seriously. Before we had finished our beach vacation together she was calling me Ralph, thank goodness.

Drives me crazy. I swear, you really do have to have the intellect of a summa cum laude to manage this aggravation with the names. Then, when she was the new Ava, I called her by the old layer’s name, Ana, when I made my orgasm crack. She not only considered me crude, but she also thought I was thinking of another woman when I said it. Actually, I guess that was true. Way to go, Rupert, or whoever I was.

I am in my apartment, a bit uglier of a place I might add, getting ready for my platonic date with this Ava. In prior layers it was a structure that kept up with the nicer developments in the area. But now I seem to live in a high rent, beige brick, high-rise apartment building that was built sometime after art deco but before latter twentieth century imagination. Or perhaps in this slightly uglier world this now represents imagination. That’s going to be rather depressing when I write the rent check. Getting worse is the same as getting less, and getting less for the same money is, with sliding, an inflation I hadn’t bargained for. This was even more of an incentive to stay put.

My building is on the Mississippi River, adjacent to a development called Riverwalk. This is a touristy thing still done up right, so it’s still nice to look at, whether right in it or up in my apartment looking down. From my den window I can see the curve of the river, a corner of water where boats downriver hang a right and upriver hang a left. From any of my bedrooms I can hear the tugs blow away under the direction of the bar pilots, and I occasionally get a chance to hear the calliope on the paddlewheeler. My dinette has French doors that open to a little balcony guarded by wrought iron railing. The balcony looks out over the river, toward the curve, the tugs, and the bridge. I often daydream out there to the buoyed enterprises floating toward their fulfillment.

Even though I live alone, the three bedrooms in my place all have beds. No one of them has ever been my favorite, as the random rotations have all averaged out. I guess I just like the change. There’s the manly oak set in the largest of the three rooms, where I go when I just want to sleep my ass off, to furiously rack out. Then there’s the gigawatt experiment in primary colors, the bedroom suite of startling clashes where I lie awake able to see all of the colors even in the dark because they’re so bright. This is where I go on those insomniac nights when I just want my mind to race, when I can’t sleep because I want to work very hard at thinking about very serious things. And lastly is the sissy room of French provincial, a make-believe style I’ve always found so frivolous and silly that nothing serious could ever be done there. This is the room where I always bring my dates. This is the room I always attempt my out-of-body experiences. (Because I notice slide-invoked changes in my home from time to time, I suppose the whole place has taken on a make-believe sort of ambiance.) Without question, though, with apologies to Marie Antoinette, the French provincial still takes the cake.

Between the room of manly oak and the room of primary colors is the bathroom I use in preparing myself for Ava. As I primp I keep catching my eye on the reflection in the mirror, a bank shot that allows me to look out of the door and be visually snagged by those crazy colors from my thinking room. It’s distracting, like trying to watch a game when there’s some wise guy on the other side of the stadium bouncing the sun off of a mirror. Of course in this layer the colors are slightly muted, now compromised to just outrageous.

Yes, I find myself thinking, that is the room where I must bring Ava when the variegated time comes. She is to get the shouting colors of this world. I now know I’ll never be able to sleep in the pansy room again. I could never be able to look her in the eye or in any other part of her anatomy among the fluff of French provincial. I’m even tempted to brick in the doorway that leads to all of that inane bland furniture, sealing in forever all of the memories of women abused by my whimsy and total lack of emotional investment. Not that I’d do it, but Ava certainly would deserve that symbolic gesture, because I am no longer whimsy-driven.

Especially if I could get that far with her.

I shave slowly, regarding my face as I think she might. I see my imagined faults as well as my imagined good points, even as a beautiful person in an uglier world. This Ava is part of this uglier world, so I strain to be critical. It is, of course, a strain, and God knows I’d hate to get a hernia or something like that. So I wisely judge myself only up to a point, because I must draw the line somewhere.

I have the television on. Even over running faucet water I can hear it clearly, as the den is situated almost equidistantly from every other room in the apartment.

“I survived the holocaust,” it says, “the true account of outlasting a war gone crazy, Sunday night at eight.”

“Now what the hell is that?” I ask myself out loud. “A war gone crazy?” Aren’t all wars kind of crazy anyway? I think. It’s bad enough even with rules and Lucerne conventions. And what holocaust? I’ve read science fiction about the possible future nuclear holocaust. Apocolyptic dystopias. This announcer talks like it has happened. C’mon, it didn’t happen here, not even on uglier Earth. As a matter of fact, I’ve never been in a layer where it had even come close. Or did it?

This is why I got my degree in mathematics. Rules in Base Ten don’t change when I slide, except that layer where Base Five was the standard. I could barely keep up with that. But even if math is generally inflexible, history always changes when I slide. A sickly realization dawned on me that history could also get uglier. Holocaust? I would ask Ava tonight.

She picks me up by honking the horn. I hear her on the first toot because I’m waiting in the lobby of my building, which is not much more than a foyer buffering the front entrance from elevator doors. I oblige her car horn by getting into her white Chevrolet, a sensible four-door sedan, and by going to whatever place she has once again chosen.

I just can’t seem to have any control as to where I’m taken anymore.

New Orleans suburbs are confusing, and her restaurant selection is in an area where I’m lost. She drives me to somewhere across the river. It was her choice, and so she should be happy. Am I happy? She doesn’t have to be so pushy, I whine to myself. Complaints, Ralph? I ask myself. No way. I have a feeling for her which I suspect is love; and whatever small-minded resentment I may have for her assuming the choice of restaurants, that feeling just about makes everything alright. Of course it does, and it should forever.

When we get out of the car, I walk to her to hold her hand. She accepts, which is encouraging. She’s dressed in a casual yellow sundress that is open in the back and so shows off her bronze shoulders beautifully. She looks so wonderful that I’m glad I wore a sport coat, even if I skipped the tie. The restaurant is a Mom and Pop place that has a surf-and-turf menu written on a chalkboard.

She orders the sensible low fat seafood special. I enjoy the addition of plaque to my coronary arteries as I savor my medium-rare butter-ladled selection. She sits so beautifully at her task as she is poised even while eating. I’m glib and droll and interesting in my conversation, as I’ve had practice on Ana before her. And what of Ana? Is it fair to find love in Ava which was defined via Ana? Perhaps the on-going (as we speak) plaque has contributed to some senility as I decline the challenge of a messy, philosophical, and private dilemma that can do nothing but introduce guilt somewhere along the line—an emotion, I’m proud to boast, I successfully avoid.

I ask her about the nuclear holocaust after dinner, because I have to keep straight.

“There’s been no nuclear war, Ralph,” she tells me over her caramel custard dessert. “Just the two atomic bombs on Japan.”

“Two! Really, Ava, just the one.”

“Some cum laude.”

“Summa cum laude,” I correct her.

“Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” she argues, “the two atomic bombs.”

“Nagasaki? God, it took two to convince those people!”

“You know, you’re carrying this layer business a little too far, what with this subtle selective ignorance of events. Please, Ralph, I’m worried about you and tired of the charade.” She’s suddenly quiet and not having any fun. I can tell. After all, I have caused the same people to stop having the same fun so many of the same times that I can be a real drag. Just ask Eddie at Burger Nirvana.

“Just one more question, please,” I ask, holding her hand to anchor her to my needs. Her other hand fiddles with a fork, manipulating a sugar pack on the tablecloth. After I almost conclude that she has ignored me, she speaks to me with that sad little smile that for some reason draws me to her, has drawn me to Ana before her, and would surely draw me to the rest of “her kind” elsewhere.

“No. Not another question. Let’s go.” Now she’s just sad; there is no more smile. “Check please,” she calls out coldly to any waiter. My needs are resented, and so we go after I pay. She drives me back to my place and gives me a Dear John peck while we’re still both sitting in her idling car, indicating to me she won’t be accompanying me, that there won’t be any lingering drop-off, that I can just bail out right there without my parachute. The air conditioner’s running, protecting us from the thick nighttime humidity, and she makes no move to shut off the engine and lower the window. It is clear that I’m invited to leave. When I do, she gives me an apparently final message.

“I hope you can start acting right—or actually stop acting,” she says as I close the passenger door behind me. She opens the window.

“Or what?” I ask her, being careful to sound concerned, not threatening. She puts the window back up, leaving me stranded without an answer. I am truly falling without my parachute. Or what? I repeat to myself. Or you’ll never see me again? Or you’re not going to see me again, anyway, even if I do stop?

“There she goes again,” I murmur as I wait for the dreary elevator in the just about dreary lobby of my “approaching dreary” building.

I lie awake defensively in my clothes for the longest time in my color-splash room until I’m ready to sleep. My emotions splash along with the colors of the room as I’m awash in the circuitous passions of rejection and endeavor, love and anger. Still not bothering to change out of my clothes, I then move to the manly oak ensemble, climb into the bed there and sleep in the hardest way possible.

I rest.

The next morning I go to a bookstore on Canal Street and buy Survey of History, by J. Bartels, Ph.D. You see, I’ve done this before from time to time, because as I have changed layers, the very book in front of me would change. This would help me keep abreast so as to function in society. Of course I learned early in my college career not to slide after cramming all night for finals. Guaranteed F—take it from the sliding scholar. And your professor thinks you’re crazy out of your mind. Unless, of course, it’s Math, which doesn’t ever change, Base Five notwithstanding, which is why I was able to pursue my degree.

I have the donuts and milk in front of me on my dinette table and begin my Survey. I’ve opened the French doors to the balcony so that I can hear the noises of the river and catch the morning sun. I look in the index under Nagasaki. It is true. Those bastards in charge allowed their people another nuking—even had three days to consider it. Holy shit—this is really bad. It is ugly. Twice as ugly as the single bombing the last layer where those Japanese were convinced after the Enola Gay.

I stop and close the book to think about this. God! I have to go back the other way. I have to go back to the reasonable bottom of my reality bowl. I need entropy. I don’t want any more momentum.

I’m more upset than I thought I’d be. Not that more people were killed: it’s hard enough to relate to that! But that people in charge allowed it to happen. And what about the United States? I mean if one bomb couldn’t convince them, I would figure an endless series of bombs might not either. How did Harvey S. Trueman not figure that bomb number two might only be the one before number three? And so on. Were there “and-so-ons” in the next layers up the bowl? Hell, last layer the U.S. didn’t even have a bomb number two.

Goodness, I have to get out of this.

Now what is this holocaust business?

I read aghast. Never have I been so sorry to quest for knowledge. One page out of a thousand that shakes the whole regrettable book.

I spend a long day catching up with this world. From time to time I open the refrigerator and nibble on the bachelor stock. I try to nap occasionally, but end up sitting at the dinette table with my Survey. I find it very lonely without Ava, and by eight o’clock that evening I am bored with atrocities, catastrophes, and historical blunders. I try sleeping but do it poorly, even surrounded by my oak. I dream of better worlds, and this is what makes me sleep so poorly. Ironically, the more pleasant realms of my sleep constitute the nightmare, because they are just dreams, and when I awake, the worse world awaits. It is a night of tossing and turning and upheavals.

When I wake up the following morning, I finally decide to shower and shave. I go out to a favorite, less convenient bookstore on Magazine Street which sits in the corner of a building that otherwise is occupied by a neighborhood supermarket. It is a dingy little store that does most of its book business in newspapers and comic books. The place is crammed obscenely in paper such that one can only imagine what a show there would be if the place were to go up in flames. In spite of my barren cupboard, I dismiss the supermarket and attend to my morbid curiosity here. I pick up copies of a Jewish girl’s diary and of some German post-war trials of the crimes against humanity—Hey! Surprise—a conscience in this stinking place. These are recommended by the employee there. He is a zitty young kid, about sixteen, who has to be a jerk, being he is so nonchalant about this subject that has me so noticeably distraught.

I spend yet another two days locked up in my apartment perusing, skipping around, and getting scared to fucking death because I’m living in this world.

God, I have to get out of here!

Ultimately, I snap back in and, to prove it, use the telephone coherently. I use it to call Ava. But having snapped back in affords me no protection, because I snap back out when her phone answers.

“Why didn’t you tell me about your holocaust?” I ask this as if she herself is responsible, or at least an accessory for maintaining silence about it—a crime of omission.

“Excuse me?” demands her puzzled aunt. There is silence from both of us. Finally, her aunt assumes correctly and calls for Ava to come to the phone. There is some muffling of the mouth piece from her end, apparently her aunt warning Ava of my agitation.

“What’s the excitement, Ralph?” Ava asks, heeding her aunt’s advisory.

“Oh, just six million Jews, a few million Russians; a million here, a million there!” I pause, but my tone does not improve. “Experiments, Ava! Shall I tell you about the experiments!” Before she hangs up on me, she hears me pause in silence, and then she hears the crying—O.K., shameless sobbing—through the receiver covered by my hand.

It’s a shot relationship, it’s a shot day, it’s a shot world.

I sleep for twenty-six hours, soundly in part of me but tumultuously in another part. I awake several times to find I’ve moved from oak bedroom to color bedroom and back again. At one point I awake and, still half inundated by sleep, I attempt as I have in the past an out-of-body experience. I feel or pretend to feel myself rise heavily an inch or two above my body but slam back down into oak decor. To drift along the ceiling; to rise above the physical bounds of this and of all Earths; to exist as a floating bird, gliding with the total perspective of all of the unimportance below me.

Then wide awake, the widest awake I’ve been my whole life, I go back to Eddie and his Burger Nirvana. I don’t have to, you understand. I just do it so I can be involved in something that depends in not the slightest way on historical knowledge.

As I flap the burger on the grill, Eddie the owner and senior burgerman tells me, “People who do not know hiztory are doomed to repeat it.”

I get this the very first day back on the job. I come back to this moronic place to distract myself and we end up talking about history. And it’s bad enough this history here had to be dealt with at all, but all the worse is a bore of yore hacking out his own versions even more destructively than his spatula technique serves up the patties.

“Yea,” Eddie starts, but only after a quick look around at all of his customers, “firzt time a nigger got zo close to being the Prezident.”

Great, I think to myself, Eddie’s a “niggerer.”

“He was just in the primaries,” I say back, knowing even from last layer how close the candidate had gotten.

“Yea, but you got zome people—even white—took him zeriouzly. Zee, boy, I know hiztory factz, and I know that after the Zivil War, when niggerz took over temporarily, thingz turned to zshit till we took over again. You can’t turn a cannibal into a politician—he’ll eat you alive.” He stops to laugh to himself when he discovers that he accidentally made a joke. A joke about a cannibal? I couldn’t know, as I was not familiar with the word.

“Now I know ending zslavery waz right,” he continues, “but too much power too zoon, well...”

“Slavery?” I have no idea of what he speaks.

“Right, zslavery, and Yeow!” he hollers as a grease bleb lands on his arm, adding a mottled addition to his yellow layering. “Hey, Ebe—do you think you can do thiz zslide zstuff zo there aren’t any other people around exzept people like uz?” He laughs louder and louder the more he sees I am offended.

I quit the workers of the world expeditiously and am quite fulfilled as a bon vivant. And I am thankful that I am unable to look up slavery as my Survey of History is now history.

And that other word, “cannibal.” From the inference, I think I’ll just skip that, too, and embrace the ignorant, blissful way.