Heading up, hash-marked arrays of light seem to sink out of the horizon like drooping spiderwebs full of golden dust. The ascent of Club TMD’s soaring elevator slightly reverses time for its occupants, un-downing the sun for a split second or so. However, because it’s ingrained tradition for “peakers” to sit or lie on the lift’s floor—ironically mirroring the state they’ll likely be “coming down”—nobody is standing to witness this pretty parallax take place outside of the box’s sleek transparent walls. The closer to the top the glittering glass compartment gets, the more it vibrates—not from increasing wind shear, but from the approaching patter of the destination’s speakers and stomps, growing now to a faint hailstorm of sledge- and jackhammers. They pass the 111th floor. Now the outside world disappears, replaced by dark marble whose white veins sear under fizzling tubes of blacklight. As the elevator slows, vivid figures start to shoot up from their risen impasto. Whatever iridescent clothes they’re wearing are absent-mindedly adjusted. Final doses are divvied up and absorbed. Hollers and claps and berserker jumps begin from within the now-doubly excited cell as the unseen umbilicals which ferried the ravers skyward finish their winding. The doors part, as if cracked open by the cacaphony of stimuli on the opposite side, lustered metal giving way to another planet of loud, inverted color, of tangible, delicious sound, and of chimeric, angelic, and most-impossible denizens. And so two-dozen individuals from the world below burst forth from the lift; a half-dozen prostrate pieces of Club TMD enter the elevator and assume their predecessors’ positions, all too exhausted or without the wherewithal to even press the button for descent.
Augmented, the towering crowd sways deeper than before—an atmospheric crucible of undulating sheens. Climaxes overlap themselves, forwardfiring waves on top of waves like sinusoidal fractals. Feel an audiovisual crescendo burgeon and build for minutes: Chins upturn, limbs flail, faces squint, and one voice yawps the sky open through myriad tongues.
Cessie has one of these tongues. Her neon-painted fingernails glistening with the sweat of strangers they brush up upon (the same fingernails that charitably stimulated “G” for the six spent souls in the elevator). Her sparkle mascara, kandi bracelets, and glow-stick diadem all leave indelible afterimages on Linc’s retinas as Cessie hoveres and plummets with each anticipation and strike of the DJ’s symphonic anvil.
Above the shimmering sea of estatic thousands, hangs the Club’s namesake, a 500-ton tuned mass damper, silently cancelling out every antagonist motion its patron throng could ever be capable of. An enormous star of steel, geodesically festooned with continents of lightwork and reflectant, the damper imperceptibly compensates Linc’s footfalls as he drifts like smoke towards Cessie.
But she noticed him first. Tall (like she), with an expression that seemed thankfully departed of some former seriousness—an injured, square-jawed mien that made the muscular man’s current exuberance all the more fierce and golden and real as he pumped his strobing fist through the air with what could only be hard-won abandon.
Here, the lingua franca is that of the body. Even if they do both speak English (and each does), any name, question, or true-love proclamation will invariably be rendered static, eaten up by the negative interference of industrial subwoofers and sawtooths. Yet Linc still tries:
“WHAT’S YOUR NAME?!”
And Cessie, guessing correctly, extends a bobbing wrist into Linc’s hand and points with a neon-nail to the beaded letters of her name, which he reads, and then kisses:
“I FUCKING LOVE YOU, CESSIE!”
She beams, and their hands float upward until parting, bringing them ever so slightly closer together. As they dance into each other’s bodies, whole spectrums of light glance off their respective anatomies, photogrammetizing avatars of perfection into a shared consciousness—beings who would rock this world far beyond what any mass damper could fix.
They embrace the whole way down the elevator, a combined pillar amongst a puddle of fetal positions. And then Linc’s first unimpeded words to her:
“So, your place or mine?”
• • •
A back-of-the-bus kid. NOT a cool kid, a “back-of-the-bus” kid. By choice? Self-segregation? 7th grade and already (still?) irrevocably alienated by all and none after semesters of:
“It.”
“Weirdo.”
“Stinkin’ Lincoln;” “Abraham Chicken;” “Lick-ass Linc;” and now “Lin-condom.”
And it hasn’t been used for years now, but “Lonely Lincoln” still stings the most—that’s what he remembers first about himself waking up in the morning (including this morning) and forgets last falling asleep at night. His last name, “Laszkiewicz,” was always impervious to schoolyard wisecracks, but his LL-initials defaultly conjur up “Lonely Lincoln” or “Lincoln = Lonely” in his mind whenever he sees them.
And he is staring at them right now, black Sharpie on white paper bag—“LL”—a lonely doesn’t-belong boy’s lonesome field-trip lunch, which he just wrested back from Rafael, his bully-biggest.
But this is actually his favorite part about field trips: Peeking out the window from the dreary old back of the bus at new places and interesting things: Smokestacks, barns, buffalos, watertowers—with strange names on them like “Twodot” and “Harlowton”—and now a murder of crows. Lincoln beholds the avian constellation shift and swirl over a fallow field. It has something to do with magnetism, right? Invisible forces? He raises his right hand and attempts to copy the engrossing shape-changes with his digits, wrapping his mind around rotating the truly exotic—
“Lin-condom! I think you’re leaking!”
From the seat diagonal, Rafael’s been dripping water from an incompletely stoppered bottle onto Lincoln’s lap.
After the bus parks, Lincoln—hoodie tied around waist—is last to get off, but he is paused by the driver before descending the stairs:
“It’s not forever, son. Trust me, one day you’ll forget all about the bad times.”
He shakes Lincoln’s hand, and the half-heartedly smiling scrawny 13-year-old rejoins his class outside. He sees someone in exchange with his teacher, a young woman with overcast clouds reflected in her pale-green eyes, wearing an even darker brown dress than the hue of her hair. Her face is plain, but in a beautiful way (he thinks), and her posture immaculate. Thin stones bull’s-eye her delicate earlobes, matching an even slighter onyx necklace around her collarbone. As she speaks her expression changes like crows in flight. Even her hands do this: subtly rising through collapsing. Lincoln is frozen at her incredible poise, at the unimpeachable intelligence behind her skull, and at the modesty of her great spirit.
But nobody else notices. None of the other boys or girls in the class see what Lincoln sees. Rafael catches a few side-looks of her breasts, but dismisses them for being too compact. Lincoln’s teacher, Mr. Fahning, the one to whom she is talking, perceives her as pleasant, but only as pleasant—only as a perfunctory agent of mundanity, not as some kind of enchanting, revelatory force. As for the girls, they wholly disregard this average-looking version of the woman they one day expect to be.
Miss Quantz ushers Mr. Fahning’s class into the Natural History Museum. Wax figures of ancient men and women exercise strictest equanimity behind their glass; the children capering before them test the expansive gallery for echoes. On the other side there’s another class, from another school. They meet in the middle of the gallery, underneath a suspended foam whale. The two classes would tour and do their activities together. Rafael finds his counterpart from another state; Lincoln does not. But that doesn’t matter, because Lincoln gets to listen to Miss Quantz for hours, gets to come up with questions for her (even if he already knows the answers), and hears the curator-in-training speak to him personally. Between exhibits, a handsome boy from the other school comments to Lincoln:
“I like her too. She seems real smart.”
This is enough for Lincoln to believe what the bus driver told him earlier and share:
“I know. I—I want to be just like her one day.”
The other boy halts his gait and makes a face, “Ew, faggot, you want to be a girl?”
Lincoln stops, looks back long and hard into this kid’s contumelious eyes and shit-eating grin. He mirrors his own disgust at this cretin, this asshole, this wretched rotten apple. To think he was about to offer sharing his lunch with this desecrator.
“I’ll remember you, asshole.”
“Hey, likewise, fruitcake. Hard to forget a creep like you.”
The two boys avoid one another for the rest of the tour.
Once every display has been exhaustively exposited—to Lincoln Laszkiewicz’s dismay—the combined group goes out behind the museum for open-air activities. After observing sundials and smoke signals, Rafael and his reflection kill two butterflies from the insect sanctuary. Mr. Fahning lunges after them and neutralizes them, taking them back to their buses. The well-kempt grass cradles torn chromatic planes, shards of some broken, disappeared kaleidoscope. Lincoln is on the verge of tears witnessing Miss Quantz collect the trampled wings, not because she is sad, but because she seems understanding—yes, with her otherworldly grace, she seems understanding of something…ineffable, but certainly positive, as if the death of these metamorphosed creatures wasn’t a death at all, but simply another change, another chrysalis, another Charybdial transformation around this scattering sea of up-and-down-and-up-again existence. Whether she really thinks this, or this is just what he wants her to be thinking, he does not know, but after she presses the wings into a museum coloring book, he asks her for a hug, and she replies:
“Of course.”
The ridiculing boy from the other school, also named Lincoln, watches them embrace.
The next activity is archery.
One Lincoln “accidentally” shoots the other Lincoln with an arrow.
They meet decades later at Club Tuned Mass Damper.
—“Mutatis Mutandis” by ineptia