of Space™ continued to explode, disfiguring the faces of young women and their beaus, and when, wrapped up like mummies, they appeared in court to claim damages, the judge—after having listened to the Coca-Cola Enterprise Inc. lawyers—would tell them, tell the mummies that is, that the burden of proof regarding the company’s negligence lay with the consumer. Which meant they’d never see a cent. After the verdict was read, one of the lawyers, moved, had the habit of going up to the mummies, to express the heart-felt understanding of the company. The lawyer would pull out a bottle of Space™ and say, “A gift from Coca-Cola Enterprise Inc., in the hopes that we can continue to call you a customer despite this unfortunate inconvenience.” Often he’d even add, “This is one of the good ones. It won’t explode.”
One time one of the mummies said, “Thank you,” and, taking the Space™, gave it a good shake and agreed, “You’re right, it didn’t explode.” She then hit the lawyer upside the head with it, knocking him out cold. The bottle, however, remained intact.
9.
Jack bought the blessed stellar atlas that he would check out in his downtime one day at the end of spring 1956. Jack and Neal had spent the night in typical 1950s fashion. At daybreak Neal still hadn’t shut up while Jack had an inexplicably sore throat. Neal had got onto this peculiar idea that every time he bought a book he had to be one of the first customers of the day, so the two had agreed to kill the early hours of the morning outside the doors of Quantum, ready to step inside the moment it opened.
Arms folded, hands tucked into their armpits, they sat outside waiting, hunched over in the cold of daybreak. The weariness of the sleepless night sent sudden shivers through them, which they staved off by stomping their feet on the pavement. A couple hours passed this way, with Neal losing himself in frenzied cursing at the cold, at the slowness of time that in the end always fools you with its speed, at the fact that he could no longer feel his feet and at how this also kept him from entertaining the possibility of going across the street to get a coffee at the cafè. Jack had the wide-eyed stare of an owl, he nodded his head so Neal would think he was listening to him, while he was actually thinking that it had now been six years since he first met Neal, and how back then he had felt weighed down by an awful feeling that everything was dead. The coming of Neal had freed him from that sad state and had opened the last few years of his life, years Jack referred to as My Spacial Years. A Coca-Cola Enterprise Inc. delivery truck pulled up in front of the bar. Jack’s mind returned to the release he signed for Arthur Miller. For a moment he was nudged by an unpleasant feeling—not unlike how he felt in the months before he met Neal—and he asked himself if it had something to do with his doubts about the release. What did it mean? Why think about all these things together, at once? The orbital controller job wasn’t dangerous and there was no reason why he should associate it with anxieties he had long since put behind him.
An Asian girl in red coveralls had emerged from the truck and was unloading a crate of bottles. Jack watched her as she centered the crate on the dolly, trying to catch her eye. He was unsuccessful, and this added a touch of sadness was added to the unrest already gnawing at him. Suddenly, he felt a desire to get into the Coca-Cola Enterprise Inc. delivery truck and go deliver bottles of Space™ with the girl. He no longer wanted to be an orbital controller; he wanted to stay on Earth, he wanted to stay, sitting in that truck, he wanted to sleep there, in that truck, with the Asian girl in the red coveralls at the wheel, driving until night fell, leaving the city behind them and moving along mysterious dirt roads left unfinished, because it had been discovered such roads would take travelers far from their point of origin without leading them anywhere. Neal was saying, “Because there’s nothing more relentless and you gotta believe me, old boy, God only knows you gotta believe me. I’m not one of those guys you can fix up real easy and you know that’s the truth, and yet that’s exactly how it went. Can you believe it, Jack? Can you believe something like that, eh Jack? You with me? Relentless like you wouldn’t believe. I for one can’t do it, I couldn’t ever do it and believe me I’ve tried. When are they going to open this place?” The Asian girl in red coveralls had come out of the bar and was getting back into the Coca-Cola Enterprise Inc. delivery truck. Jack turned and looked down to the end of the street where the girl would disappear from his life forever. The truck pulled out, turned around and headed in the opposite direction. Another strange morning sign. Jack hit his heels on the pavement. It wasn’t exhaustion or the cold. It was anxiety.
10.
While Jack and Neal waited for the doors of Quantum to open, some miles away, in a curious international-style house built on the rocks of a waterfall, Norma Jeane Mortensen was sleeping in what her husband had defined as the doughnut position. Her insufferable husband and his idiotic definitions.
Norma Jeane Mortensen had entrusted her remaining hopes of finding that certain something to the Stars—and for a brief period of time she deceived herself into thinking she had found it in her present insufferable husband. At the end of the spring of 1956, however, she was living her life, not giving much thought to the fact that the Sun was about to enter Gemini. The horoscopes provided daily updates on the fluctuating movements of the humors and uneventful course of her existence, but Norma Jeane didn’t really associate the contents of those reports with the celestial vault advancing above her. She had a vague notion of the problem, she knew that the future was written in the Stars, but she didn’t connect the Stars to the sky. Stars was a word, nothing more, a beautiful word with a smooth sound that made things seem to flow better just by saying it. Norma knew perfectly well what a real Star was, but the Stars of her horoscope were, for her, the heavens of her dreams and the answer to all sadness, a heaven where the Stars moved like cartoon characters and the concept of the Spacial Void made no sense.
In fact, Norma Jeane hated Space. She hated it for many reasons, first among them being that her husband worked at the Orbital Control Command Center for Coca-Cola Enterprise Inc. The others were merely irrelevant and irrational variations of the first—that is, her protean hatred for her husband. Because her hatred for Space and for her husband were really just different sides of the same coin.
When she thought about her husband—thought because she now avoided looking him in the eyes—she thought him an awkward man with glasses, crooked teeth and an uncompilable list of other defects that at one time, not long ago, were collected in the “everything!” sigh with which she would answer the question: “What was it that made you fall in love with him?” This man, the last of the tricks by which life induced her to make the wrong choice, went by the name of Arthur Miller, and in Norma Jeane’s thoughts he was nothing more than the steady mirror of her tragedy, of her way of life that was essentially an ill-advised relationship with the male world, the world where men, those dazzlers, went fishing . . . first blinding her completely and then—only then—appearing to her as something they weren’t.
On that late spring morning Norma Jeane Mortensen doughnuted herself further and further in an attempt to escape the waking state that had now taken hold of her mind. She wanted to squeeze her lids shut and sink back into sleep. Her lips were slightly parted and her breath moved the fabric of the pillow imperceptibly. She was blonde and considered unanimously irresistible. With a nervous twitch of her body she squeezed the radius of the doughnut even tighter. She wanted nothing more than for sleep to take her with it, down to wherever dreams go at the moment of waking.
11.
It has not yet been proved legally that Coca-Cola is hazardous to one’s health. It is, on the other hand, historically undeniable, notwithstanding the dubious veracity of sources, that in the past its ingredients have been used to cure vertigo, colds, arthritis, cancer, stomach aches, dysentery, leprosy, malaria, migraines, rheumatism, sciatica, and hysteria. Some of these ingredients are moreover said to serve as aphrodisiacs, stimulants, antispasmodics, psychotropics, and narcotics.
