Downtown Owl Read online

  10) The meaning (and linguistic derivation) of the phrase “Gunter glieben glauchen globen,” as heard during the preface to Def Leppard’s “Rock of Ages.”

  11) Being asleep, possibly inside a ski lodge.

  12) Robot cows.

  13) That one eighth grader with the insane tits, and the degree to which it would be life-changing to tickle her when she was naked. Was her name Judy? That seemed about right.

  14) Sleeping.

  15) My boyfriend has amazing hair.

  16) I wish Grandma would just hurry up and die.

  17) Nobody knows I have a warm can of Pepsi in my locker.

  18) The carpeting in Jordan Brewer’s semi-unfinished basement that smells like popcorn and would provide an excellent surface for sleeping.

  19) The moral ramifications of stealing beer from a church rectory, which—while probably sinful—would just be so fucking easy. I mean, it’s almost like they want you to steal it.

  20) Being gay.

  21) The prospect of a person being able to successfully ride on the back of a grizzly bear, assuming the bear was properly muzzled. (This was Zebra.)

  22) Firing a crossbow into the neck of John Laidlaw while he received fellatio from Tina McAndrew. (This was Mitch.)

  “You’re all 106 pages into this story,” Laidlaw continued, “or at least you’re supposed to be 106 pages into this story. I’m sure many of you feel like nothing is happening. Do not be alarmed. All great books are like this. All great books seem boring until you’re finished reading them. But for the time being, let’s focus on the atmosphere that Orwell is creating. What is the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four like?”

  Laidlaw pointed at Jackie Andercrash, a thin, big-toothed girl best known for her mild scoliosis. “Bad,” she answered.

  “You paint a vivid picture,” said Laidlaw. “But you need to elaborate. What is so bad about Orwell’s universe?”

  “The government watches everyone all the time,” Jackie said. “I don’t know what the problem is, exactly. I guess that it’s just a bad society. They tell people things like ‘Freedom is slavery,’ which seems—you know—pretty obviously wrong.”

  “What Orwell has done,” Laidlaw said, “is create something called a dystopia. To understand what that means, you first have to know the meaning of the word utopia. A utopia is a perfect civilization, which generally means there isn’t a government to interfere with the lives of its citizens. This, of course, is an impossible dream. There is, however, an extremely long book called Atlas Shrugged that’s about what would happen if all of the most brilliant individuals in the world separated themselves from the flotsam and jetsam of society and built a utopia. Rebecca, you should read this book. You’d probably relate to it, especially if you’re interested in trains. But here is my larger point: In Nineteen Eighty-Four, we have the opposite of a utopia. In Orwell’s dystopic society, the concept of the individual has been completely eliminated.”

  Laidlaw walked to the blackboard and wrote the words utopia and dystopia in large cursive letters, circling the latter for emphasis. Half of the class copied those two words in their notebooks, anticipating a true-or-false question that seemed utterly inevitable. Mitch did not take notes. He knew what a utopia was. There was actually an Intellivision game called Utopia, and the whole objective was to build a flawless society on a desert island; you had to raise food and build hospitals and protect your mindless villagers from hurricanes. If there were any abstract “utopia vs. dystopia” quandaries on this test, he would crush them like spiders. He was, however, less confident about questions regarding the book itself, as he did not comprehend anything about it. He had looked at all 106 pages that had been assigned, and his pupils had scanned across every sentence, and he understood all the individual words and all of the meaningful phrases. Yet—somehow—Mitch had ingested nothing. He could not recall the qualities of any of the characters (although their names now sounded vaguely familiar), nor could he outline any element of the book’s plot (beyond feeling an abstract sense of darkness and formality). Had he forgotten to bring the book home over the weekend, he would still be in the same position he was right now. This sort of thing happened all the time. The things he did on purpose were usually no different from the mistakes he made by accident.

  Mitch stared forward, blinking himself awake. Laidlaw was now nattering about someone who was working in a recordkeeping department and something about the availability (or lack thereof ) of sugar and potatoes. Is this, he wondered, the kind of conversation Laidlaw made with Tina McAndrew? Is this why she fell in love with a mean-spirited, chain-smoking lizard? Yes, Tina was an airhead. That was true. But still. How do you make other people believe that you are interesting? Is this the key? By talking about a story that isn’t even real?

  “How about you, Vanna?” said Laidlaw.

  “What?”

  “What do you think about this?”

  “I didn’t hear the question,” said Mitch. “The radiator is too loud.”

  “The radiator is not working, Vanna,” said Laidlaw. “However, I’m not surprised that you are hearing things. That is, after all, a sign of psychosis. As such, I will pose my question again, this time above the din of the imaginary radiator. WHO. ARE. THE THOUGHT POLICE?”

  It was too bad the movie theater went bankrupt, thought Mitch. If the theater was still in business, he could buy a ticket for the 7:30 showing of a Saturday-night horror movie and slip out the rear exit during one of the scenes that were set at night, because the theater would be pitch-black and no one would notice his departure. He could then leave his car in the parking lot and cross town by foot, arriving at Laidlaw’s house at 7:55. John Laidlaw was Lutheran, but his wife was Catholic, and she always went to Mass on Saturday night. This would mean Laidlaw would be alone, probably watching Love Boat or Fantasy Island. Mitch could enter the house through the garage, creep into the living room through the kitchen, pounce up from behind the La-Z-Boy, throw a potato sack over Laidlaw’s skull, and bash him over the head with a brick. He’d hit him twice, or maybe three times. All the blood would stay on the inside of the bag. Then, while Laidlaw was unconscious, he would drag him down the stairs and tie him (crucifixion style) to the Nautilus machine in the basement; Mitch knew the family owned a Nautilus machine because Laidlaw talked about it all the time. He would rouse him by throwing ice water in his face, and then—right at the moment when John Laidlaw became aware of his surroundings and conscious of his captor—Mitch would crush his shoulder blades with a crowbar. “Do you like that?” Mitch would ask rhetorically. After that, he’d burn Laidlaw’s pupils with cigarettes. He would use the same cigarettes that Laidlaw always smoked. “This is what I call sarcasm,” Mitch would say over the muffled screaming. At 8:15, he would put on a pair of leather gloves and beat his reptilian coach to death, supplying some extra-violent attention to his ultra-vulnerable kidneys. Mitch would then exit the home at 8:28 p.m., roughly twelve minutes before Mrs. Laidlaw and her children would return from church to discover the corpse. She would probably be relieved. And because he would still have the ticket stub from the movie theater (and because the stub would list the time and date of the show), Mitch would have a seamless alibi. Even if he somehow became a suspect (which was unlikely), he’d be untouchable. The murder would likely be blamed on a paid hit man from Fargo or Winnipeg, undoubtedly hired by the father of some pregnant teenager; Laidlaw’s lifelong history of sexual misconduct had undoubtedly created countless enemies, so it wouldn’t be illogical to assume that someone finally decided to make him pay for the things he had done. Moreover, no one would ever believe an unassuming sixteen-year-old quarterback would (or even could) inflict that level of concentrated, clinical, unadulterated damage against a local authority figure. The crime would be so brutal that a boy such as himself would be above suspicion.

  Damn.

  Why did they have to close that movie theater?

  “The Thought Police are cops who can read your mind,” replie
d Mitch, guessing through the power of context. “They can stop crimes before they happen, because they know what you’re going to do before you do it.”

  “Close,” said Laidlaw. “You’re not completely right, Vanna, but you’re close.”

  OCTOBER 22, 1983

  (Julia)

  Rugby, North Dakota, has a population of three thousand people, most of whom are blond and none of whom play rugby. It is the geographic center of North America, and the community features a rock obelisk that proudly marks that location. This obelisk has been relocated several times since 1971, possibly because a) many geologists suspect the true vortex of North America to be about fifteen miles outside of town, but primarily because b) it is technically impossible to pinpoint the precise center of any landmass that doesn’t have discernible sides. There is no middle to America. It does not matter where they stick the Rugby obelisk; Rugby is not the geographic center of anything. But everyone believes that it is, including all the people who admit that it isn’t. As such, Rugby celebrates this (almost true) fact by staging an annual three-day street festival, always punctuated by a handful of hyper-intoxicated locals who consume fried bull testicles in public.

  If you are from North Dakota, these are things you learn in eighth grade. It’s part of a class called Our State.

  Julia taught Our State while falling in love with the concept of Vance Druid.

  “The longitude of Rugby is forty-eight degrees north,” she said to a room of edgy, Thriller-purchasing eighth graders. “The latitude of Rugby is ninety-nine degrees west. You will need to know this.” Julia had no idea why anyone would ever need to know such things, but multiple-choice tests required her to create questions that had irrefutable answers. She read Rugby’s geographic coordinates off a translucent plastic sheet that rested on an overhead projector, but she did not hear her own words as she spoke them aloud. By now Julia could lecture about Teddy Roosevelt or answer questions about Lake Sakakawea without hearing or remembering anything she said. Teaching history to eighth graders is like being a tour guide for people who hate their vacation. She still didn’t know much about North Dakota, so she unconsciously fabricated many of the tangential details (including its second-most-lucrative industry, which she claimed to be cobalt). No one cared, including Julia; inside her skull, words and sentences sounded like side three of Metal Machine Music, an album she had never heard of. She had little sense of time and no interest in society. Today, all she thought about was Vance Druid and how much fun it was to be in love with him.

  Julia’s fake love for Vance was exhilarating and idiotic; it was the kind of love you can only feel toward someone you don’t actually know. Julia was wholly aware of her electrifying stupidity; she fully realized that she’d only spoken with Vance on four occasions and that none of the conversations had lasted more than ten minutes. The first had been twenty-six days ago, when they both stood by the jukebox while he criticized rock groups that did not include Charlie Watts. The second time had been the following evening at the same bar; they talked about which characters they liked on the sitcom Alice and the failure of technology. “Whatever happened to lasers?” Vance wondered. “Why don’t cops have laser pistols? Wasn’t that supposed to have happened by now?” He seemed legitimately annoyed by this. Their third encounter probably didn’t qualify as an actual chat, as this had been a group discussion about Alice that Vance mostly ignored; all he said was that the show went downhill after Flo left, and then he resumed drinking. But their fourth encounter—the one that had just happened the night before, and which had focused on nothing in particular—had somehow triggered that neurological mechanism all humans possess: He had struck the cerebral switch that makes someone actively decide they are going to be in love with a specific individual, simply because that is the person they are going to be in love with.

  There is no feeling that can match the emotive intensity of an attraction devoid of explanation.

  Julia knew this was ridiculous. She felt like a ridiculous person. She did not care. It was so much fun to imagine theoretical conversations the two of them might have, and to mentally replay their previous conversations in the hope of finding subtext. Julia found the latter activity especially time-consuming: Vance generally spoke in short, cryptic sentences. It was akin to code breaking. “That’s like salt through a widow,” he once remarked after Julia swallowed a complimentary shot of tequila. What, exactly, did that phrase mean? Was this some kind of all-purpose rural platitude, or was it specifically about her? Were widows addicted to sodium? Was he suggesting that she had a drinking problem? “You’ve got a lot of ideas,” he once remarked before getting up to piss, and he said it in a way that did not sound complimentary or sarcastic—it was oddly neutral. There was just something tragically endearing about this person; he reminded her of a character Paul Newman would have played during the 1960s, back when he exclusively portrayed charismatic alcoholics. No one seemed to care that he was a broken person, including himself. Vance was the most obviously depressed individual Julia had ever met, but no one else in town seemed to notice; they all treated him like he was the host of The Joker’s Wild. He would sit on a bar stool and pound thirteen cans of Schmidt and utter (maybe) one hundred words over a span of four hours. He did this 250 nights a year. Nobody found this troubling. People would look at his behavior and say double-true things like, “That guy is a pretty laid-back guy.” They envied his life, or at least the life they assumed he had. He was a sad Ben Franklin. He was Mr. Owl.

  Julia fantasized about saving his life. She imagined him saying, “I didn’t even have a life until you moved here.” She imagined him taking a shower in her apartment and sitting on her couch in boxer shorts, politely looking at the pictures in her photo albums; he would ask who certain people were and how and when she knew them. He would be mildly jealous of her male friends from college. He would ask if she ever hooked up with any of them. She’d tell him about her problems, and he would say, “I understand where you’re coming from on this.” He would constantly want to make out, but never in public. People would ask Julia questions like, “What is Vance really like?” and she would say, “Different than he seems.” She would understand his secret darkness, and it would make their sex life unbelievable. “We need to buy a bigger bed,” he would suggest sardonically, and they would lie on the mattress and laugh and laugh. Vance Druid had said or done nothing to prompt such fantasies. Still, these were the things Julia thought about while she taught Our State. She felt like she was on cocaine, a substance she’d never tried but had read about in magazines; she assumed this is how cocaine made people feel.

  It was Friday. She could not wait to see him. Julia decided to wear a black turtleneck sweater with a bra that made her boobs look extra spherical and a pencil skirt that made her look like she was going to a bar in a town that wasn’t Owl. The color of her lipstick was labeled Fireball Orange; it tasted like black licorice. Her hair achieved its maximum volume, which required eight dollars of Aqua Net. Julia waited in her apartment an extra forty-five minutes before going out. She did not want to appear as if she was waiting for anyone in public. When she showed up in Yoda’s at 8:55, Vance was not there. Julia had a quick gin and tonic and headed over to Mick’s Tavern. He wasn’t there either. She drank a Tom Collins and drove to the VFW; the only people in the lounge were Disco Ball and Little Stevie Horse ’n’ Phone, both of whom insisted on buying her G & Ts in rapid succession. She drank only one before heading to the White Indian, where she did not find Vance but did enjoy an extremely potent Greyhound. It was gone in seven minutes. She was on a roll. She peeped inside the Oasis Wheel but left immediately. There were a lot of vehicles parked outside Doc Jake’s Saloon, but Vance was not inside (still, she had a rum and Coke). At quarter to 11:00 she checked back at Mick’s Tavern; somebody whistled when she walked in. Julia felt like an idiot. She ordered a shot of Jägermeister and pretended not to be looking for Vance, who was not there. She eventually fell out of the bar’s back door, a move
that was not particularly dignified. When she finally staggered back to Yoda’s, Naomi and Ted were sitting in their usual booth, throwing peanuts at each other.

  “Holy shit,” said Naomi. “Jules, you look like a thirty-thousand-dollar hooker. You look fantastic. We are going to get a million free drinks tonight. That skirt is like a Burmese penis trap.”

  “Where’s Vance?” asked Julia.

  “Um…what?”

  “Vance,” she repeated. “Why isn’t Vance here? Or anywhere else?”

  “Did he say he was going to be here?”

  “He is always here! Or at least he’s always somewhere,” said Julia. “Fuck that guy.”

  “Why are you looking for Vance?” asked Ted.

  “Who said I was looking for him?” said Julia. “Besides, fuck that guy.” She was saying these things much louder than necessary.

  “I don’t understand this,” said Naomi. “Is there something going on between you and Vance Druid? Why have I not been informed of this?”

  “Nothing is going on. Fuck that guy. I just had to tell him something.”

  “What did you have to tell him?” asked Ted.

  “I don’t remember,” said Julia. “Who wants a drink?” She walked toward the wall of bottles. Chet the Dog Lover was smiling from behind the bar, totally pissing her off. The Dog Lover only smiled at people when he wanted to piss them off.

  “Give me three fucking rum and Cokes,” said Julia. “And quit looking at me. I know I’m drunk. I know I’m fucking drunk. Since when do you care who’s drunk?”

  “Since when do you buy your own drinks?” replied the Dog Lover.

  “Give me a break, man. I mean, come on. Fuck. You know what I mean? Jesus Christ.”

  “Classy,” said the Dog Lover as he mechanically injected streams of Coca-Cola into glass cauldrons of Lord Calvert and ice. “You know what? Fuck it. You can have all three of these drinks for five bucks, just because I’m such a swell guy. And—for the record—I think you look great tonight. I don’t care what the inbred morons around here think. They don’t know shit about fashion. In my opinion, strippers always look hot.”