Neon Groove

John had the Doors album and the bottle of Saint-Emilion ‘92 La Mondotte Merlot balanced on the railing of the balcony. In all honesty he had no idea what that meant, but someone had affixed a hastily-written post-it note on the side, proclaiming THIS SHIT COST ALMOST $300 SO DON’T DRINK IT DEREK!!!

He had smoked a joint an hour ago and moved slowly walking from the kitchen. It was near twilight, LA time. Music from the city had diminished. He sat down in a longue chair overlooking downtown Los Angeles as the first of the evening stars came out. The smog had died down over the past few days, he noted.

The latest text from Stacy came in. “its gettin fuckin chily here. hop they start soon.” He had last seen Stacy and Morgan two days before, saying goodbye at the highway overpass as they went out to the desert and he went into Los Angeles and his recently-acquired house on Mulholland.

He texted back: “The one day it’s cold in LA has to be today. FML.” He was always more cautious about proper spelling and grammar even in his texts, for some reason. He put the phone on his lap and went back to watching the balcony across the ravine below him, undercut by Mulholland and dipping into the valley. Across from him was another balcony, framed in a more modern style, with white railings and an odd geometry that played strangely with the California dusk. Rather than facing each other, the two balconies looked out at a roughly 45-degree angle, offering frontal views that converged somewhere over downtown, so he had to adjust the position of his chair accordingly in order to capture both the balcony and the city in one viewpoint. No one was out there yet, though he was able to note, even from that distance, a single bottle of red wine—presumably merlot—sitting on a table adjacent to its one deck chair.

Somewhere below him came the jarring whine of feedback from speakers set up around the neighborhood. He poured some wine into a champagne glass he had found in the pantry and took a sip. In the back of his throat he tasted smoky rocks dug from a mountain stream.

Morgan couldn’t be talked out of going into the desert. He and Stacy were doomed to be together, and John knew this enough to let their final meeting be cordial, despite whatever he and Stacy once had at a point no longer relevant. John had told Morgan about the fallout, the horrors of a slow death without water, telling him “remember the lucky dragon number 5?” and then:

“Was that your imaginary friend”

“No, idiot, it was a Japanese fishing boat that got hit with fallout when we did the Castle Bravo bomb in the south Pacific in ’54. Most of them died slowly and horribly over a year,”

and

“Oh,”

and a pause and then

“Wasn’t very ‘lucky’ was it?”

But Morgan couldn’t undo whatever impulses led him to the desert, and all John could do was shake his hand and wish him well and exchange pained expressions with Stacy as they left and hold onto his reassurances of an instantaneous death.

His phone buzzed and his picked it up and saw the latest text from Stacy saying “do u see anything happning?” He glanced over the railing and tried to get a good look downtown, but it was too dark and the view too far, and all he picked up was the cry and the chill of a sudden breeze coming in from the east. He typed “NO” in all caps and hit SEND. He took another sip of wine and removed the Doors album—an old LP—and placed it in the record-player, setting it to a random song. He figured if he thought too hard about which song to play, he’d never end up playing anything. The silence around him held as he placed his finger over the PLAY button.

Across the road, he saw movement behind the sliding door of the balcony opposite his. A vague feminine figure, obscured by distance and the smudges of the glass. The figure paused, and, though he couldn’t tell for certain, the gait suggested, in a cosmic sense, the stance of a gaze cast in his direction. After a second the figure disappeared into what would likely have been the kitchen of the house.

He and Morgan and Stacy had followed the news, the discussions and the inevitability and the scores of loud and meaningless opinions scattered all over the internet, all those months in their studio apartment over the used record store back east in Greenwich Village. He and Stacy curled up together in a blanket, watching the news on TV, Morgan pacing the thin floor under the skylight, endless conversations of “Makes sense, I guess.”

“Yeah.”

“Nowhere else for us to go, as a society, I mean. We’ll just keep locking ourselves into our ideologies and pointlessly fighting with each other. We lack any remaining frontiers, or the will to create new ones.”

“MmHm.”

And Morgan pausing and then saying “I think we should go west” and Stacy saying “I hope they leave something, like a record of us—a black box, with all our information” and “why?” and “So if aliens ever come they can know why this species chose suicide.”

In his recollections the breeze picked up, and with it came a the faintest of sounds that brought his mind back into focus. On the opposite balcony a woman now stood, dressed in a bright, golden sun dress with blonde hair shimmering in the evening sun and billowing unfettered within the cooler winds. She held her hand up to shield her eyes, and John could see the she was looking at him. Thinking of nothing else, he picked up his glass of merlot and raised it in her direction.

She smiled, or at least as best as he could tell. She picked up her own bottle and poured herself an oversized serving in what appeared to be a larger chardonnay glass. After taking a sip, she brought her attention to something on her lap, and John soon realized that she was writing something on a dry erase board. Looking down, he remembered that he too had planted one on his own deck for just this occasion. As he scrambled for his board and marker, the woman held up her own, with words written in a broader, elegant handwriting, large enough for him to see.

So, I guess this is our first date?

He fumbled with the marker cap and scrawled his reply, trying to hold it high enough to catch the sunlight streaming from the low west.

I guess it is. Hell of a time for it, huh?

He had also drawn a crude smiley face emoji-approximation to try and lighten the mood, though he couldn’t quite tell how well that translated the distance between the two of them.

She rubbed off her first message and scrawled something else.

At least we something to talk about.

She took a sip of her wine and he did the same. Not being a wine guy himself, he was somewhat struck by the denser body of flavors he was hit with, though he didn’t suppose he would have, in a past, life, bothered to pay $300 for it.

He wrote on his board: How’s your wine?

She wrote back: No idea. Not really a wine gal.

Him: A woman after my own heart.

From downtown the music began to die down. The orange sun, unburdened by the usual LA smog, was dancing to a denouement on the edge of the Pacific as the sky above them set into a deepening blue marked by the most ambitious of the northern stars.

She had written something else on her board: What are you listening to?

Him: The Doors

Her: Interesting Choice. Then: I’ve got Katy Perry

John looked up from his wine and realized that somewhere far away someone was counting numbers down. The breeze had grown still and the silence had grown climatic.

SIXTY

He wrote: Any last words? He tried to draw the smiley face a bit larger, but he still didn’t know how well the effect got through.

She frowned, at least as far as his vantage point would reveal. He body was still for a few seconds, save her hair prancing within the wind. Then, her shoulders dipped and she began to write.

FORTY

Somewhere downtown they had planted a thermonuclear bomb, at least 10 megatons, so he heard, residue from the cold war finally put to use, and without thinking he hit the PLAY button and music erupted from his speakers.

THIRTY

Across the way the woman had finished writing. She held up her board, but the sun, not to be outshined by what was about to happen, seemed to flare up and temporarily obscure the writing.

TWENTY

He squinted, noting a sudden desperation in his chest that he had, up until then, be more or less successful in suppressing.

TEN

Finally, he made it out: It was all bigger than we thought

…and before he could begin to process this he saw the beetle crawling up a railing of the balcony, towards a few crumbs he had left at the top when he was eating breakfast…

SEVEN

…and then all he could think of was that somehow the universe itself depended upon this beetle reaching its destination and all he could think to do was turn the clocks back, turn the record back, hit RESET and maybe then…

…but the drums had already come in, and Jim Morrison’s voice echoed across the valley in counterpoint with the last few seconds of the countdown.

Well the clock says it’s time to close now

FIVE

I guess I better go now

The wind picked up.

The cars crawl past all stuffed with eyes

FOUR

Streetlights share their hollow glow

She waved her board at him, shouting, it something, something at the last.

Your brain seems bruised with numb surprise

THREE

Still one place to go

The sun died down

Still one place to go

TWO

Let me sleep all night in your soul kitchen

His glass fell.

Warm my mind near your gentle stove

ONE

Turn me out and I’ll wander baby

A sudden light.

Stumbling in the neon grooooo—

The light knew nothing else.