Free Into the Great Wide Open by Kevin Canty Page B

sunshine on his shoulders and his neck. This was his future, the thing he was walking toward, every day another slow step. Will you walk beside me? Kenny thought; then saw her in grainy black-and-white, the pubic tangle. Will you let me inside?
    Reached to kiss her, and Junie let him, and no more.
    Kenny was opposed to the idea of the future: he was trying for Zen, where everything is the same, the past, the future, good luck and bad. He wanted to get off the wheel, samsara. Birth, suffering, death, rebirth. He didn’t do much of anything to get himself off the wheel, but he thought about it.
    At the same time, he knew that he was going to be somewhere for the rest of his life, however long that took, whatever ended uphappening to him. Sunday in the park, with the sun on his shoulders. It was something to hope for, anyway. Other times he saw his father’s face, the dark hollows around his eyes, like an electrical appliance had been socketed in his eyes and then unplugged abruptly, leaving scorch marks. Even when his father laughed, his eyes didn’t. His father had found a way from his own childhood to his present location; Kenny had seen evidence, pictures of his father as a young man, grinning, with an oar in his hand. Kenny could find his own way. The easy certainties of the children in his class—school then college then work then marriage—felt silly to him but they appeared to work: it was Tinkerbell again, the children holding hands, singing together. Successful, interchangeable.
You have to believe …
    Kenny had a plan, a dream, a fantasy, something. It came to him one night, stoned: he would write a history of the future. Or maybe an archaeology, depending. When did the future start? Who first thought of it? What were the important events in the development of the future? He thought of the Trylon and Perisphere, the Apollo program. Rounded Packards, Hudson Hornets racing into the future. All that seemed to be over now. We were back on the wheel, samsara: birth, suffering, death, rebirth. The future was
dynamic
, the future was
nuclear
—they were going to get to escape velocity, escape the orbit of the wheel, blast off. In the future they were going to vacation on the moon. They were going to banish disease, they were going to banish suffering. Samsara was to be eradicated. They were going to be directional.
    These suburban streets whirled and curved and dead-ended, intentionally; they were meant to keep outsiders from finding any use in them, to keep commerce away, to preserve the common peace. Boy lived in a house like the others. The neighborhood association prevented them from fencing their front yards, painting their houses certain colors, parking their cars on the street—they were to be inside,with the garage doors shut, a fantasy of order. Boy himself had been forced to sell a perfectly good Jeep when it wouldn’t fit in the same garage with his father’s Thunderbird and his mother’s Crown Victoria. He was a year ahead of Kenny, out of high school but still living at home.
    Seven at night, dark, a biting wind. Kenny parked the Reliant on the street, feeling like the neighbors were watching him from behind their closed shades—which they probably were, he thought, nothing to stop them. Boy had his own entrance, his own floor all to himself, down in the basement. Kenny let himself out of the cold and into the thick, jungle smell of Boy’s house. “Hey,” he yelled down the stairs.
    “Hey,” the parrot yelled back. “Hey mama!”
    “Come on down,” Boy said. “Leave the light off.”
    Boy was stretched out on the sofa, the room bathed in red light, barely visible. “Going on?” he said.
    “Not much.”
    “I hear you’re screwing a lesbian,” Boy said. “Nice work. They said it couldn’t be done.”
    Kenny stopped, exposed, embarrassed. I haven’t screwed her, he thought; then realized that not screwing her was worse. He didn’t mean to be out in the daylight with her, Kenny and