Bent Highway: Chapter Nineteen

Living Room

Door chimes morphed into Kraftwerk-esque electronica, underpinned by a pulsing bass and a stick hitting the edge of a snare. Figures walked out of the glowing walls, in perfect time with the music. Two, maybe three dozen, all males, all different ages. A few of them looked similar to my grunge wearing guide. No, they didn’t look similar - they were exact replicas. I scanned the room - a group of kids with short haircuts, more teens next to them, and then a group of twenty-year olds.

“Who are they?”

“I think you know.” He unbuttoned the top two buttons of his plaid shirt, and then did them up again. I used to do that in my teen years, like a nervous tic with clothes.

The figures got closer, making a large half-circle around me. The music shifted, a chorus of “ooos”, and a R and B riff slid into the room. Necks moved in unison, feet tapped in rhythm. There were lots of Adidas in various shades, the twenty-year olds wore heavy black Doc Martens - steel-toed, I could be sure of that.

“What is this place?” My head had started to swim in recognition. A t-shirt from Blue Oyster Cult, a pair of painter’s pants, an International Harvester hat, long hair sprouting out the sides like a spider-plant gone wrong - it was a living scrapbook.

“Why?” It’s all that came to me, so I asked it again. “Why?”

“Damned if I know. Pretty cool fucking music though, ‘eh?”

Another shift, hard guitars slamming power chords, another bass dotting the background with bullets of sound, feedback and screaming vocals over it all.

Now everybody was dancing this weird swinging arm sort of way. I let it sink in that I’d finally gone insane.

“C’mon. We need to keep going.”

“What? Where?”

The teenage grunge me tugged at my sleeve, and the dancers parted to create a direct path to a door outlined in blood red. The group hummed together the same sound.

“Mmmmmmm.”

I followed into the doorway, which slid open as we reached it.

“Hang on,” he, I, said.

“To what?”

“Your mind.”

This time the sound didn’t come from music but from row after row of small figures crawling across the floor. They weren’t crying, or doing those baby coos that babies do, they were all murmuring. I looked back to the room we had just left, the door had already slid across.

“Those were all me. At different ages.”

The teenager nodded.

“And these are me. As a baby.” The murmurs went up a third of a note, perfect infant harmony. “But why so many?”

“These are the inbetweeners.”

“The what?”

“It seems like going into a room where you meet yourself at every age, well, you wanna take that slow. That’s how it was for me, anyway. And shit, I didn’t even know all those old guys. But now we’re in the place where they show all the other ages. I guess they like to start with these little yard apes.”

“Who is they?”

“Damned if I know. Oh, wait, watch that back wall.”

A section of wall lifted behind the room full of crawling babies. Another group of figures, many dressed like the ones in the previous room, were crowded in close to each other. There had to be several hundred. A pain started at the back of my skull. 

“And again.” Teenage me pointed a finger over the heads of the crowd. When the other wall lifted, I thought it revealed an odd wallpaper, multi-coloured tiny men, boys and children in a pattern, with windows of white showing through. It wasn’t wall paper.

“How?” I swallowed hard, my head throbbed. “How many rooms?”

The teenager shrugged.

“I didn’t have this many. Still kinda fucks you up, doesn’t it?”

Something flashed in my mind.

“Wait. Who took you here? Someone older than you – I mean me.” My brain threatened to jump out my ears. “Or someone younger?”

“Neither. It was Harold. I don’t remember much of it, or how it happened. He just walked me into a room. Things are bit messed up in my head.”

I looked across the room, trying to see over the heads, the white had all but disappeared.

“They are all me?” I asked.

“Every one of them.” I replied. "At different times. Every single time, actually."

I fell down in one knee and stared into a baby me. The kid’s eyes widened and he opened his mouth.

“Trippy, dude,” he said. It came out in that baby accent, and was more like, “Twippy, dood.”

“I don’t know what this means.” I said to the baby me, who stuck out his tongue at me and blew a raspberry. “I need to get out of here. I have to find Walt, and Chalk Girl.”

“Oh, I’d forget about those two.” The teenager’s voice had dropped about an octave. It must have been from when my voice was changing during puberty.

“Why should I forget about them?”

“Oh look, I think another door opened.”

Impossibly, the room in front of me became more crowded. I had a distant memory of being in Jamaica in a gutted out mini-van that they used as public transport. When I’d got on, the vehicle was already jammed full. I was squished in next to a three-hundred pound bald man who smelled like jerk chicken and sewage. The van spun through the city, a man hung out the open door and beckoned new riders. Each time we stopped, I thought there was no way they’d get another body into the van. And somehow they did.

“Why should I forget about them?” I asked again.

“Because now that I finally have you, they’re as good as dead. It's about time I got rid of that sanctimonious walking pituitary disorder.”

I didn’t talk like that.

The pain in my head was explosive - white spots formed in the corner of my vision. I braced myself against the floor and cranked my head back to the teenage me. Even through the blurred vision, I made out the thick black fro. 

Damned if he wasn’t slurping a lime Big Gulp. And wearing my plaid shirt.

“Nighty-night asshole.”

The light inside my head went off.