Chapter IV

Downtown. Adam cared enough about his friends to make himself presentable. He didn’t want to embarrass Leah and Thomas so he threw on his housecoat before he left. He didn’t want to look crazy by just traipsing around town in his socks and underwear.
People stared, though. Or they looked away, but he knew what they were thinking. Every last one of them.
“Yeah,” he said to the people passing by, “I’m the one that’s crazy.”
They thought he needed to get out of the house, be around other people. Leah didn’t want him to get bedsores, Thomas didn’t want him to wind up like Howard Hughes. He still saw Adam as post-traumatic but Leah knew better. She couldn’t tell Thomas, of course.
“Look at this,” Thomas said, about a newspaper box, “’Man’s throat slashed, reveals tumor.’” He dropped a couple quarters in the slot and pulled out a paper. The trap door slammed shut real loud, drawing eyes.
“What,” Adam yelled, sensing their thoughts, “you want I should go around naked?”
Leah and Thomas exchanged glances, maybe this wasn’t the best idea.
“Sure it is,” Adam said to either of them. “You wanted to bring me downtown, I wanted to show you this.”
He pointed up to the stories-high jumbo tron, its insect like multi-faceted, multifarious pixilated eye trained on the unsuspecting masses, teeming below. It ran, day and night, hour after hour an endlessly repetitive stream of commercials and advertisements. All the time. He looked across the street and saw two girls snap a picture of the thing.
He pointed up at it once again and began to speak to his friends and everyone else.
“You can’t get away from it, there’s no place to escape from it because it’s the plague. It’s everywhere, on the streets, in books … everywhere. A living, dreaming plague of dangerous and irresponsible ideas. Every time you turn a corner there’s another shit and smut peddler trying to sell you a bad idea. The price is right, the price is so low you’d have to be crazy not to buy into it, because the price is you willingness to be accepted.”
By now he had a wide berth around him, no one stopped to listen. Leah and Thomas receded along the wall.
“I want you to question your sanity. I need you to go stark raving mad. You’ve got to run through the streets screaming, ‘I am fucking sick of this shit.’
“Look. Look at this. No one cares. We don’t care about our mental health or the state of things. Only status. A newer car, bigger tits, that’s what we really need, right? I’m not saying those aren’t nice things in the shop windows, I’m just suggesting that maybe we can get by without them.
“Not everyone can have an important car or a nice big fat set of tits to get you into places. And those are the things that are important, right?
“This is what we’re told over and over and it’s pounded into our brains and we start to believe it mind body and soul but there is no soul anymore because we believe and pretty soon there is no mind left at all and then all we’re left with is a body. A body to parade around and buy clothes with even more advertisements on them and then all of a sudden the images you see up there on the screen and in your home on TV or on the internet become real. They become a physical reality because it’s self-reinforcing propaganda doesn’t anyone see that? Anyone? No?
“It’s what’s inside that counts.”
“Don’t you care?”
Everyone walked by, trying as hard as they could not to meet the gaze of the madman. And it was a perfectly reasonable thing to do for perfectly reasonable people. Of course, not everybody was perfectly reasonable.
Across the street, a trio of young men watched the whole seen, grinning. They just had to get a closer look at this guy.
Adam turned back around to face his friends who hid their faces along the wall.
“I’m sorry you guys,” he said, “I try to tell the truth and no one cares, no one wants to hear it. They don’t care about the lies and the falseness. I can’t live like that. It’s time someone paid a visit to the Wizard of Oz.”
“Yo, Wizard,” one of the young men said, “you a wizard?”
“No, I’m not the wizard,” Adam said, “I’m Dorothy.”
The young men burst out laughing.
“I know who I am,” Adam said, “who are you?”
“Me,” the young man said, “I’m a thug.” He took a big swill from a bottle concealed by a brown paper bag. “They just let you out or something?” he said, indicating Adam’s housecoat with a slap across the shoulder.
“No,” Adam said, “but you wouldn’t really know anything about that. Sure, you’ve spent a night or two in the drunk tank, but you’ve never been to prison. You’re not hard. And you’re not smart either, the most hardcore thing you ever did was sell some pot in high school and it got confiscated by two undercover cops once and you were so shook you never thought about doing it again. Isn’t that right, Justin?”
Justin was confused. He glanced back at his two buddies, scared, then he flashed the gun tucked into his waistband.
“I know you won’t use that, cause it’s a replica.”
At that moment, everything went white for Justin …