It was Blue.
To say it was blue, to Neil, would have been an understatement. It was, without a doubt, the most wonderful color blue he had ever seen in his entire life.
After catching his breath, and, with a panicked pound of his chest, Neil slammed on his brakes and pulled to the side of the road. He placed his car's corrugated cardboard windshield-cover in place (It read "Need Help: Please Call Police," ensuring that no one would stop at the side of the road to disturb him). Neil then climbed out and stared in awe at the sight before him.
“My God.”
In that moment Neil forgot everything. His name, his job, his two roommates Molly and Frank, two totally opposite personalities who, through the grace of what some people would call God, met through Neil and immediately fell in one-sided fascination.
Frank had been hired by a major networking company to reduce their bandwidth by downloading digital music by Bad Religion, and writing quotes by Mahatma Ghandi on the whiteboard they provided him. He enjoyed every minute of his job, and could not understand why so many people complained about theirs. When he decided he was no longer needed, he left and waited on a bench outside the San Diego apartment rented by Neil, Molly and himself.
Every day Frank would sit on the same bench, and wait. It didn’t matter for what. And he stared. It didn’t matter at what. The sky worked. Or a person, leaf, slab of concrete. He sought to glean no new information, as he had just enough trouble as it was, recognizing the distinction between objects that were not himself.
Frank was large, with the fuzz of what had been a shaved head, and quite ugly. Frank was Life, not at all arrogant but completely egocentric. “Life is a wonderful, beautiful thing,” he said about himself. When Frank finished staring and waiting, the the floodgates opened and Philosophy flowed forth. Though Frank lacked the drive to come up with much of his own, he could very well appreciate it all, and was quite content to ponder his own three-word philosophy: “Life is Weird.”
On one particular day Frank had a friend – a long-lasting friendship of six months – waiting for a ride. Her car in the shop, she would continue waiting outside her office building, without a way home.
Molly was the absolute essence of a young businesswoman – short and thin with shoulder-length wavy brown hair covering the shoulders of her red sweater-jacket, and a throbbing pain in her arm where propping herself up on the grass had irritated her developing carpal tunnel syndrome. Acceptable losses in her struggle to climb the corporate ladder in record time. What hurt far worse was the fact that she had lots of time here and less to do in it. She had been trained from birth to be busy, and while her intelligence surpassed Frank’s, she considered herself too practical to be stuck here existing, doing all the nothing she had to do. Her high school GPA was 4.3, college was turning on her with a disgraceful 3.9, and now she was bored as hell. To make matters worse, Frank’s waiting had increased her own waiting tenfold. Why was she being made to wait here? What did she look like, a waiter?
“Waitress,” the Molly in her mind corrected her.
“Same thing,” the Frank in her mind corrected her. The whole process of self-correction took less time than it took to think all three words at once.
Great… now she was starting to think. She hated when that happened, not because she was bad at it, but because Thinking replaced Action, which everyone knows is far superior.
Molly was just one more person with whom Frank could be intrigued. In truth, Frank was intrigued with everyone, but that feeling grew with those more distinctly different from himself – and to Frank, Neil and Molly were perfect specimens. While Frank believed in the goodness and beauty of human nature, and life, and the world, and everything, Molly believed, when she believed at all, in total neutrality of the human spirit, that neither good or evil could live within one person at once, Tabula Rasa, or not, whatever, I’ve got better things to do.
Neil believed in nothing, and justified his world view with an essay he saw written on that last bastion of philosophical thought, the back of a Tool Album. “Beliefs are Dangerous. Beliefs allow a functional mind to stop functioning, a non-functioning mind is clinically dead. Believe in nothing.”
“Yeah!” was his response. Neil used this snippet ‘o’ wisdom to remind him why he should not believe in anything, to compensate for his unintentionally cynical attitude and uncooperative brain which reminded him that he could not believe in anything. Religion was a joke, science depended upon disbelief, and the thought of humanity raised his blood pressure by twenty points. Neil’s job took him to meet all the different people he could stand, talk to them for thirty seconds, and leave, which of course interested Frank as a possible side-job.
“The problem is, though…” Neil didn’t say to Frank, “Most of those new people I could do without.” And, in his own mind, he was right. He delivered pizza to put himself through school, and in any given day met ten to twelve people surrounded by beige and orange who had paid five-hundred-thousand dollars to live in half-a-million dollar homes so that they could share the suburban experience with neighbors they hated. Beige and Orange, everything. The suburban experience was an old, decayed filmstrip shot by his mortal enemies, the housing developers.
If he had actually said this to Frank, though, Frank would have responded to the tune of: “And I want to meet every single one of them.” And he did, because it was Frank’s own belief that if he had a nice, shallow encounter with every human on Earth, he would finally fully understand them all.
Neil’s feelings about his customers came to him two-fold: First, they were horrid tippers. Cathedral-style ceilings, a beautifully-architectured waste of space, huge earth-toned wooden doors, to let everyone know how welcome, as well as absolutely insignificant they were, and other wonderfully expensive Southern-Californian eye candy apparently left little room for the two-fifty it took to make someone’s day better.
The second, more indirect source of his feelings was his post-analysis on each person he met, lumped into a daily summary: “In general,” he reasoned after a series of superficial thirty-second transactions, “I am the only person in this state deeper than a kiddie-pool.” He reasoned later that he was probably wrong, but how could he tell? Neil spent all day speaking with people who believed speedy pizza delivery was a constitutional right. He had seen entire cities built in five years. Ten years ago his highways had never known the meaning of “rush hour.” His brushy mountain landscape, that he fell in love with when he moved to San Diego, had turned beige and orange. Beige and Orange, everything. His world had changed, something that made the twenty-four-year-old feel eighty. He had a right to be cynical, angry with these people who had each paid half a million dollars to take away his city.
Neil now ascended the billboard at the side of the road with the speed and power usually associated with those placed in life-or-death situations. As he climbed, the misty, pale gray sky waned into the overwhelming Blue. He moved his hand in a vague motion similar to that of petting a giant cat.
"Oh . . . "
It had a painter’s ledge to stand on. Good. He stood on the ledge and didn't fall backwards. It was an omen. Neil sat down to conserve the energy it would take for his brain to accept what he had seen. At least he thought he sat down. He couldn’t be quite sure, and it no longer mattered to him anyway; he had seen the Blue.
Neil analyzed the Blue. It was dark… but not too dark. This Blue was something he could drink; something with the word “electric” attached to it, or some kind of genetically engineered fruit punch. He had seen close relatives of this blue, but this...? They had thrown a tiny, minuscule bit of red in there to thwart the close examiner. It was almost purple, but not quite. Ah ha! thought Neil. "I'm smarter than that." he said out loud, to whoever was listening. "It's NOT purple! It's Blue. …And… and don't you try to tell me otherwise."
At that moment there was only Blue. With the world put on hold, Neil could stare into the beauty of a single color, a color so perfect that he felt even more insignificant than before.
Neil wanted desperately to congratulate whoever had created such a fine shade of paint, until it struck him that this could not have been created by any man. It was Perfect. It was the Stuff of Legends. It was whatever the Gods of Olympus would have dressed in, it was It.
He knew that. Why was he thinking it? A relentless thinker, Neil’s first reaction was to come up with thousands of answers and the questions such as these that they connected with in seconds. He had done this all his life, and it was time to stop. He had to concentrate on The Blue. "Stupid letters." he mumbled at the white letters, intruding like hecklers into The Blue's show. The huge ‘Q’ was particularly offensive. "Of all the letters... ‘Q’ has done us the least good. And now it has the nerve to intrude on The Blue." It was a problem far more pressing than the everyday life he chose to tear apart, and the hordes of people with whom he had endless issues.
"Am I the only one who is depressed by this?" Neil had asked Frank on a trip to the grocery store. “This” was a TV dinner.
"Pff... Hahah..." Frank's smile hung incredulously. "If you find one more reason to be depressed, you'll hold the record or something."
Frank had to be stopped before he unleashed song lyrics at him. Frank had a database of “inspirational” song lyrics at-a-glance. "No, it's not the TV dinner... But, like, I don't like these things anyway, it's this thing on the back. You work hard to provide a good, honest meal for your family, so trust yaddah yaddah bring you da da da new choices et cetera-Am I the only one who finds this depressing? It's intangible, sort of." Frank nodded slightly, admitting that Neil was not the only one who felt the fibers of time-space strain a little from that simple statement. He dismissed it quickly.
“Seriously, you’ve got to be the most depressed friend I have.” Frank had many, many friends. Frank’s charisma outweighed that of any other people he knew. To most onlookers that number of people ranked in the thousands, and to Frank it ranked in the ones- Himself.
“I’m not depressed!”
“Bitter, then.”
“But, uh… what would I have to be bitter about?”
“You spent all of today asking me which depressed fictional character you were the most like. I don’t know.”
“I
didn’t think you were listening,” retorted Neil.
“I wasn’t,” he admitted indifferently. Frank never listened.
Frank absorbed through his waiting and made assumptions based on his experience
with similar song lyrics. And Frank’s trouble (though he would have, and often
had, called it fascination) with the concept of “other people” led him to seek
out Neil’s counsel on dilemmas such as the time he asked whether he should ask
out the recent ex-girlfriend of one of his best friends.
“No!”
“But see… that’s what I wonder? Why?” asked Frank?
“You just don’t!” Neil was short of breath.
“You just don’t. And I’m trying to find out why,” and then Frank betrayed his true purpose, “because you think so differently from me.”
Neil knew him far too well, and Frank had proven himself again. “You’re going to do it no matter what, aren’t you?”
“My friend said he didn’t mind.”
“Of course he said that!” The breath Neil had worked so hard to regain disappeared again. He knew if he got into that subject, all he would accomplish would have been to lay his own soul bare, something he had not the energy to do at the time. He decided instead at the next opportunity to ask him about some song lyrics.
Neil honestly did not blame him for his flakiness, and often believed it to be the source of what could loosely be defined as his “charm”. Frank’s way of life had stemmed from a conundrum Neil called The Problem of the SUV – one so twisted and immense he could only symbolize it.
One morning Neil woke up and found he was driving to his college; the first things he saw were the giant letters “L A N D C R U I S E R” underneath the familiar bull insignia of the Toyota motors corporation. His groggy first-morning logic was able to think much more clearly and directly than his midday logic, so his mind immediately shot to an old C.M. Kornbluth story he had read. In the future, the story said, children raise themselves because both parents have to work to afford giant houses and giant vehicles called “Land Cruisers,” which get about five miles to the gallon and can only be driven on special roads with gas stations placed strategically and frequently alongside them.
“A fad,” he once rambled to Molly. “A hulking monstrosity, brand new for the price of two Camaros.” The studious CEO-in-training would have responded with something about the practicality, usefulness… economy? something? of a good SUV. Had she believed it. But, considering it, she stopped herself. “They probably pay extra,” Neil continued, “to keep me from being able to back out of parking spaces… And blocking traffic … I love it, I… Ugh. I don’t know…” He trailed off here, giving up talking to Molly, who needed everything explained in terms of facts when only scattered half-sentences could properly get the point across.
Neil regarded the SUV as a symbol of all that was wrong in the world, self-importance, excessiveness, organized religion. He hadn’t quite figured out how the latter fit in with that symbol, but if he analyzed it long enough, he knew he would come upon it eventually. Neil attempted on a regular basis to speak to God, though not through that whole prayer hype. Generally, these attempts began with his trying to ascertain the nature of a supreme being, continued with his yelling at God for causing humans, and ending with the realization of yet another contradiction in the dogma of most major religions he was familiar with. He was familiar with only one, though he kept his mind open to all the nonsense anyone was willing to throw at him in the hopes that he would find the secret to the blind belief he so envied. Neil’s feelings on organized religion were Nietzschian to say the least, the inevitable backfire of the religious upbringing others had had. Neil heard enough of their horror stories to last a lifetime. Molly and Frank were not among them; their suburban experience manifested itself in a number of other ways.
Molly and Frank’s families had each been the perfect San Diegan image – Norman Rockwell meets Salvador Dali, as described by Woody Allen at 60 RPM. In high school, Molly went straight from orchestra practice at four to Tae Kwon Do, which ended just in time for piano lessons at eight. After that came homework, two hours to do a perfect job on a ten-minute assignment, after which came thinking time, which occupied the eighty-five seconds between when her head hit the pillow and when she seized the opportunity to dart away from consciousness. Frank, coincidentally, had been a part of that same orchestra, and his daily schedule was a photocopy of Molly’s, except with lacrosse instead of Tae Kwon Do. To Neil, who had few obligations at any given time, it seemed both had come out of their familial bliss with numerous battle scars. The one difference between the two families was that Frank’s family had once made a passing reference to something called an option, an idea which spread throughout his soul and caused him to experience two separate nervous breakdowns by age nineteen, a fact he often put to use in explaining why he loved all of his friends and humanity so very, very much.
“I love all of my friends and humanity so very, very much,” he confessed one night when the three had made a late night food run. He confessed the same thing the week before, and would do so again the following week.
“Well, good.” Replied Molly nonchalantly.
“I should be far along the road but I’m not… ” Frank started to chant.
“Okay, stop, now.” She had already reminded them how little time she had to be wasting it here, and was growing impatient. “You’re looking for the hidden meaning in Techno lyrics, now.”
Frank’s mood changed for the worse and he felt the closest thing he could to chagrin, and Neil’s chanting “everyone on the dance floor now baby” did not help the situation. Molly laughed then – she was not without a sense of humor, as long as the joke was packaged well and easy to open.
Neil didn’t need to spend his whole life with his roommates, in fact he hadn’t known them more than about five years. Neil saw them in every house he visited. Sure, they ranged ages five through fifty and they looked different, but each was a stage in the development of a “fully functional member of society.” In watching the biographies of his roommates unfold in flashback form before his eyes, Neil had one less reason to believe in human nature. Any species that could produce Frank was surely on the road to ruin. Having discounted the physical and the mental, the ethereal and his Fellow Man, there was little that had yet to be placed in his soul’s ashtray of defeat.
Neil felt a plink of soft cold on his head. He looked up and felt one in his eye.
"Whoa!" Had he not noticed that he really had sat down in the first place, Neil would have panicked over his inevitable fall from the billboard. "Thank God." He kissed The Blue and then apologized for adulterating it with his human lips. "I'm no better than … that letter." He reasoned that if he didn't refer to it indirectly, instead of saying ‘Q,’ The Blue may send negative energies into his life.
No, it would never do that. Blue was a benevolent color. Not bitter and vengeful like Maroon, or cold and indifferent like Beige and Orange. Better safe than sorry, though.
Neil looked up at the hazy sky which had presented him with these two plinks of cold. "Pathetic attempt, Non-Blue!!" he screamed at it. As if in retaliation, the sky dropped down several more plinks. Neil concentrated deeply in the hopes that the Blue would take his mind off the rain, which it did.
After fifteen minutes, Neil decided that he had obtained everything his feeble mind could grasp from this miraculous billboard. He looked up at the sky, whose shame had obviously caused it to replace its inferior blue with a reddish gold. "Wow, that was not fifteen minutes. Either I have been here for hours, or ... the Blue..."
He looked down in the direction of the ground below, but before his eyes could hit the ground, they hit several dozen spectators, a trampoline and two cop cars. “Whatever problems you are experiencing can be fixed!” Neil thought he heard.
"Huh? Oh. Yeah, I know." Neil felt a sudden pang of guilt for unwittingly striking the sympathies of a city.
"You... know?"
"Hmm... Yep," said Neil. "Pretty sure, yeah. Listen, could I maybe get down from here?" He could.
Neil walked to his car, cutting through the crowd of people. He stopped to look at the blue uniform of the guy with the megaphone. Looking down, he shook his head sadly.
- - -
"Where were you last night? You didn’t show up, and now your name is in the paper..."
"Must have been a slow news day," said Neil.
"I'm serious! I mean, geez man, you coulda been dead for all I know."
"Meh. Molly, since when did you get all, you know… whatever this is? The article says I wasn't actually trying to commit suicide. I got off with some kind of warning about climbing billboards, or … something… hey, we don't have any blue food in here, do we?" said Neil. He opened the cabinet. "Kool-Aid."
Molly’s eyebrows contorted. "We, er, don’t really have any food in here at all. You know? … I… I wasn't really trying to commit suicide, where's the blue food? Pheh. I have a class now. Nutjob."
"Seeya."
- - -
Neil's twisted and disfigured face pulled away from the water cooler and regained its shape as the body it controlled stood upright. "They try, I have to give them that. They try." Neil looked around. "Hey, Irvine."
"Neil," said his tall, lanky co-worker.
"How long have we been here today?" came Neil's monotone inquiry.
"Thirty minutes, Neil," said Irvine.
"And ten something hours to go, hm? Damn Saturday mornings, not even gonna make any money for six hours…" said Neil.
"So this boredom thing is new to you?"
"Hah." Neil grabbed a few highlighter markers and tapped a rhythm on the metal table in front of him.
"Well," said Irvine, "if you're, uh, ready to pick things up around here, there's always the possibility of work. If you're that bored, you can, like, cut those peppers."
"Those peppers never did a bit of good for me. You have to wonder how much they really matter."
"They don’t matter at all," admitted an indifferent Irvine. He continued, as if reading off of a list: "They’re someone's excuse to buy us every day by providing us with menial work to keep us in line in return for the ability to live, even though we never reclaim that bit of ourselves that makes us want to live in the first place. Is that what you wanted to hear? I just thought that up. Woo. Now get the knife. We need peppers."
Neil applauded and searched for the peppers. “Peppers,” he went over in his head. “There're no peppers here... I probably thought it was a box of paper and put it in the office... on this computer. The peppers are probably in Solitaire. Yup, they’re definitely in Solitaire.”
It was then that the computer decided to error, resulting in that well-known bright blue error-message screen. Rather than frustration, Neil felt only hope. Immediately he began fine-tuning turning the tint and contrast knobs on the monitor.
"Boy, you've sure been working hard! It's like you've found a whole new breath of energy, like the runner's high of pizza... Oh, I'm sorry, you're just sitting there on the office computer staring at the Blue Screen of Death," is what Irvine would have liked to say had Neil not snapped at him to shut up halfway through the word "been."
"I'm ... that .... close."
"Yes, you are that close. Almost past, I'd say."
"Would you please?"
"Yeah, sure..." Irvine trailed off, realizing that he would just get another negative response from Neil.
Neil was nuts.
Irvine proceeded to mind his own business but a voice from behind stopped him and turned him around. "Irvine."
"What?"
“I’ve gotta tell you something, man. I think my life has just gotten so much meaning that I can't see the meaning in the meaning."
"Bell peppers have a way of doing that."
"I'm serious, man. Have you ever seen the Dairy Queen billboard on highway 15?"
"Yeah..." Irvine made sure to lengthen his response to indicate his hesitation in responding.
No answer from Neil.
"Yeah, what?"
Neil snapped out of his trance. "It's great, isn't it?"
"Dairy Queen?" said Irvine. "It's okay, I guess."
"The billboard..." whispered Neil.
"It's okay, I guess," whispered Irvine, mocking Neil.
"Don't you see? The Blue is there."
"Er… Is blue your favorite color or something?"
"No, green. But still. That's not the point," gasped Neil, frustrated. "This is not the color blue. It's the Blue. Listen. I don't have to worry now. You don’t, either, really. Don't you see, Irvine? Who needs work? For I have seen the Blue."
"What have you been smoking… and why haven’t you been sharing?"
"You joke. I would you understood, Irvine. In many ways you're like a brother to me." Neil placed his hand on Irvine's shoulder. Irvine quickly removed it.
"We've never talked, uh, outside this store. I've never, uh, seen you in normal clothes."
"A brother in the Blue..." Irvine’s every orifice hung open, adding extra weight to his face. Neil added: "I'm going now, Irvine."
"Oh... Kay..." Irvine was more than stunned. "Do you want me to tell anyone .. anything?"
"There will be no need for that." Neil disappeared into the brightness outside. Neil emerged from the light four minutes later and said, "You wouldn't happen to have any jumper cables, would you?"
"Not blue ones."
"Hm. Thanks."
The sea crashed upon the shore, not violently, but to assure it that it had better not step out of line. To the horizon stretched a rich teal, which could have been green or blue depending on the mood of the onlooker. It met with whispy cirrus clouds. The large gray rocks were far enough away from the shore so as not to have been weathered down too much, and the sand didn't radiate any particular heat. At this point in March, most of the world had apologized, packed its bags and left, except for the regular few that stayed and gave the tract developers a job and money to advertise to the ones who would be trapped next year. The rest were doing whatever it was that kept them in line during the week.
A nice, albeit chilly, day at the beach.
The man might have had a shirt on and he might not have. One color had eventually blended into the other, so if he had had a shirt on, it would be hard to tell from far away how well it contrasted with the dark tan color of his skin.
He did have pants on. They were slightly lighter in color than his shirt. His gray hair extended mostly down but in every other direction as well, combined with facial hair that would make Jerry Garcia jealous. He sat in the sanctuary under the rocks. A young stranger walked by, and the man decided to make conversation. He was too proud to ask for anything more than discussion over the weather.
"Sky is a nice blue today, huh?" the homeless man initiated.
"Hm?"
"I said the sky. It's a nice blue today huh?"
"I've seen better, friend," said the stranger.
"Well, alright. But ya gotta admit the ocean looks better than it has in months."
"That it does. It's pretty sad, huh?"
"Huh?"
“It keeps trying to imitate the Blue and fails. When will people learn that the ocean is not real Blue?"
"You're right," said the homeless guy. "It's more of an aqua or teal, but still... It's nice.”
"You poor man. Blue is something that comes from the heart. It can be recognized only by those who truly envision it as the wonderful thing that it is!" The stranger ranted on. "I see you have had some bad fortune in your life. But it is not bad fortune, it is because you fail to see the Blue for what it is. Don't worry, friend. I will help you. Together we will acknowledge The Blue and I will show you what I mean."
"Look man, umm, I am fine, really. I have my health."
"But have you never wanted more?"
"Well, Of course..."
"Then let me show you how the Blue can help you. The Blue will keep you safe and guide you through the troubled times of your life. It will not leave you unless you shut it out of your heart."
"Okay, I'll go along with you. I'll see what this magic blue can do. It's that or sit here."
- - -
"This is it," said Neil.
"What?"
"The Blue."
"The Blue."
"Yes, the Blue. Friend, don't you see?"
"Yeah. You know what, I do see.”
“Then you have found the true meaning!!!” cried Neil happily.
“It’s something to believe in, I guess,” concluded the older man.
- - -
“Is this the guy you were looking for? How long has it been since you’ve seen him? Months? They found him trying to get people to gather around a billboard. He was raving about shades of blue. They figured this was the best place for him.”
“What was he saying, though?” asked Molly.
“Who knows? Something about Sport Utility Vehicles, and tract housing. And blue, also. Lots about that.”
“He’s crazy,” said Molly.
“He’s happy,” said Frank.