“If you were on a game show,” Seth says about his two types of people. Seth has already pulled off the freeway and we’re driving between dark warehouses, turning toward every glimpse we get of the Space Needle. “So you’re the winner of this game show,” Seth says, “and you get a choice between a five-piece living room set from Broyhill, suggested retail price three thousand dollars …or …a ten-day trip to the Old World charm of Europe.”
Most people, Seth says, would take the living room set.
“It’s just that people want something to show for their effort,” Seth says. “Like the pharaohs and their pyramids. Given the choice, very few people would choose the trip even if they already had a nice living room set.”
No one’s parked on the streets around Seattle Center, people are all home watching television, or being television if you believe in God.
“I have to show you where the future ended,” says Seth. “I want us to be the people who choose the trip.”
According to Seth, the future ended in 1962 at the Seattle World’s Fair. This was everything we should’ve inherited: the whole man-on-the-moon-within-this-decade, asbestos-is-our-miracle-friend, nuclear-powered and fossil-fueled world of the Space Age where you could go up to visit the Jetsons’ flying saucer apartment building and then ride the monorail downtown for fun pillbox hat fashions at the Bon Marche.
All his hope and science and research and glamour left here in ruins:
The Space Needle.
The Science Center with its lacy domes and hanging light globes.
The monorail streaking along covered in brushed aluminum.
This is how our lives were supposed to turn out.
Go there. Take the trip, Seth says. It will break your heart because the Jetsons with their robot maid, Rosie, and their flying-saucer cars and toaster beds that spit you out in the morning, it’s like the Jetsons have sublet the Space Needle to the Flintstones.
“You know,” says Seth, “Fred and Wilma. The garbage disposal that’s really a pig that lives under the sink. All their furniture made out of bones and rocks and tiger-skin lampshades. Wilma vacuums with a baby elephant and fluffs the rocks. They named their baby ‘Pebbles.’”
Here was our future of cheese-food and aerosol propellants, Styrofoam and Club Med on the moon, roast beef served in a toothpaste tube.
“Tang,” says Seth, “you know, breakfast with the astronauts. And now people come here wearing sandals they made themselves out of leather. They name their kids Zilpah and Zebulun out of the Old Testament. Lentils are a big deal.”
Seth sniffs and drags a hand across the tears in his eyes. It’s the Estrace is all. He must be getting premenstrual.
“The folks who go to the Space Needle now,” Seth says, “they have lentils soaking at home and they’re walking around the ruins of the future the way barbarians did when they found Grecian ruins and told themselves that God must’ve built them.”
Seth parks us under one big steel leg of the Space Needle’s three legs. We get out and look up at the legs going up to the Space Needle, the low restaurant, the high restaurant that revolves, then the observation deck at the top. Then the stars.
Jump to the sad moment when we buy our tickets and get on the big glass elevator that slides up the middle of the Space Needle. We’re in this glass and brass go-go cage dance party to the stars. Going up, I want to hear hypoallergenic “Telestar” music, untouched by human hands. Anything computer-generated and played on a Moog synthesizer. I want to dance the frug on a TWA commuter flight go-go dance party to the moon where cool dudes and chicks do the Mashed Potato under zero gravity and eat delicious snack pills.
I want this.
I tell Brandy Alexander this, and she goes right up to the brass and glass windows and does the frug even though going up, the G forces make this like dancing the frug on Mars where you weigh eight hundred pounds.
The sad part is when the guy in a poly-blend uniform who runs the elevator misses the whole point of the future. The whole fun, fun, fun of the moment is wasted on him, and this guy looks at us as if we’re those puppies you see behind glass in suburban mall pet stores. Like we’re those puppies with yellow ooze on their eyes and buttholes, and you know they’ll never have another solid bowel movement but they’re still for sale for six hundred dollars apiece. Those puppies are so sad that even the overweight girls with bad beauty college perms will tap on the glass for hours and say, “I loves you, little one. Mommy loves you, tiny one.”
The future is just wasted on some people.
Jump to the observation deck at the top of the Space Needle, where you can’t see the steel legs so it’s as if you’re hovering over Seattle on a flying saucer with a lot of souvenirs for sale. Still, most of this isn’t souvenirs of the future. It’s the ecology T-shirts and batiks and tie-dyed all-natural cotton fiber stuff you can’t wash with anything else because it’s never really color-fast. Tapes of whales singing while they do sex. More stuff I hate.
Brandy goes off in search of relics and artifacts from the future. Acrylic. Plexiglas. Aluminum. Styrofoam. Radium.
Seth goes to the railing and leans out over the suicide nets and spits. The spit falls back down into the twenty- first century. The wind blows my hair out over the darkness and Seattle and my hands are clutched white on the steel railing where about a million hands before me have clutched the paint off.
Inside his clothes, instead of the plates of hard muscle that used to drive me crazy, now the fat pushes his shirt out over the top of his belt. It’s the Premarin. His sexy five o’clock shadow is fading from the Provera. Even his fingers swell around his old letterman’s ring.
The photographer in my head says:
Give me peace.
Flash.
Give me release.
Flash.
Seth hauls his water-retaining self up to sit on the railing. His kiltie tassel loafers swing above the nets. His tie blows straight out above the nothing and darkness.
“I’m not afraid,” he says. He straightens one leg and lets a kiltie tassel loafer dangle from his toes.
I clutch the veils tight around my neck so people who don’t know me will think like my parents that I’m still happy.
Seth says, “The last time I’ll ever be scared was the night you caught me trying to kill you,” and Seth looks out over the lights of Seattle and smiles.
I’d smile, too, you know, if I had any lips.
In the future, in the wind, in the dark on the observation deck at the top of the Space Needle, Brandy Alexander, that brand-name queen supreme that she is, Brandy comes out to Seth and I with souvenirs of the future. These are postcards. Brandy Alexander gives us each a stack of postcards so faded and dog-eared and picked over and ignored that they’ve survived in the back of a revolving wire rack for years. Here are pictures of the future with clean, sun-bleached skies behind an opening-day Space Needle. Here’s the monorail full of smiling babes in Jackie O pink mohair suits with three huge cloth-covered buttons down the front. Children in striped T-shirts and blond astronaut crew cuts run through a Science Center where all the fountains still work.
“Tell the world what scares you most,” says Brandy. She gives us each an Aubergine Dreams eyebrow pencil and says, “Save the world with some advice from the future.”
Seth writes on the back of a card and hands the card to Brandy for her to read.
“
Brandy puts a big Plumbago kiss on the little square for the stamp and lets the wind lift the card and sail it off toward the towers of downtown Seattle.
Seth hands her another, and Brandy reads:
“
A kiss, and the card’s on its way toward Lake Washington.
From Seth:
