Kicking Tomorrow Read Online Free PDF Page B

intellectual disdain. These people, with their ankhs and vibes and karma and signs. This bullshit, this time-wasting, this inertia, this empty decade. The only authentic thing they’d inherited from the sixties, he thought, was a terminal case of superstitious mind-warp. The vanity, he thought, to imagine you’re part of some cosmic plan, that you can find a personal reference to yourself in any cheap paperback index of the zodiac. And still in his mind he was stuck on Ivy, Ivy again, who was addicted to reality (so she used to say), and the last he saw of her in the hot smoke: her glistening wrists, slipping from his grasp…
    He went off to throw up in the bushes, returning, immensely relieved, to wash the mesc’s soapy taste down with beer…
    … he hears himself say something, to no one in particular,
pigs, fuck
,
    in two voices, one for each ear, out of sync like an effect on a heavy record; the one euphoric, made light with giddy foolish amusement – the source of which he can’t determine at all – the other flat and foul as death’s own burp. He’s frightened by the intensity, the sudden shift, and his skin crawls.
    And in fact has anyone, may I ask, seen or heard about Ivy?
    Yow! Eek!
These are Brat’s first words.
The devil’s own daughter
.
    Two hours now Robbie’s pelvic bones have ground against the bench, and at last the lamplit world begins to bloom. The stained-glass park slips and slides all around them, peeling away like the acetate cells of an animated cartoon. The multicoloured leaves appear gloved in a malleable varnish, and each one has a distinct musical personality. The trees now chiming. Sucking up tones from the Earth’s core and dispersing them into the star-filled air. The chocolate-brown earth humming. And the four of them on their backs watching this verdant orchestra in its bonging bowl of midnight blue milk, speaking only in bursts.
    School’s fucked
, he hears himself say.
Heh. I mean look at me. If this is the best they can do
.
    A crescent moon flits by like a swallow, white as talc, leaving seventy-five powdery tattoos of itself across the stomach of the sky.
    Uff
, the gronker goes.
Uff uff
.
    Robbie watches a crystal-mint leaf detach itself from a twig and tinkle down. And an epiphany, playing itself out like the tumbling flakes in a kaleidoscope: we’re all rushing down the cosmic flow. Consciousness is just an illusion. We only
think
we’re thinking. Thoughts are only circuits flashing, we’re really juicy robots programmed into this microchip galaxy. Man, I hope I remember this later. Turning his neck and through his jellied windowpanes he sees Brat on his back with a foot propped on a knee and his head on a swollen root, still and solid, enamelled like a garden gnome with his arms chipped off.
    Bob
, Rosie says.
I see love colours when I ball. You?
    Robbie turns to her. He likes Rosie’s ski-jump nose, her plummy lips, but she’s too, he has to say it to himself at the end of the day, too
clingy
. She doesn’t hold a candle to Ivy, who showed so little affection that when she
did
touch you, you knew she probably meant it. Frankly, he’s turned off by the way Rosie likes to hug all the time in public places, pressing her nose behind his ear and making his neck wet with her breath; demanding epic-length backrubs and smelling as she does of frangipani and Bubble Yum. When she clambers onto him like she has now, squeezing his waist with her thighs, he thinks with distaste of what he’s read in
Bosom Buddies
magazine about girls enjoying horses between their legs due to a phenomenon known as
equus eroticus
. He’s embarrassed for her; he figures a person should communicate their sexual style subtly, not announce it like some three-ring circus. He makes like a lizard with a sewed-up mouth.…
    At midnight they move on, sluggish, smuggling a bottle of St. Antoine Abbé apple cider into the Westmount Roxy, the air musky with passion flower and hashish, and get blotto