A few days before departing for the Void, Jack Kerouac, accompanied by his friend Neal Cassady, entered a bookstore to buy a stellar atlas. “You can check it out in your downtime,” Neal had said. Actually, what he said was slightly different, but Jack, who was crazy about the way Neal talked, let his friend’s words wash over him without really trying to grasp any deeper meaning. He was happy to get the basic idea, listening to the undercurrents of the conversation like a pleasing background noise. Neal had lost himself in hypnotic and elaborated reasoning, attempting to explain why it was absolutely necessary to know the names and positions of the stars and how it would be easy to learn all that by checking out a stellar atlas during his downtime, but Jack had come away with a single clear point: that he would check it out during his downtime.
Jack never worried much about understanding where Neal was headed with the things he said, even if in his frenzy he seemed like he was desperately seeking to get to some specific point. Jack didn’t worry—he was convinced that not even Neal knew where he wanted to end up. The wonderful thing about Neal wasn’t where he wanted to end up, but how his hammering away at words got in the way of his thoughts. Obviously Neal thought about this in a completely different way. Neal was convinced he had specific things to say, but that the very nature of the things hindered their illumination and that this fact should be as clear to everyone else as it was to him. Everyone else, however, refused to follow him because they didn’t understand; only Jack and women—albeit for different reasons—followed him, thinking that deep down there wasn’t anything to understand at all. The consequence being that Neal and Jack—and women—wound up not understanding each other. But the difference between Jack’s incomprehension and women’s incomprehension was that, for better or worse, Neal kept being Jack’s friend even if Jack refused to understand. The women, on the other hand, were left to their lot because they would never have understood anyway.
Then there was another distinction tied to Neal’s usual way of speaking and this was that Neal’s way constituted the difference between Jack and Neal in their dealings with women. This difference was in its turn another reason why Jack found it unnecessary to understand where Neal was going with the things he said. If Neal saw one of those blondes you happen upon once in a lifetime, he’d stare right at her and ask her to point him to the nearest post office. “It works every time,” Neal said. “The post office is not only absolutely trustworthy in the public sphere, but it is also the symbol of noble and yearning communication that instinctively implies loving correspondence and puts the girl in the most trusting and therefore accommodating disposition.” Works every time and, as a matter of fact, it did. Or rather, it worked for him. Jack repeatedly vowed to try and use the post office line, but potential opportunities presented themselves in the wrong places, like at the movie theater ticket window, or times when the post office was mercilessly closed.
“Don’t get hung up on the object because the object is chimerical,” Neal explained. “The post office is simply love . . . what matters is the way you hold the rod.” Obviously Neal had never been fishing in his life. Jack knew this, which is why he let Neal say his piece and, without listening to him, thought about how in the end everyone had to flirt however felt most natural and he felt most at ease using Space™. Attempting to conquer—although “conquer” didn’t quite capture how he felt about it—attempting to conquer a girl by relying on the industrial chance that a comet that might dart across a bottle of Coca-Cola Space™, put him at peace with the system. If just one of those bottles created the conditions in which a young misfit might pass a night of tenderness, sinking into a pair of doe eyes that seemed to submit to the inflexible insensitivity of the world, then it could also be said that there was some possibility of redemption in the market economy. It was the sort of dream that consumed him and somehow drew him with irresistible nostalgia toward a world he wasn’t fully part of—the neon signs of all shapes, the transparent reflections of windows, the chain stores and their uniformed shopgirls, the jingle of cash registers, the rush of the air conditioning, the smooth colored surfaces, the frozen foods and diet soft drinks, the escalators rising up and up toward departments on top floors.
8.
The bottling process accounted for a very delicate phase in the production of Space™. The fluorine derivative rendered the carbon dioxide rather unstable, such that if the dosage wasn’t perfectly calibrated, the bottle could very well explode in the consumer’s hand. The consumer would shake a Space™ and it would explode in their face, to devastating effect.
At first they thought to put a warning label on the bottles. Shake with care. Sales dropped by twenty percent in a few short weeks. It appeared that consumers wanted to feel free to shake the bottle as forcefully as they could; evidently they were convinced that the appearance of a bubble-comet depended on the intensity with which they made their wishes. In reality, intensity had nothing to do with it. If a Space™ had a bubble-comet, you needed only to shake the bottle lightly a couple of times to see it spray its luminous trail from the bottom of the bottle. But if there was no bubble to wish on and you insisted upon shaking the bottle, nothing came of it save a little bit of froth that in rare cases began to fizz until it burst the bottle—even with an absence of fluorine, carbon dioxide was liable to pitch a fit. It was pointless to explain such things to the consumer anyway, because these were exactly the types of things the consumer didn’t want to hear. So they decided to get rid of the warning label, concluding it made more sense to form a legal department that dealt exclusively with exploding bottles.
Bottles of Space™ continued to explode, disfiguring the faces of young women and their beaus, and when, wrapped up like mummies, they appeared in court to claim damages, the judge—after having listened to the Coca-Cola Enterprise Inc. lawyers—would tell them, tell the mummies that is, that the burden of proof regarding the company’s negligence lay with the consumer. Which meant they’d never see a cent. After the verdict was read, one of the lawyers, moved, had the habit of going up to the mummies, to express the heart-felt understanding of the company. The lawyer would pull out a bottle of Space™ and say, “A gift from Coca-Cola Enterprise Inc., in the hopes that we can continue to call you a customer despite this unfortunate inconvenience.” Often he’d even add, “This is one of the good ones. It won’t explode.”
One time one of the mummies said, “Thank you,” and, taking the Space™, gave it a good shake and agreed, “You’re right, it didn’t explode.” She then hit the lawyer upside the head with it, knocking him out cold. The bottle, however, remained intact.
9.
Jack bought the blessed stellar atlas that he would check out in his downtime one day at the end of spring 1956. Jack and Neal had spent the night in typical 1950s fashion. At daybreak Neal still hadn’t shut up while Jack had an inexplicably sore throat. Neal had got onto this peculiar idea that every time he bought a book he had to be one of the first customers of the day, so the two had agreed to kill the early hours of the morning outside the doors of Quantum, ready to step inside the moment it opened.
Arms folded, hands tucked into their armpits, they sat outside waiting, hunched over in the cold of daybreak. The weariness of the sleepless night sent sudden shivers through them, which they staved off by stomping their feet on the pavement. A couple hours passed this way, with Neal losing himself in frenzied cursing at the cold, at the slowness of time that in the end always fools you with its speed, at the fact that he could no longer feel his feet and at how this also kept him from entertaining the possibility of going across the street to get a coffee at the cafè. Jack had the wide-eyed stare of an owl, he nodded his head so Neal would think he was listening to him, while he was actually thinking that it had now been six years since he first met Neal, and how back then he had felt weighed down by an awful feeling that everything was dead. The coming of Neal had freed him from that sad state and had opened the last few years of his life, years Jack referred to as My Spacial Years. A Coca-Cola Enterprise Inc. delivery truck pulled up in front of the bar. Jack’s mind returned to the release he signed for Arthur Miller. For a moment he was nudged by an unpleasant feeling—not unlike how he felt in the months before he met Neal—and he asked himself if it had something to do with his doubts about the release. What did it mean? Why think about all these things together, at once? The orbital