Artificial Light

by James Greer

  “Goodness,” she exclaimed, straightening, as the crystal meth burned into her nasal passages. She sniffed twice, as if trying to identify the stale smell inhabiting her discarded clothing, and shivered her naked shoulders. Her eyes teared, and she wiped them one at a time with the back of each hand.

  Mary stepped into the bathtub, hardly sensible to the scalding heat. Her hands and feet tingled pleasantly as she sank up to her neck in the soapy water. She loved floating, her limbs light in the water’s buoyant grip, sweat beading on her upper lip and at her temples, running in uneven rivulets from forehead to chin, to drop at irregular intervals into the garland of suds around her neck.

  She sat soaking with her eyes closed for some time. Upon opening them, Mary gazed blankly at the tiles of the bathroom wall, sea-green and slick with soap scum. The wall clock in the next room ticked audibly as she lay still, gazing. At length she sighed, and shifted to a sitting position. The suds slid down her shoulders and arms to the steaming water. She drew her legs to her chest, running her hands down the length of her shins and over her calves to gauge the growth of stubble, and reached for the razor perched on the sill of the tub. Around her upper left arm wound the dull green band of a tattoo, a reproduction of the border around her favorite edition of the I Ching.

  Propping her right foot on the rim near the faucet, Mary moved the razor over the smooth curve of her calf, using the soapy foam as lubricant. When she reached the kneecap area, she was careful to navigate around a narrowly-striped pattern of scar tissue, the result of having tried to hop on Joe Smallman’s back two weeks ago outside the Hive. She smiled at the memory of tumbling from Joe’s thin shoulders, taking him down, too, both falling to the sidewalk in a tangle of flapping limbs, too drunk to register the bruises and abrasions until the next day’s rueful inventory. Joe got the worst of it, twisting his left ankle badly. When he stopped by the store earlier today, she recalled, he was still limping.

  Distracted by her reverie, Mary’s hand slipped and she sliced into her shin. She watched the trickle of blood trail down her leg with detached interest. Blood is thicker than water, she thought, but the body is mostly water. And so blood is mostly water.

  Having finished her legs, Mary gave a cursory scrape to her axillae, extending each arm skyward with unself-conscious grace. She then examined the pilosity of her pelvic area by resting her weight on her elbows and thrusting upwards through the bathwater. Mary was not overly fussy with regard to pubic topiary. If that was what boys wanted, she thought, they could try Rosy Cramp, who was rumored to shave her stuff completely, possibly because of crabs. She preferred a more expansive growth, and saw nothing now that required trimming or alteration.

  Her awkward position provoked a memory of sex, and she flushed with sudden heat that compounded the flush from the heat of the bath. His face there, she remembered. She moved her fingers through the soft hairs slowly. The pang of regret in her stomach was related to the remembered desire, but its greater component was the loss of a deeper, more permanent connection, the removal of which had been unaccompanied by the usual post-coital relief and self-disgust.

  Occasional bouts of intensity in her emotional life irritated Mary. She sat up and splashed water over her face, then reached for the bar of blue soap caked to the tub’s rim near the hot water cock.

  If tonight were not the same, if something different and definite were to happen, she thought, slouched on her mattress flipping through the pages of her sketchbook, I would have to be the one. After so long of pretending. On the one hand something would happen and I wouldn’t be so bored. On the other my heart might get rebroken, a thing I could not bear.

  She took a red drawing pencil and filled in the outline of a cartoon heart she had unconsciously outlined. The main point is to get out of this dreary place. Sometimes I try too hard to keep my heart out of the way, and then sometimes I don’t even know if my heart works properly. As in, can I love someone completely or do I care too much about keeping my options open? Mistake I made with Michael, but also his mistake. We both made the same mistake. Isn’t that more evidence of our compatibility?

  She laughed, or made a noise like a laugh that almost immediately brought tears to her eyes. Mary took a black drawing pencil and scored heavily the red cartoon heart in her sketchbook. I am ridiculously literal. Tonight I will dress literally and go to the bar literally and avoid most of the people I know literally and see if a metaphor happens.

  Mary sighed and rolled over on her back. She folded her arms behind her head and closed her eyes. Can see every bland facet of this room with eyes closed. If I were blind I could walk across the street to the store, walk back, use the telephone to order food and drugs. Does that mean a life? The way I’ve constructed my life, it could be lived by a blind person. Could even find my way to the Hive. Think of the more free drinks out of pity for the poor blind girl.

  She couldn’t remain still for long because of the speed. Took the pillow and hugged it against her abdomen, curling sideways into the dirty sheets, the smell of them both repellent and comforting. That girl Amanda and her stupid rocks. Probably the right idea. Wish I could get interested in something, a language or a leap of faith, but everything bores me to giggles.

  Someone like Joe, works in record store for three maybe four years now out of school, doesn’t seem to mind. But even he has ambition, to open his own store. What if a person doesn’t have ambition? Not in the ordinary sense like having buckets of money without having to work. But ambition to be, in any sense other than in relation to another person. I don’t stand alone and I don’t want to stand alone because I don’t know what that would mean: alone. Afraid I would stop existing. Not that existence itself is a peach, but the devil you know, and so on.

  Mary, restless, stood up from her mattress and walked over to the small table where her phone was positioned next to a dusty glass filled with drawing pencils and brushes. In a drug-induced smog she had one very long night painted her phone in hideous fluorescent colors. He never said the word. I never said the word. You say the word and the abstract’s set in concrete. But if I had said the word, would he have said the word back? And if he had, would that be because he felt obliged, or just felt?

  These are all good reasons, thought Mary, never to say words. All words lead to trouble: why I never read books. He reads all the time, the same books from school I skipped or lied or flirted my way through to my degree. Don’t trust a man who reads too much. Self-involved. Exclusionary. Just Michael and his little thought world like those helium balloons that one night after we first started going out. Just air that makes you sound silly when you talk.

  She picked up the phone’s handset and scrolled through the list of recent callers. Boy, boy, wrong number, boy, work, boy. None of them the right boy because the right boy never calls, never used to call, which is a game you play when you’re scared. Know because I never call unless something means nothing, or I need something from someone. Because in other situations I’m scared, like everybody. Why I try to keep other situations to a manageable few.

  Mary Valentine returned the handset to its cradle. There are things you have to learn to get by, and I have learned them all, she thought. I shall illustrate. Out loud Mary said these words: “I shall illustrate.” Dressed in a white T-shirt and boys’ briefs, she walked over to the rack where her clothes hung in disarray, a scrum of mismatched colors, flimsy fabrics draped over heavier, darker items. Pulled a periwinkle-green skirt from the rack, dislodging a teal sweater and a gray, long-sleeved wool-blend shirt.

  She stepped into the skirt, pulled it up around her waist, and zipped the side zipper. Then she pulled the T-shirt over her head and slung it across the room onto the bed. It’s too cold for this skirt, which is the reason for wearing it, she thought. Then bent down and picked the teal sweater from the floor, turned and held the sweater against her chest, appraising in the mirror tacked to the back of her front door. You wear a skirt when it’s too cold, no one else will wear a skirt. Th
is provides immediate access to easier targets, the boys whose brains are frozen and wallets are humid with desire.

  She dropped the sweater at her feet, turned back to the rack, and unlooped a white bra from a hanger. Most of the time for drinks you have to flirt or even more, although comes a point where the flirting is no longer just flirting, which is how I know I’ve had enough drinks. Problem being: I enjoy the part where flirting is no longer just flirting. Mary hooked the bra in back, using both hands to adjust the hooks properly, then adjusted the front so that her breasts sat comfortably. My name is Mary Valentine, and I am an addict. Addicted to the thrill of conquest, to confirmation of my ability to attract. The rest is motion only, silent e. Sometimes pleasure, sometimes pain, but simple, uncomplicated, inhuman. As stave against boredom, keep two on a string any given time, more thrill in pretending to avoid or avoiding or trying to conceal the one from the other or more than other. Like hide-and-seek, where getting caught is the point, and most of the fun.

  But with Kurt, there’s no real flirting except the kind all humans perform, called charm. In his way charming, and beneath or behind the aloofness, the old-fashioned courtesy which is even more funny but at the same time charming. With him I can be charming, too, or seems like charming, because removed from sexual sphere. And why is that? Because I have no interest, but he can’t know that: no. He has no interest, and I can tell. And he knows I can tell. No explicit statement of uninterest, but in his presence I’m disarmed. Intensely liberating. He buys me drinks anyway.

  Some grumble Kurt’s got motives, an angle, too good to be true, perhaps angling for demotic credibility by pretending to hang with the people. But how can you say too good to be true about a guy that rich and famous already, and who never asks for a favor, not one, ever, and only’s ever kind no matter what. What angle, however oblique, draws itself with such bold, uncomplicated lines?

  Mary shrugged into the teal sweater, pulling along the bottom edge to smooth wrinkles. She walked into the bathroom, flipping on the light switch to examine her face in the mirrored medicine chest. Skin’s a little mottled from the speed, she thought, applying a thin coat of foundation from a nearly empty jar. Why is the Hive so well-lighted? Bars are meant to be dark. Meant to conceal secrets and possibly revelations. She unscrewed a slim tube of lipstick and drew a rosy line across her lips, blotted with a square of toilet paper.

  Walking out of the bathroom, she went to the window where winter dark had descended and the bluish tint of streetlight illuminated people walking by below, bundled against the cold. You can see their shadows more clearly than their features. The outline of a person’s probably a true indicator. When you throw in expressions and ugly lies you just end up more confused. Are all of these as confused and as lost and as unutterably alone as me? The sudden gush of melancholy reduced Mary to giggles.

  She shook her head and moved away from the window, covering her mouth, an oddly girlish gesture for an oddly girlish girl. He wasn’t so famous, I’d marry him. He wouldn’t have me. But I’d marry him. The perfect husband, always least suitable of suitors. You wouldn’t guess, but I’d make a perfect wife. Unfaithful, probably, but discreet, and uncomplaining, and supportive. Ask you to keep me in food and clothes and a car and house, that’s all. Will use my powers of sexuality to ensure that when you want me, I will be difficult to lure, so you will always want me. Not always as in all the time, but as in continuously over the long stretch of years before I decay and we no longer use sex as currency.

  She took the robin’s-egg-blue scarf from the hook on the back of the front door, started to turn the knob, started to leave, to go out, paused.

  The right skirt? Black absorbs more heat. Absorbs or attracts? The difference is important.

  Notebook Six

  Record 2 (5:11)

  The Calling

  Typology I

  Aesthetics of Alt-Rock

  All rock is divided into three parts: repetition, repetition, repetition.

  —Stanley Shorbuck, I Shit You Not: A Rational Guide to Irrational Music (Vintage Classics of Rock Criticism, 1989)

  Once upon a time, we were offered the world. We turned the world down, of course. That’s just our nature, we don’t like to be burdened, though we thought at the time our motives were nobler. We thought our refusal had a philosophical underpinning, a rejection of transitory gloria mundi in favor of enduring verities.

  We’re referring to a tiny subset of popular culture in the early 1990s, a community—though one of the important traits of this community was that it refused to be identified as such—that came to be known (after it had ceased to exist in any meaningful way) as “alternative,” defined to a certain extent by the style of music to which it listened.

  The history of alternative music dates back to the punk rock eruption of the mid- to late-’70s, and even before that, back to the counter-countercultural movements of the early- and mid-’60s (La Monte Young, Fluxus, Warhol, and the Velvets, etc.), and before that, still, to the weirder Beat offshoots and possibly even to post-WWII jazz culture (or at least many alternative types in the time of our subcultural flowering liked to affect an interest in bebop). The history of alternative culture could be read as an attempt by a small group of similarly middle-class, educated people to come to terms with its basic, and basically unalterable, lameness. Of course, some things of real beauty were created within this environment, as inevitably happens when enough people sit around with enough drugs and no pressing need to work for a living. You can see, though, how such a group, when presented with the world, would feel highly ambivalent and unworthy of such a gift. The idea behind us—behind our culture-that-would-not-be-named—was an enormous sense of entitlement-deficit, after all. Our credo was lifted from Yeats’s “Second Coming”: “The best lack all conviction while the worst, Are full of passionate intensity.”

  We eventually self-destructed, shattered into ineffectual fragments, became useless and frustrated and bitter and hopeless. This you could probably have seen coming, and, in an unfairly simplistic way, can be reduced to one word: money. As soon as the big record companies sensed or decided that hitherto hidden or underground artists might also harbor hidden riches, the game was more or less over. Took us a few years of compromise and rejection (by the public, by the companies, by ourselves) to understand that easy lesson. By the time we did, it was too late for us. A new sensibility gripped the music business, frustrated with the anti-star mentality of its biggest artists; many of those same artists, unused to any attempt to exercise control over the content or presentation of their music, soured on the major label experience and were either dropped and went back to their underground hideouts, or dropped themselves and did the same, even in rare cases disbanding for good, having decided that careerism was not a good ploy for a musician with artistic pretensions. The music business then moved on to molded and preformed pop acts who were more easily controlled, and began to experience a decline from which it may never recover.

  When we think back to those years, we mostly remember the drinking. We drank a lot then, and we weren’t the only one. The reckless consumption of alcohol was a basic feature of our social life, the centrifugal force that kept us together. At the time, we had arranged a host of theories in defense of our drinking: that an altered consciousness was necessary for a proper appreciation of the rock experience; that alcohol’s proven health benefits outweighed any supposed drawbacks; that people who didn’t drink were not to be trusted; that without alcohol life was not worth living.

  We don’t drink anymore, but we are not against drinking in principle. Just the opposite, we are very pro-drinking. We understand completely and love dearly those people for whom drinking is a centerpiece of their lives, and always will be until they die (from drinking). We realize this is an old-fashioned view, long-debunked and held in contempt by adherents of addiction support groups and a society conditioned to view heavy drinking as pathetic and incontrovertibly lousy for you. But we cannot help the way that
booze appeals to every still-functioning sense we own, on both metaphorical and actual levels. We love bars, we love everything about them except the plastered assholes who sometimes inhabit them, not excluding ourself. But there’s nothing as bathos-ridden as a rundown bar in the middle of the afternoon with snow drifting past the grimy windows. Do you know what we mean? Ripped red vinyl booths, tables graffitied with pens or penknives or the acid drool of brokenhearted drunks, jukeboxes that play pop hits or obscure Las Vegas bump-and-grind songs from the early ’60s. It doesn’t matter what songs. The music in bars is always soundtrack music, carrying as many shades of emotion as the drinking heart is capable of sustaining, probably an infinite number, though those infinite shades are compressed within an intolerably finite moment of joy, or intense sadness. The ability to visit extremes of human feeling is the great thing that the conjunction of music/booze confers upon the regular drinker. The inability to render those emotions useful in the context of quotidian life is the awful, the finally defeating thing about the music/booze conjunction. When you’re drunk, and you hear a great song, your expectations are inevitably raised. You’re granted in that instant a glimpse of another life, with a pervading amber tint not merely of sound and vision but of texture and emotional tone. Everything goes gentle, and you can’t move because the joy inside you is trying to escape. (This happens most forcefully at moments of black despair.) It is the most perfect feeling possible, and it happens not because of music or booze but because something larger than life is trying to use this moment of complete receptivity produced by the music/booze intersect to tell you something ineffable, and ineffably important.