by James Greer
Before I die, though, I want to see these stones—megaliths, as they’re called. I want to go to England and see the megaliths, still in place thousands of years later, worship at these sites, in person, instead of through the color plates in books that Fiat finds for me in the library. I’m reading one now which is supposed to be the best. The Stones of Britain. Apparently the famous megalithic site, Stonehenge, is not even nearly the best or most authentic site. Or oldest, either. The guy who put together the book, which is mostly pictures and maps of how to get to the places, took three years traveling around to get everything right. I wouldn’t need three years and also I’d probably be bored by the end of three months, but I want, I need, to connect to the Earth Spirit or Gaia, as the author of The Stones of Britain calls Her. The culture that built or arranged the stones has long vanished, but not everything connected to that culture is gone. You can supposedly still feel the power of what they knew, and what they knew was connected intimately to real knowledge of the Earth and of Nature. Eventually the knowledge these people had got corrupted by other forms of worship, not even Christian but other pagan ideas.
The system of belief most closely resembling my own notions would be, I think, the one followed by what used to be called Druids. If I had to say I was anything, then, I would say I’m a Druid. But not out loud, not to anyone I know, not unless Kurt’s there to prevent everyone laughing. Hard to be a Druid in Ohio. No other Druids, for one thing. A secret unshared’s no fun. No one to decipher the tattoo on my ankle, or the one on the small of my back, not that anyone ever sees that anyway. Not even that one time, because he was too quick, too rough, and I think had his eyes closed the whole time. Navigating by touch, or some approximation of touch, like someone who’d only recently regained the use of his hands after a bad accident. Why did he not want to look at me, at my face, even when he kissed me? I always keep my eyes open. It’s the closest you get to another person, in terms of seeing them, and I like to see them. But he wouldn’t look. That was because he did not want to see me. Because I have a moonlike face which some find unappealing. Other parts of my body boys are not as fussy about.
Also even though there are places with trees, and the Miami Valley is a fairly green (or verdant is a word I like, too) area, especially in spring and summer, there’s no place you’d consider natural, in the sense of Nature. Any magic in this place, tree-spirits or such, would long ago have fled in despair, I think. You wouldn’t want to stick around all these bricks and dead wood and cars and people. Mostly people.
Fiat gave me a book about the White Goddess which was written by a poet and I could not understand even the first thing about it because, maybe, I don’t like poetry. The guy in the book was going on about secret tree languages and the magic power of words and even letters of words when used with the proper magic understanding. I don’t know if he’s right but I do believe that there’s a power in trees, in Nature generally, that makes me feel hope in things, generally, that I don’t often feel when I’m around people. It’s not that I understand Nature any better than I do people, or relate to it, or however you would say that—just the opposite is true. I don’t understand anything about Nature. It is beyond my comprehendibility, if that’s a word. Because of that, I like or respond to that power. People I sometimes think I understand too well, in the very specific meaning of they do not surprise me. Almost never anything someone does will cause me to say, “That’s surprising. I would not have expected that of him or her.” I am as predictable as the next person. Even if I say, “I am absolutely not going to do X,” I probably will do X if that’s what I really meant, and it’s easy to see what I or anyone else really means. All you have to do is look at them, which is why I like to keep my eyes open during sex.
Light from the fake Tiffany lamps nearby flecked the honey-colored ice in Amanda’s glass with gold highlights as she tipped it to and fro on the tabletop. If you could see like a bee you might be able to know the meaning of color. Because now, when you look at a color, you have a feeling that the meaning of the color is just past the actual color—if you could see a little further in the visible spectrum, maybe a line of code would appear, like on magnetic tape that carries more information than your stereo can decipher. That’s not a helpful example. Sometimes when you see a painting where the painter understands color as best as anyone can without bee’s eyes, you get a faint smell of meaning; but it’s just the painter’s explanation or idea of meaning rather than actual meaning. The way I know this: Different colors seem to have different meanings in different kinds of light. Under direct sunlight versus twilight or electric light in its multihued forms, for instance. Meaning of color in these instances strikes me as fake. Might as well talk about the angle of perception, or individual realities, or any of that nonsense. I’m looking for the real thing.
Outside the Hive, the moon was swallowed in a purplish thunderhead. The wind had increased in intensity, to the point where the row of anemic maples strapped into their squares of dirt at regular intervals along the stretch of sidewalk leading away from the bar, up the quarter-mile toward the convenience store on the corner of Stewart, was bent northwards, in the direction of downtown, in a synchronized gesture of submission. Whenever someone hurried into the Hive from the street, overcoats flapping in the pre-storm breeze, there was a burst of brassy noise from the oblong of yellow light revealed when the door was pulled open. The door swinging heavily back into its casement caused the noise to cease abruptly, and you could hear then only the whoosh of wind through the trembling maples. A crushed paper cup skittered through the gutter and into the intersection of Wyoming and Brown. Crossing against the light, the jaywalking litter was swallowed by the mud-encrusted maw of a sewer drain on the opposite corner, near the gas station whose pumps gleamed in the halogen light like glossy headstones.
The stretch from the Hive to the Gulp-N-Save, from Wyoming to Stewart along Brown, was the length of a gunshot, to crib from Gloomy Gus. Because of the cold, few figures populated the sidewalks along either side of the street, and few cars rolled bumpily over the cracked and pitted asphalt in either direction. One, a robin’s-egg-blue station wagon ornamented with terra-cotta rust near its rear bumper and along the edges of its undercarriage, pulled into the parking lot across from the Hive, and sat nestled in its slot for some minutes, engine idling roughly. Inside the car, silhouetted by street light, a slim figure smoked a slim cigarette, smoke curling from the rolled-down window and upwards, through the complicated shadow of a nearby sycamore tree, disappearing by degrees (the way everything good disappears) into the leafy murk.
Michael Goodlife sat in his robin’s-egg-blue station wagon, smoking one after another cigarette. The smoke from the cigarettes continued to climb up the sycamore shadows, occasionally backlit by a lemony gleam when the wind brushed back the tree branches to admit the streetlight’s shine. The moon passed in and out of the turbulent clouds, and whenever in its course the fullness of moonlight dusted the parking lot, the shadows would deepen, shift into focus, and Michael felt himself recede into them, becoming less a visible integer and more a part of the pattern.
There’s not a spot where God is not, he thought, smiling ironically. He reached over and turned off the engine, stubbing out with his other hand a half-smoked cigarette on the outside of the driver’s-side door. A constellation of black smudges dotted the dull paint where other cigarettes had met similar ends, and the pavement below was strewn with butts like dead white worms. If I go in now, he thought, there’s a good chance she’ll be there, but enough other people will be there, too, so the chances of an awkward meeting are less. I can’t believe that almost a year later things are still like this. Every other girl I’ve ever gone out with or even slept with is no problem, and even this is no problem, except for the way it somehow makes me feel, still. Maybe a sense of incompleteness because she never answered my letter. All it does is make me cold-hearted and mean. I’m not an angry person by nature, not at all, but she’s like a magnet for my
iron-rich bile. Not her but the memory itch, the irritation, of our former thing. Like a diamond ground to dust, chafing under my sleeves. Not that we were very gemlike, together.
Michael opened the door and got out. Stretching his arms under the arms of the sycamore, he smelled the rain on the sky’s breath and smiled. Two reminders in the space of five minutes, he thought. Two examples of the immensity of divine intelligence. But the hugeness of the evidence at hand was more than canceled by the hugeness of Michael’s doubt. If it’s true that a thing contains its opposite, he considered, I wonder does it lay inside me as potential energy. I have the potential for great faith, buried in my heart like a maggot, feeding off the trickle of misplaced hope that still somehow runs alongside the torrent of despair. He shivered in the open air. There’s no way I’m going inside that bar, he thought.
Michael opened the door and got back in his car. He turned the key in the ignition so that the radio would play. Music is a powerful friend, a friend with connections in high places, he thought. You stick with music and you’ll end up at all the right parties.
He closed his eyes and listened. The music playing was an old song from maybe the ’60s, a lightweight pop song with a girl singer. He remembered hearing the song many years ago, as a small boy, lying in the backseat of his mother’s car. At that time, he believed that the songs on the radio were played and sung live, down at the radio station, which for some reason Michael envisioned as a fancy-dress bowling alley. It was late spring or early summer, he recalled, and maple tree shadows webbed the hot vinyl of the car’s backseat. The engine was running but his mother had gone into the Green Stamp store to redeem an armload of booklets for a lamp, or a toaster, or a magic wand that properly operated could bring her back, now, in the ridiculous and lonely present.
What make of car was that? he wondered. I remember an emerald-green color, inside and out, deeply and thoroughly green like wet leaves in spring rain, and the smell of her cigarette smoke wafting back, as we drove to the supermarket. Not much help in brand identification. I think the cigarettes were menthol, though. Who smokes menthol anymore? I do. Maybe there’s a gene for what type of cigarettes you smoke.
He sighed and switched the music off. There’s never a chance that I’ll do something unexpected, he thought. I could drive right now wherever I want and never look back at this town. But he knew there was no way of that happening, because there was no way of not looking back in his mind. Too much of Dayton was knitted into too much of Michael—if you tried to remove one you would end up unraveling big swatches of the other. You could argue that people here give undue attention to unimportant things, but what’s an important thing? As far as he was concerned, everything vital to life and love was easily obtained, and at a cheaper price, in Dayton. And even if that were not true, even if he were delusional and blind to the stifling cultural isolation of this provincial backwater, just like in an old Russian novel, did any of that matter as long as he was happy? Okay, maybe not happy, but at least content. It’s not the way things were in old times, where no one ever traveled and the whole world was contained within the county borders. You don’t have to leave to see things anymore, things come to you now. The idea of flight is the real delusion, the idea that you go from one place to another and leave the one place behind until you return. People everywhere are strange; I have the hardest time relating to other human beings. You get used to them, but you get used to anything after a while, including the sweet kick of love, loneliness, habitual disappointment, patterns of seeming coincidence that contain the imprint of fate, loss of innocence, and the constant and comforting presence of death.
Once again he got out of the car. A gust of wind swept across the parking lot, causing innumerable particles of sand and discarded paper and cigarette ends and even the sawtoothed fragment of a red plastic cup to tumble along the tar in a way that looked choreographed. The lot had been recently resurfaced, so little specks of quartz imbedded in the new tar glittered like broken glass in the streetlight. Michael cracked the knuckles of each hand, lit another cigarette, and started across the glittering tar toward the Hive.
“Almost a full moon tonight,” said Amanda suddenly and for no reason to Mary Valentine, who looked at her strangely but made no reply. The door swished open; when Mary saw that it was Michael, she looked away quickly, her whole body rigid with emotion, then quickly, as if guided by some invisible strong-arm, headed for the back, to the girls’ bathroom. Thus preoccupied, she missed the rest of Michael’s entrance, particularly the part where he slipped on a wet spot of melted ice from someone’s spilled drink, lost his balance, and in trying to right himself, legs flailing, grabbed the edge of a nearby table, arms windmilling, which happened to be filled with an unusual number of empty and half-empty glasses, nearly all of which came tumbling with impressive speed and force down on Michael’s now-prone body. The clatter of glasses, only a few of which broke because most of them bounced off his chest, attracted the attention of a number of patrons in the front part of the bar, who broke into a spontaneous and sustained round of applause as Michael unsteadily stood, dripping with the dregs of several different types of alcohol, but mostly beer, and acknowledged with an ironic grin the crowd’s ovation.
Michael Goodlife was upset more for the loss of a good entrance than for the damage to his clothes. Around him on the floor lay the debris of his accident, more than a dozen capsized beer glasses, frothy dregs pooling around his shoes and the baseboard of the bar and the upended table. He shook himself, a dog shaking off rainwater, and splattered a group of nearby girls, who shrieked but didn’t mind. Billy the bartender went down through the trapdoor to the cellar to get a mop, leaving a line of thirsty customers waiting impatiently by the unattended taps.
I am wet, like the sea, thought Michael. I am sticky as pine sap. I’m ridiculous, and everyone knows. I am.
“I better go clean up,” said Michael, to no one and everyone, gesturing to his soaked shirt. He turned and began to make his way through the drinkers crowded around the bar.
When he got to the men’s room, there was a line, three people. He knew one of the three, Trip Ryvvers, and the two nodded to each other.
“Raining out?” asked Trip, who was listing slightly.
“Got in a fight. Bunch of beer glasses ganged up on me, must have been like twenty of ’em.”
“You shouldn’t tease beer. Beer’s touchy.”
“Apparently.” The men’s room door opened and a boy wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt, nascent dreadlocks jutting from his ellipsoidal head, walked out. Trip and Michael exchanged looks.
“You still driving that old rust bucket?” asked Trip. “Still.”
“You’ve got money, now, right? The big record deal. You should be buying a house, a car, a machine gun.”
“That’s theoretical money, not real money. No one in the music business gets paid except lawyers and more lawyers. And the record company. Unless you strike the motherlode like Kurt.”
“You complain an awful lot for someone with a boatload of theoretical money.” The door to the men’s room opened and two more tie-dyed teenagers walked out, laughing, the soundtrack to Trip’s joke. “How many of them do you suppose are in there?”
“As many as it takes,” answered Michael with a wry grin, or what he hoped looked like a wry grin.
Following the collegiate fellow in front of him, Trip opened the door and peeked in. “All right,” he sighed, “I’m going in. Wish me luck.”
“Good luck,” Michael called politely after Trip as he ducked into the men’s room. By now there were three or four more collegiate-looking young men lined up behind Michael, and he decided that it might be a better idea to go to the back of the bar, to one of the two girls’ bathrooms, to the one in particular that locked, which might afford him the time and privacy necessary to perform a cursory cleanup.
His anxiety level had risen, in any case, the moment he saw there was a line, as there was little Michael despised so much as the rituals
of the crowded public bathroom. He would have turned then and headed to the back, but seeing Trip did not want to seem rude. Group activities in general he found noxious, but mass micturition in particular held a taint of unmitigated masculinity that made Michael physically sick. Until he’d had four or five drinks and was desensitized to the process, he could not bear the thought much less the sight of entering the fluorescent-scrubbed cubicle, ribbed with sweating pipes, across the warped linoleum wet with beer, water, and piss, to the lone stinking urinal, or worse, to the lone stall whose width barely permitted turning around, and whose badly hinged door would not stay shut. At peak hours, it was not unusual to find both stall and urinal occupied and another backwards-baseball-cap-clad fratboy or ponytailed hippie poised on tiptoe over the sink, one arm casually extended against the dingy wall, whistling or talking to a friend who wasn’t listening or farting unconcernedly, the bang of the fart punctuating the desperately ridiculous nature of the activity, which is more or less why everyone laughs.
Why are males in general so crass and unselfconscious about their bodily functions? thought Michael. In the interval between sixth grade and the start of junior high, he would fantasize about burning down the school just so he wouldn’t have to take showers with the other boys after gym class. The prospect of group-undressing filled Michael with a horror he could neither explain nor describe, an instinctive reaction to the display of so much juvenile nudity, or so much scrutiny of his own—either way, the options were too gross to coexist with Michael’s still-developing notions of his own self and sexuality. Even years later, after he managed to overcome his instinctual fear and disrobe in locker rooms with the sort of studied casualness that the very shy often adopt (the key is to change pants first, then shirt), he was still uncomfortable, even in situations of extreme intimacy involving girls. After sex, he almost always pulled his pants back on, unless the girl complained, which she sometimes did, feeling that Michael’s gesture was meant to force apart (however slightly) the closeness between them. When really he was just uncomfortable being naked, completely naked, always had been since puberty, and pulling on his pants reflected in no way his feelings toward whatever the name of the girl lying in his bed was.