Artificial Light

by James Greer

  Joe Smallman turned in his seat and looked to the front of the bar just in time to see Michael come around the corner from the men’s room and begin threading his way through the crowd. He turned back around to face Amanda, who looked down, at her drink, at her hand stirring her drink, at the straw making frantic circuits in her glass.

  “If you stir fast enough, time will go backwards,” observed Joe.

  “That’s what I’m hoping. Backwards to the time when you weren’t sitting here, maybe.”

  “What’s up with you, anyway?”

  “I could say the same thing back.”

  “I’m miserable.”

  “Then you know what’s up with me. We could maybe start a secret society: handshakes, tree house.”

  “We tried that already. Too hard to remember the password.”

  “I guess you’re right.” Amanda scratched the side of her face with the straw from her drink. She stood up. “I’m going to the rest room. See if Mary’s all right.”

  “Why wouldn’t Mary be all right?” asked Joe as Amanda left.

  Tried and true, thought Joe, what does that mean? Everything in Dayton is tried and true, or false, and tried again till true enough. In the lack of education, because half of us are high school dropouts and the other half college dropouts, you can see compensatory self-taught erudition everywhere, too much almost. Maybe there’s no such thing as too much, though. What’s most surprising is the secret ambition of everyone to do something real, despite the outward show of null and void. Even if something real means only to fall in love.

  Tear-stained Mary Valentine stood over the sink in the Snafu Hive bathroom, the taps turned on full to cover her sobbing. She watched herself in the mirror, or rather that part of herself not engaged in sobbing regarded her sobbing self with detachment, curiously, only a little worried.

  “Hi,” she said to the mirror, and giggled, and started crying again. The sadness is never very far below the surface, she thought, and requires only a keyword to break the skin of composure I stretch across my face, every day. Every day. Silly, stupid girl. Brought to tears by a word, well, not actually by the word but by the memory evoked by the word. Why is it memories hurt more than when the thing originally happens to you?

  Mary walked over to the stall and tore off several squares of toilet paper. Dabbing her face, she returned to the mirror. She shut her eyes and tried to imagine the scene where Michael had broken up with her, except he hadn’t even broken up, it was more like he shut down, or shut off, or retreated. That was the feeling, thought Mary, it was like he retreated to the part of yourself that you keep from everyone, except the one person you love, and so in retreating you’re declaring your lack of love. Watching that retreat happen, feeling him withdraw right in front of you, is the scariest feeling there is, I think, like in that dream where everyone and everything looks familiar but up close they’re strange and sinister. All of a sudden Michael was just not there. In his place was some curly haired ghost babbling about phases of the moon, while we sat in the wet grass in Carillon Park drinking very bad wine.

  The part that will drive you crazy is trying to figure out why, thought Mary. That and the sudden absence of safety, the vacuum of no protection from the painful and hate-filled world. In space no one can hear you scream, but on planet Earth, let me tell you, sometimes that’s all you can hear, if you’re near my room. But the screaming is just a way of trying to breathe, because when he left he took all the air, too, and nothing worked, especially lungs.

  Everybody now thinks I’m overreacting or faking it, probably. Too many times I run crying to the bathroom. This is complicated by the fact that most of the time I am faking, she considered. I’m using the pity ploy to draw the attention of some boy or other whose attention I don’t want except reflexively. Like everyone I have tried, not to be crude, but I have tried to plug the leak with sex. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.

  The bathroom door opened and Amanda came in. Mary reached for the taps and turned them off, then gathered some toilet paper and blew her nose exaggeratedly.

  Amanda gave a sort of snort, still holding the door open. “You all right?” she asked.

  “I’m fine,” replied Mary, through a veil of tissue. “Allergies. How.” She balled up the tissue in her hand. “Are.” She aimed the balled-up tissue at the trash can in the corner by the door, next to Amanda. “Yo-u-u,” she singsonged, letting the ball of tissue fly. It bounced off the rim and landed at Amanda’s feet.

  “I’m good,” grinned Amanda, closing the bathroom door and walking toward the stall.

  “Uh-huh.” Mary examined her face in the mirror. The letter he sent me from Europe when he was on tour with his band. That’s one of those things: If he’d bothered to check the address, make sure it was right, and I got the letter in a few days instead of a few months later, would everything be different, the way it works out in drippy romantic movies? I hate that movie more than anything.

  She listened to the sound of Amanda peeing in the stall behind her. “Hey, Amanda?” she called. “You think maybe the red one tonight?”

  From the stall came a sound of clothing being adjusted. “You mean wig? I don’t know. What’s wrong with your real hair?”

  “First of all, it’s not my real hair color anyway, it’s from a box. And second, people are getting bored with me. I can sense it.”

  The toilet flush echoed across the bathroom tiles, and Amanda came out of the stall and moved to the sink. Mary turned the taps for her so she wouldn’t have to touch them.

  “That’s ridiculous,” said Amanda, “no one’s bored of you.” She rinsed her hands and shook them dry before pulling a paper towel from the dispenser.

  “Well, then, I’m bored of me.” Mary reached into her bag and pulled out a wig, cranberry red. She held it up next to her face.

  “You’re bored of here, probably. Who isn’t?” Amanda sighed and went to throw away the paper towel. Mary reached over and turned off the taps. “If I had any money, know where I’d go?”

  Mary put the cranberry wig on her head, tucking wisps of bright blond real hair under the elastic. “I went to Paris once,” Mary said. “For three weeks. I stayed near the Notre Dame.” She pronounced the last sentence in an affected briar drawl.

  Amanda pulled open the bathroom door, looked out into the bar. Then she looked back at Mary, who was pivoting back and forth in front of the mirror, examining her bewigged figure. “I’d go to England, to see the sacred stones. You look great.” She started to leave. “Oh, Michael’s here,” she said in a casual voice as the door closed behind her.

  Standing at the sink, Mary continued to adjust her wig. She stared at herself for a while, then reached again into her bag and pulled out a slim tube of lipstick, which she began to apply with slow care to her slightly trembling lips. I think maybe the problem with Michael, thought Mary, was that he wanted to know the answer to the question “Who are you exactly?” instead of “Who are you supposed to be?” which is all most boys want to know. And I couldn’t answer that question. I was hoping he could answer it for me. Or maybe he did, and that’s why he left.

  Notebook Eleven

  Record 3 (8:49)

  Protestant Desire

  The Cuff of Our Sleeve

  A Yellow Coincidence

  We have been told in ancient tales many marvels of famous heroes, of mighty toil, joys, and high festivities, of weeping and wailing, and the fighting of bold warriors—of such things you can now hear wonders unending!

  For ten years, swear! we have, alas, philosophy, medicine, and jurisprudence, too, and to our cost theology with ardent labor studied through and thorough, for all of which we remain foolish still, no wiser than before. Scruple nor doubt comes near to enthrall us, hence also our heart must forego all pleasure. Speculum. Spem. Spes. Laissez toot ses deséspoir, vous qui entrez!

  Explicit sentiment never serves any purpose—or rather serves only its own ends, which is validation-by-announcement, which
always (at least in others, it’s often hard to see what’s going on in your own life) seems a little desperate, and dubious, as if an emphatic statement of one’s love can will that love into being. Even when it works, it’s not the best basis for longterm success. It’s easy from the perspective of here to see the flaws in our thinking and behavior there, but in our defense we were all a little guilty of wishful thinking at the time.

  Spirits are of all substances the most capable of perfection, and their perfections are different in that they interfere with each other the least, or rather they aid each other the most, for only the most virtuous can be the most perfect friends. In the strictly metaphysical sense, no external cause acts upon us excepting God, alone, but we can’t expect people whose business doesn’t rise or fall in metaphysical tides to understand or react in the way such a truth would dictate.

  These were heady days for us, for people who in any way cared about music or music’s future. A lot of very great rock bands had been signed to major labels after years of underground accolades. The traveling rock festival referenced earlier gave birth to itself with a minimum of labor and a maximum of media cooing. We had a sense of tectonic shifts in the underlying makeup of the industry, of which we became more sensible when Whiskey Ships also signed to a major label, because we were in a better position to pay attention to these things—and we had a reason, too, since anything that affected the business affected the band, and by extension us.

  There is another aspect, too, under which this epoch has its importance—in it for the first time abstract truths sought to intervene in the world of facts. The meaning of a truth always differs greatly from its tendency. In the world of facts, truths are simply means, and we felt ourself, as a truth-in-itself, somewhat at sea. Which, coming from an extremely landlocked state (meaning State), was disorienting, and then things got, for a while, even weirder.

  Because then N—’s famous record N— was released [though there’s a way of looking at things that suggests the release of N—was actually a signal of the end of any future for what we then thought of as indie rock, which was shorthand for independent rock, which had no real meaning (except literally it was supposed to mean that the record was released by a small “independent” label instead of an enormous corporate or “major” label, but many independents were actually owned by or at least funded through major labels, so even the literal definition grew, over time, fuzzy at the edges), but could maybe be generally defined as an uncodified but mutual adherence to a set of values with regard to the production and distribution of music, rather than by an aesthetic manifesto. These values were all in a rigorously ars gratia artis vein, meaning any commercial aspirations, or the elevation of commercial aims above artistic ones, were viewed with great suspicion by the (elusive, shifting) community, which consisted of mainly devotees (you could even call them consumers) of the music produced according to these principles. Naturally, there were exceptions. Naturally, there was a lot of nail-biting about selling out, but the economics of being in a band have never been straightforward or pure or anything but hopelessly compromised. Until the Collapse, of course. Now that we’ve taken economics out of the equation, what were formerly moral dilemmas are no longer available, and seem quaint and old-fashioned] and an irrational exuberance, to misuse a phrase in currency some years ago, took hold of many of us, who wrongly extrapolated the success of one record to an entire feeding trough of fame-hungry bands, most of which, we earnestly reasoned, had labored in obscurity for too long, and deserved the success that N—had, it seemed to us, achieved on the shoulders of other, better music.

  The nameless loneliness of chance, yes, it was that which we saw before us as, ready for the fall and already falling, we stood there at our window. Unconquered and unconquerable in its abandonment, the estranged night lay open, unchanged, immobile but strange, brushed by the gently ungently unyielding yielding of the moon, of the new moon, full, immobile, and flooded by the ungentle flow of stars, submerged in the silent unsilent song, submerged emerged from the beauty and the magical unmagical unity. So remittingly unremitting gray and so low as no sky we have seen before. They fought so fiercely that the whole castle echoed and reechoed halloo! halloo! and the din was heard in the dinner hall of the din-din-nabulated Nibelungs.

  Après N—le déluge, as you may know. And even as we watched in horror while monstrous fabrications based largely on the templates we had forged in the smithy of our souls took the stage, we could not help but be tickled by the ascent of many of our former underground heroes. Not for long, of course. The whole thing collapsed under its own weight alarmingly fast, and most of those heroes were either destroyed or slunk back to their caves even more bitter than when they had emerged, blinking, into the harsh glare of the limelight. We could give you names, but these names would likely mean nothing to you anyway, which is the way, we’ve come to think, things should have stayed. Timelessness might be an outdated and romantic and inapplicable notion, or it may be the key to the whole thing, but the way of survival for any art form, for any love affair, for anything that you or anyone you know holds dear, is to shut the hell up about it. To avoid hype at all costs and let the thing speak for the thing’s self. Promotion, advertising, marketing: These really are tools of the devil, it turns out, even after everyone already knew this and then moved past that knowledge in a frenzy of postmodern, ironic knowingness. You cannot co-opt what you don’t know about, however, and even though it’s increasingly difficult to do something that nobody knows about, we’re told, it’s still worth the effort.

  If there’s ever a next time, we’d do better to keep everything to ourself. But at the time it felt like we were being offered the world. And even though we always knew that we would turn the world down, it was nice to be asked. Why was the phenomenon of the world passed over at the beginning of the ontological tradition which has been decisive for us (explicitly, in the case of Parmenides), and why has this passing-over kept constantly recurring?

  We arrived in Münster yesterday in the afternoon, after flying for what seemed like forever from Dayton to Chicago, from Chicago to Newark, from Newark to London, from London to Münster, a smallish town in the district of Upper Alsace, 16 m. from Colmar by rail, and at the foot of the Vosges Mountains. Its principal industries circa 1905 were spinning, weaving, and bleaching. The town owes its origin to a Benedictine abbey, which was founded in the 7th century, and at one time it was a free city of the empire. In its neighborhood is the ruin of Schwarzenberg. The Mlinstertal, or Gregoriental, which is watered by the river Fecht, is famous for its cheese. Münster was founded as a bishopric by Liudger, a missionary of Charlemagne; town grew around the monastery; was strong member of Hanseatic League from 13th cen.; was badly damaged in WWII.

  We’re in a German private-label motel, or an inn of some kind. The rooms are very small, which we know is standard for European hotels, having traveled here after college for a few months. The bathroom’s down the hall. This can be a problem if you have a propensity to drink a lot of red wine and pass out. In Germany, red wine is called rotwein. It’s the first and pretty much the only German we bothered to learn (other essentials: Was koste? and Bitte eine bier) on the plane on the way over, from a small traveler’s phrasebook that Stanley, the drummer, had brought. This was Stanley’s first trip to Europe and he was hopeful to have a continental experience, even if that experience was mostly defined by movies he’d seen that featured European locations.

  Wenn er das bezweifelt—was immer hier “bezweifeln” heisst— dann wird er dieses Spiel nie erlernen. Imagine that someone were to say, “I don’t know if I have ever been to the moon; I don’t remember ever having been there.” In the first place—how would he know that he is on the moon? How does he imagine it? Stanley’s experience had somehow reversed Ludwig’s proposition: He had never been to Germany, yet he remembered being there.

  Even though for almost the first time in the band’s history we have a professional tour manager, nice kid from Sheff
ield, England who can drive and do sound as well—his name’s Sammy Sparks—we feel still a certain familial responsibility for the rest of the band. Especially Henry, our singer. We’ve never met anyone more deeply, honestly xenophobic than Henry Radio. Even our grandfather, who wouldn’t eat spaghetti because it was Italian. It’s not that Henry’s wiring is intolerant of strangers, because he’s an extremely friendly person, willing to talk for hours to anyone who wants to listen, as long as the conversation is about rock music, or even better, specifically the rock music of Whiskey Ships. But having spent the first twentyseven years of his life without ever once leaving Dayton, Ohio, which is only a slight exaggeration, Henry only feels comfortable in his own backyard, drinking light beer and playing basketball on the half-court he put in upon graduating college, marrying his high school girlfriend, and moving into the house in Northridge he’s occupied ever since. His xenophobia has a specific perimeter, actually, which starts at the border of Vandalia, the slightly-tonier-than-Northridge suburb just to the north, where most residents of Northridge moved if they ever got any money, and which is thus despised by longtime Northridgians as pretentious and fake. Evil Vandalia, Henry calls it, laughing. But his laugh has an edge of real bitterness, we think. We remember him once saying that when he first went to Wright State University, and saw for the first time in his life college kids wearing backpacks and eating bagels, he nearly threw up.

  We’re somewhat surprised, then, to shower and dress and walk downstairs to the breakfast room of the Münster Inn (name has been changed) to see Henry and Stanley and Trinket, the other guitarist, sitting at a table peaceably, and from appearances happily, eating eggs and sausage and orange juice and muesli and even coffee. Sammy the tour manager’s on the phone and motions us to the buffet table on the other side of the room where all this stuff is spread out in serve-yourself fashion. We don’t usually eat breakfast, which makes sense since we’re not usually awake until lunchtime, and were surprised to find that others of our age still made a regular habit of doing so. On tour, we’re always the last one out of bed, which would have made our tour nickname Sir Sleeps-A-Lot or something along those lines, except: Magnetic Tom, our T-shirt guy, who’s Henry’s friend from high school, and who travels with us always and who sleeps, we swear, seventy percent of the time. He’s a very sweet-natured guy. His great ambition on tour is, when we get to Amsterdam, to disappear into a coffeehouse and for the first time in his life get legally stoned. We’re absolutely certain he will realize this ambition. Our tour nickname is Kool-Aid Lips because of all the red wine we drink, which tends to leave a purple residue on our lips.