by James Greer
No one moved. “You guys coming?”
Fiat shifted in her seat. “I’m ready.” The others slowly stirred and began the process of finding coats, scarves, bags.
“I need a ride,” said Joe. “Too cold to walk.”
“I don’t mind walking,” said Amanda. “It’s good for you.”
“Rule of thumb: Nothing’s either good or bad. Drinking makes it so,” quipped Joe, who then laughed noiselessly at his own weak joke, made funny through alcohol.
Mary wrapped a light blue scarf around her neck. Everyone I know is different. Different people all thinking one same thought, which is the only thought. If I had my dragon to consider, maybe I would pay more attention.
Rethread the reel, thought Joe, tonguing drops of yellowy liquid from the tips of his mustache. Rewind. What hurts is the gradual shadow of her fading smile when I say something funny. I nearly faint from the effort of renewing that smile, only to see it fade again. If I could keep it there, could I keep her? The song says everybody hurts, but I can only feel my own individual pain, thought Joe. Light from the fake Tiffany lamps flecked the honey-colored ice in Joe’s glass with gold highlights as he tipped it to and fro on the tabletop. Joe watched the movements of the glass, then closed his eyes and let the negative image flicker on his eyelids.
This is impossible, thought Joe, scratching the side of his mouth. I can’t, I cannot breathe when she’s around, can’t focus when she’s not. O hell. I am a fool, and I think I’m going nuts. I need life support: her breath, her lips, her heart. I don’t ask for much. I want to drink coffee in strange places with the morning sun in my face and her across the table, smiling. I’m no stranger to the rapture of attraction, but this is different. This is a matter of tides, of gravity. Of ineluctable force. I’m a fool.
Joe groaned involuntarily and put his hand quickly over his mouth to stop his heart from flopping out.
“I’ll walk with you,” he said to Amanda, who shrugged okay.
As many times as that, thought Joe, as many times as she wants. She can open the door without thinking and as easily slam it shut. I’ll walk through, too, I’ll follow wherever, every time. Now she’s here and I’m here, and whenever that happens it’s like life switches on, there’s an electric charge to the most insignificant action or word someone says, anyone, until she leaves. Mostly it’s potential energy: the possibility that she’ll say something to me that will carry the meaning I need to see me through the night. Some nights are more endless than others, but they’re all pretty long. And they’re all dark, lit up from inside by stray sparks of her presence, or the memory of her presence.
No one laughed, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t funny. Not everything that’s funny you laugh at. Sometimes you just smile, or not even that. Sometimes you have this inner chuckle that produces no outward manifestation of getting the joke, but there’s a slight thrill in the spine, and a warmth of satisfaction with yourself and your relation to the world, an incremental orientation toward okayness which, despite your pervasive feeling of being separate on account of the alienating intensity of emotion directed at one person or one thing, lends you an illusory sense of strength and purpose. Despite the foreboding of darkness behind the momentary pinprick of hope, though, maybe the sense of strength is not the illusion but the whole point, and the overwhelming passion—I’m just saying what if, thought Joe—is a transitory phase, as brief and powerful as early spring rain, and just as ruinous, and just as cleansing.
The assignment of riders to available cars was efficiently if thoughtlessly sorted by Trip Ryvvers. “I can take Henry and Kurt and Fiat,” he told the small group huddled in the parking lot. “That’s all I’ve got room for. Michael, you can handle the rest of the car-free?”
“We’re walking,” said Amanda, nodding at Joe, who did not look pleased. “We want to walk.”
Michael Goodlife, momentarily fazed, glanced briefly at Mary, who giggled, realizing that she was the only one of the group left. He gave Trip a brief grimace of acknowledgement. “Sure,” he said, thinking what can five minutes hurt.
He walked to the passenger side of the robin’s-egg-blue station wagon and unlocked the door. Scarf matches my car, he noted in passing, as Mary opened the door and got in.
“Could I possibly trouble you for a cigarette?” asked Mary, as Michael slid behind the driver’s seat and started the engine. He reached into the inside pocket of his coat and without looking at her offered his pack. For all her premature dissolution, thought Michael, she remains uncorrupted, the image of the thing she imagines herself discarding; a chrysalis dreaming its metamorphosis.
“Ugh. Menthol. I forgot,” said Mary, sliding a cigarette anyway out of the pack. She pushed in the lighter and sat back as he turned out of the parking lot south onto Brown Street. Her innocence is compounded by self-absorption, which in turn deflects the abundant opportunities for real learning that present themselves to anyone with eyes to see and a heart to break. Everyone knows this about her; no one is made happier or wiser by the knowledge. She is untouchable because she refuses to be touched in any other than a purely physical sense.
Things Henry and Kurt said about loneliness of touring. Kurt claims that’s his favorite part. Nice to hear I’m not the only one. Really starting to hate that bar. Clutter is not a new idea in bar decor, but the aesthetic at the Hive escapes me. Each new layer of decoration obscures the last—horrible beer-stained red-and-white wallpaper in the pool room distracting from awful pseudo-surrealist mural above entrance, stylized tortoise plodding across a stylized desert—overload of sense-impressions. You’re drunk with color and light before you’ve had your first drink. Are we drawn to the Hive in pursuit of noisy familiarity, or are we there for another reason, and drink to avoid it? The bar drives me to drink. Low-grade sophistry. Another thing Kurt said: The man who discovered the secret of life is dead.
Stewart Street. Longest red light in the history of red lights.
“Is there any way you would consider a truce?” Michael blurted, out of sheer impulse, waiting at the light as the engine idled noisily.
Mary rolled down the window despite the cold. “I feel sick. Menthol,” she said, tossing the unfinished cigarette out the window. She turned and looked at Michael, who was staring straight ahead.
“I’m not the one at war,” she said softly.
“I know. Okay. I’m offering a truce. I’m. I’m apologizing.”
“You don’t have anything—”
“I do. I’m sorry. It’s difficult sometimes for me to act like a human being.”
“It’s difficult for everybody, Michael. Don’t be precious.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Thank you. For apologizing. Believe it or not, that means something.”
“It’s just, so much time goes by, and—”
Mary lifted a finger in the direction of the traffic light. “Ain’t gonna get no greener,” she said.
Second law of thermodynamics, thought Michael as he depressed the accelerator, dictates that in a closed system, disorder or entropy inevitably accompanies progress of time. Time’s arrow moves in only one direction, inevitably. Is there a thing that transcends that unidirectional flight? Is it too squishy to say love? On even a pragmatic level I think that’s right, though, because time is relative to each person’s perception, and perception of time tends to suspend in moments of heightened emotional connection. So the only real problem is there’s no such thing as love.
There is a way to connect that goes beyond sexually, doubtless, but even that for me would be a step up. Kiss me, please. Erogeny recapitulates physiognomy, right? My heart against your heart. Slowpokes unite: The race is to the swift, but we’re all on the wrong track.
“You missed the turn,” said Mary, languid with relief.
* * *
Amanda Early, though taller and more fit than Joe Smallman, struggled to keep pace with him up the slope of Brown Street just south of Far Hills near the crest where a sharp l
eft turn and two hundred yards brought you to the front door of Albion. I am paralyzed, she thought. What’s the word, quadriplegic. I am walking but still. Standing still but walk. There’s a force field humming from my brain that renders me immobile, plus my voice doesn’t work either. Isn’t it romantic? It is exactly as romantic as the biggest pile of garbage in Huffman Prairie, i.e., the dump. Stinks of romance. The strongest soap could not clean the stench wafting from every pore of my moonlike face. The feeling is a feeling of every available drop of adrenaline in the body rushing through arms and legs at double normal blood-speed because the heart, which is the only non-paralyzed body feature, is working twice normal rate, pumping not just the blood but this unordinary amount of adrenaline, or some other chemical, but I call it adrenaline because it’s the same effect as when I was younger and played soccer and the ball came toward me on the field, down out of the multifaceted blue sky, spinning black-and-whitely in a corkscrew motion because of the slice from the left-footed kicker, high enough in the air to do a header, which I’d been practicing but still wasn’t very good at. The moment before the ball hit me full in the face instead of high on the forehead and the blood spurted almost immediately from my busted nose down my chin to the formerly yellow with blue arm stripes of the soccer jersey was, from what I remember, very exciting.
Amanda tried without success to swing her arms so as to pick up her walking pace. Exactly the same chemical-induced paralysis, which is adrenaline, which is just one of the many imbalances my body provides me at no extra charge. The excitement provoked by her secret decision had ironically frozen her typically overly-keen responses to external stimuli: In other words, Amanda did not notice that Joe was walking fast on purpose, trying to stay ahead of her so that he wouldn’t have to talk, because he was beside himself with anger at having agreed to walk with her, and then, after making what he considered but did not make clear was a chivalrous gesture, she had spoken for him in the parking lot as if walking to Albion was something he had embraced, as if it was his idea. He had hoped by erecting a wall of silence to prod some challenge to his surly silence—a reasonable hope, as that was exactly how Amanda would usually react, but not now, not tonight; she had not even noticed that Joe hadn’t spoken, was only vaguely aware of her surroundings, had even forgotten, at least in an immediate sense, where they were going.
In two days I will touch earth I have never touched. Many other people have touched that earth but I make it new, because I have never. Cannot believe I’m going to do this. Cannot believe I’ve managed to keep the secret of my going. No one knows, no one will probably even guess for a while at least. No one—here’s the real truth—will probably even notice. For a while. At least.
“Slow down, can’t you, Joe?” said Amanda to Joe’s dwindling figure.
“Too cold. I need to get inside,” Joe shouted back down to her. “We’re almost there anyway.”
We’re almost there, thought Amanda. All my life I’ve been almost there. All my life I’ve needed to get inside. All my life with my nose pressed against the window. Even one sign, one gentle word or tender look, maybe every thought process inside me would weave into a ball of wool and I would roll, bouncing, back down this hill or any hill. People think it’s easy. People really do think it’s no trouble at all. I’ve met that type of person, I keep meeting that type of person who thinks it’s easy.
Cresting the hill, Amanda could see the light from Albion down the little road to the left, firelight and candlelight and another kind of light that has no name.
Michael had lately found that sleeping with his friends’ girlfriends was in a weird way less complicated, emotionally, than with unattached women. Transaction reduced to its elemental component, pure drunken lust, he thought. No possibility of further entanglement, no need to make up excuses not to call or find ways to avoid her in public, in a small place like here. The trick is to keep moving, he thought. The alternative is a slow death by relationship, masses of conflicting emotions overlapping and tugging in different directions, each carrying a piece of what Michael regarded as his true self. The whole complex of disparate elements comprised a constantly wheeling ball of identity, and the loss of even the smallest piece would result in the eventual breakdown of the unkempt structure. Which in any case was just a construct of will. You will yourself into being, and you will yourself into feeling. Love is a thing you either control or don’t mess with, like everything else.
He took a drag from a menthol cigarette and stood against a wall hung with tattered silk, faded from its original red to a dull brick color that reminded Michael of the bricks outside the studio downtown where his band had recently recorded some new songs. In his right hand he held a coffee mug filled with a very good red wine.
If I forget the angle at which her cigarette hung from her mouth while she reached in the refrigerator for a beer, does that erase the fact of the dangling smoke? he wondered. Does that erase the fact of her smile, on which I staked the fat chance of my own life? Memory is pain. Bars on the prison of consciousness. Okay. Memory is light, heat, an empty promise of unending love, empty because it consists of itself only, a lie, a trick of perspective. Memory has no memory, can’t imagine its nonexistence. Contains and expresses its own failure, constant reminder of the shape things no longer assume. Every new thing contains the shadow of its own end.
Mary sat cross-legged next to Fiat, beside one of the two easy chairs in front of the enormous fireplace. Amanda Early was sitting in the chair, and their conversation was animated. Every once in a while Mary would dart a glance in Michael’s direction. He turned his eyes away to avoid her glances.
Is the world inclusion or is it indivisible monads? thought Michael. Is loneliness solved by love or just hidden or even made worse somehow, the way you can hide a thing and be more aware of its presence than ever? Will you ever kiss me again? Do I want you to? I’m supposed to be happy. I’m happy.
If a person, place, or thing speaks to you, if you recognize its essence or character and consequently become infused with animating passion for the subject, also called inspiration, how do you then remove yourself from the combustion process without the engine failing? Or something like that. Alcohol-speeded metaphors are my strong suit of armor. Read recently that propulsive punning is a symptom of syphilis.
He watched Kurt and Henry deep in conversation, Henry doing by far the most talking. I am a fraud, I don’t belong in their company, much less his house. Still there is that prick of ego that suggests, what if? Maybe you are not just as good but better, or maybe you could become better, and then you would not have to leave town to find success like Kurt, and then you would not use Dayton as a militating factor against success, like Henry. His fierce independence cannot hide his jealousy. Inside he wants the recognition he feels his due, that Kurt instead has reaped, honors and laurels and prizes and riches. None of which he seems to want. Nothing on display here, anyway. Look around and you wouldn’t know anything about the person who owns this place, who lives here. Having escaped, you’d almost think he’s ashamed at returning.
Whether you try to escape from here or whether you acquiesce, you are still fighting the same war if you only don’t let the space-fillers get in your way, thought Michael. Not in the sense that you have to go around them physically, in a room like here, but in the sense that there is only so much useful space in the world, space that if you are in it you need to be doing something that helps, something that defines or even strengthens these innate connections that if I were a little drunker I could actually see, like silly strings of consequence—post hoc ergo propter hoc spelled out in tiny letters on each brightly colored length—streaming from the tops of everyone’s heads, and from their fingers, and their eyes and mouths and omphaloses and crotchsections. And if you choose to occupy useful space, a choice made through the simple act of recognition of the useful space’s existence, we will welcome you, sisters, brothers, and we will show you the secret dry goods locker where we keep the cans of super
natural silly string, and also on Friday nights we have a marathon word-game competition that helps weed out the less serious-minded. A brand of honey-flavored liqueur currently being market-tested in the Dayton metropolitan region will be served, along with indestructible pretzels. From across the room Michael watched as Amanda Early got up out of her chair and walked out of the enormous ballroom toward the bathroom.
Joe Smallman, bitter and lonely, a ghost bowed with sorrows too numerous to bear, threaded through the small group of revelers at Albion, determined that his surly demeanor would attract attention and perhaps concern. No such luck. Why doesn’t Kurt bother with heat except the fire? wondered Joe. Freezing in here unless you stick close to the big stone hearth. Hearth of the matter. Trip Ryvvers, professional drunk, held court at the left lip of the fireplace. His audience was small, and only one, the Rose Scholar, appeared to be paying any attention to his rambling accompanied by expansive hand gestures.
“When I’m done with Orville, he will be unrecognizable,” Trip was saying, “rearranged like an anagram to form something new, something I hope useful. Love girl with r … Incomplete message. Isn’t that always the way? Wry, light lover. But that’s cheating. How great if Dayton could be anagrammed into anodyne—close, but not quite there. Anyway, I do appreciate the effort on the part of the city’s forefathers to cater to my writerly whims.”
Is it a trick of light that makes Trip look younger the more he drinks? Thinks he’s smarter than us, older, more experienced. Biography of loss. The size of pain is down to the amount of time involved. Time spent a way of measuring Heartbreak A versus Heartbreak B.
“I read today in some fanzine that the word punk in punk rock came originally from prison slang,” Joe interrupted, swaying on his heels as he did whether drunk or sober, as if at any moment gravity would become too much for his tiny frame to bear. “Like if you were a punk, that meant you were some guy’s bitch, in prison.”