He breaks his gaze, leaving a patch of breath on the passenger-side window. “So,” he says. “Are we done seeing the sights? You want to keep on the great suburban tour? Or could we possibly consider dealing with this thing?”
“You have a better plan?”
“Yeah,” he says. He’s rifling through the duffel again. I spy the fruits of a search, checklists of addresses, a survey map with careful annotations. See? You have been looking for me. You just didn’t realize it. I have a vision of us, this evening perhaps, after dinner, reading aloud from our respective records, mine in my paperback, his in his duffel. You saved that one, too, I’ll say, and he’ll spread out his map, and retrace his journey, then we’ll finish our lives together. Now, he locates what he’s looking for, a pad of paper with a couple of items penned in and crossed off. He squints. From this angle, the lettering is illegible to me, so whatever talisman he holds has to wait.
“Up there. Stay to the left.”
“You think you’re so smart.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t. I’m just a grunt. You’re the smart one, apparently.”
I take it as a compliment, though it feels off. He isn’t a grunt, never was. Like lady honey. Not his kind of endearment. Still, we change; people change, so I go where he points. He knows his way around, seemingly. Nods me down Longwood Avenue, and then to Chapel Street. I anticipate what we’ll see before we turn, though it’s been years, decades since I used to wait at this subway stop at the end of the school day.
“Pull over.” He points to a spot across from where I used to get the T; there’s an immense structure set above us, on some irregular rise the sun is caught behind, and so all I see is the enormous shadow. Or perhaps it is like the face blindness, something about this location that I can no longer see.
“What is this place?” It calls up no particular feeling, but for some reason, I can conjure an aristocratic hush, the red of high-end carpeting, as if I’ve been inside.
“It’s an extended stay hotel, now,” says my man. “Dignitaries recovering from vein surgery, awaiting hearts for implantation. But, some of the old residents are there, still, too, at least going by the deed. So? What do you have for me?”
My passenger has taken out a pad of paper, the kind you steal from the dentist’s office or the insurance agency. The tops sheets are crowded with handwritten notes. He pages through until he gets to a blank one and begins to write. I know these gestures, the fake phone number, the easy smile. I’m about to get the brush off. My stomach clenches. That’s when I realize, he’s been testing back. I’ve been being observed the same way I’ve been observing him.
“You ever get sick of the repeats?” he says. “Tired old shit made like it’s new? You remember where you know me from yet?”
“Of course,” I fib. “Did you?”
“We—” A kind of confusion washes over his expression, shadows of softer things flickering beneath. We’ve held each other, I want to say, skin to skin. I can sit here and tell you what you taste like. You must remember. “Maybe once we—Maybe, but—we aren’t the issue here, Amelia.”
From his throat, the name spikes into me. He does know me, but it’s wrong. “No one calls me that.”
“But it’s your name, right? For work?”
“Listen, you,” I say. “You found me. It wasn’t easy, right? You drove to my house. You waited in my driveway. You were thinking about something, there on my street. I think you followed me last night. You watched, but you kept second-guessing. You needed time to think it through. Why? Today, you came again. You got into my car. What does that sound like to you?”
He considers me, then leans in very close. “It sounds like you have something I need. So where is it?”
“There’s no it. There’s only us, you and me.” I want to shake him, wake him up. He’s caught in some stupid loop, and here I am. Right here. Why can’t he see me?
“I wish I could trust you on that,” he says. “No it. You took care of it. It’s already gone. But what about the buildup? The come-on? The coming ha ha attractions. They want to see how it turns out so bad, they let you reach inside them and put it there. The whole world, they let you use them. But I think we agree, you and I, that is not a great plan.”
“I don’t care about the whole world,” I say.
“Good girl. So, I guess that means it’s your season to wake up, too. Look around. Anything you recognize? No? OK, you’ve got your little sober thing: good for you. But that cannot interfere with the bigger picture here. Human to human, I get how you want this to go. You move into the bright big future, all the old mistakes fixed. Believe me, that’s what I want, too. But there are things outstanding, Apollo. What do you call it? Dormant. Stuff inside is sleeping, right. You know this, because you put it there. Then it wakes up again, blue. That is what we’re waiting on. It’s not the ending. We’ve been to the ending. It’s the middle that’s gone, and the middle is the alarm. That is why I’m going to need it. In my hand, not on some promise. Because rerun season is over.” His speech is muddled, contains ellipses and insertions, but I can’t decipher it the way I can with a cloud user. He’s high. I know that, but it’s not a high I recognize. The smell is strange, powdery and mineral, and yet, just a touch of lemon licks into the air.
He thumbs back through the written pages. “Kif-Vesely’e? That do anything for you? Still no?”
I want to give him whatever he wants, but it’s like trying to do the work, my old familiar work. I can’t. I can’t conjure from my mind the thing he wants from me.
“You have it, or you know how to get it, lady honey. You just need to dig a little deeper.”
Then he makes a gesture. The gesture is so known to me, so familiar, it’s like we share a skin. He lifts his weight of the seat, slides his hand into his pocket, and extracts a tiny thing. Square of paper. Nub of cloud. He’s on something else, but he knows what I like.
“Get right, Mellie.” He lifts the door handle. “You know how to find it. They’re not waiting for nothing, and they’re not waiting for long.”
In his palm, where there was paper a moment before, he now holds a handful of confetti. The one square of cloud has multiplied in a magic trick.
“No,” I say. I am going to hold onto him bodily. This isn’t how this ends.
Then he tilts his hand, and tiny scraps of paper waft to the seat between us—a banquet of cloud, a feast. I am mesmerized by the bounty.
My senses fire wildly. A D-line train pulls into the station and disgorges a few dozen passengers. In that instant, my passenger and his duffel disappear.
Things blur and brighten, a waitress and a telephone pole, a McDonald’s bag and a bicycle wheel, a handbag and baby, all the little pieces of paper on the seat where he once was, ashes or evidence or my only consolation. If this were one of Lew’s films, if I could see things the way I used to when I was high, the critical details would coalesce, the contrail of his path, and I could follow. But though the evening seems to strobe with significance, nowhere amid its shadows is the man who used to be my man.
Six
The Fenway & Brookline
1988
They are dismissing us early from the White School because of Hurricane Gladys. Outside, the limousines and Mercedes and humble Volvo wagons are lining up with the buses. After school, I usually go to Children’s Hospital, where I file patient records in the physical therapy department, but my supervisor has left a message that they’re sending nonessentials home. You can tell by looking out the window already that this isn’t a regular rainstorm. The trees lift the whites of their leaves to the sky; the rain cuts toward the earth at an acute angle. I watch as I wait my turn with the payphone. We’re supposed to call our emergency contacts, let them know of the early release.
All day, I’ve been full of manic energy, trying to climb out of my own skin.
I’d been stranded with my mother during a flood last year. Washington Square was under a foot of water, power lines down, T
cars garaged. Beacon Street was one big electric lake, and none of us able to leave our apartments. Four days of electricity sparking across the water and my mother’s cabin fever set in. “I’m just so lonely, Mellie. It’s just so hard to be unmarried and still want things.” But, in truth, it’s not so much what I want to avoid that makes me call Nancy.
When she picks up, I tell her about the dismissal. “So can you? I need a ride.”
There’s an interval of silence. Mrs. Gordon, who is waiting to call her husband, taps on the glass.
“I thought you were pissed at me.”
“I thought you were.”
I can hear something in the background, like an animal or a baby.
“Is someone there?” I ask.
“No one. Just Paul,” Nancy says. “We’re going to watch the hurricane with Judah.” She’s not inviting me. She’s uninviting me. But it’s Friday, and I feel like I’m halfway through something that needs to be finished, or like I’m hungry for some specific food.
Mrs. Gordon taps the glass again, eager to leave the school, to go home to her professor husband in Cambridge and play Trivial Pursuits by candlelight.
“Perfect,” I say.
By the front door, they’re checking kids off a permission list, but it’s Mr. Peters with the clipboard, and I’m a junior with straight As. I wave myself past the line of kids, and barrel out into the slow-moving storm. The drops spatter, sting my exposed skin and fog my glasses, but I’m impervious, the heat coming off me as I bend into the wind. The Village Fens is a full half-mile away, but that’s not where I’m going. Across the Jamaicaway, on the other side of the T stop is a place called Longwood Towers and this is where Judah apparently resides. I can’t shake the feeling that a few days ago, he lived in the crack house, and that something has changed, and now he lives in a fancy condominium, that this change has something to do with cloud. Too, I have a free-floating hunger, something I want, that I cannot attach to anything. Cloud is where it used to be.
This is my second time crossing the Riverway today. I have off-campus privileges at the White School, and at lunch, I’d been too boiled up to sit with my classmates, so I’d walked the twenty minutes to George’s Folly, the head shop where Nancy worked until she stole the one-hitter. George, a hippie with grossly long fingernails, was behind the counter.
Massachusetts state law prohibits the sale of drug paraphernalia, but what falls into that category is a negotiable list, and George always had things like tobacco pipes and screens and lined tins, things which technically could be used for other purposes. He also sold herbal mixes and beedies and spoons of cloud. I didn’t want to eat it, obviously. I would never eat cloud in school. Still. I thought of cloud’s lemon taste and some faint ghost of its relief floated back to me. Just in case I couldn’t shake this mood, just to have, I decided I’d walk over during free period.
I wandered around looking at the Indian comic books and imported wooden elephants, the ceramic ashtrays and batik tapestries for a few minutes. It seemed impossible that I was the kind of person who could walk into a store and just ask for drugs, even if they were legal, but when George took a phone call, I ducked behind the eighteen-plus curtain, where the dirty magazines and erotic statuary were kept. Between the dildos and the sheesha, there was a single wrapped spoon in an otherwise empty case.
Pursuant to local code 380.49.3, “cloud” will no longer be legal for sale in Massachusetts.
George came in behind me. “You eighteen?” he asked.
Teenagers were George’s customer base, but not his favorite people, because we stole and we hassled and we loitered and distracted his employees. Being wheedled by an adolescent was nothing new for George. I thought of flight, but just behind the impulse to run came a wash of calm, of strange confidence, like I could conjure back cloud’s blankness. I lied by two years. But he shrugged, and unlatched the ring of keys from his belt, and opened the case.
There’s just a little sheen of pleasure that comes from knowing I’ve got the spoon now, that oils my skin against the rain, and what I’m doing is something still unfolding in my mind. I think of myself as I walked home through the deserted midnight streets, everything glossy, everything blurred. I feel meaner. Like a person who can be mean on purpose.
Now, the light changes; the uniformed nurses cross opposite me, back toward the hospital towers. Beneath the bridge is the same waterway that peters into the swampland of the crack house apartments and an unmaintained section of the Emerald Necklace, a park that rings the area. My mother has stories, deep lore, of the Fens below and we’ll stop here when she occasionally comes to a soccer game or to walk me to the pediatrician so she can point out certain features. Even in summer, the growth below is tangled brown among the green, the tall reeds weeping over the slow-moving and narrow waterway. We never go in. Hidden from the road, it is rumored to be the lurking place of perverts. But it is also the location of more benign mysteries, like bamboo. Bamboo is invasive, grows and adapts like a dandelion or a zebra mussel, but it does look tropical there beside the Yankee cattails. My mother tells me that during the triangle trade era of New England, bamboo was used as packing material in the bottom of spice crates. After the crates had been emptied, sailors dumped the bamboo here and it grew. The lesson, like the past lives, may be half-invention, but it’s interlaced with my sense of my world.
It’s funny, Longwood Towers. It’s just across from the T station closest to my school. I pass it every day, but the way it sits on a rise, something about the angle from the street, or just that it’s not significant to my personal geography—even as I approach it, I can’t quite see it until I am already in its shadow. Longwood Towers: crenelated and turreted, it rises like a kid’s version of where rich people live. The lobby is hushed, the carpeting not new, and elderly white ladies push their walkers slowly around the chintz sofas while their attendants trail behind.
How Judah lives here is by his father and how his father affords it is by soft-core pornography.
The doorman is older than the Boston dames circumnavigating the lobby. I approach him, shivering and dripping rain. I’m in a man’s white t-shirt that mysteriously appeared in our laundry, and my mother denied knowledge of. It’s a small apartment, ours, but I’m often out for the night, so whatever. Gross. I clear my throat and try to see through my rain-speckled glasses.
“My friend is having some of us over,” I begin. But I’m blanking on his last name. “I’m here to see Judah—” I know it. It’s Cohen. I think. I’m nearly positive.
The doorman squints through his smudged reading glasses, takes me in, and nods. “Tower C,” he says. “Elevator on the left. Second floor. Apartment F.”
Tower C, 2f. I write it in the pages of a paperback. It’s this dimness, lately. Up too late, sleeping too little, so I’ve been trying this trick of writing things down. I tuck the paperback away and press the up button.
In the brass elevator doors, I am a watercolor girl: white skin, purple lips, and the very first streaks of platinum lightening my hair: total soft-core. Soft-core is how Nancy has described what Judah’s father makes, as if there is some critical difference between the real stuff and what Mr. Cohen does. Maybe soft-core means not fully nude, or naked but no actual like insertion—naked and just rubbing. Or maybe it includes sex, but just nothing super pervy, nothing horrible like hurting someone or putting objects into people. Oral sex is probably soft-core, but through a Vaseline lens, in blurry focus, so everything looks like the cover of a religious greeting card.
Nancy thinks I still sound fake when I use foul language. Blow. Suck off. Go down. Nancy has a theory that most girls can’t perform good oral sex, particularly to a bigger penis, and that if you can just keep the penis in your throat for longer than thirty seconds, you will addict them. You can make the boy into an addict of you. I look at my smeared reflection, think of the taste of cloud under my tongue.
The elevator opens on a silent hallway. The smell is of something odorless, som
e odorlessness, or it is the smell of dust in the cooling air, the smell of carpet fibers. Apartment 2f is at the far end, awkwardly angled in the curve of the tower. Outside, the storm is still just a rainy day; I could make it home, before the winds rise, but the crawling feeling in my throat goads me and I knock. The door swings, opening, and I step inside the apartment of the soft-core pornographer.
“Hello?” I look for Nancy, for Paul. For any sign that this is the right place. The thing gripping my throat, which is like thirst or need, tightens. “Hello?”
No one answers. I zip open the inner pocket of my backpack. Tucked next to my wallet is the last legal cloud in Massachusetts. I unstick the Saran Wrap from the spoon and suck the clear gel from the plastic.
Something stirs, a body part under covers in the back bedroom, nude limbs untangling from sheets.
“Who’s that?” a male voice calls out. The person in the bedroom stands. I swallow, pulling the grainy gel into my parched mouth.
—pop—
I feel the bitterness slide into my belly. It metabolizes into something perfect and hard—everything retreats for an instant, and then—the blond shaven head, the glimpse of blue tattoo script. It’s Judah, only Judah, pulling on a flannel over his bare chest. He points his chin in my direction and I’m fine and I keep smiling and he smiles back.
“Hey, you,” says Judah. “You happen to know what time it is?”
The Likely World Page 8