Such a gracious false humility. That Saturn was the giveaway—he could barely spit it out of himself—because he knew that he was showing off.
Yeah, Cronus, yeah that’s right, George said. He couldn’t shut it off, the chatter, though inanimate objects were moving quite explicitly now, the eyes and faces, the slatted paneling on the walls, oh my god—
Funny, he actually liked this man.
Okay, George said, for instance, right, Goya, Cronus. Saturn. And then there’s this diner over in the 90s on Madison, I think—maybe Lex? No, Madison. They have this huge painted mural covering the whole wall, the entire length of the dining area, of Achilleus dragging the body of Hector around the walls of Troy. It’s huge. It looms over everybody’s lunch.
You know, I-I-I-I’d like to s-s-s-s see that, Harrington said. I-I assume they’re G-G-G-Greek?
Yeah, said George. Greek diner. No Coke, Pepsi. Yeah. It’s on the east side of the avenue. Madison.
Well then, it m-makes pe-pe-perfect s-s-s-sense.
George got it, with the acid it seemed revelatory in some special way: Harrington used phrases like oh indeed and well then to launch his mouth into the sentences he needed to say.
Dean, I have to go, man. I mean, not man, sorry. I have to go. Have a good time! I was actually on my way out, actually.
He was frantic and inarticulate. Harrington gazed at him with large friendly eyes. I’m meeting a girl, George said. He said it with an absurd theatrical air of manly conspiracy. To explain his departure, which didn’t need explaining. Society and its fucking psychic demands, Jesus. The universe picked up speed. Everything his eye landed on began to pulsate.
Oh e-e-e-excellent, the dean said. That large hand again. Something unbearably tender in it, slightly clumsy and gentle. Other humans. George turned and waved vaguely and ran up the stairs, toward night, freedom, Anna. She was waiting five feet from the stairwell, on the edge of the multi-doored lobby.
We have got to get out of here, George said to her.
This is so wild, she said. I just saw Ichabod Crane, I swear.
That was the dean, George said.
Right, but he looked like Ichabod Crane and now I’m watching for the headless horseman. Which would be a bad thing for this trip, right? A kind of Art Linkletter moment there? It is such a bummer to see anything headless when you’re tripping.
I was talking to him, George said. Downstairs. Ichabod the dean. His face started like decomposing while I was talking to him. The walls were moving and his face was melting and I thought it was going to fall off in front of me—
Right, Anna said. He would have become the headless horseman.
Then, in a segue that George mysteriously understood, she stepped back and twirled in a ballet kind of pose and made a sound like wheee.
George covered his eyes. Oh my god don’t do that, I can’t take it, he said.
Anna twirled and seemed to laugh. We are soooo fucked up… Two girls heading down to the pub looked at them and laughed. They didn’t laugh nicely. Anna continued twirling—George’s eyes were seeing four of her at once, or five, trails of her, an endless sequence.
Don’t, George said. I’m going to lose it, I swear.
She stopped. Poor baby, she said. Let’s go. Oops, I’m a little dizzy. Here, hold my arm.
She had changed, into a flowered skirt, a cotton knit shirt, and the arm that took his occupied one side of a time-soft denim jacket. Nothing pleased him more than to hold it. Twenty-eight twenty-seven—that was her phone extension. It was burned so deeply into his skull that if he saw a campus phone, such as the one that had just come into his sight on the lobby wall of this old World War I officers’ dorm, some inner spiritual muscle in him leaped, wanting to dial her, no matter at all that she was already with him, which proved the Pavlovian power of the image of the phone.
They left the building, out into the quad, into a gust of the changeable wind rubbing up against them, a hundred brief caresses.
5
It would be their companion through the night, that wind, it spoke to them—an animated being with thoughts and will that they came to know and that they felt able, with the acid, to interpret. They went on the subway and the other faces were almost too much for them and the graffiti and the smells and the shifting patterns and smears and stains of the linoleum tiles on the floors of the train. The enormity and thousand-voiced scraping-steel noise of it. A million cigarette butts and gum stains, which were black or else lumpen gray not yet dinged to black. Anna suddenly could see every figure who’d dropped his gum, her gum, his cigarette butt on that floor, men in suits and drifters and workmen and Puerto Rican girls from the Bronx, and nervous old women and nervous old men, they multiplied like a rapidly replicating society in her mind, nurses, secretaries, cops: it was like a weird Ad Council public service spot about community. She closed her eyes, tried to shut it down but she barely subdued it, the image grew and grew like some kind of virus-infused kaleidoscope until it was all crowds in her eyes, a massive swirl of faces.
She murmured in George’s ear, Petals on a wet black bough.
He looked at her.
Oh man, he said. Not the Pound shit. Then he started laughing.
She laughed too.
Apparitions! she said.
No, he said. No no don’t. Still laughing. Bending over.
Obviously they were insane.
Faces! she said. Crowds!
Then she looked away and let her eyes and consciousness drift until she found herself focused on the flashing by of the soot-dark I-beams holding up the tunnel, think of that shit why don’t you, the whole fucking street is up there, held up on poles. Then he said, One year floods rose, One year they fought in the snows…
Oh no, she said. No Pound shit for me, so no Pound shit for you.
You had your Pound shit!
Oh, the sounds: steel on steel, rattle and bang, millions a day, millions a day, the rails seemed to sing it hoarsely: and George was singing it to her now, singing it low, to her hair, where he imagined her ear was. She pictured this mental process, determining the ear beneath the hair. He sang: millions a day. She and he almost huddled together but she wanted them to keep the appearance of normality—doesn’t every woman want this, why does it matter so little to so many men, and indeed worst of all it matters least to the most desirable ones—she wanted them to sit up straight and not stare glazed and frightening at some pulsating dot on the wall next to someone’s head. With every new onslaught she just kept muttering oh my god and closing her eyes, except then the dizziness would get her and she’d have to open them again and for a minute somewhere in there she thought she’d have to get off the train, pull the brakes and get herself off the train or she’d throw up and then, worse, die… but it passed. She tried to find some Zen inner tranquility thing, some strength-spirit entering through her open palms. Noise: clanks and squeals of stressed metal, the doors banging open and closed, bells and hollers and completely… indecipherable… messages… through the ancient loudspeaker system, like the voice of a ridiculous god who’d given up even trying to be understood, the sound of bad wiring and ominous truths just missed. Mixed in with a few slurred electric words—electric words, ecstatic words—that they thought they could understand.
He’s saying, My god, my god, why have you forsaken me, Anna said, after a conductor’s announcement.
George said, Actually, it was, Franklin Street next, watch the closing doors.
Ohhh, don’t be a total shit, she said, and hit his denim thigh, not too hard, but hard enough to make a point, and then they both stared at the spot on his leg that she’d hit, as if they could see the concussion of fist on quadriceps, occurring and occurring again, in super slow motion. They stared and stared.
Wow, George said finally and they started laughing again. They were together, that was what held it in place for them, made the heightened world bearable: they would look at each other in amazement or amusement or both and each would know to the
depths of reality and to the depths of spirit what the other was thinking, feeling, wondering, hoping. Acid clarity, acid truth.
George said, If I said what you’re thinking right now—
Long pause. Anna said, You’d be right. Of course.
Long pause. Yeah, George said.
Longer pause. I know, Anna said. You remember it and tell me later and I’ll remember it and tell you later.
Holy shit, that would be totally impossible, George said. I mean, think about it.
Pause.
I can’t think about it, she said.
Pause.
George said, I don’t even remember now.
Pause.
Anna said, Remember what?
George said, Exactly, man. That’s the thing. I mean, that’s the thing. Remember what? Remembering is living. But it’s the opposite of living too, because when you’re having the experience to remember you’re not remembering other things, right? And then there’s too much to remember.
And too much of it painful, Anna said. She knew what she meant by this. He had his own version, she could see it, some dark shape like an inner shadow.
They clattered and clanked with stretches of time—eons—lost on each other and to the world, until they were down to South Ferry, where the train turned impossibly to make the curved station, screaming during the turn as if the elements of iron and steel and aluminum themselves were being rent. And then moving ridged steel panels like rows of teeth slid out mechanically from the platform to meet the train doors, monster teeth covering the wide gap caused by the severe curve of platform unfitting the ruler-straight form of each subway car. Steel teeth. Black and silver and glinting reflections. She and he went up the stairs and out into the air. At the top she wondered had they gone up slowly or fast? She already couldn’t remember. The smell of harbor and sea, the molecules palpable in an infinite assault against their faces and down into their bronchi and lungs; the erotic air penetrated them, wrapped itself around them, touched them—right there, right there at the center of their sex it brazenly rubbed against them, with intent, lifted them off the ground—and he said, Do you feel that? and she made a sound, that unmistakable sound, low and quiet: she felt it—this air, this night, these air-feathered fingers, all things living and sentient and so intense they were hardly bearable: exquisite. And the light: they could walk on the beams of it, skip on the million stones of it that glittered on the water. He stopped her.
We cannot walk on water and we cannot walk on air, he said.
She said, I know that.
We have to remember that, he said.
Got it, she said. I mean, I was already there.
Good, he said. He looked reassured, she was happy to reassure him.
Don’t worry, she said. None of that aforementioned Linkletter shit tonight, baby.
* * *
THEY WANDERED ONTO the ferry stiff-legged, dumb, beamed from another planet, unaccustomed to the particular gravity—PEOPLE OF EARTH—they stared this way and that, George almost frozen in place by the unimaginable fist-size lugs and bolts in the thick brackets that held deck to bulwark, all ridged with soot and grime; by the long-cracked linoleum floor; by the voices, the faces. They went upstairs and then outside onto the upper starboard deck, and sat, and felt the wind and the impossible rumble of the ferry’s enormous engines departing. It ran to starboard for a quarter mile then made its sharp tack to port to gain the harbor channel, the famous immense strange statue, verdigris patina’d, illuminated and shimmering over the waters, casting fragments of luminous green that looked like neon eels on the choppy surface.
Who would build such a thing? George said.
The French! Anna said, and he laughed. She approved of the project. Behind them the insane immensities that had grown right up to the edge of land and water: an impossible palisade of corporate stone and steel and glass. One after another after another and then at the very end, far to the west side of the base of the isle, the two black ones, dwarfing all.
Who would build that? he said.
Us, Anna said, more flatly.
I didn’t have nothin’ to do with it.
Not true, your uncle, you told me, she said.
My uncle was just tacking up the drywall, he said. I mean, who decided and who enacted? They really are huge.
This led to kissing, touching, on the bench. It got serious.
Oh my god stop, she said. I can’t take it. Too much.
He sat back.
Are you sorry you missed the last game of the Series? she said.
He said, You know, I lived and breathed and died and ceased breathing over this team since I was seven. Now. Hmm. Not really. That was all before I’d been exposed to quality—to dazzling women such as you.
You were going to say pussy. You were about to say quality pussy.
No, I would never. That would be vulgar and demeaning.
Right, and you were about to say it.
Never. I would never.
She kissed him. Suddenly she could kiss again. That merest hint of swagger in him had moved her somehow. He’d told her she was the softest kisser imaginable. There wasn’t much of anything else in sex she liked in the oh-so-gentle mode but in kissing she wanted slow, pliable, hungry, wet. It haunted him, what it reminded him of. Sometimes she rubbed her cheeks lightly on the bristle of his unshaved face. She took a strange, stupid little bit of pride in pulling his attention to her and away from his baseball team. What was that?
Your kisses, he said.
Yes? A topic of interest.
My mother used to come to my room and kiss me at night.
Like when you were a kid, to kiss you good night?
No, he said. Not like that.
Oh, she said. Oh.
I’ll tell you sometime. I can’t now. My brain would explode.
Oh, babe, she said.
Later, George said: It’s very important to remember your lies.
What? Anna said.
You know, remember your lies so you don’t fuck up and contradict yourself.
Were you lying before about your mother?
No, he said. But you know what I mean. Like I told a guy on my floor that I played high school baseball. Just ninth grade. In fact I thought about trying out but I didn’t. Now I have to remember he thinks I played ball.
Oh my god, Anna said. I can’t stand when people fuck up that way. It makes me lose faith in the workings of the universe.
But you’ve never done that, right?
Oh, the wind, Anna said. God the wind. George laughed.
The wind. Time elongated in it, rose and fell and lapped with the corrugated water, grew new dimensions inside itself—Anna whispered in his ear at some point because she knew it too, and knew what he was thinking, she whispered: days sift down it constantly, years, he knew exactly what she meant, exactly, the lifelongness of it, of life! And beyond, lifelong after lifelong after lifelong, bay, light, wind, the meaning of it went deep through the water and into the earth, oh the intensity of meanings, of meaning itself! You can’t even think of it. Meaning! Standing out in the wind—what does the wind mean?—her nipples hardened beneath the cotton of her shirt and he whispered in her ear, what he was going to do, he was going to just barely touch her, and she nodded and his flat-handed palm grazed the tip of one and the other and back again while her eyes closed and he understood that he had to put his other arm around her waist and hold her. This was only a few seconds, but it stood out, as everything else had, like a bas-relief in time. The present was eternal, sure, the problem was learning how to experience it that way, so it was after an eternity holding each other and leaning on the rail in the starry wind, a rare night of such clarity even the New York sky was flooded with light—we gotta call Carl Sagan, he told her at one point, this is too much—the ferry docking at Staten Island, engines enormously and loudly in reverse, pulling against the momentum of the boat and the boat crashing hard into the pilings BOOM and BOOM again, throwing George and
Anna nearly onto the deck, the cracking creaking yielding of the wood along the retaining wall, the noise like a giant outpouring of coherent and distinct noises, the pilings each cracking and moaning, wood stretch, wood groans, a harem of them as boat slid into slip, a machine-made modern symphony of steel on wood—the mind lost itself distinguishing all the sounds; all the anguished faces.
Wet black bough, he said to her.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, she said.
How about wet black bow of the ship, he said.
Was prow, now bow, she said.
Very good, he said. That’s very good.
I knew you’d like that, boat boy.
Eventually the boat relaunched, they came back across the harbor, and the wind grew steadier and more forceful; he thought he was flying home on it, home, he realized with explosive clarity, being the here and now. They were both so cold they thought they would freeze in place. They staggered inside to the electric dry heat of the long gray metal basilica where the commuters sat on the interminable boat pews every morning.
Home is the here and now, he said to her. That’s where home is.
On the ferry? she said.
On the anything, he said. He wrapped his arms around himself. Now. Here. Wherever.
Oh, she said. She pried open his arms and stepped inside them to his chest, and his arms closed around her again as if designed for the task.
I wish that were true, she said. But home is a little more… ontological than that. As it exists in our psyches anyway. It’s an ongoing category of moral life. Far-reaching.
She was mumbling into his chest by this point.
It’s like original fucking sin.
God, your life is hard, he said.
She laughed.
They got back uptown a little after one a.m., having first gotten off the subway and wandered around an empty Lincoln Center, the reflecting pools behind the opera house black with lights sparkling on the surface, tempting to wade into it but they didn’t, galvanized and even a little frightened by (or he was a little frightened by) the massive abstract sculptures standing ominously mid-pool on stone platforms. Bronzes, dark as the water. He took out a joint from his jacket pocket, lit it, held his puff, stared at the statues.
Crazy Sorrow Page 4