I was twenty years old again. With twenty-year-old Julia.
“Well?” she said.
Sure. I’m into weird shit.
She told me to bring cash. She knew how to score some weird shit but she personally had no money. I asked what kind of weird shit.
“Dream come true,” she said.
I didn’t understand that. I didn’t trust her. I didn’t even like her. She was crass, she snorted when she laughed, she was too pleased with herself. I was on the verge of aborting the whole thing but every time I got close to doing it, she’d throw out a glance or say a phrase that was one thousand percent solid-gold Julia and pull me back in. I didn’t want to go through with it and yet everything felt heightened, more intensely real, when I was with this girl who admittedly kind of repulsed me.
Anyway, I didn’t want to return to my empty room either and watch TV and wait to die.
Until the end of that night.
* * *
—
Where do you take your age-inappropriate date? My preference was someplace discreet, but Xuuzi (Jesus Christ, I can barely type that absurd combination of letters without losing some self-respect) wanted to go dancing at the local club.
I didn’t remember there being a dance club in town.
When I picked her up from her dorm she entered full obnoxious mode. (“Nice car, Daddy. I feel like you’re driving me to soccer practice.”) She hadn’t showered. Was wearing the same ragged T-shirt and black leggings she’d been wearing when I met her. Xuuzi, it turned out, just did not give a shit. She had a duffel bag too, which she threw into the backseat with blas’ entitlement.
“What’s in the bag?” I said.
“Wouldn’t you like to know,” she said, and lit a fucking cigarette in my car! It was a rental, I’d have to pay an extra charge because of the smoke smell—but asking Xuuzi to stop smoking in my car would be an old-man move.
She knew what she was doing. Obnoxious on purpose. Daring me.
I didn’t like where this night was going.
* * *
—
It was three years ago. But I remember everything.
Like it’s happening right now.
It’s happening.
* * *
—
I‘m driving. Xuuzi is giving me directions but it’s disorienting. New roads and roundabouts since I last lived here. Some buildings demolished and replaced. What used to be wooded areas have now been developed.
The dance club is in sight now. We’re pulling into the parking lot. Already I’m dreading it. Nothing against dance clubs, I just don’t fit in at this one. I’m too old. Not dressed for it. Call it off. I glance over to Xuuzi to tell her that I’ve changed my mind, that I’ll just drop her off here. That our date is over.
Damn it.
The streetlights play over her face. At that moment she’s pure Julia, staring straight ahead with her confident look, the look that means this night will surely give her everything she wants.
I used to live for that look.
She turns to me. Smiles.
“Just a little while, it’ll be fun,” she says.
It’s Julia’s voice. But it’s Xuuzi who opens the door, who swings out of the car, who starts walking. I have to trot to catch up with her. Julia is gone.
Good Lord, what am I doing?
I recognize the club once we’re inside. It’s in a building that used to be a laser tag. I had even played here on a field trip during physics camp. The chunky multilevel mazelike layout, parapets, and little windows and turrets make no sense for dancing but it had been a great place to run and shoot and hide, with hidden coves and blind alleys where you could set yourself up as a sniper. Now those coves and alleys are occupied by college kids sticking tongues down each other’s throats. Maybe only a few years ago many of these same teenagers did play laser tag here, too, but then they got older and the building converted itself into a dance club, as if the building sensed what the children wanted and adapted itself accordingly. I jostle among the young bodies, absurdly.
I don’t belong here.
She brought you here to humiliate you.
I buy us drinks. Xuuzi sits me down, tells me she’ll be back, then goes off dancing alone. She recognizes people here, she wants to dance with them. Maybe she thinks I don’t want to dance. But I do want to dance; I want to dance with her, or not her; I want to dance with young Julia. But not here. Nobody in this place is over twenty-five. I don’t know how this music works. I would be absurd.
Xuuzi comes swinging back to the table. I grab her arm, I speak in her ear. “Xuuzi.”
“Yeah?”
“What are you expecting me to do?”
“I’m expecting you to sit there and buy me drinks.”
Here’s the ridiculous thing: I do it! I sit at the table, I buy drinks, I watch Xuuzi dance. This is her scene. I can’t even project Julia onto her anymore. She dances in the crowd in that impersonal way of club dancing, everyone a soloist, ignoring each other, almost pretending the other dancers aren’t there. But I remember how it feels, how your body might be moving with abandon but your brain is plugged into a second-by-second calculation of the attraction between you and everyone dancing around you. The fun of showing off, of enjoying the way others show off, gauging how others like you are showing off, adjusting on the fly, getting close, moving away. No way I could enter into this scene right now. What was I even thinking, coming here with her?
The next time Xuuzi comes back, sweaty and happy, I say, “I’m going.”
“No, stay. We’re waiting for someone.”
“Why haven’t you introduced me to your friends?”
“My friends?”
“What?”
“Do you want to be introduced to someone?”
“Not really.”
“Then buy me another drink.”
Xuuzi dances in her cloud of what I guess are her boyfriends and girlfriends, all viciously young, all dressed in clothes that look disposable, as though at the end of the night they’ll rip them off their bodies and throw them away like used tissue. Fashion that was deliberately ugly, that said I am so young I can even wear garbage and look good. Hurts me. Until that night I still felt like, somewhere deep down, I was still young. Wrong. You will never dance like this again. So down a drink, order another. This situation isn’t a date. Another drink. They are mocking you. I have to get out of here. Have some self-respect. After another drink, though? Xuuzi and the other dancers blur; it could be my buzz but the other dancers are staring at me, as if this entire night had been arranged in my honor…
That was it! In my honor! Xuuzi had brought me here as a joke, to make a fool of me, to see how many drinks she could sponge out of me before I…I get up to go. Little unsteady. How had I gotten clowned like this? Lost track of Xuuzi in the crowd. That’s fine, I don’t need to say good-bye. Get up and go. Where is Xuuzi anyway?
Is she even here?
I visit the bathroom before leaving. Water on face, clear my head. Back in the club, on the way out, I spot Xuuzi in one of those excitingly blocky little nooks, whispering with a ragged man in a black hood. She accepts a wrapped pouch from him. I’m getting weird looks all throughout the club. Something bad is going to happen. I have to escape this familiar-but-unfamiliar place. Get back to my safe, empty hotel room.
I turn.
Xuuzi is there.
She has the pouch. She looks impatient, like she wants to go, too. Like she needs to leave right now.
I say, “I’m leaving.”
“Good, let’s go.”
“Together?”
“Duh.”
“What’s that you have?”
“Weird shit. Let’s go.”
“Where are we going?”
“You know where we’re going.”
&nbs
p; During the car ride to the hotel Xuuzi doesn’t talk. Just stares straight ahead. The warm night slips through the open windows, blowing her hair around, but her eyes are blank. The happy abandon she had dancing at the club is gone. I don’t turn the radio on. I don’t say anything. The dark night rushes through the windows. She isn’t Julia. She never was. I am driving a child around. I’m a monster. What the fuck am I doing? I don’t want her in my hotel room. I want her gone.
But when I tell Xuuzi I’ll drop her back off at her dorm, she says, “Oh, so you’re chickening out?”—this rubs me the wrong way. Obviously going back to my hotel with Xuuzi had been the unspoken premise of the evening. But after that off-putting experience at the dance club, if Xuuzi wants to go home, I’m fine with that. Still, now she seems determined to come up to my room. I think: if that’s what you really want, I know how to do my part.
We pull up to the hotel. In the parking lot Xuuzi’s manner changes. Once out of the car she gets flirty and puts her arm around my waist, surprising me. Passing the front desk, she waves at the receptionist in a goofball way as if to say to her, You and I are women of the world, we both know what happens next! But when we get into my room, she giggles and bounces on the bed like she’s never been in a hotel before.
I go to the bathroom. When I come out I find her rummaging through my suitcase.
She takes out Lamby-Lamb. “What’s this?”
“That’s my son’s.”
“Awww. What’s its name?”
“Lamby-Lamb. What are you doing in my suitcase?”
“I knew you were a piece of shit,” Xuuzi says, crawling across the bed to me. “Getting some tail on the road. Where’s your wedding ring, Daddy?”
“I’m in the middle of a divorce.”
“You’re a piece of shit,” she says, and hops up and kisses me. I’m surprised at how young her mouth is, how terrible Xuuzi is at kissing. Maybe were we all bad kissers in our twenties and just didn’t know it? “I’m the other woman,” she says faux-throatily in my ear, tickled by a grown-up idea, “I’m the other woman.”
“You’re another woman.”
“Suave. How many others, Daddy?”
“Stop calling me that. It’s gross.”
“Nope. Can I have Lamby-Lamb?”
“No.”
“Fine,” she says indifferently, and throws Lamby-Lamb aside. She takes out her phone and she pairs it with a speaker she’s brought in her duffel bag. I hadn’t even noticed she’d brought that duffel bag from the car. She makes it start to play music. Organ chords are swelling out of the speaker—Christ, is this really the song I think it is?—and Xuuzi shimmies up to me in a way I guess is her amateur idea of come-hither, and she looks me in the eye and intones along with the phone, “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life.”
Who the fuck is this girl?
And why did she put on this particular song, an eighties song, a song that was on the radio before she was born? Is she really going to karaoke it at me? Maybe playing it was her considerate choice for an aging gentleman like me—an oldie? Some classic rock? Xuuzi keeps singing along, asking how much of my time is left, wraps her arms around my neck, looking in my eyes in an imitation of great seriousness, she’s turned off the lights so now it’s only streetlights from outside illuminating my dim hotel room, she sings “Things are much harder than in the afterworld”—and then the music really kicks in, and she starts to dance.
This life. You’re on your own.
I don’t want to dance. There’s not enough space to dance in this room. My feet are awkward. But she forces me into it. At first I’m too self-conscious. Irrelevantly my brain chatters at me about how the lyrics about not letting the elevator bring you down are creepy now since, after all, they did find Prince dead in the elevator in his house outside Minneapolis, and if I was in a Renardish state of mind I would say such a circumstance was exactly the vast invisible evil thing’s style, to make the artist unknowingly sing the details of his own death countless times before the vast invisible thing makes it come horribly true—but I don’t say that because soon all that is flushed out of my head and I am dancing, Xuuzi and I are dancing, dislodging ourselves from the vast invisible thing, getting free, and it’s not long before we’re dancing like stupid teenagers, dancing that feels like our own private thing. We’re not dancing solipsistically like she was at the club, no, this is dancing focused on each other, bodies-close-but-not-quite-touching dancing, like we’re high schoolers who slipped out of prom early to have our own awkward party in the illicitly booked hotel room. And we dance straight into the next song on the album, “I don’t care where we go, I don’t care what we do,” we’re very close, dancing, dancing, swerving toward each other, swerving away, and I come toward Xuuzi, take me with you, and she pushes me away with just one finger, the kind of push away that pulls you back, then we are touching, hands on each other, and she is laughing, and the whole universe is in this room, getting close to that breakthrough feeling you have when you’re dancing so much, for so long, that you aren’t real, you’re just a door for larger beings that are trying to come into the world, you’re a mask and the mask is crumbling the more you dance, you’re aching for the mask to crumble completely, to let the beautiful larger beings work themselves out through you.
She puts her lips close on my ear and whispers:
“I will show you the eschaton.”
I’m startled—“What?”
Xuuzi slips away from me. Sashays over to the dresser.
Did she say eschaton?
“What did you just say?”
The music keeps playing.
“Weird shit.” Xuuzi produces the pouch I saw her get at the club.
“Did you say—”
“Go sit on the bed,” she orders.
We’re both sweaty. Maybe I had misheard eschaton. Maybe she’d said something else. I’m feeling crazy. The album starts again. Let’s go crazy. All that dancing had felt like it was leading up to sex but that’s not happening. Or not yet. Xuuzi sits cross-legged across from me on the bed. She unwraps the pouch, unpacking a dozen weird little jars and tools and paraphernalia.
“Did you say eschaton?”
“Just let me take you to the kingdom.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I know, neither do I, I just want to try—”
“Wait, haven’t you done this before?”
“No, but they told me—I mean, I heard it was weird?”
I feel like I’m slipping away. Xuuzi looks up at me with a kind of wholesome daring. I must’ve misheard it, my brain must have autofilled the word eschaton—but whatever, just enjoy this weird night because I actually do like her, and not as a pseudo-Julia, I like Xuuzi herself, I like this weird person who doesn’t know how to act, who dresses badly and kisses badly and dances badly, who is even up for trying a mystery drug with a man she barely knows, how often do you meet someone as openheartedly reckless as that?
Xuuzi has spread the collection of jars and instruments between us. She is opening the brass jars. She is scooping the stuff onto little silver dishes with a tiny ornate spoon. She lights a match under a little brass box. Black incense begins to leak out. Will this set off the smoke alarm? Fuck it.
I say, “Do you have any more cigarettes?”
“Yes.”
“Why don’t you smoke one right now?”
She takes out her pack, shakes out a cigarette. I reach over and extract it from the box myself. I place the cigarette between her lips. I take the lighter from her. Our hands touch. I light her cigarette. She laughs, gets back to work on the drug, the weird shit, whatever it is. The weird shit looks like scaly black meat, the scrambled guts of an insect. Xuuzi is grinding it into a paste, she is rolling it into balls, she seems to be pretty adept at preparing this drug for someone who claims neve
r to have done it before, but I like watching her, the way she busily grinds and shapes the paste, cigarette hanging out of her mouth, kind of badass. She looks up at me with smiling eyes. There’s something heroic and innocent about her, deep eyes, actually beautiful eyes, how did I ever think Xuuzi’s eyes were flat and obvious?
Secret eyes too. She has a secret.
“Now wait. I have a surprise for you.”
Xuuzi gets up. She picks up her duffel bag on the way into the bathroom. What else is in that bag? The music streaming from her phone sharpens, deepens. The black meat paste bubbles as it cooks in its little cups, the brass box wafts bitter smoke, and this is why you pick up strangers, this is why you endure rejection, and being called a creep, not because you just want sex, not necessarily, but for the chance to dip into a stranger’s life, to get outside yourself, to step into someone else’s reality, to feel this electricity, it doesn’t always end well but I’m glad I did it tonight, that I didn’t ditch her, that I’m not alone, because being alone in this room might kill me, and then Xuuzi comes back from the bathroom.
Not Xuuzi.
Julia.
Julia comes out of the bathroom.
* * *
—
I stand up.
Unsteady.
Julia. Not Julia. Xuuzi. But Xuuzi is somehow wearing Julia’s pink satin prom dress. It’s the same dress Julia wore the night she broke her shoe heel and fell in the snow. Where did Xuuzi get that exact dress? Her hairstyle is exactly Julia’s too, back then, years ago. Impossible. What is Xuuzi doing—is she messing with me?
But how would Xuuzi know how to mess with me like this?
“Julia,” I say.
She says in a strange voice, “I am wearing Julia.”
Everything is sharp and clear. Julia or Xuuzi sits me down on the bed. She uses a little spoon to pick up a rolled-up ball of black meat.
Dare to Know Page 16