Prodigals

by Greg Jackson

  “And this is MDMA?” I said.

  “Um-hmm.”

  “’Cause I don’t know it from rat poison.”

  Little D looked disappointed in me. “I wouldn’t play you like that.”

  “Okay, sure. But someone who would play me like that would say the same thing, right?”

  “Nah…” He kind of swatted the paradox away.

  And with the streetlights hissing their miasmatic fire and a deeper quality of night shaking out through the city, I knew my imp of the perverse had made its decision in accordance with the folk wisdom that says maybe it’s better not to be, but to let yourself dissolve into the social body, the superorganism, enfolding ecology, the apprehensive moment itself.

  I regret, D, that in your line of work you have to deal with idiots like me.

  We watched him move off into the night, my fist clenched around the baggie he’d left there when we slapped hands, and at the last moment I called after him, “Hey, what’s the D stand for?”

  He turned. “What?”

  “The D!”

  “Ha ha.” He grinned. “You figure it out!”

  The substance in the bag, upon inspection, resembled a large misshapen pebble. We rolled ourselves smokes sitting on the patio furniture of some café and passed the compound back and forth, taking turns sniffing and licking it in those most primitive forms of chemical analysis. It had no smell I could discern and either no taste or was not soluble in saliva, which may come to the same thing. I found something minatory in its inertness.

  We walked back to Gaby’s car licking our little drug rock. Her car disappointingly did not seem to be where we’d left it. It was also true that neither of us knew where that was, precisely, and that technically it was her mother’s car. But the most disheartening thing was that the downtown looked to have been swept of cars, and people too for that matter. A traffic light ran through its sequence without advising a single driver. The chill wind funneled down the street between the palisades of buildings. And I wondered why I was wearing a T-shirt before remembering that it was summer, almost two a.m. We wandered around for a while, contemplating what one did without a car and just a crack rock that was probably meth. It finally dawned on us to call the police. They were terribly helpful when we got through and didn’t even seem concerned that the last thing we should be helped to locate just then was a car, and soon enough we were in a taxi crossing a bridge into the blighted outskirts of the city, a lifeless district saved from total darkness only by the sodic security lights of warehouses and irradiated signs of fast-food restaurants. Our cabbie, whose first name I had found reason to use no less than fifteen times on our short trip, did not seem as remorseful as I would have hoped about depositing us before a feral wraith of a man leaning against a colossal towing rig.

  “Toyota, yep,” the man said.

  “Toyota’s a pretty common car,” Gaby said. “How do we know you have ours?”

  “I got Toyotas.”

  Gaby and I glanced at each other.

  “That’s really not the most reassuring answer.”

  Now that he had stepped from the rig’s shadow I could see the man’s face. It might have been handsome if not for an elaborate pigmentary marking that gave it a marled look, streaks of dark nevi fanning out like comet tails below the stringy hair that fell across it. There was something vaguely regal in his bearing, I thought, a hunched, big-boned quality, like the awkward limbedness of a mantis.

  “Can we just take a look,” Gaby asked, “make sure it’s the right car?”

  “Can’t open the gate until you pay me.”

  “I don’t think that’s true,” I said. “I think you won’t open the gate until we pay you. You can do whatever the hell you want.”

  “If you like it better than way,” he said.

  It came to $120, and Gaby and I had maybe $80 between us. I was regretting a bit the business deal I’d entered into with Little D, and, in a more general sense, the subjective experience of being alive. I had the urge to say to the man something like, How did we get here, how did this chain-link fence with its small padlock come between us, strangers, men, women, with nothing against one another, acting out the offices of far-flung and abstracted necessities, gutter kings, cursed and shambling exiles muttering an obfuscatory patois, recreants with no faith left in the conduit metaphor of language, abandoned to our preterition of cash transfers, synthetic highs, and a reflexive sabotage that may be at heart no more than contempt for the self-importance and medicalized vanity of other people, the more comfortably unelect, and yet content, it seems, to waste our lives in a pointless standoff at this insignificant gate? I was a bit skeptical of my ability to make myself understood, however, and so I did the one thing I could think to do, which was to take the crack/meth rock/crystal from my pocket and say, “You got somewhere you need to be?”

  “You’re looking at it,” he said. He took the parcel from my hand and unscrewed a lightbulb from a string wreathing the lot, deftly picking out contact, stem, and filament with needle-nose pliers.

  “What’s your name?” Gaby said as he cleaned the bulb’s cavity with a bit of towel and deposited some crushed drug inside it. He held the flame below the glass.

  “Wendill,” he said.

  The smoke drifted up from the bulb as thick as milk.

  The silence of the lot struck me at that moment, the moment of inhalation, the faint wind like a memory of elsewheres, the threnody of distance, and as the vapor replaced the chill in me with a lithe magma of hot blood, as the euphoria took hold, Wendill said, and I can only relate, not explain, what follows, “Now I will tell you the story of the human soul.”

  The Story of the Human Soul, Per Wendill

  As you may imagine, I was not always as you see me now. I have lived, oh, many lives, gone by many names, worked all kinda jobs. Not that it’s such a long way from claims adjuster to tugboat captain if you—ahem—catch my drift. You are not “before the law.” The gate is locked, I assure you. Or maybe not. I forgot to check, I think. My memory … well. But what I mean is, see me as a friend, doomed for a certain term to walk the night, alas, but a father figure. I find you apt. Not like those egregious weeds on the riverbank. I spray and spray … But no, they will not shut up like a telescope. And I won’t either. Ha ha!

  Do you remember, in the Jungian sense, I mean, the sense of anamnesis, that day long ago when a slate sky dripped silver tears in the sky-painted lakes above the veldt, when you came upon the briar-caged creature and a man and a woman were one—androgynes, atmen, call them what you will—and a man and a woman and a blackbird were one? When the creature died on the hard point of a rock? How later you baited the briars with fruit, and when the man died and the woman died it was not different from when the creature died. Lush flowers fattened on their graves. And the men picked flowers for the women to remind them how life grows on the cusps of death, playing the B side of Houses of the Holy while everyone got laid?

  And when the first jockey climbs aboard a creature struggling in the mud, and indestructible space foreshortens, might we not say the rider is the mind of the animal, the way a priest is the mind of the ritual, the way God is the mind of order and accident? The hippie boys and girls of North Beach, entheogenic rapscallions and the best minds of their generation, apparently, take soma to become the mind of the sacrifice. And order and accident have their uneasy marriage, of course, which like all marriages it would be pointless to try to understand from the outside.

  That food in the briars begets more food is the initial form the offering takes. The offering is order’s humility before accident. A violation brought to consciousness. A horse let wander for a year shadowed everywhere by a hundred young men who could really use some direction in their lives. Do you know what kids in Minoan Crete have to do? their moralizing parents ask. Dance with bulls—can you imagine? You have to follow this fucking horse around, but at least you aren’t getting gored by bulls all the time.

  And when the year i
s up, in some extreme unction, they coat the horse in butter, tie it to a post, and kill it. But you’ve grown fond of the horse over the year, haven’t you? So: agenbite of inwit. Was the horse really down? You wonder, you perseverate. But perhaps, they say, perhaps it offered itself up like Odin, who hanged himself from a tree in sacrifice to himself. Well, perhaps. The queen must spend a night with the dead horse, anyway, sleep with it. The spirit of the horse whinnies in the wind.

  Are you with me? Have you drifted off, begun gnashing your teeth and looking for something to obsessively clean for the next few hours, because this is where the turn comes, the morning sun stretches its rosy fingers into the lit sky, crests mountain and hill, rolls the golden carpet of day over sparkling sea and fruited plain, over man and woman stilled of need, free of menace, stumbling into the light a little hungover, shading their eyes, like: Not bad. Supposing that thing worked. What, the offering? Yeah. Worked? (Shrugging) I dunno.

  And so in fallow years, on battlefields against long odds, on beaches dark with homesick siege forces, in the halls of anxious kings and paranoid queens, inheritance-minded princes, before the hearths of childless mothers, hapless fathers, and on the rafts of enterprising castaways, the fire set to consume the creature’s flesh is a chemical transaction, no more, a currency, an act not of subservience but of control, a way not to honor the gods but to enjoin them. A moment of fraud, for when we purchase something, let us be clear, we do not call this act a sacrifice.

  Where is the creature on its Wanderjahr, a hundred shiftless youths behind it? We cannot say. We have lost the creature. The horse now claims the land on which he trespasses for the king, as a wooden horse enters a walled city to claim it for those outside the gates. Do not, as I say, see me as a gatekeeper. See me as the blind man with a riddle at the crossroads. Dispenser of an ambiguous viaticum. We can await the barbarians long enough to become them, because it is always a question of whose bidding we do. And do not say, simply, our own. For is it then the bidding of our hunger, our fear, our lust? Are we not ever in danger of becoming slaves to what we merely can do, conscious procurers for our unconscious natures? Is it not always easier to gratify an appetite than to understand one?

  The alternative? I confess I sometimes wonder whether it is not romanticism, or only hope, that leads us to imagine a time when spiritual life was more than ornamental garnish on material, a cult of consciousness, cult from the Latin colere of course (colo, colere, colui, cultus), to cultivate, to till, life spent in radical contemplation of the tidal nuance of a thinking-feeling involvement with all around us, the character, qualities, and rhythms picked out in reflection, so, like a shoreline seen from above, relinquishing shape and pattern on approach, the play of moods and shadings in a bright meadow, say, might evolve ever more complexly in the scrutiny of leaves and blades of grass shaking in the wind, the specific motion of each trembling, the tones in the arrangement of the day as things seek their fleeting equilibria, as branches rustle and petals fall, as the air makes its way through itself immured in the maze of its fluid pressures, bearing the grains of an endless pollination, as the vibrancies set off by stridulating wing or leg contour the static breeze, below the veined crags of mountain, monuments to the gravities that bind our ardor, skirted in tree and shrub running to the silt-swept banks, the plains where snowmelt carves silver fingers into humus and loam, where banyans and mangroves reach out like old hands rung in arthritic knots, berries gather the hidden colors of soil, where deer eat them, where the wolves eat deer, where the humans gather to eat, kill, fuck, and love, to stop and listen, pause within the violence and joy and take some measure of the unaccountable processes of which we are a part, and you might say, How I long to be a gypsy running free in the riot of my heart!, through tall grasses to the song of canebrakes, wild in the pleated dirges of a light knit from hay, sewn from straw verdure, the flaxen clothing of the evening, and those plucked frequencies of the day that sum to rapture. I could a tale unfold whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul, but—well, don’t blame your mother.

  We were quiet a minute. Then Gaby said, “You said something about our souls?”

  Wendill laughed. “What do you think is that ludicrous dirigible in your hand?”

  And when he said it our eyes went to our hands, which indeed were holding a length of poly curling ribbon, and from there up the line to the pair of Mylar balloons floating four or five feet overhead, balloons hungry, you could tell, for the very heights where they would pop, and on which, indeed looking rather ridiculous, were printed our own smiling faces.

  * * *

  Pop. Pop. Confetti. A blink. The swollen nighttime luster drifts. Lights return easy to their pinpoints and peel sleepily from the glass. The car recovered, the crack rock smoked, the meth—whatever. Gaby is at the wheel and I can feel her trying with all she has to keep us in the lane. The dashed lines converge at a point beyond the horizon and blink our way home. The road had become, I saw, the line of our lives. The yarn-path not out of the labyrinth maybe, but onward. If we could just follow it, it would keep us in our lives. But it was narrow, very narrow. One deviation and who knew? The highway curves, the macadam thread spinning off its distaff before us, yes, the chord in any circle being less than the arc which it subtends, but sometimes you’re stuck on the arc, aren’t you, and Atropos is posed there with her shears. If I could have I might have said, Parents, guardians of the metanarrative, we are the minotaur. Half child, half beast. Bury us in the heart of your maze. Hide the primal insanity of your culture from view. You will know us soon enough. We are the displacements of your wounds. Bundled lies sold off in tranches. Captured carbon shut up below the streets of Knossos. We are howl, destroying all you have given us to claim it fully—and still Gaby clenches, and I clench too, praying to keep on straight through the midnight highway, to find our way home, knowing all the same that if we make it back, we will be too joy-drunk on our improbable escape to remember to change black sails to white, too misted still in the amnesiac dawn of what Little Dionysius sold us to recall that when we got to the central chamber of the labyrinth it was empty, an echoing cavity, those Indian caves. We were the monster or there was none.

  There is not much to say about drugs, hard drugs, drugs in combination, except that at some point you cease to exist. This is what you wanted, to sleep, to dream. To see the moment of your greatness flicker—out. That’s it. Take someone else’s word for it. It is unexciting and unnecessary. And that’s the last thing I have to say about drugs. The day will come when we get to rest forever, no need to hasten it.

  In the meantime the responsibilities weighing on us all—starting with the responsibility to take one breath after the next—are exhausting. They are also life. The day Gaby leaves we watch cats hunt mice in the overgrown grass behind the house. The crows watch from the field, sheening and idle lords who might be killing a few minutes between meetings. Lethargy in the heat interleaves with desire, tedium with panic. We laugh to keep the sadness at bay. I can feel it at the edges of my mind, waiting for its moment, the knowledge that I will soon be alone, that we are ever being left to ourselves, so that beyond simple aloneness a deeper architecture of loneliness exists, one obscured in the structures of identity and routine we build on top of it but laid bare in those structures’ demolition, a feeling I hadn’t sifted down through the rubble to meet since childhood, a full despair, as when, sent away and on your own for the first time, you see at last the sheer scope of the indifference hidden from you, the world’s indifference, and how nowhere in the background of life hovers the metaphysical ghost of sentient care. It had been years since I’d considered that no one was taking care of me. The notion had no place in adulthood. I’d sloughed it off. But this is what I returned to in the days following Gabrielle’s departure, as I stood in the middle of the field smoking, looking into the trees emptied of mystery, the red berries gone discreetly into shadow, the road beyond where the cars passed at the brisk, uninteresting speed they do, without the sluggi
sh drama of film, the languor of prose. There was no one taking care of me. There wouldn’t be any time soon. And I could fight the metanarrative all I wanted, slip its grasp for an evening, punish it for its tyranny by slowly destroying myself, but in the field that afternoon, among the stalking cats and crows, the rough dry grass and clover, under a sun too richly and heavily summered, dressing my exposed body in its violent cinnamon, it was me and the metanarrative alone. That even ticking beat.

  You do not get to stop.

  You do not really get to stop.

  When I went back inside I put on The Köln Concert, got a straw broom out of the closet, and swept the house. I sweated. The sweat came in torrents. As Keith built in intensity, departing and returning to his theme, an elaborately toxic water spilled from me. I brought in beer bottles and cans, glasses with crushed lime crescents, viscid residues, the tan remains of onetime ice; I wiped down tables and knocked out ashtrays; I did laundry—clothes, bedding, towels—watered plants, washed dishes, knocked grit from rugs and doormats, took out the trash. Because I am a person I did these things. This is what a person does. You make peace with the melancholy. You invite it in. You say goodbye—to friends, to lovers, to family who are dying. To stray moments of understanding and of being understood. You clean, you shop. You go for runs. Sometimes you cry. Sometimes you want to cry and can’t. You are too old, too big, the wrong gender; you have pushed away tears too long. There is a child trembling inside you but that isn’t enough. No one cares. No one has time to care. People’s lives are shot through with suffering, indignity, and privation you can’t imagine. You know this. We all do. And still to say “people” is to refuse to see the child.

  Who sees the child?

  In the days that follow, it is books and books alone that make me not want to die. At school there was a class called Poetry Will Save Your Life, which we laughed at a little for its pomposity—because so many other things come first, I suppose, because art is always being asked to apologize for its inutility and superfluity. But I think it’s true that poetry will save your life, if for no more than that I found it to be true that week, that literature was the only sort of arrival I could count on, an intimacy that wouldn’t desert me, that didn’t ask too much or fray fatally in the endless conflict of our competing needs, that permitted—or maybe simply was—the passage of experience back through us, our way of ravaging the endless ravishment of life. Heaven too is merely a dream of arrival, which we know from our inability to imagine anything ever happening in heaven.