by Mike Roberts
“To law school.”
“And the FDNY.”
“And the Tomboys,” I said simply. Lauren and Cokie smiled then, looking almost touched. We clinked our glasses together and drank.
* * *
It was a relief to find the apartment empty when we got back to Rachel’s. We were in and out and back down on the street in ten minutes. Hurrying through the sketchy beating heart of Chinatown at eleven thirty at night. We searched for our bus under the eerie sodium glow of streetlights, laughing as we clasped hands and hurried down the damp streets. We sped up instinctively as we passed the silent men standing in the doorways smoking cigarettes. Past the mysterious storefronts, with their graffitied metal shutters pulled down to shoulder height.
We stowed our bags under the bus and found our seats in the back, with the engine warming up. The cool smell of diesel clung to the static air. I pulled an ugly-looking can of beer out of the brown paper bag that I’d been carrying for the last half hour. It had a picture of the Chinese zodiac and an unreadable name. The stone-faced old man who sold it to me actually smiled as he pushed it across the counter, which was strangely thrilling.
“Wait,” Lauren said, as I scratched my nail under the tab. “I have some pills.”
“What pills?”
“I found them in Rachel’s medicine cabinet.” She smiled wickedly. “I stole them.”
“You stole them?” I laughed. “What are they?”
“I dunno. I think it’s probably MDMA.”
“MDMA? Like ecstasy?”
Lauren nodded, pulling them out of her pocket to show me. “I just figure maybe we shouldn’t drink anymore if we’re going to take them.”
“I’ve never done it,” I said, feeling strangely prudish.
“Oh, good. I can be your first, then.”
I nodded, and we both began to laugh. Growing giddy with the promise of strange drugs. The doors were closing, and I felt the pneumatics under the bus lift. I watched as the television screens flashed on above our heads.
Lauren tapped a small green pill into my open hand. “It’s funny that Rachel has these,” I said. It was too perfect, really. This image of Lauren’s prim older sister squirreling away club drugs in her bathroom tickled me.
“I bet you they’re Tad’s,” Lauren said. “Patrick Serf told me that Wall Street dudes eat MDMA on the weekends like it’s candy.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah. Which hopefully means that it’s good.”
“I’m not sure I’ll know the difference,” I said, as I pinched the pill between my fingers, studying it. “You’re sure that this is safe, right?”
“As safe as this bus.” Lauren handed me her water bottle, and I put the pill onto my tongue. Smiling as I swallowed it.
We held each other’s hands as the Dragon Bus crossed through Lower Manhattan, and the city lights, into the semidarkness of the Holland Tunnel. Lauren laid her head against mine as we watched the twelve-inch screen hanging down from the ceiling. It took me a second to realize what was happening.
“Oh, no,” I said. “It’s the same movie.” They were replaying The Matrix 2, this terrible, off-brand copy of the mediocre original.
“No,” Lauren said, pointing at the screen. “This is the next one.”
“What do you mean? There’s a sequel to the sequel?”
“Yeah. This is The Matrix 3!”
We couldn’t stop laughing over this. It was like a joke being told for our benefit alone. As though the whole reason to keep making these hundred-million-dollar movies was to entertain us on these bus rides. It felt like flares shooting across the screen. It was impossible to watch, almost. Nonnarrative. Nonsensical. And distracting as hell. It had something to do with kung fu and space insects and the FBI, I thought.
“These are the post-9/11 movies we deserve,” I said, shaking my head.
“I don’t even know what that means,” Lauren said with a laugh.
“Just tell me what’s going on.”
“I don’t know. I can’t follow it.”
“Follow what, though? It looks like a screensaver.”
“What are you looking at?”
“I’m not even sure. It’s like one of those magic eye tricks. I’m mostly trying to concentrate on Neo’s face. But it like doesn’t move when he talks.”
“Yeah. I’ve noticed that, too,” Lauren said. “It’s awesome.”
We stared up at the screen with our eyes doing pinwheels as the drugs coursed through us. The tunnel swallowed up the skyline, leaving us with a ceiling above a ceiling, and a movie that couldn’t be stopped. The light got brighter, and the colors bled apart. Our fingers intertwined in the dark as the serotonin dripped. A chemical approximation of love was commingling with the real thing now. The walls and the ceiling of the bus seemed to open up as we were shot out the other side of the Holland Tunnel and into the night.
“Why are they together?” Lauren asked as she stared into the screen.
“Who?”
“Trinity and Neo,” she said.
“Because he’s The One,” I answered simply.
Lauren smiled at me with a liquid feeling of empathy. There was contentment with the world and with each other. Love was a feeling floating just outside our bodies. Lauren’s face began to glow as I kissed her in the dark. We smiled into each other’s mouths and laughed into each other’s eyes as the whole bus disappeared. The gravity released us, and we were suddenly weightless. Somewhere high above New Jersey.
LIFE DURING WARTIME, PART I
We went out looking for the lights and the noise and the crowds. Something, anything, we didn’t really know. It was New Year’s Eve and we had no idea where to go still. We laughed at ourselves for this, for walking down to the Eiffel Tower, but it was all we had. We knew something would happen at midnight, at least.
We were happy for the crowds: the people waiting and howling up into the night. There were a half-dozen languages floating on this rabble. But after a garbled countdown at midnight … nothing. The crowd laughed and jeered and resettled again, before, bang! The Tower was set off in a flash of twinkling LEDs. This rippling, epileptic glimmering set against the murky violet sky. We felt a thrum of human heat rising up off this gathered mass. Strangers cheered and lovers kissed as the Dame de Fer shook and danced for one long minute. And then it stopped.
The sky went dark and starless, and the show was over. People laughed and cursed as they held their ground with nowhere else to go. They called out for some inanimate body to run the Tower again: to let it play, to keep it all running now. No one was ready to go home yet, and the lack of a real planned performance here was making the people restless.
Small fireworks hissed and banged across the infield, under the Tower, as people oohhed and ahhhed halfheartedly. Young men threw bottles into the wrought-iron arches, where they popped and rained down shards of glass. Somebody put a lamp out with a rock this way, and we all cheered lustily. People shouted and scowled as they pushed back and ceded the middle ground to these violent young men, turning the infield into a kind of bullring. Different bands took up the charge, taking turns, showing off and fighting, to the delight of the crowd. Flashing lights and honking sirens followed, and we loved this, too. A phalanx of French policemen, carrying sticks and shields, pushed a path into the bullring as we jeered them. They fanned out, shoulder-to-shoulder, in a wall of black riot gear, determined to break up this loitering now.
But the young men lingered, smirking at the police, unsure what their action was supposed to be. They cursed and taunted les poulets, pelting them with rocks and bottles, which were all deflected easily. We watched as the cops began to link their arms in preparation for a bull-run on the middle ground. And with a nod of the head and a puff of air, the hooded policemen came charging forward, swinging their batons at the bare-chested drunks. Thwack! We watched some poor kid get brained with a stick and go scrambling off on hands and knees. But strangers rushed out and dragged him into the cro
wd before the police could grab hold. And our merry little riot carried on.
The gendarmes pushed and shouted but convinced no one here to leave. There were angry screams and cackled French reproofs, and I was glad to be buried deep inside the crowd with Lauren. Staring out at the restless young men, looking so surreal and romantic in their smokescreens. We passed a bottle of syrupy champagne, and it made the lights and the violence feel buzzy and bright. I clung to Lauren inside this crowd, and I did not want what the bands of young men wanted tonight.
* * *
We had been in Paris five days: not sleeping, not eating much. We bought cheap alcohol and expensive desserts. We could have stayed for free at my cousin’s apartment in the Latin Quarter. She was back in Buffalo on a school break, and the French woman she lived with said it would be fine. But Lauren didn’t want to stay with the older woman, and I didn’t want to fight about it. So we went to a hostel instead, where we slept in narrow bunk beds with noisy backpackers. But Lauren didn’t like these kids, either. She didn’t want to share their wine, or play their card games, or tell them any secrets of any kind.
So we struck out on our own, insulating ourselves this way. We rode the Métro to its edges and made long treks back through the arrondissements. We crisscrossed the Seine and climbed the old stone staircases. We set out looking for churches and gravestones and museums, just because. The drizzling rain was a constant, and we sloshed around through tremendous puddles in the old city. We drank hot coffee and ate buttery crepes with chocolate in them. This was when Lauren seemed most happy to be in Paris: just walking around the streets, just the two of us.
We would joke about finding jobs, and learning French, and staying on here long-term. I told Lauren I would write something new. Something trashy and obvious that would sell like crazy and make us ugly little piles of money. I liked to get her daydreaming on this fantasy of being rich with me. I told her we could leave Europe and go to Russia or China or Chile, wherever. I told her we could move to Nepal and live on the side of a mountain, if that was what she wanted.
But Lauren would laugh and tell me I was playing the game all wrong. She said it was important to live like the nouveau riche that we were and spend our money with contempt. She wanted to go to Oslo and Tokyo and Rio. She wanted to shop compulsively and get her hair done when she felt a little blue. She wanted to put on costumes and go to operas and polo matches where she could talk shit like a real lady of standing. She said we needed to hire gurus and yogis and tennis pros, and fire them unconditionally. Lauren wanted to live in posh hotels, and pay for expensive cars, and eat small, endangered animals at fancy restaurants.
She was kidding, of course, but I still found it a little startling how much thought she’d already put into this. Sure, I would say: spend it all; whatever you want.
But Lauren still wasn’t happy, and I didn’t know what to do about it. She’d grown tired of my pap, romantic daydreams, and had begun cursing Paris instead. She was sullen and sour and suddenly worrying about money for real. We had tickets to leave in four days, but Lauren was ready now. She argued that paying to change our flight would cost us less than spending four more days in this city.
It was true that there was a kind of forced anti-American strain running through Europe then. Ostensibly it had to do with making a monkey of our president, who had just won reelection. But why wouldn’t he win reelection? It was boom times back in the States. The wars were over. George Bush, Jr., had caught Bin Laden and found the WMDs. He’d liberated the proud democratic people of Iraq, and addressed their General Assembly in pitch-perfect Arabic, proclaiming, Ich bin ein Iraqi!
Sure, John Kerry probably shouldn’t have given him the Skull and Bones handshake on national TV, but Bush was the Decider. He was making things right between the USA and Jesus Christ again. And he was actively upholding his number one campaign promise to investigate steroid use in Major League Baseball, which sent his poll numbers through the roof. Somehow he even found the time to finish reading My Pet Goat to those schoolkids down in Florida. So what if he went back on vacation immediately after? There was brush to be cleared at the ranch. We didn’t understand what the rest of the world was so uptight about.
That was our grim running joke, at least. But Lauren lost interest in it, and she suddenly seemed to take the whole thing personally. She’d started scowling back at the French people, saying they were brutes and pointy-headed boors. I would laugh and try to pacify her, but the truth was I had no idea what was going on now. She would hit me with these silences that were deafening. Right in the middle of everything, when I was sure that we were having fun. The more insistent I became that she enjoy herself, the more short-tempered she got.
* * *
We kept to the outskirts of the Tower and watched the game of cat-and-mouse begin to escalate. The young men were laughing and frothing as we spurred them on. We had no idea what we were watching, really. It was violence without context for us. We rooted for the kids against the cops, but it hardly mattered when the cops won. We were here for the spectacle.
After a while the young men decided on something inspired. Taking a page from the police, they linked themselves together in a human chain. Rival bands made one, out on the infield. And after a crazed beat, somebody shouted go, and they took off running at the cops this way. Screaming their war cries as they crashed into the barricade. A second line followed, launching projectiles, hitting and felling several policemen. The cops took a startled step back before slamming forward and absorbing this rush. The young men were knocked down and caught in space then, as the police surged. They cracked their batons and beat back a manic retreat. Wild-eyed teenagers running backward as they hiked up their blue jeans. But others were not so lucky. Young men were being pinned down everywhere, with a knee or a club, so that their wrists and ankles could be bound up with zip ties. The spectators laughed and booed as these casualties were carried offstage. The battlefield cleared once again.
I don’t know why it took so long for the police to fire tear gas into the bullring, but it missed the young men completely. The wind took hold of it invisibly, casting it out into the crowd of onlookers. We could taste the awful tang in our eyes and noses, even out where we were standing. People turned and pushed against us, and the circle broke apart for real then. There was a feeling that the scene could change and darken very quickly in this rush. Everything could topple as we all retreated at once, and there was something sickly thrilling about that.
* * *
All day long I’d been walking around with a dirty dream in my head. I’d woken up in the hostel that morning stuck to the sheet. This had not happened to me in ten years, and it paralyzed me. Worse than that, I liked it. This was a dream rendered so real that it jerked me up out of a dead sleep, right at the moment of consummation. It was just a dream, and yet I had ejaculated all over my underwear. I marveled at the strangeness of this as I tried to imagine what a body could look like in that moment of release. It all felt perfectly right, and yet it was humiliating. What had been so warm had turned so cold against my thighs so quickly. I was alone in a narrow bed, in a dark room, in a foreign country, surrounded by strangers. This must be the world’s saddest sex scene.
I never told Lauren, either. I didn’t think that I could. It all felt squalid and cheap in the daylight, somehow. She and I had not had sex in weeks, because of travel, because of stress. I didn’t know why. I was afraid that she would ridicule me now and make me suffer this thing that I’d enjoyed. This simple palpitation of the body that had felt so mysterious and wonderful to me. This warm dream of sex that had made itself into sex. It was something verging on extraordinary, if you let yourself think about it that way.
Of the dream itself, I remembered almost nothing. I had no sense of time or place, or where my body started and the other stopped. As I watched myself in the dream, I kept closing my eyes to watch something else. And yet somewhere I retained this one perfect afterglow of Lauren. Standing up before me with a b
eautiful tumescent belly. Everything growing from our sex in a kind of hypergestation. Her breasts swollen with milk in a full silhouette of smoldering heat. I remembered the elegant way that she lifted and carried her new body, as it changed underneath her. A perfect grace of posture: healthy and strong. This was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I had never been more in love with Lauren Pinkerton, or more afraid.
I stood up out of bed, at a loss for what was real. What if Lauren really carried this child now? What would I be asked to carry? But Lauren was asleep in the bunk above me, looking tired and thin as I stood this close. I could hear the soft wheeze of her breath. I could see her quiet stomach rise and fall, and I reached out to place my hand against her belly. Hardly even touching her, as her eyes flickered and her head turned over on the pillow. I smiled at her, knowing that she wouldn’t remember this in the morning. And it all made sense as what it was then: just a wet dream.
I rifled my bag for another pair of boxers, and I changed them right there in the middle of the dark room. And then I got back into bed. Alone.
* * *
There was a small girl, about twenty, with dark eyes and dark eyebrows, who found Lauren and me in the rush to clear out from under the Eiffel Tower. She grabbed on to my forearm absently, without looking up.
“Are you all right?” I asked her.
“No. I don’t know. I lost my friends,” she said in a perfect, mannered English that was impossible to place.
“Where are you from?” I asked, staring into her big doe eyes.
“Israel,” she said, pulling her hands up near her neck, as though something might fly out of the periphery and strike her. “I don’t know where they went now. I’m sorry. Can I stand here with you? I don’t like this.”
She huddled in closer as people brushed by.
“Yes, of course,” I said. But when I looked up at Lauren she was making a face I couldn’t decipher.
“Why don’t you just go back to your hotel?” Lauren asked her, not unfriendly. “Wait for them there. Your friends will show back up.”