Lullaby for the Rain Girl

by Christopher Conlon

  The colors of the world were changing, lighting up. Suddenly everything seemed so very much more than it had been. I looked over at Rachel’s arm, which was bare. I studied her skin, the little dark hairs on her forearm, and felt myself almost sinking into them, as if I was inhabiting her forearm, her. Our eyes met. She was both yards away from me and only an inch or two.

  “How do you feel?” she asked, turning to me, her voice oddly murky, as if she were speaking from underwater.

  “Good,” I said, my voice loud within my skull. I whispered, “Weird. But good.”

  “Don’t shout.”

  “What?”

  “I said,” she whispered, “don’t shout.”

  “I wasn’t shouting.”

  “It sounded like you were.”

  A translucent screen seemed to have materialized between Rachel and me. I reached for her arm to see if I could break through the screen. It gave easily and vanished. I touched her arm, fascinated at its texture, its warmth, its feeling of being something alive.

  “Look over there.” She pointed. There was a police cruiser moving slowly along the street. The cop behind the wheel had on big black sunglasses, but I was sure I could see past them, to his black eyes beneath. I was sure he was looking at us, judging us. I was sure he was about to jump out of that cruiser, pull his gun and come charging across the street at us. At the same time I was perfectly aware that nothing of the sort would happen.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Rachel said suddenly, grabbing up her things. I stood too, shocked that the world didn’t lurch or slip away as it did when I’d drunk too much. No, the ground was firm, level. She took my hand and led me to the sidewalk. The colors everywhere were riotous now, party-colored, neon. A girl in a pink track suit went jogging by—the track suit and her jiggling breasts seemed ready to bounce out and beyond her, roll and tumble all over the street. A little boy’s red lollipop seemed to hold within it a spiraling circle of rainbows. An old man’s white hair was silver silk, silk that was alive on his head, moving and waving. The fact that it was the wind that was picking up his hair was something I understood, just as I understood, damn it, that the hair was alive.

  We walked. There was no sense of disorientation; I knew where I was. I knew exactly how to get to my workplace and to Sherry’s, how to get home. My logical mind was completely unimpeded. But my logical mind also had to accept the evidence of my senses, and my senses were feeding it wild, unprecedented data.

  Before us a young man in jeans and T-shirt stumbled and spilled part of a Coke he’d been drinking. The Coke went sailing through the air, sailing slowly, so slowly that I was tempted to stick my head out and open my mouth and partake of some good cold Coke in midair. The man stopped, cursed, shook off the Coke that had spilled onto his hand, and moved on. I stared at the small puddle of soda on the sidewalk while people moved past us. The puddle seemed to glisten wildly, to beckon.

  “I’d like to lick it off the sidewalk,” Rachel said, “wouldn’t you?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I would.” But I didn’t; as I said, my logical mind was functioning fully. Yet the fact that we’d both had the same thought made us giggle together. Soon we were laughing, laughing uproariously. I’d never heard Rachel Blackburn really laugh. It was a high-pitched, girlish sound. She might have been ten years old. At least that’s how it sounded just then. I was laughing too. We were laughing so much that we collapsed together onto a sidewalk bench, unable to move for laughing.

  “Rachel,” I gasped, “why are we laughing?”

  “I have no idea!”

  And that sent us into further gales of merriment, extreme enough that people were looking at us. I’m sure they were. It wasn’t my imagination. But somehow I didn’t care, not at all.

  After our laughter subsided we moved further down the street. We weren’t holding hands now; I wanted to feel what it was like to move entirely on my own. It was, oddly, quite normal. The colors and shapes around me were going berserk—a car that passed by seemed to leave a smear of color behind it that floated in the air for seconds—but the ground stayed put, and my body responded as it should. We decided to get sodas and so we stepped into a little mini-mart on a side street. I wondered if I could have a normal business transaction with someone. Would they realize what was different about me? We moved to the coolers, got our drinks, and headed to the check-out. I said hello to the woman there—the neon signs behind her were streaking and her voice was so distant I could hardly hear it, but she took our money and hardly seemed to notice us at all. In a way it was a disappointment, yet it was also a relief. It also made Rachel and I different from anyone else at that moment: we were sharing something that no one else shared. We were the two normal people in a world that was bright and surreal. I could see why she said it wasn’t as much fun to drop acid alone. It could even be frightening, I suspected. But somehow, with your trip’s companion there, it was all right. There was someone else who was truly with you. Who understood.

  We drank our sodas—they tasted metallic but good—and wandered in and out of shops. Time was bending: once it felt as if we’d been in a store for hours, but my watch decreed it had been ten minutes. Entering a little grassy park, Rachel noticed a tennis ball on the sidewalk and picked it up. She ran a few steps from me, turned and called, “Catch!”

  I raised my hand to the ball and confidently waited for it to arrive in my palm. I saw it clearly, tracked it perfectly. There was no possibility that I would not catch that ball. And yet the ball seemed to take a very long time to come to me. At the peak of its arc it went into slow motion and I felt my hand growing weary waiting for it to arrive. Finally I got bored, turned away and flopped onto the grass, watched children running by in a straight line that made them look to me like some sort of little train, a miniature locomotive. I called out, “Choo-choo!” though no one looked at me. Finally I got up and walked to another store. This was a store that sold jewelry and little glass ornaments. I studied the tiny frozen people and houses and unicorns. I was there for hours and hours, so long that when I looked outside it was dark, pitch-black. I realized suddenly that Rachel wasn’t with me. I ran outside.

  “Rachel! Rachel?”

  It was dark and I wasn’t sure exactly where I was. I found myself running, bumping into people, looking for a street sign, a landmark, any indication of where I was. The lights streaked and buzzed, so many of them now, in the darkness, laughing lights, sighing ones. I wanted to go home. I had to go home. But where was home?

  In the park my hand waited for the ball, arcing now, picking up speed. It grew closer and closer until it nearly touched my fingers. Then it passed through them and fell dully to the grass, bouncing twice and then rolling a few feet.

  “I couldn’t have missed that,” I said. Rachel was laughing. It was night and I felt myself coming down, the lights buzzing and smearing not quickly so loudly or brightly. Voices began to sound something closer to normal. I could feel that the effect was wearing off, slowly. I was on my back. Rachel was looking down at me.

  “You okay now?” she asked.

  “What happened?”

  “You ran off. I couldn’t find you for a while.”

  “I was in a jewelry shop...”

  “Maybe you were. I found you back here. I haven’t seen you for a couple of hours.”

  “Oh my God.” I held my head.

  “You wandered away when we came into this park a while ago. I threw a ball to you and you just wandered away.” She laughed. “You sure you’re okay, acid head?”

  “I—think so. It’s wearing off. Jesus.”

  “I found you here again. You seemed all right but a little confused. I was just kidding around with you, so I threw that ball again.”

  “I—oh my God.”

  She grinned. “Cool, huh?”

  The overhead lights sizzled quietly behind her. “I’m not sure that’s the word I would use.”

  “Aw, c’mon, hippie boy.”

  “I don’t—I don’
t think I remember much of what I did for the past couple of hours.”

  “Mm. Maybe it was a little strong for you. You didn’t have hallucinations, did you? Vultures coming out of the street and stuff like that?”

  “No.”

  “That’s good. You’re coming down now?”

  “Yes.” I was very thankful for that. But I felt very close to Rachel just then, as if we were two warriors who had survived a momentous battle.

  “So, you want some more acid?” she said.

  “Oh my God!” We both went into gales of laughter. I couldn’t control myself—an effect of the acid—yet I really felt no humor about the situation at all. As I watched Rachel throw back her head and laugh, I felt distinctly uneasy, even frightened. For just a quickly passing instant, Rachel Blackburn’s dark features grew darker, blacker than black, the teeth in her mouth seemed sharp-edged and ready to shred anything in their path. Her eyes were glittering, brilliant, thin threatening needle lines of light gleaming from them. The piercings in her brows and ears and nose seemed like deadly silver weapons. She wasn’t human, I knew suddenly. She was monstrous, something demonic and destructive. My heart slammed. Sweat burst from my skin.

  And then the vision—a brief wave as the effects of the acid subsided—faded away, leaving only a young laughing girl sitting next to me. I was laughing too.

  # # #

  “Maybe,” I said as we walked up the street toward the apartment, “maybe we shouldn’t tell Sherry about this.” I watched the lights of the passing cars. They were still streaking, but less vividly now, more briefly.

  Rachel shrugged, taking a drag on her cigarette. “I don’t care.”

  “It’s just that—I’m not sure she’d understand.”

  “Is she that uptight?”

  “No, it’s just...” But I couldn’t explain it to her. As casually as she seemed to be taking it, for me Rachel and I had shared an experience that was oddly, inexplicably intimate. Tripping with another girl? What would Sherry think of that? Not much, I guessed. “It’s just—she would find it a little surprising.”

  “Has she ever done anything?”

  “Pot,” I said. “Beer. Nothing else. That I know of.”

  “So,” she said, “you’re the dangerous one of the couple, huh? The desperado?”

  “I guess so.”

  She chuckled and shook her head. “You’re sure straight-living for a hippie boy.”

  I glanced at her, a little annoyed. “I’m not sure I was so straight-living while I was wandering around the streets of Santa Barbara tripping on acid and not knowing where I was.”

  “Hm.” She nodded. “You have a point. Okay, I’ll give you that one.”

  “So let’s just keep it between us, okay?”

  “Sure. Whatever.”

  I was very aware that this would be the first secret—the first serious, substantial, deliberate secret—I’d ever kept from Sherry. But the alternative seemed worse. I wondered what was going on between us. She and I seemed to be drifting, voices and places getting in between us. It was scary. Walking along the sidewalk with Rachel Blackburn I thought about how I’d never had any other girlfriend, how it had been Sherry O’Shea from the beginning and, I’d always thought, Sherry O’Shea forever. But now when I was away from her I had a hard time holding Sherry O’Shea in my mind.

  How could it be? I wondered, almost panicked. Everything was changing. It wasn’t like it had been back in Stone’s End, where the two of us together seemed an invincible, eternal force, unbreakably bonded. There were so many distractions now, so many things. Since Rachel had dropped down beside me that afternoon I’d hardly thought of Sherry O’Shea at all, I realized. The thought made me nervous, jittery. The after-effects of the drug didn’t help a bit.

  Something was happening to me—to us. I felt I was flinging myself headlong toward disaster, yet it was already too late to stop.

  5

  “Ever since they came it’s been different.”

  “I know.”

  “I want them to leave.”

  “Their rent is paid up, Sherry. We can’t just boot them out.”

  “Then we’ll leave.”

  “With what money? And why would we leave, anyway? It’s our apartment.”

  “I just—I don’t...”

  “We get along together, don’t we? All of us? I know you’re not crazy about Rachel, but you like Peter. As roommates they’re okay.”

  “We.”

  “What?”

  “We. When you talked about Rachel before you used to say that ‘we’ don’t like her. Now you say that I don’t like her.”

  “Honey, are you crazy? This has been going on from the beginning. Rachel Blackburn doesn’t mean anything to me. I’ve never given you any reason to think that she does.”

  “I see how you look at her.”

  “I look at her with my eyes.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  “She’s not the problem. They’re not the problem.”

  “What is, then?”

  “I think—it’s just that we’re not in Stone’s End anymore, that’s all.”

  “We’re sure not.”

  “It’s different here.”

  “Yes.”

  “But it would be different anywhere. That’s my point.”

  “Why, though, Ben? Why can’t it be like it was?”

  “Because that was then. This is now. You know. We just have to work at it, that’s all. Spend more time together.”

  “Do you love me, Ben?”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Do you?”

  “Of course I do. But it doesn’t matter how many times I say it. You don’t believe it.”

  “I want to believe it.”

  “Well, what about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “You’re always asking about me. What about you? Do you love me?”

  “You don’t have to ask that.”

  “That sounds evasive.”

  “Don’t, Ben.”

  “Well?”

  “Don’t.”

  # # #

  Things blur in my memory. Sherry, Sherry and me, our life together, is less vivid at this point: as if the shining lights of our relationship had dimmed, leaving an outline rather murky and dark. I don’t remember a great deal of arguing. We weren’t people to shout at each other. But I do recall Sherry becoming, over the ensuing weeks and months, ever more withdrawn, ever more morose. We still had good times. The two of us went for drives up and down the coast, visiting Los Angeles, wandering around tourist places in Hollywood. We spent time at the beach, Sherry always insisting on wearing a light summer shirt over her bikini top—she was always shy about her body. Our sex life slowed, but didn’t stop; we still had tender moments in the darkness together, moments which seemed to push away the increasing tension between us. We wandered the Santa Barbara streets after dark, enjoying the nightlife, listening outside to the music coming from the clubs, going to authors’ readings at bookstores, having espresso and cheesecake at the little cafés. When we could afford it we’d see a concert at the Arlington Theater—B.B. King, the Santa Barbara Symphony. We watched lots of movies at the Granada. A loving young couple, spending time together arm-in-arm, hand-in-hand—we were fine, really. But we weren’t. Sherry started calling home more often and talking about visiting at the end of the semester. Her schoolwork slipped; so did mine.

  But recreating the decline of a relationship is almost impossible. I can recall behavior, hers and mine, but how it felt—the emotional context—is all but gone from my memory. What did it feel like to live in that apartment then, with Sherry and me drifting slowly away from each other? I can no longer really remember. It may be that at the time the entire situation was not as central in my mind as I imagine it to have been, now: I was so busy. Classes, work, writing. Maybe that was part of it, too.

  In spring we made a drive up to Stone’s End. I was a bit nervous about leaving the apartment entirely in the
hands of Peter and Rachel, who also didn’t seem to be getting along; Rachel’s leaving the band, and the band’s subsequent collapse, had clearly driven a wedge between them. I really had no interest in Stone’s End or in anything there, but Sherry insisted.

  “I need to go home,” she said.

  We’d been gone less than a year. Still, when we arrived there I had the experience of seeing my old hometown through a different lens: things looked smaller, somehow, differently-proportioned. It surprised me to see that both the O’Shea and Fall houses had gone on standing without us. The O’Sheas were properly overjoyed to see Sherry, and at least respectfully happy to see me, though the disapproval of Sherry’s choice to live with me in Santa Barbara was still obvious in their eyes and voices. Alice was finishing classes at community college and working. Dad was—well, Dad, though on his good behavior. It helped that I’d never had to ask him for anything since we’d left.

  But Sherry and I spent most of our time with each other, wandering the streets downtown, saying hello to former neighbors we saw and popping our heads into familiar shops. We checked out the middle school, the high school, said hello to a few teachers. It felt like we’d been gone far more than the nine or ten months it had actually been; but then our time in Santa Barbara marked the first time either of us had been away from home at all for any extended period.

  On that first afternoon home Sherry led me by the hand, in her typical way, to the fields overlooking the cemetery, the same fields where we’d had our memorable first semi-sexual encounter on the night of our finishing eighth grade. The field, lovely and sun-splashed and filled with wild grasses and daisies and dandelions, was smaller now: new houses were being built that brought civilization much closer than it had been the last time we’d come here.

  “I remember this place,” Sherry said, pushing her breeze-blown hair from her eyes.

  “Sure. That tree.” I pointed. “Right over there. That’s where you deflowered me.”