Songs come and go. “A Horse with No Name.” “Band on the Run.” “Crocodile Rock.” So do more shots.
Dawn’s face flushes and her blue eyes begin to look turquoise.
After a while Todd asks, “If he treated you that badly, why do you still care about him?”
Dawn jerks her head to one side as if she has been hit. “Don’t you know anything about love?”
“I just …” he says. “I mean …” He shrugs, opens his mouth, but no words come out.
“Look,” she says, “let’s face it: most sex is just masturbating on somebody else’s body—right?” She swallows a shot. “And in between you have to sit around pretending to be interested while this fucking narcissist babbles on and on about himself. You know what I mean? So you get—what?—maybe five good fucks out of any relationship. Ten, if you’re lucky. Then it’s time to move on.” She makes a smile that is a variety of wince. “But every now and then you meet someone—someone who’s … I don’t know: different. And then sex is like this expression of your total delight in that person. Right? And that person’s total delight in you. And actually, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing: taking a walk in the park, shopping at the Stop ’n’ Go. It’s all just like this nonstop fucking delight. Like you never lived before. But then, of course, one day: wham! It’s over.” She downs another shot. “And after that … Well, after that, life’s just shit. Right? I mean what’s the fucking point. You see what I’m saying?”
Todd takes his hands off the table and folds them in his lap.
“Oh, no!” says Dawn.
“What?”
“Oh, my God!”
“What?” says Todd.
“You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?”
He just looks at her like another taxidermied animal head.
A bleary leer comes onto Dawn’s face. “I bet you’ve never even been kissed!”
Todd sighs deeply and crumples his lips. The corners of his eyes glisten.
“You poor baby!” She leans across the table, which lurches. As Todd flings out his arm to stop the sliding glasses and bottle, she presses her closed lips just beside his and makes a big smacking noise.
“There!” she says, sitting back down. “Now you’ve been kissed!”
Todd’s face has gone shiny and red. He is staring into the eyes of a goat with a cigarette in its mouth.
“You’ve got lovely long lashes,” says Dawn. “You wouldn’t be half bad looking if you got a haircut and lost thirty pounds.”
Still staring at the goat, Todd grabs his glass, throws back his head, and pours the fiery, perfumed fluid down his throat.
As Dawn hurries Todd along the path lit by elfin streetlamps, she clutches his arm with both hands, and stops every now and then to smile at him in the manner of a woman on the verge of losing consciousness.
Todd himself feels on the verge of losing consciousness, not because he has drunk too much (in fact, he only had that one shot of bourbon; well, maybe two), but because his head is spinning with too many incomprehensible memories: Dawn grabbing his hand across the table and saying, “Come with me!” Her tongue in his ear. Her low moan against his cheek. The electric detonations of pleasure effected by her fingers between his legs. Each of these events increased the probability of an ever-diminishing range of other events, until now, as the rectangular obscurity of the Fellows’ Residence looms ever larger against the night sky, the probability of one heretofore inconceivable event rises to the level of certainty.
The pathway ends. The glass doors hiss. Dawn laughs as she leads Todd through the fluorescent dusk of the lobby to the elevators. She hits the up button and flings herself against him, twisting her wet mouth on his. Todd does his best to reciprocate, but can’t rid himself of the notion that this is merely another of those dreams in which he is onstage before an audience of thousands, holding an instrument he has no idea how to play.
All at once Dawn puts her hands on his chest and shoves herself away.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I just can’t do this.”
She wipes her mouth on the back of her wrist. When she lowers her arm, her expression is flaccid and aghast.
The elevator dings.
The door opens, closes.
“It’s not your fault,” she says. “It’s me.”
“That’s all right.” Todd’s head is lowered, his brow crumpled as if he has discovered a small, dead animal on the floor.
“No, really,” she says. “I’d really like to, but—”
She smiles sadly and shrugs.
“That’s all right,” he says.
“Wait a second!” Her eyes brighten and her mouth opens as if she is about to laugh. “I have a much better idea!” She grabs Todd’s hand and pulls him back across the lobby. “Why didn’t I think of this before!”
The doors hiss. The night is loud with insect song and the sound of flowing water.
Dawn is naked, and Todd is holding his shirt in his left hand, not sure what to do with it. In his right hand he holds his cell phone, flashlight on. He is shivering.
“Come on!” Dawn cries. “It’s perfect!”
She is up to her ankles in the grass-pierced water on the edge of the swollen creek, her clothes scattered along the shore on either side of her. Todd watches her T-shirt, sucked off a clump of water-piercing grass, slip along the roiling current just in front of her shins and vanish into the earthbound gloom beneath the crystalline sky.
“I don’t know,” he says dubiously.
“Hurry up!” she says. “The water’s incredible!”
She takes an unsteady step forward and looks over her shoulder, gesturing for Todd to follow.
He flings his shirt onto the grass, slips his phone into his pocket, and applies both hands to his belt.
There is a shriek and a splashing wumph, as if a log has toppled into the creek.
No Dawn.
No grayish smear near the shore. No clump of darkness on the glinting current.
“Oh!” she cries, from some distance downstream, then again, from much farther down: “Oh!” And then, from ever-increasing distances: “Oh! … Oh no! … Oh my God! … Help!”
Todd hears the bubble and roar of the water, but can’t see anything. He has flung himself into the creek with the intention of rescuing Dawn (though he does not, in fact, know how to swim) and his head would seem to be a yard beneath the surface, a situation he attempts to correct by thrashing his arms and doing something like a run with his sneaker-shod feet. After long moments of murk and resonant bubbling, the sounds go brittle, a new coolness strikes his cheeks, and he can make out the starry sky swirling overhead. He only has time to gulp a mouthful of air, however, before his shins collide with something hard, he is flipped forward and is once more beneath the surface, upside down this time, water drilling into his sinuses. He flails, kicks, twists, and punches, but can’t tell whether he is going up or down. Gravity no longer exerts any detectable influence upon his body.
Stars. Airborne sounds. His head coasting along a seething surface. He coughs and gasps.
“Help!” Dawn cries from somewhere downstream. “Ai!” she cries, “Oh!,” and “Oh, my God!”
Each cry is louder and more distinct than the one before, until she seems barely an arm’s length in front of him, then just at his side, and then he has passed her and she is receding quickly. He looks over and glimpses her angular back and right arm, pale gray against the dark riverbank. She has stopped shouting. She is clutching at something—a root? a branch?—and is pulling herself out of the water while he hurtles helplessly past.
First his shoulder strikes the muddy bottom, then his back, then his belly and leg. Then there is an extended instant during which his disassembled body parts whirl in a horizontal cyclone, and finally he is nose down on a stinking incline, clawing into vegetable muck to keep from being sucked back into the current.
Now he is standing in waist-high grass, rills filtering through his crotch, d
own his legs and into his sneakers. He figures he is only some thirty yards past where Dawn clambered ashore. He calls her name, but hears only the sawing of grass blade against grass blade, and the fluttery clatter of the water. He calls again—louder, then louder still. Nothing. A universe filled with inconsequential sound.
He starts to walk, his feet making suction noises inside his sneakers—and then he stops, having realized that he has a problem: this is the wrong side of the creek. If he wants to return to W.I.I.I., he will have to fling himself back into the frigid current. A shudder grinds through his guts. His teeth rattle. A wind sweeps down out of the vast sky and coats his shoulders with ice.
He is walking again, his feet plunging into invisible declivities and stumbling up sudden rises, grass stalks raking his shoelaces. He keeps thinking he sees Dawn just ahead, a smoke-colored wisp in the moonless gloom, but over and over she becomes a plastic bag on a barbed-wire fence, a drifting phosphene, a wind-rocked bush.
A black lace of trees looms on the far side of the creek, and through its interstices he can make out a trail of yellowish glints (the elfin streetlamps) and sparks of bluish red (the exit signs inside the abandoned dining hall). He edges sideways down the steep bank until he can feel the current eddying along the outside of his left sneaker. Here is where he was certain he would find Dawn, hunched and clutching her shoulders against the cold. Nothing but black water. Waist-high, pewter-colored grass. A sky exploding with stars. He calls her name, then a second time, then over and over—until the recurring silence becomes more than he can bear.
Drenched again, flashlightless, and blind (his cell phone having drowned in his pocket), Todd kneels at the place where he believes Dawn first stepped into the water, and runs his hands through grass and weeds. Unsuccess follows unsuccess, and he knee-walks forward, his fingers encountering branches and sticks, a beer bottle, a plastic shovel, and then something soft: Dawn’s fleece vest. And just beside it: her underpants, then her jeans, and, finally, the downy cotton of his flannel shirt.
As he wrestles his wet arms into the sleeves, he wonders if the night is cold enough for Dawn to have succumbed to hypothermia. Has she slumped unconscious into the wind-stirred grass? Did she even make it out of the water after he drifted past? Perhaps her muddy fingers slipped off that root or branch. Perhaps the current was simply too strong.
The wallpaper photo on Dawn’s cell phone is of a green-eyed black cat with plastic reindeer antlers clipped to its head. Todd swipes the bottom of the screen, taps the phone icon, and dials 911. He tells the woman who answers that a friend went swimming in a creek and he is worried that she has drowned. “It’s been an hour,” he tells the woman. “I keep calling her name, but she doesn’t answer.” When the woman asks for his location, he tells her that he is at the Wendall Institute for Interstellar Investigation. When she says she doesn’t know what he is talking about, he repeats the name one word at a time.
“Never heard of it,” she says. She’s never heard of the town of Wendall either. “What’s your street address?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” he says.
“How can you not know your address?”
“I already told you: I’m at the Wendall Institute. I was driven here in a van. I didn’t pay attention to the street.” Todd’s voice is trembling. It is all he can do to keep from shouting.
“Well, if you want assistance, you’re going to have to give me an address.”
“Listen,” he says, willing his voice to sound reasonable and firm. “A woman may be dying this very minute. Can’t you just google the Wendall Institute and find the address yourself?”
“Hold on a minute.” The line goes staticky.
After a couple of seconds, Todd hears a bleep and a sound like a whip snap. Then silence. The phone’s screen has gone black. He holds the ON button down for more than a minute. Nothing happens.
Todd doesn’t know whether to stay where he is or go back to the institute and try to find a working landline. Maybe it would be better to walk down the highway to an inhabited house—though the nearest could be miles away. He decides to wait, at least for a while.
He can no longer bear to call out Dawn’s name, so he walks to the water’s edge and only listens. Brilliant Vega is straight overhead, just where the ragged trail of the Milky Way edges into the ordinary night sky, and to its right: the constellation of Hercules, where, between the stars denoting the hero’s pelvis and ribs, Todd can just make out what appears to be a faint yellowish star, but which is, in fact, the M13 star cluster.
The M13 is only visible to the naked eye on the darkest and clearest nights. Having spent his entire life in LA and Berkeley, this is only the second time he has seen the star cluster outside of a photograph. The first was when his Boy Scout troop went camping in the desert. His mother had insisted he join the troop so that he might make friends, but in the end, his solitary summer as a scout consisted primarily of false fart accusations, jokes about his Elmer Fudd laugh, and a dead lizard in his hiking boot.
That night in the desert, while his troop sat around a fire singing “99 Bottles of Beer,” Todd walked off to pee, and then continued walking until he was far enough away that the fire’s glow no longer interfered with his view of the stars. He had never seen a sky so dazzlingly crowded before, and, as he rocked back his head, the very first glimmer his eye picked out was the M13. He was so excited that he nearly ran back to tell everyone, but he knew they would only mock him, so he lay down on a patch of still-warm sand, and tried to see the stars clearly enough to tell which were near and which were so far away their twinkle had been traveling since the Big Bang.
He was still lying there when “99 Bottles of Beer” finally finished. After an interval of shouts, groans, laughter, and the scout master’s imperious “Come on!” the troop began to sing “Silent Night”—a song Todd found so beautiful that, once more, he almost returned to the campfire.
Sometime later, he awoke to find that the singing had stopped and that the Milky Way had swung some forty-five degrees across the sky. He sat up and looked back toward the fire, now only a dawn-like glow against the rocks that the boys had ringed around it. The tents were zipped up, silent gray pyramids in the starlight. No one had called out to him at bedtime, let alone come looking for him. Perhaps no one had even noticed he was missing. Or cared.
For a moment he couldn’t breathe, as if the Earth had become a vacant rock adrift in a vacuum. But then he lay back down and looked up. There was so much beauty in that glittering sky. So much freedom.
From Amitier
Gilles Tiberghien
—Translated from French by Cole Swensen
Peter Sloterdijk, quoting the poet Jean Paul, observed that “books are huge letters written to friends.” This is especially true of books of philosophy, and, more generally, of the activity of philosophy itself, which always postulates the existence, implicit or actual, known or imagined, of a friend to whom one’s thoughts are addressed. And as it’s such a solitary activity, it’s perhaps even essential to its nature that it be based on friendship, that friendship be one of its conditions of operation. “It’s an important question,” writes Gilles Deleuze in his introduction to What Is Philosophy?, “because the friend as he appears in philosophy is no longer an extrinsic figure, an example, or an empirical circumstance; rather, his presence is intrinsic to thought, is a condition of thought itself, a living category, a lived transcendental.”
That said, if in antiquity, as Deleuze and Félix Guattari claim, the friend became “a conceptual being,” that phenomenon was connected to Greek society itself, to the anthropological status of the friend, and to the moral and political consequences of friendship, which determined the nature of that society. For instance, if speaking of equality between friends, as Aristotle did, is going to have a true resonance for us, we have to remember that this equality was originally founded on the deep discrimination that characterized the ancient world and marked a difference in nature not only between
men and women but also between different men—those who were free and those who were slaves.
The friendship of the ancients was governed by discourse, logos, and was considered a virtue, which is to say, it was characterized by a “disposition to act” according to rule and in ways appropriate to men who are prudent, just, and capable of evaluating their actions and those of others. The whole of Greek philosophy, and its political philosophy in particular, presumes a potential community of thought, a koiné founded on the use of reason to master desire and thus arrive at the good; therefore, it was necessarily communal, shared by everyone for the profit of all and with happiness as its goal.
For the moderns, on the other hand, from Machiavelli and Hobbes on, reason would no longer be the foundation of politics. Whether based on the fear of death (Hobbes) or on compassion (Rousseau), the cement of social bonds was no longer seen as rational, which meant that society could no longer promise moderation and justice in the name of reason as its ruling factor. On the contrary, society came to be seen as the crucible for passions that it simultaneously willfully provoked and attempted to channel. The moderns, then, no longer considered friendship a virtue, and friendship had to adapt to this new state of affairs. Given this context, and despite Aristotle’s statements, no one who came after could share even his best friend’s happiness without also envying it. Moral feelings were no longer protected from the passions, which is how the theme of love came to be interlaced with that of friendship.
Considering the wide range of meanings that the term friendship has had from antiquity to the present, and that the Greek term philia evolved into the Latin amicitia, and that one or the other is translated today into various languages as amitié, friendship, and Freundschaft, Jean-Claude Fraisse concludes that “these complexities expose the pretensions behind any claim to reconcile the ancients and the moderns through the notion of philosophia perennis, and they demand the rejection of any method that is not exclusively historical.”1 Though not to scorn history or contexts of thought that have determined certain philosophical terms, particularly that of friendship, it seems to me that we have everything to gain by rethinking these terms in light of our own intellectual, social, and political contexts, so that we can fine-tune them to better address today’s realities and needs.
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