The Lights

by Brian McGreevy

  

  There ought to be a word for the reverse of namaste: the darkness in me acknowledges the darkness in you. In this context, “acknowledge” would be interchangeable with “must destroy.” Power corrupts, and no power supersedes maternity; the universe is so unreasonably respectful of freedom that it has never once forced a person to change against her will. The wheel once again turned, George was gone from the picture and Diane was jobless, and deep in medical debt. Invoking the spirit of the mother-daughter team with backs against the wall to a hostile world, she proposed refinancing her mortgage in the girl’s name. The girl and Mark had recently moved to New York; even in their modest Harlem apartment it was not uncommon for her to wake up with her heart racing over financial anxiety. From her father she had learned the term “malignant narcissist,” and, from several years of her own alcoholism and an enabling boyfriend who loved her and her own whimsical cruelties with a child’s credulity, she had learned that like any unthinking animal, a Galvan will act exactly to the limits of its leash. A lifetime of emotional vampirism was one thing—there is a luxurious reciprocity to all parasitic relationships, the sense of unsurpassable importance as you are being consumed—but this was something else. The girl believed she had a destiny, a quality inherited and refined by her mother’s grandiosity. At the same time, she was an adapter, a survivor, trained from childhood. No one was going to get between her and her future, not even the mother whose dependency was as addictive as an infant’s. As she formulated her refusal, she was approached by Mark, his face messenger-grim. He had been searching for an aspirin, but Diane kept all pharmaceuticals in her room—out of both convenience and mistrust of which houseguests might help themselves to her medicine cabinet. Going through her drawers he’d found the girl’s driver’s license, which she had believed she’d misplaced at a bar. The girl went numb. She did not know what the scheme was—her mother could not be bothered to park her car on a different street to throw off relocation agents, let alone successfully perform an act of identity theft. But regardless of her specific intention, what could be assumed was its self-justification, that Diane’s martyrdom would have convinced her she was only taking her due because of her ungrateful daughter’s unwillingness to SAVE HER FROM THE STREETS, or whatever tear-soaked soliloquy she delivered from the proscenium of her own crazy. The girl was left with no choice; she was suffused with a pitiless grace, something greater than and originating from outside herself. (This was her first notable experience of the Higher Power around which the benevolent cult, of which she is currently a member, is constructed.) She was a person with a destiny. But the paradox of destiny, familiar to any student of myth, is that it is still a product of choice. You can lose it. It can be taken from you. Nothing had the right to take that from her. No one did. She ceased all communication with her mother.

  

  Not that this was the first time they had stopped speaking. During her adolescence it was not uncommon for her to spend weeks at a stretch with her father and long-suffering stepmother after some eruption, and they’d had no contact for the entire semester following the George incident. But reconciliation always followed eventually, either through the intervention of a family member or the natural caving process. It stood to reason this process would repeat itself after the girl decided her mother had been punished long enough; Diane had made the mistake of instructing her too well in the embargoing of affection. Things were different this time, however. Her trips home had grown less frequent after graduation—because of work, the girl told herself, and not the feeling of foreboding in her stomach the idea of returning inspired—so over the last few years the decline in her mother’s condition was conspicuous in time-lapse. It didn’t matter anymore how much of this was psychosomatic: it was real enough Diane had put on two stone at least, her complexion sallower with each visit, she complained of the toll walking even short distances took on her ankles. And the girl couldn’t help but notice her mother had stopped wearing short sleeve shirts, the wrinkled squares of wax paper in the garbage can. She told herself her delay in forgiving her mother was in proportion to the severity of the offense, and not this feeling in her stomach she refused to call disgust, that she was not the changeling of family mythology—inhuman in her frigidity toward her mother’s suffering.

  The following fall the girl was in town staying with her father for a wedding on his side of the family when a horrific news story came out about a rape by the waterfront. An unidentified woman had been held down and brutally assaulted by multiple attackers. When this sort of story comes out on a gloomy Pittsburgh November day it can only make you question the point of anything at all. But in this instance the case was cracked almost immediately. Apparently the woman—whose identity was still withheld for her protection—had fabricated the entire thing and performed the assault on herself with a glass Coke bottle. The girl and her father looked at each other wordlessly. It was impossible not to wonder.

  Before she returned to New York they were called on by a woman who in this city would best have been described as “queer.” She was in her fifties and morbidly overweight and very white, nearly albino, nearly translucent. She wore a shapeless dress that covered her up completely, but the girl imagined all the veins in her body were as visible as blue ink. Her manner was so timid that the girl imagined a harsh word from others would cause her to shatter; she reminded her of the ghosts in the Super Mario game that the girl would play with Mark in undergraduate, the big round ones who would sneak up on you but when you turned to them, face-to-face, would turn away with unbearable shyness. She said she was a friend of Diane’s. Her father asked the woman what she wanted and she nearly flinched at the firmness in his voice. The girl felt bad for her but also good; there had been a limited number of times she’d ever seen her father protective of her. After all that time Diane had spent on the alliance between them, she was bringing the girl and John Kelly closer together. She would surely have been gratified by the echoes of Greek tragedy. The woman said that Diane didn’t know she was here; that she would be upset if she knew. She would certainly enjoy pretending to be upset, the girl did not interject. The woman continued that Diane had been having health problems—the girl and her father shared a look—and had not been thinking straight because of the pain. She had gotten herself into a sticky legal situation. The girl and her father looked at each other again. He said he regretted to hear that, but neither of them were in a position to contribute financially. The woman brushed right past this. Had she acted surprised or embarrassed by the reference to money the girl’s suspicion of some sort of con would have been raised, but she was coming to believe she was simply a well-meaning kook Diane had gotten her hooks into. Another suspicion emerged that there may be more to this “friendship” and she realized she hoped this was true; it would be a relief to her omnipresent filial/Catholic/survivor’s guilt to think her mother was not alone. The woman went on. She knew that Diane had done much in the past that she was sorry for, and could not herself understand the reasons. You can go on Wikipedia and look up the term “malignant narcissist,” the girl did not interject. “Until now,” said the woman portentously. The trouble Diane had gotten herself into had awakened something in her, something long forgotten, something that explained it all. Her voice had dropped to a hush. The girl steeled herself for disappointment: how disappointing it would be if, in the end, Diane became a Scientologist. When Diane was a little girl, explained the woman, her Sunday school teachers had actually been Satanists who committed abuses on her and forced her to commit ceremonies of an unspeakable nature and she had buried all memory of it until this day. The woman looked at them wide-eyed at the scope of this revelation.

  The girl and her father thanked her for this information. The girl told the woman she would pray for Diane.

  

  The following month the girl was cutting through a park near her apartment when she was struck by the sight of a street lamp flickering to life and
then extinguishing, like a glowworm in a jar. There is a porous border between sundown and the night, things slip through—it was her nature to know these things. This vision’s meaning was as clear to her as if it was a message from the mysterious realm that had supposedly heralded her birth: someone close to her was going to die. The call from her father came the next day. Indeed, Diane had cleaned up her act, improving her diet and cutting junk cold turkey. But one side effect of quitting heroin is narcolepsy, and Diane had nodded off with a multivitamin in her mouth, which lodged in her throat, causing her to asphyxiate. Her mother was dead.

  The girl received this news while she was in a taxi going down a narrow street. There was another taxi ahead of them, which stopped to discharge a passenger, and her driver honked aggressively. This behavior had always struck the girl as odd—that no one was less generous to taxi drivers than other taxi drivers. She looked out the window where steam was issuing from a grate in a sidewalk, an effect that she liked; as alienating as the city could be, it created the impression it was a single breathing organism. On the other end of the line her father believed her lack of reaction was because of shock, and not the truth, that the girl had never been shocked less in her life.

  the click

  Exactly one year later I passed Jason in the lobby of the graduate library. He was leaving. We nodded curtly in passing.

  I said, “Hey.”

  He stopped.

  “I need you to be tall,” I said.

  He walked with me into the stacks to pick up a book I needed. It was on a high shelf and he reached for it and as he did his shirt rode up revealing the hem of his boxer briefs and the curve of his spine. He handed me the book and we looked at each other.

  “Thanks,” I said. There was a thin, hot film over my eyes.

  “Are you okay?” he said.

  “I’d be more okay with a drink,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said.

  In a few years, after neither of us live in Texas anymore, there will be a shooting on the same floor of the library. It will be of little consequence, as these things go. Some kid will shoot off a few rounds of an AK-47 in the stacks but won’t hit anyone. His heart won’t be in it. To be fair, I don’t know where exactly it will happen, but when I hear about the shooting, I will decide it is on the same floor. When this story breaks I will be working for a Condé Nast ASPIRATIONAL LIFESTYLE MAGAZINE, profiling a San Francisco–based designer in a hotel bed with floor-to-ceiling windows over the bay and another irrelevant man on the other side of the bed because I will not be able to think of a lonelier situation than spending an expense account alone. I will read the story which will have been sent to me by a couple of former classmates and I will think of the hem of Jason’s boxer shorts and the curve of his spine, and of Hogwarts, and the distinguished tradition of the mother institution of which Hogwarts is part of—sad young men announcing their grief with guns—and all the hurt in the world will seem mysteriously and incontrovertibly fucked, and I will close my laptop and look out the window and start to cry, wondering how many Condé Nast girls there are at that moment looking out the window of a hotel room and crying over a man she can never get back.

  Jason and I went to a fratty sports bar just off campus that was close and cheap and sat in a corner booth with whiskeys and ice. I took a big swallow.

  “There it is,” I said.

  “There what is,” he said.

  “The click in my head that makes everything feel more peaceful,” I said.

  We drank fast, saying little. I put my hand on the table. He put his hand on mine, once again running his finger on the indenture of my injured thumbnail.

  “Let’s go somewhere,” I said.

  “Where?” he said.

  I didn’t know. We had changed locations once already. But it felt like being on a bicycle, drunk, and the only imperative was to stay in motion.

  We took a shuttle up to north campus, stopping at a 7-Eleven and got a very cheap wine with a screw-off lid, and from there he walked me to a fenced-in field with a few scattered dark oaks. He passed the bottle through the bars of the fence gave me a boost to climb over and then followed. He wanted me to notice his effortless physicality as guys do climbing fences, but I looked at the sky. Sunsets in Texas look like every kind of heartbreak you’ve ever had, one on top of the other. We walked to an oak on the outskirts of the field. I noticed rows of markers in the ground, only a handful and off-center, like an afterthought.

  I said it looked like a cemetery.

  “It is,” said Jason. “It’s where they bury the John Does from the mental hospital.”

  “How many nineteen-year-old communications majors have you finger-banged here?” I said.

  “Shut up,” he said.

  Pleased, I unscrewed the cap from the bottle and took a drink.

  “Tell me everything you like about me,” I said.

  “You have probably the prettiest eyes I’ve ever seen,” he said.

  I scoffed. “Everyone has pretty eyes.”

  “Is there a right thing for me to say?” he said.

  “No.”

  He gestured for the wine and took a pull. “I think about you all the time. When people say your name it makes my stomach hurt. The other day I ran into Mark when I was getting lunch. We got a bagel together and had a completely harmless conversation. Every time I opened my mouth I just heard static. I can’t even make myself jealous of him. All I felt was sorry.”

  “Why?” I said, irritated he wasn’t jealous.

  “Because he followed you down here and you don’t love him anymore.”

  I got up.

  “Where are you going?” he said.

  I walked to the fence. He followed, repeating the question.

  “I’m leaving,” I said.

  I looked at the fence and realized it was too tall for me to climb without his help.

  “Help me up,” I said.

  “Tell me what I said.”

  “We’re all at Hogwarts because we’re insightful people,” I said. “But you having insights into this that make it real, and you have no business making this real, you fucking idiot.”

  He was quiet. “What’s Hogwarts?” he said.

  “Help me over the fence,” I said.

  “No.”

  “If you don’t I’ll scream.”

  He stepped forward and reached past me with both arms and grabbed the bars of the fence, boxing me in.

  “Scream,” he said.

  I wrapped my arms around his waist and lay my head against his chest. His heart was beating fast. He didn’t know how fast my heart was beating, the advantage was mine. He stroked the top of my head. It was the first time I’d been touched like this by a body that wasn’t Mark since I was nineteen. I could smell his underarm mixed with his deodorant, the dank sweetness. I found his nipple with my lips and bit hard enough for him to gasp. He gripped me by both shoulders and said, “What is wrong with you?”

  “I hate you,” I said.

  He looked at me, afraid, the way men do sometimes when they don’t know if it’s normal female stuff or if you’re actually dangerously crazy. I have always enjoyed that look, probably the way boys do when they are holding guns. He lowered his face to mine. I turned my head and walked back to our tree and sat, picking up the wine. He sat next to me and we passed the bottle back and forth. He put his hand to the back of my neck and tried to kiss me again.

  “Jason,” I said, averting my face.

  He pressed on. I put my hands to his face, pushing him off.

  “Jason.”

  “You bit me,” he said.

  I laughed. Was that possibly true? We drank some more wine and he didn’t make another move so I rubbed his thigh and left my hand there. He tried to kiss me again, and I resisted. I could feel him physically shuddering with frustration. It was ve
ry satisfying.

  “Jason, no.”

  He pulled back, breathing heavily through his nose.

  “What?” I said.

  “You said no,” he said.

  “I thought you were fun,” I said. “I should have called Harry.”

  He put his hand on my face. It felt like sheet lightning spreading inside the skin of my cheek.

  “Please come back,” he said.

  I pulled his arms around me and shook for a while, then it passed.

  “My mother died a year ago today,” I said.

  He reached for the wine.

  “When a thing like that happens, a thing like your mother dying, people expect you to feel shitty about it,” I said. “This is the convention. And I do, I do feel pretty shitty about it. But I haven’t told anyone the real reason why, not even Mark. At first I thought my reaction was numbness and that once I’d processed it, the things you’re supposed to feel would kick in. Then some time passed and I realized that what I was numb to wasn’t pain, it was relief. I didn’t love her anymore. I hadn’t loved her in years. My own mother. And her being gone felt like being set free, like some kind of permission for my life to really start. I haven’t told anybody this so when they look at me they can see what they want. They have no idea what a monster I am on the inside.”