Once, in Lourdes

by Sharon Solwitz

  “What the fuck are you doing, man?”

  It’s Saint’s first spontaneous remark. CJ holds the flame up to Saint’s face. Saint the beautiful. “If I had a few more years, I’d study sculpture,” says CJ. “There’s a Norse god you remind me of. Do you know Baldur the Beautiful? The god of purity and light? Everyone loved Baldur. Well, everyone but Loki. But why bring up Loki?” He lights the fabric a third time, in several places. It smells like burning wire.

  “You’re sending out smoke signals,” says Saint. “Do we want a party here?”

  “Lordy, how sensible we are. But the world is sleeping.” Bundle in hand, he scrambles up and over the fence.

  We watch in silence as he gathers twigs and scraps of litter and starts a small campfire in the grassy dirt that quickly exhausts its fuel. He goes over to the picnic area and finds a big trash can. He throws in the clothing, mixing it up with whatever’s in the can. Behind our fence we see it smolder, then a flame rockets up. While the sparks fly he runs to his car in the parking lot, then to the bathroom, and returns to us clean-faced in anonymous boy clothes—jeans, T-shirt, hiking boots. “Dressed for success,” he says. When the flames fade into a plume of rotten-smelling smoke, his female persona will be a pool of synthetic glop in the bottom of the can, and he will be dressed for his yearbook picture, dressed like a figment of his father’s imagination, dressed to make the man proud. “It can now be said,” he says, “that I died with my boots on.”

  He’s blustery, but he seems genuinely relieved. He crawls down the row of us, kissing cheeks. “It’s an honor to share this eternal moment with you good people. I look forward to continued love-play and good conversation in the Elysian fields, or on the shores of Valhalla.” He giggles. “Did you know that’s the name of an actual town? It’s not that far. Instead of offing ourselves, why don’t we just move there? Ha. Just kidding!” He has brought back a lighted joint and he puffs, holds it out. “First one’s free!”

  When Saint accepts the joint, CJ starts crowing. “Aren’t you glad we’re doing this? Seriously, think of the shit we’re escaping! World War Three, for one thing! Terminal pollution! Lung cancer!”

  Vera scoots over to join in the riff. “We’ll escape wrinkles and gray hair.”

  “Senile dementia,” Saint offers. We lean in his direction, warmed by his verbal return to us. “Old-age homes.”

  “Where you get raped by the orderlies,” says CJ, then after a beat: “Or is that a plus?” With no response from us he tries something else. “I won’t have to worry about getting rejected from Harvard.”

  “Or me from Lansing Community College.”

  That’s my contribution. CJ laughs; I love him for it. “Everyone gets into Lansing,” he says. “It’s open admissions.”

  “There’s always a first,” I say.

  “That’s the spirit, Kay!”

  I know the words to maintain the group of us; I know the tone. But I’m only mimicking my old part in our revelry while, with an increasing sense of futility, I look for a way to derail this train. The riffing proceeds, other evils we’ll escape by dying early: soul-crushing jobs, abusive mates, evil children. What about trying to get a prom date? Or getting one! Going to the prom! CJ is king of the hill, albeit a hill about to bulldoze itself. But he loves the hilarity he has stirred, he wants to stir it further. He offers me a hit.

  “No thanks.”

  “What’s up, dear? We won’t get busted. Your political future is safe.” He blows smoke in my face; I wave it away. “All right,” he says, “I can take no. It’s a sign of my new maturity.” I make a laughlike sound. “Uh-oh! What’s happening, baby?”

  What’s happening? God knows. Almost since we sat down here, I’ve been in a muddle. CJ is looking at me.

  “Oh dear. Tell me if I’m wrong, girl. But are we perhaps in the process of maybe changing our little minds?”

  I shake my head, fast, back and forth in the dark. I haven’t changed my mind. “I’ll abide by the group decision.”

  “Hmmm. I detect a but, my love.”

  “No!” I’m choking; I cough it out. “I want to do what’s right. What we agreed. It’s just so…final.”

  “Ah, but that’s the point! Remember how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable are all the uses of this world?”

  “I know. Hamlet. To be or not to be.”

  “And the answer to that riddle? Not!” he proclaims, pointing to emphasize, smoothing back his hair. “ ‘Final’ is the wrong word. Think of the end of Alice in Wonderland. They’re about to chop off the girl’s head and she says, ‘You’re nothing but a pack of cards.’ That’s us, Kay. We jump and it’s just down the rabbit hole.” He looks out at the water we can’t see, then up at the sky, where the stars seemed to have vanished. “No, wait. This is better. We jump, and the camera pans up to a row of four bright stars. We’ve been translated into a constellation like the Seven Sisters. An astronomer observes us. Historians call us by his name, Quadrus Rosenburgus, but forever after little kids will point us out to one another. See that line of stars? Those four bright ones? That’s the Four Friends! Isn’t that touching?”

  “Oh, Christopher Joseph.”

  “Kay, you rebel you.”

  I’m shaking my head. I don’t know what’s right. My feelings keep changing.

  “Don’t cry, dear. That’s my scam.”

  I choke out a tight-jawed laugh. “But really. It’s like I’m hypnotized. I keep trying to shake myself out of it.”

  “Beats our prior state, wouldn’t you say?”

  Does it? I’m stiff with fear. He takes my hand, puts it to his cheek. “You know, I sometimes think that if I’d been born to different parents, I could have been a remarkable person.” His earnestness embarrasses him; he says more lightly: “No need to support me on that.”

  “But I know what you mean.”

  “You usually do.”

  My teeth are chattering. I’m holding him by the shoulders. Under my hands is the fresh cotton of his shirt, in which he thinks he’ll be proud to be caught dead, and one thing is clear to me: I don’t want him to die. “CJ, you know, you’re already kind of remarkable.”

  “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

  I thought I’d quit hoping for a miracle, but I’m off and running. “No, seriously. You don’t even know what your limits are.”

  “Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh! Get thee behind me, Satan.”

  He’s joking, but I’ve made him nervous, I know. Starting down that old familiar road. “You know, CJ, we still haven’t told them about Chicago,” I start to say, but he has turned to Saint.

  “Buddy, she’s having second thoughts. All thoughts are lethal, but second thoughts are the worst. Can you give me a hand here?”

  “I never wanted anyone else to do this,” Saint says. “I’m the only one who’s fucked completely.”

  I say piteously, “You aren’t!”

  “If you only knew,” says CJ. Saint shakes his head almost imperceptibly, but it’s a dismissal. At which CJ starts twitching, head and shoulders, a caricature idiot. “Shee-it. ’Course, my shit ain’t nothin’ by yours, Mr. Saint.” At the same time he’s leaning toward Saint, taking him in, his smell, the dried blood on his shirt.

  “Saint doesn’t know his own goodness. And neither do you, CJ!” I’m shaking his arm. “There’s this innocent, kind, sweet part of yourself, don’t you see that?”

  “On the rocks down there, I’ll be even sweeter. CJ on the rocks. A new beverage. A cocktail!”

  I groan.

  “Shit, Kay. Don’t you know that my unaccustomed good nature derives from my awareness of having slightly less than an hour left on the earthly plane? I hear the waves, and the blood beating in my veins, and if I thrill to it, it’s because I’m about to lose it. Take away the dawn leap and I’m the same old asshole.”

  I put my hands over my ears.

  “Listen,” he says. “If it was just me jumping into the void, it wouldn’t mean anything. Another teen sui
cide. One more failure for psychiatry. The kid just couldn’t hack it. With two jumpers, it’s still mental illness. Folie à deux. Dismissable. But with us four it’s a manifesto.”

  Saint is listening; CJ seeks even stronger words. “It’s our fourfold middle finger at everyone who ever fucked with us! Our ‘Hell no, we won’t go.’ It’s our barbershop quartet, our band’s latest hit, it’s ‘Vera in the Sky with Diamonds.’ ” He starts up with the Animals song—“We’ve gotta get out of this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do”—and afterward the lyrics ring in our ears. “Best of all,” he says, “we’re leaving an idea. About the meaning of friendship. The love of members of a group for one another. It’s more important than life.”

  Vera: “I know where you’re coming from.”

  Saint nods agreement.

  “I do too,” I cry. “Believe me!”

  CJ kisses my lips like he means it. I’m squeezing his arms so hard it’s got to hurt. Then he takes Saint’s big face in his hands and kisses him all over.

  —

  Saint tolerates CJ’s affection as he would that of an exuberant dog. He doesn’t move, even after CJ lets go. CJ flings himself onto his back, kicks his feet over the edge, chortling, but Saint is tired unto death, and he wants it all to be over. In most ways, he thinks it’s already over. Whatever’s left of him resides in Vera sitting in the shadows at the end of the row, but there’s nothing she can do for him. Nothing he wants her to do.

  And yet? But still? When the red tip of her joint moves in his direction and she’s squeezing down next to him, he can’t help but thrill to her proximity with all the hairs growing out of the pores of his skin. For the past weeks he has either breathed her in or talked to her image in his mind. He has devised detailed mental scenarios in which he tells her everything about himself down to the most abject, pathetic weakness, and still he wins her love. He shuts his eyes tight, against this train of thought and every other, because he knows exactly where they lead. A little effort and he can stay cool till it’s truly over. Half an hour, by the color of the sky.

  Vera says into his ear, “Please don’t be a dick to me.”

  He sighs, swallowing it back like a yawn. There’s no point to more talk. He regards her out of the tunnel of his hard-won calm.

  Her lips come closer. “You did what you did. That can’t be taken back either.”

  He nods. He agrees. Nothing can be taken back.

  “I don’t want to die with you hating me,” she says.

  “I don’t hate you. I mean it.”

  “So why are you acting like that?”

  She is as near him as she can be without touching. Against his eardrums pound the waves of her voice, upon his retinas the glow of her hair in the dark, upon the nerves of his skin the heat of her body. But he can sit still, he can stay centered, and they are mere phenomena. All his life, it seems, people have wanted to know why he did something or other. As if he had intentions. In a minute he won’t remember what she said. He has already forgotten.

  “You’re such a phony, Saint. You did…what you did and I still love you. I do. Maybe I’m insane.”

  Om. Om. He does what he always does, sits like a rock while the world storms around him.

  “Please,” she says, “do you want me to beg you?”

  Om namah shivaya. “No. Please don’t.”

  “I will if I want to! I’ll get down on my knees!” she says with an uncharacteristic quaver. “Listen. I hate myself, isn’t that enough?”

  He wants to put a hand to his head, which aches, but he won’t. He resists. He will be still.

  “Don’t you blank out on me!”

  She takes his arm, then quickly lets go. She seems sad, even fragile, but he remains straight and stiff, his limbs under control. He won’t try to defend himself, though he’d like to scream into the tender hole of her ear, Never in your life have you done anything you didn’t want to do! He promised her once not to be possessive. He said she could screw whomever, and it was fine with him. But it was not fine. And he must shut out her glow and her fierce breath and the heat of her skin, because if he opens himself he’ll have to admit another image, clear in his mind’s eye all the way to death. And why, minutes from death, should he invite more pain? Do you still love him? At the thought a groan rises to his throat. But he will not ask and start an argument he can’t win and doesn’t want to win.

  Then her face is against his shoulder. He feels her hands on his back. Her fingers touch his face like a blind person’s, tracing his features, his large nose, wide mouth, everything out there on the surface asking for trouble. And into the darkness stretching in front of him like a pair of maternal arms, he feels himself emptying. His rage balloons up and out, taking his breath—private anger that he has carried nearly all his life like an unregistered gun. And he howls. He howls like a dog to the moon no one can see, till he’s empty and as weak as a child, with no energy to want to be otherwise. It isn’t satori, perfect and instantaneous enlightenment. But he can rest for a bit.

  Vera, though, is still touching him. He feels her lips on the side of his neck. “You’re so gentle,” he says.

  “That’s me,” she says, and he doesn’t care whether or not she’s being ironic.

  —

  Overhead, very near, comes the squawk of a waking bird, impatient and gruff like a throat being cleared. I am kissing CJ, the first boy I’ve ever kissed, and he is kissing me, and if we are thinking of Saint we don’t mention it. Then he pulls back, and my forlorn mouth moves involuntarily in his direction. I love kissing him. I seem to love this new pastime, kissing. He runs a friendly hand over the top of my head. I tremble like a puppy.

  The bird squawks again, then another bird farther away. The night’s hold has cracked like an egg. There is a sense of general waking, as in preschool after the midmorning nap. The sky is indigo. The lake has a wrinkly surface. “Soon,” Vera says.

  Words charge through my brain, trying to signify. Saint darling, you won’t go to jail, or not for long, and when you get out you can marry Vera. Vera, just quit being stubborn, okay? CJ, you’re so nice when you aren’t trying not to be. I look from one friend to another, again struck by their perfection. “You are the only people who ever loved me—the seeing, knowing kind of love,” I say, and they nod. They know what I mean. They knew before I said it. “Are we sure,” I whisper, “that this is what we want?”

  CJ cocks his head, ready for something new to laugh at. Vera gazes into the middle distance, not quite smiling. Saint’s hand is on her knee. They have reconciled—I see that. “I just don’t want us to make a mistake,” I say.

  Their smiles, it seems, become more radiant. Over the lake a chain of purple-blue clouds has appeared. At the horizon line the water is salmon pink. I squeeze my eyes shut, but they won’t stay shut. “The world is full of light. Don’t you want to keep on seeing it?”

  My friends gaze warmly at me as if they fully agree, but maybe they’re thinking of something else. I point out an orange cloud in the dark blue. “Isn’t that weird, with the sun on the total other side of the world? Wouldn’t it be sad not to hear birds anymore, won’t you miss birds? God, do I usually talk this much?”

  “I’ve heard birds,” Vera says.

  CJ giggles. “Heard one bird, heard ’em all.”

  “No, we haven’t! The world is big. There’s so much to do. We can make up for everything.” I think of the kids in Grant Park, their humor and gravity. I think of the space between here and Chicago, between Chicago and San Francisco and Vietnam. And the moon. Room to be lost and found and lost and found a million times.

  “What time is it?” Vera says.

  I take off my watch, throw it over the bluff, wait for the splash.

  “Kay,” says Saint, “why did you do that?”

  “That reminds me of a joke,” CJ says. “Why did the moron throw the clock out the window?” He laughs, then whispers, “He wanted to make time fly! No offense. You know, I’ve always wonde
red why people say ‘no offense’ just before they give offense. To rub it in?”

  “Kay,” Vera says, “you shouldn’t do this if you don’t completely want to.”

  She sounds solemn, like a judge or a teacher. Cold shame congeals in my backbone. Without looking at anyone I feel their attention. My mouth is shut tight.

  Vera says, “Kay, tell the truth. Do you want to get out of this?”

  I shake my head no.

  “If you don’t want to do it…” Vera says. “Listen, honey, if you want to get out of it, it’s all right. Truly.”

  “Yes,” Saint says. “No blame.”

  “Oh no, oh no,” CJ says. “You signed. You have a contractual obligation.”

  “Ignore him,” Vera says.

  A very small part of me tries to smile, but my face hurts. Their gazes remain affectionate, but I feel them retreating. Shrinking back, moving ever so slightly, not away from me but nearer to one another. Nothing has happened, but I feel like one against three. Excluded. Outcast. Please love me. Silently I beg them to love me enough to stay alive with me, despite misery past and to come. Is that asking too much?

  “When we pledged, we were babies. We didn’t know any better. This is for real.” These words come from Saint, who seems unearthly calm, older than any of us. “Kay,” he goes on, “there are right and wrong reasons to do things. If life is calling you, if it means something to you…”

  He eyes me, but at the same time he’s drifting away. “Life.” Out of his mouth the word sounded tawdry. They’re all drifting away, watching me with the indifferent, terrifying love of angels. And I’m tumbling through the hole of my terror, faster and harder than I’d fall from the bluff. How can it not mean something to you, I want to say, no matter what you did? I was crying silently, but now I’m gusting with sobs. “Life doesn’t call me. Nothing calls me but you! I believe in the pact! Don’t leave me alone!”