by Nick Tosches
Last night I had taken a long hot bath and cleaned myself well. Beneath two of my fingernails, however, there remained, almost unnoticeable, slight dark traces. I raised these fingertips to just beneath my nostrils. I could smell the scent of blood. More than that. I could distinguish it as the scent of her blood.
The heightening of my senses and the strengthening of my body, of which in recent weeks I had at times felt passing intimations and inklings, were real. My dulled mind and senses were growing ever more delicately and sharply attuned to every subtlety of every sensation in me and around me. My tired, worn-out body grew ever more kinetic and vigorous.
My body. My soul. My life. I had discarded them. But now I was regaining them. A sound mind in a sound body, as Thales of Miletus, one of the Seven Sages, is often believed to have said in the sixth or seventh century B.C., and as the Roman poet Juvenal, whether or not he stole it from Thales, said in the second century A.D. A sound mind in a sound body. All my adult life I had mocked this definition of a well-tempered and happy life. What, I thought, was a sound mind in a sound body but a plain and pretty flower in a plain and pretty vase? The world was full of such parlor-piece lives, I thought. But things were different now. Old dogs sidle with lowered heads and dragging tails toward that at which they once had snarled and bitten. A sound mind in a sound body. This is what I felt myself becoming.
I took a Valium, poured a glass of cold milk, and brought it to the couch. I found myself looking at my forearm. The skin seemed to be tighter, less parched, less cross-hatched with the witherings of age. The thin, frail veins and the large, wormy veins that visibly pulsed were less protuberant, as if the skin was not only younger-looking but also more solid and substantial. I did not understand what was happening, but I knew myself to be blessed, to be reentering the realm of rosy health. The deterioration of my flesh and faculties was in remission.
Remission? No. What was happening went far beyond that. The god within me was coming forth. This was not remission. This was apotheosis. My apotheosis. I was becoming a god.
I looked away from my forearm. I lit a cigarette. I looked away from everything. I very slowly nodded, then just as slowly smiled.
THE AIR BROUGHT AUGURY ON THE AFTERNOON PRECEDING the night of the full moon, the eve of the vernal equinox, the spring harvest festival of Isis.
The winds were strong and the sky was overcast, but the weather was otherwise balmy and pleasing; and that morning I had opened a few windows slightly to let in the air of the day. The afternoon light through the gray cloud cover was beginning to diminish when I saw it resting on the sill beneath one of the narrowly open windows. A dried pallid tawny-brown oak leaf.
Living six flights up, with not a tree in sight, I could not recall a leaf entering my home, not even in the late autumn gusts. And the branches of what trees there were in the neighborhood had seemed to be starkly bare since the harshest days of this harsh winter. And the windows I had opened this day were ajar hardly a hand’s-breadth. But there it was, resting and still, awaiting me. The last leaf of winter, on the last full day of winter, on this afternoon preceding the night of the last full moon of winter, this eve of the spring equinox.
The full moon now rising was a rare one, a big and full perigee moon, raising tides as it drew closer to the earth than it had been in eighteen years. This powerful perigean effect on tides and other natural forces had not been so strong in all the years since that long-ago night. Melissa then was in her infancy. Perhaps she had howled at the light of that moon as she lay in her bassinet.
I knew it was an oak leaf. I found its likeness in my little Golden Nature Guide to trees. The oak was sacred to Zeus, god of gods. I seemed to remember that, according to one cosmogony, Zeus and Isis were the true parents of Dionysus. I looked through some books to find confirmation of this, and found that this belief was based on a fragment of Ariston. While looking through the books I searched, I discovered that the grandest of the festivals of Dionysus, the great Dionysia, was held in Athens in late March, at this same time of the Egyptian spring harvest festival of Isis.
In a fleeting reverie of whimsical imagination I envisioned the oak leaf wafting over ocean waves for thousands of years, from ancient sacred grove to the here and now of my windowsill, passing through the veil of time but showing its antiquity through that strange dry pallid tawny-brown that made it appear as delicate as it was enduring.
This was mere dreamy fancy, of course. But the presence of the leaf was not. I placed it carefully on my desk and I looked at it awhile. It was just a fucking dead leaf. But the convergence of all that surrounded it—moon, equinox, gods and goddesses, hallowed tree and hallowed turn of hallowed days—evoked a sense of magnitude, like a precession of some vast unexplored astronomy, of which this leaf was a silent betokening.
As with the return of my youth, I did not understand what was happening. Less so, in fact, because I was at least sure, or believed it to be sure, that my rejuvenation was being nurtured by my physical and spiritual immersion in, and merging with, the vital youth embodied in the vitally youthful flesh of another. I was, so to speak, being born again in the flesh. And in the blood; for I knew, or believed I knew, that this most intimate of acts was at the heart of it all, the most powerful and the highest aspect of our merging and the sustenance I received from that merging. It seemed like magic, but maybe it was nothing more than simple, science-based physiological cause and effect. The better part of medical knowledge—the better part of all knowledge, scientific or otherwise—lay unknown in plain sight, waiting to be known. Postulate precedes theorem, the empiricism of natural law precedes the formulae of its laboratory explication.
But this, the appearance on this day of what I felt to my bones to be a sign of the supernal, this leaf of augury, was to me a greater mystery. A mystery to whose meaning I had not a clue. Yet I somehow knew that, whatever it was, whatever it meant, it was good. Very, very good.
A new season of my life was upon me. And it would be like no other season of any life that had ever been lived. That’s what that leaf said. And that’s what I knew.
I SLEPT THROUGH THE EQUINOX THE FOLLOWING EVENING. I had been awake the previous night, gazing at the big silver moon until early morning, then had slept only a few hours before waking with a feeling of auspicious currents flowing through me. In the late afternoon I drank a cup of coffee, began to feel sleepy, and shuffled to bed to take a nap. It was still light outside. When I got out of bed, it was almost eight o’clock and dark. I had fallen asleep in winter, woken in the spring.
There was still some coffee, quite cold now, in the cup. I drank it, enjoying the subtle changes in taste that time and temperature had brought to it. Hot coffee turned cold had never tasted so good. It also made me aware that this first night of spring was colder than the last night of winter. I turned up the thermostat, but my new boiler, which had failed me through the worst of the winter, gave off no warmth.
Spring was now here, and with it the promise of warmer days to come. But the long winter’s end still lingered in the air. I made more coffee and dug out the boiler manual and specification sheets. The crowded, complicated diagrams and the dense technical terminology concerning the intricacies of the machine’s plumbing and electrical elements were so immediately and overwhelmingly daunting that, before the first sip of coffee, I almost returned the stuff to where I got it. Then I took that sip of coffee, lit a cigarette, and calmly stated to myself the words of Terence: “I am human, and nothing human is alien to me.” Now of course the boiler was not human, nor were these pages of impenetrable diagrams, charts, and undefined specialist terms. But they were the convoluted product of the convoluted human mind. The alarming sound and fury of an idiot gizmo on the blink, and nothing more. With newly heightened perception, my own enhanced mind raked the detritus from what confronted me.
My coffee was still hot when I figured out how to fix my boiler. I needed to disable what was called the night-setback function. And that was that.
> Next year, I told myself. I would have sufficient heat next year. It was good to feel that there would be a next year.
And it was good to know, as that leaf told me, that the passage of breath and seasons between now and then would unfold and resplend with the fulfillment of a mysterious promise so profound that it and its fulfillment were one and unnameable.
My coffee and my cigarette brought me great pleasure. I felt a stirring that also brought me great pleasure. For the first time in a very long time I raised pen to paper with a sense of purpose, a sense of desire.
Purpose, yes. Desire, yes. But, so strangely and beautifully, not a wisp of prescience as to what was to come when the pen touched the paper. And yet there was no hesitation, no doubt that something was to come.
I pray to a memory
I kneel before a weathered stele
I invoke the stars of an ancient blessing
I utter the names of phantoms
I carry within me the soul of the savioress
I know the way to the sea
I open tombs
I seek the air
I know the colors of breath
Only then did my hand and pen pause. And only for a moment. Then once again they moved.
May the gods without names redeem me
I put down the pen, gently pushed the sheet of paper along the surface of the desk, away from me. The sense of purpose and desire that had brought me to raise that pen to that paper were released from me, and had released me from them. I felt as I had felt just minutes before, when I figured out that I needed to disable the night-setback function on the boiler. I felt good.
With no reason, for no reason, I placed the leaf on the piece of paper. It was where it belonged. There was no reason involved. No reason at all, no thought at all. It was simply where it belonged.
From the couch I looked toward the sheet of paper and the desiccated leaf. My mind wandered, to the familiar, and to the curtain-partings in dimmed lights of what might or might not be.
“Hi. My name’s Peter and I’m an alcoholic and a sex addict.”
I had always detested that face, that voice, that presence. But in years past, when I first came to know the cumulative vileness of that face, voice, and presence, I found it almost as often to be a source of perverse entertainment as I found it to be a repellent that drove me at times not only from the room but very nearly from A.A. itself. While I would not have minded seeing violence done to him, I had never felt an urge to inflict violence on him. Now I realized that this was not so the other morning. I did not flee from him in abhorrence. I fled from my urge to squash him as one would a relentlessly annoying insect. It was, however momentary, an impulse to kill. But it was as real and impelling as it was momentary. As my brain flashed white with rage, I could see nothing but his destruction at my uncontrollable angry hands. That is why I rose and left the room. It was not he, but a new and terrible rising in me, that caused my flight. And among the marvelous heightened senses of that day, from the fluttering of that sparrow’s wings to the Eucharistic feast of those croissants and that coffee, I had not thought of the intensified new sense of brutality that I had also experienced. What if my increased sensitivities toward and receptiveness to all that was good and pleasant in this life were accompanied, by the very nature of that enhancement, by an increase in all that was evil and monstrously pleasurable? What if the new dimensions of this new existence allowed me to taste of heaven while at the same time consigned me more deeply to the unexplored regions of the private hell that had darkened and defined my old life?
These thoughts gave me unsettling pause, but I turned away from further pondering on them. I could not turn far. What had brought me to that meeting in the first place that morning? It was my inability to speak to Melissa, the self-deceiving that led me to believe that alcohol would enable me to speak what I could not speak. I had been fortunate to see this self-deceit for what it was. Now I thought of the night I met her. There had been no compunction as to biting into her flesh. And now I loved her. Why then, the other morning, should there have been any faltering or unwillingness to open my mouth to gain entry to her mind and soul, which might have been in need? And even when I realized it was a matter of my wanting to open my mouth to nothing but drink, I blamed her, damning and cursing her in my mind, as if she were the Eve to my serpent. Was this only a passing disorder, an outrageous tumult of confusion and derangement, or was I the serpent, seeing and feeling himself forever an angel forever wronged?
If I were turning into a god, it was a god most strange.
THEN AGAIN, BECOMING A GOD AND BEING A GOD WERE not quite the same. And even gods knew madness at times.
I wanted simplicity and serenity without interlude. But this could not be. I decided to go to another meeting, a different one, where there would be little or no chance of encountering the bane of the self-adoring sex addict.
What I did encounter was a young, tall, thin, sexy, longhaired, flat-chested girl in skintight blue jeans. There was a time when I did not like them thin and flat-chested. But time changes everything.
“You’re doing what I should’ve done,” I said to her after the meeting. She looked dead straight at me. The light of the cold sun settled in her long straight chestnut hair.
“What’s that?” she said.
“Coming here in time. Quitting in time.”
“ ‘Do as I say, not as I do,’ is that it?” she said.
I couldn’t tell if the look on her face was antagonistic, suspicious, or good-natured. This is probably because it was all those things, a vacillation to and fro of all those things.
“No. I mean, I’ve wasted my life.”
I felt that these words flowed honestly from me and had much truth in them. Then I thought of the books on shelves, the ones I had written, the “postcards” of my life that attested that I had been more than a drunkard wasting away in bar after bar, drinking bottle after bottle, the postcards that attested that I had accomplished things, more than most, and that what I regretfully saw as a life of discarded years, shiftlessness, and drunkenness was in truth much more than that. Maybe that was why I kept those books around. Maybe I needed those postcards.
These thoughts shot through me in an instant. There was no noticeable pause between what I had begun to say and the words that followed: “You have yours still ahead of you. All those years to live.”
“You’ve got a face like a map,” she said.
Again, antagonistic, suspicious, or good-natured. Again, probably all those things.
I tongued and sucked my false teeth into place for what I wanted to say and I said it: “Terrestrial or celestial?”
“Both.”
Good-natured. No ambiguity, no vacillation. A good-natured look.
“Thank you,” I said.
I smiled, then she smiled too. Her teeth were pearly and perfect. I hated her for them. I wanted her for them.
We ambled from the room together. I was careful to speak calmly, easily, casually.
“Have you been coming here a long time?” She knew that I was referring to this specific meeting, at this particular room.
“Oh, for about a year or so,” she said.
That was good. It meant that she wasn’t a newcomer to the program. There was an unwritten law that there should be no interaction with newcomers in their first ninety days of sobriety that did not relate directly to the program, and especially no interaction of even the most vaguely romantic kind.
We walked slowly south on Sullivan Street. She said she was returning to work. Even in her old-fashioned Keds Champion sneakers, she was as tall as I. Wanting not to force foolish conversation, I fell silent and waited for her to say something. I was curious as to what, if anything, it would be.
“This has been the worst fucking winter,” she commented idly.
I nodded slowly, deliberately, before adding my words to hers. “Yep. It sure has.” A brief pause. Then, ruminatively: “But, then again, I guess it beats six feet
under.”
Her quiet laugh was like the hint of a cough that did not come to pass.
“You live around here?” she said.
“Yeah, down a ways, below Canal.”
“Tri-Beh-Ca,” she said, in a manner that served as an open indictment of real estate agents.
“Tribeca. Treblinka. Whatever.”
This time her laugh escaped her thorax, and she smiled. “It’s nice there,” she said.
“Yeah. Springtime in Treblinka. It was a lot nicer before they ever gave it that cutesy-poo name.”
“What did they call it before then?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s a great name,” she said. “They should’ve kept it.”
“Where do you work there?”
“On Greenwich. The Tribeca Film Center. The Treblinka Film Center.”
“Do you know Chiemi Karasawa? She’s got an office there. Isotope Films.”
“Oh, God, Chiemi. I love her.”
“I’ve known her more than twenty years. She’s the best.”
“Really? What’s your name?”
“Nick. Just tell her you met her friend Nick.”
“My name’s Lorna. Yeah, Chiemi’s one of the few people in that building that actually care about making movies. Real movies. The kind without the 3-D glasses and the pre-production merchandising deals. Not like the people I work for. I think she’s on the fifth floor. I’m on the fourth.”