by Rob Roberge
But of course they are real. You hear them throughout your life. They are as real as a memory or a love affair. They aren’t there. They never have been. But they are real.
—
LATE FALL 1986: Anne kicks you out of her Amsterdam apartment and you run out of money and have to leave Holland and now you are back in Boston and sleeping on your ex-girlfriend Jane’s couch with your Walkman on your chest, chain-smoking and snorting Dilaudid and listening to Joni Mitchell’s Blue.
No one understands the kind of pain you are in. Your pain and loneliness are undocumented in the history of human pain and loneliness—except, of course, in your history of human pain and loneliness from the year before, with Sasha.
The T runs through Jane’s building after it crosses the Charles River from Cambridge into Boston. Every fifteen minutes, the whole apartment shakes and dishes and glasses rattle and records sometimes skip, so Jane listens mostly to cassettes.
All day and all night, you lie on the couch with your Walkman on your chest and Joni Mitchell’s Blue playing as loud as possible. Your eyes are closed. You don’t move except to smoke cigarettes or drink beer, both of which you can manage while still on your back. Every once in a while, you sit up and crush some pills on what you later learn is the coffee table Jane inherited from her grandmother. And you will, honestly, feel like a piece of shit when you find out that you messed up the finish of this heirloom by crushing the pills with a dead nine-volt battery over and over.
One side of the tape plays to the end and you open up the Walkman and flip the tape and listen to the other side. Your life is over. You will never know love again—that much you are sure of.
You get wasted and smoke and listen to Joni Mitchell because, really, only Joni Mitchell has any idea of the amount of pain you are in.
Only you and Joni Mitchell have ever known this kind of love and only you and Joni Mitchell have ever known what it’s like to lose this kind of love.
Well, and Bob Dylan. You and Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan. But no one else.
—
2012: You’ve always had an uncanny ability to memorize things. In high school you were part of a study on eidetic memory, and it turned out you unconsciously use a series of random mnemonic devices. For years you remembered more things than you ever wanted to—some worthwhile, some not. You could remember full pages of The Great Gatsby or meaningless basketball statistics from your childhood, such as the scoring average, total rebounds, and total assists of every member of the New York Knicks 1973 championship team. Now, when you forget anything, it’s colored by your CTE fears. You think it’s all starting and that someday you will need a note you carry on a city bus, telling people your name and where you live, because you won’t know. Forget the name of a writer, forget something you heard on NPR and wanted to tell a friend—forget anything and you are scared shitless.
In May, you try to use your credit card at the gas station and when it asks you for your zip code, you can’t remember it. You’ve lived here for five years. You call your wife and ask her what it is. She tells you.
You’re shaking. “There’s no way I’d have forgotten this before.”
She knows you’re afraid. She doesn’t like to talk about your memory going. You’ve made her promise to help you commit suicide before you lose who you are. She says calmly that you’re being ridiculous. That, statistically, the odds favor you never losing your mind—at least not early. She tells you that you could have forgotten small things like this ten years ago and never noticed.
She is right. But what you used to think were the smallest things, you are afraid may now be pieces of the biggest things.
—
SUMMER 1988: You are at a party at a bandmate’s Boston apartment, and you’ve taken a couple of hits of acid in the afternoon because your girlfriend Jane is supposed to be out of town visiting her folks for the weekend, and you reason that if you are really fucked up you will be less inclined to cheat on her. This is what, in your early twenties, passes for foresight, nobility, and all-around stand-up-guy-ness.
Later, a cold plastic cup of beer sweats in your hand. You sit on your friend’s bed, watching his fish as it swims back and forth only on the left wall of its enormous aquarium. The story goes, though you have no idea if it’s true, that your friend dropped a hit of liquid acid in the tank once and the fish freaked out for days—swimming at three and four times its normal speed—and now has settled into an aquatic psychosis where it would never venture to the right side of the tank where the drug had been dropped. As far as the fish seems to be concerned, the right side of the tank is where very bad shit once happened, and there isn’t anything that is going to get him to go back there. If this is true, that fish, that brainless cartilage-knuckle full of prehistoric DNA flip-flopping a slow glide on the left side of the tank is, in its way, smarter than you, who returns and returns and returns and keeps returning in various ways to places where the very bad shit will happen for the next twenty years of your life.
You sit drunk and tripping, thinking about that little fish, and Jane suddenly walks into your friend’s bedroom. Because of the party noise swelling and receding with the opening and the closing of the bedroom door, you don’t even notice her walking in.
She is screaming your name.
It’s the first time you’ve heard her, but she’s saying it with the intensity and annoyance of someone who has had to repeat herself several times.
She grabs your head and forces you to look up at her and screams your name again.
Her beautiful face is full-mooned into your line of vision so that all you can see are these probing eyes attached to the person you love.
“Hey,” you say.
“What’s wrong with you?” she says.
A valid question, to be sure. But one you are not really capable of taking on right now.
“I thought you were in Rhode Island?” you say, stunned.
“What the fuck is wrong with your eyes?” she says.
“I think my eyes are okay,” you say, then start to get scared. You feel for your eyes, half expecting them to be gone or bloodied and dangling, but they feel normal. You blink fast a few times. “What’s wrong with my eyes?”
“You are so fucked up,” she says.
You point to the aquarium. “That fish can only swim on one side of the tank.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“I’ve been studying it.”
She shakes her head. There is no way you can articulate it or explain your desperate desire to not let her down or hurt her again. You want to say, “Don’t leave.” Or, “I’m surprised and happy to see you.” Or, even, of course, “I love you.” But you can’t. She is beautiful, smart, funny, and talented. She is, in short, everything you think you are not and will go on thinking you’re not for more than twenty years. The only thing you can find wrong with Jane is her taste in boyfriends—that she loves you is a blot on her otherwise spotless record, but you are soon to fix that.
There are few worse feelings than watching someone you love, who loves you deeply, come to the realization that they can no longer love you, out of fear for their own survival. This is a lesson, like many others, you will have to learn a couple of dozen times before it sinks into your thick, drug-damaged brain, and you finally grasp that it is not at all cool or romantic to be the drowning man who makes others, repeatedly, decide to go down with him, or leave him to whatever the world might have for him.
“I can’t even talk to you anymore,” she says.
You reach out to her. “You can talk to me.”
She shakes her head, eyes alive with tears as she looks above you at a point on the ceiling.
“You are always so fucked up,” she says.
You put your head down. The acid has you in a grip that’s making it a struggle to form words. You look back up at her. Her head sways above you.
She says it again, “You are always so fucked up.”
“I can’t
really talk about this right now,” you finally manage to say. “I’m really fucked up.”
She looks up at the ceiling again and you see a tear drop from her right cheek and fall onto your thigh where it darkens your jeans for a second. She takes the beer from your lap and throws it against your friend’s wall and runs out of the room. You sit for a moment, trying to think, losing the thoughts as soon as they come, unable to focus. Where her tear fell has already started to fade and blend in with the fabric of your jeans.
—
FALL–WINTER 1986–1987: You have started to try and make yourself useful and are cooking every night for your ex-girlfriend Jane. You are still getting over how badly things ended with Anne in Holland. You get a job waiting tables and get to bring home extra pasta and raw vegetables and you start eating better than you have in more than a year. Jane lived in Italy and you make every one of her favorite northern Italian meals that you know and when you’ve cooked through them all you ask the chef at work to teach you more. For a month, you don’t repeat a meal. Some nights, you fall asleep in her bed, but you haven’t had sex again yet.
One night, holding you, she says, “I’m sorry that this Anne hurt you.”
“I didn’t do her any favors,” you say.
“Still. If you want me to hate her, I will. I get sick seeing you hurt.”
You don’t say anything.
You start playing your guitar again—the only one that isn’t in storage at a friend’s rehearsal studio in Cambridge. Jane plays hers. You write a couple of songs together and you suggest starting a band (even though she’s already in one), and she looks down and says, “I couldn’t be in a band with you.”
“Why not?”
She smiles. “For one thing, what am I supposed to do when you’re off fucking the bartenders?”
Once. Bartender. Singular. But, still, she has the high ground on this one and while you might be accurate in correcting her, you would still be wrong.
You tell her you are falling in love with her and she frowns with what looks like a combination of hurt and anger. She says, “Don’t ever say that to me again unless you are going to keep saying it.”
You did let her down very badly once. You vow not to say you love her again until, and if, she says it.
You have always had trouble sleeping. And when you do sleep, you have alarmed many of your lovers, because you often wake up shaking and out of control, in panic attacks that sometimes come in waves, one after the other. Though they usually last only twenty or thirty minutes, it’s an hour or two before you can get back to sleep. You have trouble breathing—you can never draw a deep breath. It doesn’t matter if it’s thirty or ninety degrees out, you always wake up freezing.
You wake up one night on Jane’s couch having an attack, shaking and afraid and you at first don’t realize it, but she is cradling your face in both hands and looking into your eyes with more tenderness and love than anyone has ever shown you.
She says, “I’m so sorry, sweets,” and she kisses your eyelids and slides under the coat you use as a blanket on her couch and falls asleep with you. Sometime in the middle of the night, you wake up again and she calms you down and takes you to her bed.
In the morning, even though it’s still winter in Boston, the light comes through the bedroom window and heats up her little shitbox of an apartment so much that you don’t need blankets on her bed.
She puts on this experimental music she’s been working on. A friend of hers does heart studies at Mass General, which is across the street, more or less. The friend tapes patients’ hearts on ninety-minute cassettes and gives them to Jane to tape over for her band demos. But she has kept some of them with the heartbeats going whoosh, whoosh, whoosh for ninety minutes, while she plays textured experimental beautiful guitar and piano underneath the sound of the hearts. Her friend has told her many of these are from the hospital archives that go back twenty or thirty years, which means many of the heartbeats you’re hearing belong to dead people.
“This,” Jane says, “is the last of their hearts. Ever.”
You start to go down on her. You lick and kiss her lips and her clit and her thighs and at times her feet and toes and back to her clit and lips. You suck her labia in time with the hearts and try to do it so gently that you can feel her pulse. It’s when you have gently rested your lips on her clit that you feel the pulse of blood through her body and you hear her breathing and you realize she is in synch with the hearts on the tape. The tapes are ninety minutes, but they flip and repeat when one side is done and you want to make this last as long as possible because it’s among the most connected experiences you’ve ever had with another person.
The sound of the hearts and the music on the tape gets muffled beautifully now and then when she closes her thighs over your ears. You will always remember her legs. Once, she roller-skated into an ice-cream place where you were the manager. She wore shorts. Her thighs were muscular and tan and you wanted to trace every minor striation and every vein on her leg with your lips.
This rhythm is beautiful, feeling Jane’s body so in time with everything in the room. You have two fingers each in her ass and pussy—your left hand angled uncomfortably above your right—and you keep them going in and out in time with the heart on the tape and the pulse of her body. You feel your fingers rolling over each other through the skin, going different directions over and over, slowly—only speeding up when Jane’s pulse speeds up and goes off rhythm from the hearts on the tape.
The T runs every fifteen minutes and rocks the apartment over and over. You lose track of it, lose track of how many times the tape clicks over and you only know that a lot of time has passed because the sun left the window and then, slowly, the bedroom got darker and darker and now it’s evening.
Afterward, you hold each other for more than an hour. One of you and then the other says “We should get something to eat” so often without either of you moving that it eventually becomes a joke.
With the apartment totally dark, Jane lights two candles—one on each night table on either side of the bed. You both get under the covers and she rests on your chest and every fifteen minutes, the T shakes the apartment. Plates and glasses rattle in the kitchen. The candle shadows flicker and flutter more against the wall when the vibration of the train builds and then peaks, and then everything settles down again until the next one goes by.
1990: You drive twenty-three hours straight from Amherst on speed to visit Mary in Florida. Since Humboldt, you have been very careful to never drive drunk, since you know you will not always be lucky, so you have a serious case of the shakes when you finally arrive. Things between you seem fine until the second night. Actually, things between the two of you still seem fine the second night. The problem is this guy Jimmy who’s over at her apartment hanging out with you and her roommates. He seems annoyed with you before you’ve said five words. Everyone is drinking. Her roommates go out to hit some bars and you figure this Jimmy guy will go with them, but he doesn’t. You wonder what his deal is.
You end up playing Mary a tape you and your friend Rick recorded in his basement of the two of you working up new songs for the band, plus a couple of Neil Young covers from On the Beach and a drunken version of the Gilligan’s Island theme sung to the tune of “Stairway to Heaven,” which you don’t even remember doing, let alone recording. Mary knows Rick. You’re pretty sure Mary has even slept with Rick. He’s part of a group who all went to high school together, the sort of group where, by now, every woman has fucked every man at least once.
When the Gilligan’s Island theme is over, Jimmy says, “Where the fuck do you get off making fun of Zeppelin?”
You have no idea what to say to that.
“We were drunk,” you say. “Just goofing off.”
He looks like he wants to kick your ass. He’s a shrimp, maybe five five, but he wears a flannel shirt with its sleeves cut off at the shoulders and totally unbuttoned and he’s cut and wiry and he has abs like Bruce Lee and he ca
rries himself like a man who not only likes violence but like someone who seeks it out. You’ve had your ass kicked. It doesn’t hurt the way people think. You’re not afraid of him. But you still want no part of his shit and you just want Mary to get rid of him.
Mary senses the tension and, after a while, she tells you she’s going to walk Jimmy down to his truck. You’re relieved the guy is finally leaving and you’ll get to be alone with Mary.
It’s just you in the apartment for about ten minutes so you start to feel awkward and wonder where she is. You grab another beer and go out to the third-floor patio and see that Mary’s still talking to Jimmy by his pickup truck. It feels wrong to be watching them, like you’re interrupting, or spying, so you go back inside and lie on the couch and chain-smoke and drink two more beers.
You go out to the patio again and now his truck is still there, but you can only see Jimmy sitting in the driver’s seat. At first you figure Mary’s on her way up, but then it seems like Jimmy is talking to someone. Plus, he’s not leaving. You can’t see the passenger seat, but she has to be sitting there. You wonder what the hell’s going on.
You piss and grab another beer and by the time you check from the patio again, the truck is gone. And, you realize a few minutes later, so is Mary.
You sit drinking beer on her patio as bugs the size of small birds pile-drive themselves into the porch light. You turn it off and brood in the dark. You think, of course, that she may be fucking this guy. But maybe it’s not about you. Maybe Jimmy is having some kind of problem and she’s just talking to him. But that doesn’t really explain leaving.
More than an hour passes. You are too drunk to walk straight, but you are out of beer and you decide to go and find a liquor store.
As you get ready to leave, it never even occurs to you that you don’t have keys to this apartment. Or that Mary or her roommates might not be home when you get back. It only occurs to you when the door clicks behind you.