by Ben Lerner
We exited the house into a courtyard that had a raised pool and joined some other smokers around a table next to one of those tall portable patio heaters I associated with touristy restaurants. Some of the partygoers—although this felt less like a party than a place where people were always hanging out—seemed related to Chinati, others were people who lived in town, and some were visiting, friends of Diane’s friend, whose husband, I started to infer, was a director; all of the people in the courtyard were younger than I. A woman whose curly hair I could just tell was red in the dim light handed me the joint and said, “Did you know we’re under one of the darkest skies in North America?”
It was as if, by the time I exhaled, I was already a little too high, my breathing labored, and the speed and cadence of the speech around me hard to follow. I stood up suddenly, but then decided I didn’t want to go back into the light and face the grown-ups, so I sat down again without explanation; I thought the kids were laughing at me. Monika appeared and pulled up a chair beside us; she offered me a cigarette, which I took but didn’t smoke, just rotated in my fingers. Soon more cocaine was being emptied from a plastic bag onto the table, and the woman in the towel and swimsuit was chopping it up with a credit card she’d magically produced; more than the heaters, I suspected drugs were keeping her warm. Part of me said: Do a tiny bump of cocaine and you’ll feel sober, centered, back in control, and probably a little euphoric; the better part of me said, You have a cardiac condition, don’t be an idiot, come down a little and go home. The better part of me easily won the debate: I decided not to do it, but I decided not to do it after I was already looking up from the glass top of the table, having insufflated a small line.
I passed the straw to the intern and waited for the crystalline alkaloid to sober me, and then raise me into a state of preternatural attention, obliterating whatever anxiety I had about having done it. While I waited, I watched the intern whose dinner I’d purchased do three substantial lines in quick succession; I had the vague sense he wanted to impress me. Monika told him, “Hold your horses,” by which she meant something like “take it easy”; everybody laughed at her apt misuse of the proverbial phrase.
I was laughing too—in fact I saw myself from the outside, in the third person, in a separate window, laughing in slow motion—but then, having done such a stimulant, why was I outside of myself; why was time slowing? Before I knew it, I was trying hard to hold on to that question, felt it was the last link between me and my body, but soon the question didn’t belong to me, was just another thing there in the courtyard from which my consciousness was turning away. Then I was a relation between the heaters, the sky, and the blue gleam of the pool, and then I was gone, wasn’t anything at all, the darkest sky in North America. The last vestige of my personality was my terror at my personality’s dissolution, so I clung to it desperately, climbed it like a rope ladder back into my body. Once there, I told my arm to move the cigarette to my lips, watched it do so, but had no sense of the arm or lips as mine, had no proprioception. But when I inhaled the smoke—I didn’t know how the cigarette came to be lit—I could recognize it as traveling down into my chest, which was comforting, anchoring; it was the first cigarette I’d had since they’d discovered the dilation. Only after the young woman in the bathing suit said, “K—ketamine—mainly, I thought you knew,” did I hear myself ask: “What the fuck was that?”
I had done very little, and soon I was basically back in my body and in time, although my vision, if I moved my head too quickly, would break down into frames; everybody but Monika and the intern had gone back inside. But the intern, who I believe was also confused about which drug he had ingested, was not doing so well: as I watched him he raised his arms in front of his chest as if he were bench-pressing something; his eyes were open but unseeing, his eyelids fluttering; drool was trickling out of the corner of his mouth. Monika said his name, and he managed a groan. To my surprise, she just laughed, said he’d be okay, and left the two of us alone at the table. My mouth felt rubbery, but I managed to say, “You’re going to be fine, it will pass soon,” but he didn’t seem to hear me.
We sat there for I don’t know how long. My plan was to wait for someone to come out and, when I knew the intern wasn’t alone, to say I had to go and wander home, although I wasn’t sure how far my legs could take me. I was practicing my lines in my head—“I have to leave, I have to get up early tomorrow”—when the intern vomited all over himself, not really seeming to notice that he’d done so; he’d probably had a lot to drink. Not sure what to do, I asked him if he was okay, and he mumbled something in which I heard the words Sacramento and death, or maybe debt. I managed to stand up and walked awkwardly back into the house—my coordination hadn’t fully returned—with the idea of getting one of his friends to help him.
The living room, which seemed to have doubled in size, was empty, the music off. How long had we been outside? The kitchen, where I assumed people were, was a mile away, but eventually I got there; only Monika and Diane’s nameless partner were at the table. I had the vague sense I’d surprised them in a moment of intimacy.
“Where is everybody?” I asked.
“Some people went on a moonlit bike ride,” the man said. “Most went to bed.”
“The intern is sick. And I have to go home. Can somebody help him?”
“He’ll be fine,” the man said.
“He threw up,” I said.
“Good for him,” Monika said. “It will help.” A sadist.
“I have to go home,” I repeated.
“Okay,” said the man, clearly impatient for me to leave the kitchen.
“Can you help me put the intern to bed somewhere and drive me home?” It felt as if I were speaking underwater.
“It’s a short walk.” Now I hated him.
“What is your name?”
“What?”
“What is your name? I don’t know your name. I’ve never known it.” Monika laughed awkwardly. I believe I sounded crazy.
“Paul,” he said, his confusion making it sound like a question.
“Paul,” I repeated, as if confirming it, as if fixing him to his trivial self with a pin.
“You knew that,” he said.
“I swear to you,” I said, lifting a hand to my heart, “I didn’t.” I went to the giant silver refrigerator and opened it and found two cans of lime soda. I took the dish towel that was hanging from its handle and wet it in the faucet. I stopped before I left the room. “Paul,” I said again, basically spitting it, as if the absurdity of the name were readily apparent.
The intern could move his head to look at me when I approached, a good sign. But he was near tears. “I’m freaking out, man. I saw all these things. Horrible.”
“You’re going to be okay,” I said, and opened the cans of soda and put them on the table and then wiped the intern’s face and shirt. “The worst is over. I am with you,” I quoted, “and I know how it is.” He started to cry. He was probably twenty-two years old and far from home. The whole scene was ridiculous, but his fear, and so my sympathy, were genuine.
“Do you think you can walk inside?” I asked, after drinking some of the soda, which was delicious; the intern wasn’t able to muster interest in his. He shook his head no, but I saw he was willing to try. The smell of his button-down shirt was repulsive, and I helped him get out of it, and then threw the sodden thing in the pool. With his arm around my shoulder and mine around his waist, I walked him slowly inside, a parody of Whitman, the poet-nurse, and his wounded charge.
Jimmy was in one of the chairs, looking through an art book. “What’s wrong with the kid?” he asked. In the light, the intern was horribly pale.
“He did the pile,” I said. “Is there a bedroom I can put him in?”
“Right through that door and down the stairs.”
We managed to find the door and descended some white-carpeted stairs. I turned on the light and saw a large four-poster bed; no curtains hung from the posts, it was a kind of cu
be, a work of modern art. I got him to the bed and lowered him into it gently and helped him get under the covers. “Now go to sleep,” I said.
“Don’t leave me.”
“You’ll fall right asleep. I have to go home,” I said.
“I saw all these things. I’m fucked up. I feel like if I shut my eyes I’m going to die.”
“You’re fine, I promise.”
“Please,” he basically sobbed. He was desperate. I lay down on my back on the soft carpet and asked him what he’d seen. We were both staring at the white ceiling.
“I was sitting there in the chair. I could feel the chair. But it wasn’t pressing against my back, it was pressing against the front of my chest. Pressing hard. But I knew it was behind me. I can’t explain. My back and chest had become the same thing. No front or back. One thing. I couldn’t breathe in, wasn’t any space. No in to breathe into. And you and everybody else started flattening too. It was like Silly Putty.”
“Silly Putty?”
“Yeah, when we would flatten it and press it against newspapers and pull it off and it would have the image. I thought of it and then that’s what you were, everybody out back, just these images of yourselves against this flattened stuff. You were putty. Worse: meat. With your image on it, talking. Distorted. And I knew I’d made that happen because I thought it. I thought it was like Silly Putty and then it was Silly Putty and then I knew that if I thought something was like something else it would become that thing. I was trying to move and I felt like I was moving but the view wouldn’t change. My vision was locked. I remember I thought, ‘Locked like a jaw.’ Lockjaw. And then my jaw was locked. And then I thought like with rabies, like rabid dogs get. Like the Guzeks’ dog they had to put down when I was a kid, and then I could feel it, the foam at my mouth. Or I couldn’t feel it, that’s wrong, I could see it. Foam pouring out of my mouth, doglike. Pink for some reason. So where was I seeing it from? And I knew before I thought it that I was going to think: It’s like I’m dead, like I’m a ghost looking at my corpse, and I was trying not to think that because I would die if I did. But then I realized that trying not to think about something is like thinking about something, know what I mean? It has the same shape. The shape of the thought fills up with the thing if you think it, or it empties if you try not to think it, but either way it’s the same shape. And when I thought that I just felt like there was no difference between anything. And then there was no difference. Because nothing is like nothing. And there wasn’t any space.”
“The drug didn’t agree with us,” I said, to say something.
“I still don’t feel like I’m here.” Another sob. “Will you just talk to me?”
“You’re right here,” I said, and reached up from the floor and touched his shoulder, forehead, and then, a little surprised at myself, I sat up and smoothed back his hair, remembering how my father would do that to me when I had a fever as a child. Whitman would have kissed him. Whitman would have taken the intern’s fear of the loss of identity as seriously as a dying soldier’s.
“Keep talking,” he said, so I lay back down and did. I began by describing my response to the Judd, but he groaned, so I fished around for a subject, and decided on the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, having watched a documentary about it on my computer a few nights before. I talked about how Hart Crane had written The Bridge in a Brooklyn Heights apartment he only learned after the fact had been occupied by the bridge’s engineer, Washington Roebling, where he’d retreated after getting decompression sickness. (I wanted to describe the men laboring in poorly lit caissons, in danger, if they surfaced too quickly, of developing nitrogen bubbles in the blood, but I thought it might disturb the intern.) When the bridge was finished, the celebration surpassed that marking the end of the Civil War, I remembered the narrator saying over still images of crowds and fireworks. That was 1883, the year that Marx died at his desk. The year that Kafka was born. I talked about Kafka for a while, about how I had only recently learned how successful the author had been as an insurance lawyer, betting on the future. I repeated the phrase “pooled risk” a few times, said how lovely it was. Then I moved on to 1986.
When the intern was asleep, breathing regularly, I kissed him on the forehead and walked back upstairs to the living room to find that various young people were lounging there again, having presumably returned from their bike ride, no sign of Monika or Paul. I asked the redhead, whose eyes I now saw were the same green as Diane’s friend’s, and whom I was not ashamed to desire, how to get to 308 North Plateau, and she told me to turn right out of the driveway, then left when I couldn’t go any farther.
Relieved to be in the cold air and increasingly sober, I felt stupid about the drugs and drama, but I was happy I’d helped the intern, felt a tenderness for him. As I walked I heard the whistle of a train and imagined my dad was on one of its decommissioned cars. I thought of the dimly gleaming boxes in the artillery sheds, and then I imagined a long train of them, each car a work of shimmering aluminum, reflecting the moonlit desert it was moving across.
When I turned onto what I hoped was North Plateau—I couldn’t see any signs—an electric car quietly passed me going the other direction. It doubled back at the corner, the headlights now illuminating the street in front of me as I walked, and pulled up slowly beside me. Creeley was driving, his posture awkward because the seat was too far forward. He stopped and rolled down the window and said hello, that he was going to see the Marfa Lights, and he asked, in touchingly formal, accented English, if I would care to honor him with my company.
Thus the author found himself, his body still a little heavy with the traces of a veterinary dissociative anesthetic, driving nine miles out on Route 67 so as to catch a glimpse of the famous “ghost lights” with a man on whom he’d overlaid the image of a phantom. After about twenty minutes in the dark, we arrived at the viewing center, a platform faintly illuminated by red lights next to a little structure with restrooms. We shivered on the platform and looked into the westward distance.
What people report, have reported for at least a hundred years, are brightly glowing spheres, the size of a basketball, that float above the ground, or sometimes high in the air. They are usually white, yellow, orange, or red, but some people have seen green and blue. They hover around shoulder-height, or move laterally at low speeds, or sometimes break suddenly in unpredictable directions. People have ascribed the Marfa Lights to ghosts, UFOs, or ignis fatuus, but researchers have suggested they are most likely the result of atmospheric reflections of automobile headlights and campfires; apparently sharp temperature gradients between cold and warm layers of air can produce those effects.
Finally, I did see something—but it was in the other direction, and there weren’t any spheres. Far in the distance to the east I saw an orange glow on the horizon and, here and there, patches of red. At first I thought it was the light of a town, but then I realized they were wildfires or preventative controlled burns. I drew the poet’s attention to them and he nodded.
The poet lit one cigarette from another. Who was I to him? I wondered. I liked to think he also saw me as a ghost, a departed Polish poet. I saw no spheres, but I loved the idea of them—the idea that our worldly light could be reflected back to us and mistaken as supernatural. I fantasized that a couple of aluminum boxes were positioned in the distance to facilitate the mysterious radiance.
Some say the glowing spheres near Route 67
are paranormal, others dismiss them as
atmospheric tricks: static, swamp gas, reflections
of headlights and small fires, but why dismiss
what misapprehension can establish, our own
illumination returned to us as alien, as sign?
They’ve built a concrete viewing platform
lit by low red lights which must appear
mysterious when seen from what it overlooks.
Tonight I see no spheres, but project myself
and then gaze back, an important trick becau
se
the goal is to be on both sides of the poem,
shuttling between the you and I.
I thought of Whitman looking across the East River late at night before the construction of the bridge, before the city was electrified, believing he was looking across time, emptying himself out so he could be filled by readers in the future; I took him up on his repeated invitations to correspond, however trivial a correspondent I might be. I imagined the lights I did not see weren’t only the reflections of fires and headlights in the desert but also headlights from Tenth Avenue and the brilliant white magnesium of the children’s sparklers in the community garden of Boerum Hill and a little shower of embers on a fire escape in the East Village, or the gaslights of Brooklyn Heights in 1912 or 1883 or the eyeshine of an animal approaching in the dark, ruby taillights disappearing on the curve of a mountain road in a novel set in Spain. I’d been hard on Whitman during my residency, hard on his impossible dream, but standing there with Creeley after my long day and ridiculous night, looking at the ghost of ghost lights, we made, if not a pact, a kind of peace. Say that it was standing there that I decided to replace the book I’d proposed with the book you’re reading now, a work that, like a poem, is neither fiction nor nonfiction, but a flickering between them; I resolved to dilate my story not into a novel about literary fraudulence, about fabricating the past, but into an actual present alive with multiple futures. In a few weeks, just before this book began, the poem would end:
I’ve been worse than unfair, although he was
asking for it, is still asking for it, I can hear
him asking for it through me when I speak,
despite myself, to a people that isn’t there,
or think of art as leisure that is work
in houses the undocumented build, repair.
It’s among the greatest poems and fails
because it wants to become real and can
only become prose, founding mistake
of the book from which we’ve been expelled.