The first time Shanai and I had sex was in the woods by the Hubble Space Telescope building. It was a mostly secluded spot away from campus, where few people came at night. Those who did were usually tripping, and, I can say from experience, it was a rather pleasant and interesting place to spend some time. The building sat haunched at the top of a steep hill, behind which was a deep, rolling lawn that angled down towards a veil of tall trees. Beyond the trees was a wide brook, not too deep that boots couldn't manage the current, and then a deep rash of trees that twisted away into the night. There were all sorts of rocks in the water, some small and peculiar, others large and grotesque and squatting like sentinels. Sometimes, when I had climbed onto one and sat staring into the water, I would see gnarled faces, grim visages, carved deeply into the soul of the rocks, and then of course I would see them everywhere, encased in every aspect of the forest, all leering back at me with strangely angular expressions.
I remember Shanai rolling down the hill, spilling the mirth of small children along her path. I remember the sounds she made. I remember how I joined her, and the way she was looking at me as she pulled down the zipper of my pants. It was an enormous turn on, to be naked and erect in the cool evening air, like an animal, pawing off her clothes. The sex we had that night was brutal and exhausting, and then we screwed again. Later on, as we lay naked and satisfied on the cool rocks under our quilt, safe in the dark, soft caress of the trees, her mouth was fixed with an innocent smile, and for the first time in months I felt truly safe. Nothing else seemed to matter in those moments, but that particular one especially, because we were there and there was no need to speak.
"Tell me about Anne," she said after some time that way. I had been looking into the soft tenderness beneathe the bare branches of the trees above, covering us like a canopy, had been thinking about the camera shots in Miller's Crossing of similar scope, when that name pierced my thoughts. I flicked my eyes toward her, suddenly uncomfortable, not so much because I didn't understand my own feelings but because her insistence and the way we lay naked in the unusually warm, winter air brought to mind similar emotions shared long ago with that fierce girl from France. And I didn't need the burden of comparison and confusion.
"She was from France," I managed to say, as if it were an answer.
"Yes." The desire to know was plain in her voice. And now that I had given a part of myself I knew I couldn't refuse her. But so much of myself cried out against the sharing, screamed with mad virulence that she would later use the knowledge as a weapon against me, hurled the poisonous barb of isolation into my brain, that for a moment I almost could not bear the front of her words. "I know that. But what -? What's wrong with you?"
"Not me." My response was needlessly cold. I could not meet her eyes. If she was going to shed me like this, I was at the very least going to hide the shame from her. "She left."
"Left? Went home, you mean."
"Yes. Went home." How was I going to say this?
"Of course she did." Her hand snaked around my bare waist. I could feel her warmth distinctly, sharply. "Why do you still think of her?"
Frustration gripped me. Suddenly I envied the simplicity of the days when she was still with Antonius, before the gigantic, invisible rift had opened between us. But there was only one answer, and I believed in it then. "Because. She was pregnant."
I sensed her muscles tighten, could feel the rigor of her control, but despite her feelings she did not withdraw. "Pregnant?" she managed to say after a moment. I couldn't tell if there was condemnation there or denial or even pure hatred in her voice. "David, look at me."
I didn't want to, but I turned anyway, saw the natural beauty of her face staring back at me in all its simplicity, saw the strain of trying to understand written there as plain as the sea. And I saw bitterness as well, the hint of a sneer hiding between the ears.
"Did she have it?"
But the words were an accusation in their own way, and I flinched at them. "I don't know."
Maybe she actually understood. I don't know. It doesn't matter. But I saw her eyes flood, her skin flush. I saw it, and knew that she knew, that she knew with the comprehension of someone who also harbors a great chunk of her own pain, somewhere, well hidden and deep. She did not say anything else to me about it, and I was glad. I just put my head down and let come all the memories - all the things that were the same, and those that were different. But most of all I remembered the pain, and the way I thought there would never be any when it all began, as if this were all a fairy tale and the beautiful princess were going to make everything all right forever after.
| * | * | * | * | * |
"Your room," Canine remarked with a short nod of his head, "smells like a kind bud." And, indeed, the pungent odor of something really sweet slammed through my nostrils as soon as I entered the room, but at the moment it didn't really interest me. Antonius laughed softly and closed the door behind us, grabbed a chair next to his desk near which on the floor there was a stubby, blue Tabacco Master and a clear, liter sized bottle of water.
I followed Canine to the two chairs opposite the desk, beside Antonius' large and comfortable looking waterbed. His bedroom was small and sparse, filled with only the most essential personal items. The predominant colors were grey and white. It was a rather neutral sort of place.
"What's the matter with you anyway?" Canine demanded as he took a seat next to me, pulling a Marlboro from the box in his coat pocket. His keen eyes furrowed slightly and peered, burrowing. Almost in fear I broke gaze with him and found myself staring into Antonius' calm eyes. Calm and cold, and if cold is the price of calm I knew I would never pay it. But even those battered orbs I could not hold, and so I dropped my attention to the flowing, grey rug that was the floor.
"You really had a bad time at home, huh?" Antonius remarked, lighting his own cigarette. "Well, you're back here now. And it's New Years Eve. Everything will -"
"What?" I snapped before he could utter such blasphemy. "Be okay?" It suddenly seemed to me that things were repeating themselves.
"Yes." Antonius' voice had suddenly attained the dimensions of steel. "Stop feeling so fucking sorry for yourself. Some people are going through worse."
But what did he know? If only I could have explained, could have understood exactly how it was I felt and why, then maybe I would have spoken. But such things were closed to me then, locked horribly away, and half the reason I was so depressed was because I didn't know entirely what was bothering me, and what I did know terrified me. Because I was discovering that I knew nothing at all, that everything was different from how I had learned it was supposed to be. There were no longer reference points, no rules against which I could align my behavior, that were permanent or trustworthy. And those angels -
"Put on some Steel Pulse, man," Canine was saying. His voice was thick and raw, as if it were bleeding, seemed be dumping heaps of contempt at my feet like firewood.
"True Democracy?"
"Sure."
In a moment, the delicate pulses of the fine reggae were flooding the room, and after it trailed the bong like a shooting star. Around and around and around, always full, always transformed at last into a thick, white column of smoke that itself was never always. So how could I have made sense of my life? What sort of bargain could I have come to?
The only answer lay in my pocket, I knew, and so I withdrew the crushed, white package that held my tabacco and found myself a cigarette that was still smokable. I held the thing in my hand for a moment, listening to the music, to the scattered voices of my friends, and appreciated the way the rich odor of the stuff wafted toward my nostrils. And then I lit it, drew in a deep drag and exhaled. Okay, now I was ready.
"Salvatore will tell you, man," Canine was saying. "Ask him. He'll tell you what it's like."
"But he doesn't really know. He's not really insane."
"Oh, he's not?"
"Not any more than you or I."
"He's not?"
It had been so hard going home, so difficult to face the stage where the horror of my youth had been so languidly drawn out. I had been so relieved, so overjoyed to get away from it, and already I found myself being called back to the great, green monster, like Grandmother, like Aunt Flora, like Patrick. And the worst of it had not been any of them, or their ghosts. It had not been father, either, or mother. No, no. It had been much worse.
What, had I changed that much? Was I already so different that I was virtually unrecognizable from what I once was?
How it hurt me to go home and find that I could no longer speak to my friends. It was such a blow to realize that I was no longer interested in their conversation, didn't care who was doing what, or why, that two of my friends had already dropped out of school. I almost cried, I tell you, almost broke down and wept because they saw it, too. They saw the gulf, the abyss, saw that they could not see me on the other side. Nor could they see that I was getting closer to the edge.
And so I left quietly, packed my bags and just left. I was gone before mother could wake me up to drive her to go shopping, was already entering New Jersey when the sun came up. Once I looked back, but the view from the window on the train was obscured. All I could see was the trash people had thrown over the sides of the ditch where the tracks ran. Just before we left New York there were three black youths just off the tracks hurling rocks at the windows of the train. For some reason, they touched me.
"Hey, man, do you want to do some ether?" I looked up, saw Antonius holding the jug of water in his left hand, a crumpled tee-shirt in the other.
"What is it?" I asked.
"Ether." Already he was screwing off the top of the bottle. "Don't worry. You'll like it."
"You've never done ether before?" Canine asked me as Antonius placed the tee-shirt over the top of the bottle and turned it upside down.
"No." I shrugged. "What's it like?"
"Why," he started, and his eyes slid off my own like wet ice. "It's unreal." Antonius had already planted his face in the tee-shirt, was sucking the stuff down. "It's like - well, everything sort of goes away."
"Here man!" It was Antonius, and his voice was clenched between his teeth. His right hand extended towards me. "Take it!"
I took the rag from him, looked briefly at the cloth as if considering it, and then brought it to my face. My breath carried in with it something that stung. Coughing, I thrust the thing out toward Canine, just wanting to get it away. But even as the pricking subsided and I was relieved of the rag, a cool rush of nothing overcame my senses. I must have started in wonder, because Antonius was suddenly laughing.
"It's ether, man! Wait until you're really fucked up." He reached behind himself then and, from under the desk, retrieved two more tee-shirts. "Here," he said, filling up one of the rags. "This is yours."
Next to me, Canine was inhaling fiercely. I could hear the sharp intake of air through his nostrils, saw the face clenched in something like revelation when he removed it. Antonius was laughing again. "If I could," he said, and I felt compelled to meet his words with a fresh intake of some ether. And it was good, because I could feel the deep seed of numbness it had planted begin to grow inside me. "If I could," Antonius began again with a curt glance in my direction, "I would name my first born Ether."
"Ether?" Canine repeated dubiously, reaching for the ether jug. "I don't know, man. It's kind of obvious. Maybe Ethan, or Ethyl. Or maybe -" A smile cropped up on his face. "Maybe something like Di-ethyl Ether."
I sucked up some more, watching my two companions fade away into nothingness.
"Dr. Ethyl Ether," Antonius was laughing into his rag, "please report to anesthesiology. Dr. Ethyl Ether."
And the more I sucked the more they all fell away, combined into the nothingness which filled my head. I could still see them, could still hear them, but they didn't mean anything. They simply moved along in a way completely isolated from my own being, acted in ways that had nothing to do with my mind. Yes, that was when I truly realized what it meant to be just one of some finite number of consciousnesses trapped inside their own heads.
And then, for some strange, unknown reason, Drusus' face appeared in my head, and in a sudden fit of yearning I realized that things had so suddenly changed for us. We were the same and yet we were not ourselves. Not like it had been. I knew then that both of us would never be that weak again.
Things seemed to be clearing up suddenly, so I knew it was time for more ether. Just another moment in the rag and things receded from solidity again. Everything. Not even the idea that anything had ever existed outside of this. And then, very distinctly, I heard it coming.
From deep in the vast and hollow viscera of the Infinity I heard it, hurtling steadily towards my present position. First a tiny squeak and then gaining in strength, it emerged from the air and time and space around me like the coming of the phoenix, like the coming of the Christian god. And it grew and grew until it dominated my perception. I could still see Antonius' and Canine's lips moving, but what they said meant nothing. Just this loud crashing.
And suddenly it was rocking the universe in my brain. It was everywhere. The pounding and smashing of rock, of abysmal stone against abysmal stone. Something from out of Nothing.
And thus commenced the stoning.
The throaty sounds of bubbly cackling reached my ears from the left somewhere, but I did not have to turn my head to know what it was or where it was coming from. Almost I could taste the putrid breath of the angels on my face, on my neck, lusting after the flesh that was about to be horribly riven from me. They had come to witness, perhaps, or to take testament to the destruction of our choices.
But it was nothing compared to the vast chaos that was all around, in and through the fabric of every object that surrounded me. My eyes turned in horror to the ceiling, but it was no longer there. All I could see was the grey nothingness of Infinity.
The conflagration was so awesome it overcome me, and it was a wonder that my eardrums did not burst. It filled me up, lifted me out of my chair, bereft me of any choice of action until I found myself hurtling at a dazzling speed through the nowhere, with only the impossible sound of that cackling to reach me through the noise.
I opened my mouth as if to scream, to pour forth torrents of dispair and loss, of pain and ache and death, but just then the horrible presence of being came near to me, and although I could not see it I was terrified. The cords were taut in my neck, my back arched as if in convulsion, when the liquid started to run over me. It slid down my face and seared my skin, hardened it so suddenly that I had no time to react. Already the first few layers of my skin were stoned, and more of the stuff flowed past my eyes each second.
It was horrible. The worst thing I ever experienced besides the day I came back to discover how Shanai had died. Because in that instant I understood the implications of the turning of flesh to stone, from choice and freedom of possibility to action and reality, to granite.
Why did it have to hurt so much?
The liquid rock poured over my face, seeped down my neck and started to lap at my shoulders. My stratified features were still in their forever scream now. And all the time the stuff was sinking deeper, deeper, putting me to sleep.
The cold numbness did nothing to relieve the excruciating pain of this sort of death, and one of my last thoughts before my thoughts were quenched was that I would remain hurtling through this grey void of nothing, separated and alone, that my lips would be parted in this last scream of deference forever.
The stoning had reached my ankles. My toes were thrashing wildly in my shoes, the only parts of my body that retained any possibility of movement, and I could feel the coldness of the stuff run down the length of my foot. I could not move, could not resist.
Then my toes were stoned as well, and gallons of the stuff were still running over me, penetrating deeper, ever deeper, seeking my desires, my opinions, my most precious fantasies, to make of them a hardened monument of indignance. It appalled me to think that when it was all done I would become one of the cloaked, angelic demons that have followed me on my way ever since.
I could still hear them laughing.
Deeper and deeper into my organs the stuff sank, turning first my muscles and then my arteries to stone. Already, I was finding it difficult to breathe.
I tried screaming them - something, anything, tried to force even a whimper out of my body, but the stone was already too imbedded, to much a part of myself to break from it. I felt my lungs harden to the consistency of marble, felt my heart lurch to a sudden stop. Every last ounce of strength cried out to my lifeblood. Desperately, I tried to think my heart beating again, because never in my life have I felt anything so awful as the felling of my own heart lying inert in my chest.
And then the chaos began to recede. Its work was done. The nothingness altered, shuddered as if under heavy blows, and then broke. Even the angels had assumed their habitual, silent position at my back. Somewhere, somehow, there was light, but I knew nothing of what it was or where it was coming from. The only thing I could understand was darkness and emptiness and the nothing that pervades after the stoning.
I could still feel the tautness of my stretched lips, could sense perfectly how hard the stone was there.
And then, in the perfect calm in which I found myself bound for all eternity, I saw two people I used to know very well, one with long, blond hair and light skin and the other with short, dark hair and black skin. They crowded over my statue like vultures, pressed their faces near. The features of one of them was puzzled, and the other's vaguely disturbed, as if they didn't understand. One day I knew they would.
The one with the dark skin tried to touch the solid grey of my forehead, but he only succeeded in knocking me over, and in some freak manner of absolution, or of mercy, I shattered, littered the floor with bitter fragments of myself.
And as I lay there broken into a million pieces, waiting, unsure, trepid, I could still feel the absoluteness of my lips frozen in that perpetual scream, as if no act of penance or thought of regret would change the outcome, alleviate the consequences of our existence.
| * | * | * | * | * |
"What the fuck, man?" Drusus asked with that distant playfullness that I used to know in him. "First you put your fist through a window, then you put a gash in your bottom lip. Anything you're not telling us?" He, Shanai, and I were sitting in a circle next to the bunkbed in my room. It was one of those rare times when Fred had gone off to hide somewhere and wish he were better liked.
"Yeah." Shanai nudged me with a slender finger. "All those different drugs must turn you into an animal or something."
"What do you mean, 'different drugs'? You make it sound like I'm a junkie or something." But all three of us in that room that day knew I was digging a hole for myself that very soon I would not be able to simply leap out of. Towards the end of Christmas vacation, Antonius had brought home half an eight ball of cocaine. He, Canine, Salvatore, and I had felt compelled to shnarff it up at once. Since then, during the last couple of weeks before the semester began, we scored coke perhaps half a dozen times.
Shanai just raised an eyebrow at me and sucked in through her nose. She thought I had said something funny. I guess that's why she let me drag her into doing lines herself.
"It was ether, man," I told them.
"Did you like it?"
I hesitated only an instant. "Yeah. It was pretty cool."
Drusus laughed then. "Shit," he remarked, except I could hear that he wasn't making a joke, "I've never heard you not say that about some drug you've tried."
"And to think," Shanai added, tossing a sly smile in my direction, "he was such an innocent little boy when I first met him."
"Well," I said then, standing up. I walked over to my desk and opened the top drawer. "I think you two should smoke a joint with this innocent little boy from the Bronx."
"I don't know, man," Drusus teased absently, leaning back. "I don't do that shit. Kills brain cells, you know."
"Not that you've got anything to worry about." I sat back down next to Shanai and across from Drusus. "Where are Lee and Angst tonight, anyway?"
Drusus shrugged as he took the joint and the lighter from me. "I think they went over to the Kappa Psi house. They've been hanging out with some of the brothers there for a couple of weeks. But if you ever spent any time around here, you'd know that, David," he added slyly. He and Angst and Lee were the frequent habit of making jibes about my sudden preoccupation with artificial reality and Shanai. But they never demonstrated any dislike for Shanai, and in those short days at the beginning of the year 1992, such as scene as this one was not uncommon. But Nancy would not remain in the same room as I, never mind carry on an actual conversation with me. Those weeks after we broke up saw her turn to a ritualitic sort of hate for me. I can't understand why, but I'm sure Drusus had something to do with it. Not that he'd intentionally set her up against me, but rather because Drusus was a sap when it came to his woman and he couldn't keep his mouth shut.
"So you're all moved out, Shanai?" Drusus was asking her.
"Yep. Yesterday." It was rather odd. I was going to miss the small, pathetically cramped room in which I had been fucking her. But her new apartment had several rooms, all of which proved very quickly to be as cluttered and cramped as the dormitory. An aunt of hers sent a truckload of furniture and a bundle of household items for which neither of us could find any use whatsoever.
"Does that mean we'll be seeing even less of our young friend here?"
While we were speaking, Shanai got up and approached Fred's dresser, where there was a television set. I could never understand why, because she was such an intelligent girl, but she was addicted to the thing. Drusus and I both looked at once to see her turn the power switch, see the ghastly flickering of the screen and the musty image of the fat, balding man that was resolving there. He looked an awful lot like Chief Wiggums, except he was even uglier and was wearing a dark suit.
"Oh, man!" Drusus muttered. "Rush Limblechh." He uttered the words as if they were the name of some horrid, biblical skin disease. We sat for a moment and listened, and I grew frightened. It wasn't so much the things this man was saying (that was comedy) as it was that there were millions of people who actually believed them. And that, too, may be comedy some day. The last, desperate attempt of pain-in-the-ass white America with its sordid sense of militant Christianity to maintain its monopoly over the power structure. And the man always claimed to be speaking for all of America, and yet whenever the camera flashed to the audience all I ever saw were those annoying, middle aged men with flabby stomachs who drive fifty-five miles per hour in the left lane of the freeway as a matter of principle. And what few women that there were looked as if they hadn't had an orgasm in a half of a century, or ever.
Shanai turned the volumne off, and we were left with the wildly prophetic and overnourished visage of Limblechh, raving now about absolutely nothing, the only subject on which he was adequately informed. I almost burst out laughing, seeing his jowls bounce in his silent excitement. We decided to accompany his movements with some reggae. In a few moments, Shanai had Handsworth Revolution pumping out of my speakers. She sat down next to me and Drusus proceeded to light the kind bud joint. We smoked it in perfect silence, feeling the music, watching Limblechh dance to it in an awkward but surprisingly rhythmic cadence that matched the Pulse.
Still after the joint had passed and we were all glassy eyed and thoughtful, no one spoke. I got up to turn the volumne up on the stereo, but that was the only real action for a while. We sat still and glassy, each wrapped in the cocoon of his own thoughts. After some time, I looked up at Shanai and found her staring at me gently. I took her hand in mine.
"What were you thinking about?" she asked me softly enough so that the music hid her words from Drusus' ears. Some things didn't need to be explained to her.
"Home. What about you?"
"You."
I just stared at her, startled. And then I smiled, one of those true and beautiful smiles of joy, one that cannot be muted or diminished, one that exercises the muscles of the face. I could not resist the urge to kiss her.
And then, at that very moment, there came a slow knock at the door. The three of us did not respond, simply remained as we were and hoping whoever it was would just go away, too content with the situation to alter it. But whoever it was repeated the infraction almost insistently, and at last Drusus, who was the closest, was obliged to get up.
I looked over at the television, was soured by the musty image of Rush's face bouncing here and there and still raving. "Why don't you turn off the TV?" I suggested.
Drusus smirked, as if I were asking too much of him, flipped off the set and approached the door. I was not looking in his direction as he opened it, so the soft, French accent that reached me did not register immediately. It was only after an instant that something twisted deep inside, something that reacted intensely to the vague familiarity of that voice.
Almost too quickly I jerked my gaze to the doorway, saw Drusus staring with disbelief at the tall, beautiful girl I know he had already identified. She stepped easily into the room, navigated her long, silky legs a few steps past him into the room. Her brown eyes found mine immediately, and I knew she did not have to say anything.
The room reeled for a moment. I didn't hear Shanai ask who she was. I didn't even realize I had stood up.
"Anne." The word tore past my teeth like the question it wasn't.
This site and all its contents are the result of the tumultuous workings of the mind of one Adam Wasserman.