The Grey
Life, Chapter XI
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.
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