After we returned from the reservoir, I sent Anne to sleep in my room and without so much as a word of explanation sought out Shanai. What I had learned that evening, had obsconded from whatever native wisdom there is behind the universe, had so filled me, so contained me, that I could not keep it to myself, nor suffer to share it with someone who had no capacity to appreciate it for what it was. There was something profoundly simple I had found, something of my own to believe in. I knew then that my instincts were more reliable than what others told me, because my instincts are part of who I am, and if I didn't trust myself then who else could I trust? Because human beings are so easily misguided, and each one is acting in the best interests of himself.
She was awake when I knocked. As I walked past her into the tiny apartment in which she fit so well - as if the damn place had been made for her body - I was styled with a stern look, yet weary, as if she were vaguely exhausted from all this nonsense. I headed without a word for the bedroom to change my clothes, because they were dirty and felt so suddenly vile to me, but she misunderstood. "Do you really expect me to fuck you now?" she snapped.
I stopped short, suddenly seething. Her vehemence seemed to betray the very peacefullness I had somehow discerned in the midst of all this whorish madness. The violence coursed through me as with my blood, feeding into every cell of my body, like sustenence. "Do you think I really want to fuck you now?" I snarled into the space of the bedroom, leaving her to the ancient solidity of my back.
For a moment there was silence, and she began to cry. Such soft, vulnerable sounds they were. I tried to remain where I was, standing with my back to her as in a cold and cruel denial, and only because I didn't want to see that I had hurt her so much. But I could not. And so I went to her, put my arms around her, and for a few moments at least I held her. I wanted to tell her that everything was going to be alright, except that I didn't believe it and I couldn't bring myself to lie to her. She clutched at my back and wept as if it were the last time we would ever be together. I was momentarily taken aback at the strength of her emotion, so I just held her until her composure returned.
Afterward we fucked violently on the kitchen counter. Silverware and dishcloths and a toaster were scattered about like wreckage on the floor below us. We even managed to shatter a glass. My elbows were bleeding, and Shanai at one point smacked her head on a cabinet, a wound which later grew into a small lump. We did not say a word to each other until we were in the shower, washing each other's bodies. Her touch was delicate to my skin, almost ghostly, and for some reason it frightened me. It was too easy to imagine that she wasn't there. But when she felt my muscles tighten she wrapped her arms around my chest and pressed her warm, slithery body against my own. I suddenly realized how much I needed her, that it was wrong to have teased her. She was the only grasp on stability that I had. Being so close and naked and feeling this unexpected wave of love I was easily aroused, and so I lifted her up against the wet tiles and we had each other again.
"Was she always such a bitch?" she finally asked me as we stood resting comfortably against each other in the stream of warm water that was descending upon us.
"No," I answered sadly. For some reason I felt guilty, was sure that I had good reason to. Most of all, it seemed, I loathed with a twisting in my guts having to talk to Shanai about her, as if thinking about all the times Anne and I had screwed and how different it was with her was actually the same thing as doing it again. "She used to be - I don't know. Different."
"How different? In what way?" She spoke into my ear, her arms wrapped gently around my bare waist.
"I don't know, just different." The sullenness must have been plain in my voice.
Her arms loosened slightly. "So what did you see in her, anyway?"
"What do you mean?" I turned to look at her. Her hands slipped down to my flanks. She was looking at me intently, seriously. Part of the reason why I loved her so much, I guess, was that she was one of the strongest people I ever knew, because she wasn't afraid to be weak.
"I don't know. I look at her, and I look at me." She shrugged.
I understood then, and I sighed. I pulled her close again, and told her with as much honesty and truth as I could muster, "My memories of our relationship are mostly happy ones. Sometime since then she has grown bitter. Maybe it's the baby."
"Your baby." There was nothing accusing in the chords of her voice, but I felt accused nonetheless.
"Yes, my baby." I felt as though I should cry, possibly because I knew that Shanai was expecting me to, perhaps would even have been glad to see it. But the solidity of what I was discovering did not permit such weakness. Only obdurate strength like a barrier, shielding me from everyone else, everything else, that could hold up against the most towering tide of darkness.
"Yes." Shanai's voice came to me slowly. "Perhaps it was the baby. It's been hers for so long now - and she hates you for it, David. Maybe that's why she came back. To stuff it in your face."
"She has no right," I returned coldly. Now her arms were stroking my back, playing with the stream of steamy water that poured down it.
"She has every right. Not that I think she should blame you. I'll bet she just forgot to take her pill one morning, or did it at the wrong time, and didn't tell you, and just figured it wouldn't matter. Then when she was back in France, all by herself, her life so suddenly and permanently changed - and where were you?"
"I'm never going to see him. That bothers the fuck out of me."
"You'll have others."
"Others?" I raised an eyebrow.
"There was for Anne."
"No, there could never be."
She looked so suddenly hurt then and tried to pull away, but I held her tightly - and realized that many women must have a very inherent fear of physical power, or a stark need for it, because men are generally stronger and can force themselves upon them as if the sanctity of their will amounted to nothing - and forced her to look into my eyes. "You misunderstand me. There could never be a replacement for anyone who was ever special to you, because everyone is special in their own way. Some, of course," I added, planting a kiss on her forehead, "are more special than others."
She smiled at me, and we got out of the shower and were dressed. We sat together for a while on the couch in her compact living room, talking about what I had seen and felt that evening. I described mostly what I had learned about the universe, about all the stuff that is out there and us sitting here prettily in our tiny little corner of the cage, pretending there is nothing else. But she didn't seem to understand, or I wasn't communicating very well, and she kept asking questions that I felt I had already adequately answered. I came that night to know the true handicap of language, that we try and explain to others feelings, or experiences that involve feelings, as if the other could truly understand what the feeling felt like. But humans can only understand if they have actually felt similarly themselves once before. And that is how we become so attached to others, because there is safety and excitement in knowing that someone else is so close to you, shares something incredibly important with you, and I think these days we call it love.
| * | * | * | * | * |
I remember one day in late February when the five of us decided to trip. Over a month had passed of the new semester, and we hadn't really ever gotten around to sitting down and discussing what it was that was changing us so suddenly. We were almost all American men, you see, and American men don't talk openly to each other about their feelings. Anne's presence drove us apart like a wedge, and at weird angles, isolated me until I felt more like a virus in some clear, plastic container than a human being who could love. Salvatore and Canine were constantly together, and Antonius was too preoccupied with his social life to think about anyone else but himself. And Shanai and I - well, we tried to continue along the path we had chosen for ourselves. But there was always Anne, hanging around us like moss, following me wherever I went. I asked Shanai to put up with her, to just look forward, as I did, to those delicate and intermediary times when we could be alone. Apparently, she didn't feel the same way about it as I. But, so like her, she said nothing to me, and as the weeks of January wore into February I remember feeling her eyes less, as if I were no longer a major player in the act of her existence.
Anne even came with me to class, as if she were trying to protect me from something. But as close as she and I were then, as much time as we spent together, we could not have been farther apart. We rarely talked in those days. She followed me from one social scene to another, but kept herself as distanced from me as possible. And if she were bored she would go off and find Antonius, flirt with him ostentatiously.
Once, I remember, she said to me, "Nicholas was hitting on me the other day." I can't place where we were or who was there, just that she was being deliberate and I was refusing to look at her. For some reason, we were sitting next to one another, as if at a big party and there wasn't much room.
I shrugged. These petty games were, after all, somewhat familliar to me.
"That night at the reservoir. When we went off together." I could almost taste the hurt packed into her voice.
Again I shrugged, although now I could feel real anger beginning to stir in my bowels. One day soon, I realized, I would have to knock Nicholas down. Because a man will turn on you no matter who he is if he thinks you have something he wants. Such situations can only be resolved by a show of physical dominance. You see? We are nothing but pretentious animals.
"When we went off together, after you decided to lay down in the sand and pretend the rest of us weren't there. You remember, don't you?"
Now I did look her way. Her fatal eyes were livid with need. Almost for a moment I took her into my arms, tried to explain to her how I wished things could be like they once were, as if in a dream, but they are not, so go home. But I knew it was just a trap, and the fiery goddess of adamantine damnation would not go away. "So? You went off together. Big fucking deal."
I thought I saw the hurt pass across her features like a wave, and then it was gone, hidden behind the cold facade. "You never noticed, did you? Well," she told me, straightening her dress and coarsely turning her head from me, "we fucked out in the woods. And it was good."
But I knew her game better than she did, knew that had never happened. I also happened to know from some other girls that Nicholas was not very good in bed, and they were expecting only average performance. I knew what it took to satisfy Anne, and frankly I couldn't imagine that he had it in him to get her off. So I just shook my head, stood up, and walked away. Later on in the evening, I remember, she came back up to me and told me the truth. "As soon as we were out of sight from the rest of you he put his bloody hands under my blouse and tried to kiss me. So I punched him in the stomach and told him never to touch me again." Yes, I could understand her, and I knew that as mysterious as I was she understood most of the important parts of me, too.
But that gentle understanding only made our little games far more perverse than they ever needed to be, and now she was hitting on Antonius just so that she could irk me. Of course, she understood that I cherished the devout loyalty of my friends beyond all things, which is perhaps why I have been so alone for most of my life. Because everyone breaks that trust eventually. And Antonius so clearly wanted her. I could see it in his face. After all, Anne was a beautiful woman, and age had only sharpened her features. It is sad how dependent some people are upon their own beauty. They use it to manipulate, because it's a powerful weapon, and then when it fades they are left with nothing.
So around midnight in the heart of the deepest winter, after Anne had given up on Antonius for the evening and passed out on his bed, Antonius drew out a half sheet of acid from under the couch. "We should split this up," to told the five of us matter-of-factly, and began to cut the thing with a pocketknife.
Later on, when it seemed that the foundations of the solid Earth were crumbling beneathe my feet, I came to rely upon the very first, very sweet shred of truth I had come to know that fateful evening at the reservoir. I wasn't sure what it meant, or what I could do with it, but the sure knowledge that it existed at all, and that it implied other, more important things, far beyond the scope of my understanding at the time, balanced me easily. I guess I had been humbled, because suddenly the petty issues of my own life were insignificant in comparison to the great mission that the universe and all its constituents serve. Humbled, yes, and stricken.
An infection, too, but the castigation of the mind requires more than what we believe is holy. No, there are other aspects to consider.
Did you know that somewhere there is a matrix of equasions that perfectly describes the interactions of every atom, the state of every particle in the universe, at any given instant? Unless, of course, you consider the actions of living creatures and their relentless course throughout the cosmos, but even the acts and decisions of these things can by some means be predicted with one hundred percent accuracy. People themselves are nothing more than the sum of their experiences, limited perhaps by physiology, a long list of emotional impressions that process the input to determine an output.
Human organic machinery? Is that how I have come to view the state of things? How exceedingly hopeless, how rancid, how incredibly plain!
Ah, but there is more. None of this sillyness really matters once you understand the true nature of existence and creation - all this talk about life and death and true freedom of choice. Gazing up into the vast emptiness that fills the ludicrous gaps between the stars, past these into the immense expanses of nothing that fill the space between the galaxies - past who can say? who knows where it will begin, or where it has ended? - I gained a true sense of self. As if in the midst of all that nothing, with the sudden feeling of loss of place, of standing in that ephemeral abyss, I could find the strength to bow down to the powers that be and rest contented. That whatever it was which created all this beautifully simple and yet so viciously complex, wonderful machinery - for do you not perceive the simple genious that the fucking thing works at all? - doesn't really care the least bit about what individual people do on this little planet or how they interact. Morality and ethics are entirely human inventions, rules we set for ourselves so that our lives among each other may be led a little easier. This Genious, this inventor of the universe, whatever it be, is far beyond anything so petty in the awesome presence of creation than caring whether or not it is wrong to smoke a joint.
Creation. There was once a time when we held it in awe.
But now, so suddenly, present, back in my room. Canine has found a small, black box under my bed, hidden by some crumpled and stained kleenex, has brought it out now and is asking me what it is. Instantly I recognize the little black box the battered veteran handed to Antonius that one night so many years ago, it seemed, when all of this was just getting started. I am momentarily struck by the power of the recollection, from a time when I still felt safe and comfortable within my own head, when I was still so subtly happy and happily ignorant of what fear really is. Even now I cannot say exactly who taught terror to me or why it is a bad thing. Some things, it seems, will always remain a mystery to men. It is the fault of their individual answers, of course, but then again, who can expect to understand everything. Because here everything is an approximation. Through our senses were try and discern what is going on around us, but we never know exactly. Some humans are more correct about some things than others, perhaps, but there is no absolute way to judge, and the mere fact of belief precludes an answer.
"What's inside?" Canine has asked of me. He's staring at the thing as if it were a relic, studying the way the simple black sides seemed to be writhing in pain.
"Why did we come here?" I ask him in reply. For a moment, Fred's empty bed and the hulking television are the only things I can see. And neither gives me any comfort.
"Cigarettes," Canine has answered me, still holding the tiny box, eyes glowing intently. Staring at it, as if waiting for the thing to come alive in his hands.
Yes, cigarettes. I walk over to my desk, see that the light on the answering machine is blinking, realize that I don't really care. Darkly, I begin to search for the tabacco. I know it's here somewhere - a new pack, in fact, of white Luckies - but it doesn't seem to be materializing in front of me.
"We should get back, man," Canine has informed me impatiently from the doorway.
"Yeah, I know. Wait a minute." The search goes on. It's difficult, you must understand, to try and locate a stubby white pack of cigarettes, no matter how plainly in sight it may lie, when the colours of vision are all bleeding into each other. After a few long, frantic moments, after I have begun to think that perhaps I lost them and would have to go through this trip without a pack of my own, Canine approaches and puts his hand on my shoulder.
"What are you doing, man?" Something clicks inside my head, and for a long moment I can hear echoes of my friend's voice fading into the distance. I turn to face him with a question on my face, wondering where his voice has escaped to, as if he were not entirely ther with me but someplace else as well, or as if he had never been at all. But his eyes are so hard, engulfing, that I force myself to look away. The fear he had so loved and needed was gone now, had advanced in him like cancer to the point of excruciating need. What is it, I must wonder, that brings him so solemnly forward to meet the crux of the crisis? And what is there in the crisis that needs resolving?
"Looking for my cigarettes," I tell him, peering back at the rumpled desk and all the papers drenched in sweat.
Deftly, my friend reaches down and - I must have been looking there a minute ago - lifts up the new, unopened pack of Luckies. The circular emblem branded on its flanks seems to leer at me as if from afar as he passes them into my grasp. "We should go." And so he turns and leaves, still clutching the black box, and, of course, I follow after him.
"So what's in the box?" he asks me on the short walk back to the North Way. "You never told me."
I shrug. "I don't know. Some guy gave it to me one night. I was wasted, I guess, came home, threw it under my bed. Forgot about it, you know."
But Canine only cries out in delight and runs ahead of me, holding aloft the package he bears as if in offering to the sky and crying out ruthlessly into the cold, winter night air, "He's doesn't know! A true mystery!" And he bounds toward the future. Or the past. You never really can tell. "He doesn't know!"
Grim, faceless determination is all I have now. Because you see unlike the first time I went through this I know what's going to happen. You must understand, I am approaching the point of critical mass, of devastation. Of Apocalpyse. No need to heed all the echoes of judgement in the air. The juggernaut is coming, and you can't stop it. Believe me, I've tried.
"Oh, I remember that!" Shanai breathes when Canine tears into Antonius' living room.
"Hey, man, quiet!" Antonius tells him, but his eyes, too, are plastered on the black box. "You'll wake her up."
I walk into the room after him, through the open doorway, see that Antonius and Shanai have gathered around Canine as he places the box on a table, and come to a stop just inside, watching.
"What the fuck is that?" Salvatore, sitting on the floor playing Streetfighter, barks.
"David," Shanai says, turning to look at me. But I can only grimace when I see how large the blackness in her eyes has become, expanding, undeniably to swallow her whole. "What's inside?"
I open my mouth to answer, but surprisingly enough, it is Canine's voice that emerges from my throat. "He doesn't know!"
"You never opened it?" Antonius asks me quite seriously.
"No," Canine answers, eagerly playing with his hands. "So let's do it now."
A fractional frown slips over my face at the words, because it seems now that I am there and yet I really am not, that I am nowhere, or everywhere, because the people I am perceiving are all having my conversations for me, with no intervention on my part. What, is there not room enough in this troubled little universe for my own inconspicuous will? And Shanai isn't there anymore. Her back is to me as she watches Canine lift the lid of the black box. I feel suddenly chill standing there in the doorway watching them, feel like I'm not needed or that I hardly matter, that if I walk out of the open doorway right now they would instantaneously forget that I ever existed, and if I were to ever return we would be nothing more than strangers. The calm confidence in the mission and structure of the universe has fallen away from me, leaving me feeling vaguely betrayed. And afraid.
There they stand, the three of them, eagerly prying open the compact chest with its straight, black, metal sides, cool and cold and simply inviting invasion, like bait, the focal point of their eyesight locked rigidly onto Canine's hands, playing with the tiny latch. And then, as I stand watching, barely breathing, the spring snaps and for an instant I see Canine gasp and leap backward, a tiny dot of blood on his forefinger because you see the chest was trapped. But, of course, there is no such thing. The lid pops magnanimously open. Even Salvatore is watching now, has risen and stands not far away behind them, looking carefully on with dull, grey eyes.
"Cocaine?" The word escapes Antonius' lips like wonder. How highly he must regard himself, to think that his gods favored him so.
"No." Canine's voice is unnaturally sure. I try to peer between their backs to catch a glimpse of the cold canister's seedy innards, but the thing is so damned tiny and their backs are so damned broad, and for some reason my feet are attached to the floor. It is almost as if I am afraid to approach. No, I am afraid. There is no doubt when the world seems to close in on one particular event, something so small and seemingly insignificant you wouldn't have thought twice about it. For some reason it is only in the aftermath that we can detect the terror we should have felt. Nightmarish reality. After all, who can say what is real and what is not with any certainty?
Canine leans forward, is moving his hands toward his face. He appears to be smelling something. "No, definitely not coke." He holds up a sample of something white and powdery for Antonius to smell. But Antonius only shakes his head and frowns. "Gunpowder," Canine informs both of them. Eerie jitters, now, from the audience of angels at my back. I can see Salvatore smiling horridly somewhere in front of me. What, am I the only one who could perceive the blasphemy on his face?
"Gunpowder?" Shanai sounds disappointed.
"Yes," Canine laughed, and slammed the top of the box closed. "Gunpowder."
"What are you going to do with it?" Salvatore whispers, but I do not want to hear the answer, do not want to hear anythig, in fact, from any of them, so I flee, run out the doorway and head down the beady corridors. I do not know where I am going, just away from there, away from them. There is such exorbitant need in the strained lines of my face, if only I could see it, in the clapping of my feet upon the earth, that perhaps it can be said that I am seeking to escape myself. But it's hard to tell when you aren't removed from the urgency of the situation.
Later on, I find myself in the street. I don't think I even know my name in these dark, late hours of the night, or where I was going. The only thing that keeps me from snapping, from surrendering to the eternal and hopeless horror to which those demons disguised as friends are leading me, trying to push me over, is Shanai's name, her face. And the tattered phrase, echoing shrilly in every sound that touches my ears, from some time long ago, almost forgotten: Is there ever due punishment?
I remember being dimly aware of trees, of ancient solitude and bereavement buried deeply in the darkness, but even that soft melancholy is twisted for me now. Everything is evil, or waiting to be corrupted, and all thoughts just aspects of insanity. I know nothing of the lecherous cold, or of the icy fingers that are gaining a hold over my limbs, just that I so desperately need a resolution, a completion - anything. But I cannot stop running, cannot prevent myself from stumbling about in the splotched darkness or smacking into the solidity of the trees, as if my consciousness were entirely separate from my body. Distantly, detatched, I am watching myself freak out, bellowing, screaming madly into the winter air and stumbling onward, forever onward, not with a thought of destination but of escape, as if it were more than a dream. I am watching it right now, in fact, and it is terrible.
Yes, when the reality assumes the aspects of the nightmare.
There is not even the slightest shred of a memory of anything that went on before, for we all know that madness has no past, never changes. There are no people, no things, except two: Shanai, whose tattered face seems too thin and frightfully pale in the shifting sides of the darkness, and judgement, for which there is no image.
Is there ever -
And then, in the heart of the deepest night, I emerge from the din of the madness into perfect silence. It is darker here, too dark, a deeper shade even than black, as if somehow I had stumbled through a gap in the fabric of time and space and escaped into a great nothingness in which I would be forever trapped and alone, a place into which all of our insane find themselves so suddenly and inexoribly tossed and forgotten. The silence is oppressing, maddening, careening, sharp - and suddenly I am truly alone and there is nothing anywhere. Above me the same deeper-than-midnight upon which my battered feet trod. I come to a suddenly halt, breathing in the foul, cloying air, and my true self collides with my body with the sudden weight of invocation, and once again I am whole, but still oddly possessed, wicked - filled with the sudden urge to laugh hysterically in the face of so much terror.
Alone, did I say? Perhaps not, because dimly at first but then ever stronger, until it seemed I could see it coming from the pores of my skin, I perceive somewhere nearby something so vile, so evil, so putrid and malevolent that the tattered laughter is shorn from my lips, replaced by the sudden urge to start screaming again. And the worst part is that I can't see it. I know it's there, but I can't see it.
And before it can raise itself against me, before that deathly sick smell can really get a grip, I turn and hurl myself back the way I have come. But quietly this time, filled obsessively with the singular need to flee, but to do so undetected, to run through the woods and hope it can't catch up with me. But not horror, or terror, or any quixotic combination of both. The forest, dark as it is, seems suddenly filled with so much light and life after the empty and devastating desecration I had chanced upon. And it sustains me, brings the panic to a level I can endure and still be myself.
Somewhere, very distant in the back of my recaptured will, I wonder that I still exist, have not been mutated beyond recognition from what I once was. And what has happened to me? Ah, the answer is not clear to you yet. But do not worry. It comes.
This site and all its contents are the result of the tumultuous workings of the mind of one Adam Wasserman.