Several days have passed since I wrote about Grandmother's indignant passing. I hope you understand me better. The inscribing, the reliving, of those events had its toll on me, I guess, and for a while at least it grew impossible to continue. It is presently just after the New Year, two thousand and fifty-three years after the alleged birth of the white man's Savior, who has yet to fulfill the promise posterity shoved into his mouth. What used to be a time for great celebration is now just another sad and dreary day, the passing of which is hardly noticable here on this crowded, apoplectic planet. Few of us seem to recall that laughter is a salve for the troubled mind, most especially, and not exceptionally, during times of hardship. Most people refrain from any acts of celebration whatsoever and remain brooding in their homes, anxiously watching the hordes of men that are massing at our borders because they all know, even if they won't admit it, that once the tide has come it will not be broken. As a people we Americans traded long ago our compassion for the love of money, and in the process accrued a great deal of enemies.
I passed the New Year on the phone with Drusus. There was much that needed to be said, but not so much that I won't repeat it on the pages to follow. You must understand, Drusus was right. For most of my years I've been dragging around this grey stone baggage, like mother in the airport on her way to Grandmother's house, and finally, after all this time, the burden is not so tiring. But keep in mind, dear reader, as this story is closed that the greatest of us, the human who possesses the keenest understanding of his purpose in life and the abilities made available to accomplish them, usually originate from the most unspeakable suffering. Many are brought to the brink, as I was, and few return whole. But those who do, those who have undergone a long ordeal of their own and emerge from it with balance, these are our great ones, and although I do not think of myself as great in even the smallest sense I know that I have shared in the greatness of others. Ah, yes, but I keep getting ahead of myself.
I feel refreshed, invigorated. No longer do I fear the world solidifying around me, now almost complete, or my cold, grey flesh. The desperate need with which I began this task is now gone, and I think I will be able to finish it with a peace of mind. I've spent much of my life searching for some meaning in what has happened to me, thinking peace would follow naturally, but now I find that it was within reach all along if only I had stood straighter. But I am thankful that I came to this understanding in my lifetime, for there are many like me who never do. Yes, I think I know now what it means to be human.
You must see that all the threads of my life fit together somehow, even if not so apparently. Eventhing does. But in those long years ago now so fresh in my memory, on that fateful day when Canine died and Emmanuel emerged before us in fiery conflagration, I knew nothing except horror and madness, two things perhaps not much unlike each other. Who can make the proper distinction? I was there, I saw them both, and before you make any judgements you must hear the rest.
Emmanuel was badly burned. Whole pieces of cloth were grafted to his skin, and where there was no cloth there was blackened flesh that would have scarred over hideously without the proper treatment. His body was forever after deformed, although one could never discern what exactly it was that made him appear so crippled. He had been young, and healed relatively well, although the mark of the burning was everywhere about him. I remember the way he looked in the hospital. I remember the way his head lay still and small in that pillow, swathed in cotton bandages, like a mummy. Only his mouth showed through the wrappings. He had lost all his body hair, but the doctors said it would grow back. And it did, except that not a single strand ever raised itself on his shiny head again. He did not speak for many days. The doctors thought perhaps he suffered from brain damage, or that he was unconscious most of the time, but he hadn't, and he wasn't. Encased in the steely darkness he would know as long as his consciousness remained, Emmanuel was reasoning himself into his own.
Antonius, Shanai, Salvatore, and I were also sentenced to brief stays at the hospital. I hadn't been injured very badly at all. The lump on my head swelled and seemed filled with pain, and just as quickly it was gone. The health insurance covered the bills, just as it had when I put my hand through Antonius' window, or when I fell off the chair in his bedroom and shattered into a million unrecognizable fragments. Salvatore suffered a broken arm and that was all. Shanai was bruised and scratched, but nowhere seriously, and her stay at Union Memorial was the shortest. Antonius, who had called the paramedics from the neighbor's apartment, had to undergo a brief operation to remove some bits of glass from his leg. He was walking soon after.
Drusus, Lee, and Angst visited me often during the two days I stayed at the hospital. I complained to them bitterly about the confinement, for there was so much I needed to do, so much I had to say and to so many people. But the doctors insisted that I remain. I was thankful for the company of my friends, but I did not speak to them much. My thoughts were clouded and confused, and I felt as though I didn't know anything any more. I had been stripped bare of every vestige of stability a human beings needs to thrive, and I knew from experience that those who cannot forge a new state of being in such an absent state of mind are doomed to eternal madness and then death. The thought frighened me.
"David," Drusus breathed to me once, after Angst and Lee had left. "Tell me, what's the matter?"
I turned to him, my eyes vacant slots in the mangled flesh that was my face, profusely bleeding pain and bereavement. Perhaps I could have answered him, told him about the ensueing darkness that hovered about my head like vultures, but I did not. "Shanai," I whispered to him, my voice breaking, and he nodded in response. And it was true. She had walked out of the hospital as surely as if she had walked out of my life, and I knew that in her mind our relationship was over. But I needed her more than ever. I felt her absence starkly. A brief flash of sadness passed over Drusus' face, and I took it for sympathy. Perhaps I should have known better. But there were more important things on my mind, like the nagging, suspicious questions the police sergeant was asking, so even after I was allowed to leave the hospital I did not see Shanai for some time. Lauren was unhelpful, and looked at me with judgemental eyes as she avoided my questions. "She doesn't want to see you right now," she informed me coldly, while Sarah sat quietly and demeaningly in the background, staring absently at the floor.
The sergeant questioned me about the black box. Where did I get it? I told him, but he didn't believe me until Antonius and Shanai confirmed the story. He made me listen to a speech about responsibility, too. As he spoke my mind wandered, and I could see once again that corpse dangling from the tree. Then I was brought to wonder how he had gotten himself up there all alone, or if it had been a suicide at all.
With Antonius and Emmanuel waylaid in the hospital and Shanai hiding herself so well, there was only Salvatore for company. I spurned that of my more sane companions, Tom even with his glorious sense of humor and thirst for life, because they struck me as inconsistent with my mental state. Drusus, Lee, and Angst knew me well enough and what had been going on to understand, but several of my pledge brothers took the denial quite poorly, and spoke to me only curtly for some time afterwards. Salvatore and I were the only ones left after the resounding echoes of the explosion had faded in much the same way as our tired, communal friendship seemed to be expiring. Few words were spoken between us. There was little to say. Neither of us had the answers the other was seeking. For some number of days he and I took to wandering the city, with no thoughts about tests or assignments or responsibility. I simply placed one foot in front of the other and looked about myself in awe as the city was exposed.
What strange comfort I discovered in the decrepid rowhouses of Baltimore, in the abandoned hope I recognized in the faces I saw staring glumly back at me from the shadowy doorways. Such raw, black faces they were, bleak and barren and hopeless. The people sat like stones, eroding slowly away, dissolute. When I walked that city those dying days of cold, there was silent anger brewing. I felt it, but had no idea what it meant. Eventually the people oppressed must rise up and stake a claim for themselves, and whether or not they succeed or fail is the only difference between glorious revolution and seditious rebellion.
Once Salvatore and I were crossing a large, brown park sometime after noon. The air was pleasantly warm, the sky clear and blue, but there was nothing pretty about that park squatting dreadfully beside the cold, graffitee-ridden bricks of the elementary school across the street. The windows of that building were hardly even transluscent, subdued by grime as if to keep the children from eyeing the outside world, to shut them in that place of hulking darkness. No, there was nothing natural about the crooked, rusted metal fence around the park or the dead grass or the blue, plastic bags beneathe trees barren of leaves in the early spring. The was an old black man with one eye astray, hunched over himself on a park bench, rocking. It was not until we crept closer that I could hear he was singing in a strange, harmonic key, his voice cracked and withered, direly out of tune. "Why are you crying, Baltimore?" his flattened voice wailed. "Why do you weep so?"
My twentieth birthday came and went and I didn't even know it. Shanai's loss had begun to fester inside. The unbearable need to weep was so strong, and yet even if I tried not a single tear would wet my cheek. I was broken up inside, pent up like an animal, and I actually found myself hoping for more disaster just so the dam would break and I could cry again. But never in front of Salvatore. He expected me to remain hard and cold, and that is what I intended to do. Shanai, Shanai. I understand now why you were so hurt. I was blind to your emotions, but you were unreasonable as well. In those days we were all in the habit of taking things too far, and you snapped when you saw me run after Anne, didn't you? Yes, you snapped, thought I was giving you up, because that's all your past would have allowed you to believe. In that single act of desperation you discerned betrayal. That I can understand. But if only we could have talked it over, you could have broken down in my arms and we could have screwed and everything would have been alright. Of course, looking back I can see that I never really knew you at all, that you were carrying around too much buried pain and judging us all by it. What is love, really, but extended affection? It fades eventually, like the bright colors of clothes washed too many times. At the end of all paths there is only neutral grey.
The din in my mind was growing worse, and the faint edge of panic hovering above those damned angels at my back would descend upon me sometimes like great birds of prey. It was all I could do, required all the strength I could muster, to ward it off. Perhaps the eighteen years of hell I spent with mother were only a preparation, and a good one at that, because what I had endured hardened me so that I did not bend. But I did not break, either, and that is perhaps a greater virtue. Like the rocks, like the river, like the mountains, I endured, although all these, even the earth, fade eventually. To create and then to destroy. Rebirth.
At some point, Salvatore turned suddenly and gripped my shoulders. I tried to break his frantic hold, but his eyes opaque pinned me down. "David," he hissed, "I feel like I'm tripping all the time." He waited for me to say something, I think, but the only words I had for him were untimely rebukes. Throwing off his arms, I ran back up the street. He remained behind, looking calmly after me with those burning eyes, perhaps waiting for me to return. But still I fled, until he was far out of sight and the panic had receded. Because I knew even then that if I remained in the penumbra of his innumerable shades of madness they would eventually come to engulf me as well. The desire for sanity, for life, burned miraculously within, the instinct to resist, to struggle against the coming of the darkness until there was no more strength, and then to struggle some more. To never submit. To not see.
I wandered onto campus around evening, haggard and dirty and tired. Some of my old friends saw me. I smiled at them and tried to speak a humble word or two. So long had I been removed from the worlds of normal, functioning human beings that I knew it might take some time to readjust, but really, I also knew I had to loose myself from that deep scarab of instability I had taken for friendship in their stead. Could I blame such a thing on Shanai? At times I did during that long walk through the city, but I always knew that the fault was my own, that laying blame was half the reason we had all been brought to destroy ourselves. What, had I grown so accustomed to the dark side of human nature that I willingly opened my arms to it, turned my back on the other emotions beside fear and hatred? What about love, compassion, joy, satisfaction? What about confidence?
Shanai was in her apartment. I could hear her at the door peering through the peephole. There was someone else in there with her, perhaps Lauren or Sarah. I could hear brief footsteps, could detect them both trying to be silent and signaling fervently at each other. After a brief time I realized that she was not going to open the door. Dejected, still wandering in that great dreamscape that seemed to be undulating around me, I departed.
I headed back to the dormitory and crept inside. There were suddenly the happy sounds all around of people speaking and laughing, the pounding of healthy footsteps on the stairs above. Flinching, as if the noises caused me pain, I accosted the stairs and headed for my room. On the way I passed Nancy's open door, saw her sitting inside on her bed with Nicholas on the floor. "Where's Drusus?" I asked her briefly on the way by. I hoped she wouldn't respond cruelly, because as much as she hated me she also knew that he was perhaps the only one aside from Shanai who could comfort me.
I remember her face when she looked up at me, briefly sad and then hardening over. "I don't know," she snarled, although I don't think she intended the harshness. "I thought you might."
Nicholas looked up, the guilt flashing briefly in his eyes, and I smiled coolly at him. Without another word I continued toward my room. I don't know what I was seeking there. Certainly not acid, for I hadn't taken a hallucinogen in over three weeks, although judging from the relentless panic in my head I would never have known it. Salvatore's face on the street came to mind, and I could almost feel his cold hands on my shoulders again.
I opened the door of my room. The horrible smell of Fred's unchanged sheets wafted through the doorway. There he was, lying solemnly on his bed, staring at the ceiling. A feeling of digust flowed through me, and as his eyes fell on my own I shut the door. For a moment I stood uncertainly in the corridor outside, unsure where to go next. All doors seemed closed to me then. So I took out a Lucky Strike, inserted it into my mouth, and sought out the company of Emmanuel in the hospital, running away from the sadness I perceived about me everywhere, in everyone.
| * | * | * | * | * |
"I have no eyes, David," Emmanuel said to me when I arrived at his hospital bed and identified myself. He looked so small and emaciated lying in the conscientious swaths of white linen. Those were the first words I had heard from him since the day Salvatore had blown us all apart.
It was true. The doctors had removed the last bits of tissue that had remained in his bleeding sockets and sterilized them.
"Everything is dark." He tried to make some sort of gesture with his hand, but I could not garner any meaning from it. Meekly, he allowed his arm to fall back to the sheets. "Even when the bandages come off."
I sat down beside him and bowed my head. What could I say?
"The doctors say I'm lucky I'm still alive." He chuckled darkly.
After some time he asked, "David?"
"Yes?" I answered dreamily. For some reason I felt quite safe in his presence. I was content during those hours by his bed to just sit and muse and perhaps suffer some healing in the interim, answering what questions he asked or simply listening to the words he chose to speak.
"Where has Salvatore got to?" He sounded genuinely disappointed. "He hasn't come to speak with me."
I sighed wearily and laid a gentle hand on his chest. How suddenly strong he seemed to me. The weak, frightened boy I had met at the beginning of the year was vanquished, and I was unaccustomed to this man in his place. His blunt manner was somehow familliar to me, though. Of all people, he knew that I knew how to answer such questions. "I don't think he will, Emmanuel," I answered sadly.
He heaved a heavy sigh. "If he does not come, I cannot heal him."
I glanced at him sharply, but of course he could not see it. Already he was falling back into that silent cloak of contemplation. Healed, had he said? Perhaps so. I laughed aloud.
"What's so funny?" Emmanuel demanded sullenly from his bed.
"Nothing," I answered, waving the matter away with another meaningless gesture of my hand. "It's just me."
I did not think he would respond, but a moment later I distinctly heard him utter the words, slowly, as if to himself. "Twice denied." There was no more. He had returned to the permanent darkness behind his face, and in that world I suspect there was nothing else except bitter images of truth that must be reconciled. In the world of Emmanuel there was no light, but I could see that in its place he had tapped new strength. The sound of it radiated from his voice like the light from the sun, and my heart was lifted to hear that he had found it. And if one of us could find the answer to madness and resolve it then it was possible for us all. I smiled then, the first time perhaps in weeks, leaned back into my chair and waited with him painlessly, waited while Emmanuel found himself and forged his will, shaped it until he was the man that he would become for us all.
| * | * | * | * | * |
When I returned to Shanai's room and knocked on the door I felt something akin to exuberance in my bones, something brilliant and of gold. I cannot describe how I felt I was gliding on air as I walked. "Go to her," Emmanuel had told me gravely. The vigil by his bed was over, it seemed. When I left him my thoughts were colored with hope, the knowledge of what I had to do plain in my mind. Shanai and I had shared something too pure to be destroyed by the darkness of others, and if I could get her to listen to me I believed we might have been able to work something out. Emmanuel remained cold and still on his bed when I thanked him. There was something innately serious about the way he seemed to be looking back at me through the stiff bandages covering those two empty holes in his head. I had no idea of the knowledge that he possessed, that Drusus had come and spoken with him at some length.
Resolution. The way I pictured it then, walking toward her apartment, there was little chance things could go wrong. It was the strength of the emotion that carried me. I knew what lay near the center of her heart, and I knew that she loved me, too. It was a short walk to the Bradford, but for that small length of time the world seemed to shine with brilliance. The police had stopped inquiring about the drugs they had found in Antonius' apartment and Emmanuel seemed as though he were going to be alright. Antonius was of no moment to me then, and Salvatore for all I knew was still wandering the streets of that forlorn city far away, and I could have cared less.
This time Shanai opened the door for me. She stood wrapped in a bed sheet, her skin twinkling warmly in the light of the sun through the great window behind her. The words on my lips were warm with greeting. A smile opened there. It was the first time I had looked upon her for quite some time. Something struck me immediately as wrong, and the smile fell away uncertainly. She was returning my gaze uncomfortably, then averted her eyes altogether. I frowned, for she hadn't yet invited me in, when I saw Drusus step out of the bedroom with a sheet around himself as well, his naken skin flaring at me mockingly. His eyes were sad, so sad, but he did not look away.
The words forming on my tongue dropped away instantly, as did the rest of the world. I crashed, felt as though I were spiralling downward a million feet into some accursed and endless Abyss, the bottom of which was an empty wasteland full of deep crags and lava pits. The sinking feeling in my stomach was like a weight that would carry me onward toward the center of the earth, miles deep within the hot magma. Would I ever escape the promise of hell?
And then came the anger, the fury of the gods pounding between my temples. It welled up so strongly and so suddenly that I almost screamed, felt so charged with energy and the need for action that I felt as though I could have torn down the walls to get at them both. Their naked skin seemed to be laughing at me through the sheets that tried to hide it. There they stood, the both of them, one staring stupidly at the floor and the other defiantly at me and waiting for me to say something.
"Bitch!" I roared, but I did not allow myself to take a step forward, because I was afraid I wouldn't be able to control myself. Drusus flinched visibly, but did not look away. And Shanai, she looked up at me. I stood glaring at her terribly, quivering, my face flooding with blood. The bitter taste of the double betrayal was striking in my mouth, and I could not ignore it.
"O David," she started to moan. She took a meaningful step forward, but I backed away, suddenly filled with revulsion at the thought of her touch. She was looking at me with regret, one of her arms outstretched. "David," she whispered, her voice choked with tears, "please, forgive me." Drusus behind her seemed to echo her folly with his eyes. The fucking bastard wouldn't even speak. But at the moment I had no eyes for him, but only for her who had been my beloved. Never had I felt so banished before, never so filled with a hurt that pealed so strongly. Never so uncontrolably dangerous.
My rage flared monstrously once again, and I feared indeed I might strike her. "Never!" I cried out, throwing my arms about my face as if to make her go away. "I never want to see you again! Either of you!"
"David," she moaned, her legs sagging, but I could not take any more and so I rushed down the corridor. Shanai shrieked my name once, and when I didn't acknowedge fell sobbing to her knees in the middle of the hallway. But I no longer had ears for her, no longer cared about anything except destruction. There was such a fire in my veins as I had never felt before, nor felt since, obliterating every trace of weakness from my mind. Burning, burning, that rage, that fury, burning my mind clean, and never again did I feel the threat of falling victim to unerring madness. Never again.
There were no coherent thoughts as I ran to Salvatore's apartment, only raw passion, images, a need to do something. I put my fist through several car windows on the way, so that by the time I reached the front door of his rowhouse my hand was streaming with blood. He answered the pounding on his door with a brief flash of bitter, self-mocking anger, the familliar manner of Salvatore I had come to detest, but when he saw me standing on his doorstep raging like an avatar his eyes widened. The blood on my fist perhaps he mistook for someone else's. He looked at me hard, his brow furrowing slightly.
"Give me your car keys," I demanded, seething, raging.
"David -"
"Just give me your fucking keys!"
He hesitated a moment longer, then reached behind him and unhooked a keyring from the wall. I snatched it greedily and without another word started from his house. He looked after me keenly as I searched for the car, unlocked the door and threw my body inside. There he was, still standing alone and cold like a statue in the doorway, when I sped by him heading for the highway and the open road, watching me keenly.
| * | * | * | * | * |
What happened next in Shanai's room saw the end finally come to pass. For so long I had yearned for it, and when the ties were irrevocably cut I was not even present. So be it. When finally I did return to Baltimore the place had changed for me permanently, for better or for worse. Antonius was the one whose appointed task it was to relate to me those strange and terrible events from which I had so inexplicably estranged myself. At first he would not agree to talk to me about it, but in the end through he struggled my will prevailed. Slowly, haggardly, he explained, answered each question no matter how trivial or insignificant it may have seemed to him then.
After I ran away Drusus brought Shanai back inside, for the doors along the corridor nearest her apartment were all cracked. Angrily, she pushed him away, collapsed to the floor in the kitchen and wept bitter tears for herself. Drusus retired to the bathroom to shower and dress himself, and when he finally emerged he found Shanai reclining on the divan to one side of that great window through which the city seemed to be trying to squeeze itself. A cold expression marred her face, and when Drusus asked her if she would be alright she brusquely asked him to leave. But he would not. He could read the look on her face well enough, knew that if he left her to her own devices she might have ended up in the hospital again. She railed at him vehemently when he refused, cursed him and threatened to call the police, but he knew that she meant the words for herself and so suffered them quietly.
Perhaps after a time Drusus grew frightened for her. He felt that someone else should be there with them because he hardly knew her at all, or how to talk to her. So he picked up the phone and called Antonius. At first he refused to come, but Drusus was adamant. He couldn't explain why, he said, but it was important.
Seeing that his presence was agitating her, Drusus withdrew into the bedroom. Moments later he heard Shanai moving some items in the living room. Carefully, he approached the open door, looked through and saw that she held a small bong in one hand and a pack of Marlboros in the other. "What?" she snapped at him bitterly when she caught sight of him. "Checking up on me?"
"Shanai -" Drusus tried to say, his voice calm and his eyes pasty.
"Jusus fucking Christ!" Shanai shouted at him, throwing her hands madly into the air and rolling her eyes conspicuously. She collapsed onto the divan, her eyes brimming with tears, suddenly weak. "What have I done?" Her voice cracked, and this time she allowed Drusus to sit beside her and comfort her while she wept.
It was quite some time before Antonius arrived. At first he was trepid and flighty, not yet prepared for the gravity of the situation. Shanai sat frigidly and silently next to Drusus as he explained what had happened. Antonius' eyes stared back in disbelief as he listened, looking from one face and to the other uncomprehendingly.
"You did what?" he gasped.
"We slept together, you asshole!" Shanai screamed horribly, her voice rumbling deeply from the back of her throat. "Which word didn't you understand?"
"How could you?" The words seemed to have slipped out. Drusus passed him an evil glare, but Shanai seemed not to have heard. She remained limp and still, staring into the space before her eyes emptily.
Antonius approached the great window, looked down over the mass of jumbled brick and cement sprawled beneath him, examined the tiny cars as they crawled up the arid streets. "Shanai," he said suddenly, "you've got to find David. The both of you." He turned around to face them, was silhouetted by the blazing sun hanging in the sky behind him. The light split around his thin, lanky body, seemed to spring from it like wine. His voice was soft, penetrating. Calm. "Go to him and explain it all. We all know David. He'll listen. He's usually pretty reasonable."
"Reasonable?" Shanai grated. There was something hideously self-mocking in her voice. Her eyes returned to Antonius in the window, squinted then as if trying to locate him in all that light. "Absolutely not. He's the most unreasonable person I've met. I'll never get him to listen to me." Her voice trailed away into doubt.
Antonius took a step towards the two of them on the divan. Now he was speaking to Drusus. "You can't just let it lie."
"I won't," Drusus sighed. "He'll have to calm down a bit. Probably want to throw a couple of punches in my direction and not talk to me for a while. Things are going to get worse no matter what we do."
"O God," Shanai exclaimed suddenly, rising to her feet. She held her hands before her face and stared at them amazed. "What have I done?" she whispered horribly, and Drusus next to her shuddered.
Antonius let out a snort of contempt and started for the kitchen. Drusus remained quietly on the divan, curiously watching Shanai turning her hands slowly before her eyes. Staring, staring, bewildered. The sudden sound of running water punctured the air, water filling a glass. "Here, Shanai," Antonius started to say from the doorway. "Some water."
A brief moment passed before she managed to pry her eyes from her hands. Her arms fell limply by her sides. Vacantly she approached him, reached for the glass Antonius extended towards her. But before she could take it Antonius' eyes widened, and he moved the glass from her reach. Shanai stopped, looked curiously into his tall, green eyes.
"You're pupils are awfully dilated, Shanai," he said to her carefully.
Shanai did not respond. The look in her eyes had faded to vacant, Antonius told me later with a shiver, as if she were looking through him. Her mouth hung limply open.
"Shanai," he demanded more forcefully this time, "are you tripping?"
Still there was no answer. She was gone from them, lost.
"Shanai!" Antonius snapped incredulously, and started for her.
No one knows exactly what she was seeing then, what familiar and comforting world she had returned to. But I know. It was the same one that enticed her that night at the top of the parking garage. At times in a person's life there is a certain and calm knowledge that strikes with the force of truth, and the acid can fool you into thinking truth is something it's not. Even in a room full of people you can be completely and utterly alone, and if an outsider suddenly forces his presence upon you, in the middle of that pristine clarity, he can appear frightening. I do not pretend to know what it was she saw when her eyes found Antonius almost upon her, but whatever it was it filled her with absolute and acute terror. He told me later he could see it plainly in her eyes.
She screamed, let out such a ghastly shriek that Antonius brought himself to a sudden halt. He said that the hair was raised on the back of his neck, seeing her mouth twisted that way and her eyes fading to black, staring into his face as if he were a demon, or her father.
And then she was running from him, back across the room. Perhaps she had given into that instinct we all carry with us as animals, to flee whenever the danger becomes too great. But what she wasn't capable of understanding at the moment is that you can't escape from the demons in your own head. Those demons have to be dealt with, and firmly. They have to be banished, and sometimes you have to take down some of the infrastructure to find where they are hiding, tear it down and built anew. Shanai never possessed that strength, certainly not in that state of mind. Cold reality had failed her, and the acid she had taken while Drusus was in the shower permitted her to recede so that she was in that room with them and at the same time she was not. And so she ran, her eyes locked onto Antonius, ran from him while he looked back at her stunned and hurt. He knew in an instant that she was running from him and that was all, that the look on her face was because he disgusted her, and he did not know how to react.
Antonius told me later that Drusus dove from the divan to stop her, but Shanai was fleeing for her life now and her steps were quick, pounding. She did not seem to see, did not realize the danger ever, perhaps, until it was all over and Drusus and Antonius were staring out over the city with the cool wind streaming wonderously over their heads, and perhaps not even then.
Shrieking, still looking behind her, she plunged through the window and kept on running. The glass shattered before her, let her easily out into the afternoon, and still, even as she fell away from their sight towards the inevitable earth with bits of glass shining frightfully in the sunlight, her feet continued to churn the empty space. The fading screeching of her voice rose to meet them and seemed to hang in the air far longer than it should have. Antonius was staring through the gaping hole in the window, still holding the glass of water, unmoving. And Drusus, looking out after her in front of the divan, his mouth agape.
She had been running from Antonius. Yes, she was simply trying to get as far away from him as she could. And she did.
| * | * | * | * | * |
I returned to Baltimore three days later, the fifteenth of April nineteen hundred ninety-two. It was evening, and the streets were deserted. The heavens above were shrouded, cloaked by angry, broiling clouds that spit hard torrents of rain. The water battered the city, cleansing it as best it could. Driving had been difficult since I left New Jersey, and what should have been the last hour and a half of speedy driving lengthened towards three. I passed two wrecks in Delaware and one in northern Maryland.
The wind was spraying the rain into my face when I stepped exhausted from the car and looked around. The sudden roaring of the rain and the systematic lashing of the bitter wind struck me like a whip. The cold found its way into my bones, raw and unbearable, despite the fact that I pulled the coat tightly to my body. Hugging his keys to my chest I approached Salvatore's apartment only to find it dark and empty. I stood in the doorway for a moment, trying to decide what to do next. Antonius could have been staying anywhere, so reluctantly I decided to go home.
Except for the rain the world was strangely subdued and silent, I remember. I did not encounter a single soul on my journey. There were no moving cars, no people, just an unbearable emptiness, and the sudden memory of Shanai opening her door again shoved its way into my mind. Wearily, as if I had not slept in days, I pushed open the door to Gildersleeve Hall and stepped inside. I stood for a moment in the doorway, dripping stupendously onto the tiled floor, listening to the rain and the wind howling through an open window somewhere above me. The lofty sounds of silence filled my ears, an eerie, grey silence, and somehow it comforted me.
Up the stairs, past the gaping window on the second story landing, through the small puddle of rainwater that had collected on the floor. My steps were slow. I was in no hurry. I walked and reveled in how differently the world reflected back to me. It was as if I had returned to an entirely alien place, even though on the surface everything looked the same as it always had been. I took the last, flacid steps to the door of my room. I was thankful that no one was about. It was dinnertime, so I was spared the curt responses yet again to those surly stares and the questions: where have you been? did you hear ...? Three days I had been absent, and yet it wasn't enough. I needed to be alone, to wallow in my seedy sorrow pasted grey and plot my revenge.
The first thing I noticed when I found my way into my room was that Fred was gone. Breathing a heavy sigh of relief, I wondered if I could ever wake up to face the future. But sleep first, yes sleep, and worry later. The answering machine on my desk was blinking rapaciously. There were so many calls I wouldn't have been surprised had the tape run out. At first, I disregarded them. But as I stood there against the cold metal of the door my eyes would not leave that dancing, red prick of light in the absolute darkness. What if she had called? But I put the thought out of my mind. What difference would it make if she had?
But it made all the difference. So I found myself sitting in the chair at my desk, a Lucky Strike dangling fancifully from one corner of my mouth, listening to the strange litany of voices that greeted my ears. The first couple of calls were interspersed with shouts of "David, pick up the phone if you're there" and the like. I recognized Salvatore's voice, Nicholas' voice, Antonius' voice. Antonius had called several times, in fact, and the voice through the machine had been sparked with such intensity that I was momentarily alarmed. But I quickly calmed myself. Thoughts of more disaster seemed so implausible. Hadn't there been enough? But even then I was filled with an uncanny paranoia, and I was painfully aware of it. I sighed wearily. When would it end? Eventually, it did.
Several of the calls were hangups. Then a deep voice was rumbling through the speaker at me. "David Berkowitz, this is sergeant MacPhail here. I want you to give me a call. There are some questions I want to ask you. Routine. I'm sure you understand." He left a phone number, and then someone was berating me again for not answering the phone.
I climbed to my feet, not really listening anymore, and lurched toward my bed. The police were still poking around about the explosion, it seemed, and the thought of being connected to a drug ring (as it was already being referred to) made me uneasy. Why couldn't they let the damned thing drop? Couldn't they see that we had punished ourselves, that we hadn't need of help from them? On the way I put out my cigarette, and then I was on my bed. Exhaling contently, I started to sink into billowing sleep when I heard Angst's voice anxious on the tape.
"David? David, are you there?"
My eyes blinked suddenly open. I had never heard Angst sound so composed before. He sounded so goddamned serious.
Angst breathed heavily into the phone. "David, this is Angst. When you get home you've got to come up here."
What, had something really happened? Salvatore and Antonius took themselves too seriously to alarm me with their dramatics, but Angst was an entirely different story. For some odd reason, the sergeant's call returned to mind, and I was overcome with clammy foreboding. O, my god, what's happened?
Angst considered me gravely when he opened the door for me. He suddenly looked almost as tired as I was. "You look like shit," he muttered, looking me over.
"Thanks." I pushed past him into the great, sprawling mess that was his room. He closed the door carefully behind me. The air was stuffy and smelled of stale beer.
"So where have you been?" he asked me guardedly as I took a seat on his bed. He remained by the door, leaning comfortably against it, his hands behind his back.
"Driving." He had been studying, I could see. There was an open book on his desk and the reading lamp was lit. I didn't know Angst to study very often. Usually he did it because he was bored.
"Driving? You don't have a car."
"I borrowed one," I responded crisply. "Look, Angst," I said then, turning my eyes on him, "I'm really tired, so if -"
"Where did you go?" Now he was crossing the room to one of the uncomfortable wooden monstrosities which the university thought to call chairs.
I rubbed my eyes, suddenly hoping that the conversation would not take that inevitable turn towards betrayal. I was too tired to think about such things. I was too tired, I thought, to think about anything much at all. "Does it matter?" I snapped at him, momentarily losing control. He just looked calmly back at me, waiting. "Sorry, man," I breathed, shaking my head. "There's just so much - I guess you heard what happened."
Angst nodded but said nothing. He just sat there, leaning back in his chair, looking at me.
"I drove up to New England to see an old girlfriend. You know, try and feel better about the whole thing and get myself laid." I laughed, but it was a bitter sound and was not at all comforting to my ears. "When I left, you know, I wasn't planning on coming back. I really wasn't, but -"
"But what?"
I shrugged. "That chick, Debbie, kicked me out of her house this morning."
"Why?" Angst's questions were so pointless. Once again I was filled with a sinking feeling of dread.
"Does it matter? Look, Angst, I want to go to sleep."
"Have you talked to anybody since you got back?" Angst's brown eyes, set fiercely in his scraggly face, burned into my own. A slim growth of facial hair framed his cheeks. Sitting there in that chair and looking so serious my rebellious friend appeared almost severe, like a nanny.
"No. I just got back about ten minutes ago." Something twisted inside. There, it was getting closer. I knew I should have asked him to tell me what news he had straight out, but the fear of what it might have been prevented it. So like an ostrich with its head in the sand I sat there before him wallowing and let him continue to play this silly game.
Angst's eyes tumbled away. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but the words did not come out.
"Shanai?" I said, and when I saw his reaction there was no need for an answer. Suddenly I didn't feel so tired. Something had happened, I knew, something terrible, and I could not stand any longer to be left to try and guess what it was myself. Standing up, bearing down upon my old friend, I told him, "A police sergeant left his number on my machine. What happened?" Each word was like a knife slicing my lips, but they had to come out. "Angst, tell me. What happened to Shanai?"
Angst's answer was plain. "She's dead, David. She's fucking dead."
I could see in his eyes that it was the truth. Dead? My lips were locked, wouldn't form the words to the questions to which suddenly I so badly needed the answers. My thoughts were an incongruent jumble. There was no registration. It would take some time, but I knew it would come, the pain, the grief, the rage. But at that moment there was just disbelief, and numbness that left a bitter taste like bad fish in my mouth. "Dead?" I echoed. I took a meager step backwards. "How?"
"She fell out a window."
"She fell," I repeated stupidly, backing away unconsciously toward his bed. "She -" I suddenly heard voices, clear and distinct, and from behind I could make out the quiet shuffling of heavy cloaks. Grim echoes of sordid laughter seethed in the air by my ears, blended well with the fierce gasps of the storm, its fury unabated. But the company of those dark angels was already so familiar to me that the noise hardly mattered.
"David, there's something else. The police -" He was looking away again.
"Dead?" I was still trying out the word. And then the idea came to be associated with the thought. Something wrenched painfully inside my head. I no longer felt like sleeping. All I wanted was to banish the substance of the idea as far away as possible, back towards the Infinity from which it had come. It was not an acceptable outcome.
"David -" Angst started to say, but suddenly I was moving toward the door. "Where are you going?" he barked after me.
"To Shanai's," I answered coldly. I would see for myself.
"But -" But I slammed the door behind me.
Dead. It didn't seem possible. I remembered what I had said to her. As I emerged once again into the raw night, with the rain and the chill and the wind ringing in my ears, I felt as though I were approaching the final apocalypse. Except that I knew it had already happened and that I had missed it.
The faintly familiar smell of suicide was in the air. I recognized it. She had given up, taken the way out I knew she had contemplated so many times before, because once the fear of death has been diminished it is the easiest solution. She couldn't get what she wanted because she wanted to be worshipped and adored by everyone she knew. And I would have worshipped and adored her. I have ever since. But the others, never. No human is a god. To strive for it, as Alexander of Macedon did, requires remarkable feats. The five of us sitting around in a room staring each other down did not constitute such remarkable feats.
Dead, and there had still been so much flesh beneathe that smooth skin.
A sudden wave of grief overcame me and it was all I could do to force it down.
Bent under the stifling power of the earth raging, shuffling through the air suddenly alive around me, I realized that somehow, somewhere, that girl had died to punish me.
"David." The sudden sound of Lee's voice behind did not startle me. I hardly missed a step. Now he was beside me, splashing through the small ponds that dotted the satiated earth. "David," he gasped again, "don't do this."
I glanced at him, saw him looking feverishly back at me. Slowly, I shook my head.
"David," he repeated, laying a hand on my shoulder, "don't."
With a fierce cry I threw his arm away and started to run. I felt incredibly strong, as if no obstacle were strong enough to prevent me from reaching my destination. Easily my feet carried me to St. Paul Street and now I was in sight of the Bradford. The building was dark and brooding in the shadows of the evening. Some of the windows were uncovered and some were lit, but they did not concern me. Shanai's room had faced the other side, along Thirty-third Street, and so I kept on running.
And suddenly I was there. I closed my eyes, came to a sudden stop on the drenched sidewalk and lifted my face to the sky. Pellets of rain pounded me, fell onto my shrouded features and slipped wearily around my cheeks onto my clothing and the distant ground.
Dead. Irrevokably dead.
I opened my eyes, was instantly greeted by the gaping window far above me and the ugly plastic that had been placed over it. So it was true. Already I could feel the tears coming. I could see her falling in my mind, falling to the earth and dying where I was standing.
I was filled with rage, loss of mind and grief. I knew that I would never have a chance to apologize, or forgive her, or to fuck her again, and now the tears were coming, yes, they were coming in draughts, and I fell to the earth deprived of any remaining strength. I lay crawling in supplication upon the pavement, clawing at the cement and pressing my forehead there, and I wept, yes. I pounded the cement with my fist between gasps for air, and still I wept, groveling and screaming and kicking the ground where she had landed. Desperately I sought some mark of her passing, but this rain had washed away all the blood, as if she had never existed. As if she were so easily put away.
There were sudden hands on my shoulders, pulling me up. There was so little strength in me that I could not resist, but the tears did not abate. Lee had to hold me erect by the armpits, sagging deleriously, while my head lolled pathetically from side to side. The tears were drying now, and the will was gone. If Lee had let me go I would have fallen helplessly back to the earth and just lain there.
"David," I heard him whisper distinctly into my ear, the words torn so quickly from his mouth that they barely reached me. "There is also good in the world." And then I caught sight of another shadow hovering on the verge of recognition. Drusus must have seen that I noticed him, because he stepped forward, very timid, his eyes flighty.
For a moment we just looked at each other, and then I put my feet under myself and found the strength to approach him. His eyes followed me warily, but acceptingly, and I knew that if I struck him he would not defend himself. Slowly my footsteps carried me closer, until I stopped a few feet in front of him.
After a chill moment I reached out a hand and laid it gently on his shoulder. He smiled at me, but it was such a dreadful smile, devoid of any warmth at all except perhaps faint echoes of gratitude. There was still much we had to say to each other. And so together, painfully, we walked away into the night while Lee looked incredulously on.
And it amazes me still - even as I knew it then - that such a little time in my life was to mean so much.
This site and all its contents are the result of the tumultuous workings of the mind of one Adam Wasserman.