The Grey
Life, Chapter VII
The
time passed that fall like water, splashing over us in beautifully
long cascades, more than enough it seemed. There was almost a sense,
that fleeting October and November, that too much time was passing,
and all while we were caught up in our little one act play that
seemed to be heading for dangerous places. Each day Antonius and
Shanai would fight terribly and then gather us in small groups to
curry the favor of sympathizers. They were growing more and more
estranged from each other as the days melted on, always aware of it
and ever denying it. It seems to be the greatest fault of humanity,
this universal estrangement. We are constantly denying to ourselves
what is most obvious and then encouraging each other to believe in
the illusion because it promotes a false sense of security.
Look
at what we, as a people, have become.
Time
tells all, it seems, and Americans have the worst sense of time
perhaps of all the peoples that have walked this planet. Americans
don't like the rest of the world because of the brooding sense of
history that pervades there. It disturbs them. There's just too much
stone.
I
said it before, that hindsight is such a powerful tool, and it is
true. When we study the distant past, when we have access to good,
unadulterated information, we gain a clear perspective on events
because we aren't affected by the prejudices prevalent at the time.
But one day the Roman Empire was sold at auction. Rough soldiers
started making emperors and not wise old men. Rome's weary decadence
had been fought against since the latter days of the Republic. It
wasn't so much that one day the people awoke and had no regard for
their social amenities. Over time they simply grew confused. The
conviction and spirit of heart that accompanies a man who knows he
does what heaven ordains can easily check the fury of ten barbarians.
No, the people of Rome and her subjugated provinces were corrupted
beyond repair over the course of five centuries, and the barbarian
invasions were only running over a shattered husk of what had once
been.
There
were, of course, many reasons for the fall of Rome, the greatest
perhaps of which is the fact that all institutions of men are mortal,
and in today's day and age any reasonably intelligent person can read
enough about the subject to form his or her own rational opinion. At
the time it happened the citizens of the world were aware of Rome's
problems, too, and yet they were as incapable of solving them as we
are our own. Oh, they tried. All they could come up with was
Christianity. Because Rome was destined to fall the day Tiberius
Gracchus was killed in the Capitol, and if you don't know who he was
then you should pick up a book. The widely held interpretation was
that things would improve - Rome could never fall - and so the people
never really affected the sacrifices that were required, behaving
with sublime ignorance and, when it suited them, hypocracy. It's no
wonder, then, that one of the most immoral (if hypocracy is indeed
the best measure of immorality) peoples in history also produced some
of the most avid men of virtue.
But
what does all this mean? Yes, that is the question. What does any of
this mean? We look at history from a distance, attaching towering
heaps of importance to names, as if the name itself were the entity,
always forgetting that these men and women we read of, who we are
told have done great things, used to masturbate, too. History in too
many eyes loses an aspect of humanity that is essential in learning
from it.
Each
of us, each of our lives, is history in itself, even if no one will
ever know it. It is the common sum of the individual that is
humanity. To stand in awe of a great man or woman is to reverence at
the same time the nobility of the human mind, of mortal character, in
which we all share. Most of us comprise the great herd, the great
consciousness, and when one day the human race has traveled to
distant suns and splintered off various evolutionary branches, we
will not remember so much what a few of us did or said but rather how
the most of us felt. The common mind is what truly holds us in awe,
because that is God, that is what we return to upon death, and that
is what we are born of again. History has shown us that humanity is
constant, that men have been moved by the same passions since the
dawn of his current stage of physiological advancement. Even the
cheeks of Alexander of Macedon knew tears, even he was moved by love.
The passion of the individual human spirit for whatever it is his
emotional past has created for him has and always will move him to
great deeds.
And
so this only leads me to wonder, what does it mean for me? A
different answer to that question has visited me many times during my
life, so how could I possibly see for myself how I fit into this
spiritually cosmic view of things, beyond some link in a chain of
sordid delusions?
Yes,
yes, I know now; I am not myself - or, that is, we are not ourselves.
And if we are not ourselves, who are we?
Oh,
Shanai, you helped me discover so much. How blind I was then. You
showed me many things, in fact, forced me to face myself with some
measure of honesty. It's almost something I regret, that everything
you showed me I came to understand long after you had gone, and in
ways you had never intended. The things I have realized in your life,
in what it meant, could have done me so much better while you were
still by my side. That this world almost succeeded in hiding from my
peering sight that which is now the very blood of my existence - and
yet this blood no longer has veins through which to flow, no body to
serve. How useless, how tiresome life has become! I've tried to find
so much hope in you, in life, and I know that there is because I
trust in the good of humanity, and yet I also know that there is none
of it for me any more.
O,
to what malevolent, festering power will I attribute the terrible
wrath that has been incurred against me? To which god of the earth,
sea, or sky, to which calculating, demonic power of nature - to which
enduring creature's scorn should I give thanks for the dark
procession of statues that now encircles me like lions stalking the
gladiator of Rome, for this monstrous tribunal of angels that stands
now not far away? I can see nothing good, nothing whole. Everything
is broken and silent. Stone and grey is my world, and yet I can still
remember a place long ago that was not this dark.
Can
I say it was Fate, my young princess, that stole you away from me?
Ah,
but I think you already know the answer to that question.
I
look for you every night, Shanai, in the stars of the sky. I used to
think that you were gone someplace else, as if it had been the
physical laws of nature that had made the separation permanent, but
now I know. Now I know the crack into which you slipped. Because our
world is made up of atoms with electrons and things flying all about,
and all the suns of the universe are just the nucleii of even larger
atoms of an inconceivably larger world. So where does it all end? And
where does it all begin?
Antonius
stood in a haze of thick smoke before me, brandishing two red hot
kitchen knives. "We seem to be approaching some sort of
landmark," he was saying.
He
pressed the glowing blades together and brought them towards his
puckered lips. He was rewarded with a thin, steady stream of hash
smoke. I waited for him to finish in silence, not really worried that
the rest of the world had long ago faded away into a thick, unending
sea of haze, and put the knives back in the blue flame of the gas
stove. Next to the burner was a Campbell's tomato soup can, the
surface of which was scarred in several places. Seven small, thin
slabs of hash dotted the shiny surface, looking ready to be smoked.
"Shanai's
father is an alcoholic," he managed to mumble. His face was very
clear before my own. "And her mother's off in her own little
world trying to pretend things haven't gotten as bad as they have."
A
moment of intrepid silence.
"But
what was it that happened -?"
But
Antonius just shook his head and averted his eyes.
I
sucked down my hot knife. Antonius wandered uneasily about the room,
and for a moment I lost him in the haze. I moved over to the window
and looked down at the street below. Everything was silent. From
behind me I heard the hiss of Antonius' breath as he inhaled another
stream of smoke. I turned around and my eyes came to a rest on his
tired face. For a moment, standing there crouched over those two
blackened knives, he looked like the face on Domenico Fetti's Veil of
Veronica. Yes, it is not the face of Jesus but Antonius that stares
out from the canvas at the ground in front of you. They had the same
eyes, the same passion that instant - Jesus in the Washington Museum
of Art and Antonius in the petty and obscure existence he was
suffering in the cubicle he rented in some insignificant part of
Baltimore. They eyes tell all, and as I stood there looking at him I
knew he felt much the same as Jesus must have two thousand years ago,
when he hung with deprecation from the cross that had been hastily
erected for him, as the sudden realization dawned on him that
everything he had believed in, everything he had worked for, even
what he was dying for, was an illusion - a hasty product of the
easily swayed minds of men. Yes, the look of complete and utter
abandonment, the moment of realization when the veil has been lifted
and things finally appear as they really are. And for a moment,
Antonius shared his passion, and I saw Antonius upon the cross
himself, executed by the establishment because he refused to believe
the advertisements on the television, as the people for whom he bled
peered at him with a morbid curiosity.
But
then he stood up, and the image was lost. Antonius was Antonius
again, a little more stone than flesh, perhaps, but Antonius
nonetheless. I could see that he was not happy. There was something
smouldering in his eyes.
"Shanai?"
I asked, and it hurt me as much as it hurt him.
He
looked up at me quickly, and I knew I was right. For a brief moment
his green eyes were sharp again. He was looking through me. But what
did he see? It made me sad to see him like that, but I could not deny
the passion I felt growing inside myself. Did he know? He never
mentioned it to me in all the years I knew him.
I
proceeded with the hot knife that had been prepared for me. Then we
moved into the living room, leaving the three other slabs of hash on
the soup can. Antonius seated himself on the couch, I in the chair
across from him. On the way, Antonius had grabbed himself a CD case,
and as he seated himself he produced a small, Indian trinket with a
sliding top. He slid the top open and pulled out a small chunk of
hash. Setting the CD case in his lap, he started to break off tiny
pieces and rol them into miniscule balls that he dropped absently
onto the case.
I
watched him patiently, studying him carefully as he moved. He set
about his work intently. His fingers jerked rudely at times, and his
lips were pursed with raw concentration. Everything about him was
tense. But he did not speak. He finished tearing the hash into tiny
balls while King Crimson played on in the background, then produced a
delicate wooden bowl and packed it. Only after he had taken a hit and
he was breathing out the cool smoke did any semblance of peace touch
his troubled features.
He
passed the bowl over to me, and, having taken it from his fingers, he
leaned back and closed his eyes. A rush of air escaped his lungs, but
it was more of release than frustration. "I'm losing her,"
he told me. His eyes remained closed, the rest of his body calm. "I
can't help it."
I
sucked on the pipe, but my eyes did not leave his face.
"We
don't really say anything to each other any more." His eyes
opened, but I could see that there wasn't any realization there. I
passed the bowl back to him, but he did not bring it to his lips. He
ran rather a tentative finger over the rim of the bowl, feeling it,
sucking every bit of confidence he could from the comfortable and
familiar way in which the thing sat in his hand. "Why does this
always seem to happen?"
But
what could I say? Nothing, and so I simply sat by and joined him on
his unequivocal descent into the netherworld.
Yes,
there was too much time. How could I have felt then, at such an
awkward time in my life? So excited and yet at the same time so
afraid to hurt. I didn't want to add to the mark of sadness that
pervaded one of my dearest friends. Canine never said anything to me
about it, but Salvatore couldn't keep his mouth shut. "Look,"
he told me once, "what you are doing to him."
But
I was doing nothing to Antonius. Shanai and I had never so much as
kissed, and I coolly refused to travel down any dangerous paths when
she attempted flirtation. And because Drusus had shown me to some
small degree what it was he was feeling. I didn't want to hurt
Antonius. And Antonius was keen enough to have seen that. As November
drew on it became clear to Salvatore, Canine, and me that their
relationship was swiftly drawing towards disaster, and what would
happen in the aftermath was a subject that we religiously avoided.
And
so it was that I descended into a brief period of depression. Looking
back on it now, I see that it started that long and torturing descent
into obscurity I have long since suffered. And the acid, it only made
it worse because then all the emotional demons became real. I could
not escape them. It's sort of like one of those abstract paintings
you can find around sometimes, the ones that at first glance just
look like a mess of colored lines, jibberish on paper. If we're
lucky, we stare at the paper and don't see anything much, or we see
something really interesting in some obscure corner and pretend it's
the substance of the entire thing. But I was not so fortunate. I
stepped back for a moment and looked closely. That's what I was
doing. Stepping back for a better look.
O,
how I wish I had never seen! Because now it will never be gone. I
will always see the demons in the painting, see them towering over
me, behold them in all their Infinity. Never again will I be blind
enough to be able to discern those little, harmless shapes of
nothing. Never again will I be able to look at life and not see.
To
not see, to not see.
I
didn't see you very much the last few weeks of November, Shanai. You
were taking care of things, I guess, preparing the stage for the main
act. Ah, a cold wind blows, and I am shivering.
There
are those, you know, who suppose that man, the human mind, is nothing
more than a complicated computer, and, being one, can conceive of
nothing higher than himself. If this is the case, I should shoot
myself now and save myself the trouble of writing this all down,
because there is nothing worth living if it is inside a program.
The
snow was falling in light, airy flakes. Canine stood next to me by
the window in his apartment, looking grim. Our eyes looked out over
the street below, staring hard, peering. What was he looking for that
day as he washed the world with his vision? I knew what I was looking
for. The girl in the bedroom. Occasionally, a loud voice would come
through the walls, sometimes a male's, sometimes a female's. Hardly
recognizable they were, but we knew whose.
I
don't know how long we stood there before she came bursting out of
the bedroom. Canine did not turn around, but I could not help myself.
Shanai was approaching the door, torn and sobbing, and reached for
the doorknob. As she did, she turned her head a little and I could
see her face. For a moment, her eyes met with mine, and I knew her
pain. Then she opened the door and ran out, leaving the thing open
and gaping like a great jaw.
My
eyes moved to the bedroom door, awaiting the arrival of the Iceman.
He appeared a moment later, remained swathed in the inky shadows of
the evening. He was just a phantom standing there. I could not see
his eyes. Canine felt his somber presence and looked up.
With
a coldly judicial presence Antonius remained for a fraction of a
moment. Then he melted away in silence, and I turned back around just
in time to see my fist go through the window.
"You
really know how to make somebody feel like an asshole," Drusus
told me from where he sat on his bed. I looked across the room at
him, across all the empty beer bottles that we had yet to clean, past
the cassette tapes with the few songs we seemed to listen to more
than the others, songs into which we had great, emotional stores
invested. He held my eye for a moment, but then he looked away. The
fingers of one hand were clumsily playing with those of the other,
and his naked legs were swinging gently back and forth. I followed
his gaze to the window, out through the inky pathways of the night.
He bunched his brows, and his eyes gleamed as if with tears, or
something painful. What a soft soul, I said to myself, is in my
presence tonight.
I
did not say anything for a long while. After all, how could I have?
To act, even then, required enormously extreme circumstance, a
situation that went beyond the normal parameters in which our dulled,
societal minds function. So I just sat there calmly watching him
struggle. He was, it seemed, a much more delicate person that I, not
yet inured to the emotional strains that a society dominated by the
ghost of poor Jesus Christ requires of its members.
It
had been quite difficult for me to come knocking on his door, but I
knew it had to be done. Already, he meant too much to me, and I
didn't want to lose him even if he had taken Nancy from me. At first,
of course, I was quite angry. I don't know why, really, and to this
very day it puzzles me, that I felt the way I did. I am quite sure
that I didn't care for her all that much, but what else could it have
been? The worst thing, I remember thinking just before I knocked,
would be if she were in there with him.
Thank
God she wasn't.
So
there he sat ten feet away from me, a well-formed ox of a young man,
handsome face, golden hair, the only one in the whole university I
could relate to aside from Shanai, and I think he understood me
better. There wasn't really much to say. There shouldn't have been. A
lot of a big deal was being made out of something that wasn't really
that important in our lives. Ah, yes, but at the time the opposite
was true. Everything seemed to be at stake for us.
No,
there wasn't really anything to say. Not even "I forgive you",
for there wasn't really anything to forgive in the first place.
It's
almost funny to think back to that cold night in late fall of 1991,
to see Drusus as I'll always remember him, so young, so full of
vigor, so there. It's no wonder I needed him, I guess, so it's also
no wonder I slept with him, too.
I'll
never forget that moment. He was sitting next to me in all that
uncomfortable light, trying to explain something he himself did not
comprehend, and in a moment of sincerity had placed a hand on my
thigh. Ten minutes later I was sucking his cock.
What
a strange night that was. All the conflicting, confusing emotions. I
never felt that way again - never, with any other man - so it just
feels all the more like something important. It never does come up in
conversation, not ever, with each other or anyone else. It was, like
the tall, cyprus tree of morals we have taken for ourselves,
something that was always there, of which we were continually aware,
and yet never acknowledged. At least, not in practice.
When
I left his room later that night, I didn't know where I was going. I
just wandered around in a cloud of unknowing, furrowing, clammering
through the twisted maze of hallways that dormitory had become. There
was no order to my path, no purpose to my steps. I just wandered,
painfully, like Peter outside the courtyard where his doomed prophet
stood dying. The world was growing all so suddenly different then.
And the dreams in broad daylight, the ventures toward Infinity.
Sometimes, it could get confusing.
At
one point, I ended up in front of the door to my room. I shook myself
of the spell, and things became more or less solid again. The key out
of the pocket, I stuck it in the hole and opened the door. From
inside I heard the quick pull of the sheets, and I knew Fred had been
going at it again. But that was not important. I stepped inside the
darkness and closed the door behind me.
I
stood looking around myself for a moment, still not sure of what I
was doing, when I noticed the red light on the answering machine was
blinking. It was awkward growing accustomed to moving with the extra
weight I had just accumulated, inertia I had acquired due to the
transformation from possibility to stone. Eventually, I reached the
machine and was able to press the red button.
During
those terse moments as the tape rewound, the soft sounds of Fred
trying to move about discretely under his covers were suddenly
obvious, and he ceased in an instant.
"David,
it's me," Shanai's voice materialized out of the machine,
sudden, sharp, all terse and wrapped up in a heartbeat. She paused,
revealing the soft hiss and crackle of static. "Well - never
mind." She hung up.
The
last part was like a surrender.
I
turned and walked out of the room. Fred would be happy, I knew.
It
must have been about three in the morning when I set foot on St. Paul
Street. I looked around at the buildings, at Wolman Hall and McCoy,
at the parking garage and restaurant across the street, at the
rowhouses next to the restaurant. Down past the rowhouses was the
Bradford. Across thirty-third street on my side of St. Paul was the
local Wawa. The other end of St. Paul vanished into seedy darkness.
Where
the hell could she have gone, I remember thinking to myself,
frustrated. Something worried me, something was tugging at my mind,
pointing out how the precious seconds were ticking away. I could feel
the universe sliding along the timeline with shadowy grace, suddenly
aware at how impossible it was to stop the damned thing. Despite my
inability to act, in the worlds of others events were passing
rapidly.
Another
sweep up and down St. Paul. Nothing. Nothing but the groaning of the
city, slow and unyielding, shielding the slow malevolent tumor that
spreads in places we cannot see. Nothing but darkness, but a cold
shoulder turned to the needy hands of the slaves of big business.
Nothing but that slender shadow standing on the top of the roof of
the parking garage across the street.
Wasn't
it Salmon Rushdie who wrote those eerily fatallic verses, How does
newness come into the world? How is it born? Of what fusions,
translations, conjoinings is it made?
Without
even thinking I crossed the street and entered the garage. As I stood
in the elevator and experienced the four-fold change in my weight,
waiting in stone silence for the ugly, hidden brilliance of the metal
to part, I knew nothing but what I might find. The image of that
shadow, so much like any of the others I had seen - some large, some
sadly small - stuck in my mind, not only for its beauty but also for
the way it seemed so fragile and ready to break, ready to spin to the
earth from a hundred feet at the slightest push of the wind, or even
from the force of a loud noise in the street below.
Eventually,
the doors slid open. I stepped out onto the top floor of the garage
and slowly mounted the cement stairwell that gave to the roof and the
open sky. The cold November air slapped me in the face when I finally
reemerged into the night. The ground was covered with gravel and
stretched out in all directions. There was an edge to that
two-dimensional surface, though, clear and defined because it dropped
off into space all around. To my left, standing looking out over the
Baltimorean night, on the very edge of solidity, stood the
all-too-familiar shape. And standing there, looking at her, I
suddenly wanted her with such passionate desire that I felt that hot,
first rush of blood into my cock.
My
feet churned beneath myself and carried my body towards her, but
softly, silently - always silently, because if you were quiet you
didn't run the risk of attracting the attention of the evil powers
that lurk in the cracks between moments.
"Oh,
Antonius," Shanai's soft voice came to me then, borne across the
wind, a spurned, choked cry that bled with tears.
I
stopped not far away from her. She did not move, she did not even
flinch, but she knew I was there. The moment of passion I had felt
for her drifted away as I beheld her, and the feeling of hopelessness
returned. Like the day I stood in the doorway to her room when I
first met Antonius and Canine, the day I saw Sarah cry, I do not know
how long I would have just stood there, drowned in the ignobly fleshy
spirit of my incapacities, if she had not spoken first.
Her
words surprised me, but I soon let them encompass me, and once again
I was put into my role as audience, as the dumb interpreter.
"You
know," she breathed into the liquid air. The wind came slowly,
icing us with a chill that would not be warded away. "I'm
listening, but I just can't hear anything."
I
tried to move, to stop her from saying, as if by the mere act of
shaping the idea into words she would also shape the words into
reality - as if it weren't already so.
"I'm
staring into these deep, brown eyes, and I finally realize they're my
own. It's my own face I see, not anyone else's." She sighed in
mortal resignation. "I finally realize that I am all alone."
I
stopped trying to run away then.
I
guess I'm just walking in silence, she went on. Trudging through the
fine mists of eternity.
"Cause
that's all I feel."
And
if you really think about it, all of us walk in silence, separate and
alone, miserably detached from the worlds of our companions.
Why,
Shanai? Why did you have to believe this?
"Sometimes
I ask myself, what is there? What is it a human being must do?"
Ah,
I answered her finally, but no one answers. Maybe there is no answer.
The
angels are pleased, I see. They chitter eerily amongst themselves.
Yes,
that is what it is to walk in eternal silence. To have all the
questions and none of the answers. We are paradoxical in our
existence here.
To
strive and have nothing.
"And
so we walk on -"
-
engulfed in mist, unable to see what lies ahead of us, or beside us.
We wander on, leaving only a faint trail through time in the hopes
that someone might discover it and realize our own dreams.
"No,
we trudge inexorably forward, continually striving, seeking an
unknown destination -"
Anger
now, fury against the carving of stone out of mist. Now I must weep,
but I cannot. The tears have been locked inside for too long, and
besides, you can only cry with eyes of flesh and blood. Hare dare
you, angelic little devil you, how dare you raise the demons from
their bane?! How could you? What was wrong with you then?
"-
hoping it's all for a purpose."
No,
Shanai, stop. Please.
A
deep drag off a cigarette, the gentle smoke rushing in a double plume
from her nostrils. "Listen. Listen to the noises we try and
make. And enjoy the silence. Like the tree that reaches for the sun
and never quite makes it, so we trudge on. We walk in silence,
forwever onward and never quite understanding what it's all about."
Her
voice trailed away then, and I really did want to cry.
"Shanai,"
I whispered, "come down from there."
But
she remained, took another drag off her cigarette. Her eyes would not
give up the sprawling city in all its shadowy splendor.
"Shanai!"
My voice cracked like a whip. She shuddered, as if I had actually
struck her. "Come down from there now!"
There
was a tense moment during which everything seemed to stop, but
whatever it was that had held her entranced, whatever fantasy world
it was she had been seeing, it was gone. She turned towards me and
stepped carefully away from the edge. I did not look directly at her
face; I could not. But her steps were slow and weak - lost, perhaps -
and I knew she would need my guidance. I put an arm around her feeble
waist as she shuffled towards me. Almost like an old woman I led her
away from the empty air towards the stairwell. As we moved, I could
feel her body trembling.
"My,"
she remarked absently, almost to herself, as if she hadn't noticed
before. "It's cold out here." She tried to pull her flimsy
jacket around her slim body, but it was no comfort. "It's so
fucking cold."
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