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."
This site and all its contents are the result of the tumultuous workings of the mind of one Adam Wasserman.