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Chapter X

I remember the first time I saw Angst after they decriminalized pot. I was still living in Los Angeles then, and he had flown out to meet with his publisher about a book he had written. I picked him up at the airport, and as we were walking out through the crowded streets to the nearest subway stop, he reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a joint. "We can do this now," he told me, lighting it up. I remember looking all around, at all the people there were, all the cars trying desperately to squeeze by, saw the narrow looks and the smiles.

We crossed the street in noon daylight, feeling the soft hands of the drug encase our conciousness, drinking the divine drink of the sun, passing the joint between us in hallowed silence. It was a tense first few minutes together, the first time we had laid eyes on each other in over two years. I knew that the years since we had graduated from college had been hard on Angst, but they were nothing like they had been for me. But if the young shadow walking on my left knew anything about me he knew that I knew, knew everything I had been through when it really mattered, was with me when the bloody, shattered fragments of my life were staring at me terribly from the battered streets, hazy in the flourescent streetlight, all jagged and reeking of violence.

"How is everything with Allie?" I finally asked him as we lumbered down into the earth, were sucked down the gaping hole like a jaw. The noise of the city slowly receded, was taken over by the loud murmuring of men all around. This place under the earth, this object into which the endless flow of humans never ceased to eddy, was dusty, dank, and as we passed through the gates - dropped our tokens through the slot - I felt as though I were weaving my way through a flourescent forest.

"We're getting divorced," he muttered gravely, adjusting the shoulder strap of the small bag he carried.

Yes, I knew they had been hard on him. In these last seven years he had only managed to publish three short stories, one in Playboy, one in Omni, and one in the New Yorker. That last break had been a real encouragement, and, I suspect, had launched him into the successful conclusion of his latest work, a novel called These Tall Ships of Earth, that Harper and Row was going to publish. It was the only work for which he ever received any formal recognition, and even that short burst of stardom was doomed to a quick extermination. I am glad that I never pursued the ambition to write, because I have no wish to suffer what Angst did, knowing exactly what it was that he could not have every second of his life. I prefer to keep the objects of my terrible longings obscured.

But as we sat there in that dim subway car together, neither he nor I knew that he was just about to reach the pinnacle of his professional career. There were other things on our minds. His career seemed to be dramatically improving, and it was yet not too long before this book, just after the turn of the millenium, in fact, that he caught his wife with the next door neighbors. And now they were getting divorced.

How strange to think. He had met Allie through some friends of mine in Sacremento. It was the same night he gave up on trying to get his first book published. I know that because he couldn't keep quiet about it the first few weeks after they started going out. He would feel compelled to tell anyone who would listen about how she had inspired him, about how he had decided to drop his first novel so that he could concentrate on writing the new one. It was disconcerting how obvious it was that already he depended upon her, needed someone to help him deal with those abysmal convictions of failure and inadequacy. So it must have put a horrible strain on their relationship when nobody wanted to publish the novel she had so ignobly inspired.

I didn't know what to say to him them, so I didn't say anything. He at least deserved that much. As we were seated in the cavernous subway car and after he had a chance to relax, Angst tried breaking the silence. "I heard from Drusus the other day." He paused as if for me to say something, but, like before, there was nothing yet to say. "Seems like he and Nancy are doing well. Hull'uva wedding they had. Remember that?"

O, yes, I remember that. I remember what he had asked of me when he asked me to come.

"All shit-faced and dancing drunk. Where did those days go, David, huh? Things aren't that carefree anymore." He stopped again, and I just looked at him. He dropped his eyes, suddenly daunted. Then, he shrugged. When he spoke next, a hint of seriousness had creeped into his voice. "Hey, I don't know. I just seems like - well, it was a long time ago, that's all. Almost like - almost like it could all be -" But he didn't finish.

"What?" I asked him finally. "What were you going to say?"

"Nothing, David." He tried to wave the comment away, but now there was all too much to say.

"No, really, what? Forgotten? Where you going to say 'forgotten'? Do you really think so?"

"It's just, well - we were all friends."

"And we still are," I finished, crossing my legs adamantly. "We still fucking are." I sat back and spread my hands before him, almost in the manner of an offering. "You know, man," I tried to tell him, but my voice was hijacked by trepidation, and all I could manage was a hoarse whisper. "You know that I still - know that he's still -" But I couldn't go too far along certain paths of reason, especially since there's never anyone who knows everything about what's happened to you. So I tried again, and this time mustered the strength to speak with a full voice. "You just don't understand, Angst, everything we went through. You weren't there in that room with them."

"Neither were you."

I cut him a tight glance out of the corner of my eye. "You don't think I've been there? You don't think I'm there every fucking moment of my life?!" My voice had risen, and I noticed then that the people sitting next to Angst were looking over. "What?" I snapped at them, a tight, middle aged woman with streaks like stars on her face and a fat mole under her bottom lip and her friend, whose glasses made her eyes into sickly eggs done over easy. The one with the mole gasped, and both turned quickly, offended, away. I saw Angst smile out of the corner of my eye, and his mirth moved me enough to allow a shred of a laugh onto my face.

"Did you see Canine on television the other day?" Angst asked me, abruptly changing the subject. I would have answered him sooner, but the serious rocking of the subway car as it hurtled under the streets of the city groaning reached me momentarily.

"Yeah," I finally managed to respond. "Looked good, didn't he?"

Angst nodded his head. He looked so forlorn as the dancing patterns of dirty light came at him, passed over him, out of the ensuing blackness outside the windows. "I never knew his name was Emmanuel. I always heard you call him Canine."

"Yeah," I answered dimly. I wasn't really listening. "We always called him Canine."

"He's done pretty well," Angst went on, "for a man - in his condition."

But I couldn't hear him anymore, either. I was listening to other voices, watching the shadows of things past and trying to discern the shawl they had thrown over my life. Poor Angst. He must have thought he had lost me. But that's something that had already happened, longer ago than he would care to have thought.

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Hearken ye, O infidel, to the infinite, abysmal passions of our forefathers. Haven't we suffered enough? What is God, that he has afflicted us with intelligence, that he has abandoned us to the madness of our dreams? I have no need of him, for he has betrayed humanity. He has preserved the price of blood.

Hear me, heathens, harken and hear! To what breach of human nature have you led me?

Look, the stars in the sky are mocking us. They are an illusion. The light they shed is old, stale, and their bodies are elsewhere. What need have I for eyes that lie, for the chemistry of our organic nature when it cannot perceive what occurs throughout all space and time?

All the statues around me are weeping now. They are hunched in obdurate pain, facing me as if to concentrate the brunt of their dispair on my withered flesh. But these are statues. They are merely reflections, are they not? Dusty images.

The sentinels of despair are tall, peculiar beings with lean hands. They do not have to walk to reach us.

Our growing knowledge may be a bane. All the things we had once to keep our faith, all the mechanisms we had constructed for ourselves so that we might preserve the precious balance of our sanity, are slowly being stripped away. We can see nothing more than the men in ancient times except that all the things they believed are false. Our knowledge leads us to despair, to nothing but horror, because it will leave us all empty and incomplete, and we will have nothing to grab onto, nothing to steady us. Then we will fall like the abatross through the infinite void, and our screeches will stretch out around us in all directions, and still, none will hear them. There will hardly be enough room in our brains for our own voices.

But I never wanted to believe this!

I torment myself unnecessarily, and I believe like Emmanuel that humanity is made out of the stuff of Infinity, and that forever will won't let its children wander off into a mad slaughter of rationality. But such tenets are difficult to refute when there exists nothing in our knowledge to contradict them. And yet man was made and forever walks this earth without the knowledge of death, and while he yet breathes he will remain ignorant of that most important aspect of his existence. So the question should not matter, should not be important -

What, do I rave?

The idea used to sicken me, but I have come to love the great cocoon of sovereign non-committant melancholy that now scours the moltage grains of my visage. It has sustained me more than once before when I knew that nothing else would. I just wish it wasn't etched on my face for all to see. I wish I could hide it, or hide from it, or suffer some escape.

Already I can feel the dread again, the deep, dark, diabolical dread that I thought I had been able to annihilate. But I knew the risks when I started this meager attempt at a confession, at some sort of convincing absolution. But it is not over yet. No, it hasn't even begun.

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Salvatore pulled into the Amco station on St. Paul, just south of Mount Royal Avenue. "We need gas," he informed us all, jabbing a finger towards the dashboard.

"Sure, man," Antonius agreed, "but make it quick. We've got to be at the Eight by Ten -" a quick glance at his watch "- in fifteen minutes."

"Whatever, man," Salvatore replied, shaking his head. He pulled the Accord to a stop under the cement awning and turned to look at us in the back seat. "Yellowman won't come on for at least another hour. And doesn't he have some cheezy opening act or something?"

Already, he had opened the car door and was swinging himself out of the car.

"Yellowman doesn't have any opening act," Antonius continued, but it was no longer apparent to whom he was speaking. Salvatore had slammed the door shut.

I made a move for one of my jacket pockets, but the only things I could find there where some used kleenex and a crushed soft pack of Marlboros. It was empty. "Hey, Canine," I said then, "move your seat up. I gotta get out."

"No, man," Antonius returned. He was slouching deeply in the seat, filling virtually all the space alloted him in that tin sardine can Salvatore called an automobile. "We've got to be at the Eight by Ten soon. Real soon. It's already eleven."

"So?" I answered, shrugging. "Canine, move so I can get out."

The cold, early December air tore at my face, and I was instantly reminded of how much I hated the winter, of how dark and cold the world seemed. I never seemed to see the sun. And the grimy city sucked up into nothing what little light there was. It was like wandering in gloaming for a couple of hours before the hungry darkness could reassert itself.

I passed Salvatore on the way to the booth. He was filling up the car, puffing on a cigarette. "Where're you going? To buy some smokes?"

I nodded, walking past him.

"Try to hurry, dude," he called after me. "Antonius is getting impatient. You know how he is."

Yes, yes. I knew how he could be. Sometimes I couldn't understand how I had gotten along without him and other times I wondered if I wouldn't have been a thousand times better off if I had never breathed his air. And the fact that he never said anything to me about Shanai, not a word, was a constant irritation in the background of my thoughts. I wasn't sure what it could mean, that he understood or that he condemned.

He receded a bit, naturally, and we were never again as close as we had been when I first knew him, but he remained my loyal friend to the end, I think, although there are those who do not share that opinion. But I could not understand why he would pay the price of the martyr, or what he hoped to achieve by it. But that sacrifice, the payment that was forced from him each day he saw us together, was never absent from the hollow crooks of his eyes, and that winter I often found it difficult to look upon him without feeling something wrench, and wonder why.

The thick, misty, bulletproof glass of the window loomed suddenly ahead of me. The face trapped behind it was thoughtlessly smeared into a dull oblivion. I could not make out the man's eyes, just a dark patch of vague looking flesh in a cage. As I focused my sight upon the window, I realized that there was already someone there. It was an old, hairy man hunched over and gnarled.

And how ragged a man. My eyes were drawn to him instantly, perhaps because he was the only clear, sentient organism in my sight, or perhaps because of the way his skin seemed to tremble with the weight of death. Dull, grey hair tumbled in dry gasps from his face, spilled absently down the front of his chest. His left elbow was cocked precariously over the top of a cane. It was straight, but in many ways that noble stick seemed as worn as its master. There was a manner of comfortable care in the way he stood, balanced on the top of his cane, as if at the merest touch of the wind he might topple over and sink into the cement.

I came to a stop just in time to hear him ask the faceless man or the manless face behind the glass for a pack of Luckies. His voice was filled with so much gravel that it was barely possible to distinguish the words.

There was movement behind the glass, faint and unsure, and then the thick hiss of the intercom interposed upon the silence of the open night.

"What?"

"I said a pack of Luckies!" the old man snapped. His entire body shuddered as if under the effort of spitting out the words.

The smudge of flesh started swimming about in its pool of flourescence. While he was waiting, the man in front of me held still, and as I stood there quietly the strained rattle of his unsteady breath laboring in his chest reached my ears. It seemed to take inordinately long for the attendant to find the cigarettes, and while we were waiting I afforded a look back at the car. Salvatore was speaking energetically with Antonius through the window. Money was being passed between them.

When I returned my attention to the window, I saw that the old man had not even so much as shifted his weight. A quarry of granite there was in him. Eventually, the metal drawer underneathe the window slid open. The old man was already lifting a twisted hand, streaked and covered with hair that had decayed beyond grey, clutching a five-dollar bill. As he brought it to the level of his head, I could see it was twitching uncontrolably. A chill shudder passed through me.

They grey container slammed shut, and through the silence and the wind and the cold of winter, I could hear nothing but the broken breathing of his man in front of me. A moment later, the drawer opened again, and this time there was a stubby, white pack of smokes inside. While the old man was reaching for his tobacco and his change, I saw the smudge behind the glass lean slightly forward, uncertain. A moment later, the harsh hissing of the intercom broke once again.

"Sorry for the delay, sir," the man's incorporeal voice crackled to us disembodied. It hesitated, unsteady, before continuing. "It's just - I've never sold a pack of those things before, and I've been working here a long time. Didn't even know anyone still smoked 'em."

The old man clutched his smokes in a battered hand for a moment before hiding them away somewhere in his dark clothing. And then, as he was turning away, I heard him grate, almost as if to himself, "That's because we're all dead." Now he was shambling away.

I stared after him, amazed at how quickly he was able to move. Something inside wanted to burst out laughing.

"What?" The broken voice leaked from behind the glass. But the old man either did not hear or disdained to answer.

But I could not take my eyes from him. Somehow he had managed to keep his face hidden from me, and for some reason I would really have liked to have got at least a glimpse of his face - of what must have been his sharp, hawk eyes.

I dimly became aware that the voice through the intercom was distressed. "Hey, you! What'll it be?" I hesitated before answering, my sight still lingering after the shape that had so simply allowed itself to be swallowed by the utter darkness from which it had emerged.

"A pack of Luckies," I answered finally, a rueful smile spreading across my face.

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We arrived at the Eight by Ten not too late to miss the second song and were hardly rewarded. The place was small and crowded. It was difficult to get drinks, and there was an even greater and more fundamental problem - not a single person was smoking any pot. And Yellowman, he knew it. We stood watching together for a couple of minutes from the second floor balcony, then backed away in agony. There was no trouble finding ourselves a place to sit, but it was not very secluded. Our displeasure was ragged on our faces, and the smell of testosterone throbbed in my nostrils, but then Salvatore pulled out a bat of a hash joint. Despite the commercial reggae and a sober crowd, we knew things would look better if we were stoned. Some real rostamen materialized out of the crowd and smoked with us, even deigning to offer us some of their kind bud, but they weren't much for conversation, and after everything was smoked they quickly disappeared.

"Dude," Canine said dimly, an unlighted Marlboro dangling loosely from his mouth. "This really sucks." The statement was plain and was met with a stark silence of agreement.

"Hey, Emmanuel," Antonius asked after a moment, "can I have one of those?"

"What?"

"I said, 'can -'"

"You can call me Canine, dude. You always have."

"Right. Well, can I have one?" "No? What do you mean, no?"

"I mean what I said. No."

There was a moment of silence in which I realized I was the next target.

"David -?"

But I was ready. I had drawn out the squat, soft package of Luckies from my pocket and presented it to him. But he didn't seem to notice that they weren't the usual Marlboros.

"Thanks."

I passed him one and watched as he lit it. He prepared a rather large drag. The inhalation was quickly followed by a stark look of displeasure. "Oh, man! What is this?" He help up the cigarette like a gun.

"Filterless," I answered, laughing.

"What?" Salvatore inquired, jutting his face before mine. His eyes, red with passion, floating like orbs in the abyss of his features. "You're smoking filterless?"

For the night, at least, I knew I was safe.

We lapsed into an uneasy silence, and I decided to light up another smoke. It was some time before Salvatore remarked, "This crowd is pretty weak."

"Yeah," Antonius agreed, looking off somewhere. "Everybody's white."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Canine asked softly. I thought I heard something bending dangerously in his voice, but that edge of ferocity was apprently lost upon Antonius.

"You know," he said, waving his arms about himself. "Everybody here is white. Most of these people wouldn't know good reggae if they smoked it."

"What does that mean, that only black people like reggae?"

"Hey, man, cut the crap. Don't try and lay your guilt trip on me again. I've heard it all before. I've heard it from you when you're drunk, I've heard it from you when you're tripping, I've heard it -"

"Hey, will you guys shut the fuck up?" Salvatore suddenly cut in. "I didn't come out tonight for a political discussion."

"Why don't you get me a beer then?" I asked him, smiling. I reached into my back packet and pulled out a ten.

Salvatore looked at me for a moment, feigned disbelief rippling over his face, before he answered, "Why don't you get yourself a fucking beer?"

"No, dude," Antonius continued, ignoring us. "I'm sick of it. I'm sicking of people telling me what I can and can't say. Anyway, it doesn't solve anything. I'm going to feel the way I do, and telling me I can't doesn't change anything, it just makes me mad."

"So you're saying people should be able to say whatever they want, whenever they want, without taking care they aren't offending anybody?"

"Welcome to America, Canine. Look, if someone's challenging your heritage and he won't back down it's your natural born right to go over and kick his ass. That, I guarantee you, he'll understand."

"And get thrown in prison. They'd throw us all into prison if we didn't wear a suit to work. They want us to be just like them."

"Here," Salvatore suddenly snapped, hurling himself to his feet. "Give me that money."

I handed him the ten and watched him disappear into the massless throng of bodies.

Antonius shook his head slowly. "Look, man, we were here first. Love it or leave it."

"No, man." Canine was growing more serious. "You guys brought us here in the first place. And you know what? I never forget that, not one fucking second of my life that I'm walking around in the street. You gotta let us be who we are, and stop putting conditions on our freedom. You don't know what you're talking about, anyway. You're white. You owe us."

"What?" I couldn't keep myself from speaking. "What did you just say?"

"It's ridiculous that you deny it," Canine continued, speaking directly to me. He puffed needlessly on his cancer stick, speaking intently and certainly, his eyes alight and consumed with the confidence of a firm opinion. I had never known him that way. "You don't believe any compensation is due?"

"No," I replied calmly. "I don't. That's the way shit happens. Sorry, but black people aren't the only ones who have suffered. Deal."

"I don't give a shit about other people! All I know is that I get pulled over far more often than you, and I always feel like I'm explaining myself. Shit, half the time it's to another fucking black guy!"

"Hey, look, from what I remember at school, the Africans initiated the slave trade themselves." I glanced at Antonius out of the corner of my eye, saw him pasting me with eyes slightly surprised - as if I had never spoken before. "Four, five hundred years ago, the Europeans were just another civilization rushing along the timetrack to dominate the world. At the time what they did was perfectly acceptable. What, there was no slavery in Africa?"

"And the Africans," Antonius continued before Canine could cut in, "were the least technologically advanced peoples in the proximity of Europe. Culturally, I don't know, but the Indians, the Chinese, the Europeans - shit, even the Aztecs - they were all civilized powers."

"They only had more advanced weapons. Oh, so it's okay to enslave an entire nation, just because you can?'

"That's the way things worked back then."

"Yeah, well it wasn't so long ago."

Antonius shrugged. "I didn't have anything to do with it."

"Whatever. And then you try and kick us out, but the thing is we aren't Africans anymore, and we don't want to go back. This is our country, too. We are the fucking ones who built it up, while some ugly white motherfucker sat on his fat ass and sipped lemonade on his veranda and eyed our women in the fields.

"So you don't think we're owed anything? Not even respect enough to let your children play with our children, to let us sit at your dinner table? Let me tell you something, you have no idea what it's like to be a black man growing up in America. And what's worse is that most of the obstacles are hidden from people like you. The fucking government sells crack in our neighborhoods to keep us from thinking straight. But there are those who came before armed with words of hatred whose solutions people like myself are not unwilling to consider. Take what cannot be had. That is how many revolutions begin."

"But there will be no revolution," Antonius answered softly. "White people have all the guns."

"Really," Canine returned severely. He wasn't flinching at all.

"I wonder where Salvatore went?" I muttered to myself, suddenly feeling the need for something bitter down my throat, something that if I drank enough of would fuck me up.

"Look, man," Antonius said, smiling mockingly. He was tapping his foot on the floor. "You said it yourself. The media creates a fear of the black man. So once you guys start popping people and it looks organized, the fucking government will come down so hard you won't even have a trial."

"Trials don't mean anything if you're a black man."

"What I don't understand," Antonius said then, "is why the assimilation hasn't occured. It seems to me that the blacks in this country have contributed to their own racial problems. Look at the Asians. The work ethic is alive in them, and that, at least, Americans can respect. But the blacks, I don't know. The impression is that many of them have given up, or resorted to thievery and deceit because it's easier. Because they think we owe them something."

"Why work in a country that has enslaved you and pretended to set you free? Naw, fuck that shit. Segragation. We will grow stronger on our own. The longer we remain dispersed, the more your weakness infects our purer spirit. Don't you see them walking around school, like cadets in the army? There is real militarism, real power, in all this passion. A new sense of ethnicity."

Canine leaned back, brought his hands behind his head, and smiled knowingly. "When we strike we will catch you offguard. Your love of luxury and laziness will be our greatest advantage."

Antonius looked into Canine's eyes deeply, seriously. I did not know what he was searching for there. "I can't dig your shit, Canine," he said at last. "We're friends, remember? Are you going to kill me when it comes time? Are you?" No response. Antonius sighed and tried to smile. "Well, all I meant is that I can't be held responsible for what my ancestors did. And, well -" a wild smile spread across his face "- I love you man." He feigned emotion, choking his voice, and leaned forward as if to embrace Canine in a bear hug.

Roughly, Canine shoved Antonius away. "Fucking asshole," he muttered darkly. "It's not a joke."

"Are you guys finished yet?" Salvatore's voice cut between us clearly. He was standing in front of me, shoving a beer in my face. I took it from him and gladly sucked down half of it. Salvatore resumed his seat next to mine and started talking to Antonius about this hot chick he had met at the bar. I tried listening, but the conversation did not interest me. When I looked over at Canine I saw him staring back at me blankly, passionlessly. I was momentarily taken aback by that gaze, at the still purpose I glimpsed lurking there. Never before had I considered him different from any of the rest of us - he had always been Canine - but now I sensed that that he was always aware of it.

"Well," I offered to him, vainly attempting to banish the serious specter that had arisen between us, "here's to the love humanity." I offered him the butt of my Sierra Nevada.

A rueful smile flickered across his parched skin. "Yeah," he agreed, raising his beer. "To fucking humanity."

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Chapter X

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