Clearly Now, the Rain (3 page)

She shakes her head and lights a smoke. I wouldn't have been able to identify my father's friends' behavior as selfish, I would have dubbed it a simple lack of understanding, but Serala is right—it is selfishness, however unconscious.

We spent a lot of time reclining on the mounds, smoking, watching the poison in the sky. We laughed and snuck hits off a pipe; we watched people and talked trash, innocuous cruelty that made me feel better—like punching a wall, but without injury.

But even in our mutual solace, by May you could have packed the bags under her eyes. When I pressed, she allowed that sleep was a sweet and distant thing to her.

The sharpest strike of trauma in my life at that point was my father's fall. Standing over him as he was far away in a coma, gripping his hand in the ICU, watching machines breathe for him, made every parcel of fear and hurt I'd come up against before pale in comparison. But I learned I could wage battles with poor odds in the adult world and win—that Pyrrhic victory was a bitter gift I treasured. I also learned a lot about other people and their incapacity to engage with the terror I'd missed six weeks of school to stare in the face. Friends that I fully expected to be at my side as solidly as they had been at house parties were simply at a loss, and newer friends from Sage Hill became acutely uncomfortable around me because their lives were finally the party they'd been looking forward to back in their rigid private high schools, under the thumb of conservative parents.

Even for those who were courageous enough and cared enough to want to be there for me, the imperative to explain my experience with my father's mortality and then his suffering was exhausting; it was all I could do to catch up on schoolwork and keep my temper before the vapidity of social and academic concerns. Serala ratified everything that I'd dared to hope for from her at this time—it wasn't merely that she understood; it was that I didn't even have to explain. She developed my own thoughts, as if she could see they needed help evolving. She gave me the permission to percolate with unlikely but very real rage when people embraced me and exclaimed, “I'm so happy your dad's okay!” She offered me membership in an inner circle that I hadn't known existed and of which she was the only full-fledged member I'd met.

But it was more than that. I finally had something to offer her, too, if only because I'd been through a nightmare. She began to trust me as a place where she could be free and open, where her levity would be safe, where it wouldn't ruin her to drop her veils—as on her birthday when she came to me with the joy of a child. It didn't occur to me then how sad it was that only a hundred dollars of chemistry could produce such a trick. I didn't see any of this then. I simply thrilled at the intangible love blooming like a planet between us.

Three

By that summer, Samar had found her way back into my life, determined to put her betrayal behind us. She and Louis and I started descending the coast from Seattle in late August, having filled the van with all of our belongings now that we were sure we'd stay at Sage Hill for three more years. We stopped in Portland for a Taj Mahal show at the Rose Garden. It was an awkward event with Oregon yuppies and obnoxious rich kids (I still didn't place myself in this same pigeonhole) and I was glad when it was done—we had what now felt like a new life to get back to in Riverside.

As we double-time it up a hill, I remember how I parked the van kind of crookedly, and I hope that no zealous meter maid has ticketed me. We round the bend and three breaths catch. It's gone.

Later the cops will find our beloved van, set of so many wheeled, teenage dreams, emptied of all our possessions and broken down. Later, we will get well paid by my mother's homeowner's policy. Months later, on a San Francisco street, Samar will see a girl wearing what she swears is her hat, and we'll follow her for a dark block or two, at a loss for what to say or do, until she vanishes into the night.

In my memory it is September 1997 when the sails snapped up and college moved forward in a lurch. Classes started and El Niño hit: days, weeks of impossible water flooded the town. Walking anywhere meant soaking yourself to the knees. Two kids died when a sycamore fell on their car; you needed an eight-cylinder vehicle to power through the worst of it—and that, at least, Louis and I had. We had squandered our insurance money on a 1965, drop-top, sky-blue, Buick Skylark. The car was the sparkling center of our lives, and any let-up in the tempest was excuse to roar around town, pretending we were rock stars.

Serala was fading into a realm occupied only by Monty and a small circle of others. What these characters shared, mainly, was a streak of caustic humor and cynicism about the do-gooder school they'd wound up in. At least that's all I thought they shared; there was also the question of drugs and money.

I walk into the common room of her suite one Friday. The sounds of college recreation float around outside: a missed Frisbee clattering on cement, skateboards rolling, Peter Tosh crooning to “Legalize It,” laughter and shouts. Serala is dressed in her customary black, thrown over a sofa like a discarded coat. On the chairs and sofas around her, three members of this clique whom I don't know recline in similar poses.

Hey,
I say,
what are you doing?
In the time it takes her to swing her eyes up to me and focus, we could have had a short conversation.

Livin' it up,
she says, finally, and a broad grin sneaks onto her lovely face. Her apparent detachment allows me to look her over. Usually meeting her eyes is tough. The strange thing is that she looks so good: smooth, taut skin, sculpted jaw, a thin and graceful neck, collarbones rising from her chest like wishes. Her perfect teeth and storm of jet-black hair, freed from her usual tight ponytails and buns.

What's happening this evening?
I ask, just making awkward conversation because I am in of a room of zombies. She shrugs, lying there on her back, so the motion is like opening her chest to me. She gives that grin again and reaches for a smoke, but misses the pack. I dig one out and light it for her. Around me the kids scarcely stir; their gazes are on the small square of sky out the window or the flaking ceiling. As if they're watching TV.

I don't know how to feel, and the cleaving of my mind is the type that would occur many times in the future: there she is, possessed by poisons, playing with her life, destroying her insides. On the other hand, there she is: safe, comfortable, for the moment not feeling any pain.

I could tell in those days that the honeymoon was over for Serala and Monty and she was in the grip of a hard love—just like me. When I finally had Samar and settled in, I began to punish her. I had buried most of the pain that I'd suffered from her casual betrayal with Jay. I treated her as if she had the abuse coming and it was my prerogative to mete it out as I felt proper. But I was improper and I was cold.

I find myself one night pissing in the bushes in front of a house where a party thumps along in the backyard. As I zip up and turn, I can see Samar chatting with this tall dude a few yards away. There is the briefest measure of time that I can see myself mutating, going back to the same insecure, vindictive boy I was in high school, but then I have ice water in my veins. I watch her laugh at something, throw her head back. I return to the keg to keep fueling. When she approaches me with a smile, I turn my back on her.

What the fuck?

Get away from me,
I say, as severely as I can. She holds her ground. Samar is not a girl to surrender any ground. Samar spent much of her early life being mistreated by males. From her abusive, corrupt father in Beirut to the string of New England lovers who welcomed her with manipulation and deception into the game of love, American-style. She has every reason to expect this kind of shit from me, but she hasn't.

I saw you with that fucker
—I shrug in his direction and spill beer over my hand—
so why don't you go back to him, huh?

You're trippin',
she tells me calmly and flatly, leaning forward into my face to say it. Then she walks away.

Mercifully, I don't recall how it all turned out. I know I went as far as to call her a slut, to insult her clothing as trashy, to leave her at that party out of spite and drive home. I was a mess, I was a child, and I was taking out more on her than could be justified by the most liberal rationalizations. I acted as Serala's inverse, flailing to her calm, vindictive to her forgiving. Meanwhile, she'd tell me of Monty's philandering with a near-whisper, as if it was something
she
was ashamed of.

Two memories rendered in the infrequent sunshine of that season:

Samar is idling in a friend's dorm room at Messert Hall when through the window she sees Serala approaching. She mistrusts Serala as much as Serala does her and she lifts her chin and looks away. She expects a glare at worst, so when Serala lights a Pall Mall and knocks on the glass to call her outside, I imagine Samar is taken aback. When Samar gets there and Serala says,
I don't give a shit what you think about me or if you like me or not,
I imagine Samar recovers her composure, and sees an opening. Serala says,
You hurt my friend and I hope you don't do it again.
I imagine that the gravelly roll of skateboard wheels from the quad devours the brief silence. I imagine that Samar says something back, like
yes, okay, you've got every reason to dislike me. I won't hurt him again,
uncrossing her strong arms. And I imagine Serala says,
good,
and blows smoke past her and then says,
I guess what I mean is I'm giving you a chance, I don't want to hate you, I just want him safe.
And she drops her butt and crushes it and forces a smile and then puts her gaze on her feet—in that way she has—and walks away.

The second:

It is a weekday and Serala and I escape for a meal, both of us fed up with our unhealthy love affairs. This time we do better than Denny's—St. Charles, a café with high booths and a Cajun theme. We drink beers at midday; I remember sitting outside, the sun a welcome sensation after long, wet days.

We are doing writing exercises, something that our odd, beloved creative writing professor has pushed on us like a flu shot. The scritch-scratch of her blue pen gets urgent. Her brow is furrowed and locks of hair are hanging down over it, escaping the big sunglasses that hold most of the bangs to the top of her head. She bites her lip once, hard, I can tell, because a ridge of caramel flesh is white from the dent of her teeth. Then she pauses and curses in a way that is supposed to be sardonic but I know is actually somewhere nearer to happy.

Fuckin' A.
She holds up the leaf of notebook paper by the corner and lets the breeze rattle it.
This is what we got, Eli. This is it.
She shakes the paper.
Painters have these big heavy canvases, texture, and color. Musicians have pounds of material hanging from them and they beat their art right out into the world with it and watch how it affects people, right there! Right fucking in front of them.
She wags her head and slaps the paper down, reaches for a smoke.
All we've got are these flimsy fuckin' pieces of paper, weightless. They'll fly away quiet, fast, and easy. We got it rough.

We climb back into Desert Storm. We light cigarettes and tear down Route 66 with guitar banging on the radio and we smile because we find that fleeting intermission of freedom again before the reality of Sage Hill swallows us. As we round the last turn she fiddles with the radio. I feel like the idea got into my head a fraction of a second before the tune did: “I Can See Clearly Now,” just starting up. We look at each other and smile and don't need to say a thing.

Those last soggy weeks of 1997 felt more cramped, mainly because we were bound for Study Abroad programs in the spring. I hugged Serala goodbye on the bleached concrete outside Messert Hall and we agreed to come together through words. We were to meet for lunch dates where we would both write letters at mid-afternoon—once she settled into her Parisian sidewalk cafés and once I settled into my Venezuelan watering holes.

(Here is my parenthetical nod to chronology because I learned it right here in time; here's what she told me on a tiny postcard that read
Christmas Love
; here's the bad stuff; here's the savagery of my duty; here's the consequence of her moments of peace in that drug; here is when I began to guess at the horror she'd endured. What I mean is, here's the shape and shadow of it, which is all that I have to offer, because it's all she's offered me: in Riverside, at the end of the term, there is a man and his hypodermic blessing, there is her frail form rendered helpless by it, there is the advantage he takes with his lust and his fists, the two confused and conflated; but there is the oblivion of her sharp mind, the detachment of her old soul and on that postcard, which I read in front of the mailbox with adrenaline swirling through me, she shrugs it off—
not so bad,
she claims. And more: in Connecticut, just before she flies away, slides a black ocean between herself and home, there is another man, one she used to know who tries to but cannot hurt her, because despite warm flesh, a distant pulse, a sip of air, despite his knife gleefully lacerating her in private places, it seems that her grace remains untroubled, because, again she claims,
she is not really there.
)

Four

Before I knew it, I was shopping Seattle's awful February streets for bug spray, sunscreen, and an inauspicious backpack. I was saying goodbye to Samar over long, dramatic telephone hours.

The closest I came to capturing Venezuela was in those imaginary café lunches that Serala and I convened for: her scribbling with frozen fingers in a French street, me sweating in a humid Venezuelan noon, the pages that then drifted slowly, back and forth over the Atlantic.

Mérida was high in the Andes in a valley formed by craggy peaks. If you dared the suicide switchbacks to reach such altitudes, they would take all the warmth from your bones, render your alpaca hat and sweater silly with one driven gust. When we first arrived, all my wrong expectations went the way of spindrifts I would see smoking off blades of mountains. Venezuelans were supposed to be hospitable and open. What the “preparatory reading packet” didn't mention was that Mérida was an anomaly; it bore more resemblance both in climate and character to cold European places. Packed buses were often silent and upon greeting a stranger you were as likely to get an indifferent stare as a nod.

I walked down those streets and pedestrians avoided my eyes. I moved into a Catholic house and three generations of women who lived there treated me with kind formality. I went to sleep at night (by plowing through fat cans of Polar, the national beer) after failing to get a familiar voice on the sketchy phone lines.

One afternoon, after lunch, I push through the wrought iron front gate to return to the city center. I catch sight of the bus at the stoplight, affectionately dubbed the “Gray Buffalo” by its driver. The cylinders of two-dozen dirty vehicles growl and huff. I pull myself aboard and dump myself onto the last seat in the back.

Soft lamentations, directed at no one in particular, come from sticky vinyl seats,
Ay, Dios mio, este calor . . . insoportable sol, coño
. . .

Indeed, it is a freak weather pattern that brings this heat suddenly blazing. There are many children: over a dozen of the blue-shirted, pleat-skirted schoolkids on their way back to class after lunch. Two black girls with sweet voices play a singing game behind me. Through the window I see a blade of a woman in a white linen dress bargaining hard for a block of cheese and a barefoot child trying to catch an older one on a bicycle.

I put my attention on the
Harper's
article I'm reading, a scathing review of Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Among other abuses, prisoners are often coerced to participate in the annual rodeo, which usually wraps up with maiming and even deaths.

The slowing of the Gray Buffalo
,
and the rustle of bodies, tears me from the article. An adolescent mestiza is suddenly leaning over me to peer out the window, the scent of her humid flesh in my nostrils, her black curls swing cool against my cheek. From the front of the bus, whispered prayers and exclamations unfold, seat by seat. The cause of our delay appears outside my window. A man has been run down. He is dead—or else seconds from it. His head is mostly severed and he has literally been knocked out of his shoes. He is fairly young. His face holds a contorted expression that could be delighted surprise. The driver stands curbside next to his damaged car. He crosses his arms and rocks a little on his heels; he nibbles a cuticle. He holds an awkward smile on his face, a look of profound embarrassment.

When the horror registers, I turn away like waking from a nightmare. The cleavage of the mestiza is still pressed against me as she cranes her neck to catch the longest glimpse possible. I can hear her pulse.

All of the children are clambering around, squirming between appendages. They are transfixed, like they might be at a magician's trickery or a cartoon. The older people shake their heads and grimace. The crowd reorganizes itself, “Ave Marias”
and other benedictions rising from the seats, the motion of the sign of the cross.

I go back to the article. The story is well written but inconclusive; a Justice Department investigation is pending at Angola.

When we reach downtown, I enter the current of midday and find myself on shaky legs. I quiver under the eave of a bar. A breeze brings a scrap of newspaper to rest against my leg, a headline and most of an article:
La Violencia Surge (Violence Rises)
. Instead of my errands, I find myself in a dark corner of the bar, pouring Polar beer through my nerves.

This is some of what I learn in her letters from the Old World, a composite of the spring of 1998:

Big, soft DJ headphones cover and warm her ears; sweet, sad music that makes her a little bit more okay pumps softly through them. A long wool jacket wraps her torso and she loosens it a bit as she goes, pulling up the hood—the better to slink through the throngs of men with hungry eyes. She's been too proud to betray any fear, but on the inside the violence of their stares has cut at her and she wants someone on some mornings, someone it's okay to be scared with, to hold her tenderly, someone to dab away her quiet tears with a steady hand. But now she is all right; she is walking, twilight a silvery promise on the horizon. For a while she puts her eyes on the ground as she walks, in that way she has, just the same as pulling up her hood—to take her a little bit further from the bandstand of the world.
This old Paris is okay
, she thinks, the wine and the coffee mixing in her veins, her face pleasantly cold against all the warmth under her jacket. When she emerges from the narrow streets of an unfamiliar neighborhood, she suddenly knows exactly where she is: beside the Seine, a block from Shakespeare and Company, crossing the bridge to the busier side of the city. The way the brown river is flowing—
dirty but fucking pretty
she thinks—it calls her to pause on the bridge. One of her favorites is coming through the headphones now, either “Drunken Angel” or “Jackson,” maybe. And as she lights a Pall Mall, and the drizzle picks up, and the two waters mingle, their clarity and their dirt, as waiters hustle to crowd chairs under umbrellas, as the booksellers bang closed their kiosks for the night, and it all seems to happen in time with Lucinda Williams, Serala thinks that maybe, just maybe, this might be enough. And she's shocked to see the swollen lip of the sun peek out for a moment before day is done, but not as shocked as she is to find herself standing there in the rain smiling at it.

The night seems thicker than when she entered the bar. She removes her shades with reluctance, remembering Allen Ginsberg's warning:
It is uncool to wear sunglasses at night, unless, of course, you should be wearing sunglasses at night, in which case, you know, it is uncool to take them off
. The stir of shadows around the bus stop seems heavier. Gin burns in her, roiling the gastric juices in her stomach, which has shrunken into a negative space since the last time she choked down a meal with her aloof host mother. The bus is half-empty and she lurches aboard, grabs a pole, and steps away from the man who already stabs her with his eyes. She puts her shades back on, faces away, but he sidles up, says something lewd in French that she can't make out.
Fuck you
, she tells him and he laughs like a gunshot and grabs between her legs, hard, chattering on, something about brown girls. And then he knows what's happened before Serala does, reeling from her jab, his lip hanging raggedly open, blinking stupidly, dripping blood on the expensive shoes of commuters. Her hand hurts but she doesn't care and she stumbles off the bus onto a corner where a café spills generous light. And at her back she knows that strangers witness her as scrappy and tough, that heads in the bus window turn with respect for her. And she's pleased in a way, of course, but it doesn't change the fact that now she wants to cry and be held as anyone, weaker or stronger, would. But there is no one for this and instead she's off at a trot down another ancient street, searching for the black door where she will find what she needs. Where she will find the thing that can do the trick that gin cannot, will ease the aches in her spine, will let her sleep maybe even until tomorrow, will make her feel better than held, better than loved, better than rested—even if she has to go away from herself for a while to get it.

One afternoon in Mérida I sat at a sidewalk café that resembled a French café—one could order café au lait and wine, though I stuck with hard coffee and beer. There was an old waiter who chain-smoked, and well-dressed citizens with newspapers; umbrellas were placed to shield us from the mountains' sudden storms. It was that day I wrote a line I recall clearly, seared into my memory by its flagrant naïveté. It went like this, in response to Serala's self-destructive revelations from Paris:
I would love you no matter what, even if you told me you were going to take all your pills and go play on some French freeway.

I went away for seven weeks to the northern Caribbean coast, leaving behind most of the telephone and postal service. She hit the rails of Europe with her friend Cassie and had a blast, recalling the
I wonders
and the
maybes
and the
ifs
. In the end it seemed like maybe France was a wash: a lot of unhealthiness, trouble from piggish men, and a lot of loneliness, but also proof of strength, some moments of possibility. The lesson: she
did
miss—and
did
have—the love of many good people oceans away.

I like to imagine it as a single moment:

She sits at a sidewalk café. A smattering of strangers populates the tables, everyone arranged so that everyone else has the maximum of space around them, all angled toward the finale of a bright spring day. Serala has her sunglasses and her cigarette smoke and her woolen coat with the floppy collar, so she feels cozy, hidden even in plain sight. A French version of Camus's
The Stranger
lies open next to her diary, which holds waterfalls of her blue letters. As the tangerine light grows richer, she loosens her scarf and she's suddenly hit by an image of me, facing the same horizon and dreaming of our reunion, and she almost smiles thinking of how many long meals and poems and road trips we have yet to share. She feels excited even, ready to return. And as her cigarette burns down and the day starts fading like it's on a dimmer switch, the faces of all the people that she loves spin through her head. And the remaining bar of sun goes out like a wick in pooling wax, she stubs out the smoke and, for the first time in her life, a few tears arrive without pain.

When I picture the towheaded boy, just barely clear of teenagedom, dressed in a weak attempt at Mérida's formality, hunched over a tiny circular café table, filling his veins with caffeine and beer as liquid midwives to his words, I chuckle. The melodrama of my and Serala's “imaginary lunches” is sweet and nostalgic—the fetish of poetry and romance of handwritten pages, wielded like weapons or lightning rods. But I'm glad of that overly earnest kid, that terrible writer, not only because my commitment to Serala caused me to record my experience and make it real to myself, but because it fused us closer. I didn't know when I made the vow to meet her on the page that it was the only way I'd really know her; at the time it was consolation for not being in her presence for many long months. I know now that if I hadn't sent her my fuzzy truths, I would not have received her stark ones and might never have had another chance to prove I was brave enough to hear.

I had a burning need for her to hear me and understand me as I bumbled through that other world like a drunk alien. This need isolated the other lessons just enough that I could absorb them. For one, I was receiving the lesson of solitude. I had no one in Mérida aside from my straight-backed Catholic household and three female Sage Hill students I saw infrequently; no one spoke English and no one was going out of their way to incorporate some blond yanqui into the brilliant weave of that culture, as I had hoped and dreamed among my pre-journey jitters. My life had always been attended by a best friend, a girlfriend, or both—not to mention a broad social circle. The lonesomeness of the first weeks was terrifying in itself. The fact of being strange in addition to solo brought me to tears at night in the shadow of an avocado tree; I wanted to snap the neck of our rooster myself when he sang down the day at dawn and announced another cycle of heartsickness. But because I had to articulate this to Serala, I had to wait for her response. And so I had to hear her gentle admonitions to suck it the fuck up and embrace the challenge of anonymity and silence, which eventually taught me more than any person has.

I didn't know then why the violent death of that pedestrian was the loneliest moment of the semester, but I do now: I had just seen a body for the first time, a grotesquely destroyed body at that. Everyone around me had reacted with meager curiosity. I, on the other hand, had been hypnotized for only the briefest moment—and then horrified by my own interest. My life—with a handful of exceptions—had been sheltered from violence. The flurry of punches I'd received and given, the infrequent streak of bloody bodies in a house party or the slashed face of a drunk on the streets of Seattle composed my limited kaleidoscope of experience. That's truly what it means to be “first world”: insular. I was alone in a universe so hard-knock, so raw, that grisly death caused only a soft stir—how could I not feel like an alien?

Likewise I only know now why Serala flew into my mind that afternoon, why it was her that I wrote a letter to with a trembling hand in a downtown bar: she was the loneliest person I knew, because she saw things distinctly from others. And perhaps she saw things that others did not, as I felt I had—the twisted pleasure in the dying man's face, the appalling amusement in the driver's.

Not only that, though—it was also that Serala didn't share my privileged cocoon of insularity, that violence both by choice and by the whirl and stab of fate's hand was not foreign to her like it was to me. She had witnessed violence as an EMT volunteer on the fast roads of New England—lodged in my brain are her tales of scraping motorcyclists off the asphalt, or cutting leather from a spine-damaged man who would later threaten to sue over his ruined jacket. I know these traumas sometimes excited her; I can see her dark eyes alive on the shoulder of the turnpike, reflecting the spinning red of sirens. I can see her, working around a shattered body, perhaps altered by adrenaline or something more. I know that she experienced violence at the hands of others, though she always refused me the specifics. I know that she even inflicted violence from time to time when she was scared enough.