Clearly Now, the Rain (5 page)

Seven

In the house I moved into, plastic flapped over broken windows and mysterious roommates had pornographic sex at dawn on the other side of thin walls. Just when you reached the edge of sleep roaches skittered and stuck you full of the willies. In sum, I might have spent ten nights there during the last six weeks of the semester, what with Serala's Batcave always open to me.

It isn't but a night or two after I've “moved” that Serala and Monty and I, all cocked on the cheap booze of a dive bar, stumble back to the Batcave and fall into a heap. Serala is way past done with talk for the night. She slides a Lyle Lovett CD into the stereo and the melody tugs Monty and me quickly toward sleep. I make noises about going home, a slurry promise to stop for a soda to sober up, but she hushes me.
Don't be stupid
, she says, and that's it. I don't know how we all fit, but somehow we three sleep together in her little bed—or Monty and I sleep while Serala watches, most likely. I don't know when the muted but strong animosity I felt toward Monty melted away (because of what his presence in Serala's life had meant for Jay). Maybe harmony between us was a condition for both of us of retaining her company so we swallowed the pill. But something else was starting to happen, too—I was starting to soften toward Monty because despite his bluster, his politics, he couldn't fully hide that he contained a lot of hurt, too.

Most of those spring nights she left me in her blankets for Monty's room at 3 a.m. or later. She'd kiss my cheek or slide a hand over my head slowly, then turn and walk out with contrary speed. I'd lie there, missing Samar sharply despite the sneers and silence with which she treated me when we crossed paths on campus, but grateful also for the simple words Serala had spoken, or sometimes put onto paper and left waiting for me in the pillows.

The Five Star: a Route 66 dive of red vinyl booths, strong drinks, and smoke you had to wave away to see others. It was a place where a friend would have his car cordoned off in the lot for twenty-four hours while a murder was investigated. It was a blessedly dim place, relatively empty in the early hours. A couple of ruddy-faced barflies always hunched at the bar holding cocktails as if they might try to get away. Sad, mellow blues tunes rasped from the jukebox.

If the outline of the events that haunted Serala was slowly fleshing out, the things that remained mysterious haunted Monty. I recall the way that he looked sometimes in the Five Star when his eyes were glassy, his hands wrapped around a cocktail. I know there was a dead mother and half-told stories of witnessing violence. His father, some kind of international aid baron, had dragged him around to bastions of third world “development” as a child and I don't think that Monty always saw the pretty side. I think, actually, that whatever it was he had seen may have glazed him into the suit of cynicism and drugs that I first knew him in.

One particular night in that glorious dive, Serala is off peeing or getting high or something, and I catch that look on Monty's face, in the way distance has filled up his gaze, and I say something like:
Hey, so I appreciate y'all kind of taking me in. I can always give you more space if you want it, you know.

And he comes back to the present and blinks, spins his glass and tells me:
No, it's okay, man. She—we—really mean it, really want you around, to take care of you. It's hard times.

Late that night, in the Batcave, she's off again on some kind of wandering. Monty puts his finger to his lips and digs a black bottle with a rubber stopper out of her closet, opens it—
oops
—then goes to put it back. But before he can, I snatch it and look into the tarry bottom, smell, for the first time, junk—that balm of hers, that acrid mystery that I will never know. I grimace at the sting of the poison in my nostrils and turn away, not wanting to see where the bottle lives in the Spartan closet.

So Monty pulls out the jar he'd intended to, and takes a snort. His big pale face jerks skyward with a smile that looks like it has been put there by a hammer, and he hands it over. I do the same—and reel several feet to flop on the bed. I see shimmering lines and hear only a glorious ringing, like heaven's trumpets. I laugh hysterically till I come down in what turns out to be about ninety seconds.

Don't tell her,
he says with a wink that takes three seconds to effect.

I suppose I didn't. I don't even know what it was.

That is to say that despite his transgressions with her, he was good to me in the ways he knew how and he respected me, I believe. And so there was a particular moment when guilt cranked up high in me . . .

I'm at a kickboxing exam for my third belt. I hold onto this practice despite the fact that it's a three-minute walk from Samar's door. The master is a world-famous fighter and the exercise is hard and good and necessary to keep violence from spilling out of me at foolish moments. I pass the exam and hurry back to campus for some other test in Mexican Politics or Middle East Conflicts or some such thing. But I have to shower and so I stop by the Batcave where I find Serala sunglassed despite the dim room, smoking angrily and stabbing her computer keyboard with an aggression that I can't believe is poetry—but there it is, tumbling to life on the screen. I put an arm around her from behind, intending an abbreviation of a hug, but she grabs it and reaches up for the other.

Did you pass?

Yeah.

I knew you would.
She pulls me closer.

I'm super sweaty,
I say, because it's true.

I love it,
she says, and holds on for a long moment, looking up at me frankly, before I can break away, step into the shower and stare up into the spray of hard water and wonder just what the fuck that was.

That weekend, the hip-hop group the Roots comes to perform on campus. It turns out to be a genuine disaster: they show up two hours late, disrespect everyone they meet, demand strong weed (not a problem) and chamomile tea with honey (a bit of a problem) before going onstage. Then they give a mediocre performance until their soundman blows the school's entire speaker system. But I don't care so much because I'm pressed up next to Serala in the surging crowd and I don't have to do a thing but listen and feel her body push and yield with mine.

When the show ends with the explosion of speaker static, we go to meet my father who is visiting. The hallway in the Riverside Inn is dim and thickly carpeted; his room is dimmer. I find acute feelings of both nervousness and excitement about introducing her to him. He lies supine on the double bed, right ankle up on his left knee, stretching the damaged ligaments. There is an old movie on the TV, his pills under the bedside lamp. He doesn't look his worst by any means tonight, but I wish that she could see him when he was younger, thinner, unbroken.

He cuts off the TV and removes his glasses; she sits on the other double bed closest to him and I sit at the foot of his. We are carrying around a bottle of wine and we share it in the tiny hotel cups. I know that we talk about films, about the Roots show and what it says about fame and corruption, and about our dog Sky, a thousand miles north, probably hobbling around looking for Dad at that very moment. I recall all this, though, as more of a feeling than an event; picturing the two of them chatting brings me comfort. I know that for both of them, the other's presence also brings comfort. I know it that night when we leave the hotel and she is quiet for a long time. I know it the next day when he asks more than he ever has about her, as if he were writing a profile.

I didn't find it odd when Serala became the second person that year, after my father, to suggest we drive to Tijuana. Really let the highway carry us this time, instead of the mere miles between campus and diners. Her objective is the same as my father's was: to get our hands on some painkillers.

The wind and flying cigarette ashes make my study of the British partitioning of Palestine tedious. Somewhere closer to Riverside than Tijuana, I put my texts aside on the empty backseat. Locks of Serala's black hair roll and snap behind her, nearly touching my face. In the shotgun seat is Monty. Björk does her best to escape the static-shot speakers of Desert Storm.

Hustlers take us very quickly to what we want. Monty and I together make short work of the alleys and drugstores with our Spanish skills, honed in points farther south. The white-coated pharmacists sometimes balk; we are more risky clientele than my father, but when we extract larger bills, their scruples crumble and we gather big foil sheets of Vicodin, Soma, and bottles of liquid codeine. In a Corona-pennant and chili-light crowded taqueria, Serala goes to the restroom with the pills; Monty and I buy Gatorade and pour codeine into it.

A few hundred yards shy of the border's razor wire, stern agents, and German shepherds, we split up. Serala checks her watch a lot and is very good at looking exasperated. Monty and I play the role of fatigued tourists. I'm nervous for Serala with all those pills and her dark skin, lip ring, but the agent doesn't even ask her a question when she whips out her ID, like a cop might do with his badge. When the officer asks me if I have anything to declare, I shake my head and take a swallow of the sour red blend. He waves me on.

Later that night, back in the Batcave, Serala doles out Vicodin, lying prone on her elbows with Fred the parrot at her side. Her hands flying over the foil sheets, punching out the tablets, she gives me specific instructions.

If you take three you can drink a little; if you take four you can't. If you take two, I'll tell you when you've had too much to drink.

But even Serala couldn't understand the way that those pills affect me. While Serala and Monty and a redheaded girl all reel into lazy dizziness, I get downright hyper and giddy like I've been snorting coke. Going stir-crazy in the Batcave, I fly out, beer in hand, to the quad, where I run up and down the chemical grass mounds, drop and roll like a child. I find an Asian freshman kid lolling in a hammock and start some kind of deep exchange; I remember hearing the music leaking from Serala's window fifty yards away—Mazzy Star, I think. The night is oddly clear for southern California and the stars are bright. Spring is in effect and it feels good.

We stop at the grocery store for booze and the fluorescent lights are too much so I buy cheap sunglasses, then a big red rubber ball. None of them can figure me out, but I'm not even interested—if I'm having an adverse reaction to painkillers then I'm all for adverse reactions.

At a rowdy party at a beat-up old house, I am in my element with the drunks, flyers-up games with the rubber ball behind the place. It's a while before I realize I've lost track of Serala, and I wander down the driveway. I find her on the front stoop, looking bad, Monty standing awkwardly off to the side, draining a cup of beer. The light from orange streetlamps softly coats her. I ask how she is.

Sick,
she says, and when I look at her hunched there, collapsed into half her size and trembling a bit, all my moron high burns off and I realize she's been poorly all night and I have been oblivious. It is literal—she's been puking—but also not so, I think. It is one of the most troubled looks I've seen on her: pallor even on her dark skin, eyes both glazed and wild, like she has witnessed a massacre.

She must have pasted on one of her don't-fuck-with-me faces and strode off to some funky corner of that house to add heroin to the litany swirling through her, because just the pills would have been a mild high. I see her in the bathroom of that old house, the fluorescent light, the odor of rotting pipes and drunk misses of the toilet around her, sloshed assholes pounding the door while she screams
fuck off
and then gets the needle in or the line cut and sucks orgasmic air as the rush turns the room into cloud.

Soon after that night she tried to explain.