Clearly Now, the Rain (6 page)

And in this letter, too, came the confirmation of a suspicion. All that she said:
I once lost someone, someone who was like me, someone I loved more than any child should have to bear. He told me one night, both of us bleeding and crying, that soon he would die.

And then he did.

That's all she told me.

That's all I know—if I were to speculate, I'd say that he killed himself, this child-lover. I'd guess that he couldn't go on and so he ended it and, as a result, she was imbued with a romantic pull toward that act that would curse her forever.

Three months before our split, Samar and I had adopted the cat, Ché. Quickly after, he is diagnosed with leukemia. His worsening condition keeps pace with the gulf yawning open between her and me. The last time I exercise my visitation rights he's jaundiced, moaning in pain. I finally cajole her to bring him to campus for what I suspect will be my last glimpse. Samar does not look me in the eyes when she dumps him into my arms, just tells me where and when to give him back.

I bring him to the Batcave where Serala is battling her poetry portfolio. She doesn't blink at his condition and she takes a break to sit on her bed with him in the slanting rays of May sun. He is so far gone at this point that he can't move around very well, just stares confusedly at things and makes broken meows. His belly is swollen and his ears are turning yellow. Serala caresses him, gets him settled down into a semblance of comfort for a few minutes. In the Batcave it's like she snatches some moments out of time's hands just for him and I remember hearing him purr.

A few days later, Samar calls.

I'm taking the cat to get put down
, she tells me with the chill and confidence of an iceberg,
so if you want to say goodbye, you better fucking come over
. Ché and his descent toward death is an apt metaphor. I tell her I'd be glad to take Ché to the vet myself, but I can't make it over. She hangs up on me.

In the end, she stalls too long, and Ché crawls off somewhere for the dignity of a private passing.

Serala had never showed nervousness per se, only anxiety from time to time. And she didn't acknowledge it the night of her avant-garde “thesis defense.” She just acted pissed off and smoked with a violent hand.

I'm falling all over myself to be supportive and help her but
there's nothing
, she says, shortly. So, dumbly, I go buy her flowers. I catch up to her a few minutes before it starts and she grabs them out of my hands.

Fucking idiot—you're not supposed to buy me
flowers.

It hurts even though I understand she is just undone—as well as I understand that buying her flowers was a dumb thing to do. I lean against the chain-link fence outside the presentation hall and look away up to the smog-cloaked mountains. Her face reforms around a conciliatory smile and she takes the time to hug me. Then she drags the bouquet away in a death grip, upside down.

The big room is packed, the floor covered with butcher paper, microphones in different corners, tubes of paint and brushes, projector and screen in the center, huge woofer speakers against the wall. The faculty members are seated at their card table, smiling anticipatorily. Serala rises from her own table and grasps a microphone hard enough that no one can tell she is shaking. I hear it in her voice, though, and happily count it as evidence that I know her best.

Okay, so what I'm going to be doing tonight is basically splicing together all these filmstrips of my work, based upon or in response to whatever you all are doing. Thanks.

Not a lot of preamble. No outgoing-filmmaker/poet-speech; no nostalgia.

Then she sits, the lights go down, the beat drops and a lot of kids on a lot of drugs go at the room. Shirtless hippies smear their torsos with acrylics and roll across the floor; a crew of ravers start their weird dancing. The faculty smiles and scribbles. Jay—who wants her to know that he still cares—kicks the first freestyle raps. And she goes to work—head down, fingers flying, weaving a filmstrip of cached footage to the rhythm of the present madness she has invited.

There is part of me that thinks she conjured this project as a cloaked scoff at Sage Hill, at the fetish of “interpretive, cutting edge” art that people in liberal arts schools tend to wax grandiose about. On the other hand, maybe it was real inspiration, a piece of evidence that despite her derision of the world she inhabited she was very much
of
it—as an artist, at least.

I don't know because I don't remember the final filmstrip. I just sat, watching over her through her discomfort and her art, feeling proud as hell because I had some nascent notion of just how tough it was: to stand under the acid burn of the limelight, believing all her scars and bruises visible, to simply be public, to be gracious—to be wide-open by way of art.

It was only days later, the golden hammer of May dropping hard, that she asked me to follow her and Monty across the country. I'd made plans to pick up two old friends from the end of their college careers in Boston and New York. The prospect of looking at the back of Monty's and Serala's heads over a series of days and nights was not one hundred percent appealing. But the ability to decline wasn't in me. She packed up the Batcave in less than an hour, I folded her futon into my new-used Pathfinder (Louis kept the Buick), and we went out for one last Californian night.

I say farewell to Samar at a house party hours later, at the cracked front door. She leans into the rectangle of light and grins and kisses me, mimicking all the goodbyes before—only different. We haven't acknowledged a truce, just somehow moved on. She takes off the hooded sweatshirt I'd coveted and pushes it into my arms.

Take it; it's still cold where you're going.

The next morning, I struggle to keep sight of Serala's Desert Storm, weaving in and out of the traffic, over the ruts and potholes of I-15, blasting north, under the razor wire–wrapped exit signs, the billboards for bail bonds and plastic surgery, the exhausted sky. I feel some of the freedom that Serala and Monty do, even though I'll be back for my own senior year soon enough. Only minutes down the freeway, she sticks her skinny, scarred arm out the window and starts flashing numbers at me—5, 0, 3, 4. I have no idea what this means. It is hours later in a Nevada truck stop, the sun bleeding away in the land we've left, that I ask.

A radio station, retard,
she says, sweetly.
It was just that
KXPR was playing “I Can See Clearly
Now”—one last time.

It's peculiar to consider the willingness with which I made myself a third wheel to Serala and Monty. But then again, Serala was skilled in a good number of dynamics, not least of all presenting absurd—if interesting—plans as perfectly logical. I was headed to the East Coast to pick up friends? Perfect—I'd just caravan with her and Monty, share some road meals, safety in numbers, maybe a few parties along the way, et cetera. The fact that I was proud to a fault is only a further testament to her ability to frame things compellingly. But all that was only scaffolding; the deeper truth is that I was already deeply under her spell, hungry to gobble up time and space and the world itself in her presence.

I'd shot off for Mexico to smuggle drugs without a second thought; I'd swallowed those drugs with glee. I'd joined Monty in ripping my brain with a mystery substance, and I'd lost weeknights when I should have been studying to loud, sad music and too much wine. I'd done these things not only because I was in a reckless and unbalanced phase in my own life, but to stay in her orbit, to make that orbit tighter, even. It's ironic that I'd do so because Serala was always responsible when it came to others and would have hated to think she was influencing me to damage my liver, fuzz my brain, or bury my blues instead of confront them. She never pushed a drop, or a drag, or a line, or a single capsule on anyone, so far as I know. But the instant that anyone expressed interest in altering their head, she was up for it—searching, supplying, sharing.

Eventually, she enabled years of pleasant fog for me, some of which I regret. If I asked her in the late morning, as I did sometimes as a test, if it was time to start drinking, she always grinned and said,
fuck, yes,
and I'd have to make some lame excuse for why I couldn't really do so. She never bothered with justification.
Life is rough enough without fucking guilt,
she'd say with a cartoonish sneer, cracking the seal on whisky, crumbling hash, throwing back a pill. And I joined her in the measure that I could without derailing entirely because I wanted her to know I was near and that she was not judged, either.

I wasn't overly eager to introduce anyone to my father at that time—he was too broken, too addicted, too sad, and there was a part of me that wanted to protect his image from those who had no point of reference. But the inverse was true of Serala. I wanted her to know my father as quickly and as deeply as possible; I wanted, for both of them, a chance or two to feel less strange and alone, to glimpse the beast of sadness—to say nothing of addiction—turning over inside another soft but durable person. There was bound to be an automatic and genuine kinship there, beyond that which I could share with her because he had lived as an addict and as a manic-depressive for decades. These things alone do not form a kinship of course, but the unconditional love they offered to those around them and the hazardous wide openness to the world it indicated certainly did.

What did not occur to me then was whether their darkness would metastasize within reach of the other's—if by presenting them to each other I was perhaps accelerating my own coming loneliness, the sad charter for my looming adult life.

Part  Two

Eight

So we drive.

The vulgar flash of Vegas lies ahead. At first, though, it's just a glitter blanket, like a scrap of desert sky cut out and dropped. As we get closer Serala starts to tailgate me, then passes. She's eager, I suppose, to get through Sodom without temptation—God knows what kind of mess she and/or her man might be able to get into there. So we bypass the whole nightmare: the tall billboards proclaiming the cheapest prime rib, the highest stakes, the best cabaret; past the casinos shaped like pyramids, pirate ships, teepees; past the pawnshops with their twenty-four hour neon promise of
next time, next
time you'll win
; the marquees large enough to read from an airplane:
Elvis Lives!

About the time we pull into a trashy motel, I am interrogating my desire—my reason for agreeing to this journey—to be closer to her. What does closer mean? I try to snap my brain closed and enter the room. The blue neon Vacancy sign bleeds through the thin curtains. I watch her and Monty collapse into bed. I lie on the floor with a beer, scrawling my confusion in a spiral notebook.

Monty decided we would be making a detour: from Denver up to St. Paul to see his brother, a cool thousand-mile tangent. It was then, rolling up the spine of Minnesota, that I really laid into myself:

What the
fuck
was I doing?

But before I got a chance to turn the query on her, she shut me up.

We are at a Thai joint, in the company of Monty, his older brother, and some girl. They are all chattering away. She slides her hand under the table and grabs mine. She flips it over like she's examining it; then she tangles her fingers up with mine and just holds it against her thigh. If Monty leans back, he will see this. But I don't have to hear anything from her anymore. I'll follow her without a discussion of anything at all.

Finally we're whipping through the outer belts of Chicago. We go with Serala's brother, Emet, to dinner in a vegetarian joint on the outskirts of the ghetto. I see us all candlelit and eating bright green falafel, the flames winking through pints of amber beer. Emet is so warm that a part of me wants to stay on with him and be done with the questions of our caravan. He's carefully dressed, a bit of a pretty boy, actually, thirty-odd sweaters gathering dust in a walk-in closet. But he's unpretentious and funny, as at ease discussing
South Park
as Nietzsche. While Monty and Serala have an ill-concealed fight by the restrooms, Emet entertains me with stories of his road trips, as if he's covering for his sister, protecting her virtue by not allowing me to see her strife with Monty.

And then we swallow Dexedrine capsules and begin riding into the northern Midwest, pointed toward Ohio. When we hit the storm at two or three in the morning, we are driving blind. There is too much water to see anything besides the squiggled embers of Serala's taillights and the flashbulbs of lightning all around. I'm thinking we should stop, but I know Serala won't want to.

What my Buddhist stepfather would call my “monkey mind” has been turned loose by the speed and I'm talking a million miles an hour to myself. I want to know it all and I can't fathom the notion that something will happen between Serala and me, nor bear the opposite, so I don't know what I want, and I think that she does, but she won't say anything clearly, and then there's Monty, to say nothing of Jay, and the pitfalls here are many but maybe it's not even an issue because—

BOOM!

The bolt quite literally blinds me. The thunder shakes my truck—so hard that I hear the grinding whine of the transmission, trying to pop out of third gear. Luckily, my fishtail on the asphalt swings me into the empty lane and not the drowning culverts on the shoulder. I'm white knuckled and silent and too frightened to stop. The Zen disciplinarian in the sky has applied a castigating blow to my chattering head. So I stay that way for hours, strangling the steering wheel, rigid, keeping on after Desert Storm, which hasn't slowed a bit.

The country around Elyria, Ohio, is quintessential Americana: red barns and rolling fields, intersections with kids selling fruit from plywood stands, signs pointing directions and giving miles to the next town, the roller coaster of blue highway hills. When we get close to Cassie's campus, it's already early morning and full-fledged sun is coming soon. Coming around a corner, though, we hit fog sifting through a grove of trees. A black bird lifts off a gravestone in a cemetery suddenly on the right, cuts across my path. And then there is a car—only it's not a car—right fucking in front of me and I have no choice but to wrench left into the oncoming lane; fortunately it's empty. In my state of mind, twelve hundred miles and twenty hours since the last stop, spun out on speed, gas station coffee, and the psychosis of sleeplessness, the sight is beyond surreal: an Amish family with two children, formally dressed and bonneted, in the carriage with a team of draft horses under the whip of Dad, who wears an Abe Lincoln top hat, his beard like a pelt strapped under his chin. To them, of course, I look every bit as bizarre, with my bare chest, wilding hair, and dilated eyes, my California license plates. I lock gazes with this specter, and when he gives me a strange, three-finger salute, I find myself returning it, as if hypnotized. I knock the gearshift up into third and leave them as far as I can behind, trying to catch Serala's Desert Storm, flying, feeling as if I'm being towed through a dream that teeters on the precipice between nightmare and not.

Cassie—always a caustic, insulated personality anyway—is hungover and not terribly glad to see us, it seems. Serala is grouchy and muttering curses at the world; Monty is drowsing; I am trying to choke down Corona so I can fall asleep. I'm glad when I can curl into a corner and will myself to unconsciousness, and I'm glad that when I rise, it's time to go again: on to one of my people in Oberlin. Ohio afternoon light is erasing the eerie memory of the morning and I feel rested despite everything. The setting is all heartland: residential estates; TV antennae devouring the horizon; a barn flattened absolutely, as if fallen from the sky; John Deere machinery parked in duos and triplets, like a meeting of machines; silos, like cocks or missiles, rising all over the passive countryside.

It is a pleasure to see my old friend Gene, but he is distracted by graduation. I recall our time there as a two-day swim through strange parties, lots of beer from those red plastic cups, a house full of black lights, a postmodern art exhibit—but it all runs together. Except for one moment.

It is the morning and we are lounging around Gene's apartment. Gene is out, as usual. We'll be driving again within an hour, and Monty has to hit the store for socks and shaving cream. Serala has put on
The Pretenders' Greatest Hits
very loud. I'm doing my manic calisthenics. I finish and lie down on the floor and she ambles over and lies down next to me. I feel like a child, still and quiet in the dark, hoping the monster he's heard under the bed will just go away. Only my fear is of the way her sudden closeness makes my head swim. Her perfume braids with the cigarette smoke and binds my mind. I'm in a small pouch and she has hold of the drawstrings, closing them. My heart raises its tempo even further when she rolls to me. She's smirking, beautifully, but I don't need to see her eyes to know that there is more than just games in her heart. Monty has been gone all of ninety seconds and she snakes an arm around my neck and pulls herself to me.

I'm sweaty as hell,
I say, stupidly.

I told you I love it,
she says, and kisses my chest. I disentangle and hop up, hiding my erection with a T-shirt.

I'm going to go take a shower now
, I tell her,
because I'm sweaty as hell and because your boyfriend will be back any minute.

She just smiles and rolls onto her back, lights another Pall Mall, taps a ring on the floorboard to the Pretenders' beat. I get under the cold water cursing her.

She hops in my truck for one hour in Indiana so she can tell me, like a business proposition, over the Beastie Boys' shouts, that
we should have sex if the proper opportunity presents itself
. I cough and scratch my head and study the road through the bug guts on my windshield before nodding.

Good,
she says,
now pull over. He doesn't even have a driver's license.
I obey, round the bend of this over-thought ethical question. Just for kicks, I suppose, she sends Monty to ride with me after that.

I bid Monty farewell with a spine-slapping embrace on a Connecticut train platform. An unpleasant mix of affection, nostalgia, disdain, and guilt percolated inside me. I drew myself away so the couple could have a last intimate moment, a handful of kisses, some hurried words, the language of suspended love.

A few hours later, after a diner meal with stilted conversation, too many cigarettes, and the requisite drinks, we walk into her childhood bedroom, and look at each other in the first privacy we've had since California. We sit on the edge of her bed and listen to cicadas sing, rising and falling with a wind from the fallow fields beyond her suburban house. She's fiddling with a lighter, getting up and rifling through drawers, sitting again.

TV,
she says suddenly, like an announcement.
TV was the best company when I was a kid. It was always there for me, you know? No better nanny than that.
She speaks loudly and laughs at her own joke, which is unnatural. I know she has decided I will have to start this. I flip off the lamp and put my hand on her neck.

God, what an awkward start. I can see us still: her, the most caustic, forward person I've ever known, the girl that tortured me with innuendo for thousands of miles—her, in that TV-lit bedroom, turning shyly away, whispering:
I'm a big dork when it comes to this part.
Me in the grip of performance anxiety, overwhelmed by the arrival of a moment I've lived in my head many times, finally lying her down and beginning—too tenderly, I think. In the deceptive currents of TV light, the long curves of her bones—her jaw, her clavicle, her cheeks—are like swells in a sea. And I move as I might in a precarious life raft, careful with every inch. We treat each other like we are both virgins and by the time we get the logistics worked out, she arches on top of me, her face now a distant planet, only her thin, double-jointed arms with the scars propping her on my chest. I am half-mast with nerves, scared of her parents waking, distracted by the
TV
images that silhouette her from behind. She moves stiffly for a while and I'm sure I am boring, terrible, failing at the crucial moment, convinced she is listening to the sitcom. We finish it out with me on top, but it's a Pyrrhic victory by then.

But there is a kind of comfort beneath the blanket that I didn't expect, as if we moved from new lovers to old ones in the space of those few tense moments. She rubs my head and we tangle together, more natural in rest than in lust. The moon rises through the sheer curtains and it cools me, like her hands on me. Lulled, I sleep the sleep of the dead, like I've had the wildest loving of my life.

When I awakened the next morning, she was gone and the sheets were cool, her pillow squared—in its place. I spent a few minutes squinting at the few photos around the room, trying to learn from these frozen moments of her youth. I willed brightness into my face before stumbling out to greet her mother and the rambunctious chocolate Lab.

But things felt heavy. We had only our separation now, which arrived quickly with my friend Gordon and his NYU duffel bag. Her mother packed us a road cooler, we thanked her profusely, and I hugged Serala quick and hard to skip the threat of tears. But she tugged me aside into the shadow of a pine.

Look,
she says, gazing downward at the perfect suburban lawn,
I feel like this isn't the end of anything—not the beginning either.
She scuffs her sandal on the curb, breathes and looks up.
And “this” is nothing that you can define, by the way
, she warns, with the pantomime of a gut punch that makes me flinch.
But I want to know that there's more ahead of us, Eli. I think . . . maybe I even need to.

I just nod and hug her tight as she wraps those skinny arms around my neck again.

We pull away while the Rolling Stones sing “Under My Thumb” from my tape deck. Next to her beautiful mother, who waves us goodbye, Serala watches from behind her shades, a snapshot of suburban summer.

We made it to her brother's place in time for the first Chicago summer heat wave to roll in like a nuclear blast. We found ourselves lolling around his apartment sweating, smoking bad weed while the most vicious parts of afternoons hung in the sky.

There was this moment there that has stuck with me like an intense or troubling dream: Emet and Gordon are in the living room, talking comic books. I'm in the front room, overlooking the stoop. Emet has just one picture of Serala on his mantle; he keeps things as spare as she does. In it, she is dressed in black and staring the camera down like an adversary. I've just tried to reach her by phone and failed, and so I take the second best option and put my eyes close to her. I'm trying to puzzle her out; I'm trying to figure out if I'm falling in love. The light bulb in the room winks on the photo's gloss, just above her head, like she's having a cartoon idea. She stares back in her defiant way and I can almost hear her say it:
Don't be asinine.
It's what she'd tried to say on her front lawn:
Of course you're falling in love with me, but you ought not insult me or yourself by thinking you know what that means.