Prodigals (27 page)

M:
I think it comes down to a sense that if God's not watching, maybe thirty million Americans are the next best thing.

G:
That's the dream.

M:
Not necessarily a dream we quite articulate to ourselves, but yes.

G:
So the longing behind celebrity worship, if I'm understanding you, is for proximity to God.

M:
One way to put it.

G:
Or …

M:
Proximity to God's absence. The innermost circle of our aloneness.

G:
Ooh. You make it sound fun.

M:
Dante's ball pit.

G:
I don't think I made it to that ring. I got stuck with a gargoyle in a Velcro maze.

M:
…

G:
But is there comfort in this inner circle? It doesn't relieve whatever loneliness or despair drove you there, does it?

I told Gaby I didn't know but I assumed she was right; I was pretty sure the aloneness was only deeper at the center, where you could hear it echo, where enfolding the contingency of your existence always was the weightless, transparent envelope of the
idea
of you, a public action having expropriated part of you into the social body, culture's eminent domain exercising its claim on your soul, when all we really wanted were resting points, or so I thought—God, celebrity, accomplishment, sex—weren't they all just pleas for arrival, for the moment sufficient in itself, that feeling of
getting there
, dropping your bags, pouring yourself a drink, and sitting down with an old friend on the porch? The spiritual equivalent of saying, Ah, here we are.

Gaby thought about this for the span of two unhurried sips. “But then the morning
after
the day of arrival.”

“Yeah. I know.”

I did. I was not only coming down off mushrooms just then and getting drunk, but also, due to a mix-up in my prescription, going off the SSRI I usually took. It had been five days since my last pill, and as we talked and drank I felt an increasingly tenuous line connecting me to my life, a line I imagined as the tether that keeps astronauts from floating away on spacewalks; I was floating, letting something go, possibly myself, possibly because I was in a different story and felt the need to sever ties with the old, test the tensile strength of the new, even as the game of musical chairs I seemed to be playing with my somatic chemistry had set off a sort of inner vibration in me, starting in my abdomen and radiating outward, a proprioceptive fuzziness, like the atomization of my cells experienced from the inside out, the feeling of what it would be like for them independently and all at once to question whether they belonged together, whether we could come to some flawed consensus that pooled our fortunes and coexist under an umbrella dispensation we would call identity. I trusted that I could ride this feeling out. I trusted that despite its buffetings I wouldn't decompose or unspool too far, that after years of holding myself together in what felt like an act of will I could unclench, release myself, and let the environmental pressure contain me, like the ocean depths, and that as long as I had one hand on the line, like a grip on Ariadne's yarn, I could find my way back.

I want to say that there was something comforting, liberating, ludic in this feeling, but I can't and remain honest. As we walked the cobblestone streets of downtown, where the faux-gas streetlamps scattered yellow bands in the shadows, and the colored lights jostling on the harbor water below us were flecks of candy on its jellied skin, it was rather placelessness I felt, an indifference to orientation, the way standing on the North Pole gives you only one cardinal direction in which to head; for through the darkness paneling my mind, what I saw at the far end of my tether, far from anchor or cleat, was instead a face, not the face of any person, but the aureole-enclosed fantasy of a smiling recognition, the face that is emblem and locus of celebrity, visible seat of the invisible being, so that rather than securing me to anything firm, I understood, like the velvet rope outside a club, this line was my invitation to the sanctum of celebrated space, my invitation to let go, that is, to give myself over to the
idea
of me, and like an acrobat transferring lines midair, to swing up up up into the divine and unanchored Valhalla of our debased world.

I admit that this may be somewhat overstated. Grandiose vis-à-vis the facts. I didn't mention it to Gaby, to whom, if this was true of one person on earth, I could say anything. But it was the endpoint of this train of thought, I think, that underlay the self-disgust and wretchedness that led me, when we'd shut down all the bars, to buy street drugs from a figure who appeared at my elbow calling himself Little D. I glanced at Gaby, who sort of shrugged at me, as though to say, Sure, why not? And I wondered if there weren't a bigger D out there somewhere, whether the adjective might not be relative, because our friend looked to me to epitomize male height.

“And this is MDMA?” I said.

“Um-hmm.”

“'Cause I don't know it from rat poison.”

Little D looked disappointed in me. “I wouldn't play you like that.”

“Okay, sure. But someone who
would
play me like that would say the same thing, right?”

“Nah…” He kind of swatted the paradox away.

And with the streetlights hissing their miasmatic fire and a deeper quality of night shaking out through the city, I knew my imp of the perverse had made its decision in accordance with the folk wisdom that says maybe it's better
not
to be, but to let yourself dissolve into the social body, the superorganism, enfolding ecology, the apprehensive moment itself.

I regret, D, that in your line of work you have to deal with idiots like me.

We watched him move off into the night, my fist clenched around the baggie he'd left there when we slapped hands, and at the last moment I called after him, “Hey, what's the D stand for?”

He turned. “What?”

“The D!”

“Ha
ha.
” He grinned. “You figure it out!”

The substance in the bag, upon inspection, resembled a large misshapen pebble. We rolled ourselves smokes sitting on the patio furniture of some café and passed the compound back and forth, taking turns sniffing and licking it in those most primitive forms of chemical analysis. It had no smell I could discern and either no taste or was not soluble in saliva, which may come to the same thing. I found something minatory in its inertness.

We walked back to Gaby's car licking our little drug rock. Her car disappointingly did not seem to be where we'd left it. It was also true that neither of us knew where that was, precisely, and that technically it was her mother's car. But the most disheartening thing was that the downtown looked to have been
swept
of cars, and people too for that matter. A traffic light ran through its sequence without advising a single driver. The chill wind funneled down the street between the palisades of buildings. And I wondered why I was wearing a T-shirt before remembering that it was summer, almost two a.m. We wandered around for a while, contemplating what one did without a car and just a crack rock that was probably meth. It finally dawned on us to call the police. They were terribly helpful when we got through and didn't even seem concerned that the last thing we should be helped to locate just then was a car, and soon enough we were in a taxi crossing a bridge into the blighted outskirts of the city, a lifeless district saved from total darkness only by the sodic security lights of warehouses and irradiated signs of fast-food restaurants. Our cabbie, whose first name I had found reason to use no less than fifteen times on our short trip, did not seem as remorseful as I would have hoped about depositing us before a feral wraith of a man leaning against a colossal towing rig.

“Toyota, yep,” the man said.

“Toyota's a pretty common car,” Gaby said. “How do we know you have ours?”

“I got Toyotas.”

Gaby and I glanced at each other.

“That's really not the most reassuring answer.”

Now that he had stepped from the rig's shadow I could see the man's face. It might have been handsome if not for an elaborate pigmentary marking that gave it a marled look, streaks of dark nevi fanning out like comet tails below the stringy hair that fell across it. There was something vaguely regal in his bearing, I thought, a hunched, big-boned quality, like the awkward limbedness of a mantis.

“Can we just take a look,” Gaby asked, “make sure it's the right car?”

“Can't open the gate until you pay me.”

“I don't think that's true,” I said. “I think you
won't
open the gate until we pay you. You can do whatever the hell you want.”

“If you like it better than way,” he said.

It came to $120, and Gaby and I had maybe $80 between us. I was regretting a bit the business deal I'd entered into with Little D, and, in a more general sense, the subjective experience of being alive. I had the urge to say to the man something like, How did we get here, how did this chain-link fence with its small padlock come between us, strangers, men, women, with nothing against one another, acting out the offices of far-flung and abstracted necessities, gutter kings, cursed and shambling exiles muttering an obfuscatory patois, recreants with no faith left in the conduit metaphor of language, abandoned to our preterition of cash transfers, synthetic highs, and a reflexive sabotage that may be at heart no more than contempt for the self-importance and medicalized vanity of other people, the more comfortably unelect, and yet content, it seems, to waste our lives in a pointless standoff at this insignificant gate? I was a bit skeptical of my ability to make myself understood, however, and so I did the one thing I could think to do, which was to take the crack/meth rock/crystal from my pocket and say, “You got somewhere you need to be?”

“You're looking at it,” he said. He took the parcel from my hand and unscrewed a lightbulb from a string wreathing the lot, deftly picking out contact, stem, and filament with needle-nose pliers.

“What's your name?” Gaby said as he cleaned the bulb's cavity with a bit of towel and deposited some crushed drug inside it. He held the flame below the glass.

“Wendill,” he said.

The smoke drifted up from the bulb as thick as milk.

The silence of the lot struck me at that moment, the moment of inhalation, the faint wind like a memory of elsewheres, the threnody of distance, and as the vapor replaced the chill in me with a lithe magma of hot blood, as the euphoria took hold, Wendill said, and I can only relate, not explain, what follows, “Now I will tell you the story of the human soul.”

The Story of the Human Soul, Per Wendill

As you may imagine, I was not always as you see me now. I have lived, oh, many lives, gone by many names, worked all kinda jobs. Not that it's such a long way from claims adjuster to tugboat captain if you—ahem—catch my drift. You are not “before the law.” The gate is locked, I assure you. Or maybe not. I forgot to check, I think. My memory … well. But what I mean is, see me as a friend, doomed for a certain term to walk the night, alas, but a father figure. I find you apt. Not like those egregious weeds on the riverbank. I spray and spray … But no, they will not shut up like a telescope. And I won't either. Ha ha!

Do you remember, in the Jungian sense, I mean, the sense of anamnesis, that day long ago when a slate sky dripped silver tears in the sky-painted lakes above the veldt, when you came upon the briar-caged creature and a man and a woman were one—androgynes, atmen, call them what you will—and a man and a woman and a blackbird were one? When the creature died on the hard point of a rock? How later you baited the briars with fruit, and when the man died and the woman died it was not different from when the creature died. Lush flowers fattened on their graves. And the men picked flowers for the women to remind them how life grows on the cusps of death, playing the B side of
Houses of the Holy
while everyone got laid?

And when the first jockey climbs aboard a creature struggling in the mud, and indestructible space foreshortens, might we not say the rider is the mind of the animal, the way a priest is the mind of the ritual, the way God is the mind of order and accident? The hippie boys and girls of North Beach, entheogenic rapscallions and the best minds of their generation, apparently, take soma to become the mind of the sacrifice. And order and accident have their uneasy marriage, of course, which like all marriages it would be pointless to try to understand from the outside.

That food in the briars begets more food is the initial form the offering takes. The offering is order's humility before accident. A violation brought to consciousness. A horse let wander for a year shadowed everywhere by a hundred young men who could really use some direction in their lives. Do you know what kids in Minoan Crete have to do? their moralizing parents ask. Dance with bulls—can you imagine? You have to follow this fucking horse around, but at least you aren't getting gored by bulls all the time.

And when the year is up, in some extreme unction, they coat the horse in butter, tie it to a post, and kill it. But you've grown fond of the horse over the year, haven't you? So: agenbite of inwit. Was the horse really
down
? You wonder, you perseverate. But perhaps, they say, perhaps it offered itself up like Odin, who hanged himself from a tree in sacrifice to himself. Well, perhaps. The queen must spend a night with the dead horse, anyway, sleep with it. The spirit of the horse whinnies in the wind.

Are you with me? Have you drifted off, begun gnashing your teeth and looking for something to obsessively clean for the next few hours, because this is where the turn comes, the morning sun stretches its rosy fingers into the lit sky, crests mountain and hill, rolls the golden carpet of day over sparkling sea and fruited plain, over man and woman stilled of need, free of menace, stumbling into the light a little hungover, shading their eyes, like: Not bad. Supposing that thing worked. What, the offering? Yeah. Worked?
(Shrugging)
I dunno.