The Drunken Spelunker's Guide to Plato (28 page)

Later someone noticed that anyone who touched the coffeepot by accident during the course of the day would be certain to have good luck that night. Billy Joe bumped into it while helping himself to cigarettes and then found a ten-dollar bill on the sidewalk. Vera collided with Rafi and jostled the coffeepot in the
process and then didn't lose a single game of pool all night long. One of the busboys from Tia's knocked into it getting himself a beer after closing time and then went home and found a girl he thought he had lost forever waiting for him on his back steps.

You had to touch the coffee maker completely by accident, though—it didn't work if you touched it on purpose, although there were some people who didn't believe that. Hank, for one, touched it on purpose every day for a week, but as far as we knew he had no luck.

11

SNOWFALL

PANCHO, IT SEEMED TO ME
, lived only in the Cave. I rarely saw him anywhere else—or if I did, say at the bookstore or taking a drink at Tia's with Pamela, he was only a brief visitor, soon to return to his home. I was wrong, of course. Pancho, too, had a whole life of his own. In fact, it turned out that Pancho had a secret life none of us even suspected. Fortunately.

When Pancho was just a kid, his mother had woken up one morning to find that the face of Jesus (if Jesus did in fact closely resemble a California surfer boy, as was popularly believed) had emerged in the tangled glory of the kudzu vine that covered practically the whole south side of their tiny house at the edge of the farm town where Pancho grew up. The image was clear as day, if you squinted some, formed from the very leaves themselves. The photographer from the local newspaper was sent to take a picture of it, and before she knew it, Pancho's mother had a phenomenon on her hands. The faithful came from as far away as Kansas to witness the “Miracle of God's Creation,”
“Our Lord Among the Leaves,” “Our King Among the Kudzu.” Pancho's mother, who enjoyed a good miracle as much as the next person, nevertheless figured that God was probably most likely to help those who helped themselves. She started charging a buck to view the vines—two bucks if you wanted to take a picture. She also sold ice-cream sandwiches (seventy-five cents) out of the deep freeze on the back porch and paper cups of ice water (a dime). By the time a cold spell caused the vine to die back to just looking like a regular vine again, she had taken in almost seventeen thousand dollars.

It was a miracle.

She put the money in U.S. government securities and in a couple of well-run high-tech start-ups, so that by the time she passed away and left everything to her only child, she was a surprisingly wealthy woman. Pancho never told anyone about this and never touched the money, being shy and a little embarrassed about it, and the interest just kept rolling in—more every year. We had no idea.

Rosalita had never married Tom. Even though there was no doubt that Tom would have legally claimed Bertie as his own child, he wasn't alive to do it by the time she was born. Nevertheless, after several months of lawyers filing paperwork, the bookstore became Bertie's inheritance from her father, held in trust for her by Rosalita. While this was lovely and entirely fitting in a symbolic way, in a financial way it was a mixed blessing at best.

Every month, Rosalita did the books, and every month the numbers looked worse. Rosalita worried and visited Tom's loan officer at the bank, and then she really worried. Creditors were
patient at first, but they had businesses and families themselves and their patience couldn't last forever. Rosalita didn't complain, but there started to be a frown line between her eyebrows and an anxious look in her eyes.

Pancho noticed and, although he didn't say anything right away to Rosalita, he asked me, late one night while Rafi was restocking the beer and Vera was making out the deposit slip, if everything was okay at the bookstore.

“Well,” I told him, “I'm not sure, but I think Rosalita is up against the wall. I think she's going to lose the store. Last time she paid me, she borrowed the money from Vera to do it.”

Pancho didn't answer, just nodded his head, frowning. He spent a long time that night trying to touch the spirit world, and although he never said so, I think that in some way it's possible he might have finally had the success he was looking for.

The next day, Pancho made a visit to his own bank, where they were surprised to see him. Then he came by the bookstore, and he and Rosalita went out back and stood together talking in the yard. Forty-five minutes later, Pancho was flat broke and the bookstore was saved. Pancho made Rosalita promise not to tell anyone, and I'm sure she did her best. But as far as I know, after that Pancho never again paid for a meal at any restaurant in town or for a drink at any bar, no matter how much he tried to.

Eventually, Socrates says, the freed prisoner blinded by the glare of the sun would begin to adjust to the brightness. At first, he would be able to see only the shadows of objects in this new world.

Shadows are tantalizing. In themselves, they are nothing—only the absence of light. To see them is to see what is not there.
And yet, on the other hand, shadows are also premonitions of what is real and solid. Their existence as absence is dependent on the reality of a presence.

That is our fear of shadows. They are harbingers—but of what? What lurks behind them? In this, shadows call up all the terrors of our fevered imaginations. The unknown is filled with both dreams and nightmares. Shadows herald their arrival.

Chained in the pit of the cave, the prisoner had an intimate knowledge of shadows, formed his world from them. The routine of those shadows passing ceaselessly to and fro in the firelight was a comfort to him. These new shadows, though, presage the arrival of a dimly glimpsed new world. These shadows are the future. But will it be a future made of monsters or of something better?

The freed prisoner's eyes slowly adjust to the light. After shadows, he begins to see images reflected in water.

Reflections are tricky things. They are upside down or backward. Space is topsy-turvy and difficult to navigate. If you try to touch a reflection in water, it shatters.

But in that topsy-turvy world, we do begin to see—a tree, a cloud, a man. The images quiver and vanish, they stand on their heads, but they are there. And we are there. We can see ourselves among the reflections, trembling and fragile (as we always are) and upside down (as we often are), but there nonetheless.

The quiet pools of water in the new world are the first mirrors the freed prisoner has ever seen. Plato talks about his seeing the reflections of other things, other men. But standing with his head bowed by the edge of the water, the freed prisoner also sees, for the first time, himself.

Vaslav and Jake talked incessantly now about their plan of attack on Nashville and how they would conquer the music world there with Vaslav's songs—songs that Jake was collaborating on now, helping Vaslav to write. If Vaslav wasn't there, Jake and I talked about him anyway. We talked about how he would get on in Nashville. It had been a long time since I had slept in Jake's bed or even been alone with him at all.

And so I was glad and a little surprised when Jake came, one wintry Sunday morning, to my little shotgun house all by himself, bringing a sweet potato pie from Blossom's and coffee in paper cups. We ate the first piece of pie in the kitchen sitting at the table and the second piece in bed after we made love. The temperature was dropping, and we wrapped blankets around us and wished we had more coffee.

After a while, we got dressed and sat again in the kitchen. The light coming through the windows was silvery, reflected from the clouds riding low in the sky. Jake seemed far away, lost in thought, and his face reminded me of how it had been when we killed the squirrel.

“You have to do something you don't want to do,” I finally said to him.

He looked at me, although not quite in the eye. “I guess,” he said. Then he took a breath and looked at me straight. “I guess I have to tell you that I'm going away alone with Vaslav—to Nashville. I guess I'm in love with him.”

It was like all the air was kicked out of my lungs. Like I had hit the ground hard. Like I was still falling.

“What?”

“I love him. I love him more than I can even say.”

“I don't understand,” I said. “What about us? What about you and me?”

“I can't help what I feel. I didn't mean for this to happen.”

“You liar!” I yelled at him. “You are a liar! You lied to me! You made me think you loved me!”

“I thought . . . I really thought I did. I thought I loved you. And I do, but in a different way than I thought.”

“But we belong together—you and me.” I was crying now. “We're too much alike to be apart.”

“No, we're too much alike to be together,” he said. “I belong with Vaslav.”

I was furious now. “Don't you say his name! Don't you say that bastard's name to me!”

“This isn't his fault.”

“Don't defend him! He knew you were mine and he took you from me!”

“I was never yours,” Jake said. “I was never anybody's—not until I found Vaslav. He's like a missing piece of me.”

I was crying so hard that I was almost choking. I had a sick feeling, a sinking coldness in my guts. All those hours they had spent together while I stupidly waited for them to come back. Now it dawned on me what they were doing. I had been an idiot all over again, ignoring the truth just like I had with Danny. I should have known Jake was betraying me. I should have known all along that he would.

“You were in my bed ten minutes ago!” I screamed. “You were making love to me! What the fuck are you doing?”

“I wanted to say goodbye to you.”

“A pity fuck? It was a fucking pity fuck? Fuck you, you fucking bastard! I never even liked you in the first place! You were the one who came after me! Get away from me—get the fuck out of my house! Get out!” And I slapped him in the face as hard as I could slap.

He didn't even flinch—just stood there and took it. But his eyes filled with tears, and he had to blink hard to hold them
back. “I never meant any of this to happen,” he said.