Newt Run

It was a week before I saw her again, a seven day period that I've almost completely erased from memory. I worked, I know that – I must have worked because I had enough money to pay rent and buy food, but I have no idea what I wrote, or for who, which says a lot more than I'd like it to about the value of my work.

  The next Friday I showed up at the share house uninvited. I didn't know if Richard would be around, but I was sure I'd find someone there, even if it was just a few college kids getting drunk in the living room, and I reasoned that drinking with people, even people I didn't know, had to be better than doing it alone.

  The same two guys were on the porch when I arrived, the blond and the long, thin black man, sedate and comfortable in their deck chairs. It was almost as if they'd never left, two stoned, amicable guardians granting entrance to an infinite string of loosely-organized parties.

  "Hey man," the blond said. "Long time no see."

  "Yeah."

  "You goin out with them tonight?"

  "Not sure."

  "Well they're goin out."

  The black guy appeared to be asleep.

  "I'll just head in yeah?" I said.

  "Sure man," said the blond, laughing. "We'll be here."

  I found Richard sitting with Kelly and Taylor in the living room. Like the last time, Taylor was wearing sunglasses and his voice modulator, but he'd added a band of colour-shifting fabric to the ensemble, wrapping it like a bandana around his head. He nodded at me as I came in, and so did Richard. Kelly didn't seem to notice.

  "You're here," said Richard flatly; I couldn't tell if he was disappointed or not. Looking back, I guess it's possible that he was interested in Kelly himself, but if so he never said anything, and I've never bothered to ask.

  I sat down in an empty chair. Kelly was across from me, and finally she glanced up, not quite smiling, but with enough openness in her expression that I allowed myself to think she might be happy to see me.

  At the time I had no intention of sleeping with her. I wouldn't have minded sleeping with her, but I wasn't planning on it. I know that it doesn't make much of a difference to say so now, but sometimes that's the way things pan out; what's true at one time isn't necessarily true later, and the future can influence the past. Or at least our memories of the past, which amounts to the same thing. At the time, I thought Kelly was unique enough to be interesting and tall and blond enough to be good looking, but I wouldn't have said she was beautiful, not in any classic sense. She had very nice legs and an expressive mouth, but whether or not I found her attractive had nothing to do with it, as I don't make a habit of going after other people's girlfriends. Not that having good intentions makes what I eventually did any nicer, or me a better person.

  That night she was wearing a black, floral-patterned dress over dark leggings and a half-inch band of orange plastic around her wrist. The outfit worked for her: the dress was sufficiently short to focus attention on her legs and the unusual pattern did a good job of announcing her status as an artist, or at least as someone who wanted to be thought of as artistic.

  "Richard barbecued," she said, offering me a plate of grilled vegetables. I took a half of green pepper that had been stuffed with ground beef and onions. It was good – Richard's cooking is almost always good – but by then the meat was already cold and I set it down without finishing it.

  "You going out tonight?" I asked.

  "A friend of mine is playing at this bar," said Taylor. The voice that came from the modulator was high and musical, completely different from the one he'd used the previous week.

  "From the capital?" I asked.

  "No. A local guy."

  "In Northside," added Richard.

  "We're going all the way up there?"

  "Well we are," he replied dryly.

  "You ever been?" I asked Kelly. She shrugged.

  "You're not drinking tonight?"

  "I didn't bring anything."

  "Where would you be without me?" said Richard. He handed me a beer.

  "Dead," I told him. "In a ditch somewhere."

  "Raped and left for dead," said Taylor. Kelly was examining her nails.

  It wasn't easy to find the bar – it wasn't listed online, and we had to stop at a coffee stand to ask directions from a couple of miners. They were both drunk, and couldn't agree on the best route, not that it's easy to give directions in Northside; past Norfolk none of the streets are labeled, and the landmarks are always changing, coffee stands switching corners, buildings being torn down, and bars springing up and dying only to pop up again in the same location under a different name. When we eventually found the place, at the far end of an alley strewn with garbage bags and milk crates, it almost came as a surprise.

  The interior was small and dark, and the walls were covered in old concert posters blackened with graffiti and spattered paint. Kelly said it reminded her of a place she knew in the capital, but from her voice I couldn't tell if that was supposed to be a good thing or not.

  We went to the bar and set into drinking, steadily and with authority. First Taylor and then Richard drifted off to talk to someone they knew in the crowd, leaving Kelly and I alone. Her slim body was draped over the bar, and she sipped her rice wine and brandy with a bored look on her face.

  "Absynic," she announced suddenly.

  "You want to go down that road?"

  "Can't hurt."

  "If you'd ever done it you wouldn't say that."

  "It's that bad?"

  "The miners say that working in the deep pits with an Absynic hangover is as close to perfect misery as a man can hope to get."

  "If it hurts that just means you're doing it right," she said, and I shrugged and ordered the shots. They tasted like a combination of cardamom and lighter fluid, and I nearly gagged trying to get mine down, but Kelly threw her's back as if she'd grown up drinking it. We followed that round with two more of the same, and after that it was easy, one moment sliding into the next and I found that I had my hand on her back and that she wasn't complaining. Her head was bent forward and I could just make out the shape of her nose and her cheek through the light fall of her hair. I asked her what she thought of the music. She said she couldn't tell, but it was loud and that was all that mattered. She was moving, unconsciously swaying in the way some girls do when they're drunk and drowning in loud music, and I ordered us another shot and once we had that in us I led her onto the dance floor. At times she touched me. More often she didn't. We were still hesitant with each other, trying and failing to act as if we hadn't already crossed a line.

  You move in a dark box, strobe lights cutting time into pieces and you wonder where in any of it there's something to hold onto. You look at the girl you came with, someone else's girlfriend and still more than half a stranger and then a column of light cuts her face to a cheek and an eye, streaks of sweat, a single, curling strand of hair, and you touch her arm, or the side of her hip, or brush against her, and it's almost enough. It's very, very close to being enough, and if you're smart, you stop there. But I've never been accused of being smart, or anyway not by anyone who really knew me.

  At some point we stopped dancing. She looked at me through the stuttered darkness and then she announced that she was going to find the others. I nodded and waited at the bar. When she came back she put her hand on my shoulder, briefly, as if I was a friend she'd known for years, and asked if I was ready to go.

  "Absolutely," I said.

  "Taylor's just saying goodbye to someone."

  "Fine," I said, suddenly possessed of a need to get away from her. "I'll be outside."

  I pushed through the crowd to the door. At the mouth of the alley a group of guys in heavy coats were standing in a rough circle. Before them, a tall man was biting off a series of short, clipped rhymes, the Northside slush rap that Pit Boy first popularized years ago. When he was finished, some of the others favoured him with a round of terse, scattered applause.

  "You like that?" asked the guy closest to me. He had a thick,
nearly matted beard and, like Taylor, he wore a band of colour-shifting material around his head.

  "Loved it," I said.

  "He didn't like it," another guy chimed-in, and the man with the headband laughed.

  "You can't do any better you got no room to complain," said someone else.

  "Absolutely right," I answered.

  "So alright," said the man with the beard, and made way for me to step into the circle. I tried to beg-off, but they insisted. Either they were being very friendly or the idea of putting me on the spot was amusing, but in any case I was drunk enough and at last I entered the ring.

  I'd never rapped before and I haven't done so since. I write prose, and I've never been comfortable with lyrics or poetry. For me, writing is work. I can spend days revising the same, worn-out paragraphs, picking away at them until they resemble deflated sacks, all the life and colour drained out of them, and then I'll start again. But that night it was different. Words sprang into my head almost ready-made. It was like they were written in the air in front of me and all I had to do was read them.

  "Havin nothing, there is nothing," I began. "Nothing to fear, nothing to lose, nothing to hear and nothing to use: words follow hollow words, stated and weightless as I wait for a word that will stay where I place it, arrayed as I made it, static and still 'til the pit comes to claim it."

  And that was all - nothing else came to me, the flow of words faltering as quickly as they'd appeared. Their absence left me oddly empty. I stopped and looked at the ring of men, swallowing in a parched throat. A few of them nodded and the guy with the headband laughed, slapping my back as I stepped out of the circle.

  "You did good buddy," he said, still laughing.

  I turned back in the direction of the club. Kelly was standing in front of the entrance, smoking. If she'd seen me get into the ring she didn't mention it, which was fine by me. I felt hot, and embarrassed without really knowing why, and when she put her hand on my shoulder and left it there even after Richard and Taylor appeared, it was like I had a spotlight on me, as if the two of them could read my thoughts. I shouldn't have worried: they were both too drunk to notice anything. Of course I was drunk too - I must have been if I imagined that anyone would bother wasting their time on what I was thinking, and I moved away from Kelly and led the way to the bus stop.

  No one spoke much on the way back to the share house. Taylor sat on his own in the back, and Richard sat next to Kelly in the seat opposite mine. When we finally arrived we found the living room occupied by an older couple lounging on one of the couches. I thought I vaguely recognized them, from some party or event I'd been to weeks ago, but I couldn't recall their names. A bottle of rice wine was open on the table in front of them, and there were two others, both empty, beside it. The man, who was well into his 40s, moved like he was in a trance or half asleep, his dark eyes almost completely closed. Slowly, he fixed his gaze on us, taking a long time to register what he was seeing.

  "Join us," he said, pushing the bottle across the table.

  "Thanks," I said. Taylor went into the kitchen for cups, but as no one in the house had done any dishes, we wound up drinking from soup bowls.

  I sat next to Kelly on one of the couches, while Richard sat in the chair at the head of the table and Taylor laid down on the floor.

  "Taylor," Kelly said. "You ever meet up with your friend? I never saw him on stage or anything."

  "There is no stage," came a woman's voice, which I assumed was Taylor's.

  "Then where'd he spin?"

  "There's a room in the back for the DJ," the woman answered.

  "Did you see it?"

  "They wouldn't let us in."

  "That's weird they don't have a stage."

  "It's common in Northside apparently."

  I took a pen from my bag and started to draw on the back of my hand, tracing a few patterns around my finger nails. It's a habit I've kept from childhood and bring out when I'm drunk or forced to endure the after-effects of being drunk, conversations that blur into incoherency in the faded hours of the morning.

  Kelly watched me drawing. She stretched her arm out and offered her hand as a canvas. The warmth of her palm was a separate thing, more like a startled animal than any part of the girl sitting next to me.

  The older man looked in my direction.

  "Would you rather be present at the beginning or the end?" he asked, but as he was slurring his words so badly he had to repeat the question twice. Beside him, his wife or girlfriend snored peacefully.

  "The end of what?" I asked.

  "The world," he replied.

  "What do you mean by present?" said Kelly.

  "A witness."

  "I don't know."

  "Talk it out," he told her.

  She frowned and took a drink from her bowl.

  "Well the start is always more exciting. The start of a relationship, you know, a book or movie before the ending ruins it. Something new is always good. But then again." She bit her lip, and as I watched her try to reason out the answer to a useless question in the ass-end of the night I suddenly felt closer to her than I had any right to, closer really than I knew what to do with.

  "Then again," she went on. "There shouldn't be anyone at the end should there? Because it's the end. What would it be like at the end of the world?"

  "Darkness," I said.

  "No," she shot back. "Not that, something else. Emptiness, all the lights burnt out, but not dark."

  "So you'd choose the end?" asked the man.

  "Maybe," she said. "Because maybe being there you'd get a hint of the beginning."

  The man nodded and sighed, and after that he seemed to lose interest in us. Not long afterwards he pulled himself off the couch and tugged at the arm of the woman beside him. She responded slowly, getting to her feet and allowing him to lead her from the room.

  "That's it?" Kelly asked, smiling.

  "Took a lot out of him," I said.

  "Me too," said Richard, rising to his feet. He looked at us both quietly and then he turned his back and headed to the stairs. Taylor was asleep on the floor. Kelly glanced at me and I ran my hand up the inside of her arm. She looked away, because it was clear by now that we'd both been waiting for this, a chance to be alone, or as close to alone as we could hope to be in lives like the ones we were living.

  When I kissed her it was like falling face-forward into a shallow pool.

  I tell myself now that it wasn't special, that people kiss all the time, and that in the end a kiss is nothing more than the preamble to any intercourse that may or may not come afterwards. That's what I tell myself, and sometimes I even come close to believing it.