Nine. And
“So, who here has done the readings?” A shabby red cover popped up into the professor’s weathered hands. His hopeful eyes search the stained walls and brown floors for a glint of recognition in the vacant stares. Nothing. I glanced around the room. All the kids blinked back, blank and bored. Before I could even raise my hand the professor chirped onwards, not missing a beat, his smooth vowels drifting lonely through the still air.
The fluorescent glare drained my mind, followed soon after by my body, of life and will to live. I sank further into my seat, trying to get the night out of my mind.
That night I headed to the darkroom with A Momentary Lapse of Reason. The bathing red light and cool black machines had a way of soothing my soul, as did the music. I twirled the white paper in the liquid darkness, batting it back and forth between my fingers as I waited patient for second thirty – the most beautiful moment in photography. When the first sharp outlines of your past bleed through the white.
There was Jack, fingers in a V at his face, a cigarette floating between them. Gazing intently into the lens. I looked at the gray images of these new creatures I called my friends. I had captured them in moments, but it was like quantum physics – you can either know where they are or how fast they’re going, but never both. It was as if I held a few scattered pieces of the giant puzzle of their lives, whose larger picture I did not know. I was determined to find out more.
The door slid open and I stepped into the familiar hall. In a slow trickle the room transformed into something like a Victorian salon. The light at the end glowed low and red, drowning a girl in satin on the couch. Legs swung half hung out the giant bay windows in stilettos and ripped chiffon. Gangly boys dressed in top hats and tails slouched with beer in the corners. I gazed around with the uncanny sense that I had seen it all somewhere before.
Morgan dug into his pocket. “I think it’s time for another…” The fingers stopped and his face dropped into a frown. “Adam,” he called sharply. “Where is it?”
“Where is what?”
“What you were supposed to bring.”
“There.”
“But it’s not.”
“That’s all I got.”
“It’s all you brought?”
Adam shrugged. “That’s the lot.”
Morgan stared in despair. “Well can you get some more?”
“I’ll try. But I promise nothing.”
“Adam! Adam!” Shelley ran to Adam. “Do you have any? Can I take some?”
“Of course,” Adam breezed.
“Do what?” I was aghast.
“If you have to ask,” Morgan laughed, “you’re not ready to know.”
“What is he talking about?” I asked Jack.
Jack ignored my question and took me by the shoulders instead. “Now I’ve got to do some things,” he said. Take a cab with Adam and Shelley. I’ll meet you there.”
“Where are you going?”
“Just on an errand. Now get in the van. Shelley will take care of you,” Jack promised.
An inspired choice. I had the constant feeling Shelley would, given the chance, throw me into the harbor at her first opportunity. She cast a sideways look down her long nose before turning sharply away. “Great.”
“She will look after you,” Jack stressed. “Because if she doesn’t,” he said, raising voice so she could hear, “I’ll never speak to her again.”
“I’ll look after you,” Adam promised. I knew he had ulterior motives but all the same it made me feel safe.
Then Jack called out for last drinks. Beers were finished and tossed over the edge onto the aluminum office roof next door, and we headed out into the cold.
Jack peeled off in a cab and the rest of us clambered into a car. We careened through the park under the blackened trees, and then slid on the giant gray tongue into the concrete tangle of the city. The car tumbled down from the highest hill in town in a sea of yellow headlights as if it were alight a waterfall of fireflies. On the street half naked angels mingled with animal heads in a line that wound down the sidewalk and snaked underneath a darkened marquee.
The only thing left to do was buy a ticket.
Shelley pointed a long finger down a hallway where two winding streams churned into the building. I took two hesitant steps and was swept into a golden hallway along with the rushing tide. The sounds of the crowd melted together, the ceilings echoed with jubilant chatter. A menagerie of moving colors carved glittering paths through the lobby like sparkling rivers. Flashes of red lips, towering wigs and blackened eyes, chased paths around where I stood against the wall frozen. Amongst all the madness I must have looked like a refugee from the land of normalcy – lifted straight from a dinner party or an afternoon walk in the sun.
I found myself looking for Jack despite knowing he was lost in the swim of downtown, across gridded streets and flashing traffic lights, lost in the transition between coins and chemicals.
Coins for chemicals. The words rattled round in my head, sparking all kinds of terrible visions.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” Jack soothed.
I was still flattened against the wall when Adam’s hand emerged out from the Technicolor stream. We grasped for each other and headed for the doors.
“I have had this” – Jack held a tiny yellow pill between his fingers and flipped it to display a P carved into one side – “exact print, several times.”
I glided past the ornate doors and underneath the fears that flooded my mind. No one was on the stage. There was only the audience.
“I want you to take a look at this.” My mother, holding a newspaper, motioned me close. “There are children,” she swallowed, “having parties.” She pointed to the front page. “In old buildings in cities.”
“It will be very clean” – I didn’t know what that meant – “and very smooth. No concerns, no troubles” – he shot a finger into the crevice of an eye – “not even those little eye wiggles you get sometimes.”
I leaned over for a closer look and my mother snatched the paper away. “If I was to look in your room upstairs, would I find any of the items on this list?” She began to read aloud, pausing for a stern glare between each item. “Cotton. Candy. Glitter. Water.” She glanced up from the paper. “I hope you have a good reason for why you carry your own water.”
Jack roared in laughter. Silver and gold wands glittered above the bobbing heads. A man in the center of the room, nodding at the attention, flicked a finger over a button and the crowd dissolved into hysterics.
What had gone through Eve’s mind, from her first thought to that graceful fall? The moment that cast our fate to live forever with the thirst for the unknown. Ever since childhood there lies an intrinsic fascination with what lies behind the billowing curtain. Some never get there. They remain lost in their own cluttered thought for their entire lives. Others find talking snakes.
Adam stuck out his tongue. “This is Freedom.”
“All of us are on the same thing. Me, Shelley, Adam” – Jack waved off the rest as insignificant. The theatre roared in response. “If anything were to happen, we’ll take care of each other.
Hands joined—Shelley’s to mine, mine to Adam’s, to the back of the room, led by Jack, and bottles of water were fished out as we all pulled out the pills concealed in our palms.
It started as a tingle. Then, just over my left shoulder, I felt the roar of something coming.
“What’s the worst that could happen?” Adam shrugged. “When nothing happens at all.”
“So the only question really is” – Jack turned his hand – “Do you trust me?”
I didn’t hesitate for a second. “Yes.”
The roar vanished. Somewhere between then and the lights, and not before, or after, but around the bass line, behind and through the expanding and collapsing colors, things changed.
Time raced back to when all the world was America, that first blue promise in dawning rays of the morning sun. T
he steel and rafters fall away, and all the masks and all the guns, and all the girls and all the gold, and all the doors in all the walls, from all the buildings in all the cities. The electricity casts you adrift on an invisible sea, under light swirling golden and velvet. The top hats and cream lace and crimson one by one melted into pink waves that churned and splashed over the floor. I plunged my hands into the sea, lifting the foam and sending it adrift over the swaying heads.
“Will we ever see you again?” Leslie was the only one who had come out to say goodbye.
“Of course,” I assured her, knowing full well it wasn’t true.
The grand staircase that swirled its way up the center of the room melted. Wide black irises, eyes crinkling, teeth clenched never-ending smiling, and I simply wanted to reach out and kiss, and kiss, and kiss, and I felt each moment not just as it passed, but also its anticipation and comedown, vibrating between the others and licking up alongside them like flames.
“My keys,” Shelley cried, patting her clothes. “I think I left them on the car seat!”
I felt charged with energy. “Leave it to me!”
I ducked into the bathroom and whirled the red door shut. A boy in a blonde wig gasped when he saw me in the mirror. “You look like an angel!” his reflection said.
“And you a queen!” I cried back. Instant best friends.
He snapped up when he heard the accent. “Where did YOU come from?” His voice with curiosity danced. And he roared when I said New York. “What are you doing HERE?”
“There’s no time for any of that.” I told him what happened.
The boy’s back snapped. “This sounds like a job for Karma Chaos!”
He cut across the dance floor and bent sharply at the table of a broad Pacific island queen whose hair was three times the height of anyone else’s. The queen leaned over, picked up the edge of her baroque gold dress, and dramatically rose to full height. “Let’s go.” The troupe of us walked out to the car in a royal procession with the queen out front, and the boy and I trailing respectfully behind.
“Chi Chi,” the boy whispered.
“Hmm.” Chi Chi peered into a window. “I’m going to need a coat hanger.”
Chi Chi spun on her heel, hiked up her skirt and in a matter of quick strides was digging near a chain link fence in the shadows of an alley. After a few moments Chi Chi held a rusted coat hanger, one side already bent and twisted, in triumph above her head. She strode back to the car and carefully set down her wig. She stuck one end in the window and wrenched it down towards the lock.
After a few grunting cranks noticed we were watching and looked back up. “My brother is a criminal,” she explained with a casual breeziness as if she had said he was a doctor instead.
Jack trolled to the parking lot, misting yellow in the wet night air. “I thought you had DIED!” He stared at Chi Chi with his jaw hanging open. “How did you get a coat hanger?”
“We found one in that alley.” I pointed to the shadows.
Jack turned this over in his head. “That’s not dodgy,” he finally said.
“There!” The lock popped open and Chi Chi dusted off her hands. “I’ve still got it.”
The drag queen strode off, the curls of his wig bouncing in his hands, and Jack looked around and stubbed out his cigarette. “What would you like to do?”
In the distance the sky was shifting to a pale blue.
“You go your way,” I insisted, “and I’ll go your way too.”
Jack was already leaning against a cab in the street. He spun his keys round a finger and caught them back in his hand. “Let’s head out.”
The party spilled out the doors and under the low ceiling of the marquee. In the car rain spilled down the window, racing each other in sparkling streams. I leaned against the window and closed my eyes. Then the glowing sunrise melted into a black abyss.
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