Twenty. The Party
At first Sera didn’t understand. How could this have happened? She spent sleepless nights prowling the West End, lauding the cause to all the drunk freshmen who would listen. She stalked the cobblestones with petitions. She distributed pamphlets and rattled cans. She lifted quotas from logged in students and put out hundreds of flyers that littered the campus. She staged demonstrations on the steps and held vigils outside the station. She sent letters to trustees and threw blood when it failed to take effect. But still no one paid attention.
By the New Year frost every college experiences the same flood of emotion. None of the students want to leave. Instead there are long pauses and sad eyes as they realize that soon they will have to leave this beautiful life, where friends roam like packs of butterflies.
I felt for these kids, who needed to be pried like flies from every statue, tree and column and flung against their own accord into the raw murky bath of the next thing. Come down from the lampposts, I wanted to tell them, you’re only making yourself look foolish. This place is not the end. You are showing your age, I wanted to say, before realizing that for many this was it. This was as free as it got.
The last week of classes the school threw a carnival. Sleepy inflated castles and long running yellow races covered the campus. Pete had cotton candy and I had a hot dog. We were ready for the races. Sera was there too, in tailored Armani. There was a coldness in her eyes that I had never seen.
I stared bewildered at the crisp shoulders. “Sera, what are you doing?”
“I’m being responsible,” she shot back.
“What happened to the revolution?”
“Don’t get mad, play the game.” Sera reached for her cigarettes. “The world is chaos, Addison. What do you want from me? Kids today – there's no community. They're passionless! But what do you expect?” She snapped a lighter at her cigarette. “It’s not in their nature to be any different. Ah well. The life of virtue is elitist anyways. The time for morality is the privilege of the educated.”
“Sometimes I think you’re insane,” I insisted.
Sera took a poignant drag from her cigarette. “What is sanity?” She glanced around slow. “Do you think it’s this place? She narrowed her eyes. "This bureaucratic corporation they are trying to pass off as a university is the exact kind of broken establishment responsible for the decay of society.”
Pete snorted. “Don’t you say that about everything?”
“I mean it this time.” She lowered her voice. “Did you know it has war contracts with the Pentagon?”
“Everyone knows that. They developed the nuclear bomb here,” Pete reminded her.
“My point is, we can’t stay in the Ivy Tower forever. At least I'm dealing with it. Consider me promoting the natural process of disintegration.”
"What about Darwin’s pelican?”
Sera jerked her head. “Come again?”
“The blind pelican that Darwin wrote about whose friends fed him fish. The world isn’t as bad as you think,” I insisted.
“You live in a dream, Addison. Like a kid! You're like this... this island.”
I headed down the steps and for the darkroom, winding through more angry kids and neighbors with signs. Another scattered set of voices heading out alone into the void. Four years in this place, and we all spent it staring out the windows watching the world pass us by. No matter what I dreamed I was still simply one of the millions of freaks, all disenfranchised, staring out at the abyss. A million freaks in New York, and each one angry for their own reasons and lonely as hell.
In the darkroom dark lines slowly unfolded on white under the blood red light until I was staring at the first and only photograph Nick ever took. It was the most beautiful picture I have ever seen. I sank down the side of the cabinets with dumb tear streaks all over my face.
The last party was a masquerade. Sera painted herself up as a China doll. I went dressed as nothing and called myself a nihilist. Phantoms and courtesans in red blue white black sparkling masks arrived in droves to drink the absinthe. Whispers of forlorn futures danced across the party. Everyone stayed on the move. I had the sense I was watching something I had seen somewhere else.
As the night wore on I found myself looking around for Jack. In the distance, I could have sworn I saw him, still and staring through the blurring parting hands. He tapped at the ashtray, then put on a smile. I had to see him, I thought. But when I looked back at where his haunted figure had stood, he was gone.
I threw the rum back, it tore up my throat. This isn't what I was looking for. It's a cheap copy for something else.
Is this what we have to do to grow up? Kick off the valve on Fridays, and sleep on Sundays, gathering up enough energy to spit ourselves back into the machine? Like the masks at Mardi Gras, it was all an illusion. Carnival – a pretending valve to get through the next thing. And the world would melt back. The feeling would pass by. I couldn’t handle it. I was no Oscar Wilde. I no longer wanted to play.
The colours all began to blend and melt until it was one giant throbbing mass of deep reds and blacks and lace and top hats and velvet scarves – all churning together, pulsating, growing stronger, louder, fiercer with every drink tipped down a throat.
But now it’s becoming clear that Sera’s had too much to drink, and before she could even pass out she vomited all over her own mattress and then promptly shut her eyes.
The digital clock in the station ticked down to midnight. As always, Pete was the only one there. He tuned a sitar he had found in the Village and I talked to the lonely people who called. Not many listened. But those who did were notorious. They called in from all over the world, saying they worked on the record or just to say thank you. The conversations went something like, "It sure is nice to hear this stuff again." They talked slow and friendly, with an easy Zen that comes from having nothing to lose.
Through the glass Pete’s eyes wound steady around analogue ribbons. I was curled up in the Gillespie chair. It was so named for the trumpet legend having once stumbled onto it and taken a nap. The upholstery had been auctioned off years ago in ten thousand dollar strips to help pay off the station’s debts. It had worked for a while, but stripping off the past will only get you so far for so long.
"What happened?" My eyes softened at a fading image of Gillespie holding up an ear to Bird’s horn. "Why is all the music we play over forty years old?"
“Things were made different back then.” Pete’s head nodded over the tape deck. “Everyone was sharing around ideas and playing with each other. There’s no place in New York like that anymore – but that’s how great things get made.”
I swung my finger in time to the music. “Why do you play?”
Pete kept his eyes fixed on the rolling tapes that clicked and spun in a never-ending hum. “Why are you always reading?”
“To find myself?” I guessed.
“It’s the same with music.” Pete passed a hand over a bare guitar as if cleansing it from his previous sins and set to work attaching new strings. “I hear beautiful things, and I can’t stand the thought of them ever going away. But if I can catch them, then they are saved.” He smiled and nodded to the piano. “Would you like to hear it?”
“I thought you never showed people works in progress.”
“I don't,” Pete said. “But I'll play it for you.”
He sat down. And in an instant the chords crashed. Thunder rolled down my back. Then everything became colours. I was surrounded by shades of red melting into one another.
The bass moved round my heart flooded my spine. I remembered but my body had forgotten what it felt like. My veins filled with liquid light. I closed my eyes and saw orange and red, softly sloping in all directions, churning with each breath. It was sunrise. And I was on the beach again.
How did he do it? How did he make it sound like remembering something, even though I was hearing it for the first time?
“It's magic.”
&nb
sp; Pete shrugged. “It's nothing.”
“My god,” Nick cried, sitting down between Adam and Jack. “I haven’t seen either of you in ages.”
Adam cocked his head. “I don’t think we’ve been together since Addison left.”
Jack shook his head.
Strings sounded out over the airwaves shimmering into the limousines on Park Avenue crawling down in slow streams. I laid my head down on the floor and felt the life drain out of me. Maybe you don't always have to be figuring everything out. Sometimes it's enough to just listen. And there may be no heroes, but at least there is music.
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