* * *
In between fireworks there is a hushed silence amongst the crowd. It was nice, up here where Katrina and I had climbed out the bathroom window to the roof. The fire department set up camp directly across the street, making our hot tar roof the best viewing spot in town. Up there you could lay back and watch the fireworks explode over you as large as God. Some years the winds drifted south during the proceedings, and streams of fireworks would shift from their soft whirring noise across the air into a louder, more shrill KYYYYIIIIIIIIAAAAAAAAA as they hurtled towards earth – and more specifically, our backyard. The evening’s amusement came not only from the sky, but also from the alternating sounds of the fireworks making a gentle plopping noise into the iced blue pool, and the splashing cannonballs of relatives abandoning their white plastic chairs and diving into the abyss as a burning flame shot up fresh dirt where their asses had once sat.
“That wasn’t cool, passing that crazy woman off to me,” Katrina remarked.
“Sorry about that,” I apologized. “I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to tell her you got a perfect score on your SATs.” I rolled over onto my stomach. “I wanted to see if her head would explode.”
Katrina considered this. “She did look somewhat possessed,” she admitted finally. “Every time you said the school’s name I swear her voice got higher.”
“In these parts, a shameless name drop justifies virtually anything,” I assured her. “If I went around saying, ‘When not at Columbia, I kill endangered species,’ people here would smile and say, ‘I’m sure it’s for the best.’”
“The White House must stay safe,” a voice floated up from below. “If Kerry gets in, the terrorists will have won.”
Katrina sighed. “This is one weird town you have on your hands.” The white smoke from her cigarette curled apathetically into the night.
“Even Marlon Brando thought so,” I replied. “He got kicked out after riding his motorcycle through the high school.” I shook my head. “Clever bastard.”
“It’s a marvel you made it out alive.”
“At least I got out.” I cast a look over the yard. “I can’t imagine still being here like the majority of my high school class.” I turned over the idea of the girls I used to know with fresh pregnant bellies and still found it baffling. “Boredom can really push people to do absolutely anything."
The silent darkness exploded into frenetic streams of red, white and blue. Cheers erupted from beneath us. “Case in point.”
“Nonsense,” I defended. “Fireworks are crucial to the inner workings of society.” I grinned. “Their majesty reminds the brown and plain peasantry of their own potential for inner greatness.”
“They’re sensationalist,” Katrina corrected, “and so are you.”
“Then Don Quixote was a sensationalist too. So I care not.” But even the most steadfast fantasy has its limitations. I could only turn the world medieval for so long before it all faded back to windmills and plains.
I had to leave the false perfection of the white columned house.
Where everything went unsaid.
Where we sunned ourselves silently on vacations.
The fireworks began to rumble and exploded by the dozen. Hundreds of plastic legs quivered on the manicured grounds. Poppa-poppa-pop crack sizzles of sweet white light and spiraling orange and careening green shot through the sky in every direction.
The finale was upon us – the big let-go. Soon, all the remaining fireworks would go off in one loud orgiastic finish and then the sky would fall silent and it would all be over. The guests would stream out in an unending river of laughter and shouts, leaving the yard an abandoned mass of overturned chairs and wrinkled napkins, littering the vision of the cool blue pool shining up into the night.
back
Four. The Wish
After months of glowing red summer nights in solitude on the wide white steps, the autumn semester and its crowds brought a distinct sense of loss to the grounds. Katrina and I headed down to the steps to watch the grand pilgrimage of returning students dart and weave their way over campus. It was always easy to tell the freshman – they were the happy ones. Everyone else was shrouded in some sort of low halo, their mouths set in thin lines.
“What’s the matter with this place?” Katrina remarked, taking a poignant drag from her cigarette. “No one even looks at each other.”
I studied the blank passing faces. “It’s as if they’re all focused on some faint point in the near future.” I nodded to a circle of kids in black stalking around with posters. “I wonder what they’re up in arms about.”
Katrina shook her head as smoke billowed out her nose. “Someone is always sitting in a fountain protesting something.”
We watched the guttural calls and battle cries and the anger of the scattered waving signs. No one was screaming back.
“I’ve got to give it to them,” I said, watching a tidy line of briefcases stream across the fountains behind the gates. “At least the Republicans are organized.”
Katrina tapped at her forehead with two fingers. “This campus has been driving me nuts. You know, college is the most self-obsessed time in our self-obsessed lives. We’re supposed to ‘find ourselves,’ don’t pay for anything, sit and have classes poured into our ears, and half the time we’re not even paying attention and going off and getting drunk on our parents’ dime. And for what?”
That night I drifted to the library, as I had so many summer nights before. I would stay in the alcoves until late at night, legs up in an old armchair, and reading Fitzgerald and Melville and Hawthorne until the lights went down, and then I would stagger home, dizzy from all of the ideas buzzing around in my head. It was a world where everything made sense, where it all tied up into a tidy bow at the end, where no one fell off the edges or was forgotten. It allowed me to forget about the weariness on the streets. I could pretend we all had a destiny.
But the library was not the same place that it had that summer been. Now I couldn't even think. I just kept staring at the kids. These were the ones who made it. These were the superstars who never saw something they couldn't conquer. But their eyes were sad. And their shoulders sagging in. Their heads were sunk. They were propping their chins. Closing their eyes willing it all to go away. Only to open them and stare off at nothing again.
One of the biggest problems about New York is that everything is so sped up. You step onto that sidewalk for a second and wham – people rushing by everywhere, heading to this and that and every second you spend inside your head trying to decide which one to do you're missing things. It's easy to feel like you are just trying to tread water in a rushing stream, paddling desperately trying to catch as much as you can before it all passes by.
People are always telling you these are the best years of your lives. They must not remember what it's like to be walking alone at midnight, lonely as hell and freaking out that the supposedly best nights of your life are passing you by in the silence.
Is this growing up? Is this what being an adult is like? Who wants to stay young? Why? Sure you have the ability to reinvent yourself a thousand times, trying on different things. But the flip side of that is being plagued by anxiety. You have no idea who you are. You don’t know whether what you do is good or not. And you want answers badly while still feeling so far off.
I stared back at the kids. What made them happy? What did they really want? They had never stopped to figure it out.
It was everywhere. And no one smiled. Now it was all serious. The light had gone from their eyes, now they were empty and gray. It was as if the childhood hustling had turned into the new Gesellschaft along the way. And they were now miserable, obsessed with the time clock and clawing out their eyes. Madmen led the blind. We were nineteen, and the best times had died. This was our last chance at an unbridled life and it was fading, one day at a time.
So I too saw the best minds of my generation lost, not to morphine or Benzedrine or fast guns or stre
et brawls, but rather to the claustrophobic clutch of self-preservation hurtled into overdrive, in these turbulent times, with a wayward President and the glimpse of one opportunity to get out alive, and that was to swagger in a sharp suit like the Monopoly Man, to sit behind a desk and rob the people, not the banks, and sail away on a yacht as soon as you can.
You couldn’t blame them, really. The country was hanging by a thread. One more attack and we were looking at the suspension of the Constitution and the amber dawn of a military government. We were the babes of an endless doomsday. The children of 1984. The world was on the path to destruction, going faster than ever before.
It was all going too fast for anyone to change. It would be like stopping your hand with a spinning blade – no matter how noble, you’re still getting sliced up in the process. There were more hurricanes, tornadoes and tsunamis than there had ever been. Even nature had an agenda of vengeance.
At night I sat on the wide milk steps that tumbled down the center of campus and would just stare for hours up at the sky, looking for something. I always thought I'd see a thousand stars twinkling out over the city. But there was nothing but black.
Cartographers used to find their way by watching the stars. But there were no stars in New York. How would we find our way? I felt so alone. I couldn't shake the feeling I was forgetting something I should know.
Do any of the things we are collecting matter? These stupid goals that other people said were great? Does anyone else out there feel like this all isn’t worth it, and want to give up the chase? What if we’ve gotten lost somewhere along the way?
It was a lot to process. This would require a break. I needed somewhere I could slow down and just be for a while. I was tired of staring at flecks of black, brown and grey that dotted the sidewalks for miles. I needed some time to clear my head – a journey into nothingness as far from Broadway as I could get.
Why couldn’t we go back to the ancient, primal wild? To the beginning of creation? Where all men were saintly, and there were no gods, or demons?
Why couldn’t we go back to some perfect age? To Dionysus and debauchery? Where honeysuckles kiss the sky and a thousand vines twist up the trees?
Where labour was no longer objectified, and we could return to a wholeness of life? What if we could go back to a place where stars still filled the sky? What if you could go to an island no one could ever find?
I wanted to run like Rimbaud and unlearn the dirty devices of the city. It was decided. I had to cut myself off completely. I was ready to go, to disappear, to trawl in search of something – there must be something that can make me feel alive. If only I could be banished like Prospero. All I wanted was an island.
I pushed open the door to the lounge in our hall and crept past the piano. With one finger on New York I slowly turned the golden globe. I wanted to get away. I had to get away… but where would you go?
back
part two
the island