Eyes closed and hair wet from the rain. I am surrounded by dark water and the air is different, colder. The air has teeth and it must be winter. A noise like sweet kisses and the low croak of a frog, an old man coughing. I’m different, too. I’m smaller. Thick socks and rubber boots, long underwear. Heavy wool pants and a goosedown vest. Something in my hand, cool and slender. A composite bow. The shallow breathing of another and I’m not alone. Trevor is here, my cousin. A cruel and silent boy four years older than me who holds a shotgun in his steady hands and now I can smell oil and sulfur and bourbon. This is a duckblind and everyone laughed at me when I wanted to hunt ducks with a bow and arrow. And they were right to laugh. I never killed a single bird and check it out: that was a false memory, my first. I never had a cousin named Trevor and I never went duck-hunting as a boy. Pretty cool, huh. Psychological dislocation. Modality of the visible, the tactile. And like Stephen Dedalus I’m walking into eternity along Sandymount Strand.
Nacheinander and Nebeneinander. What is real and what is perceived as real.
Protean theory. The real is unstable. The real is self-consuming, like fire. And this seems to be a pretty big deal in Ulysses. The real. Stephen Dedalus is tormented by his own belief or disbelief in what he can see and hear and the way I understand it, Nacheinander refers to physical reality as it is perceived in linear time, to objects or events that occur once after another. While Nebeneinander is a spatial reality. Objects that exist on the same plane, or side by side.
Okay. What the fuck, right. But everything Dedalus sees is tangled up with memories real and false and reconstructed images. There’s no separation. Meanwhile, his own thoughts are more coherent and more immediate than the noise around him and so it all blurs into this terrible internal monologue that shifts and changes and licks at the air like fire. Stephen Dedalus exists on four or five levels of reality at once.
Which seems to be what’s happening to me.
The creepy little hunting scene might have happened to someone I know, or I might have pieced it together from a book or movie. It doesn’t matter. I stepped in a puddle or heard a migrating duck cry in the distance. I smelled damp wool or brandy and the whole false memory was triggered. For five seconds it was real.
Dear Jude.
I’m freaking out, yeah. But it’s a lot of fun.
Chrome:
Now this was quite the fucking pickle. He couldn’t be certain but it seemed that he was bleeding very badly and his left arm may as well have been attached to someone else. His left arm was unresponsive. He could see it there, extending from his shoulder and resting in wet yellow grass tipped with frost, but he couldn’t feel it at all. He couldn’t feel it.
Shot. The Fred had shot him.
Chrome sat with his back to a modest pink marble headstone that read: Lucinda Sweet, faithful wife and sister. His math was spotty but she seemed to have died just a few months ago, at twenty-nine. Chrome himself was twenty-nine. He was long in the tooth and slipping into winter.
S’il vous plait, aidez-moi avec mes bagages.
Christian’s favorite movie was La Femme Nikita, the original. The American version with Bridget Fonda was vile, it was beyond putrid. The producers of that shitty mess should be lined up and gutted like dogs. They weren’t worth the bullets. He had heard from someone that Nikita was now a very hot blond starring in her own television series on cable and the show wasn’t half bad, but Christian didn’t own a television. He had sold it to his brother. His brother. He had not thought of his brother in months. What the hell was this. Chrome was slipping, he was actually slipping. His brother’s name was Anthony. Two years younger and slightly better looking. Anthony had those killer green eyes and a perfect scar on his chin. It made him look tough and he liked to tell people it was from a fight but Christian knew it was a chicken pox scar and now Chrome bit his own tongue, hard. He was allowing the defunct Christian to poison his dying thoughts.
He would have to be careful, very careful.
Ironic, perhaps. But it was his own blood that was keeping him warm. It was like sitting in a hot bath. This was an illusion, though. He would catch a nasty chill if he didn’t move along soon. But he was curious about the nature of the wound and he sent his good right hand on a casual scouting mission across bloodwet skin to get a clear notion of the damage. He had a cartoonish idea that the hole would be clean and round, the size of his fist. And as soon as the blood dried up his friends and lovers would be able to peek through it like a window. Those round windows they have on boats, he loved those windows and the bullet had struck him somewhere on the left side, obviously. The chest or shoulder. It had spun him around like a toy soldier hit by a stone. It had made him angry, very angry. And before the shock and pain had dropped him to his knees, he had managed to crush the Fred’s skull with a handy chunk of concrete and then to eat out most of his tongue, like it was sushi. The tongue had been sweet as a nice cut of raw tuna and Chrome now sat with his boots resting on the Fred’s soggy torso because he had always believed it was proper to elevate the legs when injured but he would definitely need to get inside, and soon.
Please, he said. Won’t somebody help me with my luggage?
I smoked a cigarette and waited for Griffin, who had stepped into a convenience store to buy mouthwash, of all things. Time was unreliable, as ever. Griffin had been gone five minutes, or half the night. I stood on one foot, the left. Because Ray had a bad right knee, from an old basketball injury. The knee ached on these rainy nights. I smiled into the dark as Griffin walked toward me, sipping from a travel-sized bottle of Scope.
Docile.
I became docile. I allowed myself to be led on a crisscrossing and seemingly nonsensical path across town that threaded the inner eye and dipped in and out of memory and dream. That was it. If I had been dreaming and some person from a strange land had asked me to draw a map of Denver, it would have resembled the city that Griffin dragged me across. I couldn’t have sketched it in two dimensions, however. It would require impossible three- or four-sided paper and the bright textured pop-ups of a children’s book. There was a remote pain in my legs and Griffin seemed to be moving along at a fast trot, a jogging pace that I could never have maintained on an ordinary evening.
I followed Griffin along bright, crowded sidewalks without touching anyone, without making eye contact. Through damp, black tunnels and across scorched vacant lots and before long I was climbing. I was climbing a cold metal fire escape and never realized it until we had ascended a rooftop.
The Pale.
That shit was magical. Tar and gravel underfoot. Griffin’s steady breathing in the dark. I looked around and around and the sky was curved around me, it was a hollow black dome bright with needles. My God it’s full of stars. Laughing, someone was laughing. The soft and fearful laughter of a paranoid. I was laughing. Phineas was laughing. A voice hissed at me to shut the fuck up and now Griffin leapt to the next roof without a backward glance, rolled to his feet and grinned like a monkey and said, come on Ray, pull yourself together. It was five and a half feet across, maybe. The length of your average dead body. No problem. I sucked at my tongue and looked own. We were high enough that the ground below was invisible, the ground was purely speculative and I did a fast inventory of personal phobias. The fear of heights did not seem to be among them and while I couldn’t speak for Ray Fine, I jumped easily across the narrow chasm.
Faith.
Eve and/or Goo:
How did she feel and oh God but that was a stupid question, so stupid and she hated herself for thinking this way. Unglued. She felt like she was in a dentist’s chair waiting for him to cut into her gums and realizing that the painkiller had not taken hold and she wanted to tell someone but her mouth was full of cotton and mirrors and that sick little device they used to suck out your saliva. It was fear. The kind that bubbled up from deep in the tissues and paralyzed you. She wanted to run away but her arms and legs were so tight and she felt herself curling inward, tucking herself in crash
position and she wasn’t sure if this conflict of the senses was panic or rage or despair. Or nothing. She was bursting out of her skin, she was molting and she didn’t want anyone to see or touch her.
One thing was clear. She was not Goo, not at the moment.
Eve was backstage at the Unbecoming Club and she was going on in like ten minutes and she wasn’t ready. Or was she. Eve could do this, she could do this. And maybe this was her chance to get out. To get out of the game. An hour had passed since she learned that her boyfriend was a murderer and she was numb and stupid with goose bumps even though it wasn’t cold at all. It was hot in here, the air was thick as soup but in her head she was walking along the top of a very high cliff, a place where she could stop and see for miles and miles on a clear day but the sun was much too bright and the wind was pulling at her, she was contemplating the plunge and it just didn’t seem real. But this was enough, wasn’t it. This was it. Christian had killed someone and that was reason enough to disappear. She wanted to go back to the world where your boyfriend was a bad driver or an asshole, a hypochondriac, a compulsive shoplifter. Or married. The daylight world was depressing but safe and predictable and she could at least relate. She could see for miles on a clear day. Her boyfriend was a killer, though. It was so melodramatic, so Hollywood. My boyfriend killed a guy, yeah. That’s right. Fucking killed him. And I’m Courtney Love. Tap tap tapping. She sat on a circular green sofa that smelled of pee and her foot was nervously bouncing on the dirty stone floor and she remembered that she wasn’t alone. Goo was here somewhere.
No, she said. Goo wasn’t going to make it. But Adore was here.
Adore was ten feet away, talking in a hushed, conspiratorial tone with Theseus. One ghoul talking to another, oh God. Theseus was dressed in white, all white. Fine white linen suit, white shoes and hat. But his clothes were stylishly frayed and crusted with grime and mold. He looked more or less like Mr. Roark’s corpse, freshly dug from the grave. Adore was dressed in pretty straightforward Aeon Flux gear: three banded leather straps across her chest that managed to cover some but not all of her muscular breasts. Obscenely tight, shiny green vinyl pants and black motorcycle boots. And Eve might have been seeing things but Adore appeared to be wearing a prosthetic penis tonight. She had a plastic banana or something shoved down her crotch. Adore had quite a package.
Eve hopped up now, jittery. She felt weirdly like a grasshopper.
The bathroom. She needed to pee, she needed to be alone and she skittered along the dark hall backstage, her legs were full of juice and she was trying not to hop. She was trying, God help her. She should never have shared the Pale with those guys. In the bathroom she got a look at her clothes and she looked fairly mild by Exquisitor standards. Dark suede jeans and a little black sweater that would probably better fit a twelve-year-old. It was thin and snug as a glove and her nipples looked like they were trying to escape but Adore would say she was much too conservative for this crowd of rubber and latex and aluminum clothing and she could always alter that before she took the stage, or not. Never mind that. Her hair was a fucking fright. Black tendrils, unwashed. Her hair stood on its ends as if she had just licked her finger and jabbed it into a socket. Eyes sunken, buried in hideous dark circles. White vampire skin and too-red lips. She pressed one finger to the big artery in her neck and measured her pulse. Fast and furious, her heart was violent. She was apparently terrified.
Eve peed.
Fuck it, oh fuck it.
A haze of blue smoke and endless, untethered shadows. The flicker of gas lamps. It was an old warehouse space with a gray stone floor and scattered sawdust and I briefly imagined I could smell the raw meat that had once been packed here. There was movement in the dark and I saw that maybe a hundred people were drifting, scurrying through the place. They slithered about like ghosts. Long fingernails and pale makeup. Bone and silver jewelry, tattooed flesh. Leather and silk and rubber, in relatively Goth colors. Black and black. In the far corners of the dark I caught the random mottled flash of naked skin jerking and grinding but there was altogether more fear than sex in the air and most of these freaks were just kids. They sat huddled in small groups, sharing unmarked bottles of the Pale.
I give you the Unbecoming Club, said Griffin. I give you beauty and chaos.
Paranoid murmurs. No one trusted the others.
It’s a happy place, I said.
Hush, said Griffin.
A bar had been hammered together in one corner out of misshapen scraps of metal and wood. There was a large unfinished stage in the center of the space which was empty but for a curious pair of steel hoops under a single muted spotlight. There was an upright piano against one wall and there was a truly odd assortment of furniture: church pews and cast-iron tables and chairs that might have been salvaged from the dump. There were several torn and weathered sofas, water-damaged leather armchairs that might have once looked nice in a bank lobby. Rocking chairs and one bright blue La-Z-Boy recliner. Even a few wheelchairs. There was a terrifying fan mounted in one wall, the eye of Cyclops with seven-foot blades.
Griffin’s face was glowing.
He clearly loved it here and I could only wonder if he saw this crowd as one big family or a lot of potential victims. And what was the difference. I sat down in an empty wheelchair and began to spin myself in slow circles. Now a sinewy, silver creature detached herself from a semiconscious cluster of trolls and came over to give Griffin a long, lurid kiss on the mouth and when she came up for air she turned to look at me and I recognized her. The creepy girlfriend, Kink. Who had wanted to eat my tongue. I was doubtful that she could hypnotize me a second time but one never knew. I would be careful with her.
Hello, she said.
I ignored her. I decided that if Griffin ever went to the bathroom I just might try to Tremble her myself, for kicks. Her tongue was probably nine inches long. I lit a cigarette and looked around and everyone seemed to be waiting for something to happen. And while some of the patrons had the pallor and attitude of zombies, there were plenty of others who looked like Griffin. Hungry and watchful.
So. What are we doing here? I said.
Hmmm. Do you want a drink? said Griffin.
That depends. Do they have anything but that Pale shit?
Griffin shook his head. Please, Ray. Will you keep your voice down?
I think there is some kind of sweet wine at the bar, said Kink.
Yes, said Griffin. There is usually a barrel of port.
Fantastic, I said. I’ll see you later.
Griffin blinked at me and didn’t smile. He obviously didn’t think it was a good idea for me to wander off alone and unsupervised. What the fuck. That was as good a reason as any.
Wait a minute, Ray.
I rolled through blue smoke and although it did cross my mind that handicapped folks would probably be pretty unamused to see a guy with two good legs zipping around in a wheelchair like it was some sort of toy, I have to say it was a gas. And lately I hadn’t been having much fun and I would have to take it wherever I found it. I rolled over to the bar and was about to ask somebody what kind of currency was accepted here, brass buttons or seashells or actual dollars, when I found myself staring into a familiar face. Long and gloomy and washed of color. The same self-administered haircut, the mental patient special. Crumb, of all people. And why not. Crumb would naturally gravitate to any underworld scene that featured drugs and regular nudity.
You son of a bitch, I said.
My God, said Crumb. As soon as you think the day is wasted you get a nice surprise.
Never fails, does it.
You’re alive, said Crumb.
Pretty much.
Did you take a bullet in the spine?
What?
The wheelchair, said Crumb. Are you a paraplegic?
No, man. I’m just fucking around.
What are you doing here?
I’m looking for a drink that isn’t laced with methadone.
Fancy that, said Crumb. You don’
t care for the Pale.
Not really.
I would have thought it was exactly your speed.
Yeah, well. Once upon a time.
I stood up and was so stupidly glad to see Crumb that I threw my arms around the old fucker and he still smelled like he never bathed. I lit a cigarette and wiped at my eyes. Fucking hell. I was lonely, wasn’t I? Two days in the city and I had briefly touched three friends, with mixed results. Eve had promptly disappeared. Moon was dead. And Griffin was out of his fucking mind.
It’s good to see you, I said.
Now I turned to the bartender and asked for a jar of the port, a request that was met with mild disgust and a trace of fear. For God’s sake.
People are suspicious of nonconverts, said Crumb.
I shrugged and paid two dollars for a tall glass. It was strong and sickly sweet.
What about you, I said. Do you drink that shit?
The Pale? said Crumb. I take a drop, now and then. Purely medicinal.
Uh-huh. And are you involved in the game?
Crumb licked his gray lips. I am Gulliver, he said. The Redeemer.
Perfect, I said. I’m Ray Fine.
And have you chosen a caste?
I’m a Fred, I suppose. I’m self-aware.
Crumb grinned. He scratched at his dark, unshaven jaw. The harsh whisper of sandpaper against stone and I was surprised to find my senses were still unusually heightened.
Eve:
Out of the bathroom and right away she saw Dizzy Bloom and Mingus standing in an uneasy circle with Adore and Theseus and without even thinking about what they must be discussing she hopped over to them and was glad when Dizzy smiled and pulled her close. Eve needed that, didn’t she. She needed someone to protect her, someone to tell her she was okay, to love her. Because everything was coming apart and Theseus was already spitting electricity.