It was too beautiful for words, too terrifying to think this was what my life had shrunk to. In the mornings I made instant coffee and tried to read what I’d written the night before. Nice words but they made absolutely no sense. I cranked up Marcy’s expensive stereo and played my records, compulsively transcribing song lyrics as though they might somehow bleed into something else, breed with my words and create a coherent story line. I scrawled more words on the bedroom wall:
I HAVE BEEN DAMNED BY THE RAINBOW
I AM AN AMERICAN ARTIST, AND I HAVE NO CHAIRS
It had all started as an experiment. I held the blunt, unarticulated belief that meaning and transcendence could be shaken from the world, like unripe fruit from a tree; then consumed.
So I’d thrown my brain into the Waring blender along with vials of cheap acid and hashish, tobacco and speed and whatever alcohol was at hand. Now I wondered: Did I have the stomach to toss down the end result?
Whenever David showed up it was a huge relief.
“Come on,” he said one afternoon. “Let’s go to the movies.”
We saw a double bill at the Biograph, The Story of Adele H. and Jules et Jim. Torturously uncomfortable chairs, but only four bucks for four hours of air-conditioned bliss. David had seen Adele H. six times already; he sat beside me, rapt, whispering the words to himself. I struggled with the French and mostly read the subtitles. Afterwards we stumbled blinking into the long ultraviolet D.C. twilight, the smell of honeysuckle and diesel, coke and lactic acid, our clothes crackling with heat like lightning and our skin electrified as the sugared air seeped into it like poison. We ran arm-in-arm up to the Café de Paris, sharing one of David’s Gitanes. We had enough money for a bottle of red wine and a baguette. After a few hours the waiter kicked us out, but we gave him a dollar anyway. That left us just enough for the Metro and the bus home.
It took us hours to get back. By the time we ran up the steps to our apartment we’d sobered up again. It was not quite 9 o’clock on a Friday night.
“Fuck!” said David. “What are we going to do now?”
No one was around. We got on the phone but there were no parties, no one with a car to take us somewhere else. We rifled through the apartment for a forgotten stash of beer or dope or money, turned our pockets inside-out looking for stray seeds, Black Beauties, fragments of green dust.
Nada.
In Marcy’s room we found about three dollars in change in one of her jean pockets. Not enough to get drunk, not enough to get us back into the city.
“Damn,” I said. “Not enough for shit.”
From the parking lot came the low thunder of motorcycles, a baby crying, someone shouting.
“You fucking motherfucking fucker.”
“That’s a lot of fuckers,” said David.
Then we heard a gunshot.
“Jesus!” yelled David, and yanked me to the floor. From the neighboring apartment echoed the crack of glass shattering. “They shot out a window!”
“I said, not enough money for anything.” I pushed him away and sat up. “I’m not staying here all night.”
“Okay, okay, wait …”
He crawled to the kitchen window, pulled himself onto the sill to peer out. “They did shoot out a window,” he said admiringly. “Wow.”
“Did they leave us any beer?”
David looked over his shoulder at me. “No. But I have an idea.” He crept back into the living room and emptied out his pockets beside me. “I think we have enough,” he said after he counted his change for the third time. “Yeah. But we have to get there now—they close at 9.”
“Who does?”
I followed him back downstairs and outside.
“Peoples Drug,” he said. “Come on.”
We crossed Queens Chapel Road, dodging Mustangs and blasted pickups. I watched wistfully as the 80 bus passed, heading back into the city. It was almost 9 o’clock. Overhead the sky had that dusty gold-violet bloom it got in late spring. Cars raced by, music blaring; I could smell charcoal burning somewhere, hamburgers on a grill and the sweet far-off scent of apple blossom.
“Wait,” I said.
I stopped in the middle of the road, arms spread, staring straight up into the sky and feeling what I imagined David must have felt when he leaned against the walls of Mr. P’s and Grand Central Station: I was waiting, waiting, waiting for the world to fall on me like a hunting hawk.
“What the fuck are you doing?” shouted David as a car bore down and he dragged me to the far curb. “Come on.”
“What are we getting?” I yelled as he dragged me into the drugstore.
“Triaminic.”
I had thought there might be a law against selling four bottles of cough syrup to two messed-up looking kids. Apparently there wasn’t, though I was embarrassed enough to stand back as David shamelessly counted pennies and nickels and quarters out onto the counter.
We went back to Queenstown. I had never done cough syrup before; not unless I had a cough. I thought we would dole it out a spoonful at a time, over the course of the evening. Instead David unscrewed the first bottle and knocked it back in one long swallow. I watched in amazed disgust, then shrugged and did the same.
“Aw, fuck.”
I gagged and almost threw up, somehow kept it down. When I looked up David was finishing off a second bottle, and I could see him eyeing the remaining one in front of me. I grabbed it and drank it as well, then sprawled against the box spring. Someone lit a candle. David? Me? Someone put on a record, one of those Eno albums, Another Green World. Someone stared at me, a boy with long black hair unbound and eyes that blinked from blue to black then shut down for the night.
“Wait,” I said, trying to remember the words. “I. Want. You. To—”
Too late: David was out. My hand scrabbled across the floor, searching for the book I’d left there, a used New Directions paperback of Rimbaud’s work. Even pages were in French; odd pages held their English translations.
I wanted David to read me La lettre du voyant, Rimbaud’s letter to his friend Paul Demeny; the letter of the seer. I knew it by heart in English and on the page but spoken French eluded me and always would. I opened the book, struggling to see through the scrim of cheap narcotic and nausea until at last I found it.
Je dis qu’il faut être voyant, se faire voyant.
Le Poète se fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens. Toutes les formes d’amour, de souffrance, de folie; il cherche lui-même …
I say one must be a visionary, one must become a seer.
The poet becomes a seer through a long, boundless and systematic derangement of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he seeks them within himself …
As I read I began to laugh, then suddenly doubled over. My mouth tasted sick, a second sweet skin sheathing my tongue. I retched, and a bright-red clot exploded onto the floor in front of me; I dipped my finger into it then wrote across the warped parquet:
DEAR DAV
I looked up. There was no light save the wavering flame of a candle in a jar. Many candles, I saw now; many flames. I blinked and ran my hand across my forehead. It felt damp. When I brought my finger to my lips I tasted sugar and blood. On the floor David sprawled, snoring softly, his bandana clenched in one hand. Behind him the walls reflected candles, endless candles; though as I stared I saw they were not reflected light after all but a line of flames, upright, swaying like figures dancing. I rubbed my eyes, a wave cresting inside my head, then breaking even as I felt something splinter in my eye. I started to cry out but could not: I was frozen, freezing. Someone had left the door open.
“Who’s there?” I said thickly, and crawled across the room. My foot nudged the candle; the jar toppled and the flame went out.
But it wasn’t dark. In the corridor outside our apartment door a hundred-watt bulb dangled from a wire. Beneath it, on the top step, sat the boy I’d seen in the urinal beside David. His hair was the color of dirty straw
, his face sullen. He had muddy green-blue eyes, bad teeth, fingernails bitten down to the skin; skeins of dried blood covered his fingertips like webbing. A filthy bandana was knotted tightly around his throat.
“Hey,” I said. I couldn’t stand very well so I slumped against the wall, slid until I was sitting almost beside him. I fumbled in my pocket and found one of David’s crumpled Gitanes, fumbled some more until I found a book of matches. I tried to light one but it was damp; tried a second time and failed again.
Beside me the blond boy swore. He grabbed the matches from me and lit one, turned to hold it cupped before my face. I brought the cigarette close and breathed in, watched the fingertip flare of crimson then blue as the match went out.
But the cigarette was lit. I took a drag, passed it to the boy. He smoked in silence, after a minute handed it back to me. The acrid smoke couldn’t mask his oily smell, sweat and shit and urine; but also a faint odor of green hay and sunlight. When he turned his face to me I saw that he was older than I had first thought, his skin dark-seamed by sun and exposure.
“Here,” he said. His voice was harsh and difficult to understand. He held his hand out. I opened mine expectantly, but as he spread his fingers only a stream of sand fell onto my palm, gritty and stinking of piss. I drew back, cursing. As I did he leaned forward and spat in my face.
“Poseur.”
“You fuck!” I yelled. I tried to get up but he was already on his feet. His hand was tearing at his neck; an instant later something lashed across my face, slicing upwards from cheek to brow. I shouted in pain and fell back, clutching my cheek. There was a red veil between me and the world; I blinked and for an instant saw through it. I glimpsed the young man running down the steps, his hoarse laughter echoing through the stairwell; heard the clang of the fire door swinging open and crashing shut; then silence.
“Shit,” I groaned, and sank back to the floor I tried to staunch the blood with my hand. My other hand rested on the floor. Something warm brushed against my fingers. I grabbed it and held it before me—a filthy bandana, twisted tight as a noose, one whip-end black and wet with blood.
* * *
I saw him one more time. It was high summer by then, the school year over. Marcy and Bunny were gone till the fall, Marcy to Europe with her parents, Bunny to a private hospital in Kentucky. David would be leaving soon, to return to his family in Philadelphia. I had found another job in the city, a real job, a GS-1 position with the Smithsonian; the lowest-level job one could have in the government, but it was a paycheck. I worked three twelve-hour shifts in a row, three days a week, and wore a mustard-yellow polyester uniform with a photo ID that opened doors to all the museums on the Mall. Nights I sweated away with David at the bars or the Atlantis; days I spent at the newly opened East Wing of the National Gallery of Art, its vast open white-marble space an air-conditioned vivarium where I wandered stoned, struck senseless by huge moving shapes like sharks spun of metal and canvas: Calder’s great mobile, Miró’s tapestry, a line of somber Rothkos, darkly shimmering waterfalls in an upstairs gallery. Breakfast was a Black Beauty and a Snickers bar, dinner whatever I could find to drink.
We were at the Lost and Found, late night early August. David as usual had gone off on his own. I was, for once, relatively sober: I was in the middle of my three-day work week; normally I wouldn’t have gone out but David was leaving the next morning. I was on the club’s upper level, an area like the deck of an ocean liner where you could lean on the rails and look down onto the dance floor below. The club was crowded, the music deafening. I was watching the men dance with each other, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, strobe-lit beneath mirror balls and shifting layers of blue and gray smoke that would ignite suddenly with white blades of laser-light, strafing the writhing forms below so they let out a sudden single-voiced shriek, punching the air with their fists and blasting at whistles. I rested my arms on the rounded metal rail and smoked, thinking how beautiful it all was, how strange, how alive. It was like watching the sea.
And as I gazed, slowly it changed; slowly something changed. One song bled into another, arms waved like tendrils; a shadow moved through the air above them. I looked up, startled, glanced aside and saw the young blond man standing there a few feet from me. His fingers grasped the railing; he stared at the dance floor with an expression at once hungry and disdainful and disbelieving. After a moment he slowly lifted his head, turned and stared at me.
I said nothing. I touched my hand to my throat, where his bandana was knotted there, loosely. It was stiff as rope beneath my fingers: I hadn’t washed it. I stared back at him, his green-blue eyes hard and somehow dull; not stupid, but with the obdurate matte gleam of unpolished agate. I wanted to say something but I was afraid of him; and before I could speak he turned his head to stare back down at the floor below us.
“Cela s’est passé,” he said, and shook his head.
I looked to where he was gazing. I saw that the dance floor was endless, eternal: the cinder-block warehouse walls had disappeared. Instead the moving waves of bodies extended for miles and miles until they melted into the horizon. They were no longer bodies but flames, countless flickering lights like the candles I had seen in my apartment, flames like men dancing; and then they were not even flames but bodies consumed by flame—flesh and cloth burned away until only the bones remained, and then not even bone but only the memory of motion, a shimmer of wind on the water, then the water gone and only a vast and empty room, littered with refuse: glass vials, broken plastic whistles, plastic cups, dog collars, ash.
* * *
I blinked. A siren wailed. I began to scream, standing in the middle of my room, alone, clutching at a bandana tied loosely around my neck. On the mattress on the floor David turned, groaning, and stared up at me with one bright blue eye.
“It’s just the firehouse,” he said, and reached to pull me back beside him. It was 5 a.m. He was still wearing the clothes he’d worn to the Lost and Found. So was I: I touched the bandana at my throat and thought of the young man at the railing beside me. “C’mon, you’ve hardly slept yet,” urged David. “You have to get a little sleep.”
He left the next day.
* * *
A few weeks later my mother came, ostensibly to visit her cousin in Chevy Chase but really to check on me. She found me spread-eagled on my bare mattress, screenless windows open to let the summer’s furnace heat pour like molten iron into the room. Around me were the posters I’d shredded and torn from the walls; on the walls were meaningless phrases, crushed remains of cockroaches and waterbugs, countless rust-colored handprints, bullet-shaped gouges where I’d dug my fingernails into the drywall.
“I think you should come home,” my mother said gently. She stared at my hands, fingertips netted with dried blood, my knuckles raw and seeping red. “I don’t think you really want to stay here. Do you? I think you should come home.”
I was too exhausted to argue. I threw what remained of my belongings into a few cardboard boxes, gave notice at the Smithsonian, and went home.
* * *
It’s thought that Rimbaud completed his entire body of work before his nineteenth birthday; the last collection of prose poems, Illuminations, indicates that he may have been profoundly affected by the time he spent in London in 1874. After that came journey and exile, years spent as an arms trader in Abyssinia until he came home to France to die, slowly and painfully, losing his right leg to syphilis, electrodes fastened to his nerveless arm in an attempt to regenerate life and motion. He died on the morning of November 10, 1891, at 10 o’clock. In his delirium he believed that he was back in Abyssinia, readying himself to depart upon a ship called Aphinar. He was thirty-seven years old.
* * *
I didn’t live at home for long—about ten months. I got a job at a bookstore; my mother drove me there each day on her way to work and picked me up on her way home. Evenings I ate dinner with her and my two younger sisters. Weekends I went out with friends I’d gone to high school with. I p
icked up the threads of a few relationships begun and abandoned years earlier. I drank too much but not as much as before. I quit smoking.
I was nineteen. When Rimbaud was my age, he had already finished his life work. I hadn’t even started yet. He had changed the world; I could barely change my socks. He had walked through the wall, but I had only smashed my head against it, fruitlessly, in anguish and despair. It had defeated me, and I hadn’t even left a mark.
Eventually I returned to D.C. I got my old job back at the Smithsonian, squatted for a while with friends in Northeast, got an apartment, a boyfriend, a promotion. By the time I returned to the city David had graduated from the Divine. We spoke on the phone a few times: He had a steady boyfriend now, an older man, a businessman from France. David was going to Paris with him to live. Marcy married well and moved to Aspen. Bunny got out of the hospital and was doing much better; over the next few decades, she would be my only real contact with that other life, the only one of us who kept in touch with everyone.
Slowly, slowly, I began to see things differently. Slowly I began to see that there were other ways to bring down a wall: that you could dismantle it, brick by brick, stone by stone, over years and years and years. The wall would always be there—at least for me it is—but sometimes I can see where I’ve made a mark in it, a chink where I can put my eye and look through to the other side. Only for a moment; but I know better now than to expect more than that.
I talked to David only a few more times over the years, and finally not at all. When we last spoke, maybe fifteen years ago, he told me that he was HIV positive. A few years after that Bunny told me that the virus had gone into full-blown AIDS, and that he had moved home to live with his father in Pennsylvania. Then a few years after that she told me no, he was living in France again, she had heard from him and he seemed to be better.