"Now Ophelia she's neath the window.
For her I feel so afraid.
On her twenty second birthday
She already is an old maid.
To her death is quite romantic,
She wears an iron vest.
Her profession's her religion,
Her sin is her lifelessness.
And though her eyes are fixed upon
Noah's great rainbow,
She spends her time peeking into
Desolation Row."
-Bob Dylan
1.
Katherine and Lester moved in with us for a month or so to save money for the trip. They brought along everything they owned, which they ended up selling to us before they left. We didn't take this opportunity to jam, however, such attempts usually descended into the bitterness and recrimination that had started to overtake us before Napalm and Andy came on the scene. Lester and Katherine went out to do things, and when they came back, Vesper and I would leave. She and I even went to restaurants to get away (her idea of restaurants to this point had been going to the Hardee's down the street to steal some toilet paper).
So close to each other, and so in denial, I suppose it was inevitable that the situation would explode as it did just a few days before they left. One Saturday morning, with all of us desperate for weed, I woke up to Lester yelling at Vesper to feed the cats more food to stop their yowling. Vesper, having worked out over time the precise diet, refused, and both unyielding tempests flared. It had been going on only a few minutes when Lester made a threatening move toward Vesper while pleading for Kitty's special diet. Vesper called the police to escort him away. I cowered in the foam chair in the corner.
Lester called Katherine at work from a corner bar. She came rushing home, but Vesper was unrepentant, adamant he had drawn first blood and could rot in hell forever for all she cared. I meekly tried to calm her down but she just said "you can kiss my ass, too, slim, it's your fault he's here in the first place," and stormed into her old room. Katherine calmly sat down and took out a cigarette.
"Are you okay?" she asked, her look an expression of concern.
I lit up our cigarettes. "Motherfucker," was all I could say, in an absurdly passionless way, as if I had just smashed my hand with a hammer.
"You know they're only fighting over love, don't you? It means nothing."
"It's the same thing that happened with my wife. I always have to choose between one or the other. I'm being torn apart."
She looked at me with sad eyes that betrayed no pity. "Everyone knows all too well you are torn, you wear it like a bandage. At our best, we wonder why. At our worst, we see you being torn and try to open the wound further. That's what your ex-wife did. It's your call, of course, but you might consider growing up."
Her face was hard with the look that nothing I had experienced was on the scale of what she had seen, and no personal failure of mine was worth the degradation I was bringing on myself.
"Hey, I'm trying to hold this whole crazy, impossible thing together," I argued meekly in my defense, "and everyone, including you it seems, is trying to pull the legs out from under it."
Her eyes gleamed slightly. "Surely you understand how precarious this thing you're talking about is. Here you are trying to be mister word up hard-assed passive resistance punk philosopher and at the same time get married, make your parents proud, buy some blue chip stock and maybe join the Masons. You seem to want someone to point out the absurdity of it, as if you cannot do both things, as if you have to choose. You can be whatever you want to be. Look at what you've done already. What," she asked, eyes flickering, "is your goal?"
My mind stopped for a minute. I sensed her telegraphing the answer to me, and tried to receive the vibration. My instinct told me the only way to redeem the contradiction was by following the dream even though I know it to be false, because someone, somewhere, would be redeemed by the effort. I had to live it, feel it and finally, let it go by expressing it. "My goal, I guess, is to turn it into," I lowered my voice sheepishly, "music."
My eyes darted away from hers that were looking intently behind the thick glasses, her big lips pursed like grapes hanging low on the vine. "Do you know why Lester wants to go to Italy?" she asked after a pause.
"Hey, I don't blame him for that..."
"It's because he fancies you don't want to play music anymore with him. He thinks you're abandoning him, and he's very sensitive on that subject as you know."
"What are you talking about? He's the one who doesn't want to play with me. He always drowning me out, not telling me the chords, paying no attention to what I'm playing, raising the volume with each bowl until he's ready to scream at us for playing too loud."
"And he would point out here that you are always testy and contrary whenever he wants to play with you. You've been pulling yourself away with all kinds of excuses for some time now, Vesper being only the last in a long line, and you know that. You seem to have forgotten how to look past everything, which is one of your most endearing traits. You and Lester and Coffee Bob could make music that could mean something to the world, but instead you just denude it in bickering and delusion. You're not just squandering time, you're squandering talent, which is so much more precious. Think of how that makes me feel, when I see you guys each pretend it's some macho fight to the death to get his own voice heard, then you spend all your time canceling each other out."
"Yeah, I know all that. We all know all that. It doesn't change anything. We can't just suddenly trust ourselves."
"It's just people, all of this. Those two love each other, as they love us. Their anger, which is not really anger, is not against each other, it's for our benefit. You and I," she pointed to me with her cigarette, "don't get all hot about things, we don't show how we feel, we seem to watch from a distance. To them, our not reacting is maddening, an evasion of life itself, for the heat of the moment is all that has any staying power, any meaning, to them."
"So you think he's just trying to get a reaction out of me?" I asked her.
"I think he's going away because he wants to find you."
Within a few hours, Lester and Vesper were friends again, Vesper making a wonderful salad of wild greens while Lester made his own special polenta recipe, cooking the sauce beyond any rational point, until it was just sweet enough for his rarefied taste. I had needed the ugliness to step into the fresher air outside of myself and, lesson learned, the tension disappeared. We spent the night together in the living room, eating, drinking, smoking and toking, yes, but mostly talking and laughing, building up joy and love until the wee hours. It was love, always only love that surrounded us when we were together. It clung to the walls and stayed there, making us forget that decisions always must be made, but could or should not ever be.
2.
As soon as they left for Italy, a construction company set up shop behind our house. The beloved scrapyard where we used to play baseball, black with cracked tar rubble and rusted machine parts, was soon demolished, and in a few weeks, our view of the sea was taken by a throng of shoddy condominiums lifted up along the water's edge. They were priced, we discovered to our horror, for almost half a million dollars apiece. Our rent was $250 a month. Our neighbors and us waited for the inevitable match that would smoke us out of our homes.
We had entered the darkest part of the Eighties, the Bush Presidency. We worried what would happen to us once the bloated carcass of totalitarian fell. They had recently passed laws that would put us away for five mandatory years for holding the amount of pot we went through in a week. The only hope came from the truly hopeless. The couple who rented out the first floor of our house, for example, became our friends, i.e. our primary source of drugs. Domestic violence, drug and soft drink addiction, habitual crime, it was a world we now knew, but there was little humor in it for these people. They kept a twelve-foot python as a pet, always crooking its head upright with a stick, keeping it away from their German Shepherd because the snake, they said, would devour the dog in less than a minute. They also had a three-year old boy, and once when we had discovered a cat giving birth outside, the kid came out, eager to watch, and his father had to finally hit him with the stick to keep him from witnessing the miracle of birth.
After Lester left, none of our old friends wanted anything to do with us: Coffee Bob, Barbie, Marcy, Red. We made friends of a kind with the neighbors, children of alcoholic mechanics and war dead and Jehovah's witnesses, but their lives all seemed to revolve around cigarettes, their five or six kids, the male's chronic underemployment, and junk food bought with food stamps. They were violent as a way of communicating, and all conversation took shape around the TV, always on, everyone gazing at the shows and commercials with the same glazed attention. I became disgusted by the silence of these people toward the larger world and their place in it, not complacency but silence, a silence all-too eagerly replaced in that larger world by the journalism reality that overhung everything like a wet kiss of death.
We measured out our lives by trips to the Royal Farm Store for cigarettes, Klondike bars and Perdue fried chicken. Nothing seemed to be true to me anymore, least of all music. Every time I turned on the radio, its playlists determined exclusively, as were soap choices and political opinions, by market research, it taunted me with how good our band had been and how terrible the corporate rock passed off as the only musical reality was. It was such a thinly veiled threat to keep my mouth shut, I felt profoundly sad they found it necessary to menace someone as powerless as me. To deepen the irony, Top 40 radio put into rotation a dance remake of "I'm Free," that forgotten Stones song from the Sixties. It was now gussied up with a house beat and a multi-ethnic chorus of synthetic voices, simplified as a song and made infinitely more complex as a work of studio showmanship. It appeared the revolution would be televised, and would contribute substantially to the slave trading company's bottom line.
Lester and Katherine lasted in Italy about three months. They managed to connive most of their old possessions out of us (which we had for the most part stored in an empty room) and moved into a row house at the very edge between the mansions of Guilford and the York Avenue slums. It was fascinating the way the English gardens and riding stables and vast dormered roofs of slate gave way to needle parks and condemned crack houses. I kept trying to find some zone, some cushion, between these two disparate worlds, a block in between or something, but there was only Lester and Katherine's row. When handing them the keys, their landlord said, "welcome to paradise," but didn't say whether this proffered heaven inhered in the emerald lawns and lush willow trees in front or the piss alleys in back with their broken glass and disemboweled cats.
Their kitty had died soon after they moved in, after years fighting the leukemia the city seems to spread on its cats like exhaust. They'd tried special diets, constant affection, candlelight vigils. They thought Italy would save her, and she fattened up for a while, but gave up her strength as the whistling squalls formed from the vacuums between the buildings of Baltimore in November emptied the streets and reminded everyone of how heartless the city really is.
As if that was some kind of symbolic pin in their balloon, Lester and Katherine's relationship had changed as well. Their conversations degenerated into shouting matches, Lester pontificating about, say, the righteousness of not returning library books, Katherine wearily responding how unfair it was to others, the city, the authors, before changing the subject to dishes and litter boxes and other domestic resentments. In the past, such sniping was a surrogate for affection, a way of reaching through walls to touch the soul, even if it meant constant bickering that was painful to watch, because they let themselves be hurt by their love for each other. Now it revealed a meanness, born of boredom — Lester halfheartedly trying to shock, Katherine, bitter and closed off, barely bothering to hold in her resentments. He still tried to talk his way out of everything she threw up, surrounding the life out of every question by trying to discuss everything all at once — a broken hinge, for example, inspired an analogy about how the Etruscans lost their moral center because they succumbed to a mindless and soulless "fix'it'up" fastidiousness. He seemed to be the only one unaware that his answers, because no longer amusing, could no longer satisfy. Vesper, after one visit, broke off all contact with Katherine. The only explanation she gave was "Lester's your friend."
I tried to find out what had happened between them, by talking to each of them individually. He said it came down to Katherine becoming dependent on him in Italy, for his father's place, for Lester's knowledge of Italian, for learning the whole standard of propriety ("ideas just seem more real in Europe when you're sitting under huge porticos seeing peacocks in the ponds and Giotto in the churches"); it all made her feel less sure of herself and he hoped the fresher American air would revive her spirits. This made some sense to me, but then so did her explanation, that he and his father made her wait on them hand and foot all day, scrubbing the house, paying the bills, painstakingly making all the meals, meanwhile Armando kept insisting that Lester absolutely could not work, he was just not cut out to do that sort of thing. She had wanted to start work on a novel, but found that she was just another Italian slave girl who all the men pretended was the real power behind the throne.
Since neither answer was ultimately satisfying, I somehow blamed myself. I reasoned I had somehow forced them to go to Italy so I could discover myself, and concluded I had been as necessary to Katherine and Lester's relationship as Katherine had been to Lester's and mine, another yin to balance Lester's overwhelming yang. I just never wanted anyone enough, and I thought of how little I really knew Katherine, and how little I saw of the love between them. All I saw were the shadows left after love had hurt them. The magical secret at the center was theirs alone, which made it all the more confusing when the whole thing fell apart. Vesper only got drunk and slurred how they never held hands or showed any affection, or how Lester always disagreed with Katherine, no matter what she said. Vesper decreed him a nowhere man, insinuating that nothing he had to offer was of any value because his parasitism overhung everything, like a Shell no-pest strip in a Greek temple. That was all wrong, of course, he was a Greek statue come to life, only to be pelted with tomatoes for being in the end just a work of art.
First Katherine left him alone in the apartment for days at a time, then she moved away, still paying the rent, before asking him, finally, to leave.
He resisted for almost a month. The apartment had completely fallen apart; even the front door had come off its hinges. He was under a constant siege of his own making, smoking bowl after bowl against the inevitable, thinking that as long as another sweet hit was on its way, life would still be bearable. When I'd visit, all he wanted to do was write love songs, which was difficult for me, as my relationship was going so well I found no need at all to sing about it.
Katherine, indeed, had found another ne'er-do-well, not the beatnik divine rage type but a more garden-variety gigolo. I went over to her new place in Lauraville as a favor to Lester, because he needed to pick up some of his stuff. She had a pork roast in the oven (which Lester never let her cook), had the TV set tuned to "Star Trek Next Generation" (which Lester never let her watch), and her new boyfriend was in the closet sawing dowels to make more room for Katherine's work clothes (something Lester wouldn't condone even for argument's sake). She looked at me with a frightening penetration, and said we really ought to get together sometime, just like old times. I was itchy to get out of there, but she kept me — us — as long as she could. Her new cat snuggled my ankles.
A Hindu country singer and bongo player with whom Lester sometimes jammed let him stay in his downtown apartment/meditation center. He hadn't been there more than a few days when I received the first of many bizarre phone calls.
"You've got to counsel me, brother. I'm in a deep freak."
"Whazzamatter?"
"It's like the opening scene of The Iliad," he explained. "What happened to this place? Who caused all this carnage and suffering? Who left the rotting bodies for carrion?" He paused. "It was a girl."
It was an apparently magic, angelic, terrifyingly beautiful girl named Samantha, a substitute teacher who dreamed of being an activities director at a nursing home and looked, according to Lester, like a cross between Janis Joplin and Amy Irving. Barbie had introduced them, after Sam let Barbie move in with her after the fire. Sam realized her mistake right away and used her wiles to enlist Lester to kick Barbie out of the apartment, causing Barbie to fight like a corrupt politician to stay there, accusing him of the worst kinds of betrayals and selfish lusts.
"I take my shirt, my pants, my shoes off to her," continued Lester about Sam. "She's the consummate professional, because she manages to be a menacing sexual shell game artist and at the same time completely sweet and innocent. Don't let anyone tell you they don't know how to work the whole keyboard, my boy. She's probably going to ruin my life — ah, well. Do you know what obsession is? It's listening to old Motown songs and thinking you wrote them yourself."
"I just can't visualize you in love with someone else," I responded.
"Imagine then how I must feel," he quickly rejoined. "My life's at a standstill. I can't eat, sleep, bathe, forget thinking about where I'm going to live. She has that power to move me."
"Be careful of the rebound," I said, dutifully repeating the wisdom I had heard on TV.
"You nailed it. I was convinced I'd received my quota of love in this lifetime. What am I supposed to do?"
It was clear I was not going to get much more specificity, so I improvised a pontification based on the frightfully few licks I had learned over the years, about how the only reason women don't control the world is that it would fall into hopeless chaos from their complete and utter lunacy, for they have the earthly right to change direction again and again as well as the divine right to be unconscious of the effects of their actions, because they feel their most minute transgressions so acutely they could not survive an awareness of how they suck men's souls out with each inference they turn into an implication and finally into irrefutable fact before they forget everything and manufacture a garden for the conquering hero out of the same gauzy whole cloth and the cycle starts anew. The only solution I could offer was hugs and kisses.
"It's like Cleopatra dipping her sails into jasmine oil before coming into Marc Anthony's harbor, the feminine act of war," I said. "Surrender is always the most profitable approach."
"That was my father's angle. I can't go there. They give you nothing but scorn. Men must be devils. How else can you wrestle nature?"
The difference between our two approaches was on display over the next few weeks for any angel who cared to venture in for a closer look. Vesper wanted to get pregnant. She didn't much seem to care if there was a father around. It was all high concept, consequences were irrelevant, you were either with her or against her. As for the idea of marriage, that was almost as outmoded and sexist a concept as the Catholic Church. I gulped and supported her, even as she started talking about dropping classes to prepare for the blessed event.
Lester and Sam, meanwhile, flitted through apartments and movies and restaurants without seeming to say a word, chasing each other like deer. They seemed to float on an electrical band, tense, powerful, all consuming, their harvest moon eyes flashing with whatever light the outside world provided them. They seemed like perpetual teenagers who never left their bedroom and never let anyone else in.
Lester soon moved into her ghetto mansion near the zoo. Vesper and I came over with a bottle of Andre's champagne, which Lester thought was to toast his new digs, but was actually to announce that Vesper was pregnant. Sam, a stranger, seemed a lot more excited about this than Lester, who treated it as if we had just decided on a blue interior. He immediately wanted to know names, offering Zeus for a boy and Carmen for a girl.
Sam, if she could be characterized, would be described as a calico peace freak with iron-poor blood whose speech was peppered with archaic terms like "groovy" and "what a gas." I saw her, though, in a flash, as Rabbit from the Winnie the Pooh stories — fretful, smothering, always busy and kind in a complaining sort of way. Then I looked over at Vesper and saw Piglet, the small creature whose very soul was bound up in caution in the face of the too-large world. Then, miraculously, there was Lester as Winnie, dipping his fingers into his jar of pot, letting his tummy guide him wherever he went. Something crystallized, this trajectory our lives were taking. We could be children forever, or leave childhood behind to serve children. As in an old "Twilight Zone" episode, we would become children's playthings unless we left during this instant of realization. But it was too comfortable to leave.
I bounced around the room explaining my vision to them, my hands flying around, and they all laughed. It was just too good. I paused before I asked, "who am I?"
They all looked at me for a split second before they burst into laughter. "You're Tigger!" So that was it. Life imitated Art, after all. I couldn't help thinking of Katherine, poor Christopher Robin, who had moved to another suburban subdivision, one with a name like Sherwood Forest or Peter Rabbit Way. I looked at the three of them as if they could tell me something about where my life was leading, but they just drank the champagne in costume and talked of how we really should leave before it got dark. Sam's cat, however, passed me the kind of look that came straight from Mother Earth's living breathing connection to the source of the universe — a look that automatically prompts remorse, guilt, sorrow — whatever you call it, it is only the necessity of facing pain, of making it one's own — and is that not the better part of love?
3.
Domesticity abounded that winter. Lots of soups, sweaters and sleeping in on the weekends. The thought of a new child entering the world made Christmas especially precious, even as it exposed the holiday as empty and the presents we shared as meaningless. New Years Eve was 70 degrees and Vesper and I sat naked on the porch watching the fireworks from the harbor, the blooming fireflowers screaming up like rockets and crackling into flakes of fire and glimmering trails of blue smoke. Amid this violence manipulated into art, we gently toasted the unknown future. Katherine had heard the news about Vesper's pregnancy, and called all excited, offering all sorts of plans for showers and birthday parties. We, in response, asked her to be the baby's Godmother. She missed us and felt bad about what had happened, but we shrugged it off, saying there's nothing fair in love or war.
I think I managed to get in some jamming with Lester once during this time. Sam's house was decorated like a beehive, something out of Gaudi. Lester and Sam were composing "bad haiku's" that he recited in imitation of Wilfred Brimley ("blue mulberry leaves/ the crying of silken scarves/ eunuchs strike lutes"). The shadows of the lamps on the stucco wall hovered like giant jellyfishes. Sam laughed and muttered along with our conversation, but it soon became clear she was talking to someone or something else. She waved around a toy baton, what she called a "magic wand" that held "the sea." The only light in the bathroom was a black light that seemed to electrify all the dust. I remember having to wait while Lester played Dylan's "Self-Portrait" double album from beginning to end. It sounded like a cantor singing Las Vegas show tunes, something Dylan did, Lester informed me, just to fuck everyone up.
"Speaking of which, I had a strange conversation about Dylan while you were in Italy."
"So did I..."
"This guy was trying to tell me how rude Dylan was when he interrupted Donovan in Don't Look Back."
"That's exactly the same thing that happened to me."
"And this was a guy I normally trusted with matters musical and spiritual,"
"Absolutely..."
"And here he was claiming that Donovan "Hail Atlantis" Leitch was a more genuine artist than Dylan."
"Same here, some rap about Dylan not being able to handle Donovan's holy innocence and so he comes up with the most complicated song he could find, just to show him up."
"And all this time I had been blessing Dylan for shutting Donovan up."
"Tell me something I don't know. And the guy had the audacity to say that Donovan has gotten better while Dylan has stagnated."
"In a cesspool of selfishness and heartlessness?"
"And bad harmonica playing."
"How can one live on Earth when people think that way?"
"Some people actually like camping, ya know?"
We felt like jamming after this, but the only instruments he had left was a guitar that constantly changed key, a flute his mother had given him for Christmas, and an old banjo Sam bought because it looked "hilarious." We played in rocking chairs, with Sam more often than not humming in the background while doing needlepoint or cutting paper dolls. The whole scene made me feel like we were knocking out Stephen Foster songs instead of the authentic black minstrel songs he copped. Lester would say things like "Herbie Mann is jazz flute" before playing scales with puckered sour notes and no connection to a rhythm at all. It was all so white. I could no longer relate; the great prophets James Brown, Marvin Gaye, John Coltrane and Bob Marley had destroyed Babylon and brought the breath of God upon us; how could I not identify myself as the black hero, the sworn enemy of the evil white man?
On the other side of town, Vesper's pregnancy had taken on qualities of Rosemary's Baby. She experienced sharp pains, bled profusely, talked of the experimentation going on among humans to test the sustainability of crossbreeding. Certain over-intellectual species had been weakened to the point of extinction, she said, by a lack of love, and throughout the Earth their seed was mingled with passion-rich humans to save them. Humans as we know them, in fact, had been crossbred, a melding of native apes with a multiplicity of space species. If you read the creation legends from Sumeria to Greece to India to the Old Testament closely, she pointed out, you'd see how "the Gods" were actually advanced warring extraterrestrials who later freed us by leaving. We are their zero sum of holy minds and earthly bodies, trapped together in order to breed in us the confusion and blind yearnings that made us so valuable to the others.
Vesper claimed she saw things "we aren't supposed to see," things that when her nesting urge pushed through made her resentful she was chosen to see them. These "visits" seemed to occur when I was asleep, or away from the house. The only time I saw anything was one night she suddenly brought me outside to see a thousand geometric spirals in the sky, which I took to be lights from a distant airfield that had traveled many miles in the clear night air, except the power went out again. I recall another time when I was smoking cigarettes listening to music, noticing it was eight'o'clock, then a minute later it was two in the morning, the music stopped, the ashes spread across my fingers. Had I fallen asleep? I was puzzling over this when Vesper came running out of the bedroom. "Didn't you see that? How could you miss it?" She turned the light off and ran to the window, scanning the skies feverishly. She thought I was trying to make her feel insane by denying whatever had gone on had actually happened. I was too busy worrying about my own sanity. "Will you promise me," she finally pleaded, "no matter what happens, that you'll be a father to this child?" "Yes of course I will," I said, and held her close in the darkness.
4.
The snow came down at first like feathers. Vesper and I stayed in all weekend, wishing upon every snowflake that dusted the grimy city. How black the city seemed when covered in snow. We woke up on Sunday morning to find the city an endless glistening ice-enameled marble, as bright as the white winter sun. All the people the city had turned ugly came out of their ugly hovels, to shovel and offer assistance. They glowed like embers, made somehow beautiful and holy, entranced by the canopies of snow. We went up to Patterson Park to throw snowballs at dogs and feed bread crumbs to ducks. The trees were shagged with ice, sheaths of crystals weighing down the boughs. At sundown, we turned the TV set onto the 24-hour weather prophecy. The newscast showed a picture of a totaled Honda Civic that looked somehow familiar, the first casualty of the snow. We turned the TV off, snow tired.
I clomped to work the next morning. White grime drifted along the plowed streets, black snow was piled on pedestals, smoke poured out of snow-covered chimneys like hissing teakettle steam. The neighborhood grifters had gone back to flagging people down with their fiery eyes. I saw in the crystallized newspaper box that two people had been killed in the snowstorm, speeding like idiots on icy streets it looked like. It was hard for me to care. The cloud-soaked morning skies reflected in the skyscrapers like a Monet painting. Hot chocolate awaited me at work, the rosy faces and high absenteeism promising a carefree morning. I was just about ready to sign on for the day when my supervisor came over to say that Vesper was on the line and said it was important. I feared she had miscarried.
"Hello?" I answered warily.
"Felix, Katherine's dead."
"How did you find out?" was my immediate response, the enormity of it reducing to the most exacting of details.
"Coffee Bob called. It's all over the news but they haven't announced her name yet. Her car hit a salt truck that was parked on an exit ramp to the Jones Falls. But it's okay. She told me how happy she was to be flying with the birds."
"She told you this?" I asked, just to clarify, not because it seemed any stranger than the facts, as they say, on the ground.
"In my mind, yes," Vesper answered, as if this somehow made the insight less valid.
"I'll be right there. Will you be okay?"
"Hurry," was all she said.
I went out as everyone else, it seemed, went in. The clogging of a thousand ladies shoes on the atrium floor sounded like a flock of swallows flying away. Swishing my way home, I used every opportunity to look at the bird-sodden radiance of the sky, blotted sheets of them falling and ascending in the cerulean void. I wondered which one was Katherine. Dirt birds flickered in the budgeted sky, swept away from all pointed oblivion as they languorously glid towards the horizon. They all seemed in their singing to be old human souls looking over us, congregating around church bells, obeying the tolls. I tried to call up something from the beyond, but found only my mind reminding me the ground under my feet was always moving, the moon was always dark, the leaves were every color but the green they appeared to be, the sea was not blue, the sky was not endless. My eyes were thieves, and right now they had taken away Katherine.
When I returned home, I embraced Vesper with all my power. Her eyes looked into me not with her own grief, but to find mine and empathize with it. This revealed to me, in turn, how pitiful rough it was for her, and this feeling I had for her kept away the thought of myself. Again, we talked of details: how did the word get around, who had heard, when was the funeral. Around two o'clock the first of a parade of people showed up at our door: Marcy, Coffee Bob, Barbie, finally Lester and Sam. As everyone's story was pieced together, the details of the accident became clearer. Katherine and John, her new boyfriend, wanted to go "one last time" to the Mt. Royal Tavern, the scene and soundtrack of Lester and her lives together, because they made the best Bloody Mary's outside of Bombay. There they met up with Marcy, had a few too many, left, bickering out the door as usual. Katherine drove as she had a hundred times before onto the Jones Falls expressway, probably arguing and glaring at John while driving, and there, on the exit ramp, its hazard lights frosted over with ice, the salt truck was parked, just sitting there, the driver having walked off to hunt down a chili dog or something, assuming the road to be deserted I guess because the omnipresent squeegee kids with their filthy wiperblades and angry faces weren't around. Lester seemed convinced she saw the high speed collision coming and in the split second before glass crushed her bones and metal compressed her humming emptiness understood everything. Marcy added that Katherine often spoke of her best friend in high school, killed in a prom night wreck. They were inseparable, and Katherine had expressed late at night or deep in the throes of extremity a desire to join her — the easy, sweet way out. Katherine had seen her, Marcy said, in recent dreams, reaching out joyously. Vesper lit a prayer candle Katherine had brought back from Italy. It pictured Martin Luther King, Jr. (while it would be considered sacrilegious in this country to put Dr. King on a Catholic prayer candle, in Rome they considered him a saint). I put on the stereo "Innervisions" by Stevie Wonder, and each song attached itself to something of her special spirit: the strength through adversity ("Living for the City"), the compassion and idealism ("Visions"), the struggles against darkness ("Higher Ground") and instant ecstasy ("Too High"), as well as the elegance and strength that derived from not needing to prove anything to anyone ("Golden Lady"). We all wanted to be reborn as songs. Yet all of these perceptions about her (or the songs) were absent a day earlier; they seemed to be created solely out of our grief, still they became her reality. She had finally escaped, and those who remained had created greatness out of the traces of spirit she left behind. It was like she left, as the Rabbis say, a little of herself behind in everyone. Without the constant challenge her life posed, we could accept her into our souls, and be changed.
Waves of grief engulfed us, that palpable sense of loss, so primal, so inexplicable. It opened us up to a wondrous awareness of the emptiness and smallness of our own lives, as compared with the richness of all we experience, things like cologne and chicken skin. Coffee Bob was proud she was smoking and drinking to the very end — she would have none of that talk of immortality, to her it was like living in a bubble.
We shuffled aimlessly around the house that night, wandering between short, intense conversations and gaping silences. The only thing remotely in my recollection to compare it with was the time I witnessed National Park Service workers airlift Canadian geese with nets to resettle them. The other geese started moaning and wailing when they saw one lifted away; the flock went instantly into the throes of mass suffering, enduring as we did a loss without any explanation.
We all sort of crashed in corners of the house. The candle stayed lit in the living room all night long. I came out of the bedroom to look at it throughout the night, just to make sure it was still alive. I was convinced it held Katherine's spirit and was somehow saving me.
My boss let me take a few days off even though my relationship to Katherine didn't fit into any bereavement policy and the company "would lose a tax exemption" if they waived their rules, but they made an exception anyway because the incident had made all the papers. The media focused on the controversy over whether the truck driver or Katherine was negligent. It was hard for us not to see it as both, an example of the perversity of divine justice, she with a death wish and the city blocking access out of the section of town she had tried to save and now wished to move away from. Katherine, as Rilke wrote, carried her death with her at all times. We were just too blind to see it.
We spent the next night at Lester and Sam's, again trying to make love triumph over grief, sharing remembrances, realizing all too well that memories became a physical part of our being, like our bone structure.
I tried and almost, almost succeeded in keeping Lester from taking full responsibility for Katherine's death. But then Marcy brought in a package for Lester. He opened it feverishly, hoping for some touchstone of meaning. Instead he found a letter from Katherine to an old friend, written just days before the crash. Sam read it out loud:
Dear Suzanne:
I thought I couldn't dare write to you again until I was a great and famous writer with a couple of potboilers under my belt, but all I've got to show for the strangeness of my life is a few cursory sketches and a beastly case of nerves. There's always time, I keep reminding myself, but life has become more comfortable every day. In regard to your question, I don't honestly have an answer about Lester. I saw him yesterday. I'd so hoped we could get back together soon, but he still hasn't learned how to treat women (like we know how!). I fear it may take longer than I had presumed since that unfortunate waif picked him up. He's been so cold lately. The wait is terrible. Our getting back together will simply take more time. I'm so sorry to hear about your father. I remember before my brother went to Beirut in the Marines I feared I'd never see him again. The finality of the loss must be overwhelming. I can't imagine what it's like to be denied an answer to the real mysteries that plague one. Please write me again — soon.
Love,
Katherine
As I clicked on the loud pre-mercury light switch in their bedroom, Lester read and reread this letter. There was no consoling him now. He tried at first to explain to me that there was no other sensible explanation but that he was responsible for everything, and when this didn't move me, he resorted to screaming, crying, stamping between rooms with an unearthly distance. "I didn't m-mistreat her, did I?" he finally asked, wide-eyed. I had heard all the talk, seen all the evidence, but, to tell the truth, I just hadn't been paying close enough attention. All I could think of was the way she, always so serious, would shake with laughter as his voice tattooed words onto the graphite clouds of sunset.
Sam tried her best to touch him softly and look into his eyes, but he ended up barricading himself in his room, at which point most of the guests left. Vesper and I were opening the door to go when Lester suddenly came out of the room, almost smiling through his tears, and said "you guys are staying, right?" saying it with such finality we heard all he meant to say in his catatonia of grief. Then he went back in with Sam, leaving us to set up the sofa in a room that looked like a Joseph Cornell box.
A baby in the apartment next door screamed all night, seeming to suck all the fresh air into its system, wailing at the horrible curse of being born. Vesper and I tried to sleep, but the mood was too electric. She was supremely confident that souls went to a higher place after death, but she was as unsure as any of us how to deal with the human loss. I laid on the cold floor, hearing water rushing in pipes, feeling spirits impinging down from the ceiling, perhaps my grandfather, maybe Poe, my mind accepted readily any possibility. I groped for more insight, but I heard only "imagination is all" like some incandescent whisper.
Meanwhile, in the bedroom, much stranger messages were being received. As Lester related it to us the next morning, Katherine had entered through the medium of Sam's body and told Lester she, both of them in fact, were very old souls who had agreed to be together through numerous lifetimes, and had learned a little more each time by making wrong, perverse choices again and again, about the beauty of suffering, which took one on the painful road to empathy, which led ultimately to the memory of their divine source. Choosing was the point, for free will was the only sign of our sovereignty we could see (an idea underscored when Sam refused to translate some of Katherine's pleas to be united with Lester in heaven, cutting them off to remind Lester that she wanted to be the one with him in heaven). Other things became clearer in this encounter, which Vesper and I knew nothing of in the other room amid the constant cry of the baby. Katherine would soon be leaving this plane, but she wanted him to know that all was forgiven, because forgiveness was the one certainty in the universe. As humans we can only strive for nobility, a pursuit that plays itself out in a darkened arena where we are always wrong except when we know we are wrong, where our quest for heroism and distinction may, if we are aware, lead us to learn the truly noble things — to give in, to let go, to love. Forgiveness, she murmured, was the fuel for the universe, the only thing that brought the world into our grasp, that set us free. The light bulb in the lamp I had turned on increased its glow for a few moments, then slowly tapered out. This seemed like the most amazing thing of all to Lester, even though he had read in Popular Mechanics or somewhere that the dead communicated through light fixtures.
In the morning, everyone seemed stronger, strong enough at least for the funeral. It was a mustard yellow day, with baby blue sky, bright sun and awesome shadows, the steady beat of ice melting everywhere we went. The funeral parlor was filled with people. Everyone dressed formally, even Barbie wore a bright yellow sundress, accompanied by Blue in a denim tuxedo. One might say grief united us, but in fact it separated us; we suddenly didn't know what to say to strangers, we were too careful to touch, too hesitant to assume, nothing could be taken for granted.
Katherine's mother had asked Lester to say a few words. The steel casket on the catafalque was closed, of course. The sunlight was so bright through the skylight the casket seemed to meld with the sun, inflaming the room with a blinding gold.
During the eulogies, I wasn't sure if it was Katherine or Mother Theresa we were laying to rest. Every story pulsed with radiance: the social worker who was inspired by Katherine to scrutinize herself each night to make sure she had been as understanding and humble as she could be that day; the teacher who said Katherine couldn't be happy unless every student learned as much as she did; the boss who simply called her "one of the good ones"; finally, it was Lester's turn, which caused a few greyhairs to scowl a bit, but made us freaks sit up and take notice. He stood there calm, strong, obviously inspired by the grace of God running through his veins. He started what seemed like a shaggy dog anecdote, about the path they always took to the Mt. Royal Tavern, past the symphony hall, the railroad station, always eyeing the same silent people, never really talking about what they saw. Then Lester paused, green eyes gleaming, and softened his voice to tell about one time when Katherine stopped to point out the light of a lantern on the cold, slick pavement. As they watched the light overtake the shadow, Katherine whispered "sometimes I feel the only thing I have in the whole world is that shadow." Lester paused for effect, and there wasn't a dry eye in the house. We all understood the message as if by a sudden gift of insight: all she left for herself was a shadow, which was in metaphorical terms the blackening of her spirit that came from standing in on Earth each day trying to make a difference. None of us could accept that she had found the right moment to let go, for we in the room could not admit to ourselves how much easier it was to just let the light take us away. We all spent our energy trying to convince ourselves that our lives had meaning, and this struggle was always futile, not because there is no meaning, but because we haven't any concept of what the word means. Like snow bunnies hopping through the drifts with all their desperate tenacity to flee the arctic fox, we clung to a thread hanging over the abyss, holding on for dear dark impossible life, refusing to face even the inkling of nothingness.
Each of us at the funeral heard in Lester's speech a secret, individual message, and as it sunk in we knew we were the same, not merely together but one, somewhere outside of these hollow shells we were having, as Vesper put it, "total brain sex in heaven."
We drove a long way out in the country through icy winding roads to the gravesite, where Katherine and Lester had courted years ago with books of Shelley and bottles of ripple. A giant red hawk-like bird escorted us on our way. It watched from a distant tree as the pulley lowered the casket into the carpeted opening beneath a purple canopy. We all commented on the bird as significant, one final gift from Katherine. After the body was given back to the earth, Lester and I embraced each other, smiling through the tears. Lester's expression was as full of love as I'd ever seen. Out of my mouth came the words "now I know what they mean when they say 'the second half of life.'"
We went back to Katherine's parents' house for the party, in the Catholic tradition of trying to convince ourselves and Katherine how happy she had made us. She had brought us all together before the priest, a massive luncheon spread and generous toasts — like a Christmas party, as if to say, in her slightly English accent, "You all have wonderful lives to live; this is a fucking carcass." Lester's mother was there, genuinely sorry at losing someone who actually tried to know her and care for her. She didn't seem long for this world either, pale and wearing a wig from chemo treatments for the breast cancer brought on no doubt by holding all that guilt so deeply inside. I drank some Pikesville Rye Whiskey with Katherine's brother, who seemed to be competing with me to see who was better at controlling his sorrow. Vesper met up with me to note that there were many light beings in the house; could I see them? Tiny, momentary white, purple or gold flashes in the air.
On our way home, Vesper driving Coffee Bob, Barbie and me, we passed a city salt truck on the highway. Coffee Bob shook his fist at it, and we all yelled towards the cab. The driver looked mortified, as anyone would in the face of some unknown person(s) expressing the most virulent kind of hatred for you. He was innocent, of course, as was the real driver ultimately. We felt better, though, laughing together afterwards. More birds flew overhead. I wondered how they, like that one who flew us in our grief to the gravesite, could have emerged from this wreckage: of parts that never did fit together, of love that always was withheld, of souls who refused to touch? How could all the thoughts we let fly overhead unresolved, swirl so rapturously now, in our laughter, caught in the sunlight's interstices? Katherine's spirit had extricated itself, its traces had by now seeped away, and the golden light glowed ever farther away, so that our egos could once again soar — against the ceiling.
EPILOGUE
"Yes, I received your letter yesterday
About the time the doorknob broke
When you asked how I was doing
Was that some kind of joke?
All these people that you mentioned
Yes I know them their quite lame;
I had to rearrange their faces
And give them all another name.
Right now I can't read too good,
Don't send me no more letters no,
Not unless you mail them from
Desolation Row."
-Bob Dylan
Death, they say, always comes in twos. Soon after Katherine died, Lester learned that his father was dying in Minneapolis. He and Hector flew out in the middle of winter, trying to nurse him, trying to explain things to him, trying to reminisce, most of all trying to forget what was in front of them. Armando had contracted a specialized form of leukemia from his work with Army intelligence in the Fifties; he had watched literally hundreds of hydrogen bomb test explosions in the Los Alamos desert. He loved to watch the sheer beauty of the plume, to feel the underground mountains melting. He would linger at the recon point, staring, as ghastly phantasms of gold afterburned the sky and warm sand fell on him like rain. He took the experience with the grace and humility of a soldier; he was proud, as if his witnessing the awesome power of this ultimate weapon somehow helped kept it from being used, as if his eyes kept it sacred. Late one afternoon, Lester stepped out of the colorless hospital room to smoke a bowl in the bathroom, slatting the window open to let the steam escape into the frigid air. When he got back into the room, his father was gone, as if he had been waiting for him to leave.
I talked to Lester afterwards and found in saying the most generic things ("I'm so sorry," "let me know if there's anything I can do,") I had imparted something profound. He lost all interest in jobs and friends and spent his time, as he put it, taking his flute into the woods and communing with spirits high in the trees and under the dark muck of the ponds, finding in this more of an answer than human contact could provide.
When I did manage to talk to him, he didn't care to talk about music, or politics, or sports. What he did want to talk about was the ungratefulness of Coffee Bob, the insincerity of myself and the general lack of understanding about what he was suffering through. After a couple weeks of trying to talk to him and failing, his phone was finally disconnected in one of the phone company's periodic sweeps. I saw him on the street a month or so later, mangy, without a shirt, absquatulating past the Butcher's Hill convenience store where the aimless people sucked on things languorously. He didn't see me as I looked right at him; he seemed, without the sparkle of recognition, blank and heartless. He seemed lost in the chaos of a life lived in an obsession.
My own life didn't allow me any pity. I was given a supervisory position at work, and as a result, certain things were revealed to me, about special manager bonuses and bar codes on my car to get into the parking lot. I felt I was becoming a professional, and thus would finally be entitled to an opinion, as a hack of truth. The new job didn't require any actual work, which of course made it a lot harder, the main requirements being confidence in what you say no matter how absurd and the ability to lie on command. Vesper was becoming more and more frustrated with the dirt and crime of the city, and Lester was emblematic to her of both. Some of the condos behind our house had been sold, the others were full of broken windows. Someone had spraypainted "Die, Yuppie Scum" on one. Vesper called a real estate agent to show us places out in the suburbs, bungalows with mail pickup and a maple tree in the back yard, places where I could sing to a child in a hammock while maple seed helicopters whirled down. We stopped smoking pot, started going to AA meetings. She even insisted I get a new driver's license, a feat I accomplished by taking an infant car seat with me to the driving test. I even started watching TV again.
Life took on more of a past tense feel. Even Vesper got nostalgic: "it was cool to be poor, to think of cool ways to survive, to not have hot water and have 20 wild rabid cats circling you at all times, it was very cool, celebrating the weirdness, happy to be among the weird, because it was so cool, so good, to live in the blow-away zone, the nucleus, with the DNA, to get no sleep all weekend, no food all week, to let everything go. And it meant absolutely nothing... except that it was cool."
Coffee Bob kept me in touch with what was going on with the old crowd. Marcy moved to California. Barbie got a job with the government she had applied for years ago as a joke. Juli finally did leave Red, enrolled in art school, and, less miraculously, was discovered by a famous New York painter who hailed her in the New York Times as the next big proto-realist. Lester meanwhile had joined, in Coffee Bob's words, a religious cult. He had reportedly if unbelievably stopped smoking dope and played in a band with some others from the group. I didn't make any serious attempts to contact him about it because I really didn't want to know. I was too busy feeling sorry for myself. What did I have to show for all my efforts? A quick, greedy road to enlightenment that revealed, because it was a short cut, only how little profit was in the truth? Hundreds of songs that no one would ever hear? What good was a secret identity if nobody knew about it? Even worse, the answers to my dilemma seemed all too obvious. I was young. I was rebellious. I was idealistic. Was I supposed to just smile at these "insights" and accept a life of small joys and victories as what God intended for me, or was it all right to be stuck in rage at what I'd seen, unable to look people in the eye because they did not, would not know what I knew?
Then I remembered something Vesper had said about my mind being merely a vehicle of divine energy flowing through an empty body, with no destruction, no destination, no meaning other than the way I perceive. The time she had said this I thought she had it all figured out. Now I thought she might have actually been on to something.
Slowly, as I learned to laugh out of conviviality rather than humor, to betray nothing with my eyes and words, to fear for my family and strip away my vices, the world put on me the purple overcoat of conventionality, and I began to realize how little Lester and I had actually rebelled. The true rebels were those who ate off the tree without thinking about the compromises, who read society as a handbook of rules, who saw gifts as rights and pain as punishment. Such souls lived in a netherworld of loneliness, because they suppressed their own true voice, their source, they simply refused to be baffled by the world. But when faced with things like music, art, expression, they were confused, uncertain whether to spit at us for our audacity or to cling on like lamprey eels. I finally learned that it was their rejection, not their approval, which made what we did important. What was the point of love if we expected anything in return? What was the value of the world we created together if we had to share it with everyone else? Our isolation pained us into feeling, which prompted us to imagine, and in imagining together, Lester and I alchemized the darkness into that rarest of things, a truth that lit a glimpse on heaven.
I finally saw Lester at the ranch about four months after Katherine's funeral. About 12 people were there. Coffee Bob had arranged instruments and amplifiers in the familiar center of the living room. We feigned a festive air, but we kept looking out of the corner of our eyes for Lester's arrival, for we bore the bitter traces of a nostalgia that we thought he could revivify. Couples formed, conversed and sought new combinations. Coffee Bob had prepared fettuccine and shish kebab smothered in rosemary. The ranch, which turned out in the end to be his parents' house, seemed like a series of still-lifes: the cello, the Navajo rugs, fresh paintings on the walls, books by Bronowski and African pottery heads on the mantle, ancient scallop shells hanging from the ceiling.
Lester came very late, saying only "carry on, but no Scarlatti, play the blues."
Sam, like a hostage at his side, smiled, and seeing the way we all looked at them, said to Lester "what's with the attitude — those guys seem so uncool."
Lester didn't respond, instead he skulked insolently away from her, her dim quips nothing to him. He demanded that sage be burned and took the Mozart off the turntable, insisting he only be played in the daytime. We couldn't laugh, this time, we were all, somehow, offended. Coffee Bob, who felt the intricacies of social interaction as viscerally as others feel bee stings, complained that Lester should have been here hours ago, he had no right to come in and take over everything and assume that everyone would just accede to his every demand (although we were doing just that). Sam spoke to his defense, saying gently "I think you'd better leave him alone right now."
"Why won't you just leave right now?" Lester immediately retorted to her. She stiffened and fell back into her silence, fitting in like a willow amid the crowd as Lester ate the leftovers and opined about the precious Chopin and insufficient Debussy.
After a few more tense minutes, Sam suddenly and inexplicably said she was leaving. Lester picked up the guitar. He aimed the neck at her and ratcheted it up and down like he was shooting a gun. The front door gave a thudding report. Lester started playing. His gun became a guitar and the notes boats to his stygian remorse — and all our cigarettes became drums, bass, rhythm guitar.
So the dead could get their kicks not forgiving.
After an hour or so, we looked at each other, the silence between us broken.
"Thanks for giving me the secret of life and death," I said.
"Back at you," he grinned.
THE END
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