by Adam Klein
But I must stay calm. If I appear calm, if I keep walking toward the streetlights, no one will ask where I’m going. No one will say a word to me. And I’ll see Hannah, and she’ll make this a good experience if I don’t let it get out of control. I mustn’t let this get out of control. So I begin breathing, and the cold outside has frozen my thoughts. And by the time I approach the bakeshop, every thought has died in the cold.
I go up the stairs and I am quiet on them, gliding light as a person with all their thoughts dead. I arrive at her door. I knock on it, but no one responds. No one hears the dead knocking. It is too solemn.
She does not answer, but I know I can’t drive home. I must wait for her, so I sit in front of her door, and after a while I close my eyes.
There’s a coldness around my heart, and it feels as if it were being squeezed. But I cannot open my eyes. If I open my eyes, I will see the figure clutching my heart and I’ll know its face. I do not want to see that face.
‘Carrie?’ Comforting, kind voice. I open my eyes. ‘Where have you been?’ Hannah asks.
Where did you go?’ I get up and notice a neighbor’s head sliding back behind a door.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I went for a walk, and when I came back you were gone.’ We go into her apartment. Safety and confusion. But safety wins out. I sit on the hard chair in front of the oven. The light bulbs are blue and red in the two small lamps she turns on; the room is ocean deep in their harmony. She sits down in front of me, smiling.
‘How long have you been here?’ she asks.
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I have no idea.’ We both laugh; it is too abstract. Clock hands are fear and relief. They sweep over us.
‘I went to his studio. We weren’t far from it.’ She’s still smiling, but her eyes are implicating. I look away from her.
‘What did you do there?’ I ask.
‘I can get in there. I’ve gone in there a few times since Ellen—’ She reaches into her pocket. ‘That whole place was cleared out, all the paintings and things. Another teacher’s in there now.’
‘Let’s not talk about it.’ I say it suddenly, my heart cold again.
‘But it was so weird,’ she goes on. ‘It was like I was drawn there, and I knew exactly where to look. I felt like I was Ellen, and I was really scared and upset, but I had to go in and look. So I broke in just the way Ellen once showed me she could, and I just felt guided. I walked over to the desk and opened the drawer and it was full of this other teacher’s stuff, but I put my hand all the way back into the drawer, and caught up inside the desk I found this.’ She shows me a photograph folded up like an accordion. She flattens it on her knee.
‘It’s them,’ she says, handing it to me. ‘Standing in front of the cemetery gates in Burlington.’
‘It’s too creepy,’ I say, unable to keep my gaze off the picture. She is thin and clever-looking with large eyes and two long braids. She is wearing a turtleneck and a short, plain skirt. Her hands are stiffly by her side, and she is looking intensely at the camera, and I know instantly she has considered this expression for posterity. She’s staring us down, will not be forgotten.
He is a big man with an almost boxy physique. His hand, grasping her shoulder, looks very large. The other is tucked into a jacket pocket. He is wearing glasses with a simple wire frame, and his hair is thick and wavy and black, his beard with whorls of gray. He does not seem capable of controlling her; her eyes have something too hungry in them, too ravenous. Next to her, he seems like a slow and defenseless animal.
‘It was so strange,’ Hannah whispers, ‘how I knew just where to look. I went straight to it.’
‘Let’s not look at it anymore,’ I say, laying it face down on the carpet. ‘I really don’t want to look at it anymore.’
Because I saw Janine’s face, what Victor had done to it. They described how they found her, and how her throat had been cut. That’s the kind of danger you learn to live with when you’re out there. It was something she and I had to be concerned about before we did a private show in a stranger’s hotel room. Or every time we copped with some dealer who wanted more from us than we wanted to give. But I don’t remember us talking about it, working out some kind of plan in case someone tried something, did something crazy. That was before the dark possibilities had outlines, shape. Now I see them everywhere.
We knew we could be discovered like any of the women you hear about and forget. Women who hand themselves over to fate, to malice. Still, the unreality and inevitability of his violence stays with me, some dull disbelief I can’t shake off. And I wonder if that’s because she had already stopped dancing, and changed her life, when Victor entered it.
And the picture reminds me of Victor and me, how we looked standing beside each other. Never an easy intimacy between us, only a proximity, a defiance of odds. Never an easy intimacy. Someone must have taken a picture of us together, someone who’d passed through our lives for a night, sharing the drugs, and the hustle it took to get them. Someone must have had a camera. Victor would have told them to shoot. He would have posed. He said I looked like an angel when the drugs drained my color.
We spend the last part of the evening sitting on the floor in front of the large mirror on the back of her closet door. The acid ebbs and builds again, like light. We sit very close to each other, staring at our reflection. ‘Now,’ she says, ‘I’m going to concentrate on your reflection in the mirror, and I’m going to make one half of your face disappear.’ I watch my face and see the ear and the eye go. And then she says, ‘Now do it to me. Make me disappear.’
I drive home when the acid is just pulsing, almost burned up, and my thoughts are very even and quiet. The colors are still magnificently vivid. Now there is an aloneness, a starkness shared by every tree and house and every person behind their walls, as though nature were about differentiation, about the austerity of our separateness and individuality and its particular ache.
King gets into bed and calms down quickly, giving me just what I need. He is close and soft. I keep my eyes open, looking at the ceiling and the shadows crossing it, how they move. And then there is the fear again, the fear of the wheel. For months after I’d thrown out my syringes I dreamed of myself with the belt around my arm. Sometimes I’d be shooting up at my father’s feet, sometimes in the office. Always with shame. I would wake up with my pulse racing, the terror of thinking I had actually done it, couldn’t or didn’t stop myself. And then seeing I hadn’t done it, I would feel a sense of peace that made that day seem a triumph. But the acid was real. I could not consign it to a dream regardless of how dream-like it felt. And this made me fearful again – that I might go back to the needle. Turn on a dime. An accident of reason.
The needle draws time out of the blood. It plants you solidly in a place where there is no memory of anything that came before, no hope of after. Time exists between shots, and each shot starts the clock over again. You can use for many years and have no sense of the years going. But one day of not using feels like lifetimes. The rise and fall of each day is so subtle, so immeasurable when your blood is the baseline of its measure. Then time flies away from you, blows past you like a breeze. And I don’t want to lose this year that separates me from the past. Now I want to hold on to every sober day that felt like a lifetime. I measured each of those days with remorse and anger and solitude and sleep. I want what I worked for, what I endured.
I’ll tell Hannah about my drug history and why I have to guard myself. She can understand thinking right about something and still doing the wrong thing. Oh, God, please don’t let me wake up tomorrow to discover I’ve done something I didn’t want to do. It’s a prayer, but my fists are clenched. I fall asleep just before the sunrise – a stone outside my window.
It is Saturday, and I wake in time to see the mailman walking carefully away from the cottage. I am also walking carefully, as though the environment has shifted while I slept, grown denser. There’s a bill, and there’s a letter postmarked from Florida. I o
pen it on the couch.
Your mom passed away on December 6. Your grandmother is handling all the arrangements, and you should be hearing from her soon. I’m sorry, baby. They did everything they could for her, but she had two more strokes after the first operation. This last year has not been good for her. I hope it’s better now.
I’m still in general population, but I may have to be moved. The other guys say I’ve got dirty blood, and they harass me a lot. But I keep pretty much to myself, and I’ve proven myself to most of them.
I’m so proud of my little girl! Please go to your grandmother if you can. I’d hate for your mother to be alone.
Your Daddy.
5
I remember her hair, the way it fell out over the pillow when I put her makeup on, her eyes closed and her breathing so light. And when she wanted to talk to me she’d grasp my hand without opening her eyes. ‘I want it to look good,’ she’d say. And I got to where I could always make it look good, until the drugs made her stop caring. Her head on the pillow and her face like a mask, the eyes blank but the expression grim. As though there were a war going on in a deeper part of her she could not affect. Always the war on her face, but nothing in the eyes to disclose its particulars, if such wars have particulars.
That’s what I’m thinking when my grandmother calls. The last time I talked to her I was ten years old.
‘I know your father wrote,’ she says. ‘I thought you should hear from him and not some old lady you’ve never met.’
‘I hope we can meet.’
‘I do too.’ Her voice sounds tired, but not old. ‘I’ll be spreading your mother’s ashes next week. I know it’s last minute, but I can help you if you need some money to come down.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘I have money.’ There’s a moment of silence before I ask, ‘You cremated her?’
‘I didn’t know how to reach you. I had to wait on your father receiving my letter and writing me back. I didn’t know what else to do.’ She informs me of these facts with what sounds like an edge of disgust or disappointment. I’m not sure which.
The family – not just the death – has its complications. She’s pursued a tangle of paths to contact me. I’d warned my father, over the phone, that no one could know my whereabouts. He asked no questions. This was familiar to him. He had anticipated his daughter’s hiding out, this flowering of his blood.
She tells me where she’s staying in Miami and asks me to meet her at her apartment, a converted hotel for seniors. ‘You can stay with me,’ she says. ‘I’d like us to have a chance to talk. I’ve always wondered about you.’
‘I’ve wondered about you too.’ I say the word ‘wondered’ back to her so she can hear how odd it sounds. But perhaps it isn’t odd to her. It was all my mother allowed.
‘Your mother never wrote a will,’ she says. ‘Not that she had anything.’ She says this with a kind of sadness in her voice – it is not a condemnation of her daughter, nor is it meant as a discouragement to me – she wants me to know what to expect, the simple, barren facts. The facts as they have always been.
When I hang up the phone, I remind myself I can do this. I’ll get a ticket, stay in Florida for a few days. Easy enough. But I feel my heart racing, a strange panic that I decide is grief. I know it was my mother’s hand on my heart; cold, squeezing it. That’s who I felt waiting at Hannah’s door. And that is why I couldn’t open my eyes to see her face, because the war had ended, but her face had fossilized its horrors. Even death can bring no peace to some – those who crave it selfishly, who think they can practice death by endlessly killing pain. For them, death is just a prolonged denial of rest.
And I’m grateful to not have to see her face, but something more elemental, the ember of her needs. Ashes. My mother once said: Ghosts are forgotten people. That was her mother, and me after I’d left home. She never sought us out. We were harmless ghosts. We betrayed her, some dim ache. But my mother could not remember herself, either. She had no memories of herself when she wasn’t bereft, betrayed. She had no memories of a world that wasn’t only ghosts, the cold sense of them passing through and beyond her.
Gina reminds me to pack lightly. She’s on the floor with King. She’s agreed to walk him and to keep him company while I’m gone.
I do what she says.
‘I think you should give your grandmother a picture of yourself, so she has something to keep.’ She and King are in a tug-of-war with a sock puppet.
‘I don’t have many’ I reach up for the one above the fireplace and hand it to her. ‘Can I give her this?’ I ask. ‘Or is it too crazy?’
‘She might like it,’ she says doubtfully. She’s crossed her legs and is rocking slightly at the waist. She looks at it a moment longer. ‘What a strange picture. You look like you’re praying.’
I take it from her hands and notice the pupils, soul closed up. Victor took it. I’m high in it, slightly out of focus.
I pack it just in case she asks for a picture, but I don’t expect much of this meeting.
What do you wear to scatter ashes?’ I ask.
Where are you scattering them?’
And I can think of no place suitable, except the doorsteps of the men who sold her drugs. Or the doctors’ offices where her pills were prescribed. ‘I don’t know,’ I say, looking up from shirts I’ve folded and put aside. ‘I don’t think there was a place she felt comfortable. I don’t know what places held any meaning for her. I think she was wary of everything, equally. I hope my grandmother doesn’t want to take her out to the ocean or something. She hated the outdoors.’
‘Let your grandmother do what she wants,’ Gina says abruptly. ‘When my father died, I had him buried next to my mother. He’d divorced her. He never had a good word to say about her. If he’d had his choice of burial, he might have chosen the bottom of a bottle of tequila. But it was my choice, and I wanted to have something I never had growing up. I wanted them together, and if it took death to resolve their differences, so be it.’ She looks as if she’s about to say more, then turns her head and looks over at King.
‘What else is on your list?’ she asks. She calls it mine, but she’s written it. She’s thorough, and there’s comfort in looking over the tasks she’s numbered for me.
Throughout the entire preparation – which is no more than a couple of hours – Gina sits quietly, patiently guiding me. Once the bags are packed and Gina has my spare key, I tell her, ‘You’re so capable. Here I am packed and ready to go two days before my flight. That never happens. My family certainly never organized like this; my mother should have taken lessons from you.’
‘Nah,’ she says, standing up and going to the door. ‘If your mother wanted to get her shit together, she would have taken lessons from you.’
Late that night I call Hannah and tell her what’s happened. She suggests we meet at Dave’s bar. I hang up the phone, take King out, and watch him run. There’s a faint pink glow on the horizon that makes me feel ineffably sad, as though it were the last pleadings of light. For a moment it reminds me of how I often felt in San Francisco, everything bleeding through, no separation between, myself and the city. I couldn’t see an old person without feeling a morose pity. In my neighborhood, they were always alone, on walkers or canes, their skin and bones like glass. They had either lost anyone who could support them or were too headstrong to recognize the danger that seethed around them at every corner. They were alone, period. At least my mother didn’t have to see old age in that kind of impoverishment.
I let King in the back door, then get in my car and drive into town. When I arrive at Dave’s, the place is still pretty empty. Two guys are playing pool, one lanky and pockmarked with a striped tie that looks like a barber’s pole. The other is older, silver-haired and burly, with wire-rimmed glasses at the bulb of his nose. He leers at me from the moment I walk in. I smile at him, and catch him off guard. He quickly looks sheepish.
Hannah is leaning over the bar. I squeeze her arm and she smiles at me, asks me wha
t I want. ‘Go sit down,’ she says.
She joins me a few moments later.
‘How long are you leaving for?’ she asks, silding into the tight wooden booth. Her scarf is pale blue and has gold metallic thread running through it; it looks old and from another country. It brings out her features, softens them.
‘Just a few days. I’m leaving the day after tomorrow and coming back on Thursday.’
‘I’m glad it’s only a short time.’ She grabs my hand over the table. ‘So, how are you doing?’
‘Just numb, I guess. The last time I saw my mother was right after she had her first brain surgery. I was using then; I couldn’t feel much for her. Even now, though, without dope, I still feel mostly unaffected by her death. I didn’t have any relationship with her in the last ten years. Longer than that. And the funny thing is, I didn’t hate her when I left home. I was angry at her. Sorry for her too. I feel like she cheated me out of a regular childhood. But sometimes I think it was destined to come out the way it did.
