Your Face in Mine

by Jess Row

  What the fuck is that?

  That? I stabbed myself with a pen by accident.

  I should say, by way of explanation, that though we’d sampled our share of drugs in high school—bong hits, shrooms, black-market ephedrine, and one collective acid trip the summer we all turned sixteen—Martin and Alan and I were mostly bystanders, and in those days heroin and cocaine were all but unheard of, a relic of the Eighties, of Less Than Zero and Sid and Nancy. The theater arts building at Willow was named for Samantha Dinerstein, class of ’88, who overdosed on speedballs her freshman year at Sarah Lawrence. What instinct for self-preservation we had drew the line at snorting, shooting, and sex without a condom, or, in some cases, sex at all.

  At Telluride, though, Alan was befriended by a circle of New York kids from Stuyvesant and Saint Ann’s, who were hardcore for Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller, Kathy Acker. They did a lot of mescaline and hash, but this guy named David kept getting these care packages from a friend in Washington Heights and then disappearing for six or eight hours at a time. Finally Alan asked David directly, and David—who had the longest lashes he’d ever seen on a boy, or boy-man, whatever seventeen-year-olds are—said, there’s really only one question. Are you in or out? And handed him a copy of De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.

  You have to understand, Alan told me, his eyes wide, you have to know what it’s like there. You’re going from building to building, and there’s just these miniature canyons, with bridges over them, and you could be reading and not paying attention to where you’re walking, and just like pitch into the rail and boom! You’re looking down three hundred feet into this gorge, with this tiny little creek you can hardly even see at the bottom. I mean, okay. Everybody knows that kids go to Cornell, the winter drives them crazy, and they jump into the gorges. But it’s not like you have to seek them out. It’s more like Camus: every day you have to come up with a reason not to jump. Look, this is what David said to me: the question is why I’m doing it. The question is, why aren’t you? If somebody said you could sit at the table with Jesus at the last supper, wouldn’t you? If somebody told you you could sit at Buddha’s feet in Sarnath, wouldn’t you? What if you could talk to a rock in its own language? What if you could become a cloud? What if you could be whatever you wanted? What if you had eyes in your kneecaps, your armpits, the crooks of your elbows? What if you had eyes in the soles of your feet that could stare down into the earth’s magnetic core? And look, I just thought, this kid is a fucking lunatic, but then that same night I was reading the Critique of Judgment, about the aesthetic sublime, and I realized, holy shit, Kant is talking about exactly the same thing. It just all came together. David kept saying, the greatest gift is to take life out of your body and give it back to your body. That’s what heroin is. Death in life. And you know what? He wasn’t lying. Can you understand how rare that is, for someone to tell you something that’s one hundred percent the truth?

  Are you saying the rest of us are lying?

  No, I’m saying that language is never completely accurate. Ordinary language. I mean, this is just basic stuff. Wittgenstein. Quine. Language is all about its own failure. But heroin, heroin, is more than anyone can ever say it is. It takes promises and raises them up a level.

  —

  By this time I was, I think, Alan’s closest friend. But not his only friend. And not the only one he told when he started shooting up. It was a secret, but a badly kept one. In a month it was the general word around the hallways at Willow, and some younger kids, sophomores, began asking him to hook them up. He refused. He wouldn’t give it to anyone else, he said, much less sell it, not unless the person was completely and utterly prepared. He got packages from New York, sent to a P.O. box in Mount Washington, just down the hill from his house, and he hid them in the rafters in the garage.

  All of which is to say that I could have exposed him, reported him, at any time, and so could any number of others. Cheryl was, all things considered, a wise and understanding mother. She had pictures of herself dancing in the mud at Woodstock hung up over the fireplace in the living room. But Alan’s younger sister, Rebecca, had just spent a month in Sheppard Pratt over the summer; Rebecca was the basket case in the family, fifteen, bulimic, a cutter, who’d been having an illicit relationship with a thirty-five-year-old father of two. Alan was headed to Harvard or Oxford, in her eyes, already all but gone.

  Lots of people have maintenance-level habits, he said, and if you hear otherwise that’s just Nancy Reagan propaganda. Look at Patti Smith. Look at Joey Ramone. Look at Wayne Shorter and Jim Carroll. It’s not the healthiest lifestyle, but what is?

  Methinks the man protests too much, I said.

  Meaning what? Meaning I’m not actually aiming to make it past twenty-five?

  Nobody does heroin without a death wish. You all but said so yourself.

  Okay, he said, well, let me refer you back to The Myth of Sisyphus, our text for the day. Who doesn’t have a death wish? Freud says it’s as natural as anything else. It’s never felt anything other than natural to me. And yes, you can say, that’s just garden-variety teenage angst. Guess what? Rimbaud quit writing poetry when he was nineteen. Keats was dead by twenty-five.

  We were raking leaves down the slope of his front lawn, piling them up in a neat barrow at the curb; Cheryl had promised him a theremin if he did all the yardwork that fall. He’d insisted on wearing a pair of oversized leather gloves, claiming he was afraid of getting blisters, and his wrists, jutting out of a flannel shirt, seemed hardly more than bleached bones.

  Alan, I said, trying to keep my voice as neutral, as level, as I could, are you listening to yourself? I wish I had a tape recorder. You’re becoming a caricature, do you know that?

  And you’re not, Savonarola?

  Forgive me for giving a shit.

  Oh, I do, he said. But not for being so transparently jealous.

  I was jealous of you for getting an A in AP English, I wanted to say. I was jealous when you were fucking Ayala. I was jealous when you were L’Arc-en-Ciel’s frontman, giving all the interviews. Do you know all the times I’ve been jealous? It sounded so petty, and so rote, so high school. You’re not a genius, I wanted to say, and this isn’t your time, or your stage, or your historical moment, you’re just an embryo, if that, suckling on a nutrient-rich diet of hundred-year-old ideas. Is that what I wanted to say, or what I would say now? In any case, I put down my rake, and walked farther down the hill to where my car was parked, and drove away.

  —

  It seemed to me in those purgatorial months between Halloween, when the first of our applications were sent, and April 15, that the hierarchy of our world disintegrated: parents and teachers losing their grip, and then, more disturbingly, losing interest. Like teenagers, they kept to their own rooms and avoided our gaze. You could say some part of it was relief, some part a kind of gallows nonchalance: they had handed us over to another tribunal, and, for the first time, felt that they had been instructed to withhold judgment. My own parents, who had been minimalists in the kitchen as long as I’d known them, took up an interest in northern Italian cooking, and began filling the basement with cases of Barolos, Brunellos, Sangioveses. Between dinner and the end of whatever they were watching in the den—Masterpiece Theatre, Frontline, NOVA—they finished a bottle a night, sometimes two. I was playing drums for two new and short-lived bands, The Near Misses and The Wash, and was out more nights than I was home; I might come in at ten and find the dinner dishes still on the table, the candles melted to nubs, and the two of them, my guardians, my progenitors, asleep on the couch in their work clothes, their slippered feet poking out of a plaid blanket. I was never sure whether to wake them or not. I was never sure whether to envy them or pity them. In one way, at least, I had seen the last of them, and I was, for better or worse, alone.

  —

  We avoided each other for more than a month
, until Cheryl called me to ask why he wasn’t filling out any college applications. I think you should ask him, I said, and she began to cry, over the phone, a sound like the plashing of a waterfall, so loud I held the receiver away from my ear. You’re his rock, she said, you’re his conscience. He brushes me away like a fly.

  Look, I said, I have no power over him. You want me to talk to him? I’ll talk to him. But it won’t make any difference. He’s got bigger problems.

  Bigger problems than not going to college?

  I stared at the touchpad, at its recessed buttons, at its strange and awkward division of the alphabet, and tried to recall the last time that one of our parents—anyone’s parents, that is, even Ayala’s dad, beloved Rabbi Kauffmann—had tried to exert, to possess, moral authority. All our independence, it seemed to me, had been a smoke screen, a shadow play, and they had bought it, they had inhaled it. We had been granted the status of superior beings.

  I can’t help it if you’re blind, I wanted to tell her, but instead, I said, look, Cheryl, I think you need to draw a line with him. Stop giving him money.

  What the hell are you talking about?

  It was unbearable, it is unbearable, a thousand times more so, in retrospect, that I didn’t answer her question. Instead, I got off the phone, making some excuse, another three weeks passed, Christmas and New Year’s passed—skiing in Lake Placid, a strange last-minute inspiration of my father’s, though I sprained my ankle and spent most of the week in the hot tub reading Jude the Obscure—and when I returned our answering machine tape was shredded from overuse, and Alan had already spent two nights in the ER, two nights in intensive care, and was on suicide watch at Sheppard Pratt. Rebecca found him, I was told, or else he wouldn’t be alive; she knew immediately it was an overdose, though he’d hidden the syringe, thrown the works out the window, and she said so to the dispatcher. By then, in the space of those weeks, his future had disappeared; the question was his survival.

  —

  How else can I say it, other than to say it? That he remade me in his own image. Or that he wanted to, and succeeded, for a while: there was a version of me that was Alan, a provisional, experimental second self, that knew all his jokes, all his stock phrases, anecdotes, and allusions. I could have been his Charles Kinbote.

  Or is it nothing more than a dodge, a kind of metaphysical excuse, to say that I failed him because I was him? Instead of saying that I failed him by taking my life away and moving on. For the last year of his life, from the time he entered rehab to the day he died, I became terrible at paying attention to him. My own trajectory, I suppose, was too absolute for that. I was admitted early to Amherst, my first choice; I won a merit scholarship that, in the end, as my father never tires of reminding me, paid for half of one semester; I gave up playing the drums and started reading and writing poetry every free moment, fascinated by James Merrill and John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch. How’s Alan? people asked me, constantly, and that was all that reminded me that he was still alive. You could say that I wrote elegies for him starting in the winter of 1992, that he became useful to me before he actually died.

  —

  It was the third-to-last day of winter vacation the following year; I was due back at Amherst on Sunday night, with a paper on Giordano Bruno in hand. Alan and I hadn’t seen each other since the previous weekend; he was working eight-hour shifts at Borders in Towson and going to NA meetings nearly every night. Called in sick today, he said, when I finally took off my headphones and picked up the receiver. I’m feeling crappy. And we’ve hardly seen each other at all, have we? You’ll be back at school in a minute and I’ll be leaving anxious messages on your machine.

  There had been times, that year, when he acted like a jealous, left-behind high school girlfriend, sending me long letters and calling three times a week, wanting to know about my life, my new friends, and I’d all but ignored him, and then long stretches of silence in between, when I’d been the anxious one, calling Cheryl at work—a number I still had memorized—to make sure he was all right.

  As far as I knew, as far as I had seen, he was solidly in recovery, after a month of rehab, a relapse in the summer, after graduation, and another month of rehab the previous August. He’d been in methadone treatment but had stopped, abruptly, claiming it was just the same high, that it felt wrong, and then he’d gotten seriously into NA, going night after night, spending hours at coffee with his sponsor, Charles, an ex–Hells Angel and ex-con. It was at Charles’s insistence that he’d gotten a full-time job. His letters to me were full of jargon I barely understood: Working the steps. Having a day. Crazymakers. Restitution junkies. And—not surprisingly, I guess—his tastes in literature had changed: The Road Less Traveled, The Courage to Heal, Fire in the Belly, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Be Here Now, Awaken the Giant Within. Recovery lit, he called it. When I tried to bring Bataille and de Sade with me to rehab the second time they just chucked the books in the trash. It’s like North Korea in there. But over time, hey, you get to like it. It speaks to you. It’s sweet and medicinal. Like Charles says, you’ll have plenty of time to read later if you can only stay alive.

  I have this memory, though it was January, of parking my car with leaves overhead: black-leafed oaks and elders and gum trees, their branches blocking out the sullen sky. I walked across the street to his house in a tunnel of imaginary leaves. The door was open; no one answered my knock. Cheryl was at work, of course, and Rebecca was spending her senior year at a prep school in Colorado. The house felt loose and creaky underfoot, full of odd drafts, barely inhabited. Alan, I called out. Hey, man, put some clothes on, I’m coming up, okay?

  Okay.

  He was sprawled over the enormous overstuffed couch we’d found abandoned down the street, years before, and hauled upstairs, unscrewing the hinges of his bedroom door to fit it in. There was a slash across one of the arms I hadn’t seen before, the stuffing flowering out like a corsage, and hundreds of cigarette burns, as if he’d gotten into the habit of using it as an ashtray. And Alan in a Victims Family T-shirt with a blue-and-white afghan coiled around his waist. Sorry, he said, I would have come down, but I’m sick for real. All out of sorts.

  What, the flu?

  Who the hell knows. In any case, keep your distance.

  You want something? Should I make you some soup?

  He fixed me with a one-eyed stare. No thanks, Mom.

  I mean from a can. It’s not rocket science.

  What I need is your company, he said. I need your advice on an important metaphysical question. He produced a book with a streaky brown cover from underneath the afghan, a bark-colored cover.

  What the hell is that?

  Shut up, he said. It’s important. Listen to this: A little knowledge, a pebble from the shingle, / A drop from the oceans; who would have dreamed this infinitely little too much? What do you think that means?

  I’d have to hear the whole poem.

  Why?

  Because, I said, a line like that out of context could mean almost anything. It’s all fuzzy metaphors. Are we talking about the tree of knowledge, carnal knowledge, scientific knowledge? For my taste it’s a little too vague. And condescending. Who’s the who? Who are we talking about?

  I could hear myself talking, snappy and dry, squeaky, an irritable pedant already at nineteen. No less of a shell, in my own way, than he was. He stared at me out of dark eye sockets that now looked perpetually bruised. At some point, without my fully registering it, a capillary had burst in his right eye, leaving a red blotch just outside the pupil. Otherwise, oddly, his face looked better, plumper, than it had a year earlier. He was finally putting weight back on, I thought, at long last.

  All right, he said. I get it. Due diligence. Okay, the poem sucks as a poem. But that’s why I read it to you. I’m taking it as advice.

  And what kind of advice would that be?

  He fli
pped the book back open.

  Young men, he read, when lifted up may become white swans, grandiose ascenders, “flying boys,” just as young women when similarly lifted up may become flying girls, and make love with invisible people at high altitudes. The Jungian thinkers have done well in noticing and describing this phenomenon, and the phrases puer aeternus and puella aeterna are familiar to many.

  I’m reading this, he said, and I’m thinking, this is about me. This is my life. Don’t you see that?

  Dude, I said, Alan, have you been making love with invisible people at high altitudes? How come you didn’t tell me? I want in on that action.

  He closed his eyes.

  I’m not going to respond to that, he said. You know why? You know what I think the problem with college is?

  You’ve never been to college.

  I had a summer, he said. Telluride. College teachers, college courses, college texts. I had my taste. And you know what the problem with it is? It’s an extension of adolescence. It’s just camp. It happens too late in life. You know what Charles said to me? By twenty-two every human being should have spent one year in the army and one year doing manual labor.

  And how much time flogging Deepak Chopra at Borders?

  Don’t mock me.

  I’m not mocking you. I’m calling you on your BS. Didn’t you tell me that’s what an addict’s friends are supposed to do?

  You’re not my friend.

  What the fuck are you talking about?

  I don’t mean that in a bad way. I mean it as a factual observation. I honor you. As a former friend. I mean, really, come on, can you see it another way? This is our polite visit in the museum of our friendship.

  I’ll believe that, I said, when I meet your new friends. When there’s someone I can hand you off to. And I don’t mean Charles.

  We’re getting off track here, he said. I was telling you something about who I really am. I’m sorry if you don’t want to hear it. There’s a word for it: that’s what I’m learning. Puer aeternus. The eternal boy. Peter Pan. Icarus. Et cetera. Listen: the name of this chapter is The Road of Ashes, Descent, and Grief. I’m grieving. But here’s the thing: now I know I’m grieving! And what you know, you can control. What you recognize you have to re-cognize.