by David Gordon
Trying to circle the sinkhole, I quickly lose my bearings and tumble into a campsite. I crash blindly through a bush, yowling as switches lash my face, and there they are, squatting over a fire, a bald dad and his young son, limp wieners on the tips of their sticks. They stare at me, aghast, as if I were a Sasquatch: long hair full of leaves and twigs, body covered in cuts. The mud I’ve layered on my face for sun protection is flaking off. But then again, who are they to judge? Look at their fucking faces—swelling horribly with pustules and throbbing rainbow colors. The little boy is actually aging, wrinkling right in front of me, while the dad morphs backward into a pudgy hairless baby. Somebody screams. It’s me. I turn tail and flee back into the forest, trying to outrun the screaming, which follows me like an echo. I’m dodging right and left, ducking the trees that keep throwing themselves in my path, when I collide with a deer. A fucking deer! At first I just see a brown blur, knocking me back as it darts by, startled no doubt by my idiotic thrashing. He brushes past, high chest blazed with white, antlers, neck, back, tail. So fast and so strong that I am left vibrating, like I’ve plunged my arms into the quick of a freezing river. Stunned, I sit in some mud. The deer stops and, as if taking pity on me, looks back to calm me with a noble gaze.
“Follow the drums,” he says. Or thinks. He seems to be licking a leaf, but his thoughts sound too deep and profound to be coming from me.
“Thanks, friend,” I say, rising slowly. But now there is a disturbance in the force field, angry crashings in the woods, like a giant hunting for meat. The deer starts.
“Don’t listen to the cat,” he whispers quickly and springs away. I cringe. The leaves tremble. Philip comes toppling out, dragging his shoeless foot.
“Hear that?” he asks. We listen. Far off. Drums.
The drumming is faint, and we can’t see where it’s coming from, but the sound is steady, like a beacon, and wherever there are drums, there must be people.
“It’s some kind of ritual,” Philip suggests as we hobble along. “A tribal gathering. We’ll be cured.”
That sounds good. There is definitely something wrong with me now. I don’t know how long we’ve been tripping, but I feel years older: half blind from sweat, swollen with insect bites, and limping painfully. The drugs and heat have cooked my brains down to where I can’t tell what’s real anymore. Trees mumble and sigh as I pass. Rocks squint in the sun. Nymphs flash and giggle nudely among the pines. Day and night rise and fall randomly, every few minutes, or is that just wind in the leaves? Maybe I’m laughing at the birds instead of them laughing at me. At first I think I see the deer again, following me, but it’s a satyr, grunting and thrusting with a girl down under his hooves. His horns tangle her long hair into a crown of fine-spun gold. He sinks his teeth into her neck. She moans and her eyes open, fixing me. I know her, but I don’t recall from where. She smiles, showing her fangs. The blood seeps out between them, purpling her mouth like wine. I wipe sweat from my eyes and walk faster and don’t mention it to Philip. I don’t want him to worry.
By following the drums through mud and brush and swarm, Philip and I reach paradise at last. Paradise, it turns out, is a man-made lake surrounded by a sand beach on which a hundred Puerto Rican families are picnicking. The ritual drumming is the sound of all their radios and boom boxes playing and echoing at once. Hitting the sand, we break into a run. We are alive. Philip peels off his shirt as he sprints toward the concession stand, and I do likewise. But I slow to a jog when I see him pulling down his shorts. I stop in horror as he makes a bee-line for the water fountain, a fat, sunburned, sweaty white boy, covered in filth, wearing briefs and one sneaker, pushing and shoving little kids aside as he forces his way to the front.
“Cutter!” they yell.
“Water, water,” he moans, knocking a scared child to the ground. He guzzles from the tap, and then, as the passersby watch in disgust, he splashes the water under his arms and crotch. Now several burly guys in Yankees shirts and razored haircuts are being dragged over by their kids.
“Hey, man, what’s your fucking problem?” they want to know.
Philip bolts, and the angry dads chase him across the sand. The barking pack quickly outflanks him, but they pause when he charges into the lake, hesitant to follow a half-naked madman into water. A crowd gathers as he howls and splashes around. He blows waterspouts, snorting like a whale, and waves his sodden underwear over his head. Old women cross themselves. Mothers cover their children’s eyes. Philip begins to urinate, laughing tearfully at his own little stream, while swimmers panic, scrambling up the shore.
A park ranger’s truck and a cop car arrive, and the crowd parts. The officers sigh and shake their heads. They get the bullhorn.
“You in the water. Stop what you’re doing and come out.”
But they know there’s only one way this is going to end, and finally, resigned, they go in. It is a brief, disturbing struggle. They wade out and take him down, flailing and screaming. It takes four guys to drag him like a seal onto land and get him to the car, tears and snot streaming. He screams numbers between sobs.
“Seven seven nine point three two one. Nine seven six seven two. One oh one oh one oh one. Nine. Nine. Nine. Nine. Nine. Nine.”
The police call our parents. Philip’s folks meet the ambulance at the emergency room. Mine drive me home in silence. But in a miraculous twist, we get off scot-free when Philip’s freak-out is blamed on sunstroke and dehydration. We’re lucky to be alive, the doctors say, which confuses my parents and takes the fun out of punishing me. In the end I am simply forbidden from camping, which is fine by me. I never want to see another tree.
Summer returns to normal: bong hits, air-conditioned double features, and nights playing Frisbee in the Dunkin’ Do-nuts parking lot, but looking back, I realize now Philip is never quite the same. Maybe he never really manages to rehydrate. He complains that one eye sees in a rectangle and the other a triangle, or that he can only perceive two dimensions, though he actually finds this helps his painting. There is a grumbling under his bed that he can never make out, that starts just as he is falling asleep, but when he checks, there is nothing but dust balls or the cat. I mock him, laugh it off.
Then, one weekend that August, Philip’s parents go away and we do angel dust at his house. We lie on the floor and listen to Miles’s double album Agharta with our eyes shut. When it’s finally over and I sit up, it’s too late—it doesn’t make any difference. I keep seeing the same thing, planets forming and imploding, the history of the universe speeding up. We go to the kitchen and try eating fun things. Ice and grapes are best since they change state in your mouth: the exquisite torment of the melting ice, the sunny burst of a grape against the tongue. Philip goes into the bathroom to pee, and I hear him laughing hysterically.
“It’s like I have this sort of hose sticking out of my body,” he announces. He laughs so hard he pisses all over the floor. “You’ve got to try it.”
“Later,” I say. I’m not sure I am ready for that. Then we sit facing each other on the couch and do “impressions.”
“OK, I’m Humphrey Bogart,” I say and Philip immediately hallucinates that I am Bogart, complete with the cigarette and raincoat.
“I’m Eleanor Roosevelt,” he says, and I howl as I see it: the big lips, the dress, the hair.
“I’m Jimi Hendrix.”
“I’m Hitler.”
“I’m Cher.”
Soon of course, we raise the stakes and get into the scary ones.
“I’m your dead grandmother,” I tell him, and his eyes widen crazily.
“Stop it. Stop it.” He is jumping around and punching my arm. So I turn back into myself. Then he gets up close in my face and grins, looking me in the eye.
“I’m you.”
Philip decides to go to sleep, so I go lie down in his sister’s old room. I am worried. I know I won’t sleep, and the cat is giving me the creeps. It keeps growling and clawing on my chest, muttering like a soft engine that I can feel dig
ging toward my heart. When it leans over me, eyes aglow in the dark, I know right away: It is a demon. I remember the words of the deer and lie there, paralyzed with fear. Finally, I work up my nerve and, with a superhuman effort, I jump up, toss the beast into the hall, and lock the door. All night, I huddle under the blanket, staring into the dark, while the cat scratches and meows in the hall. Around dawn I hear crashes and screams, but I don’t dare peek. Who knows what that creature is doing? Quiet returns, but that scares me even more. Now I really do have to piss, but there is no way I am stepping out there. I get up and look around for an old bottle or a plant. There is an air conditioner in the window, so that’s out. When I press my head to the glass, the lawn and shrubs look like a black mass closing in on the house. The trees seem to float an inch off the ground. I hear the muttering that Philip complained of, from behind the door, and I understand: It’s the demon speaking numbers. Finally I just piss in the corner behind a dresser. I’ll blame it on that fucking satanic cat.
I crash out, and when I wake up, it is midafternoon. I feel a lot better about everything. I want to head to the diner for pancakes, ham, and eggs. I want coffee. I venture out to Philip’s room, hoping he will be in the mood for breakfast. Everything in there is smashed and torn to bits: the furniture, the stereo, every single record and book. The windows and mirrors are shattered. Philip is lying naked and unconscious in the middle of the floor with a hammer in his hand and blood smeared on his feet from the broken glass. I split immediately and go home to have lunch with my parents. Later I hear that Philip’s parents have packed him off to some kind of rehab or nuthouse and after that to a special school. A year later, I will start college and move away.
Decades pass. I enter my own dark period and finally emerge, a reasonably sane sort-of-grown-up living a seminormal life. At least I learn to fake it, more or less. I move back to New York, where I find work as a teacher. Not long after I arrive, I bump into an old classmate, Christine, browsing the stacks at Strand Books. Despite loving her madly through grade school, I don’t recognize her at first. She’s a mother now, with her hair in a long yellow braid and red knuckles above the wedding ring, but up close, in the smile and the eyes, she’s the same. It’s Christine who brings up Philip. I admit I haven’t thought of him in years. She says he’s back in a mental facility in New Jersey yet again, diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. Feeling guilty, I write him a letter, raising the possibility that maybe, if he stays off drugs, he can find another, freer life, like me. I offer to visit. “After all,” I write, “you are my oldest friend.” The reply is succinct, printed on a plain lined sheet: “Glad to hear you are well. Please do not contact me again.”
I never see Christine again, but from then on, Philip, you are in my thoughts. I hear that you’ve been seen panhandling in our old neighborhood or gotten arrested for sleeping in Central Park, and although I know it’s ridiculous, I begin looking, randomly, peering close when I pass a dirty scarecrow begging on a corner, or spot a wastrel snoozing on the train. Then one night, I am on the subway, heading home late from a party, a fund-raiser for a magazine that has just published a story of mine for the first time. It was a fancy dinner, and I am dressed in a suit and feeling pretty good for once, with a free copy of the magazine on my lap. My story is right up front, and I am rereading it one more time when I notice a bum who matches your description passed out at the end of the car. He is slumped forward under a droopy old hat, but his hair is the right brown, down past his shoulders, and his face is all beard. Leaves and twigs stick out, as if he’s only just returned from that bad trip in the woods, a time-warped refugee from the wilderness of the mind. His gathered shopping bags are all filled with paper, and I can see there are drawings in marker and crayon and pastel. Other pages are covered in numbers. As I draw closer, I see too that there are numbers scrawled on his arms and legs, covering all visible skin.
And there it is: 999, the number you cried in your agony, written on the backs of your hands, facing me now upside down, right and left, 666 666. Did only one of us escape from the evil we met on the mountain that sunny day? Or did you carry it back down with you, like a mark?
“Philip,” I say, soft at first, then louder. “Philip! Is that you?”
Then your eyes open. They are blue. Not even madness can change your eye color, I don’t think. It isn’t you. So I apologize, handing over a dollar with a shaky hand, as we pull into a station. The bum takes the bill with a grave bow, removing his hat in dignified thanks, and that’s when I see them: two red horns protruding from the storm of his hair, bone hard with sharp black tips. The demon smiles, and a black tongue slides between his sharp white teeth. Terrified, I edge away as the door opens behind me, but a grimy claw grabs my hand.
“Hey, David,” he says, in a voice I know. “Let’s do impressions.” Then he gets up close in my face and grins, looking me in the eye.
“I’m you.”
Hawk
The hawk wheels east toward Riverside Drive, low above the playground’s shrieking kids, soft and slow but too big to eat, seeking fat rats that breed in warm co-op pipes, feeding on white garbage, brie rinds and organic fruit, writhing like muscles under black, plastic skin when you walk your little doggy at night. The river is stuck like a sleeping shark, mouth frozen open, eyes clouded. The river rolls over and shows a spotted gray belly to the sun. Bare trees pass by with abandoned nests in their throats. Old smoke drifts back down to earth, and a veil of soot spreads on the snow, like a shawl covering cold shoulders. Surging swaying riding on the trembling point of a
branch,
the hawk
stands
still.
“I saw the hawk today, over by the river,” Jack said, breathing a last lungful of ice-sharpened air into the dim and stuffy room. It was an old building, and the radiator sang and sighed like an old man’s guts. “He was cruising the promenade by the dog park with some kind of dead body. It was crazy, just sailing along in a big V, not even moving its wings, holding like a mouse or sparrow in its claws. It gave me an idea for something.” He pulled off his hat and gloves, squeezed out of his sneakers and thermal top, and searched the messy desk for a pencil, trying to remember the lines already crumbling in his mind. “Hey, what’s wrong, why are you crying?”
She sat on the edge of his bed, facing the window, weeping with her hands in her lap. Was someone dead? His mother? The thought appeared from nowhere, a dumb and wild fear. Why would they call Janet and not him? Her family then? Her dad’s heart at last? He felt his damp hair drying, cooling his scalp as he knelt, hands on her knees.
“Janet, what is it?”
She turned her wet and shining face to him, as if in pity.
“I’ve been thinking about breaking up.”
“Us?” he whispered. The small word clawed his throat.
She nodded.
“About wanting to break up with me?” he confirmed.
She nodded again, and tears dropped from her cheeks. In a cracked voice, she screeched, as if in horror: “I’ve been thinking about sex with other people.” Her eyes were wide with shock at herself. “I can’t help it.”
“Have you slept with someone else?” Dread made his own voice sound distant, as if he were hiding under the bed.
She shook her head. “But I’m afraid that I’m going to.” With this she began to sob so hysterically that he leapt up and held her, crushing her small head softly against his chest and stroking the knotted curve of her spine. He loved her very much at that moment. He admired her bravery.
“It’s OK. These are normal feelings. Everyone has them. You’re just more honest than everyone else.” He sighed. “Much more.”
“Do you?” Her gleaming eyes searched his eyes.
“Sure.” He answered her question carefully, as if testifying before a congressional inquiry, a tiny lawyer buzzing in his ear. “Sometimes. Everybody does.”
“What does everybody do about it?”
He shrugged. “They live with i
t. They just stuff the feelings and don’t talk about it. Or they act on it and then they lose their relationships and are single till they find someone else, but eventually it all happens again. Until you’re too old to care, maybe.”
“I don’t want to lose you.”
“You will,” Jack said, self-pity washing over him. He was older and he’d been through more, which gave him a tragic, fatalistic angle on life, but not much practical wisdom to go with it. Once a relationship began to turn like this, to decline, there was no way back. Or if there was, he didn’t know about it.
“Have you ever thought about an open relationship?” she asked.
“You mean dating other people?”
“No. Well. Having sex with other people. Do you think that could work?”
“No. I’ve never heard of it working. Have you?”
“No. Well. There’s that couple Rita has been dating. They have threesomes with other women and men. Or couples. Or there’s swingers clubs.”
“I don’t want to see you with another man. That sounds horrible.”
“I think it would be hot to see you with another woman.”
“It would be. I’d like to see you with another girl too. But not some dude’s hairy ballsack.”
“That’s not fair. I have to see your hairy ballsack with girls.”
“But you don’t have to. Anyway what does fair have to do with it? We’re talking about what turns us on. Thinking about you with other guys makes me nauseous. Sorry.”
“It would be so much easier if you thought it was hot.”
“Easier for you. It would be easier for me if you wanted to stay home and bake cookies while I date other girls.”
They laughed finally. A small dry laugh but some relief at least.
“I guess maybe . . .” He spoke in a measured, wary tone. “Maybe if I just didn’t know. Like if you were going on a trip and had a little fling or took a weekend off from me to fulfill some fantasy. Like wanting to fuck a guy with a strap-on. I suppose I could live with that.”
