The Book of Chocolate Saints

by Jeet Thayil

  But on Monday morning Rene was gone, bailed out by a friend.

  It was Xavier whom Dismas had called. On Tuesday, his day in court, Dismas found him waiting on the courthouse steps in the company of an Indian lawyer. The lawyer was a nervous man in a new suit and loafers, who kept checking his nose in a tiny pocket mirror, the kind of Indian who made it a point to mention that he had never lived in India, he’d visited only once and felt no inclination to return. New York City was his home.

  “Let’s strategise,” he said in greeting.

  He asked questions and wrote in a notebook from which he distractedly tore out tiny squares of paper. How much heroin had Dismas been carrying when he was arrested? Was he addicted? What kind of work did he do? Had he published anything other than articles?

  He said, “This judge is well read, mate. He’s kind of a scholar and may be the only one you stand a chance with in all of Nu Yawk. It’s a gamble, a gamble, but let’s beat this thing. I’m going to get you a suspended sentence.”

  There was a crowd in the courtroom and when Dismas saw the prosecutors and defendants, the policemen and gawkers, he was struck by sudden vision. The enforcers and incarcerators were white men of a certain age and the offenders were black men and women. He and the lawyer balanced each other as brown men on either side of the divide. It was plain to see that America was in the midst of a race war and the prison system was its clearest reflection.

  The lawyer put his mirror away and told the court it had no right to keep his client in a cell without letting him make a phone call, Nine Eleven or no Nine Eleven.

  “As clear a case of civil rights violation as I have ever encountered,” he said. “This is no way to treat the perpetrator of a victimless crime. I contend that NYPD overshot its jurisdiction.”

  The judge took off his eyeglasses and asked Dismas if he would like to address the court.

  Speaking slowly and apologetically Dismas said what the lawyer had told him to say. He admitted that he used heroin but insisted that he was not an addict, he was a journalist and poet working on a book. He added that he was ashamed to be standing in front of the court and that he had hoped he would do better for himself in America. He had let himself down. The judge sentenced him to six months, suspended.

  Outside, the lawyer shook his hand and disappeared and Xavier clapped him on the back.

  When he went to collect his things the officer gave him a brown paper envelope on which someone had scrawled the name ‘Dismas’ in so extravagant a hand that he knew it was Rene. The tealish book was inside. On the title page, in the same spacious cursive: “For Dismas / Rene Ricard / no sloppy sentiments”.

  They walked to Christie Street and Xavier waited while he washed off the jailhouse stink one grateful inch at a time. In a café in the meatpacking district he had his first good meal in days, a breakfasttype event starring Eggs Benedict. Afterwards Xavier produced Cristos and they walked along the cobbled streets of the West Village puffing at the smokes. And this was when Dismas asked his friend if he had ever regretted telling the Post that Nine Eleven was an example of “the chickens coming home to roost”, the quote that had made him a vilified figure in the city. Xavier said he regretted only the second part of the quote in which he had said that the old world order was kaput. In his opinion ‘kaput’ was a word that he should not have used under any circumstances. Then Xavier hailed a cab and went uptown and Dismas took a hurried walk to Avenue A where he paged Tony from a pay phone. He shivered sweatily for forty minutes waiting for his man and later he snorted two quick lines in a doorway.

  Xavier did not go home. Dis’s cold turkey spikiness had filled him with a craving he could not immediately identify. The cab took him to MoMA where he took his usual spot on a bench in front of Water Lilies from where he could also see One: Number 31, 1950. He looked at the paintings together and let his eyes unfocus and his vision meld. It was his habit and his pleasure to respond not to colour but to rhythm and sheen. He let his eyes rest on One and he let the Lilies crowd his peripheral vision. There was maintenance work going on in the museum. Men pushed handcarts full of paintings across the scarred floor, the room noisy with tourists and students. Xavier sat as if alone, as if time and the body had fallen away and he was returned to himself at last, visited by light. On the way out he stopped at Starry Night. He was always surprised at how small it was and at how much work was put in by each square inch of the canvas, how much toil toward how simple a provocation: that hallucination and vision were as one to the dislocated mind. Who would not rather die than look up at a sky so terrifying? He muttered some remembered or misremembered lines, “the day’s on fire, a night glowing with birds”, and he knew Vincent would have liked the workmen and the crowds and the idea that the museum was messily alive, not a hushed cathedral.

  An hour later on the subway home he found himself squeezed between a man with an empty birdcage and a woman who got up and said, excuse me, honey. Her filled jeans were rolled to the knees and she wore clunky leather boots. When she saw him staring she pulled a joint out of her pocket and held it up and Xavier followed her to the street where they sat on a bench in a tiny park and smoked the giant spliff, expertly rolled in the reggae style. Her black lipstick left kiss marks on the filter. Near them was a trash can surrounded by litter and a basketball court with the hoop missing. Plastic bags blew across the gouged concrete. The weed hit him in an instant. His heart raced and the daylight shifted by a tone. The woman said, this is good hydro right here, baby, and all he could do was nod. She laughed at him and then she dusted her clothes and said she had to go to work, nodding in the direction of an outlet store on Lexington. Xavier watched her walk away, the rolled jeans and the sway, and a police siren swelled and was cut off and he flinched. He took the subway home and he waited, did nothing all day but wait with his stomach butterflying, timing it so he got there a little before she was done. They picked up a bag of McDonald’s, because, she said, she needed her grease and they went to his apartment where she ate on the floor because he had no dining table. When she was done he moved the damp food cartons to the side and they fucked quickly and she made another spliff. He turned on all the lights because he wanted to memorise the deep colour of her and they fucked again, in his chair, slower this time.

  As Xavier fucked the outlet worker whose name he would never discover, Dismas Bambai sat alone in his apartment. If we can separate for a moment a thought worth recording from the welter of junk, not yet junk, and future junk in his brain, then he was thinking of Q Ball Li, a seventy-two-year-old former junkie who had recently published his journals. Li’s rent-controlled apartment on the Bowery was a lesson in how to live alone. There were hundreds of books but no clutter. In Dismas’s opinion Li was a philosopher, an American mystic, a man who’d written of incarceration in relation to addiction and decided that the conditions were comparable but dissimilar because addiction was desirable, an exercise in joy, and incarceration was not, except in rare instances. In his sixties he’d given up heroin and focused the considerable force of the addictive brain, as he called it, on the smoking of a daily cigarette, always one cigarette and never two, taken with intense enjoyment every night after dinner. He spent all day in anticipation of it and he spent all night in the satisfaction that followed, and he received, he said, as much gratification from the single cigarette as from his six-bag-a-day heroin habit. As if, thought Dis, addiction was a human condition like parenthood or grief and everybody was addicted to everything or one thing, like a default setting, a given, and the only area in which free will played a part was in which substance or activity or adrenaline rush you chose as your personal Jesus. And Dis thought vaguely about the future, about whether he would have to find another job and what that would mean to his own habit. And he thought about Xavier and Goody and considered it likely that the reason Xavier had kept himself productive, if not prolific – periodically making art radically different in tone from what he had done before – was because he did not have to chase af
ter instant gratification: his emotional and sexual and artistic lives were anchored in the same person. He was one of those fortunate men whose partner was also his muse. They were complete, thought Dismas, a team, and his thoughts went to the Two Marys and when he touched himself he climaxed immediately, shudderingly, because he was low on H.

  *

  He saw the yellow I HATE NEW YORK T-shirt from half a block away. She wore it with a leather jacket and a boy’s slouch and there was something different about her hair. Slung across her chest was a camera in a small leather case. She was looking at a phone booth plastered with the faces of the disappeared, on fliers that said LAST SEEN AT THE WORLD TRADE CENTER, and when she saw him she put her shopping bag on the sidewalk and made a quick shock face, eyes wide, mouth open, gloved fingers spread. They walked two blocks to a diner on Fourteenth Street and did not speak until they were seated at a booth in the back.

  “Downtown?” Dismas said.

  “I like it. I collect things New can use. Or I look for photo ideas. The fliers? I’ve been taking pictures of pictures of missing persons.”

  “Photographer.”

  “Yes. Just set up on my own. Journalism is how I met New. I interviewed him in Delhi for a magazine and we moved here when his Indian life fell apart.”

  “Must have been quite the interview, tell me more?”

  “Another time.”

  The coolant-green sheen was gone and she wore her hair in a side parting, at a sharp angle, a look from old Hollywood publicity stills. She arranged the hair on her forehead and looked at him and did not smile.

  “And what are you doing downtown?”

  “Oh I work around here. This is my half-hour off from the Indian sweatshop.”

  “Which one is that?”

  “Indian Angle.”

  “You’re kidding, right? With the halal meat and grocery shop ads?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Holy samosas! But why? I thought people only picked it up for the classifieds. Hellish work, I’d imagine.”

  “The space between the matrimonials and lawyers’ ads? That’s where I come in. Among other things I’m Mrs Chatterjee, Agony Auntie.”

  “But that’s fantastic!”

  “Put it this way, the words ‘Indian community’ do not give me a warm feeling.”

  A girl came to the table with a pad in her apron. There was a tiny silver bone in her septum and a metal stud in her tongue and she wore a plastic tag with her name on it. June.

  “A couple of aspirin for me, please, and an Americano and water? How about you?”

  “Double decaf espresso and a scoop of vanilla ice cream. June?”

  “Sure.”

  “Like your piercings.”

  “Thanks,” the waitress said. She placed a cup of crayons within reach and nodded at Goody as she went away. It was that kind of establishment: patrons were encouraged to doodle on the place mats and selected doodles were posted on a communal board.

  Dismas said, “Are you hitting on the waitress?”

  “You’re a druggie, aren’t you?”

  “Is that what he told you?”

  “That’s what you told him,” said Goody.

  “He wants to know things and I end up telling him,” said Dismas.

  “Everybody tells him things. There’s no point resisting.” She picked a red crayon from the cup and weighed it. “What’s it like, heroin? Is it a comfort and balm to the troubled mind?”

  “When Xavier told me your name I thought you were married to a Mr Lol. I don’t know why.”

  “You thought I was droll Mrs Lol. It’s my stepfather’s name. More’s the pity. He’s a doctor and he really wants to be a spiritualist with an ashram full of young female disciples.”

  “And what’s your good name, Ms Lol?”

  “My good or better name is Maia. My mother named me after the goddess, which may be why I turned out so secular. She named me Maia and calls me Gudiya, Hindi for doll.”

  “Which makes you Doll Lol.”

  She scrawled a phrase on her place mat, ‘Missing Person Last Seen’, and a quick ‘LOL’ below it.

  “My name is Goody Lol, daughter of Mrs Lol. In Kashmiri, Lol means love. I’m not married.”

  “But you’re not single.”

  “Probably not. Does New miss India?”

  “You’re asking me.”

  “Yes. I’m asking.”

  “You don’t know much about him.”

  “Who knows about anyone? Talking to you I get a sense of, I don’t know, isolation fever. It’s like you don’t know anything about being with someone.”

  “Doesn’t he tell you things?”

  “He tells me and I listen.”

  “What do you tell him?”

  “I don’t. I try to protect him.”

  “From?”

  She wouldn’t say.

  It felt like they were sparring, taking quick jabs at each other and flinching sideways around a still centre. He had to be alert to the swivel and he liked this. Her order arrived, three scoops of ice cream in a porcelain boat and coffee in a white cup and saucer. The waitress asked if there was anything else they needed and Goody said, no, thank you, you’re very kind. She took the camera off her neck and put it to the side. Then she put a scoop of ice cream into her coffee and brought the cup to her lips and held it to her face and regarded him through the steam.

  “Did you know that heroin was introduced to the world by Bayer? Your doctor would write you a prescription. All perfectly legal.”

  “Doctors were doing it for themselves too.”

  “American prescription meds are so great, Vicodin, Oxycontin, Demerol, Fentanyl. I don’t know why you people bother with heroin.”

  “You people.”

  “What’s it like, addiction?”

  “You want the quick answer, you don’t eat, sleep, shit, come. All the things humans do, you don’t.”

  “What else?”

  “A way of killing time. Time is stretched or compressed depending on how much you’re holding and how much you’ve done. You’re never bored, not until you quit, then all the time you killed comes back.”

  “So, time is elastic, you save up on boredom, and you don’t come. This is supposed to be fun? Maybe you need to get out more.”

  “I joined a methadone programme three weeks after September Eleven. Not that it’s necessarily connected.”

  “Methadone. Synthetic opiate, addictive, gets you off and you skip the go-to-jail option.”

  “You know your drugs.”

  “And anyway, everything’s connected.”

  “Now you sound like New, I mean Xavier.”

  “Or he sounds like me. He’s sixty-five, older than my stepfather. We’ve been together seven years, or six, and it goes both ways. He sounds like me and I sound like him. People think I’ve found an older man to take care of my every need. Except it doesn’t work that way.”

  “How does it work?”

  She took a sip of her coffee and said, “He needs to be looked after and I like that. He’s a binger. When he’s working he’ll work for days at a time. If he isn’t working, he drinks. A lot. We have terrible fights. He hides bottles around the house. If I tell him I’m leaving he won’t get out of bed. Sometimes there’s no money in his account, not a sou, and he’ll borrow cash for a two-hundred-dollar haircut. My mother will send me a cheque or I’ll borrow. But people see us together and create a fantasy in their heads. I want a drink, don’t you?”

  They were sitting at a table by the window and a slant of sun fell across her mouth and chin.

  “There’s a bar across the street but I have to be back at work.”

  “Well, have a quick drink and go.”

  “Or give me an hour and I’ll meet you there.”

  “I can’t give you an hour, is what. I can’t give you any time at all. I want a drink before I go home. Come along or go and do whatever it is you need to do. It’s simple, really.”

 
Give me a minute, he said, and went through a pair of frosted swing doors to the restroom in the back. He took more than a minute, more than five minutes, and when he got back to the table she was gone. He looked at the place mat she’d been scribbling on. In a few lines she had sketched the figure of a woman between ‘LOL’ and ‘Missing Person Last Seen’, a woman viewed from the back, all full lines and falling hair, the face and torso hatched and cross-hatched: a self-portrait. At the bottom of the frame was a Union Square address and an arrow pointing to the portrait. He folded the place mat and put it in his wallet. Outside as he hurried back to work he glanced at the bar across the street. It was the usual Irish drinking franchise with green neon signage and dim interiors.

  At six he punched out and walked to Union Square. The building had a uniformed doorman and an awning and from her window he could see all the way down the avenue to the exact spot where the towers used to be. There was no art on the walls and little furniture and the fridge was empty but for white wine, bottled beer, a jar of olives, and a dozen cans of film. She assembled items on a tray, Chivas, two short bottles of Cobra lager, water glasses, a bowl of ice. She put the tray on the floor of the room and placed two chairs facing the windows. He looked at the darkening skyline as she constructed the drinks, one drop at a time it seemed to him, first a cube of ice, then three fingers of whisky topped off with lager. She stirred with her finger and passed him the glass, the smoothness of the whisky coarsened by the rough beer, and he tasted sweat or hair, something raw and unwashed.