“I don’t know, my friend, my brother. I don’t know if I’ve said it or only thought it. You’re either brilliant or you’re a fool, out here in the night, unseasonably cold, all by your broke self. No allies to call on.” He points at the books in the window. “What have you been doing, my brother, while everyone else was building networks, consensus, shared ideology?” He cackles again. It rips the night.
“No allies?”
“Well you can count me in, for whatever that’s worth.”
“I will.”
“I will.” He mocks. “G’wan claat! How goes the rest of the crew?”
“Gav’s back in.”
He winces, as though the news physically hurts him.
“That boy never met a fight he didn’t want. By the way, that was Gladys — yesterday.” He jerks his head back as though she’s behind him. He shoots the imagined woman down with a sharp, quick stare. “She ain’t mine”—he leans in as though this is a secret he needs to keep from her. “I’m just looking out for her, till she gets on her feet.” He cracks his knuckles. “Where’d you get that suit you were wearing?”
“Had it awhile.”
“You a banker now, too?”
“No.”
He shakes his head again, closes his eyes, frustrated, as though he’s trying to remember something he had to tell me. “Looking at you helps me remember. Sometimes that’s not so good, you know.” He springs forward, catching me with that old quickness, and hugs me. He rocks us back and forth. I smell sweat and pharmaceuticals — rubbing alcohol. He lets me go.
“What’s up, man?” I sigh.
He smiles, gently puts a hand on my shoulder. “Hey baby, gut me then haruspicate: Extrapolate from my viscera.” He bends, covers his mouth, and laughs to himself. He straightens but still smiles. “I can tell you what’s going to happen. I just can’t tell you how. I don’t know. Not a living ass can. Hell, the dead can’t probably either. I’ve been outside a long time now — way outside — but when I see you, I think of things I saw when I was in. I think it might be worse, being in, looking for something, seeing all the faces, the places that you’re locked out of, while they demand that you behave like they’re going to let you in. But I praise my psychophar-macologist: I haven’t spun completely out. I take my pills, try not to bust anyone in the head, and wait for my inheritance of the earth. Now that’s a plan. Hope to see you there.”
“What about now?”
“What about now?”
“What are you going to do?”
“What, you got a plan? You want to raise an army and take the capital — shit — nothing but mercenaries out there anyway. And how you gonna trust them?” He looks at his wrist, but he doesn’t have a watch. He lowers his arm, looks down, and goes back to the Thorazine shuffle. For a moment I wish I had the switch to shut him off. He looks up and jumps back, breaking the prescribed pattern. I can see the fight in him, trying to make his movements fluid, resisting being locked into a new box step.
He tries to shake his head, the effort to keep it slow requires him to turn his body in tandem as if it were all one piece. He whispers.
“I gotta go.”
I nod. We both exhale together. He spreads his arms, palms up, and waves them slowly, up and down.
“This collective consciousness ain’t big enough for the two of us — remember?” He stops his arms in midair. “That’s your fight — so I’m off.” He turns, wades into the street, and starts across.
“Donovan?”
He cuts me off — a hand raised into the air. He doesn’t turn, so I can’t see his mouth move but it sounds like his voice.
“Not fare well, but fare forward.”
And he’s off into the night.
Marco’s asleep on the couch again — having tried again and failed to make it to the end of Cool Hand Luke. He rouses at my presence and looks up blankly from the depths. I leave him alone, go upstairs, sit on the bed, and stare at a blank sheet of paper.
“Hey.” He’s snuck up on me again.
“How are you?”
“Wiped. Hey, I have a question.” He lets it hang out there for a while, but not long enough for me to begin asking myself what it is. “Are you around on Friday?”
“I’m not sure. Why?”
“Are those your clubs in the basement?”
“Yeah.”
“Feel like playing?”
“I can’t.”
“Come on. Take a day off.”
“I can’t.” I must have bent the last refusal — blue. He gets it. He loses the playfulness, puts on a face I haven’t seen before.
“You’re pretty good.”
I shrug.
“Listen, it might be worth taking a day off for this.” This time he lets it hang long enough for me to grab.
“I can’t.”
“Friday morning. First thing. Think about it.”
Marco leaves. Thomas bloops, demanding a song I can’t give him. It’s quiet time in the house of Andolini, time for all good lawyers to sleep. Tomorrow I will scrape more paint and row that much closer to failure. Donovan once said that our action is our choice, our fate made by our own hands. I choose not to be me. I choose not to be afflicted, not to bear witness. Not to be wed to notions of transcendence—as if they were real. I choose not to be a postmodern loser — a fool. Real. I choose to be real, whole and solid — deaf to the wail of the haunt, mute for all future incantation. Dead to the wind. I calclass="underline"
“Seawrack and seatangle.”
But I am not transformed.
12
I seen the morning light
I seen the morning light
It’s not because I’m an early riser
I didn’t go to sleep last night
I am desperate for all the wrong reasons. It occurs to me now, sitting on the bed in the dim room with a legal pad on my lap, that this has always been so. Claire thinks I’m desperate to receive a six-figure book deal. Over the years she’s woken up late at night and found me churning out pages and she’s smiled. Even C has been afflicted by the notion that a finished manuscript means a contract and a contract means a new silver minivan. So my words, in a sense, are written to that automobile, calling for it to show itself to me.
I don’t remember all of my desperations: desperate to publish before this author died; desperate to record before that singer passed — either to have them validate me or for me to tell them that they were wrong. I don’t know when everything got so turned around. I once was desperate to have writing do things, to contain transformative powers, but writing has never done anything for me. It has never been cathartic or therapeutic. It names things, locates them, or at least when I’m writing, I can pretend to be involved in some kind of management of my netherworlds. I start with a feeling, perhaps even more substantial — an image attached to that feeling. I write something, even finish. Sometimes I think it is good. But the feeling is still there, unchanged, but now with a name and a reason for being, legitimized and calling for a permanent place in me. I can’t do this. I am desperate because I know rage is still rage, sorrow still sorrow, and the only actions that can give them the voice each demands is to destroy and to wail. I am desperate because I write to the minivan and all that lies between it and me. I push a pen across a page, gesturing at symbol, metaphor — pasting a collage of willfully mute and deaf images beside each other within some self-conscious vehicle that masquerades as story. But I get sidetracked in the production, ambushed in my own head. I trick myself for a moment, believe the words arranged just so will metamorphose into a balm. Part of me doesn’t believe. It tries to conceive the minds of unknown agents, faceless editors, and book review consumers. But part of me goes with it, chasing the words that follow the image as it moves up like braiding smoke offerings of ritualistic purification. It will never sell. I scribble a line across the page beneath the last jumble of words to signal I am done.