I look at the bag of Lucky Jeans. What will I say to Claire? These jeans mean I’m leaving, baby. How do you go? My father seemed to rehearse it — softly closing the door, the light click of the latch. To me it always sounded like he was just going out for a moment — taking out the trash or having a smoke in the cooler summer evening. He made it sound like he was coming right back. She must know it’s coming — shaky breaths or silence on the telephone. We’ve got nowhere else to go, nowhere else but down. And I don’t want it, another generation of inscrutable hisses and diametrically opposed truths. I was a husband and I’m not anymore. I was a father, now I’m not—It is undone! How will I watch those green eyes melt and that crooked mouth fall? But how on earth can a man just disappear? Gavin’s ma used to plead with us not to be swallowed by the bottle. And Lila used to terrorize me with stories about uncles who’d vanished in the Virginia night. And I suppose that I’ve already disappeared from myself — that boy who was so full of light. That man who promised so much.
The wine. She said to “help yourself.” That’s not the way I want to go out, but it’s better than some idiotic mumbling about the past and future and—sorry. Claire’s never seen me drunk, never seen me trying to make myself uncrooked. Then she could go, vindicated, have some story to make sense of it all—it was the wine, not him, not me. The wine. A man could disappear into a bottle. I can’t really remember what it feels like to be drunk. Only before — dread and dislocation — and after — dread and sorrow. I think I have enough of that, without having to add the insult of retching into some gutter. Don’t call for the wine because the wine might answer and then what do you do?
The music shuffles in the player. I step back from the wine. The Animals’ version of “House of the Rising Sun” begins. I’d forgotten I’d put them on. They always have seemed to me to be one of the mystery bands that only exist in the radio. The picked, trembling arpeggio on the electric guitar sounds both sinister and wounded, then Eric Burdon’s husky baritone — funny fuckin’ white boy — but he seems to feel it. It’s so clear on her stereo. I’m only used to hearing it on the AM dial. He growls: “There is a house in New Orleans, they call the risin’ sun. .” I turn it up and go into the bedroom, half dancing, half stumbling, and I remember the photographs on the board. They’re all four-by-six, black-and-white, arms and legs and necks seemingly disconnected from their bodies, but not violently. She’s faded out the joints — elbows, knees, shoulders — so that they seem to float in space, nerveless, bloodless.
The demonic organ solo starts, and it sounds like a plea either to deliver the player from evil or to speed him through it, and causes me to sway about the bedroom to the makeshift bookcase. She’s sectioned it by genre — several art history books, photography, poetry: Neruda, Wordsworth, Hughes, Blake, Plath, Dickinson. Yes. Eliot. Four Quartets. I think the cover page of my dissertation is down in Marco’s basement: “Eliot, Modernism, and Metaphysics.” I’d typed it proudly, looked at it from many different angles, and after leaving it on display for almost a week, filed it in the oblivion section. “Oh dark dark dark. They all go into the dark.” I look to the windows. “The vacant, interstellar spaces. The vacant into the vacant.” I know it by heart, but I take it out anyway and open it to the section. There’s something about seeing the words that alternately concretizes them and explodes them off the page into abstraction. “What do you think?” I’d paced slowly in front of my students, every once in a while peering over the top of the thin book and leaning toward them. I’d stand there, in the full force of their stupefied silence.
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors
A noble sentiment, old man, lovely even, but I don’t think I’m one of those listed. Where do I go: Into the ground beside an all-but-forgotten skull, or perhaps I’m future clay for patching holes? They won’t be burying me in Westminster Abbey for calling the cognoscenti out into the “dark dark dark.” No. You can bury my body — by the highway too. . Mr. Eliot. . Mr. Johnson. Well met. Well met. Burdon starts screaming, “. . one foot on the platform. The other foot on the train. .” I drop the book on the couch and think to turn off the music, but it’s too late: Delta morning, dark, bloody horizon, and you are, in every consideration, of two minds.
I go back into the bathroom, sand and prime the wall, then install the cabinets. I reconnect the fixtures and drop in the sink bowl. Her tiles need regrouting. I feel a drip from above — another skylight. The rain is getting heavier outside.
I try a bedroom window to see if it opens. It does. I close it quickly and think about finding some way to screw them shut — angle irons perhaps, screwed into the frame and sill. I shake that notion off, go sit on the couch and look back at them, try to see through — the imagined sway of the outer wall in the wind. The airshaft is the space between the stars, seemingly nothing, but a place, space — darkness upon the deep. No thing—a mask upon the abyss. When I was a boy, I already knew of that double-dark, so I wondered what starlight was — an ancient message of good beamed from somewhere so far away it could only be measured in time. But stars burn out, explode, or collapse inward — everything near pulled into absence. Darkness on the deep: the temporary and ancient light — its death, the hole from its implosion, deeper than any interstellar shroud.
I put Eliot away and browse through the rest of her books. There’s a compilation of early Superman comics. I start to take it out but then remember that I never liked him — the lost son of doomsday prophets, rocketed away as an infant just before his planet was destroyed. I always thought that he was too smug for that amount of grief.
Time passes. It’s late. I don’t know if I’ve been sleeping. I don’t think so. When I sleep, I have nightmares and I wake up screaming. I don’t think I ever convinced Claire that my inability to put myself in bed and then to sleep had anything to do with her. And when we had kids, each one spent a good amount of time in that bed. I’d roam from kitchen to couch, waiting to shut down — a small death — not sleep but a place before or beyond it where nothing happens, where you’re safe from a cumulative history represented by some toothy demon calling for your blood. Even if I do sleep and don’t remember the dream, I still can feel when I awake that I’ve been attacked.
The door clicks. There’s a rustle of bags and keys jangle. I shoot to my feet, move quickly to the stereo, and turn it down.