I regret, D, that in your line of work you have to deal with idiots like me.
We watched him move off into the night, my fist clenched around the baggie he’d left there when we slapped hands, and at the last moment I called after him, “Hey, what’s the D stand for?”
He turned. “What?”
“The D!”
“Ha ha.” He grinned. “You figure it out!”
The substance in the bag, upon inspection, resembled a large misshapen pebble. We rolled ourselves smokes sitting on the patio furniture of some café and passed the compound back and forth, taking turns sniffing and licking it in those most primitive forms of chemical analysis. It had no smell I could discern and either no taste or was not soluble in saliva, which may come to the same thing. I found something minatory in its inertness.
We walked back to Gaby’s car licking our little drug rock. Her car disappointingly did not seem to be where we’d left it. It was also true that neither of us knew where that was, precisely, and that technically it was her mother’s car. But the most disheartening thing was that the downtown looked to have been swept of cars, and people too for that matter. A traffic light ran through its sequence without advising a single driver. The chill wind funneled down the street between the palisades of buildings. And I wondered why I was wearing a T-shirt before remembering that it was summer, almost two a.m. We wandered around for a while, contemplating what one did without a car and just a crack rock that was probably meth. It finally dawned on us to call the police. They were terribly helpful when we got through and didn’t even seem concerned that the last thing we should be helped to locate just then was a car, and soon enough we were in a taxi crossing a bridge into the blighted outskirts of the city, a lifeless district saved from total darkness only by the sodic security lights of warehouses and irradiated signs of fast-food restaurants. Our cabbie, whose first name I had found reason to use no less than fifteen times on our short trip, did not seem as remorseful as I would have hoped about depositing us before a feral wraith of a man leaning against a colossal towing rig.
“Toyota, yep,” the man said.
“Toyota’s a pretty common car,” Gaby said. “How do we know you have ours?”
“I got Toyotas.”
Gaby and I glanced at each other.
“That’s really not the most reassuring answer.”
Now that he had stepped from the rig’s shadow I could see the man’s face. It might have been handsome if not for an elaborate pigmentary marking that gave it a marled look, streaks of dark nevi fanning out like comet tails below the stringy hair that fell across it. There was something vaguely regal in his bearing, I thought, a hunched, big-boned quality, like the awkward limbedness of a mantis.
“Can we just take a look,” Gaby asked, “make sure it’s the right car?”
“Can’t open the gate until you pay me.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” I said. “I think you won’t open the gate until we pay you. You can do whatever the hell you want.”
“If you like it better than way,” he said.
It came to $120, and Gaby and I had maybe $80 between us. I was regretting a bit the business deal I’d entered into with Little D, and, in a more general sense, the subjective experience of being alive. I had the urge to say to the man something like, How did we get here, how did this chain-link fence with its small padlock come between us, strangers, men, women, with nothing against one another, acting out the offices of far-flung and abstracted necessities, gutter kings, cursed and shambling exiles muttering an obfuscatory patois, recreants with no faith left in the conduit metaphor of language, abandoned to our preterition of cash transfers, synthetic highs, and a reflexive sabotage that may be at heart no more than contempt for the self-importance and medicalized vanity of other people, the more comfortably unelect, and yet content, it seems, to waste our lives in a pointless standoff at this insignificant gate? I was a bit skeptical of my ability to make myself understood, however, and so I did the one thing I could think to do, which was to take the crack/meth rock/crystal from my pocket and say, “You got somewhere you need to be?”
“You’re looking at it,” he said. He took the parcel from my hand and unscrewed a lightbulb from a string wreathing the lot, deftly picking out contact, stem, and filament with needle-nose pliers.
“What’s your name?” Gaby said as he cleaned the bulb’s cavity with a bit of towel and deposited some crushed drug inside it. He held the flame below the glass.
“Wendill,” he said.
The smoke drifted up from the bulb as thick as milk.
The silence of the lot struck me at that moment, the moment of inhalation, the faint wind like a memory of elsewheres, the threnody of distance, and as the vapor replaced the chill in me with a lithe magma of hot blood, as the euphoria took hold, Wendill said, and I can only relate, not explain, what follows, “Now I will tell you the story of the human soul.”
The Story of the Human Soul, Per Wendill
As you may imagine, I was not always as you see me now. I have lived, oh, many lives, gone by many names, worked all kinda jobs. Not that it’s such a long way from claims adjuster to tugboat captain if you — ahem — catch my drift. You are not “before the law.” The gate is locked, I assure you. Or maybe not. I forgot to check, I think. My memory … well. But what I mean is, see me as a friend, doomed for a certain term to walk the night, alas, but a father figure. I find you apt. Not like those egregious weeds on the riverbank. I spray and spray … But no, they will not shut up like a telescope. And I won’t either. Ha ha!
Do you remember, in the Jungian sense, I mean, the sense of anamnesis, that day long ago when a slate sky dripped silver tears in the sky-painted lakes above the veldt, when you came upon the briar-caged creature and a man and a woman were one — androgynes, atmen, call them what you will — and a man and a woman and a blackbird were one? When the creature died on the hard point of a rock? How later you baited the briars with fruit, and when the man died and the woman died it was not different from when the creature died. Lush flowers fattened on their graves. And the men picked flowers for the women to remind them how life grows on the cusps of death, playing the B side of Houses of the Holy while everyone got laid?
And when the first jockey climbs aboard a creature struggling in the mud, and indestructible space foreshortens, might we not say the rider is the mind of the animal, the way a priest is the mind of the ritual, the way God is the mind of order and accident? The hippie boys and girls of North Beach, entheogenic rapscallions and the best minds of their generation, apparently, take soma to become the mind of the sacrifice. And order and accident have their uneasy marriage, of course, which like all marriages it would be pointless to try to understand from the outside.
That food in the briars begets more food is the initial form the offering takes. The offering is order’s humility before accident. A violation brought to consciousness. A horse let wander for a year shadowed everywhere by a hundred young men who could really use some direction in their lives. Do you know what kids in Minoan Crete have to do? their moralizing parents ask. Dance with bulls — can you imagine? You have to follow this fucking horse around, but at least you aren’t getting gored by bulls all the time.
And when the year is up, in some extreme unction, they coat the horse in butter, tie it to a post, and kill it. But you’ve grown fond of the horse over the year, haven’t you? So: agenbite of inwit. Was the horse really down? You wonder, you perseverate. But perhaps, they say, perhaps it offered itself up like Odin, who hanged himself from a tree in sacrifice to himself. Well, perhaps. The queen must spend a night with the dead horse, anyway, sleep with it. The spirit of the horse whinnies in the wind.