Robin’s teeth parted, and her tongue slipped gratefully back inside her mouth.
“Promise?”
“Yes,” Robin said.
“Good girl,” her mother said. “Have fun and drive safe,” like some fucking public service blurb, and Robin turned her back on the mirror. Concentrated on buttoning each sanguine button, on the retreating tattoo of her mother’s footsteps. Her mother played pretend, pretend that Robin was still a child, pretend that her father was held up late over his blueprints and drafting tools instead of his latest whore girlfriend. That her life wasn’t as hellish as everything else in the world, and Robin didn’t really give a shit as long they paid the bills on her charge cards and didn’t bitch about where she spent her nights. Who she spent them with.
Robin sat down on one rumpled corner of the bed and laced her feet tight into tall vinyl boots, icicle heels and toes like fresh slices of midnight. The calm she’d felt only a minute before had dissolved completely, whatever dim sanctuary her room conferred violated by her mother’s voice and brittle delusions, and now all she wanted was to escape. Put all the miles she could between herself and the neat suburban rows of brick and aluminum siding, pretty mortgaged cancers, and follow the interstate over the mountains, to Spyder and the honest desolation of the city.
But she’d wait a few more minutes, give her mother plenty of time to clear out. Robin lay back on the bed, the sheets that smelled like jasmine incense and clove cigarettes and her musty sex, and stared at the walls.
Walls her painstaking alchemy of acrylics and sponge dabbings had transformed into some impossible marble, simple Sheetrock into ebony stone shot through with scarlet quartz veins. Four stark slabs supporting, framing, the tragic tableau overhead, the pillars of the world, and the walls were almost bare: only a giant Siouxsie and the Banshees poster above the headboard and a raccoon skull hanging snout down in the narrow space between her cluttered bookshelf and the new stereo her parents had given her for her last birthday.
“Nineteen,” her mother had said. “Robin’s so mature for just nineteen. Don’t you think so, Bill?” And her father had smiled, his eyes a hundred miles away.
She’d painted the door a single bottomless shade of glistening black, like hot tar or spilled oil, clinging absence of anything like light.
Robin listened, as patient as anything cornered, and when she finally heard the faint growl and clank of the automatic garage door, the softer purr of her mother’s car backing out of the drive, she got up and opened the black door.
2.
This is where it started.
On an April night when thunderstorms had swept out of Mississippi, raking the world with lightning and the promise of tornadoes, and the city’s civil defense sirens had howled shrill apocalypse. And Walter, who said he wanted to be a sailor and only pretended to be queer so nobody would think he was strange, had brought them a tiny bit of opium, black tar in Spyder’s antique hookah, just like Gomez and Morticia. There was almost nothing that Walter could not secure, given time and the cash, no pill or herb or intoxicating powder too exotic that he didn’t seem to have a source, somewhere.
Gawky Walter Ayers, rawboned and hair like a handful of dead mice, so hard in love with Robin that she always got to laughing if she looked at his eyes too long. He bought her company, Spyder’s, Byron’s, with drugs and clumsy, helpless charm.
And that night the storm and Bauhaus turned down low so they could still hear the thunder and the sizzling rain and sirens, and she’d nestled content and almost naked in Spyder’s tattooed arms; waiting for her turn at the water pipe’s brass mouthpiece. Listening to whatever Walter was saying, gathering his words inside her head: the book he was reading on the Holy Grail, having exhausted Jessie Weston and Roger Sherman Loomis, a book by Carl Jung’s wife and the grail as vessel, the sword and the lance, grail as stone. She’d watched their candle-oranged faces: Walter’s too excited; Byron, bored, but watching Spyder to see what she thought before he agreed or disagreed.
“And these angels, the zwivelaere, had wanted to preserve the original God-image,” he said, “the unity, the divine inner opposites that were being torn apart by the war in Heaven.”
“Zwivelaere,” the German had rolled easy and slow from Spyder’s tongue. “What does that mean?” And then she’d taken the mouthpiece from him and filled her cheeks with the faintly sweet, acrid smoke, had leaned down, and Robin parted her lips and accepted the kiss, taking Spyder’s breath and the opium inside her, had closed her eyes and only exhaled when her lungs had finally begun to ache and the distant thrum in her ears, like the empty space between radio stations.
“The doubters,” Walter answered, guarded awe in his voice like this was a secret, dangerous knowledge, and Spyder only nodded her head.
Robin had watched Spyder’s slow eyes, eyes the gentle color of faded denim. Spyder almost never smoked anything but pot, routinely turned down the best acid and ’shrooms, but the opium was a treat too rare to allow her caution to interfere, her fear of the wild things and places in her head. Robin knew it was those parts of Spyder she loved most, the turbulence behind those pacific eyes, the part that Spyder locked away with her tranquilizers and antidepressants.
“The doubters hid the grail stone on the earth,” Walter said, and she wished he would shut up. He rarely actually seemed to understand the books he read, arcane treatises on conspiracy and occult Christian orders; but he rattled on about then endlessly in a desperate attempt to impress her, and so it had become a sort of game: she fed his desperation by suggesting the most difficult texts and watched as he struggled, fixated on the obvious, the superficial skin of myth and history. Everything reduced to Tolkien-simple fantasy, and the magic and deeper mystery lost on him.
She did not particularly dislike Walter, but she didn’t love him the way Spyder did, either. Didn’t see him as some integral part of the circle of her life.
The storm had rattled at the windows, wanting in, and she’d watched the water caught like glistening bugs in the screen wire behind the glass.
There was a longish pause in Walter’s exposition, then, and Byron sighed loudly, got up from his seat on the spring-shot sofa to put a new CD on or a tape, cold molasses motion. And Walter had said, “I can get some buttons next week, if anyone’s interested.”
“Buttons?” Byron said. “What kind of ‘buttons’?”
“Peyote,” and the word had brought Robin drifting back from her contemplation of the raindrops trapped inside the squares of wire, held fast by fate and their own surface tension.
“How much?” she’d asked him, and Walter looked lost for a second and shrugged.
“Randy said to get back to him about the price, but-”
“No, I mean how many buttons can you get?”
“Oh,” and she’d seen his hot embarrassment, inordinate unease over nothing at all.
“Probably as much as we want,” he’d said. “Why?”
“’Cause I did peyote once when I lived down in Mobile, but I only got one button and it didn’t do anything much but make me puke. You gotta eat a lot, like nine or ten buttons at least, if you’re gonna get a good trip off it.”
Byron had stopped fumbling through Spyder’s CDs, clack-clack-clack of jewel cases against one another, and put on My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult’s Sexplosion, skipped ahead to “Sex on Wheelz.” The music drowned the storm, and Robin had to raise her voice to be heard.
“It would be worth it,” she’d said, “if you could get enough.”
“I heard that stuff tastes like shit.” Byron had returned to the sofa and took his turn at the hookah.
“I’ll see what I can do,” and Walter had tried to sound matter-of-fact about it, sure of himself, but she’d heard the crisp uncertainty between his words, knew that the chances of his coming up with that much peyote were slim to none. Just another test, like Carlos Castenada and Foucault’s Pendulum. Spyder had frowned down at her with sleepy blue eyes full of admonition and lazy passion.