Save My Life

A story.

“That night the fever started and later, in my delirium, I said over and over, I am dying. (Maybe you even start to die, and then something saves you. Perhaps it’s like flipping a coin or stepping off a high, unrailed porch when you’re first starting to walk, flinging the leg out into space … Save my life … Isn’t that the core of childhood, that cry as you tip over and what will happen next?)”

-Harold Brodkey, “This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death”

The landlord’s eyes don’t rest that’s the first thing I noticed when he came over to the cabin.
It had just hit midnight but even so the landlord let himself in. I heard his pick-up rattle down the dirt road, saw the headlights cut through the white pines in the front. The shaky light pushed in through the big open window at the front of the cabin and dodged around the room. That window has no curtain.
I had just put wood into the stove that sat in the middle of the main room. I had collected a pile from out back earlier in the day, after I got home from class. Bought an ounce of good pot, it was sitting in a mason jar on the kitchen counter. I planned to put more wood in the stove, smoke two joints then pass out. I wasn’t expecting the landlord.
I had been lying on the fringe carpet, just lying on my back with my hands under my head when he opened the door. I turned my head to the side and saw him. He was old and stocky and short. Hardly had any hair left. The hair that he did have was either plastered to his head or sticking straight out. He pulled off his gloves and stuck them in his coat pocket. Then he bent over with a grunt and unlaced his boots. Stepped out of one. Had to kick off the other. He was wearing thick blue socks.
“Pete, where you at?” He hollered before he even looked up, then he looked up and saw me just lying there in the main room, looking at him.
“Well, there you are, boy,” he said as if he had searched. The landlord walked in the room. Settled down in the one old easy chair that was near the stove. His nose was red and a line of thick, clear snot began to crawl out of his right nostril.
“Get me a beer. You’ve beer? Get me something to put my feet on. Stool. A box. I don’t give a fuck, just something, my feet ’r killing me.”
I didn’t say a word. I got up though. Walked to the kitchen and pulled two beers from the fridge. There was a milk crate in the corner, I grabbed that.
I handed him the beer and tossed the crate on the floor. He straightened it out, put his socked feet on it, crossed them and sighed out. I sat back on the floor, further away from him, leaned my back against the wall. I opened my beer with a lighter and then tossed the lighter back on the floor.
“Listen Pete, you ain’t gonna pay in cash you’re gonna pay some other way and that’s just how it’s gonna be. Gotta pay someway somehow, boy.”
“What’d you have in mind?” I asked. I knew what he had in mind.
He let that lizard smile loose and ran his fat, pink tongue over his thin top lip. He wiped the snot from his face with the back of his hand. My head was hanging low but my eyes were looking right at him. I told him I had to smoke first.

I think it’s the oddest thing all the horrors people allow to harbor in their bodies while going on about their day to day. How those people can look just the same on the outside as they did before the horrors started. I was thinking about this later that night, when I was lying with my back on the fringe carpet stoned out of my mind looking at the wood-burning stove in the center of the room. My feet were right up close to it and they were hot but I kept them there anyway.
The landlord had left. When he got off the old chair and walked to the door, stepped into his boots, bent down to tie them up, I crawled back to the center of the room. Lied down in the same position I was in before. Flat on my back with my hands behind my head. I listened to the landlord open the door, shut it, walk down the way. I heard the pick-up start with a rattle then drive off, the light cutting in and out through the room. I was thinking how if someone had seen me before midnight and then had come back and saw me now, in this same position in these same clothes, here with my back on the fringe carpet, there’d be no reason to think anything had changed. No reason to think I had just sucked that old, rotting man’s dick. Twice.
But shit like that must make a mark inside us somewhere, I thought.

Last week the nurse at the health office told me I didn’t have AIDS.
“That’s good,” I said, “But now there’s blood coming out of my penis.”
She didn’t look surprised. She didn’t look any different. She kept on the same calm face. She said I didn’t have to worry about it but she did make me another appointment with the doctor.
It’s not like it’s bleeding all the time but it’s still bleeding. It’s still weird. I try not to think about it. Try not to imagine it while I’m sitting in class. How there are small beads of ruby red blood dripping out of the tip of my purple spotty dick.
I was standing in my bedroom in the cabin one night. My bedroom is the only room on the second floor. The roof slants from the middle of the room and goes down to one side. That allows me to stand up straight only in half the space. I was in my room taking off my clothes when I pulled off my boxers. I stepped out of them and began to ball them up, was about to throw them in a pile on the floor. I stopped myself and held them out in front of me, spread them wide. The bloodstains were all blotchy. Like some sponge painted red butterflies. I considered this and then I threw them on the floor.
See, I’m having trouble sleeping. That’s another thing but it’s all right. I change in my bedroom and then come back downstairs. Read or smoke or drink beer and just lie there. I’ll just spread out on the fringe carpet and watch the wood stove burn.
I’ll think about things. Things I’ve tried not to think about for years. It’s like recently all these things have been bombarding my mind. They force themselves in. They rape me. That’s the only part about the whole not sleeping thing that really gets to me—how I’m not able to turn anything off. How it just keeps going. My mind just flips everything over and over again and I wish, I mean honestly wish, I could just turn it the fuck off. So yeah, yes, maybe the not sleeping thing does bother me a little.
And I see things. Pictures. They just flash in front of me. I’m looking at the wood stove and then suddenly I’m looking at my mother on the kitchen floor. Or I’m looking at Kate’s old house from my living room window. Kate, my best friend, my childhood neighbor. Kate. Pure. Pure. Pure and good. I drum her name. It’s better to think of her than to think of other things. I know that. I do try.
See, now I’m there. In Connecticut. Now I’m standing in my house watching Kate’s house across the street and I’m sixteen. I’m watching the warm yellow light from her front bay window pour onto the dark front lawn. I’m watching it spread out like a picnic blanket. I see her mom walk by the window. And I know I’m far away. I’m in some ice blue country watching her house all warm and yellow. I know I am very far away.
When the pictures come they are clear. They are very, very clear. It’s like all of a sudden I get it. And I see it. Clear as day, right there in front of me. So what if it happened five years ago? So what if I was wasted at the time? Now I can see everything. What’s that good for? That’s my main question.
I see the Pain. It is a slow and steady creeping red lava. It boils and bubbles and I watch it slither through my old house. I am obsessed with it. I watch it. I try to catch it in old peanut butter jars. I want to trap it and I want to contain it. But it’s impossible to hold Pain in one place. It keeps moving everywhere. It doesn’t stop.
When my mother’s body hits the floor it makes a thud. It sounds like a dead tree and I’m fucking annoyed. I’m reluctant to retrieve it. She is a chore. No more, no less. A chore to slap her in the face. To pull her arm out of it’s socket, accidentally. To call her doctor again. “Yeah, I’m sorry but my mother is having another episode, yes, I’ve stuffed a rag in her mouth…”
We’re at the kitchen table. My mother and I. I am sixteen. The pill container is between us. She shakes out the pills. They tumble into her hand. Bright orange plastic pellets. There is a big glass of water. The glass is blue. Orange in the palm of her hand. A smooth white hand. She laughs. “Here’s looking at you, kid.” Big blue glass of water. She clinks the glass in the air. Cheers. “We’ll see.” Hand covers her mouth. Brings her hand down and the orange pills are gone. She smiles. Squeezes her eyes when they go down hard. She smiles. What’s on my face now? I can’t see that.
Then my mother goes upstairs and gets into bed, tucks herself in and I swear to god she doesn’t wake up for the next two years.
“Here’s looking at you, kid.” She laughs.
My neck hurts and I’m on my bedroom floor again. The back window is open and ice cold is wafting in. There’s that first waking moment of the long drunk black out before you know where you are, when you can be anywhere. Endless possibilities. There is a messy note on my stomach from Kate. Kate’s gone but her notes always last. Black permanent marker on my bare stomach. Wake the FUCK up Peter! I rub my belly. Rub the note. I get into bed. Crawl up into the bed like a dog allowed back in the house. It’s morning. That doesn’t matter. My neck does hurt.
I shave off all my hair for no good reason. My mom sees my skinhead in the kitchen and goes running up the stairs sobbing like a baby. Fucking cunt. I take a picture of myself. Hold the camera out and click. Standing there shirtless in the empty kitchen. Shaved head. A three day old letter on my stomach that reads, Peter STOP STOP stop stop STOP! My stomach is hard now. Punch it, it’s hard. I’m a warrior. I don’t smile. There isn’t a flash on the camera. The picture’s no good.
I find the Pain. I am seventeen. Warm black red blood is crawling down my body. The lava. It’s exactly how I imagined it. I’m digging for more. I’m digging to get it all out. Digging with my dead grandmother’s silver sewing scissors. Digging into my left forearm. I’ve found it and I’ll get it now. Kate’s in the doorway. Kate’s standing there silent and dumb looking like a baby idiot. Is she even fifteen yet? Is she fourteen? I don’t know. I come at her with my silver scissors when she tries to get close. I am growling like a creature. She retreats. She slinks down against the wall. If she stays quiet I won’t give a damn. I’ll let her stay if she stays silent. Say one word though and I’ll get you. I dig and I pull out the Pain. Pull it out like some long intense from a dead person’s gut. Scrap it on the floor. I’ve found it and I watch it dry up and hiss and die. The red turns to brown. It looks like shit.
It’s morning and I have clean white gauze wrapped around my arms and thick white tape. The window is open and Kate’s gone.
I’m on my bedroom floor arms and legs spread out like a dead dried up starfish. My mom’s in her bedroom asleep and gone away. Night after night. Year after year. It is a tomb! Years have passed. Moss has grown over everything. There is long grass coming out of the kitchen tile cracks. There are brown maggots crawling out of the telephone cord and the television remote control. And where is my sister? Where is my father? Where did they go? The house is a layer of corpses slaughtered, left behind to rot. The Pain did it. And then the Pain left. The two who stayed behind were demolished. Had no chance.
Now it’s the woodstove. Now I’m back on the fringe carpet. I’m not asleep but it’s not exactly like I’m awake either. I see the woodstove. I am here and I’m alone. I am in my cabin in the middle of nowhere Maine. I just sucked my landlord’s dick and I don’t care. I’m alone and I can’t stop seeing things.
And I know. I know this is not good. I know. I’m not an idiot.

When I first moved here Kate was the one who warned me over the phone not to tell my mom I was living alone.
“Why’s that?” I asked laughing at her.
“It’ll make her nervous,” she said concerned. Kate was pretty much always concerned. I was pretty much always laughing.
“Anyway,” she pressed on, “I told her you lived off campus but with friends. She asked if you lived with Andrew. I don’t know who Andrew is but I said yeah anyway.”
“Who’s Andrew?” I was laughing harder now.
“I don’t know Peter,” she was getting angry, “but just go with it, okay? It’ll be easier.”
“Fine, that’s fine,” I said.
Kate was still living with my mom then, in my old bedroom. I never understood why she was doing that.
After Kate moved out of my mom’s house she went back to West Virginia, to her parents’ house for a few months before she would start college in January. Last month, out of nowhere, she called and told me she wanted to come up to Maine to visit me. I said that would be fine even though the whole prospect made me uncomfortable. How she would see it all, see me. Like I said, I knew I was pretty far out. I knew I wasn’t exactly in a good or stable place. But I couldn’t say no to her.
Kate came at the end November That was the last time I saw her. She stayed for two days. This was last month.
When I left to pick her up from the airport it was cold out. There was snow over everything and ice over that. It all just looks so far here when there are no leaves on the trees and nothing is blocking your view from seeing out. Except for the pines, they’re still covered.
“I nearly died!” She said laughing. Kate was walking towards me between a row of plastic orange chairs bolted to the floor. The carpet was old and brown. Illuminated flight announcements were scrolling on the wall. She had a backpack over her shoulder and a red scarf looped around her neck. Her hair was staticy and longer than I remembered. She was small. Kate’s young. That’s always what I’d notice first when I see her after a time. I think, Who is this child?
We walked out to the car and she kept going on with the story. How she was convinced that small plane she was on had almost gone down. How the fat Muslim sitting next to her had pulled out his Koran and started praying out loud.
“I swear to god!” She cried when I said yeah right.
“Well, what’d you do then?” I asked.
“I just sat there! I was just thinking how good of a story it’d be if, you know, if I survived.”
That first night I made grilled cheeses on the gas stove. Kate sat on a stool. She still had on her red scarf and she was looking at her lap, fingering the tassels.
“So, what do you do here most nights?” She asked finally. It had been quiet. She had commented on that, how heavy it was here. The silence and the space. She said here they felt like actual things, parts she said, not nothing.
I shrugged my shoulders. Kept pushing down the plastic spatula flattening the slices of bread on the griddle. The butter hissed.
“Write. Do work. Go to parties. Have parties. I don’t know, whatever, stuff.”
After a time she still hadn’t responded. I turned back and glanced at her. She was still looking at her lap, nodding, thinking.
“You’re alone though, I mean most of the time. Do you think you’re alone most of the time? Here, I mean.”
I laughed. “Kate, come on,” I said. I flipped over one grilled cheese, then the other. Pushed them down more. I didn’t know what else to say. I knew what she was thinking. I was wondering how much I had fucked her up. Overall. I was wondering if she would ever blame me for that. For fucking her up. Probably, I thought, eventually.
I shoveled the grilled cheeses onto a plate and put the plate on the table. Kate and I sat down. Kate brought her feet up onto the edge of the chair her knees in front of her chest. She picked up her sandwich and started to peel off the crust. She always ate the crusts first. She did that when we were kids, I remember that.
“You’re going to college in a month then?” I asked her, even though I was well aware that was her plan. I wanted to shift the focus.
“Yeah,” she said and bit into her sandwich.
“Nervous?”
“I don’t care.” She looked up at me and smiled. She put her sandwich on the plate. “I’m not just saying that, you know, meanly or whatever.” She paused and picked up her sandwich again. “I honestly just don’t give a damn about it. I don’t really give a damn about much.”
I nodded, I understood. I got up and walked to the fridge. I asked Kate if she wanted a beer.

Kate said she didn’t mind sharing a bed with me, it was the only bed in the cabin, and after she finished dinner she said she was pretty tired. I led her upstairs, she carried her backpack. I warned her to watch her head on the ceiling.
I told her I still had some homework to finish. That I’d do it in the kitchen while she slept. She stood in the center of the room and pulled down her jeans. She stepped out of them and left them like that. A little mound on the floor, still holding her shape in the seat. She left her t-shirt on while she unhooked her bra and pulled it out of her sleeve. Kate was trying to be brave. She was trying to be casual and she was trying to be brave. I watched her. I missed her. That’s what I was thinking then, how much I missed her. Still, right then, even though she was right there. There was so much space between us. I wasn’t even close to her.
She got into my bed, which is just a double mattress on the floor pushed against the window. There are beige flannel sheets and two plaid comforters. I had changed the sheets for Kate. She pulled the covers over her and looked towards me.
“Just stay here for a bit and then go downstairs, okay?”
I sat on the floor in the center of the room. I crossed my legs.
“What homework do you have to do?” she asked.
“Reading.”
“About what?”
“The ancient Greeks.”
“What about them?”
“Stuff. Some philosophy stuff. How they saw time.”
“How’d they see time?” Kate rearranged the pillows. She pulled the blankets over her shoulders and then she closed her eyes.
“Well, they saw it like, differently than how we perceive it. Sort of the other way around. You know, we face forward. That’s how we imagine it at least. We’re walking towards the future while walking away from the past.
“But the Greeks saw the future as something that came up from behind them. So it’s like they’re standing there facing the past and then the future grabs their shoulders and drags them into it backwards.
“Okay, I mean, think about being in a car. Think about being in a station wagon, okay? We’re in the front seat driving. We see our destination as the future, as where we’re going, what we’re headed to, the point, you know? We’re driving towards it and the Past is just receding away behind us, it hardly matters. Whereas if the Greeks were in the same car they’d be sitting in the trunk of the station wagon, they’d be looking out the back window. Watching what they’re moving away from as they’re being driven into the future. It’s interesting. Does that make sense?”
Kate nodded her head but kept her eyes shut.
“Peter,” she said and then she stayed quiet for a while. I just sat there, waiting.
“Do you ever miss us? Miss the people we were as kids? Together like that,” she smiled to herself but kept her eyes closed. So she understood the space then, too, I thought.
“I think I’m like the old Greeks,” she went on, “I think I’m always facing those kids playing.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Alright,” she said. “You can go downstairs now.”
I told her goodnight and then I got up. I went downstairs and rolled a big joint at the kitchen table. Put on my coat and went out to the front stoop. I watched the night and tried not to think about a thing but like I said, for me that’s pretty much next to impossible.

I never actually went upstairs when Kate slept in my bed for those two nights. I ended up sleeping on an old chair in the main room. I would get stoned after she went to bed. I thought I had AIDS then. And if I didn’t have AIDS I figured I must have something else. That was one reason why I never went to bed with her. What if there was something sick inside of me? What if I got into bed and she reached for me? What then? I didn’t want to infect her. In a way I wished she had never visited me in the first place. It was too late. I missed Kate. The whole time she visited me I was missing her.
She was there but she wasn’t and I wished I didn’t have to know that. I wished I could blame our physical distance on the great space between us. But she was upstairs and I still couldn’t touch her. I was gone.
I am dead in large parts. I know that.
I love Kate. I do. And now I just need her to stay far, far away from me.

The next morning we climbed a mountain and I gave Kate a wool hat to wear because she didn’t have one. I packed a backpack with water and sandwiches. I had climbed the mountain plenty in the summer and fall but I had never gone up in the dead of winter like this. I didn’t think it would be that difficult but like I told her I thought it would be worth the view.
Kate didn’t seem too concerned. She asked how long I thought it would take to reach the top. I told her maybe three hours. Truth is I had no idea.
I remember she started up before me and I followed her. I found a good walking stick early on. I could have moved faster but I wanted to stay behind Kate. In case she fell. In case something happened. I wanted to be able to see her.

Kate wrote me this email last summer. It was right after she graduated high school. I was in Guatemala. I was in this dingy internet shop. A little cement hole in the wall with two beige computers set on a weak, blue card table. The computer screen pulsated and it was making me sick. The shop sold bottles of warm coke in the front and there was a fat little boy running in some sugar-induced circle. There was an old man with a freckle in his eye and long stringy hair chain smoking in the corner. It looked like he had been planted in that spot for decades. For generations. I thought he and the boy were the same. There was a circle to life that was easier for me to see there, in that poor, dusty town somewhere east of Guatemala City.
In Kate’s email she told me that she was going to live at my mom’s house because her parents were moving to West Virginia. She said she didn’t want to go down with them. Said there was no point since she was just going to college that fall. She asked me what exactly I was doing in Guatemala. There was no easy answer for that, I thought. She asked if I thought it was weird that she was going to live with my mom, she reminded me again why it was practical. She was trying to be brave. Kate was always trying to be so brave.
Then she wrote the last part. I imagined how she must have written it. Quickly. Like ripping off a band-aid. Quickly. Squeezing her eyes shut right after she pressed send. She wrote, Peter, without you I don’t know who I am.
And that was how she ended the email.
I remember I never responded. I thought about it but what was there to say? A couple weeks later I went to reread it, I was in Mexico searching for the town where Neil Cassidy died. I looked through my email and it was just gone. My email box only holds so many emails and if you don’t save them they eventually expire. Disappear.
Where did it go? I was surprised how badly I felt when I realized it was gone. I imagined emails go to the same place where dreams go. My dreams can be so vivid. Horrifyingly vivid. I will dream I have love, I mean I will really feel that love. Completely. And when I wake up alone I wonder if it counted.
Where did Kate’s email go? The one where she said she needed me in order to be herself. In what space in this world do these things collect? Where did the love my father hold towards my mother go? If nobody deliberately threw it away where did it go? Where was Kate’s email? We lose things every day. What I want to know is where they are right now, as in this second. And are they still alive? And do they still count?
That was the same night I had sex with a male prostitute in an alleyway. I didn’t know he was a prostitute until he asked me for the money afterwards. When I started to walk away he came at me with this small, stupid pocketknife and I laughed at him. I told him to go ahead, stab me. He just stood there looking at me waving his knife back and forth like a fly swatter. Then I gave him the money. Threw a crumple wad of pesos at him. When I told that to Kate she cried. We were at a diner. It was late. I kept eating my pancakes and she just cried, her head hanging low over a cup of coffee.

When Kate and I reached the top of the mountain everything was white and black. It was wide and it was open and it was free. Kate and I hardly had said a word to one another on the way up. She stood there, standing on a boulder covered in a foot of snow, looking out at that great distance before us. She held her arms around herself. I stood behind her and I watched her. The mountain rolled down into hills that spread out and settled into fields. Everything was under the snow. The bare trees looked like fractures running up and down the landscape. Like slits in the universe. I imagined that if you wanted to you could just step into one of those black cracks and find yourself somewhere else.
I imagined running then. Just running straightforward. Running pass Kate and running pass the trees. Running over the boulder and just jumping off the side. Just jumping into the white and black and falling into it completely. I pictured myself as a buffalo. I imagined that someone had herded me to this point. And now they were about to run me off the edge. Even though I knew. Even though this was my land and I knew where I was running to. But I didn’t care. I didn’t care.
Kate stood in the center of it all. Kate, Kate, Kate, pure and good.
Black and white and cold and snow. And Kate.
I stepped back. I kept walking backwards and with each step Kate became smaller and smaller. I turned around and walked a distance away from her. Then I turned back and there she was. Still. Looking off at that great distance. Her body against the white mountain, the white sky and all those black cracks. She was dressed in light blue and her red scarf was swimming. Rippling up and down in the wind. I watched her dash of red waving, continuingly waving at me. I watched it and I started to step back again. Slowly at first and then quickly. I stepped back further and further until I couldn’t see Kate at all.
I spread out my arms wide and I let myself fall back. The snow had started to come down lightly. My back hit the ground and the pain echoed through my body quickly and then that was that. I opened my mouth and the snow came in. It filled up my mouth.
When Kate left the next day, when I drove her to the airport the last thing I said, when she was looking up at me with her long hair, I cupped my hands on her face, my fingers were touching her hair. I said, “Kate,” and she was waiting for it. I said, “Kate, go on.”
She smiled and then she did. She turned and walked on. I just stood there and she kept walking. I watched her backpack, the bottoms of her shoes come up, her scarf. Then she turned the corner. And she was just gone.

It’s not all bad, the things I see. Right now I’m sitting out on the front stoop smoking a cigarette and watching the night and suddenly I see yellow.
I’m not wearing any shoes and I’m fifteen and I’m telling Kate, I’m saying, “This is perfect, I can’t even see you!” And she’s right there in the center of that gutted out yellow bush hollering, “You sure? I’m waving my hands, can you see me wave my hands?”
“No! You can’t see past the flowers. I can’t see a thing.”
I crawl in and we’re both just sitting together in our secret space. That big azalea bush next to the garage, behind the Albertson’s house. And we talk. We talk and we talk and everything is exactly as it should be. I know that.
The bottoms of her feet are black. We’re in Kate’s kitchen and her mom laughs. Says, “Why don’t you kids ever wear your shoes?”
“We’re making our soles tough,” Kate goes, waves her off.
“Making them tough for what?” her mom says back.
See, now I’m starting to think that maybe we did suspect something was about to happen. And maybe what we were doing was actually preparing for it. Why else did we think we needed that secret space so badly? I think it was all in preparation. I think, somehow, we sensed what was looming ahead.
I see Kate sitting cross-legged inside our yellow secret space. I see Kate and her hair is long and wet and clean. I try to touch her. She doesn’t even realize it. She has no idea. How much I love her. I try to reach out my hands. I want to touch her. I try to reach out my hands.
I love her. I love her. Can’t you see that? Can anyone anywhere understand? Does any of this count?
But now she’s gone and its still night and I am alone in nowhere Maine. It’s cold and all that’s in front of me is my breath. I hear the landlord’s pick-up before I see his lights. Then I see the lights cut through the white pines and I know he’s coming back.
I can’t see Kate anymore but I’m thinking about her still. I’m thinking about what we could have known and what we never said. And I know there was one thing, only one thing that I am sure neither of us had anticipated and that was the fence. When the Albertsons tore out all the bushes and the fence was put up well that, that was truly a surprise.
The landlord kills the engine. He is hacking when he opens the door. He spits and turns back, reaches into the passenger seat for something. He is digging through glass bottles. I hear them clinking.
And I see the old fence now, white and peeling, dividing two overgrown lawns. The wind comes through. I see the high grass blowing. A cold tin trash can. Big black round bags piled up. A broken garage window. A fallen oak tree branch mushy with mold. And I see that Kate and I are gone. And I have to wonder, I can’t stop thinking, I cannot stop thinking and I can’t sleep, please. Can you understand this? Can you understand me? Why I need a fucking ounce of sleep? I cannot stop thinking and what I’m wondering now is, what I have to wonder is where, I mean exactly where did Kate and I go?
I need this to stop. I can’t. I need sleep. Please.
The landlord has a big, clear bottle in one hand and he takes a long swig. He slams the car door with his elbow. Ambles up the way. Throws the bottle in the woods, it shatters against a tree. “Boy!” he calls out. He’s wearing a bright orange hunting cap. “Where’s the party tonight, you tell me. Hey, boy! Where’re you at?”
And I know, I know, this is not good.
“There you are,” he says standing above me.
I am trying to be so brave. Can’t you see that? Can anyone anywhere understand? I am trying to be so brave.

Tangerines & Cigarettes

You know. Things happen. When I was nineteen I was in Galicia, the hard coastal northern tip of Spain over Portugal. Rocks claw out of the sea—the sea claws back at the rocks. I remember the senoras with their tight silver buns and blue kerchiefs, baskets in their arms—and the bread. They walked in flocks buzzing from the market. Their breasts lapped over their bellies and the tops of their hands were lined with veins that looked like tree roots, looked like if they finger the soil they will be swallowed down, digested, and then they will come out again and bloom into a row of soft smooth lovely girls.

I don’t exactly feel like telling a story just now. I feel like poking at the beautiful parts. Are they still alive some place? I am taking an Archiving class. I wonder if I print this story out and stick it into a filing cabinet will it stay alive? If the potential to be found remains—does it continue to count? You know. These stories are my marrow.

It was July in Galicia when I was reading For Whom the Bell Tolls for the first time. I took acid in the main plaza with Karen. Sitting on the ground leaning against the big pillar—I could feel the stones coolness on my bottom through my skirt. I kept itching at my bare knee. We drank tea from a thermos and watched the pilgrims. Streams of them with the seashells around their necks. Dirty, their shoulders raw and burnt. How far had they come? It varied, Karen said—she was examining a pebble, twisting it in her hand. Holding it up to the sun and squinting. As far as Bhutan.

Bhutan. All of the doors felt unlocked when I was nineteen. And Karen was in love with me. And on acid I was in love with her, too.

Years later, in a rural village in Thailand Bootsaba told me how her husband fell onto her when he was dying. It was in the middle of the night and he was going to the bathroom over and over again.
—We both knew he was dying. I knew and I did not know.
She could feel Dying in the bedroom. Could feel Dying packing it’s things into a suitcase.
“I will be ready in five minutes,” it might have said.
—But we would not say it out loud. We believed in words so much! If we did not say the word maybe it would get bored and shoo away.
He would go to the bathroom and then to bed. He was scheduled to check into the hospital early the next morning. Dying in a hospital? Can you imagine anything more awful? Staring at that beige speckled ceiling. Your last earthly sight.
We shuddered. I feathered my left hand. I shuddered again. No, I cannot. Imagine anything as awful.
—We knew. We must have known.
Now Dying pressed the last shirt into the suitcase—a red blouse with a ruffled collar. Smoothed it over and thought, am I forgetting anything? Talcum powder.
—If I had found him on the floor, between the bedroom and the bathroom. I would have never been able to go on. He knew that. My heart would have died.
Bootsaba had fallen asleep, she supposes, is surprised, but must have, and then she woke to his warm body falling onto her, falling into her with a heave or a sigh or a moan or a relief—You are the safest place on earth, he might have thought.
And Bootsaba cried out, “My love, my love, my love!” And she took him into her warm, safe, beating chest.
The suitcase snapped shut. Both locks clicked. Dying straightened its back. Evened it’s shoulder pads.
He fell into Bootsaba and then he fell through her and then cool, cold, colder.
Shaking him now, crying. Screaming. Crying. But before he became cold she was not frantic. She held him and loved him for that moment. For that minute or hour or season. It doesn’t matter. That time, from when he secured himself into her chest to when he died, it wasn’t neat time. Was not measurable rather, was more like the space of daylight filling a room.
—I was brave, Bootsaba says. Smiles. Ticks her head to the side and leaves it there. First her eyes are away but then they come back and refocus on the temple facing the West.

This is the story she tells me in a peeling blue classroom that only has three walls. The sun parades in. There is no wind this month. The temple is on top a hill with 506 stairs leading up to it. We watch it from the classroom. The monks are robed in orange ascending the stairs. Their balled brown heads buoying lightly and in unison. In the blue room Bootsaba and I are sitting by a fan and drinking water and eating wedges of tangerines. There are two stray dogs sleeping in the corner. I look out towards the monks and then back at Bootsaba’s old lovely mapped face—lines running in every direction. Her life’s evidence. Her proof. She breaks my heart, chiseling it away with a very small hammer. There are tangerine peals all over. They smell divine.

Karen and I were going to get matching tattoos so that later in life, when we had left Galicia and had moved on to different places and people and times we would have evidence that one another existed. That we were important to each other. That we were not alone.
—It would be hopeful, she said.
I propped myself on my elbows. We were lying in the grass on the hill that looked over the cathedral. The pilgrims flowed in and out like water. The sun was going down and the light was a warm autumn red. I peered out at it all.
Where was I? Where had I begun?
If we exist in memory does it count?
We never got the tattoos. She burnt my left forearm with a cigarette though. Under a Ferris wheel. There was a traveling carnival. We had befriended a pilgrim, Jordan, from Johannesburg. He stuck around for a while. The three of us would buy wine and bread from the store and drink it on that hilltop in the evenings. Jordan and I kissed once. He pushed me against that cathedral and kissed me suddenly and for a while, I remember. Two years later his car was stolen and he was shot in the face in the afternoon. I saw it on International CNN, the only English station that came into Antonia’s apartment in Barcelona. I was standing up when I saw the clip, holding a pile of textbooks. First they flashed his picture and then they said his name and I knew.

I was asking for it and Karen was exasperated.
—Fine. Fine!
It was nighttime and the glow of the colored Ferris wheel lights fell down on us like dots. Jordan flinched, then laughed.
—I cannot believe, he began. Then instinctively he gritted his teeth, showed his gums. The red cherry went out on my forearm, sizzling. I gasped in a shot of air.
Then I was left with black, a circle of ash haloing around a bubbling blister.
—Happy?
She tossed the cigarette butt on the ground.
—Now we will remember it forever!
I clapped. I was drunk. I looked at Jordan and gave him a prideful smile. I felt like I had won something, that I had just proven correct on a difficult test question.
Now this will always count.

Six years later I am rubbing the dot of scar tissue. Now. Today. In my bedroom in Manhattan’s lower east side. The sound of the street is pelting in through the window like stones. It is my birthday. What do I have to prove it? That I have completed all of these years—that my life has existed? I don’t even own a bed frame or a kitchen appliance. I don’t know. I was once burned under a Ferris wheel in Spain. I am rubbing it. I have proof. I have that.