Lily: Sequence 1

When I first came to this city I saw a land of sparkling lights twisting up into the heavens. It was a thousand towers of Babel, a city of Babel, a city of decadence and filth, of sex and violence, a city of the wicked and the hypocritical, a city where sin was expected and even encouraged. Beauty was etched into the city’s every deformity.
         I was in Babylon, and it was there I found the famed whore. Or rather, she found me.
         I had come to make a name for myself, to feast at the table of Bohemia. Bohemia and Babylon, you see, turned out to be one and the same, as the anarchy I craved turned out to be a byword for a bondage like no other.
         This city was grander than I had thought, impossibly vast. I came there alone, with little luggage. I had left behind my brothers; in the days that had followed after my mother’s death, I had left my old life behind. I was no longer Emerson, the in-between child, stuck in the middle between the handsome brother and the cute brother.
         The neighbors had always said about Morrison, “He knows what’s what, he’ll keep this family together, keep the other two on the straight and narrow.” About George, they pitied him, understood that he felt the loss of our mother most keenly.  But they never knew what to say about me
         I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t have known what to say to myself either.
         I was a blank canvas, an empty stretch of material. I wanted to be something. I wanted to be a painting, I wanted to be rags, I wanted to be something more than canvas stretched on bars, waiting to be painted…I wanted to be more than wool upon the loom, waiting to be woven.
         I had come to the city to become something, or someone, or a man on my own.
         I found an apartment. It was one room and that was all. With walls with the periwinkle paint peeling away. With narrow windows, the panes cobwebbed with cracks. It smelled mildewy, and a rusty sink was attached to the wall; water dripped dully from the pipes beneath it, plinking rhythmically to the ground. A cot was against the wall, an old cot with a stained mattress on top of it. It was the shittiest-looking place I’d ever seen.
         I loved it. I spread my sleeping bag across the mattress, put my backpack and duffel bag under the bed, and relished in the gloriousness of the surrounding squalor.
         I slept in my clothes that night, wrapped in my sleeping bag, listening to car alarms wailing, people screaming in tongues I never knew existed, and mysterious thumps on the opposite side of the thin walls around me.
         Then the train passed by, roaring all the way.
         This was the wildlife of the city, the new nightlife. I had come here to lead a wild life, to cloak my life with the dark glamour of night.
         I had come to Babylon at last.

         I had not been in the city long, before I met Crackwhore Lily. When I first met Lily, she was sitting on her fire escape, twisting up a joint, her invisible eyebrows drawn together, as she tried to wrap a wad of weed into a small scrap of paper.
         I was looking out my window into the night, surveying the city which I had been trying to better acquaint myself with during the past month or two. Lily looked up from her joint, and took a Zippo from her pocket.
         The night crashed its noises around us, but I was enraptured by the small girl with the joint in her hand. When she lit it, and the weird sweet smell filled the air, we both smiled, and then the ice was broken.
         “I’m Lily,” she said, in a voice that was oddly rough for a young girl. Her accent was twisted into her words, the accent that sounded exotic to me. Mixed in with the thick aroma of marijuana, it made me feel as if I were in some exotic world of spices and mysterious women.
         Lily was very white. Her hair was white blond, and her skin was impossibly pale, but unlike many very white girls, there was no pinkish tone to it. It was chalky white. Her eyes were pale blue, with no visible lashes, under eyebrows that were also invisible. Her mouth was small, what they call a rosebud mouth, small, pink, and sickly sweet. She breathed out sweet smoke from those sweet lips.
         She couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen, two or three years my junior. Her body was painfully thin, skinny arms that stuck out of the sleeves of a ragged T-shirt, and skinny legs lost in worn jeans. Her little feet were bare and childlike, with black polish chipping off the toenails.
         She almost could’ve fit in at a trailer park. But somehow, she exhuded a glamour that grounded her into this city.
         “Lily’s a sweet name,” I said to her.
         She snorted and got to her feet. “I’m not some delicate flower. At school they used to call me Crackwhore Lily.” She held the joint out over the space between us, grinning crookedly. “That’s more like me.”
         I accepted the twist of paper and weed, and brought it to my lips. “I’m Emerson,” I said, and I fell deeply into Bacchanalian abandon.
         Which is, of course, similar in many ways to what we call love.

         The thing about Crackwhore Lily was that she was a bit like George. Sweet. Almost disarmingly innocent and pure.
         Unless of course you knew anything about them.
         Lily was seventeen years old and the daughter of this woman named Ivy, who worked at a bar. Lily had had an older brother; his name was Bracken, but by the time I came around, he was almost dead anyway.
         “Brack’s got…that thing…AIDS,” Lily said slowly, twisting open a bottle of black nail polish.
         I nodded, uninterested, a joint in my hand.
         “Brack’s got this girlfriend.” She rolled her eyes. “Her name’s Jasmine. Like what the hell? Is she a Disney princess or what? Y’know?”
         “Uh-huh.”
         Lily loved Bracken more than she loved anyone. She told me how Bracken had dropped out of school at sixteen, and had mostly occupied himself with buying, selling, and doing drugs. By seventeen, he was in rehab, thanks to a certain neighbor who cared more than everyone else did.
         “This was back when we lived on the east side,” Lily added. “Not quite as shitty over there, as it is here.”
         In rehab, Bracken met Jasmine. She was a volunteer, and Bracken fell for her.
         “Don’t know why,” Lily said, with a frown. “She’s not even that pretty. And she’s really up-tight, y’know. Damn hoity-toity bitch.”
         Jasmine was a good girl. Once he was clean, Bracken was on a mission: to prove himself worthy for Jasmine. He started attending church. Then he changed. He was a new man. Church became less about getting Jasmine than finding meaning in his life. He was a Christian, to Ivy’s amusement and Lily’s shock.
         “I mean, Bracken was the most scummy guy around,” she said, dragging the polish brush over her toenails. “Nobody thought it was even real.”
         But it proved real.
         Bracken went to church every week—sometimes even twice!—and he and Jasmine were an item. Bracken started working at the used car dealership Jasmine’s dad owned, and eventually got an apartment close to Jasmine’s family house.
         “But they didn’t even move in together,” said Lily. “I thought they would, but they didn’t.”
         Bracken was a new man, with a new life, a life Lily could not understand. He tried to convince Lily to go back to school (Lily was fifteen and had just dropped out), tried to persuade Ivy to find a better job, tried to tell Ivy that she wasn’t setting a very good example for Lily. When he told Ivy she should let Lily live with him, Ivy had had enough.
         Ivy moved to the building where she and Lily lived now, and told Bracken to keep his opinions to himself. Lily, though she loved Bracken more than her inattentive mother, didn’t want to live with him. Bracken had betrayed her, had left the life they had always had, and had become part of Jasmine’s life. Lily had always wanted to be like Bracken, but he had become someone she did not know.
         For two years, Lily and Ivy avoided Bracken, and after some time, he returned the favor. But now, Bracken was dying.
         Jasmine had been the one to tell them. Apparently Bracken wanted to see Lily, and Jasmine, determined to please Bracken, was constantly pestering Lily to go see him.
         But Lily was scared, and never visited. Her brother had become the unknown, someone who she feared would look down on her. She was already Crackwhore Lily by this point, and any semblance of innocence or purity was just that—a semblance and nothing more.
         Lily loved him even more than she loved me.
         The night Bracken died comes to me in pieces. Some of it blurry, some of it painfully clear.
         I remember coming into Lily’s apartment. Ivy was out. I remember Lily was flying high, was drunk. I was scared, so scared I drank just to numb my fears, as Lily numbed her pain.
         “I loved him more than anyone!” Lily shrieked, her brown eyes wide and wild.
         Her skin was cold as I held her, and I tried to warm her against my own skin. She melted into me, but for the first time, I went through the motions of loving Lily mechanically, because my mind was on my own brothers. I had put them behind me, but still I loved them with a passion that burned fierce. If I lost them, where would I be?
         How I had always hated being defined by my birth order, by Morrison, by George! But it was inescapable. More than that—it was essential, it was natural, it was human. If Morrison, or George, or by some sad twist of fate, both of them, were gone from this world, were dead—Who would I be? Just Emerson, without parents, without brothers, without family—I would be a single planet spinning in the same lonesome orbit. Who was I if not Morrison’s younger brother, or George’s big brother?
         I had left home with the intent of leaving my family ties behind, without realizing that those ties I so hated were not external, but internal. I could never disconnect myself from my family entirely. Everywhere I went, I carried Daddy, Mama, Morrison, and George with me. In my blood, my heart, my mind, and my skin.
         I woke in the night, my head aching, my mouth papery, with Lily’s skinny limbs twisted around me as she slept, breathing raggedly.
         Lily was a single planet, spinning in her lonesome orbit…Slowing down, slowing down.
         But I was going faster, my life was still starting—I was only twenty years old.
         But Lily was eighteen, and her life was coming to a close.
         Slowing down, slowing down…to a standstill.