The Oxford Suite

Five Friends (2012)

         “So where would you bury him?”
         “Same place Sylvester hides my socks. Nobody'd find him!”
         Everybody laughed pretty convincingly, partly because even though she wasn't that funny or interesting they knew she was that kind of desperate friend who would always show up if you were trying to get something together and though she was a little irritating everyone could admit to having been halfway grateful, on some occasion, for being a little less than alone while finishing up their drink after everyone else had left the bar and she would listen attentively while they sort of spilled over the side the way you do when you're almost falling asleep with your lips still moving, mumbling about how they were never going to get married because they were still in love with their best friend or whatever, and she would nod quietly and they would wonder if she really got it but they wouldn't care, and everyone loved Becka just a little bit for that despite everything she had going against her. They also laughed because it was late and the night was loose and they really wanted to laugh.
         “I'd bury him in that little copse by the bayou where we used to go dicking around with Jackson back in fifth grade. Under the overpass where you've got some noise cover, and that spooky orange light to work by.” Cray was sprawled against the crushed arm of the sofa pinned under Mattie, who was tangled in her own hair like a fish in a net.
         “The orange lights,” she murmured, twisting a little further into his stomach. “Burning bright above like a flyehh hauhuhhhhh,” she yawned.
         “A what?” Becka grinned.
         “Saucer,” she said after some cute, unnecessary tongue smacking to emphasize the yawn.
         “Not there anymore.” Richard. Or, Dick.
         “Huh?”
         “They put a jogging trail through. No tree within twenty feet of the bayou.” He was running his finger around the inside of the lip of his bottle. His eyes were red.
         “Fuck.” Cray gazed at the grain of a wood panel trying to picture the absence of trees, which upon reflection was silly like 'one-hand-clapping' or some other pocket koan.
         “There's a gravel trail with dark green guardrails where the bend is, you know with the concrete slope into the little, the damn...”
         “Tributary,” Cray said.
         “Isn't a fucking 'tributary' it's a bayou not the god damn Amazon. Alright, the tributary, and there's the concrete slopes and there's a rail over that now so these people with their douchespeedo horrendously colorblind “Hi. Tech. Cardio. Gear.” and their iPods tucked in those thirty dollar sweatproof holsters, yeah those people don't fall in and break their cross-effete necks. And running down from the trail to the bayou there's these interlocking bricks in an ugly grid. Just all over the damn place.”
         “Wh--”
         “Prevent soil erosion I think.”
         “Oh.” Becka looked at her hands. She'd never seen this bayou.
         “And no, I don't know what happened to Jack.” He got up, wiped his nose on his wrist and went to the bathroom. Everyone else was silent for a minute.
         “Well,” Cray started. “The silos maybe.”
         “Yeah, that'd be a great spot! And there's just piles and piles of dirt and sand.” Becka knew the silos and she was clearly happy about this. “The hobos would probably help for a buck.”
         Mattie scratched her ear. “Or assault you and take the shovel to pawn.”
         “I think they'd just want to be left alone.” Cray reconsidered his submission. “Dunno if they'd make trouble over someone burying a body in their backyard. I wouldn't appreciate it but then I don't have hobo priorities.”
         Then Mattie said, “For one thing you don't have a backyard.” With the careless brevity and careful timing characteristic of a self-conscious witticism. It wasn't a side-splitter but if one does not count one's tiny victories then what has one left to count?
         She laughed triumphantly with Becky and Cray, a laugh that accelerated with the weight of a little pathos as each of them discovered and contemplated the strange juxtaposition of industrial squatting and apartment life, wildly disparate urban property values, and the sort of Grapes-of-Wrathsy (because that was the only adjective that Mattie had for this kind of thing and she wasn't certain what that implied about Chicago and about her and about the year two-thousand-twelve and maybe the analogy wasn't perfect but what do you call it when you pour water in a glass and it doesn't level out it just stands there in a column like it's frozen? There's something viscous [is that the word?] about this city, she thought. It's uncertain whether a similar thought went through Cray's or Becka's [unlikely] head but the timbre of the laughter suggested some kind of accord insofar as such an accord can ever be externalized and confirmed [which is not a question that concerned any of the people present] [probably]) absurdity of some lowish-income college grads with sensibilities inherited during a bygone boom and since debunked but not discarded joking about the great dilapidated empires of the most miserably free of their fellow citizens who were not even citizens for most legal purposes and the joke brought to mind the question of the significance of land ownership and rent and debt in contemporary society which they were not equipped to deal with and by the time Dick came back in the room the laugh had gotten kind of weird and chuckly.
         He sort of smirked as he sat down, possibly for genetic reasons if laughing is indeed “infectious” in the way yawning is or possibly owing to a lifetime of classical conditioning i.e. to the frequent association of funny things with the presence of laughing people reinforced by the laughtracks on sitcoms and the general expectation of polite laughter to signify a lack of hostility (see above) or possibly because of a fairly common and understandable automatic desire to be doing whatever other people are doing especially if that something is perceived as a shared communal experience with salubrious effects on social cohesion and solidarity and one is struck by a subconscious terror of being left out and subsequently abandoned in a time of strife down the road. So he was either laughing confusedly or jealously or anxiously or some mix of these. But in any event Richard “Dick” Richard was almost certainly not experiencing the same particular blend of late-night introspections likely shared amongst Cray, Becka and Mattie.
         For that matter the latter three had mostly forgotten Dick's outburst about the jogging path earlier which he had been thinking about in the bathroom so they were not missing Jackson as much as he was just then.
         “Well alright,” said Dick, attempting to reintroduce himself to the conversation by regaining control, “if I had accidentally hilariously poisoned Bill Murray in an unlikely blowfish-carving scenario--”
         “Puffer fish.”
         “Same thing.”
         “Or drunkenly ran him over in a speedy golf cart--”
         And the iron was hot all over again.
         “Or hurled a mean discus out of the arena and Bopped! him on the head--”
         “(Perfect Greek testicles all dangling)”
         “Bill's? Dick's?”
         “Well I figure for the purposes of this loosely allusive scenario everyone is Greek and evenly tanned.”
         “I'll accept that.”
         “Or- or told him a heartbreaking story about a retarded boy and his ageing dog!”
         “Literally heartbreaking!”
         “Nonsense. Bill Murray Cries For No One.”
         “Or forgot to fill his food bowl before going on vacation--”
         “Right. If one way or another I had a dead Murray on my hands I would--”
         “(Or two dead Murrays)”
         “One Murray at a time, Mattie. Anyway I'd just put him in a big cardboard box marked OTHER MEATS and stick him in the back of the freezer at Jewel Osco.”
         Cray was already practically dying.
         “I mean,” he breathed, “I- I mean when you're sent in there to fetch something particular it's damned well not going to be anything called OTHER MEATS, uh, uhther meats....” he repeated this phrase a couple more times, struggling to spit out something coherent amid the paralysing cachinnation, “a-hand, and you're not paid enough to care about the big box of the stuff in back where it's coldest anyway. Won't start to smell for a few months and by then you're more than likely already fired and about to get fired somewhere else on the other side of town.”
         The chuckles reverberated, weaker this time.
         “So some unlucky fuck is just gonna have to take the whole box and chuck it in the dumpster. Maybe a pair of them stoned off their asses at one in the morning, zombie shift. Suppose they even open it, maybe they 'kidnap' the dead comedian and try to sell him on eBay, maybe they try to report it and they're arrested for something-or-other because who the fuck finds a dead celebrity in the freezer of a grocery store? Maybe they just dump him anyway and keep the story. One of those crazy drug stories nobody believes and maybe even they begin to forget to believe it and it just becomes another offcolour urban legend and five years down the line you're at a concert, a guy passes you a spliff and tells you he knows a guy who knew some kids who put Bill Murray in the microwave thinking he was a bag of popcorn. Or another time somebody asks 'hey, whatever happened to Bill Murray?' and you say 'yeah, and when was the last time Sean Connery made a movie?' And you both laugh over retired people who may or may not but might as well be dead.”
         For just a moment Becka uneasily wondered if it could maybe vaguely be possible that something like this actually--- no, Wes Anderson wouldn't know what to do with himself if Bill disappeared. But come to think of it who knows what Sean Connery is doing these days? She decided she'd Google him when she got home to make sure he was-- well no surely somebody would have posted something on Facebook. No that's ridiculous everybody would know if he... but what if it was somebody else...
         Cray stared down at Mattie while Richard rambled on, meditating on her nose and wondering how soon he would find out when she died or if she'd find out when he died. If tomorrow then tomorrow obviously but twenty, thirty, hell five years from now if and probably when they weren't a 'thing' any more (a bizarre expression. And will 'it' become the new gender-neutral pronoun?) would they still be in touch? Would an automated system keep them apprised of each other's major events? If he wasn't logged on at the hour of her death would he miss it in his news feed? Or if she'd unfriended him or he her in a fit of whatever years earlier and nobody had bothered to reconnect would it be impossible to even find that information again? Were he and Jackson still friends on Facebook? He couldn't remember.
         It's uncertain what Mattie was thinking about but her smile also shrank and dissipated as Richard continued his soliloquy. She dug one fingernail under another and tried futilely to get out that thin layer of dirt that nobody could see anyway because her nails were painted lavender. But it, or something, bothered her.
         Then she asked, “Dick, why did you drop out?”
         She sat up and leaned forward with her elbows on her knees. Cray pretended to readjust himself more comfortably and looked half-keenly at Dick, though he was miffed that there was suddenly no woman in his lap. Becka was quietly excited.
         “I got tired.” Quick and aggressive.
         But then he looked down at the rug with his mouth a little open, a slight intake of breath which he held loosely, the way he does when he's gathering his thoughts.
         “I wanted to pay to be around people who wanted to pay to be around me.” He winced. “What does that mean. Um. I wanted to be surrounded by sacrifice. Gratitude. A little fear. Just something living. A little fire. People afraid of debt, afraid of obscurity, afraid of the towns they came from. Fire under their feet. Because Fort Worth...
         “My neighbor, I had this neighbor Mister Kirkwood, this guy always grilling in the front yard. Every single day I got home from school and he was grilling something- mostly expensive cuts of beef or pork. He'd scowl at me when I got off the bus and glanced at him. I think he had two daughters but I never saw him playing with them. I don't think I ever saw him even talk to them, or to his wife. I only remember him grilling and sipping shitty beer, sometimes wearing this black “Birth of the Cool” t-shirt. Which was strange in itself because, you know, Fort Worth. Garth Brooks territory. But he would grill up piles of meat slathered in these succulent marinades. Some neighborhoods there's that one mom bakes apple pies and leaves them on the windowsill to cool, kids try to steal it. 'Cept I don't think that ever really happens. But this guy was for real and he cooked delicious-smelling steaks, ribs. I never tasted one but he was some kind of grilling wiz I swear. I don't know what he was doing there and I'll bet you he didn't know what he was doing there and he was clearly angry all the time and if he could hide inside a nutshell with a grill and his Davis cds and a case of beer I think he'd set the city of fire to do it.”
         Speaking of which Dick grabbed another beer and twisted off the cap with the inside of his shirt. “I don't want to live in a Fort Worth, any fort, any worth.
         “But then there were these kids in Dallas.” He swigged about half the bottle before continuing. Cray was getting uncomfortable but the two women were intent.
         “Hipsters, free-gans, crest punks, self-styled bohemians, I don't know what you call them. But there's a lot of kids digging in dumpsters eating cast-off donuts and sandwiches because it's hip. Drug addicts too. Disowned gay kids. After a point it doesn't matter if they identify with a counter-culture because they're literally fighting over scraps and there's no culture left, just desperation.”
         He leaned forward grasping the neck of the bottle in both hands, twisting with both hands, arms resting on his thighs, twisting, staring.
         “I was afraid of them too but I didn't know where to put it so I filed it away.”
         Thinking.
         “I thought that at U. of C. I'd be lifted above the muck. Like there's two sides: the people who struggle horizontally, like with humans about being human, about money and pride and the half-acre future, and the people who struggle vertically, who'll do anything to climb up and get a better view, who were born better than that and knowing that's enough.
         “But when I'd been at U. of C. for three years I realized that I was a lazy idiot and I was surrounded by privileged lazy idiots and I was getting good grades from lazy tenured idiots. Only that's not fair. Lazy's not the word and idiot's not the word. I'm decent, I think. I'm a sinner and I'm a decent one. We're decent. But we're scrambling. I've seen so many people with something smart inside of them but they don't have time to be smart or do smart because they're scrambling to get by and they're always afraid but fear isn't enough to get out. Crawl out of a hole in a honeycomb, fall into the next one. A little orb riddled with holes. Finite but unbounded.”
         Nobody really knew what to do with that so they all sank back in their chairs and breathed a bit. Then Mattie said softly “I wish you'd stayed” and Cray cracked his knuckles loudly and Becka offered to drive Dick home and after some long hugs and “don't worry we'll clean up” and “thanks for having us the pasta was great send me the recipe?” and “sure thing come around again anytime” and a whispered “Sorry about that. Get some sleep.” and various goodbyes Becka and Dick left and Cray wondered whether they'd end up screwing at her place or his. Mattie leaned her head on his chest and they stood there entwined by the front door.
         “Why do we still hang out with him?” she murmured. “I can barely look at him any more.”
         “He's usually pretty fun and he brings good beer. We just need to get better at wrapping things up before they get weird. What the fuck was that about, by the way?”
         “You heard him. He got tired. A lot of people burn out in their third year.”
         He squeezed her tight and whispered in her ear, “Well we made it, baby.”
         “Yeah, whatever.” She was suddenly bitter and that confused her. “B.A. in Liberal Arts. What's next, bartending school? Exciting horizons, honey.” She laughed angrily, weakly, but a little relieved that she could finally go to sleep. Cray laughed too thinking about his cousin, a Psychology grad who was currently 'sorting things out' as a barista in Albuquerque, and also wondering where he presently stood on the 'getting laid tonight' scale. And so they ascended the stair, arms around each other's waists, laughing about unrelated things.

Brand New (2012)

         His thighs clenched and unclenched slightly and his left hand jerked laterally at the wrist. A vibration began deep in his vocal chords, died and began and began again as his voice slid along the sides of his tongue repeatedly initiating an unresolved “lllrr, llr, luuhrrrr, ll-llluh...” His eyes opened and he paused, then squeezed them tight again, hips still moving but without the same animal electricity. He opened his eyes again and looked at the bright slim triangle of sky at the top of his window.
         His eyes widened and he rolled half his body off the bed as he searched and grabbed for his watch. He stared at the clockface for about four seconds and his shoulders slackened. It was about 11:38. He fumbled it around his wrist and threaded the metal tongue through the seventh notch, then laid back down and wrapped his arms around his pillow. He closed his eyes again but his breathing never lapsed back into a sedate rhythm and as he shuffled he winced and his fingers went to his left eye socket and temple. He got up on his feet and took a couple of steps towards the kitchen, stopped, waited, head weaving forward and back in a slight dizzy orbit, then proceeded lightly on the balls of his bare feet across the cold floor.
         After preparing a cup of coffee, microwaved water and a weak handful of beans loudly ground and steeped in a french press, he stood in his briefs by the window, sipped his cup, looked at the only poster in his apartment. John Goodman in a suit and a rage, charging down a burning hallway brandishing a shotgun. Big letters at top: I'LL SHOW YOU and beneath: THE LIFE OF THE MIND! Underneath lay a pile of bills, books, pamphlets, playbills, receipts concealing a desk. With his other hand he was carefully opening an aspirin bottle with just a thumb and index finger, steadied in his palm by three other fingers. Cap pinched between index and middle fingers he tilted the bottle back and tapped it against his teeth, one, two pills tumbling down his tongue and no more. He drained the last black dregs and clumsily replaced the cap on the bottle, the bottle on the windowsill, the cup in the sink.
         He set his laptop on the bed of papers and tapped his knees in overlapping 3/4 - 2/4 time, [both-pause-left-right-left-pause]-[both-pause-left-right-left-etc.] while the OS loaded and then the browser. The email, starred and saved, highlighted, waited. His wrist flickered with familiar acumen, and the email still said: “2:00. Bourgeois Pig.” He Googled “Bourg Pig” and reviewed the map for a moment. Three blocks east of the Fullerton stop. He closed the map and read the email again, lips twitching. He Googled “Bo____ [autofill]” again and double checked the directions. Going back to the email he opened the thread and read it all through again, seventeen notes back-and-forth, then “2:00. Bourgeois Pig. ;)” He read them with two fingers between his teeth, leaning in close to the screen. The clock said 12:01.
         He closed the laptop and leaned back far in the swivelly-bendy chair, stretching his arms at oblique angles like the hands of his watch. Then he got up, kicked and nearly tripped over a Beat Poets' anthology sprawled on the floor beside his bed. He picked up the thick poetry and tucked it back on the shelf between The Wise Blood and a glossy collection of Bauhaus chairs after removing the empty bottle of vermouth that held its place. He returned the bottle to its display alongside the other cornerstore glassware lining the top of his shelves and wardrobe and shambled to the bathroom. Stopping at his closet he pulled out a black button-up shirt with details embossed around the sleeves, fancyish, then sought a big-buckled belt and pair of untattered jeans. These all under arm he grabbed a pair of old cowboy boots with remaining hand and brought it all to the bed where he lay out the outfit, except the boots which after some reflection he threw back in the closet on his way to the bathroom.
         There was a little vomit left in the toilet bowl from that unfortunate bit last night so he flushed again and watched it spin away. Then he breathed on his hand and sniffed, promptly retrieved and prepared a toothbrush, and set to brushing while he settled back on the throne. He paused and glanced at the watch again, 12:07, again, 12:07, again and again, finally 12:08, then flushed, spat, rinsed, twisted off the faucet, stuck his hand in his underwear and once again sniffed it, removed said underwear and untwisted another faucet, stepped in the shower, leaving his watch by the sink.
         Applying the bar directly to his skin he rubbed soap all over every inch of his body and massaged it in with his fingers, slight pressure from his fingertips and slight pressure from the falling water squeezing the soap in and out of and off of him. He grabbed the bar again and meticulously attended to his groins and buttocks, careful to extinguish any smelliness. He reached for the shampoo bottle with the face of the grinning, slightly stubbly model, white sudsy foam tracing the outer curves of contrived enthusiasm, selected the dandruff shampoo instead, rubbed the chilly tingly stuff deep in his scalp, slight pressure, shimmering chemical sparks flickering around his brain, shed and eased away by the warm jets falling and faintly pressing and pushing the blue burning stuff down his neck, spine, to swirl around his feet and into the drain. After running a sweet white conditioner through his hair and treating his face to a similarly electric deep cleanser, he washed away all the product and with pruny fingers finally resolved the spigot.
         In front of the mirror he stood, silently dripping onto the mat. He leaned into the vanity and inspected his nares and cheeks for pimples, pushing aside his nostrils with his finger. He popped a small one tucked behind the left nostril and as he was about to tear at his cheek he tore his hand away and began, continued, finished rubbing his body pink and dry. He reapplyed the watch to his wrist, which read 12:51. Sniffing his armpits, then sniffing his armpits again, then wiping his armpits just once-over with a deodorant stick, then stepping out of the bathroom, then reversing step and retrieving the stick and rubbing a few more times, then sniffing and gagging slightly, then wiping gently at his armpits with the towel, sniffing again, finally satisfied, he left the bathroom.
         From the top drawer of the wardrobe he rummaged for underwear and pulled down one of the tighter pairs, that bunched and sort of hugged his package. He held it thinking for a minute, looking at the baggier pairs, stuck his hand in the back of the drawer and pulled out a condom which he slid into his wallet before pulling on the generously-framed briefs and a pair of long black socks.
         He put on the jeans and the belt worn and bent at the fourth notch, which he tugged a little and threaded at the fifth notch. Drawing the black shirt over his shoulders and starting from the second-to-top button he followed the sequence down to the belt, which he, muttering, unhooked, unbuttoned and unzipped the pants, tucked in the shirt and smoothed it evenly in back, refortified the hip situation down to the fourth notch this time, and walked back into the humid bathroom before the mirror. He stepped back and stood on his toes. He rolled up the sleeves, unbuttoned the second button. Then hastily he disjoined every button and yanked the shirt out of his pants, throwing it on the floor as he stomped back to the closet. He walked his fingers along the row of t-shirts and pulled out one from a Frank Turner concert two years ago. He also grabbed his favorite jacket, the brown leather bomber. He ditched the belt and returned to the mirror. He leaned against the wall with his thumbs hooked in the belt loops, then breathed a raspy red “hgaaaAA” and stripped down to his underwear again. Going back to his pants drawer he finally picked out a pair of synthetic black pants, technically women's pants from the thrift store that hugged his thighs and flared a little around his ankles. He matched them with a tight cream sweater that emphasized the modest V of his torso for all it was worth and a red scarf, threw open a window, shivered and confirmed the scarf, closed it and went for the black knee-length coat as well.
         At 1:04 he was sitting once again at his computer, 2:00, three blocks east, ;). 2:00. He opened the media player and was about to play some Vince Guaraldi when a chime directed him back to his Inbox. nUtero533: gtfo of my brain Of Montreal was terrible, just like last time. Janelle was okay though. I got kissed by some drunk bitch and I almost punched her. It was my first concert in, well... And it was weird going home alone smelling like other people's beer. You have my Converse. Are you still in town?
         He read it three times and finally exhaled. He checked the selection box and was about to delete it, paused, sent it to the spam bin instead. In the sidebar the little folder changed from Spam (208) to Spam (209). Another soon followed. (210). He opened the spam folder but it was just another Nigerian scam and his whole body went limp after he slammed down the screen.
         He looked at his watch again, 1:13. Swivelling around he sprang up and grabbed his phone, keys, wallet, glanced quickly down at the stained green Converse hightops under the bed, and glided to the door. He stopped, pulled his phone out of his pocket and scrolled through recent contacts. His finger hovered over the call button and he thrust his other hand in his pocket, jangling around his keys and some change. He leaned against the wall, breathed and called. He began pacing across his apartment listening to the dial tone. It rang and rang and went to voicemail and he waited just until the tone and with a nervous jolt he hung up. He breathed at the phone some more, thinking, then called again. Dial tone. Voicemail. “Hiiiiii Luce? This is, is Richard. Just calling to con... um-We're still on for two o'clock at the Booj, right? I'm on my *doorslam* I'm headin' out right now are you oh sh-- *click* whoops!... *slam* (forgot my uh) so I guess I'll see you there, you at Le Bourgeois Cochon haha... be there in forty-five. Can't wait. … see you soon … alright Bubbye.”

Sapphic Blues (2012)

         Always, always, always she would hasten at the shadow of my beckoning. The walls of the house, hard and languid like great cats, would slumber lightly with the promise of violence. My brain, connected by a splinter of a wire to the sky, would groan and vibrate. Then my eyes would screw up and bloom on stalks and slump back, pulsing in and out, winding and unwinding spools of telescopes. The silent air would shudder at two hundred and eleven degrees, so I'd desperately shovel globs of ice cream into my body to try to fight the simmering night and the verminous hum of the television but everything would continue to lean inward and those large invisible jaguars would flex and ripple and yawn. At last I would coil up into my phone tapping the words, “Rescue, rescue, o luv im nitemare help me busy?” and before the earth could twist any tighter the white blaze of her highbeams would wash over the parlor and I would tiptoe to her open car door. With my knees curled up in the leather seat I'd say to my charioteer “Step on it, Velma,” and she, smiling sleepily, would peel out, leaving our crackled snakeskins behind us.
         That was any night, any week. That was two years, I think, or three. It got better some times and I wouldn't need her so badly, or we'd drift away for a little while. The occasional intermises of boys were the interludes of our friendship; but inevitably I'd be lying on the couch again, patches of my heart tendons clenching and unclenching in haphazard coffee-and-whiskey-induced microconvulsions, dreading the flood of oneiromachy, and I would cry out and always she would come.
         She went away to Chicago to study contemporary visual art at SAIC and I occasionally dragged myself to community college on good days. There are weeks and months I can't remember. I felt like dust under a bed. I never called. But when she came back for the holidays we resumed the life we'd paused, or exhumed it really, dangling at the edges of our old haunts retelling stories.
         And the nights got bad again. And again she came in her mother's borrowed car with the windows rolled down and her elbow and wrist resting on the sill, shifting into park with the other hand, her knees guiding the wheels along the curb. One evening in late August I climbed in babbling about an hour's worth of Wikipedia factoids.
         With earnest urgency I blearily offered, “They used to think echidnas don't dream but recent studies show they go into REM sleep like everybody else.”
         She laughed metallically, precious gold bubbles blossoming from her mouth, and said “I didn't used to think anything about echidna dreams. What do they dream of?”
         “And platypuses dream like crazy,” I went on, “where are your cds?”
         “Oh, back here...” she dug around behind her seat with one hand while her other fingers splayed upon the wheel designed a line unerring down the highway.
         “I got it,” and with the binder unbound in my lap I shuffled around and found Automatic for the People, slid it out of the jacket and into the blue effulgent console. The familiar thin strings of the mandolin brought a smile to her face, then a deeper smile. She murmured, “Excellent. Echidnas. Rock n' roll,” and revved up and drove that highway ahead of us like a midnight cowgirl. “Where to go?”
         Delirious, intoxicated, exhausted, ecstatic, I leaned out the window and swam in a cosmological vision of amalgamated memory. Dozens and millions and billions of orange lights shown and wound down the road like luminous pearls on a string, wrapping across and over the horizon deep into the sleeping earth, sharing a light for the nervous children of the night lost in subterranean hallways, tiny hands clutching cellphones, purses, teddybears, switchblades, cigarettes, glasses of water, mothers' skirts, the rails of the embankments, hair and spittle hanging over the edge. The black extinctness of stars curved up the sides of the interior globe of space, a hollow sphere, indefinite, unbounded, resting and rubbing on the orb of the earth at exactly the point beneath our four wheels and four feet. We sat motionless as the surfaces of the earth and sky sped behind us. The car became the anchor and engine of the night, rolling the spheres of earth and sky together: we were the endless form of the interlocking teeth of two gears, every moment exchanging substance, perpetually reincarnating the interlocking tension of she + me at the center of two universes. I retreated into the car and rolled up the window, registering her expectant face.
         “Galveston,” I declared. “Every mile between here and Galveston.” She glanced askance and said the way she always says, “You're crazy. You're absolutely beautiful batshit.” But she took the I-45S exit and turned off the cd just before Nightswimming was about to come on, which made me sad because this was exactly one of those kind of nights.
         “So before you called I was just finishing up a piece on Rodin.”
         “What kind of piece? A painting?”
         “A sculpture, sort of.”
         “Is it a formal imitation?”
         “Not at all. Not even a sculpture. Not exactly textile either. It's stupid...”
         “No, tell me. Now I'm interested.”
         “Okay... long story for a long ride I guess. Robin, you remember when we went to the MET on the New York trip? And I took a picture of you posed by that statue of the guy with his hand over his face. Six guys. But you raised your arm and tucked your face in in the same exact pose and I took you two together. I never knew who made those statues but I really liked them and scrolling through some old old facebook photos reminded me again, a few months ago. And in Chicago, you know I'm at the Art Institute all the time these days, and they have a lovely ensemble of Rodin sculptures, part of their massive Impressionist collection. I've loved Rodin since I started noticing I loved all the same tortured, fingerhewn, raw, bristly, bronze men all signed 'Rodin'. Every time. He moulds me too in ways and places with his hard, mean fingers, deep, tingling gouges in the body of my soul. And there's one bust in particular that caught my eye, a beautiful bronzecast face, wrinkled brow, eyes upturned in infinite resignation. Almost trembling upper lip. I did some reading. His name was Pierre de Wissant and he was a beloved merchant in the town of Calais. There was a siege, medieval, everybody starving and dying, the invaders demanding these six community leaders surrender their lives for the city, six Messiahs for the price of one. Well anyway they're folk heroes and he made this bust of Pierre de Wissant. It pulled me and transfixed me every time I walked through that gallery.”
         She peered thirstily across the water.
         “Couple years later I'm in London poking around the gardens behind Westminster Abbey and I see these six bronze men. In a circle. Auguste Rodin, The Burghers of Calais. I look for the one with his hand over his face, like you in the picture. I have to walk around the side to see past the hand into the face.”
         Constellations converged in the freckles of her face.
         “It's Pierre.”
         I felt a river running through me.
         “So I took a blanket, pinched it together at three wrinkles, and interpenetrated them with a grey thread and a scarlet thread, both tied to the same needle. Titled Rodin's Fingers. ... Egads, listen to me, pretentious art school bladiblabla. I'm as ridiculous as that painter O'Hara wrote about!” She laughed again. Those glimmering baubles spilled again from her snowy teeth. “Galveston is all around us. Where to go?”
         I was eager to smell the water so I said,“Let's drive along the Seawall!” She took us past the desolate shanty heads of Easter Island with tall noses and rotting porches, grey tongues lolling across prim lawns of little even blades blanched in the glare of the headlights, past the centenarian candy store, empty and fudgeless and odorless (I remember from when I was nine and my mother and my father drove me down one weekend and we stayed at the Commodore Hotel, ate imported oysters and played in the sand; I feared the rough salty water that even then smelled strong and vaginal to me; I played chess with an old man in the public square caddycorner to the fudge shop, right there) and finally the horizon, far and wet.
         “They built this after the hurricane,” she said, “a hundred years ago,” nodding to the levee to the left, “to corral the ocean.”
         The wall cut across the sloped surface of the earth from end to end. To keep out Mongols. Or monsoons, anyway. I shuddered. “I know.”
         The beach is always as I remember and nothing will ever change about the ocean and its appendages. Coarse yellowy sand, inky dim water faintly blue in the moonlight, cusps of foam brimming over the waves like the head of a pint. I could feel the gentle exfoliation of my bare feet as I scoured them across the sand. The consensual revolutions of the twin globes of night finally ground to a halt as we lay in a dwarf dune and pointed at constellations.
         “Andromeda! Umm.... Cassiopeia? Right next to it right? Right. And, and-- Virgo! Oh, Ursa Major, which means... Minor. There.” My arm stretched so far I could tug the cloth of the sky and watch it draw the celestial embroidery with it, like the invisible pull of dark matter. She scrupulously attended to my lessons, sighting along the barrel of my index finger as I indicated the shoulders, hips, statures of these ancient ladies, generously inferred the curves and lips and thoughts framed upon their stark angular asterisms.
         “And what's that?” She plunged her fingers deep in the sky.
         “Oh, those are the Pleiades! The daughters of Atlas who carried the world. Seven heavenly nymphs most beloved by the gods. There's Maia, and Electra and Taygete and Alcyone, and Celeano and Sterope, and that one's Merope. She married Sisyphus and carried him forever. There's lots of different catasterismi or little catastrophes explaining how they got there, always ending in death, often suicide. But I like to think that when Atlas shrugged the women shouldered the weight. There they are down at the bottom of everything holding us up. Seven maids for six martyrs.”
         As I spoke I felt her pressing warmer and closer, lapping in like the tide, saw her face in the corner of my eye glancing up, then down at me. I felt her lean in, kiss me, kiss me square on the cheek, lips fused for lingering moments with my flesh and lingering in the mind of my body. Gently they peeled away, crouching close beside me like Gemini cats.
         And my heart, clenching and unclenching in patches of fear and bewilderment, spun in my chest and wound up tighter and tighter like all the blood was being wrung from it by hard, mean hands. I blanched and shrivelled. “You're a great friend, Nora.” My words, not mine.
         Her lips fell away like a star from the sky. We lay in silence. I was battered by a flurry of questions: Does she... Is she... Has she always... Why didn't she... Well, do I... Am I a... Can we still be... Should I even... How could she do this to me?
         During the car ride back we attempted some small talk, a couple jokes about David Bowie and Mick Jagger, but it died away listlessly. She turned the cd player back on and Nightswimming played, dripping lonesome pale piano keys across the black sea. I ejected it halfway through and replaced the album with New Adventures in Hi-Fi. Strange, angry synthesizers followed us home.
         She pulled in front of my house just as dawn was breaking and unlocked the door. “Get some sleep, Robin,” she said, briefly taking my hand and squeezing it. “I'm in town for a couple more days. We should get together again before I go. Saturday maybe?”
         “Yeah, maybe,” I mumbled. “I may have a, a thing that evening, but if I, but if they cancel or something... um yeah. Maybe.” I got out and started walking to the door.
         She rolled down the window and called to me, “Good night! Good morning! Goodbye, luv!” and waited until I'd opened the front door, then slowly drove off. We never met up later. I've seen her around town occasionally when she's back on vacation, rubbing shoulders with other old friends. We catch up, guardedly, then all get drunk together and laugh about old dead things and she swears drunkenly “We should get together again, the two of us, I'll call you babe,” but she never does after she sobers up and I'm too embarrassed to try.
         But I haven't seen her in almost a year now and I heard she's moved to New York with her partner. And I get so, so goddamn lonely and angry thinking about it.