On the train home, in the late afternoon, with my head too light and the bottles nestled at my feet, I reached into the shopping bag to find the long blue envelope. I unsheathed the note, felt the paper dense and rough on the tips of my fingers as I unfolded it in thirds. It was green or greenish, the train’s light made it hard to tell, and it was flecked with gray. Its edges, all of them, were uncut. The message, in a heavily condensed hand, began at the very top left, where you might start a grocery list: first the salutation, then my name and Karen’s, then straight into the text, all on the same line—thin, quick, maroon strokes made with a plastic-tip pen. Garrett’s letterforms were precise, rectilinear, and showed almost no variation, regardless of their position in a word, like a typeface. They looked as if they would be more at home on graph paper, one glyph per box, not on hand-pressed rag. Probably Antral had only recently made the switch from one to the other, as they’d expanded from hard-edged science into less defined areas. Still, as I read the letter through, I could almost see a vestigial grid overhanging the page.
Form aside, there was, surprisingly, nothing much left to glean from it. I’d assumed Karen was radically paraphrasing before, she conveyed so little about it to me at the office, but she’d in fact shared nearly the totality of its contents. Nearly. In a tiny postscript on the back of the note, Garrett had, pace Karen, actually mentioned a provisional name for the drink, which was Paul’s idea: Theria. She must have missed this tidbit, which was a shame, as it might have forestalled tensions back at the office; it suggested that Garrett’s description of the drink as a reviver was offhand, nothing to make too much of, as John most certainly had. In any case, beyond this detail of a name, the letter really did say very little: more or less, Here are some of the items to be sold. Sample them... and what, exactly? There was no mention of, say, making sketches based on the bottles, or composing logotypes or trademarks. Garrett simply said he’d be in touch very soon. Then he signed off, or really, printed his name in that same geometric script. Conspicuously, he offered no valediction.
Come to grips with these drinks—I suppose that’s all there was to infer from his words. Garrett had a habit of underexplaining things. I’d already noticed the pattern on the telephone and in person. Here it was again in letters. It didn’t matter, though. I wasn’t irked. It seemed to emanate from his nature, rather than being a play at obscurantism, or a way of avoiding responsibility for his own thoughts by making them yours. The most natural explanation, given his wealth and stature—he was someone who by right might have dealt with people in blunter ways—was that this was actually a sign of his generosity: working with people without merely giving them instructions, without treating them as a means to an end. By refusing to finish half his own sentences, he could see what leaps others would take in concluding his thoughts. They might well stumble on ideas that he liked more than his originals; although I’m sure there were occasions on which he had no complete thought in mind, and his meaning remained only partly formed, a mere stem waiting for the right interlocutor to bring sense to it.
After a couple of line changes, I emerged at my usual station, past the multiracial mosaic, and my nausea reawakened. I was thinking I’d stop in at one of the two diners I frequented, but within a few blocks, walking in the September breeze, I found there wasn’t much need. My unwellness had mostly lifted; little of my hunger remained. The simple passage of time, the cool air, and perhaps most of all my withdrawal from company into anonymous circumstances, had calmed me, if not healed me altogether.
I climbed the stairs to my apartment, past that vacant first floor, the Becker floor, that I hadn’t dared to enter properly. It was a problem still waiting for a solution. But the closer I got to its dirty door and those cracked windows, to the scene of the family’s eviction, which had begun with repo men and ended with police, the less I felt able to solve it. A tinge of the sickness seemed to return. The feeling impelled me onward, upstairs.
By the time I’d gotten my own door open, one floor above, I no longer felt any need for a nap. Before doing anything else, before even taking the key out of the lock, I pulled the bottles from the bag, two by two, and lined them up on the sill of my window wearing that veil of grease—the one I’d sat Claire on for the charcoal portrait. Seven bottles of Theria—and if this word was not arbitrarily generated like most brand-name pharmaceuticals, but actually borrowed from the Greek, would we then be talking of, well, wild animals?—and the fifth of a gallon of whiskey, minus what Karen and John had drunk from it. The sun filtered through the glass and gave me my first proper look at these liquids. The Theria had a transfixing blue-green to it, more saturated than water but of the same general tint. It looked like water as we sometimes imagine it or represent it in art: intensified, concentrated. The wheat whiskey, which sat at one end of the line-up, shone a diaphanous straw hue, with none of the reddish shades of scotch or bourbon. The daylight passing through it only amplified the brilliance I’d briefly seen in it at the office, blending an atmospheric gold with the drink’s more localized variety. I tipped the bottle on its edge and swirled it a bit. The surface, still quite high in the vessel, despite John’s depredations, rippled sluggishly, as if it were the molten form of a solid. I did the same to the Theria and it jittered with the immediacy, yes, of water.
A dusty tumbler sat next to the easel. For how long? Weeks at least, to judge from the grime in it. I washed it out in the sink, then returned to the window and poured myself a measure of whiskey. I held it just beneath my lips and drew in the vapors. It felt like our second encounter, this wheat spirit and I, given how closely I’d observed my colleagues partaking in Queens. The nose, it was apparent once I’d uncorked the bottle, was profoundly gentle, without a trace of pungency, yet with no sacrifice of complexity. Baking bread, that’s what occurred to me. Each of its visible traits was recapitulated on the tongue: the peculiarly lambent flavor that never threatened to blind, only clarify, an ethereal pianissimo of a grain so utterly familiar from other contexts, but not in a whiskey; the contrasting tactility, a light stickiness in the mouth, just as those slow ripples lapping against the walls of the bottle had presaged. It was this body, almost universally lacking in young spirits, that promised more.
Just as I was about to finish off what I’d poured, a dispute convulsed the street, acrimonious enough to reach me through closed windows. I couldn’t see the participants below, but the voices, male, female, even infant, were all gilded with the spontaneous anger I’d grown used to on this block. Remarkably, the argument turned out to be over a parking space, an objectively improbable dispute, given how few of my neighbors had operational cars. As I listened more closely, I realized that the clash issued merely from hypotheticals—apparently the belligerents were philosophers—conjectures concerning the entitlement to park rather than about actually parking a vehicle. But abstraction only intensified the discord, through a purification of all real-world complications, the things that make for gray areas, compromises. Strangely, I’d discovered that conflict wasn’t just a means toward the resolution of disagreements around here; instead it seemed to hold intrinsic value, often more value than conciliation could deliver. Hence disputes tended to conclude only when people had spent themselves and not before. For this reason I finished my drink in some equanimity, the heated words scudding outside bringing an innocuous piquancy—innocuous for me, anyway—to the occasion.
The first few times this sort of thing had happened, of course, I’d reacted differently. I’d felt something akin to terror, in fact, and I would have trouble working or sleeping for hours afterward, fearing all sorts of potential outcomes from the incident. By now, though, having found that usually there was no upshot, just a flaring scrap in the manner of angry dogs, the disturbances began to hold for me the pleasant terror of horror movies. Although punches were sometimes thrown, knives pulled, blood spilled, cops summoned, I in my person had come to accept my total and complete safety. I was a pure spectator, as removed from what was occurring as anyone watching a police procedural, except that I had a better seat, so I could see the real color of things. Even though I was stationed only on the second floor, the artificial hill the slumlord had built beneath the house meant I always held the high ground, the same ground that necessitated the abnormally long stoop I had to climb each time I returned to my place, as if I were approaching the monuments of Lincoln or Jefferson and not a simple profiteer. I was always slightly winded when I made it to the door.
A few incidents, I should say, were so intense they managed to shatter all sense of remove. Not even a month ago, I’d heard an outburst at three in the morning, an hour that increased the odds of consequential violence. But this drama sprang from a single voice, which in fact only ratcheted up the tension. I could have stayed in bed. I was actually terribly tired that night, having fought with Claire in my dreams, but the sheer force of the man’s voice, which arrived like a conflagration, drew me to my feet. I delicately tiptoed ahead, with exaggerated high-steps. For me, the man owning this voice had to be something more than mortal; he would hear footfall any heavier from the street itself. I slowly headed for my northern window, which faced onto the tenements, the source of all this bile. But I left all the lights off. I drifted through my kitchen and living room from memory alone, experimentally, trying to recall what I’d left lying around, so as not to stumble and alert him to my approach. Once I’d drawn close to the window, I crouched down as low as I could, inching the last few steps on all fours so that my head just peeked up above the bottom lip of the frame. There below me, under the high-pressure sodium lamps, was a black man of less than twenty draped in giallo-film red. The T-shirt was so large, its sleeves ran to his forearms and its hem fell to his knees, just where white enveloped him down to his sneakers. He blurred phantasmagorically under the lamps as he skipped and twirled up and down the street; it gave his rant an unmistakably ecstatic dimension, I thought. This went on for a full eight minutes, too—I timed it on my kitchen clock, whose glow-in-the-dark hands cut easily through the black—this soliloquy of purest contempt, somehow shunted into a single phrase, all of this menace and pain. And not even a threatening phrase, but a couple of numbers: Six two. What his tongue was able to do with this little incantation, I cannot fully account for. Dozens of times, though, there was six two, in every possible inflection, sometimes in one breath, sometimes in two. Some of these soundings betrayed real despair, fear, self-pity, though the varieties of menace with which he was able to charge the numbers far outnumbered them. I’d not known so much life could be extracted from a pair of syllables, from such a mundane utterance hitched to that little dance, up and down and back again. For all I knew, this was it, the whole of what he was offering, and in its own unfathomable way, it was probably plenty. Yet eventually, like any actor, he couldn’t resist bringing a touch of sense to proceedings. I stared into his face as he screamed out the kicker: Right here. The six two. Who wants it? I’m right here. Because every bit of this is mine. There was only a cavernous silence as he held his face aloft for the first time, staring up into the windows all around him.
This was enough for me to work out the significance of his chosen number. He meant 162nd Street, and he was laying claim to the entire block, to exclusive dealing rights, I presumed, if not other illicit enterprises as well. Indeed, I realized, as he peered into the apartments, seeking some rejoinder, that I had seen him around before; I circulated so much through these blocks, everyone and everything fell under my gaze eventually. He always wore a bug-eyed look, I recalled, as if he’d been awake for days; and his short dreadlocks were perpetually blown back by some phantom headwind that never stopped fronting him, whichever way he turned.
He wasn’t done, apparently: I’m telling you—I am. This mine. This the six two. Ain’t nothing none of y’all can do. See that? I see you.
He whipped his head my way and I thought his eyes met mine.
So see this.
I ducked beneath the window and leaned my head against the wall, wondering if he’d just pulled out a pistol. How could he have seen me in the dark? And when was all this bluster going to draw a response from someone, on a block this hardened? Not necessarily a retaliation, but something: maybe just an old man screaming out, I can’t sleep like this. I will not do it, son! And then what would this kid’s response be, if not some higher violence than mere words can conjure? My legs were shaking.
But the street stayed quiet. Not that the challenger had gone unnoticed. Not at all, to my chagrin. Looking around at all the neighboring buildings, I was made ashamed by the sight of people, whole families, including young children, filling at least a dozen lighted windows of the high-rises. They had the courage—though only a coward would describe it that way, I knew—they had the mettle for high-stakes guerrilla theater without any need for a cloak of darkness, something that was simply out of the question for me. Worse still, as far as my pride went, as their eyes met the young man’s squarely—eyes I avoided even while I returned to his face through the dark—not one of them flicked out his light.
Eventually his voice frayed, he shook his head at the onlookers, his dreadlocks flew. Then he reared back to declaim one last thing, I sensed, with arms operatically stretched toward either side of the street. What followed was just the slow flexion of his fingers around what could only be the necks of two rather tall ghosts. He wrung them thoroughly, face held low, before shoving those murderous fists into his pockets and shuffling off, barking something to himself like a lost dog.
I don’t know if he actually flashed a gun at any point during his monologue, though he had brought his hands down to his waistband several times while prancing to suggest as much. And his tone certainly implied the presence of arms. But now I think it might all have been wild bluff, and my neighbors had somehow sniffed this out, though I don’t know how. To me, it seemed foolhardy to press so hard without a gun. I almost wanted him to have one, for his own sake. But this might have just been the logic of a foreigner. Today, though, was different. As I sipped Garrett’s whiskey, an atonal polyphony wafted up from the street, and far from discomfiting me, I found my nerves positively soothed. Communion took many forms, I was learning. Here it could come through fractiousness and contempt, even if no-one understood this to be a kind of fellowship. Yet what did that matter, knowledge, I mean, so long as fellowship existed? I drained the tumbler and pushed off from the stool, where I posed people like dolls, to the formless couch where no-one sat but me these days, to lie down and savor the fading screams and the drink’s decay.
The braying had lost its edge. The women involved decided the space belonged to one of them, Darla. But if it was open—as it always was, since Darla hadn’t owned a car in years—then Macy, or rather Macy’s relatives, might use it when they visited town. She herself, of course, was as carless as Darla. A few snorts and mutterings concluded things, and with that my full attention returned to the whiskey, the flavor of which had expanded tenfold in the finish, both in size and import. It no longer seemed to reside within me—in my mouth, my belly, or even my head—but rather cocooned me. Never had I experienced such a long tail to a drink, one that reached its peak intensity, as with certain peppers, well after it had landed on the tongue. I rose, poured again, and tested my hypothesis. Each sip seemed to overlay the previous ones, so that a sort of round or fugue of flavor was produced: a series of overlapping crescendos that remained distinct from one another, like ripples in a pond. As for the fermented wheat, it manifested itself as the staple it was, in a way corn or barley didn’t manage.
I wasn’t a connoisseur like John, nor did I seek to be. I abhorred wine (literally sour grapes) except as a way of getting drunk, particularly at openings, where often little else was available; and although I’d had my share of liquor, I’d always found something faintly ludicrous in the language around it. Speaking about taste, the gustatory phenomenon, seems hopelessly impressionistic in ways that don’t afflict other modalities, especially sight. The only way you can do it at any length is to name all the things something tastes like: ripe fruit, say, or toffee, but also things you will never put in your mouth—granite, leather. This isn’t wrong-headed, a category mistake, say, so much as pointless. Demonstrative definition—this is what it’s like—seems the only serious choice when it comes to grasping the properties of taste. Why pretend you can understand such character through description? Better to keep one’s comparative talk to a minimum, and push forward on factual grounds, as one might do with the look of a drink, with no pretense to conveying the experience itself.
In any event, all the sampling I carried on with through the afternoon had more practical consequences. Though I didn’t feel drunk as such—my head grew exceptionally clear, pervaded by a kind of mentholated coolness—my co-ordination began to fail me in small and telling ways. I managed to shatter the tumbler, for one thing, dropping it while feeling myself to have a perfectly adequate grip on it. (Thereafter I had to work straight from the bottle.) More agonizingly, when I eventually turned to drawing, my line lost all its shape. I finished by throwing out not only the papers on which I’d sketched, but the pen, too, never mind that the defect lay elsewhere. After this fit of pique, I started to feel a strong pull toward sleep, of a different magnitude from the one that had plagued me earlier at Cosquer’s offices, even if it was not yet six o’clock and there was nothing natural about the need for unconsciousness just eight hours after rising.
I did nothing to resist, though. I didn’t move to my bedroom either, preferring the broad volume of light I found myself encased in on the sofa. I let myself drift off into the drink and I didn’t even bother dreaming—not memorably, anyway. I woke many hours later, around ten in the evening, yet with hardly a hangover. Sitting up and checking the low waterline of the bottle, the absence of after-effects was remarkable. I didn’t recall having drunk anywhere near as much as I must have, but in the throes of experimentation, who can possibly keep track?
Usually after sleep, the taste of scotch and especially bourbon would have been sour and somewhat vile on the tongue—unlike, say, vodka—as if the grain had undergone a second fermentation in my mouth. But for all its sneaky intensity, Garrett’s whiskey didn’t offend in the ways of other brown liquors. It was almost its own kind, neither a brown nor a clear. I could taste it, yes, but it wasn’t at all unpleasant.
Now the apartment was black except for the faint light coming from the street and the lamp I’d left on near the easel and windowsill. Too late, I thought, to do anything useful with such a small slice of night remaining. Anyway, I preferred to work in the late morning and through the afternoon: so, though I wasn’t tired, I got myself up from the couch—my co-ordination had returned—and took myself to bed.
Sometimes it was possible for me to get a full night’s sleep just after having napped profligately. But it took real concentration. I would lay in the dark and consider all the things I might do in a wakeful state, that is, all the worthwhile mobilizations of consciousness I could think up; and, just as with window shopping, merely contemplating these possibilities was often enough to satisfy any urge to realize them. When it wasn’t, and ideas continued to tantalize me, I turned to rationalizing how each one of them might most profitably be put off until later, which would of course sap their urgency and all capacity to keep me awake. I’d grown very good at rationalizing, so that once I’d delegitimized all my plans, and my head was empty, that was generally it.
Tonight, I didn’t have to exercise myself in this way. There really was nothing I needed to do right now. My personal projects were on hold. I did need to investigate the energy drink, of course, but that could wait for morning. Garrett had given me no time frame, no deadline. Probably it should wait, until the whiskey had fully cleared my body. Curiously, my mind refused this relief, and what crept into it might well have been the forgotten substance of my dreams, so familiar did it seem. Colors without shape: that’s what I saw. They filled my entire visual field, despite my closed eyes. For even then, we know the field remains, as when one sees a wide hazy yellow-red expanse through one’s eyelids while dozing in the sun, or electric green when rubbing one’s eyeballs in the dark. This time the shades were different, and different in a way that seemed right: non-arbitrary, though not exactly explicable. Cyan and ochre. Were these not shades that always found favor with Claire, that flecked her wardrobe, that had indeed once draped the apartment itself in the days she would fill with fabric and fiber projects? But wasn’t there more still to these colors? There must have been, I felt. I opened my eyes, hoping to vanish the tones and the forlornness they brought me. In the pitch dark, though, they continued to strike at me, like those flickering frames at the end of a film reel. I sat up and rubbed my eyes but nothing changed. I knew nothing would, somehow; the flashes of blue and yellow kept coming. I was seeing without seeing, the illusions were pouring out of me. I had to be the source, right? I turned on the light and the sparks dimmed, as I knew they would. I switched off the light and there they were. I had known this, too.
Through my growing bewilderment rose the odd and inescapable feeling that I might be living with these two luminous shades for a while. Sensing no change in my state, even after some minutes in bed watching these fireworks, I decided there was nothing to do but get them down in front of me, properly, then and there. With the lights back on, I dug out a sleeve of pastels from my nightstand, which was piled with the modernist tomes I’d been prone to reading in the last months, predictable things, the natural companions of recent estrangement: The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge; The Sleepwalkers; Auto-da-Fé; and that ultimate bourgeois saga of bemusement, In Search of Lost Time. The pastels looked chalkier than they should have; perhaps they’d dried out a bit. I smeared a couple of sticks onto the sketchbook I’d been keeping on the other half of my bed, but the colors didn’t align with what I’d seen or imagined. I made a few more tries, colors in combination, but there was a bigger problem than tone. They were more matte than what I needed, which was the rarefied shine I no longer worked with, the kind that only found a place, here and there, in my imagination, or my night terrors, or whatever this whiskey-bred state was. No, try as you might, you couldn’t summon this glow without the help of linseed. As there were no tubes of paint in my bedroom, I went out into the living room that served now as my studio. There on the broad table of unvarnished pine I kept just off the kitchen was an unopened set of oils. Rick had brought them by on his one and only visit here. I’d not invited him; he’d just come with Karen, to remind me, I suppose, of his own art, the one I used to practice: painting. Since I’d not paid for the paints myself, and since I’d felt less close to Rick than I had in a long time, I handled them wastefully now, squeezing gobs of green and red and orange and yellow, and half the tube of white, onto my long-neglected palette. This was a part of painting I missed: the preparation. This and the manner in which one built up an oil painting, layer by layer. The length of time it took, all that drying, as compared to any other medium. It’s what kept it fungible, responsive to a creative act that might extend in time over months. Pastels and chalk generally blended best optically; they rarely mixed deeply when you combined physical strokes. Watercolors could be mixed to very good effect, and acrylic, too, though they both dried far more quickly than oil, so you couldn’t keep them growing, developing, the way an oil painting was almost an organism. But then, I was also using less of those paints. And given the unrelieved shimmer I was seeing in my mind tonight whenever the lights went out, there was no question that those media would pale next to oil, a priori. Really, when you’re looking for the purest liquid intensity, you don’t have a choice.
I stirred the paints with a narrow kolinsky-sable brush, a prized instrument of John’s which I’d stolen from him in school and always hid whenever he came around. It hadn’t seen water in a long time now, hadn’t even been cleaned properly since I’d given up painting. It was more or less ruined, the bristles didn’t give. I used it like a reedy stick now, stirring the paints so that the oils remained rich and globular, even as they metamorphosed in color. Eventually I smeared each onto a sheet of Bristol board with my finger, and after myriad trials over multiple sheets, each of which became covered in swatches of near identical colors, I approached something like what I’d imagined, or what my imagination had forced on me, in the dark.
The ones that worked best, it turned out, were the ones I’d blended incompletely. The paint had marbled rather than blended, so that the smears appeared unified in color from a distance, even if, on inspection, you could see the traces of white I’d mixed in to give them their light-raked appearance. Around one in the morning, I arrived at two perfect, irregular swatches. I say this because I could turn away from the lamp and close my eyes tight and find those peculiar afterimages alive and lustrous as ever; but I could open them up now, too, look directly down at the paper, and experience something of the same order, in tone if not in rhythm. Tomorrow I would really know what I had, of course, when I checked the patches in daylight, which gave everything away. Maybe some of that rhythm would even appear.
I crawled off to bed with my eyes on fire and laid down over the covers, feeling too clammy to be swaddled in them. I didn’t bother turning the lights out. What would be the point, with those shimmering blues and golds hounding me through the dark, who knows for how long? Probably just as long as this not-quite-hangover lasted. So I closed my eyes and basked in the rust glow penetrating my eyelids, masking all other sensations, as if I were sunbathing on some remote island beach. Which is to say, even then, my mind couldn’t expel those stubborn tones. They merely shifted ground, fleeing sensibility and finding refuge in my thoughts.