AFTER THE REVELATIONS in Debbie’s office, the disputatious meeting with Ludovicci-Lint, and the unveiling, it seemed perhaps irrational that Sarah and I would fall into each other as we did, yet at the moment it felt natural. In the late morning we awoke wondering, What now? If that was a one-time final goodbye fuck or a merging of love leading to a future together, we both needed time to reflect, to absorb the possibilities of being together again. Had that night given Sarah a graceful, exonerating exit? Her actions gave no indication to the implicit, but unspoken question. We spoke little about the new truths we heard in Debbie’s office, we needed to let the emotions and acts find their place in our hearts and heads, become comprehensible. At last we agreed she’d come to India after the show, and we’d try to rebuild the trust and love that had been so good for so many years and somewhere, even before I knew, turned against us.
On her way to Kugliani’s Hampton’s home, Sarah went with me to the airport, where six months before I’d gone alone. I’d left New York then feeling like a metaphysical paralytic cemented in a Beckett-like static time, aching for my own death as the silent blip … blip … blip … on the monitor of my mind played and replayed the known vision of my son dying, and the unknown image of my wife screwing another man. Denying I was searching for anything but silence until Levi exposed my empty denial, that begged the question, What do you search for after there is no longer a search for god?
That day, no less laden but hating myself less, less lost but not yet found, still godless and faithless, still a walking dialectic—loving Sarah and newly befuddled and furious at Sarah, missing Sarah, wanting to be with her forever and never see her again, but wanting less to die myself, we parted—and as the 747 lifted off and the spires of Manhattan and the pyres of Brooklyn and Queens and New Jersey merged into a sunset sky of pink and gray, wounded yet scarring, with a quixotic mix of hope and despair, and an odd, unreasoned belief that a future existed beyond Castor’s death, my gut told me that I was leaving New York, where forever I would be from, for the last time when I could call The City my home.