SEPTEMBER 1
Albuquerque, New Mexico
RAE AND I ATE in silence. Actually her name was Desiree, but I called her Rae, like my brother’s name. We were living in a cheap rental house with dirty windows and bugs behind the refrigerator and in the bathroom. I needed help. My drug supply was low. I knew I was spiraling into a meth addiction, and I took oxycodone, too, or whatever I could get. Everyone knew what was happening to me, how horrible I’d started to look and how bad my addiction was becoming. Doing pills had started as a way for me to avoid feeling miserable all the time, but the more I used, the more depressed I became. It was a fucking nightmare. I was only twenty-one and already at a dead end. Rae was about to leave me. I knew I was getting worse because I could look anyone in the face, even her, and tell a long, elaborate lie. It made me feel awful, even though I knew I was a terrible liar anyway.
We stared into our plates, moving pasta around with our forks, pausing every so often to drink cheap wine from plastic cups. We barely ate anything. Light slanted in through the windows, pulsing particles of dust. The house ached with a sense of dread for me—I could feel it everywhere, on our street, or in every New Mexico town surrounding us. I wondered whether something bad was about to happen to me. I pictured other people like me, fuckups getting high and avoiding their own loved ones, looking out their windows with longing and terror, afraid of their lives falling apart. Thinking this made me feel better.
It was like this night after night. I had followed Rae to art school a year earlier, back when I still felt hopeful about our relationship and my future. I kept my drug use a secret for months, meeting people in the park or smoking when Rae was gone and I was in the house alone. It didn’t take long for Rae to notice that I was becoming overly thin, developing tooth decay and skin sores.
At the table I had a sudden coughing fit, bringing a napkin to my mouth, which made Rae stand up and take her plate to the kitchen sink. I heard the water from the faucet come on, then the grind of the garbage disposal. Her silence was a presence designed to put me on edge, a way of communication to reinforce what I feared would happen soon: that she would leave for good. Once Rae left, I knew I would be truly alone, since I had been pulling away from my family for months. Ever since they showed up for the intervention, I had been promising to go to rehab, and I wanted to go because I knew how much sadness and worry I had caused them. But I couldn’t bring myself to check in, and now I was way too embarrassed to go back home and face them.
I set my fork down and watched Rae rinse dishes in the kitchen.
“Put on Ornette Coleman,” she called out to me. “The record we were listening to last night.”
I downed my cup of wine and went over to the turntable to put on the album. I put the needle on the record and, as the music played, picked up the album cover and looked at it. Rae once said Ornette Coleman was the spitting image of her dad, who had been a jazz drummer himself. Maybe that was why she wanted to listen to it. Her dad had introduced her to free jazz in New Orleans, where Rae spent summers growing up. He died when she was a teenager. When we first met, we had bonded over our experience losing a family member. Death brought us together, that’s what we always joked.
I sat on the couch and listened to the frantic shrill of the trumpet, the wild cymbals and drums. Listening to jazz revved me. I could drum my hands on my lap for entire songs, long periods of time, which was something I did almost every time we listened to music. I could imitate Charlie Watts, Stewart Copeland. That drummer from Cheap Trick with the cigarette hanging from his mouth. Rae hated when I did this. She stepped out onto the back porch to smoke and talk on the phone. I never knew who she was talking to. I wanted to care more than I did, but our relationship had become so routine and dull that I never felt the desire to ask. When she came back into the house, she told me my mom had called her.
“What did she want?”
“I’m tired of making excuses for you,” she said. “Call her yourself. The anniversary is coming up.”
“I plan on going,” I said, but I didn’t know if I wanted to go home or not. I knew Rae was pulling away from me. I wondered whether she was cheating on me, although she had never actually given me any reason to be suspicious. All she wanted, I think, was some sort of physical tenderness from me, or maybe a sign of empathy, which I never gave her. I knew deep down it was my fault she was pulling away, but I almost wanted her to for some reason. I couldn’t understand why I would want to punish myself.
I looked up and saw that she was standing with her hand on her hip, giving me a look like she couldn’t understand anything I was saying.
“I don’t know,” I said.
She stopped herself from speaking, looking annoyed, then turned and went back into the kitchen, which made me want a hit from the pipe. I did not feel guilty or ashamed of this, of course, because the way I saw it, getting high could make me feel better the same way antidepressants helped people, even though it wasn’t doing anything anymore except making me feel worse. I understood, too, that I needed to get better so I could be a better boyfriend to Rae. I’d worked on a ranch with my friend Eddie for a while, which was good for me, but at the end of summer the work ran out and I had to get a job I hated at a hardware store. They let me go after missing too many days. Now I couldn’t get motivated to find more work. Rae worked at an art gallery and was able to handle the bills, and I felt guilty about not being more interested in helping out.
While Rae was in the kitchen I stepped into the bedroom, quickly pulled off my T-shirt, and got the pipe from my dresser. A hit or two from the pipe always revived me. When Rae came into the bedroom, I was already smoking.
“What the fuck are you doing?” she said.
I was hunched over my pipe, taking another hit.
“What the fuck, Edgar?”
I finished one more hit, and when I turned to her, she was already gone. I set the pipe down carefully on my dresser, then went to the screen door and saw her pulling out of the drive in her Mazda, talking on her phone. She was always talking on her cell phone. I didn’t have a cell phone anymore. Or maybe I did and never used it. At the screen door, just then, I suddenly felt the urge to go after her.
Here’s what I did: I rushed out of the house into the cold air, shirtless. Across the street, a teenage girl was kicking a soccer ball in the yard, and she stopped to look at me. Rae glanced at me and sped away. I stood in the middle of the street and scratched at my arm. The girl turned away when I looked at her. Then she picked up the soccer ball and went into her house. My arm was itching terribly. I saw that it was bleeding from where I had scratched so hard. When I walked back into the house, Ornette’s trumpet was blowing like wild laughter.
I went into my room and put on a hoodie and sat on the edge of the bed. I thought of Rae and me in the beginning, when we stayed in bed all day. We spent many days like that, too lazy to get out of bed, which was one of the reasons we felt so attached to each other: we saw it as connecting spiritually, emotionally. I fed her soup, carried the dishes to the kitchen. I brushed her hair, then hugged her waist in bed and fell asleep with my head in her lap. We smoked weed and listened to music. Those were good days, and I knew it would never be like that again.
Now, sitting in the house alone, I was fidgety and agitated. How many nights had I sat there in the past, waiting for her to return? I pulled my hood over my head and walked back out the front door. I figured I would go meet my friend Jessie, who often sold jewelry in the park nearby, and maybe hang out with him so that I wouldn’t sit around the house being depressed or angry about Rae. I walked quickly down our street, hurrying past the corner gas station with the green roof, past the small Assembly of God church with its motto JESUS IS HERE on the sign out front. Then I broke into a run down the street, crossing over to the park. My heart was racing when I arrived, and I felt immeasurably sad.
It was near sunset, and the park was mostly empty. There was no sign of Jessie. I walked to a bench and sat. I felt like a goddamn loser, wanting to get high. Someone would show up, this was what I thought, but nobody showed and I couldn’t sit around.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw a bird, a red fowl, strutting like a rooster. I stared at it a moment. Spreading its wings, it saw me and started to charge, as some will do. I turned and ran away through the park. I ran until I couldn’t see it anymore. It was almost dark now, and when I crossed the street, I heard motorcycles coming. I kept walking in a hurry, and the cycles got louder, and when I stopped to catch my breath I turned and saw people riding past me, like a blaring windstorm, a whole line of loud motorcycles with rumbling pipes and red taillights.
* * *
Several months earlier, Jessie had given me a small red fowl in the park. It was harmless and small enough to hold in my hands. The fowl was partially red with spots of orange, a rounded chest, and a sharp beak. I lifted it and said, “What’s your name? I’ll name you Red Fowl,” and Jessie and his girlfriend Shawnee laughed.
They had their own fowl. The people around the park kept fowls and brought them to the park for exercise, feedings, sharing them with anyone who wanted to see them. Right there, I made the decision: the fowl was mine. I would feed it and watch it grow into something bigger, a rooster or larger fowl, whatever it was. The fowl cocked its head and looked around. I could see its little chest breathing. I put my hand on its chest and felt the tiny heart, the pulsing beat, rhythmic. The fowl was alive. I put it in my jacket pocket to keep it warm and safe. The fowl kept still then, never moving. When I put my finger in the pocket I felt the bird nibble, which tickled a little, but it was never painful. It never scratched at me or tried to get out of my pocket all night. I felt an overall sense of acceptance with it, as if it needed me and I needed it. It’s strange to articulate the feeling for me, but the others in the park felt the same way about theirs. Fowl, fowl, fowl.
Jessie, Shawnee, and I walked past the park and along the road that runs beside the highway until we got to Jessie’s house, where music was blaring and a party was going on.
“It’s a party to celebrate nothing and everything,” I said. “It’s a party to celebrate my new fowl, this bird.”
“We were already here,” Jessie said. “We just went outside to give you the fowl. Be careful with it, though. Someone brought it here to my house. My own fowl’s so big now I can’t even carry it around like I used to. It scratches my skin. Claws at my mouth. I’ve heard it will knock out teeth if I’m not careful, so I have to keep my eye on it.”
“I have to watch it for him,” Shawnee said. “I’m the one who keeps it tame.”
“Mine won’t be that cruel,” I said. “I won’t feed it so much. I’ll let it nibble at my finger and peck on me as it grows, but I won’t let it get out of control. Not this fowl.”
“That’s what everyone says,” Shawnee told me. “That’s why I never took a fowl. Jessie offers one to me, but I haven’t ever taken it. Just look at Jessie’s fowl. The thing is so big it lives out back in a coop and shrieks in the morning and at night. It wakes him up shrieking. You have to feed it or it’ll attack you. I googled that shit once. Those fowls become aggressive and will charge you, and if you walk away or turn your back, it’ll attack. Fucking all around Albuquerque.”
Jessie was chewing on a straw. “You have to raise your arms and flap them so that it thinks you’re a bigger creature than it, and you gotta hope it goes passive.”
“My fowl won’t attack me,” I told them.
“Be careful with it. If you’re not careful with the fowl, it will want to be fed all the time and become angry.”
I took the fowl out and looked at it. Its beak was tiny, and it seemed to almost smile at me. What kind of fowl smiles? But mine did—or at least that was the way I saw it.
“Come inside,” Jessie said, but I declined. I wanted to enjoy the fowl myself, not share it with others. Others inside the party would want to see my fowl.
“No way am I going inside,” I said, and laughed a little. “I’m taking this fowl home.”
“Good luck,” they both said.
I unlocked my bicycle from his porch and rode it back home, where I would have to hide the fowl from Rae. She wouldn’t like the fowl, never. I steered my bike with one hand so I could check on the fowl in my jacket pocket. Its eyes were glowing in the dark as it looked up at me, smiling. I had a happy fowl, and it made me happy. It was fine right there in my pocket, with me protecting it, already grooming it. The fowl wasn’t trying to hurt me or make any noise at all. The fowl was so nice.
When I got back to the house, I hid the fowl in the bedroom in my dresser drawer so Rae wouldn’t find it. I told it good night and looked at it. The fowl had no odor whatsoever. It never made a sound, just breathed its chest in and out, breathing heavily for a tiny thing.
That night I wasn’t able to sleep because I kept thinking about the fowl. I took it out of the dresser drawer while Rae slept and stayed up all night in the living room with it, looking at it and touching it and letting it nibble and peck in my hand. I had no appetite and the thought of food made me feel sick to my stomach.
The most fun thing about the fowl was feeding it, and like most things, it grew quickly and became bigger, but it began to smell bad and shit and vomit in the house. The fowl was too big to hide from Rae, so I had to carry it with me to the park and leave it there. It tried to follow me, and when I picked it up and threw it, I must’ve injured it, because then I saw the fowl drag itself across the ground toward me. I ran away from it that night. I kept hiding from the fowl anytime I saw it in the park, but it always saw me and ended up back at my house, which frightened Rae and caused us to fight.
The only way I could get rid of the fowl was to ignore it. Eventually it went away, but never for good. Sometimes it returned, and whenever I saw it, I felt a pull at my heart to want to pick it up and hold it. I could never fully rid myself of the fowl, and there was something I loved about it, no matter how disgusting or how elated it made me feel.
WHEN I GOT HOME, Rae was still gone. I called her cell but got her voice mail. “It’s me,” I said. “Where are you?” I hung up. I couldn’t figure out if I was mad or sad. I didn’t know whether to be angry at myself or at Rae for ignoring my call. In the kitchen I drank the last of the wine. I looked through drawers for a pack of cigarettes but couldn’t find anything. Then I went into our bedroom, packed a duffel bag, and left.
I drove my shitty low-slung Oldsmobile to the El Cortez Motel. It was the motel where Rae and I used to stay sometimes, pretending we were somewhere far away. I wanted to call her on the motel phone and try to get her to come stay with me. The motel’s VACANCY sign flashed pink out front. Inside, I was certain the motel clerk recognized me. He chewed on a toothpick and wore a patch over one eye. His hands looked like my dad’s, dry and cracked with stubby fingers. Behind the front desk, the sign on the door read: MAN GER. All the motel doors opened to the empty parking lot. Nearby, a desolate highway stretched west through the plains.
“The door says manger,” I said. “Away in a manger.”
The clerk handed me the key to room 121 but never looked at me.
I walked down the row of doors until I got to my room, opened, and went inside. It smelled of old cigarette smoke and cleaner. I immediately went to the phone, which was the old rotary kind. I called Rae’s cell, and she answered.
“I’m at the El Cortez Motel,” I said.
“Why? Go back home.”
“Drive over here,” I said. “I’m sorry I smoked. It was because my mom called you. Drive over here.”
She was silent a moment. “No, you need to go home. You lied again. I told you I was leaving if you kept smoking that shit.”
“Please come to the motel.”
“My God, Edgar, I can’t even talk to you right now. I’m staying at Jessica’s tonight.”
She hung up, and I immediately called back. It went to her voice mail. I called again, and the same thing. I was a little high. I’d brought along a small duffel bag containing a bottle of a few oxycodone pills, aspirin, a tape recorder, a few cans of beer, and Rae’s broken sunglasses I had doctored with black tape. These were all the things I needed for the night. I took the sunglasses out and squeezed the tape on the handle to make sure it hadn’t loosened. I put them on a moment, then took them off and set them on the desk beside the bed.
I wanted to talk to someone. A roadside motel like the El Cortez was not a good place to feel lonely. The room was a mirror image of all the other rooms, the center of nothingness, dim and warm despite the air conditioner blowing. It felt like an isolated presence, welcoming me. But I liked the room dark—no light entered from the drawn curtains, which were green. The lamp threw a jagged and intimidating shadow across the pale wall, and the carpet, partially stained, was avocado.
In the room I sat on the edge of the bed, looking up at the ceiling. Something in my head was expanding, I felt, trying to force its way out. My skull felt heavy when I kept my head tilted back, looking up. This was how things went—first the head, then the stomach. When I saw my reflection in the mirror across the room, I wondered whether people saw me differently. I’d lost some weight.
In the bathroom I took an oxycodone and drank a cup of water. The only thing I had in my pocket other than my wallet was my turquoise snakeskin lighter, which was a gift from Rae. I imagined her here with me. I thought of her watching me play chess in the park against one of the druggies, daring me to lose. She kept me on edge, a dominant and unpredictable force. I started to feel sick to my stomach.
I turned on the TV. A movie was on, showing a man walking through the desert. I stared into the TV. The man was walking and walking, going nowhere. Where was he going? I wondered. A drifter, a wanderer, in search of something important. This must be real life, I thought. Searching for something, trying to move forward. Looking for meaning or happiness. The commercials were all in Spanish.
When a commercial came on, I peeked out the peephole and saw the parking lot outside. I could see desert dust blowing around in the wind. I looked back up at the ceiling and felt a sense of transparency and isolation, a sense of longing, a dampening of the soul. The room smelled like all the other motel rooms. Above the bed hung a framed watercolor of a farmhouse painted in browns and reds. A field surrounding the farmhouse was dull green, with nothing else around, only empty pasture. The farmhouse looked vacant, too, with a broken-down pickup truck beside it. No sign of life anywhere. I wondered who lived there and then who painted it, and for what purpose. On a different wall, the only other picture in the room, was another watercolor, a painting of an old wooden fence with barbed wire. A dreary sky in the background. A barbed-wire fence. I wondered why a fence, such a lifeless and dull thing, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. A fence, used to enclose territory. It was as if the motel was emphasizing its loneliness.
The room darkened as I sat in silence. This was how I liked to spend late afternoons, it occurred to me, sitting in a room as it darkened. Letting the darkness spill over me and the room. I opened a beer from my duffel bag and played the tape on my recorder, hearing my own voice. I heard myself say, “I looked for the Great Spirit today.” I heard myself laugh through my teeth, but I wanted to hear someone else’s voice, by circumstance, unfiltered and cautious.
I stopped the tape and called a random number. A woman answered. “Hello?” she kept saying. I hung up on her. The next number I called was a business. The guy who answered said, “Maintenance.”
“I want to talk, if it’s all right with you,” I said.
“What?”
“Where do you work? I just want to talk.”
He hung up.
I called a number that registered a busy signal. I found it strange and rhythmic, an alert of sorts. The sound put me at ease, helped me feel better. I became aware of my surroundings, of the dim motel room with the green curtains and pale walls. Maybe there were no colors in the room. In my mind I see black and white, something out of a French film. I liked watching the room dim on its own, listening to the hum of the air conditioner blowing.
I called my friend Jessie, but he didn’t answer. Then I called Byrd, an old friend I hadn’t spoken to in several months. He’d crashed his Harley on a highway just outside Tulsa and managed to survive with a concussion and stitches in his tongue. “I grew my hair out,” he told me. “Now everyone thinks I’m Neil Young. The guy at the diner keeps asking me what happened to Crazy Horse. What happened to the Stray Gators, he says. Sing ‘Yonder Stands the Sinner.’ Sing ‘Cinnamon Girl.’ Where are you?”
“New Mexico.”
“Come back to Oklahoma. You need somewhere to stay? You can stay with us, kid. I got an extra mattress in the basement. I got Rubber Soul on vinyl. I got Exile on Main Street.”
“My man Keith Richards.”
“Hey, Lucille’s sister’s in town with her kids, so I gotta go. Try to lay off the shit, brother.”
“I miss you, Byrd.”
He had already hung up. I found myself waiting for someone to pick back up, but the line went dead. I turned on the lamp and called Sonja, who was half asleep when she answered.
“Is everything okay?” she said. “Where are you?”
“Albuquerque.”
“Is everything okay?”
“Rae left me, and I just wanted to talk,” I said.
“Well, I’m sorry, but don’t use it as an excuse to use meth. Are you coming home for the bonfire?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Everyone wants to see you. I want to see you, and so do Mom and Papa. They keep asking me about it, and I tell them I don’t know.”
“I don’t know.”
“I hope you come home,” she said.
After I hung up, I didn’t feel like calling anyone else. I thought again of Rae, and how we could heal each other through language. We could say words and reach an understanding. We could touch each other’s face and say one organic word. Sometimes we never spoke. We once spent an entire afternoon embracing in the park.
Darkness spread around me. After a long while I got out of bed and took a beer with me into the bathroom, where I filled the tub with warm water. I removed all my clothes and stepped into the tub. I wanted time in isolation, quiet, but there was laughter coming from the next room, voices talking. My body felt warm and heavy in the water. The heaviness was an abstraction, I felt, a part of some equation convoluted by the presence of the room. Be aware of your surroundings, Rae used to say. Be aware, cautious, observant of time and place. I’d dealt with too many dealers who could hurt me. She didn’t want to see me beaten up over drugs. She was right.
I popped open a can of beer and reclined in the tub, thinking of the times she and I splashed around in the tub in a different motel bathroom, maybe at the Route 66 Motel or the Knights Inn, a mirror image of this room. A bathroom with the same tile full of squares, part of the equation to entrap me. Motel bathrooms all look the same, I told myself. I thought of Rae, of us splashing around one hot July afternoon during a dust storm that sanded over the windows. We listened to the Mexican radio station and drank Mexican beer. We paid the housekeeping to stay away, immersing ourselves in our own bodies, in each other, for six days.
In the tub I counted the tiles from ceiling to floor, around the room. It became a sort of game, counting vertically by row, then horizontally, eight, fifteen, then twenty, thirty-four. I kept losing track. The tiles over the sink were smaller and of a different color—pink rather than light blue. Pink, the color of skin and flesh, the color of body parts, tongue. By the time I finished my beer I had counted over a hundred square tiles, not counting the partial tiles that stopped at the edge of the tub. They were not half tiles, maybe a quarter of a tile. The numbers were confusing, and I couldn’t figure out the pattern, but I thought of it as a game. I had a strange and intense vision of being stuck in an elevator as a child, gripping my mother’s hand. A hard jolt from a cable or faulty electrical circuit. A woman crying out. A loud ringing alarm from somewhere. I felt the loss of air, no oxygen, the room shrinking. Closing my eyes, gripping my mother’s hand. My mother bringing me closer against her. The doors finally opening.
In the tub I let myself slide down into the water until my head was underwater and I was staring directly up at the trembling ceiling. I blinked underwater. I felt my eyes burning and saw only blurred whiteness above, everything shaking. I saw myself falling backward. I realized then I was drowning, being held under water by some force beneath me. The heaviness of my body made it difficult to sit up, but I managed to gain enough strength to lean forward and gasp as I came out of the water like some horrific beast, sputtering as I steadied myself in the tub. I leaned forward and pulled the plug to drain the water.
Slowly, I stepped out of the tub and watched the water drain as it made a loud sucking noise. I got dressed and went through my bag for a cigarette. The room felt much dimmer than before. I looked to the curtain and saw part of it trembling from the blowing air conditioner. On TV, an old movie showed a crippled boy taking his first steps. I sat on the edge of the bed and watched. The boy’s mother fell to her knees. A crowd of people surrounded the boy. There was no sound. I changed the channel with the remote and saw a movie with De Niro, the young, tough De Niro, sitting in a dingy apartment, writing in a notebook. De Niro, talking to himself, strapping a gun to his arm and ankle. Pointing a pistol at his reflection in the mirror.
I spoke into the tape recorder. I said, “Because I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.” I said, “I’m sorry I got high.” I talked for a while about what I loved about Rae, pretending I was being interviewed by the brother I barely remembered. I said, “Ray-Ray and Rae.”
By sunrise I had spoken thousands of words into the recorder. At the window beside the door, I peeked out the curtains and looked up at the morning sky. I could see the open land past the parking lot, dust swirling in the wind. I could see the motel sign, the pink VACANCY flashing. A hawk swooped down and landed on the sign. From my bag I took out the oxycodone pill bottle, tilting the last few pills into my hand, and swallowed them with a beer.
I put on Rae’s broken sunglasses and lay down in bed to try to sleep. A surge of pain went right to my head, and I saw myself projected forward into the darkness, an eccentric and intense sensation. Outside the window, I saw my ancestors walking and falling. Some were crawling. I saw the soft, yellow light on the horizon. I saw the rain lifting from earth to sky.