This story begins, as they so often do, with heartbreak.
I am at a party for a young man whose wife has left him,
so he's abandoning graduate school to join the Navy.
There is a lot of despair at this gathering,
the young man's and the impoverished students'
and, of course, mine, which has less to do with money
and more to do with time,
which is running out, in case you haven't noticed.
And then there is the red drink.
Our host looks as if he has just stepped out
of a Trollope novel, a nineteenth-century cleric,
rotund in rumpled chinos and a tee shirt.
He and a friend have driven to Georgia
to buy grain alcohol and have mixed it with red Kool-Aid
in a styrofoam container on the back porch.
Later when this party is famous, I learn the red drink
ate through the styrofoam,
but this was not discovered until the next day
or maybe the next week when heads had finally cleared.
My host warns me not to drink much.
I don't, but I drink enough.
I don't know anyone at this party but the red drink
makes me intrepid.
I talk to many people, make jokes, see God.
How many times can you see God before you realize
his face is different every time?
Is this a revelation? Maybe.
Not only do I see God, but I see through him
to the other side, though probably it's a vision
of cerebral matter being sloughed off,
and I have a tête-à-tête with my most persistent epiphany,
that is, life is nothing, rien, nada, niente.
I find it comforting to know the world is transparent,
insubstantial, without meaning.
I think of Niels Bohr's assertion that there is no deep
reality, and I know exactly what he means.
I am looking through the woman I am talking to,
seeing through her
to the soft bank of azalea bushes behind.
It's a nice effect, rather like a double exposure.
My husband is at this party, but I am avoiding him
for a reason I can't really remember.
Oh, I remember, but it's too tedious to go into here.
I look at this man whom I love to distraction
and wonder how he can be so utterly dense,
and I know if I say anything he will say
I've had too much to drink, which is entirely correct,
and that there's alcoholism in my family, but show me a family
that doesn't have a drinker or two….
My beloved is in a cluster of beautiful students
who think he's marvelous, which he is.
Wait a minute, girls, I could tell you things,
but the red drink has turned ethereal on me,
and it's two-thirty in the morning and the young man
who's going into the Navy is delirious or dead,
and the lovely students have disappeared
into their enchanted student hovels.
So we leave and the car seems flimsy, as if made from
cardboard, like the East German cars about which
I saw a documentary in a hotel room in Tampa:
after World War II the East Germans didn't have any steel,
so they made cars out of cotton wool compressed
between layers of organic plastic
that has proved to be almost unbiodegradable.
I look out into the night and think, this could be East Berlin,
except it so obviously isn't, unless magnolias
and enormous oaks dripping with Spanish moss have been sighted
on the Alexanderplatz.
But we are in motion and I sit in my seat, pulled through
the night as if by a magnet
to an intersection in which I see that a low-slung black
Oldsmobile will run a red light
and plow into my side of our flimsy East German car
and the metaphysical and the physical worlds will have
to come to some kind of decision about my corporeal frame,
and I think maybe I don't want to walk
into that good night just yet.
I say to my husband, “That black car's not going to stop,”
and he slows down, even though we have the green light,
because I have authority in my voice,
authority bestowed on me by the red drink; in fact, I believe
the red drink has made me psychic,
because the black car doesn't stop.
We watch it sail through the deserted early-morning
intersection with wonder and astonishment,
or at least I do
for Death has passed me by, its chariot zooming toward Perry,
Florida, driven by a laughing young man with an Elvis
haircut and his blonde teenaged girlfriend.
Time passes, probably a few minutes, but it seems
interminable hours have stretched out before us.
We continue through the now empty intersection,
down an oak-lined street,
and turn to drive through the park,
but a red fox is in the middle of the rumpled
asphalt and stares into our headlights.
He has a message for me and for my husband
and the pretty spellbound students
and our Trollopian host
and the unconscious soon-to-be ensign,
and I should be able to hear it, but I'm giddy
with being alive, my arms chilled from the sleeve of death.