9

I DID not make a conscious decision to begin fasting. Within days after Carol had spent the night at my place, a terrible winter clamped itself down on Morgantown and hung on. The temperature dropped to well below freezing and stayed there. Instead of the usual flurries alternating with rain to turn the paths of the campus to mud-pie slush, the snow poured down and kept on coming—piled up, drifted, and clogged the streets until the campus looked like Siberia. Classes were cancelled, but I probably wouldn’t have gone to them even if they hadn’t been. Carol’s visit had left me so depressed I couldn’t do much of anything. That she’d forgotten her damnable high heels seemed like one of those mysterious accidents that isn’t an accident at all. I kept digging into myself, looking for the tiny green shoot of hope that had sustained me after Cohen and Cassandra’s visit, but I couldn’t find it. My mind seemed as hopelessly contracted as the mercury in the thermometer nailed to the wall outside my door, and the snowstorm was the last straw. I’d run out of food; even worse, I’d run out of beer, but I couldn’t force myself to go outside.

I searched my kitchen and the best I could come up with was half a box of stale Ritz crackers and the green tea Cohen had given me as a parting gift. I ate the crackers and drank the tea. In an attempt to escape into another world, I read Rilke. It was a mistake, I thought, to study him in a university course. I was certainly learning a lot more German grammar, but I’d lost something of the wild excitement his poetry had generated in me when I’d first discovered it, and I wanted to experience that again. I read Rilke until nearly four in the morning.

I woke far too early the next day, sick with the kind of steel-edged hunger that won’t put up with any nonsense, the kind that says: DROP EVERYTHING YOU’RE DOING AND EAT SOMETHING NOW. I piled on several layers of sweaters and ventured outside. It had stopped snowing, but most of the sidewalks hadn’t been cleared. I slogged up to Johnny’s, but he was closed. Instead of trying to find the nearest open grocery store, I took off, driven by an obscure anger, walking quickly, sliding and nearly falling, panting, pushing myself hard, up to the elevation where Cohen and I had stood and watched the first snowfall in November. I found the sharpness of my hunger oddly satisfying, and that’s when it occurred to me that maybe I was fasting.

I’d learned enough Buddhism by then to know about “the beneficence of the mind-body unity”—that what altered the body altered the mind, or, as Lyle used to say, that the purpose of training is to make the flesh match the spirit. “You’ve got to get light,” he used to tell me, and he hadn’t been talking merely about physical weight. I needed a major change in my life, and I was sick to death of waiting for it. I needed that change, not sometime in the constantly receding future, but right now. On the way back to my apartment, I bought oranges and apples. I’d read somewhere that fruit is good for you when you’re fasting.

The first two days were truly unpleasant. The hunger never let up. I had sick headaches. I rationed out my oranges and apples, tried to stretch out the time between them. I drank tea and huge amounts of water. I kept coming back to Rilke and making entries in my notebook. I began to have extraordinarily vivid dreams. On the third day, I found myself seeing the world with a strange euphoric hard-edged clarity. My hunger was beginning to feel almost pleasurable—something to push my mind against like an inner knife blade. I vowed to walk in the snow for at least an hour a day no matter how bad I felt.

My mind kept making brilliant leaps, and I knew that I couldn’t have achieved such speed and clarity with food weighing me down. Lines of Rilke’s came burning up from the page and went sizzling straight through me. “Du im Voraus vorlorne Geliebte, Nimmergekommene . . . You’re already lost, beloved . . . never going to get here . . .” Yes, I thought. “Ah, you were the garden. I saw you with such hope.” Yes, yes.

The world had never looked sharper or brighter, and I understood why religious seekers have always fasted: everything was charged with meaning. I wanted to keep on going until I achieved a state that was as pure and clean and brilliantly focused as sunlight reflecting back from a mirror.

• • •

MORGANTOWN RETURNED to normal; the temperature went up, the rains came back, and the snow began to melt. Walking became easier. I had infinite energy. I walked for hours. Eating a whole orange or apple began to feel obscene; I ate either a single segment of an orange or a thin slice of apple, but never both at once, and I forced myself to wait at least an hour before allowing myself to eat again. Even though I kept the gas heater turned up high in my apartment all the time, I could never get warm enough. Taking endless showers, I used up all the hot water so often that the guys upstairs complained. I knew that Cohen was the only person who would understand what I was experiencing. I wrote him a long letter. A few days later I read it again and thought it was too extreme, too melodramatic—and too presumptuous. I’d said that I was sure I was right on the edge of a major satori. I tore the letter up and threw it away.

It never occurred to me that it might be a good idea to go back to classes. I jotted my insights into my notebook and continued to read Rilke. I copied his enormously evocative lines about childhood onto a card and taped it to my wall: “O Stunden in der Kindheit, da hinter den Figuren mehr als nur Vergangnes war und vor uns nicht die Zukunft.” Having spent years doing my best not to remember my childhood—putting it all behind me—I was now trying to remember every detail, trying to recreate that numinous feeling when, as Rilke says, what was behind each image was more than merely the past and what lay before us was not the future.

I kept running into huge holes in my memory and wondered what might be lost in there. Mere trivia? Or maybe something repressed but absolutely essential—something that might hold the key to my entire personality? I took the picture of me as Alice down from my altar to young girls, laid it on my desk, and shone the full light of my gooseneck lamp on it. What I wanted was impossible. I wanted to stare at that picture until I melted back into it.

• • •

I COULDN’T remember where my mother had found the dress, apron, wig, and petticoat. Maybe she’d rented them from a costume store. I clearly remembered borrowing the black patent Mary Janes from a girl named Cindy Douglas who lived two houses down from us. If our moms had been involved, I would have been too embarrassed to go through with it, but they hadn’t been; I’d simply walked over to Cindy’s house and asked her. She was a grade ahead of me, part of that familiar group of people called “the neighbors,” and we’d known each other forever. Until I’d grown old enough to realize that boys shouldn’t do things like that, Cindy and I used to spend whole afternoons playing with her dolls, and sometimes playing dress-up—which we’d both had enough sense to keep secret—so I knew her shoes fit me. She wasn’t the least bit surprised to hear that I wanted to be Alice, but they were the shoes she wore to parties and church, and she was reluctant to lend them: “Promise not to get them dirty. Cross your heart and hope to die.” I thought it was really nice of her to trust me, and I was careful not to get them dirty. Before I gave them back to her, I polished them, first with a damp cloth and then with a dry one, wiping away even my fingerprints.

I couldn’t remember what had attracted me to Alice in Wonderland in the first place. I took the book out of the WVU library, brought it home and read it, found it to be witty and occasionally wildly funny. As a child, I hadn’t felt that way about it at all. My mother had read it to me a chapter a night, and it had felt like an enormous saga, stretching out in all directions into infinity. It hadn’t been the least bit funny then, but rather a magical journey—fascinating, bizarre, and sometimes deeply frightening. Yes, the Tenniel illustrations were the smudgy drawings I remembered, and maybe I had used them as guidelines for my costume, but I didn’t feel any electricity coming from them, not a flicker of anything that would have said to me when I’d been seven: “You absolutely have to be Alice.” But I seemed to remember another book.

All of my childhood toys and books had vanished long ago, so I couldn’t simply go home to Raysburg and look on the shelf. I went back to the library, to the stacks where I’d found Alice. I could see at once that there were a number of different editions. I was prepared to look through them all, but I didn’t have to do that. The third book I pulled off the shelf was the one. On the cover was a picture of Alice and her cat. The moment I saw it, the world went spinning out from under me and I had to catch the nearest shelf to steady myself.

In the earliest years of my childhood, I’d believed that some storybook characters were real people; I’d certainly thought that Alice was a real little girl. I now recognized in the Tenniel illustrations an element of caricature; when I’d been a child, I’d simply thought that whoever did those pictures couldn’t draw very well. But the illustration on the cover of that other book was exactly what I’d thought the real Alice looked like. I might even have taken the painting for a photograph. The illustrator, someone named Gwynedd M. Hudson, had moved Alice forward in time, and her Alice could easily have been one of my classmates at Jefferson Grade School—could, in fact, have been my first love, Nancy Clark.

Hudson’s Alice was posed, standing just in front of her cat, exactly like a real little girl waiting to have her picture taken. Her house looked remarkably like our house. I could see, through an archway off to the right, a window seat exactly like ours. (It was a spot where I used to lie for hours and read.) Like Tenniel’s Alice, Hudson’s wore her long hair brushed straight back from her forehead, but it was held with a modern hairband. When I was little, you could tell a girl’s age by her skirt length; Tenniel’s Alice wore a skirt that was, to my eye, far too long, but Hudson’s Alice had it just right—above her knees where it ought to be—and she wasn’t wearing long stockings with her patent leather shoes, but, just like any real girl I knew, little white socks. But the final touch that made her look so much like an ordinary little girl was the way she was standing: facing the viewer, her toes pointed straight ahead, one leg supporting her weight and the other bent slightly, her knees pressed together in a shy, modest, intensely girlish pose. She looked so sweetly awkward I knew she had to be real.

I laid the book with the Hudson illustration on my desk next to the picture of me. I took down my class picture from the second grade and put that on my desk. Now I had me as a boy holding hands with Nancy Clark, Nancy Clark herself, the “real” Alice, and me as Alice. I remembered that wearing the dress, even the petticoats, hadn’t felt the least bit strange but perfectly natural. Much like Hudson’s Alice, I was facing the camera, but I hadn’t imitated her girlish pose. I was standing with my feet about a foot apart. Looking at that picture, I realized that I hadn’t been imitating a little girl, I’d become one. I didn’t have to prove anything to anybody, didn’t need to pose in an unnatural position with my knees pressed together. Because I was a girl, I could stand any way I pleased. My absolute conviction—based on an equally absolute ignorance of human anatomy—came through strongly in the picture.

As a boy, I’d been far less sure of myself. For my second-grade class picture, I was wearing a plaid flannel shirt and what appeared to be corduroy pants. My hair was neatly combed but, from the point of view of most adults at the time, far too long. I wasn’t the shortest boy in the picture, but I was certainly the thinnest, so underweight I looked sickly. My face was inwardly focused, closed off, unreadable.

All of the girls in my class picture were wearing dresses, most of them nothing fancy—patterned fabrics, stripes and tartans— but a few, like Nancy, were in party dresses. Nancy’s mother must have worked on her interminably to get her ready for the class photo; even in that small image, each separate ringlet was clearly visible. Nancy was already an experienced performer, accustomed to being looked at and photographed; she was staring straight into the camera lens with a pretty girl’s prepared face that was just as unreadable as mine.

Neither of us was smiling. She appeared to be exactly my height. We were not trying to hide the fact that we were holding hands; we were doing just the opposite, raising our intertwined fingers toward the camera as though to make sure that everyone would notice.

I stared at those pictures, tried to put myself inside them, feel what I’d been feeling, think what I’d been thinking, but how much could I trust my own memory? I closed my eyes, searching for any evidence I could dredge up that was not merely a story I’d been telling myself over the years—not an embellishment, not an interpretation, not a falsification. What I wanted was a vivid image that would carry the weight of authenticity, and then, suddenly, I had it: my feet in black patent Mary Janes.

I’m dressed as Alice, standing at the back of the classroom, looking down at the floor. I can feel my hesitancy, confusion, embarrassment. Our class has just split into girls’ activities and boys’ activities, and I don’t know which way to go. I look up and see Nancy Clark. She’s some kind of princess: blue dress with a million petticoats, cardboard crown painted gold, rouge on her cheeks and bright red lipstick.

It’s Nancy who saves me. She takes my hand. “Come on, Alice, sit by me.”

Then that flicker of memory was gone, and I couldn’t find much of anything else beyond what I always remembered: that I stayed with the girls and no one objected, that by the end of the day, they were all calling me Alice. My memory of walking around the schoolyard holding hands with Nancy tells me it was spring by then—trees budding, warm electric feeling in the air— but Halloween was in the fall. Could Halloween have been the magical moment when Nancy and I first connected? And if it was, did that mean she’d liked me as a girl?

• • •

AS I moved into the second week of my fast, I knew that I had to give up my orange segments and apple slices. I’d been pampering myself, trying to ease into things gradually, but all I’d done was avoid the clear burning heart of fasting. What was required was a purity as intensely focused as Bodhidharma’s when—in the legend—he’d cut off his own eyelids so he wouldn’t fall asleep when meditating. Suffering arises from attachment, and what was required of me was obvious, was Zen simplicity itself: Do not eat anything. I had only two oranges and two apples left, but I threw them into the garbage—and felt a wave of dark grief. Of course freedom was painful. What else had I expected?

Since I’d left high school, I’d been developing a little beer belly, but now it was melting away. Hollow spaces were appearing under my cheekbones; so that I could see them better, I shaved off my sideburns. I hadn’t thought about losing weight, but now that it was happening to me, I was delighted. I began to spend long periods of time staring at myself in the mirror. Maybe, I thought, I would eventually become so thin that I would be able to see the sharp lines of my stomach muscles under the skin. Yes, that was possible. Anything was possible. Every object in the world radiated a fierce, nearly murderous power, and I felt myself just on the edge of being able to comprehend that power, absorb it, use it. Maybe that’s what Cohen had meant when he’d said, you’re alive.

I knew now that there had always been a great gulf fixed between myself—the thing that I called my self—and life. My self was a puzzle, a double-sided demonic construction that was irresolvable by ordinary means. I could not think my way out of my dilemma; I could not even feel my way out of it, but I could sense that there was plenty of power available in the world. If I kept on fasting, I might be able to tap into it. I now recognized my experience with Cassandra at the top of North High Street as a tiny satori, and it had been one of the most profound experiences of my life. So what would the big one be like? Incomprehensible. Far beyond words. A psychic lightning strike. And that was exactly what I needed. Sex is absolutely irrelevant to an enlightened being.

• • •

I WENT through my back issues of Seventeen, cut out more pictures of slender adolescent girls, and taped them to my walls. I thought of them as “muses.” I retrieved Carol’s high heels from the back of my closet and arranged them like art objects on my altar to young girls; surrounded by candles, their gleaming black surfaces reflected the light beautifully. I wrote in my notebook. I stared at my pictures. I stared at myself. Something deeply significant was about to happen. But I was also getting dizzy spells when I’d have to lie down. Walking was becoming difficult. I was running out of energy, but I didn’t let that stop me. Do not eat anything.

I’d never had such trouble sleeping. Falling asleep was easy— I was drifting off a dozen times a day—but I couldn’t stay asleep for very long. Bad dreams kept waking me up. I wandered through ominous buildings with endless corridors. I took strange trips on mysterious Greyhound buses that didn’t seem to have drivers. But the dreams that really annoyed me—because I thought they were beneath me—were about food. Like a rat, I skulked into dark corners and gobbled up whatever the dream gave me: cheeseburgers, spaghetti, fried chicken. I sat down with my family at Grandmother Dupre’s and ate one of her enormous Sunday dinners, the ones that had two kinds of meat, two kinds of potatoes, and both cake and pie for dessert. I ate with manic speed, shoved in the food and kept on eating. I was never satisfied, always woke up hungry, disgusted for having betrayed myself, even in my dreams. Hunger was my friend, my constant companion. Do not eat anything.

Some of my dreams were genuine nightmares that woke me to a racing heartbeat and an icy panic. I wrote some of them into my notebook. This was one of the most vivid ones:

• • •

I’M IN Zoë’s bedroom. (In real life, I’ve walked by her open door many times, but I’ve never stepped through it.) Looking at myself in a full-length mirror, it occurs to me that I should be wearing one of Zoë’s dresses. It’s a kind of joke. I open her closet and see the blue dress she’d been wearing the night I’d kissed her under the mistletoe. I take off my own clothes, put on the dress, and it fits me perfectly. I’m thinking, this can’t be right, nobody’s going to think it’s funny, but I can’t quite remember why I shouldn’t be doing it. Then I’m downstairs. There’s a party going on. It’s Cassandra’s living room, but it seems able to hold an infinite number of people. Everybody I’ve ever known in my life is there—except for Zoë. It’s important to me that I find her, and I keep looking for her, but she’s nowhere to be seen. I keep trying to think of something I can say that will explain why I’m wearing her dress, but nobody’s paying the least bit of attention to me. I push through the screen door and step out onto the front porch. It’s like the front porch of Cassandra’s house, but it’s also like the front porch of our house on the Island and the front porch of my Allen Street apartment. I immediately feel the pressure of summer: high hot sun, smell of vegetation, trees in full leaf, and I think: Herr: es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr gross. It’s a line from Rilke, but in the dream it feels as though it’s my own thought, something that has just occurred to me: “Lord, it is time. The summer was so full.” Then I see that there’s someone sitting on the glider on the porch. I step tentatively forward. It feels very quiet: the middle of an eternal afternoon of a huge summer. I see that it’s a girl. She’s sitting with her feet up on the porch railing and her head turned away from me so that I can’t see her face. All I can see is a sweep of long beautiful hair. I’m painfully aware of wearing Zoë’s dress. I hear the sound of my own breathing, and I know that soon the girl will turn and look at me. I’m instantly awake, sitting up in bed, my heart pounding. Deeply frightened. Panting. Still trying to figure out what was so frightening, still can’t find words for it.

• • •

I THOUGHT that the girl in the dream might have been Natalie, so I wrote her a long letter. It took me hours, but once I finished it, I tore it up. I went for a long walk, came back, sorted through my photographs, and found the two that I’d been remembering. One was of Natalie at Waverly Park; she was wearing a white dress shirt borrowed from me, jeans, and the cowboy boots she’d bought at the Jamboree Shop. She had on no makeup whatsoever. She was standing with her feet wide apart, her jeans low on her hips, her thumbs tucked into her belt just below her hip bones, facing the camera, leaning against an oak tree. “Don’t smile,” I’d told her. She’d tried not to, but the smile had gone to her eyes.

The other picture had been taken by a professional photographer at the prom. Natalie was wearing her baby-pink formal, her white shoulder-length gloves, and lots of make-up. I’d been standing to the left of the photographer, and Natalie was looking directly at me, giving me the kind of smile any boy would be delighted to get from a girl he liked. Each picture seemed incomplete without the other. I taped them up side by side. I was fully aware of what I was doing, what those pictures meant: Natalie as a boy, Natalie as a girl.

• • •

I’D BEEN sleeping an hour or two whenever I’d felt like it, and I’d gradually become separated from the rhythms of the ordinary world. I kept the drapes in my apartment closed all the time, so the only way I could tell whether it was day or night was to go outside and look. I began to feel as detached from my body as though it were a sullen mass of modeling clay, mucilage, and old bones. Eventually I couldn’t walk for much longer than ten minutes, and my sleep began to have a nasty sick drugged quality to it. After a burst of letter writing—another one to Natalie, then one to Cassandra, and another one to Cohen—I didn’t write anything. Even making notes took more energy than I could scrape up. I was, I had to admit, feeling terrible—downright ghastly, as a matter of fact—but there was only one thing I could trust, only one thing that would never fail me, and that was the tiny burning center of my own will saying: Do not eat anything.

The last in my series of dreams was the most frightening of all. I didn’t write it down, but I remember it clearly. It began in such an ordinary way that it didn’t feel like a dream at all. I woke up in the night, knew that I couldn’t go back to sleep, sat up and lit the light. Everything in my room looked perfectly ordinary. I got up, put on my bathrobe, and wandered around my apartment wondering how I was going to kill the time; the only thing I could think to do was walk. Without giving it a second thought, I picked up Carol’s patent leather shoes from the top of my bookcase and slipped my bare feet into them. They fit me so perfectly they could have been made for me, and I was surprised that I’d never worn them before. I put on my coat over my bathrobe, stepped outside into the night, and began walking toward campus.

It was bitterly cold, far colder than any night had a right to be in Morgantown, West Virginia. The sky was clear with the inky black of infinity; the stars appeared bigger than usual and were glittering savagely. Wearing Carol’s high heels made walking a challenge, and that, I realized, was the point. It was a test. I had to walk like a girl, and, like a girl figure skater, I was being judged on my form. But, like a boy runner, I was also being timed. The text was extremely difficult because it had those two elements: a girl’s grace and a boy’s speed.

I walked to the hill above the stadium and back again. I knew that I had scored very well on the test, perhaps better than anyone else had ever done. Pleased with myself, I stepped into my apartment, took off Carol’s shoes and put them back on my bookcase, undressed and got into bed.

I woke several hours later feeling groggy, sluggish, and sick. The dream had been so real that I had to check to see if I could really wear Carol’s shoes. Of course I couldn’t; I didn’t even come close. All I wanted to do was take a hot shower and go back to sleep, but I knew I had to walk. I put on my coat and stepped outside. In the snow, from my door to the end of the alley and back, were footprints—delicate heart shapes from the ball of the foot, tiny puncture marks from the heels. For a moment I thought I might still be dreaming; then I knew that I wasn’t. I checked Carol’s shoes against the prints in the snow. They matched perfectly.

Then, with a brilliant flash of insight, I understood exactly what had happened. I’d slipped through the time continuum. It was easy enough to do; the only surprising thing was that it didn’t happen to people more often. I had been the girl that Cohen and I had tracked into that cul-de-sac behind Woodburn Hall. Of course we hadn’t been able to catch up to her. If I had met myself, it would have caused a cataclysmic disturbance in the continuum, an atomic explosion at the level of time rather than at the level of space—utter devastation.

I came back inside and threw myself onto my bed, still with my coat on. I couldn’t tell if what I was feeling was cold or fear, but I was shaking all over. Even my teeth were chattering. As I was lying there trying to find a way out of the cul-de-sac, I fell asleep. When I woke again, I felt even worse. I was glad I was still wearing my coat. It didn’t seem possible for someone to freeze to death while wearing a coat in a small apartment with the gas heater on high, but I felt as though that’s what I was doing. I made tea and drank several cups. I took a hot shower, dressed, and looked outside. There were no footprints. It hadn’t snowed for days.

I was truly desperate. I had to do something, but I couldn’t figure out what. Then I saw my guitar standing in the corner. I hadn’t played it since Carol had spent the night. That was odd. Hardly a day went by when I didn’t play it for at least a few minutes.

I picked it up and tuned it. Without my conscious thought guiding them, my fingers began to pick out “The House Carpenter.” The sound of it, the feeling of the strings under my fingers, was wonderful. Why hadn’t I played my Martin? Where had I been? Except for a few words on the maintenance level necessary to buy something or check a book out of the library, I hadn’t spoken with another human being since Carol had been there. Except for a half a box of Ritz crackers and my carefully rationed oranges and apples, I hadn’t eaten anything for days— how many days I couldn’t quite remember, but I knew that I was well into my second week. Maybe I’d even entered my third. I put my guitar down, stood next to the gas heater trying to get warm (I knew it was hopeless) and asked myself how I was feeling— asked the question in a clear detached way. I answered myself in exactly the same way. The best I could tell, I was feeling sick and crazy. Sartre was wrong, I thought. Hell isn’t other people. Hell is the inside of your own head.

I could do anything. Of the many things I could do, one of them was to keep on fasting until I died. I called Marge Levine.

If Carol had answered, I would have hung up, but Marge got it on the first ring. “Hey, asshole,” she said, “do you know what time it is?”

Of course I didn’t know what time it was. Panicked, I stepped partway into the kitchen to look at the clock on the stove. “It’s six-thirty,” I said. “If you’re having dinner, I’ll call back.”

“Dinner? What the hell are you talking about? I haven’t even had breakfast.”

Shit, I thought, it must be morning.

“Look, I’m sorry,” I said, “but I’m kind of . . . I don’t know . . . in a bad way,” and then, as though someone had opened a sluice gate, words came pouring out of me: the beauty of fasting, Bodhidharma’s eyelids, the sharpness and clarity of the world, on the edge of breakthrough, possibly even a satori, fantastic insights, flashbulbs going off in my mind, but weird places, cul de sacs, kind of scary . . .

“John, wait a minute. What do you mean, fasting?”

“You know. Fasting. A spiritual discipline. All over the world religious seekers have always fasted . . .”

“Shut up. Do you mean it literally? Not eating? You’ve gone a couple days without eating?”

“Oh, no,” I said proudly, “it’s been more than just a couple days. It’s been at least two weeks.”

“You’re kidding. You’re crazy.”

“Oh, no, no, no. It’s been great . . . It’s just . . . Well, you know . . . when your dreams and your waking life get kind of mixed up . . . and you get kind of lost . . .”

“What do you mean, lost?”

Frustrated at trying to translate myself into something somebody else might understand, I yelled at her: “I’ve got myself into a really weird place. I’ve got to get out of this weird place.”

She took me literally. Her sharp penetrating voice came crackling out of the telephone: “What are you talking about, John? Dropping out of school?”

“Oh, God, no,” I said. “I mean a place in my mind.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” There was a long pause, and then she said, her voice lowered to a whisper, “Look, I really can’t talk right now. Give me half an hour, and then meet me at Johnny’s.”

• • •

IT WAS not a long walk from my place to Johnny’s, but I was so sick I had to keep stopping to catch my breath. Johnny’s was packed with students having breakfast, but Marge had nailed down a table at the back. The first thing she said to me was, “Christ, you look like hell.”

She ordered scrambled eggs, toast, and a chocolate milkshake. “I’m your Jewish mother, asshole. Now eat!” I sipped the milkshake. Within minutes I felt the sugar hitting me. It was like an electrical current I could feel throughout my entire body. I began to eat the eggs, taking small bites. Nothing in my life had ever tasted as good as those stringy overcooked eggs. “Now tell me what’s going on,” Marge said.

I tried again. It was hard to explain. Words really were no damned good. I heard myself wandering off into elaborate excursions: Rilke, the I Ching, seeing into one’s own nature, intensely vivid dreams . . .

“Wait a minute,” she said, interrupting me, “when did you start this craziness?”

“In the big snow. When they closed the campus. It was right after Carol pulled that all-nighter at my place and . . .”

“She did what?”

“You know, she had a paper to write. She came over to my place.”

“She came over to your place to write a paper?”

Marge’s eyes narrowed, and she looked out across the crowded restaurant at nothing. “Was she all dressed up?” she asked me.

“Oh, yeah. She had on a black sheath.”

Marge remembered that night quite clearly, she said. Carol had told her that she was going to a party, that she was going to spend the night with Andrew. She’d left with him. None of that made any sense to me, and I said so. “Oh, my God, and she told me a friend dropped her.”

“Seems pretty weird to me too,” Marge said, “seeing as she hadn’t spent the night with him before . . . and she hasn’t since. So she gets him to drop her at your place, huh? My God, what on earth could she have told him? . . . It was supposed to make him jealous, of course . . . So what happened? Did you do anything? You know what I mean.”

I wasn’t sure that it was any of her business, but I said, “Well . . . no.”

“What did you do?”

I didn’t answer.

“Come on, buddy,” she said, “I’m just like Sergeant Friday . . . All I want’s the facts.”

“She wrote her paper and we talked.”

“Talked? What did you talk about?”

Again I didn’t answer.

“Oh, you don’t have to tell me, but I bet it wasn’t lots of fun, was it?”

I laughed. Then I realized that it had been a long time since I’d found anything funny. “No,” I said, “it wasn’t lots of fun.”

I was finally getting warm. I kept eating bits of egg and toast, sipping the milkshake. Eventually I began to get downright hot. I started to sweat. I had to take off my coat. Marge had fallen silent. I could almost see the cogs turning over in her mind.

“Why have you been wasting your time on that little bitch?” she said. “Sure, she’s pretty and bright, and she’s also . . . Who needs it? I mean really? . . . It’s too bad Natalie didn’t go to school here. You seemed happy with Natalie.”

“I was happy with Natalie.” My eyes filled with tears. “Sorry,” I said, “I’m kind of fucked up.”

She let her hand rest on the back of mine. “Listen, John, you should have called me a long time ago . . . You’ve read Mills. If there’s one man who can’t find a job, that’s a personal problem. If there’s hundreds of men who can’t find a job, that’s a social problem. How many students do you think there are . . . all over campus . . . feeling lonely and isolated, going quietly crazy?”

I couldn’t believe she was talking about C. Wright Mills. What the hell did he have to do with anything? She was asking me what would happen if all the fucked-up kids in America got together and understood that they didn’t have merely personal problems. As I always did, I appreciated her passion—although I couldn’t see how anything she was saying applied to me. I couldn’t imagine any problem more personal than mine.

“If you ever get yourself in another mess like this,” she said, “call me, OK? You’re not alone. And I want you to promise me something. Just take it on faith for now, OK? Don’t see Carol again. I mean, not for any reason at all. Not even for a Coke. Don’t even talk to her on the phone. If you call our place and she answers, just ask for me and leave it at that. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

I did understand. Far better than she might have guessed. “Yeah,” I said, “I’ve got it.”

“You’ve got to stop isolating yourself. Go back to classes. Come to SDS meetings. Play your guitar. Visit your friends. Find yourself another Natalie. There’s a whole crop of freshman girls you haven’t checked out. Come on, buddy, get with it.”

• • •

I’D NEVER felt as grateful to anyone as I did to Marge Levine. She’d brought me back down to earth. But how had I allowed myself to drift so far away? I thought I’d been paying attention to the I Ching, but I obviously hadn’t been. It had told me not to be alone. Now I was going to call Cohen and Cassandra.

I bought groceries, enough to fill two bags, and it damn near killed me to haul them back to my apartment. The moment I walked in, the heat nearly knocked me over. I’d been keeping the windows shut tight, the drapes drawn, and my gas heater on high. It must have been over eighty degrees in there. Oh, God, I thought, how am I going to pay my gas bill? I turned the heater off, opened my windows, and put the groceries away. I wasn’t hungry, but I wanted to keep the nutrients coming, so I drank a glass of milk. I was yawning, my eyes watering; my mind felt thick and useless. If I didn’t go to sleep soon, I might simply fall over where I was standing. I crawled into bed and was gone.

I slept nearly ten hours. It was a good sleep, a deep sleep, the best sleep I’d had in weeks. The sound of my telephone ringing woke me up sometime in the afternoon, but I couldn’t think of any reason why I should answer it. I woke again to the sound of the rain falling steadily in the alley outside my open window. I loved that sound. Eventually I got up, walked out into the alley, lit a cigarette, and stared up into the rainy grey sky. I felt almost human. I knew I was going to be all right.

I heated up a can of mushroom soup and ate it slowly. It tasted so good I could have written a poem in praise of it. I looked around. Debris littered the floor in every room: scraps of paper, cut up magazines, rejected and crumpled up letters, dirty socks and underwear, jeans and shirts, damp towels. The place stunk of cigarettes, moldy tea bags, and my own misery. While I’d been fasting—while I’d been gone—I’d spent hours, day after day, poring through fashion magazines, clipping out pictures and taping them up. Behind my altar to young girls the images fanned out in the shape of a peacock’s tail. They filled up every inch on the wall all the way to the ceiling, continued around the corner and invaded the other wall. They’d begun to appear in the kitchen and my bedroom. Girls. My God, I thought, the guy who’s been living here was crazy as a bedbug.

The rainy wind blowing through my windows wasn’t enough; I wanted a torrent of air. I opened my door. I needed to clean up the mess. I started by peeling the pictures off my walls. I was standing on a chair, stripping off a girl near the ceiling, when I heard the bang, bang, bang of hard leather heels coming down the alley. I jumped down off the chair just as Carol walked in. “You bastard,” she said, “just what do you think you’re doing?”

She stopped in the middle of my living room, rain streaming from the gleaming red surface of her raincoat. She was so angry she was panting. “Why the hell don’t you answer your goddamned telephone?”

I felt my stomach clench into a knot. I finally understood something I should have known for a long time: I was frightened of her. “What are you doing here?” I said.

“How dare you?” she said, not yelling, but slamming the words out hard. “How dare you go around telling people it’s all my fault?”

“Wait a minute. What are you talking about?”

“It’s not my fault. How dare you say that? I tried to be your friend. I feel utterly betrayed.”

I could not imagine anything I might have done to betray her. All I could do was stare at her.

“Did you think I’d just let it go? Did you think you could tell any lies you pleased and get away with it? Did you think about me at all? Obviously not . . . It’s time you faced up to yourself, John. Go over to the medical center and see a psychiatrist. That’s what they’re there for. But, please, in the future just leave me out of it. Do you want to know how I feel? Do you even care?”

Take a deep breath, I told myself. Go slow. Take it one step at a time. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I honest to God don’t. What do you think I’ve been saying about you?”

“You’re dropping out of school, aren’t you? Isn’t that your latest brilliant plan? And it’s supposed to be all my fault, isn’t it? That’s what you told Marge, isn’t it? Oh, the bitch. I always knew she was jealous of me, but I didn’t know she hated me that much.”

“Carol, stop it. Just shut up for a minute, all right? What did Marge say?”

“She wasn’t going to tell me anything. ‘It’s none of your business, Carol. It doesn’t concern you.’ Oh, the bitch. But when you called this morning, I heard her say, ‘dropping out of school,’ and I knew it. I’ve seen it coming for months. So, were you going to tell me? Or were you just going to leave town and let me find out later? After you’d told everybody that it’s all my fault?”

It was so far-fetched, and at the same time so weirdly plausible, that I had to laugh. “I’m not dropping out of school. That’s ridiculous.”

She stared at me. “You don’t have to lie to me.”

“What on earth do you think I said to Marge? I never told Marge that anything was your fault.”

I could see her hesitating. “Nobody has ever . . . How dare she? Nobody talks to me like that! She has an opinion on everything. ‘I don’t care whether you want to hear it or not, Carol, you’re going to hear it.’ Well, screw her. Who does she think she is?”

I was beginning to get the picture. It was all I could do not to laugh again. “How about me? What is it I’m supposed to have said?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, John, you obviously gave her an earful. She told me to stay away from you. ‘You let him alone, Carol. I mean it.’ What did you tell her? How could you do that to me?”

“I didn’t tell her anything. I know she doesn’t like you. I wouldn’t tell her anything about you.”

She looked away from me. For a moment, her face looked oddly pinched, turned inward, and I felt a small victory. I didn’t need to be afraid of her. What could she possibly do to me? “Carol,” I said, “this is my place. I didn’t invite you here. Would you please go home now?”

She deliberately unzipped her raincoat, slipped it off, and handed it to me. Stupidly, I took it and hung it up in the hallway. “Oh, John,” she said in the voice of the teaching assistant, “whatever am I going to do with you?”

• • •

I DO not want Carol in my apartment, and, strangely enough, I’m not sure she wants to be here either. I’ve seen her grey suit before; it’s one of her favorites. There’s a pair of grey heels that goes with it, but she’s wearing penny loafers instead—probably because she walked over. And I’ve seen her standing like this before: a peculiar stiffness in the way she holds herself, in the way she moves, as though the muscles in her lower back are contracted as tightly as door springs. Circling my living room, she studies the garbage bags, the cartons, the stacked up papers and books, the pictures and notes I’ve taped to my walls—and the ones I’ve begun to tear down. For the last half hour she’s been giving me a lecture on why I shouldn’t drop out of school. I’ve been telling her that I have no intention of dropping out of school, but she obviously doesn’t believe me. “Could you close the door?” she says, “It’s freezing in here.”

I close the door and the windows. “Could you light the fire please?”

“No. I like it the way it is.”

She sighs. “You don’t have to be mean.” Our eyes meet. “You’re a terrible liar, you know.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

I don’t know how much longer I can put up with her, but for the moment I appear to be stuck with her. Relenting, I kneel at the gas heater and light it. I look at her and feel the same electricity I’ve always felt; I could never convince myself that she is anything other than beautiful. Marge was right; I shouldn’t be seeing her. She shoves a stack of books off my big chair; they fall with a bang, and she sinks into it, still holding her back rigidly upright. “Carol,” I say, trying it again, “I’ve got a lot to do, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d go home.”

“Oh, God,” she says, “you’re impossible. Give me a cigarette, will you?”

I pound one out of my pack and light it for her. “So what do you think you’re going to do with yourself?” she says.

I retreat to the far side of the room and say nothing. “Well, you must have planned something,” she says. “I can’t understand what you could possibly be thinking. The university is just made for people like you . . . You’re so impractical, what on earth do you think you’re going to do?”

“I’m not dropping out . . . Come on, Carol, it’s true. Believe me, believe me, believe me. I’m not going anywhere.”

She looks at me, smiling. Infuriatingly smug. “I don’t know why you think you have to lie to me. I know you, John. This is one of your big, dramatic, romantic gestures. Utterly stupid. Utterly self-destructive. And somehow you’re blaming it on me. And it’s just not fair. I can’t help the way things are, and neither can you.”

We look at each other across the space of the room. Outside, the rain falls; inside, the gas heater hisses. There’s a warning note sounding somewhere in the back of my mind; I can feel it as a tingle on my neck, my arms.

I have to find some way to get her out of here. I dump her high heels onto her lap. “Oh, my God, I’ve been looking for these. Where’d you get them?”

“You left them here.”

“I left them here?” with a light tinkling laugh.

“Yes, you left them here. How the hell else do you think they got here? It was when you pulled that goddamn all-nighter . . .”

“OK, OK, don’t be angry.”

I’m not just angry, I’m furious. “Carol, for God’s sake, just go home, will you? I really don’t want you here. I can’t make it any plainer than that.”

A flash of anger in her eyes. Maybe she’s going to blow her role as the infinitely mature older woman. She puffs on her cigarette. Eventually she butts it out. “All right, I won’t bother you any more. But first, I want you to tell me just what the hell you think you’re doing. You owe me that much.”

I feel something in me snap. I’ll say anything to get her out of my apartment. “Oh, for Christ’s sake. I’m going to hitchhike to Florida. I’m going to tan myself dark as a buckeye. I’m going to work in a hot dog stand. I’m going to sit on my ass and play the guitar. I’m going to write the great American novel . . . All right? Now will you please just get the hell out of here?”

She sighs again, says in her most superior, big-sisterly voice: “Oh, John, it takes so terribly long to get any insight into yourself, and . . . You’re not going to solve anything by running away, you know. No matter where you go, you’re still going to have to face yourself.”

“Look, Carol, I don’t want to talk to you right now. Maybe I’ll talk to you later, and maybe I won’t. But will you just take your goddamn patent leather high heels and go home?”

She stands up abruptly. “I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve this, I really don’t.”

“Oh, Jesus. Just get the fuck out of here.”

“Please. You don’t have to swear at me. I’m going. Just remember, I tried to be your friend.” But she’s not walking toward the door. She’s walking over to my altar to young girls. She stands there studying it, then turns to me with her most glittering smile.

“You know, John,” she says, “your little schoolgirls . . . they must be very convenient for you. Not only do you get to pretend to be a mature older man, but you can date them, and even fool around with them . . . but you never have to do anything with them . . . You do know exactly what I mean, don’t you?”

I feel my body absorb the shock of it: something in my chest flinching away from her. I’ve had plenty of bleak thoughts about myself, God knows, but never that one, and she could very well be right, but that’s not the most terrible thing. It’s the cruelty of it.

She’s still smiling. She turns back to the wall, pretends to be studying the pictures. Cassandra. Natalie. “Oh,” she says, “and the other thing about little girls? They look an awful lot like little boys.”

I’m one jump ahead of her: sometimes little boys look like little girls. Now I understand what’s so frightening, so sickening, about what she’s doing. It’s not what she’s said—or anything else she might find to say. It’s the unmasking of her hatred. I still can’t react, can’t move, can’t speak. Something is telling me to fight back, defend myself. Two can play this rotten game. She might know my weaknesses, but I know hers too.

“And now you’re on your way to Florida,” she says in a softly purring voice. “How very nice. Dropping out of school. Giving it all up. You must be deeply in love with him.”

She’s moving too fast for me. My voice does work, although it comes out low and harsh: “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Bill Cohen . . . Oh, John,” and she laughs, “you’re so obviously in love with him.”

I grab the nearest thing I can get my hands on, a kitchen chair, and throw it, not at her, but at the far wall. It rebounds, skitters back, and falls. There’s a smear of red haze in front of my eyes. “Listen, you bitch!” I hear myself yelling. She’s looking up at me, her lips slightly parted, her face oddly shining and expectant.

I have always imagined that when the moment of revelation comes, it will require a mighty action, a heroic effort, a sprint to the finish. I have never imagined it like this. I hate her so much it’s like swallowing acid, but she’s just invoked Bill Cohen, and now that he’s in my mind, all I do is stop. Attachment makes you slow, he’d said. See the human being in front of you. I look into her eyes and think: equally empty, equally awake, equally a coming Buddha. And then it’s there like a beam of light. My God, I’ve been stupid and clumsy and slow. Why has it taken me so long to see the obvious? I’ve been like a sleepwalker.

I can still feel the adrenaline pounding through my body. I could easily do what she so badly wants me to do, what she’s wanted me to do for months: slap that frozen smirk off her lovely frightened face.

I turn away from what I see in her eyes and walk out into the alley. It’s raining hard, and I’m glad of that. I’ve always liked the rain. I crouch forward and cup my hands to get a cigarette lit. I stare up into the blue-black nothing of sky. It’s not merely an idea in my mind; I can feel the pressure of the past, my attachment to the past, my desire for something lost in the past. But the past is not a place, and nothing will undo the chain of events that brought us here. Carol has to do exactly what she is doing. I have to do exactly what I am doing. We will continue to do exactly what we are doing, making the same mistakes over and over again without ever learning from them, and even if we change masks, put down old ones, pick up new ones, the attachment will remain the same, and the suffering will remain the same, and the process will go on forever through endless cycles of death and rebirth. It’s true: the only thing worth studying is lock picking. Because Hell is not a literary conceit or a metaphor. Hell is not somewhere else. Hell is right here, and we’re living in it. We should, at the very least, have compassion for each other. God help us.

I don’t know what God I’m invoking, whether the Buddha in any of his incarnations or a more personal deity left over from my childhood, but I immediately feel an inner response and it’s exactly what I’ve been seeking—a clarity that has nothing to do with choice, a power that enters me from the outside. The message is unmistakable. I’ve got to get out of here, and I’m already gone.