Clearly Now, the Rain (13 page)

Of course, this was Serala in short: whereas this kind of philosophical debate would go well over a good wine and filet amid old university chums, Serala drained all the abstraction from it, because the answer could make all the difference.

Of course, we were already bombing Kabul.

Sixteen

It wasn't a week after I got back to Wilmington that Serala called in hysterics. I was sitting at my desk, fingers poised over some nascent essay, daydreaming out the window that framed a piece of my suburbia.

Why the fuck, why, Eli? Why if you say you love somebody would you hurt them? Why would you do fucking horrible things to them? How could you use your fucking hands against them? How?

I didn't try to coax the event out of her; I knew I couldn't, at least not that close in time. And I couldn't answer her questions, so I tried to soothe her with the insufficiency of
I love you's
and
I know's
and
I'm sorry's.
But after her tears dried, and I couldn't hear her sniffles anymore, and instead heard Springsteen's “Used Cars” faintly, and she started with small brushstrokes of self-restoration,
Got to get to work, everything in its place, suck it up, power through,
I allowed the call to end with a lame encouragement to
keep your head up
.

I could see her, driving—as I knew she had been by the wind and horns in the background—with both hands uncommonly on the wheel, trying to compensate with proper posture for the fact that she can't even see the road through her tears. The window is cracked for the constant cigarette, and the wind sucks all her loose locks of hair toward it. Her eyeliner has run so much she's not even fighting it anymore, bound to hide in a bathroom along the turnpike somewhere to redraw her eyes before she gets to work. I imagine she's going uncharacteristically slow, needing every moment possible between her and the job, all the questions from her employees, the myriad needs from her father's office, the whole banal nightmare chugging along just as it was yesterday; it's both symbolic and real that yesterday never ended for her. I imagine that she left a dark house where no one was awake, where they were, in fact, more than asleep, in the heavy Nothing after a binge. I imagine she had lain for several hours with red lines weaving through her eyes as some sick man snored next to her, a hand on her shoulder in sleepy care, no memory in his cells of how he'd treated her, what he'd done because maybe just as dreaming is the inverse of living, his need in dream is inverted, too, is to care for someone, use his hands sweetly. But Serala without the consolation of sleep, without the possibility of calling it a nightmare, has known instead that it is her life, and the anvil of resignation has sat on her chest, next to his hand, through all the small hours. Maybe there is also the ebbing relief of smack running laps through her body, but I suspect it had run out hours ago by the way she'd been weeping.

And in mid-reel, I chop this footage: I shake my head and look out the window at my sunny subdivision, where fat southerners cut their rectangles of grass with riding mowers outside their one-story brick houses, and the mailman waves to them and I can see him whistling, all of it just a pantomime from where I sit, but good enough to yank me out of my best friend's world that morning. And then, I'm sure, I go back to work on an essay, or grade some English Composition paper, or watch the awful news with my taciturn girlfriend.

Late that autumn Serala writes of her mother more honestly than she ever has.

Most troubling at that time, as the weather slogged into her worst part of the year, was that sleep became more elusive for her than it ever had been. But Serala had a bag of tricks to get her to dawn.

On the dark border between autumn and winter, one of the few people to whom I'd gotten moderately close in my time in Wilmington, a big-eyed and beautiful girl, tried to die and failed. I was upset and I reached out to Serala, but when I did I realized I had set her off, probably done more damage and made the season even worse.

Over Christmas, Mona flew home to California and I flew home to Seattle and my father—Luke was somewhere between Mexico and Panama. After hearing of my plans, Serala reported with uncharacteristic obfuscation that she was coming to visit Cassie in Seattle. But it was me who picked her up at the airport.

She climbs in, bundled in her peacoat, and looks at me, I'm relieved: her eyes are different than they were in October and the wake of 9/11, and it isn't merely the green contacts. She seems open again. But I'm also unnerved: she looks so magnetic to me that keeping my boundaries in place is sure to be a challenge.

We eat Thai food on University Avenue, a few blocks from her one-time apartment. While green neon light bleeds through the window, we push around topics (October, heroin, Mona, and writing) like the scraps of napkin she's tearing up and arranging on the table.

What should we do with this old town for the next couple days?
she asks, raising her eyebrows over the contacts, which is spellbinding really, which is why I look away as quick as she does, shrug.
I want to see your dad,
she says,
and not just in passing, but to really have some time.
I look at the creases in her hands that are folding and refolding her scarf now, feeling unaccountably embarrassed.

You should probably see him on your own, no?
I ask, hoping vaguely that she will disagree, but she doesn't. She nods like it makes sense and I know it does. And then our food comes.

She's shy with me a little that night, like we are on a date, and that arouses me. But I swallow my spicy soup and take her for a chaste evening of goofing around with Louis and his rambunctious dog—a simple affair of old college friends, none of this overwrought struggle with mortality, loyalty, ethics, or love. I shared a bed with her that night, though. I sucked down slack-jawed rest like a glutton while she no doubt sat nearby and watched, then slipped off to Cassie's in the morning.

The state schools' spring break fell in March and Mona and I headed for New Orleans for two days of wandering the Garden District and French Quarter, sampling Cajun dishes. The air hung like wet sheets and promised, already, that summer was coming. We strolled miles of Magazine Street and I slid into dark places for beers while she shopped in boutiques, the magic of the city enough to steal us from our own cycle of sniping misery.

And then my father called and told me it was time to put our dog Sky down. After fourteen years, cancer, the loss of a leg, arthritis, after thousands of miles of travel and many different homes, and holding the flame of our little three-man family like a hurricane lamp, she was finally done.

I sit at an outdoor café table, fight my tears with a cigarette—and lose. Mona faces me, her hands on my shoulders, until I let myself weep and then she does a little, too. She wants to share every shred of pain, wants to match me tear for tear, wants to give me her solidarity. The flipside of this desperate desire to enter me completely, to meld, is very unhealthy and damaging, but in this moment on a Cajun street with strangers all around, she's perfect. Finally, she pushes the salt from her eyes with a painted nail.

You have to go home,
she says
. You'll regret it forever if you don't. Go.

I know that Serala did not take the death of a dog lightly. I know that she was with us when we gathered, lit candles, said our farewells, and the gentle vet shot Sky's mainline full of blue poison and she breathed once and grew cold. I know Serala said a prayer about peace for her and helped us send her on.

My father's first grateful email was sent before I even landed again in North Carolina. And more followed, along with phone calls. He was desperate with the need to make Luke and me know the value of our visit, and to make sure we believed his intuition that Sky was still lingering. But he didn't take this as a bad sign, only a signal that he had to let her know it was okay to move on. My father was not a new age flake; he was, in fact, a cynic. But he rushed headlong into vague spiritualism, talking to Sky, writing her letters, doing whatever his equivalent of prayer might have been. If it struck Luke and me as odd, we probably chalked it up to the giddiness he felt, also, at being finally free—of caring for Sky and free also of OxyContin's hammer, having pulled off a switch to a lesser narcotic. And, indeed, he quickly assembled plans to travel to Ecuador, a country that had called to him for some time.

The night before he left, just a month after Sky died, he called me to say goodbye. He was excited about the trip, but he felt angry with the many friends who, instead of supporting his plan to reenter the world, tried to warn him away from adventure. They cited cautions that ranged from state department reports to the weather.

I swear, Eli, it's like these people that allegedly love me would rather I stay in this goddamn house for the rest of my days and wait for their phone calls.

I empathized, but I was whipped by a twelve-hour day and I begged off the phone, wishing him well and making sure he knew that he had my support for his adventure.

If I'd been paying attention, I might have suspected what was coming. As it was I was uncharacteristically happy and oblivious on that Friday morning, April 12, 2002. I was eating crepes with Mona while the dogs tumbled around, the cat hunted lizards, and the news unrolled the story of the coup in Venezuela—
next door to my dad,
I thought, vaguely. Mona answered the phone. Then her brow furrowed. Then she turned white and handed over the receiver.

The consulate was formal, then almost tender.
Your father died of an apparent pulmonary embolism,
she said,
here in Quito this morning.

Part  Three

Seventeen

I sat in a beachside bar alone that night, pouring Coronas I didn't taste down my throat and thinking about my father's bills, his business, his mortgage, his body. A gaggle of logistical stand-ins for the rages and sadness that I was due.

Serala would know what I meant if I said “numb.” She'd know that numb is not exactly right. She'd know it's more as if all the pain that's coming is bottled up, bound to wreak chaos in the future, but, at first, not unlike how a very stressful day feels.

Mona had broken at my side just the way she did a month before when news of Sky came. She sobbed till she gasped and held onto me like a castaway—her love went beyond comforting me and into her own wild grief. She had whispered and wailed her promise to do anything for Luke and me in the coming madness, but when I told her I was going alone to the beach in the dregs of the spring day, she had fought me bitterly.

I knew that Serala could tell me if I was losing my mind, if my heart was still inside—or if what this numb truly meant was that it had somehow slipped out of me while I was letting cigarette smoke crawl out of my mouth against the sunset. I called her from my truck, which at the time seemed a logical place to spend time, even parked. For some reason she was in Washington, DC.

Hey,
I said.

Hey, love,
she said.

I didn't say anything else, and she said:

Should I pull over?

She stayed calm and clear that day, on some sketchy DC side street, en route to Monty, or a score, or God knows what. She'd been paying attention when I'd reeled off the details over the last month: Sky lingering, my dad giddy, the warnings about him flying off into high altitudes with his damaged body. She had suspected what was coming; maybe she just wanted me to have a few more days intact.

Her words in the time that intervened between his death and his memorial were straight and so right at a moment when almost every sentence made me want to cut out my tongue.

The evening of my father's memorial, I stall outside the building, taking little hits off a flask. I know they won't start without me and I don't want to start without Serala. It doesn't occur to me to be angry that she's late, just scared that she won't make it at all.

She and Jay round the bend and I watch them approach against the gunmetal sky. She's dressed in a black pantsuit, a black pashmina, black shades. Jay is buttoned up and has a flashy tie jumping on his chest as he strides. They're walking fast together, purposefully but comfortably, like a couple of lawyers or detectives might walk into a press conference. Serala removes her shades, and they both look into my eyes from a distance, and they're both strong enough not to weep and wise enough not to try to smile—they just give me their eyes. It's another one of those moments for me, like Serala meeting my dad, like her and me and Samar in the sushi joint in the village—the conjuring of a broader notion of family, the warmth of being in the middle of a great bed in a bad fucking storm. Seeing her and Jay together, getting squeezed tight by both of them, having my hands on both of them at once—it almost makes me cry for the first and only time that day.

We almost started without you,
I say with her face pressed to my neck.

No, you didn't,
she says, and takes my hand and we go in.

Standing vertiginous at a podium in front of that sea of faces—memories reeling past in each one—I don't feel nervous, just incapable. I've spent days composing and revising my eulogy, to the point of striking and rewriting, striking and rewriting, the same adjective, drunk at 3 a.m. But it falls through me in that moment, the knowledge that words won't cut it, that there is no way to adequately honor my father there. But then I glimpse Serala: a small island of darkness. I can breathe then, and I punch through the blockage and read with passion if not clarity.

As the service ends Dylan sings “I Shall Be Released” from a boom box and the room lines up to light the dozens of candles on the altar. Luke and I set up a two-man gauntlet of tenderness at the door, to hug every person that comes through, to emblazon our smiles into all the weeping eyes.

That day wasn't for us or for our father, of course—it was for everybody else. All those people may have come thinking they were honoring our father, but they mainly came for closure. We provided it as best we could. We won't have the privilege of closure until God knows when—probably never. But it was a gift that only we could bestow on all the people who loved him—however inconsistently, conditionally, or poorly. That's why neither one of us wept that evening, even as sobs broke the crowd at their knees.

But Serala knew all this already; she was faintly angry, I think, with the arrangement, and she stood off to one side of us, staying near, as if to catch us if we fell.

That night was mad with rock 'n' roll and whisky, with furtive celebration and farewell, our house packed and bright and shaking with laughter and guitar, as my father would have wanted it. At one point, deep into the morning already, Luke and I cut ourselves from the thinning crowd and went into our father's office to play a song that we knew would break us. We needed to fall apart at least once before the ceremony could be complete and we invited Serala in but she refused. Instead she stood outside the door like sentry, arms crossed, warning away drunk friends.

I remember kissing her, once, not entirely chastely, and her smiling, telling me to behave. Eventually she disappeared with Cassie and the process ended with me, Samar, and Luke on the front porch, sharing the last drops of booze in the house—a Corona—and watching a new dawn build itself above the familiar trees.

Serala and I see each other only once more before she flies back to her life. It's in a Greek restaurant in Fremont, a stone's throw from the funeral home that burned my father's corpse. The sun is setting, and we are eating lentil soup, and she is probing gently, though with a spear of a gaze, to find out what I need—to find out if she should stay. The place is near empty and all my words sound too loud, wrong. The Greek waiters can't keep their eyes off her, though, and so they keep arriving at inopportune moments to top up water glasses and whatnot. She watches me, worried, waiting for me to betray something I've been hiding.

I don't know what we said, but I know I was still more or less stoic, still angry. I'm glad I have her words here, scrawled in her wild script and blue ink on a Hallmark card.

In June I faced my and Luke's birthday, our father's birthday, and Father's Day. A row of grievous dominoes like Serala had had in the winter. Things were all wrong in Seattle then and I should have shoved off early in the summer for New York, or Carolina, or any point between, found solitude and grieved without familiar eyes inevitably reining me in. But there was my father's “estate” to sort (he'd written a will years earlier when he had had some money), Mona and me to somehow resolve, and Luke to watch out for.

I might have tossed all those concerns to the wind and coasted to Serala's bed, but she was back in the stiff, corporate saddle. She never had much to say and everything she did say was clipped, impatient, bored. I deduced that employees lurked around, guilty and nervous, waiting for her to look up from her desk, just to ask her for small things; I deduced also that sometimes she snapped at them and set them scuttling away. I know that sometimes she went to great lengths to help one of them out of a jam of their own making. I understand that during business hours she sometimes closed her office door to weep. I heard that later, alone in the offices, she shut her office door to suck lines of smack through her thin nostril off the cluttered desktop. I know that the small relief that these practices brought her was usually enough—enough to get her on the road to Brooklyn where she could chain-smoke, blast her rocking tunes, and sometimes call me, talk sweet and low about how the road looked or where she would go if she only could.

But then, slipping off the ledge of the night into the oppression of another morning, it would all begin again.

I was in a rotten mood, too. And I suspected I would be for at least three years. It's too easy to say that my grief over my father brought me closer to Serala, but it's also true. Though she clothed many of the causes in half-statements and cryptic commentary, grief underwrote the darkness of her vision, at least as much as heroin and whatever manifestation of mental illness she suffered. In fact there is an argument to make that Serala simply grieved: that's what was “wrong” with her. She grieved when her friend Lila died, when the mystery Original Lover died, when friends I never knew died, when her beloved childhood dog died, when that strange dog died in her arms on a Seattle street corner, but she also grieved over every single awful headline. When the rains took tens of thousands of shanty-dwelling Venezuelans to their deaths in 1999, my sorrow, even having lived there, paled beside hers. More complexly, she grieved when people hurt her—Monty with his infidelities, the violent frat boy she pepper-sprayed, or others, sick men with drugs to offer that I would still rather shank than consider.

Enlightened resignation to the impermanence of life and, therefore, suffering, is something that Buddhists endeavor to embrace: everything and everyone you love will die and be ripped away from you—that's the basis for the methodological elimination of desire and the cultivation of nonattachment. Notwithstanding the fact that I'd hurled my Buddhist texts against the walls, breaking their spines, the morning my father died, I found myself nearer to the path of acceptance of suffering than ever before. I had been forced deeper into her world, which was the only silver lining of my father's death.

Unfortunately for us both, we never figured out the detachment part. Her sorrow persisted and my bitterness swelled.

For example, Luke and I were to receive one Christmas card that year, in contrast to the dozens that had covered my father's fridge in any prior December. It would seem that, with a sigh, maybe one last shiny tear, they all just crossed him—and us—out. We were to hear from less than six of those so-called friends of my father's after they walked out of the memorial we'd hosted for them that night, blurry with weeping, trembling with their release, like selfish lovers rolling away—spent.

As a rule, people suck,
Serala might have warned me any number of times with a tight jaw. And this was the kind of thing that Jay and others meant when they said,
she's dark man, it's toxic
. But as the years piled up, so did the reasons to believe she spoke hard, unwelcome, but fundamental truths. And I preferred to see and speak plainly, especially then, when my father was irrecoverable and language was loathsome.