Indecision (26 page)

“Mon Dieu. C’est affreuse. Combien des heures est-ce que cela peut—” She hacked, coughed, retched, and then just moaned.

My entire life was marching itself before my mind’s eye as a leering Halloween parade of continual mistake-making. I stared into the face of my first cringed-at shot of Popov vodka, then into the frowning visage of my first inhalation of brain-warping pot smoke—or who knew what originally fucked me up? Maybe it was puberty that did it, as I began to see the world sometimes through lustful excitation, then sometimes through postcoital disappointment or après-onanistic resignation, and never in the same level way. Not to mention that I had been raised in a two-parent household, as is so wrongly recommended by both major political parties, when it so clearly induces a lifelong schizophrenia. Yet the crowning error of my life must have been to go on Abulinix. And the shining jewel in the dunce’s crown must have been then to swill this emetic San Pedro drink that was making me need to vomit again.

I crawled back to the toilet, and puked.

A botched life, was my conclusion as I watched the last of the morning’s orange juice, chocked with food bits, wind counterclockwise, the wrong way, down the flushing toilet. I crawled back to the feverishly undulating couch, and there determined that when, after twelve or more hellish hours, I had at last recovered from this evil drug, I would finally set about firmer plans to kill myself. I’d write a suicide email to my parents and cc it to Alice. And in this email I could mention Abulinix. The bad press might keep the drug off the market, and maybe with my dying keystrokes I would have accomplished a minor social good.

Plus I felt that suicide would bring me some closure.

Very, very slowly,
Brigid was thrashing back and forth on the bed. It was like she was toiling in syrup-thick air to hide one of her three dimensions. She punctuated these remote efforts with moans. “Bof—” she kept saying, or crying.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Oui, oui. Je suis tout à fait d’accord.” She got up again, so slowly it seemed like time itself was low on batteries, to wade a few steps into the bathroom and there lethargically dry-heave above the toilet. She sounded like a sick enormous bird whose calls of distress are played at too few rpm.

When she didn’t come back out, I stood up with my feet a little too far out in front of themselves, and went to see what was going on. There was Brigid kneeling on the tiles with her head collapsed and dark hair spilling over her face, looking like some last-gasp pilgrim crumpled down with ruinous piety on the final, most meaningless floor, and I felt very bad for her, very sad for this sad person.

Then she sprung up. I staggered back. “You are sensing the difference now?” she asked, looking around with a dawning smile. “So it is not bad, in fact. Ah ha! What a change from one minute to the next!” She pulled her sweater off, so that she was in just a tee shirt and painter’s pants. Her breasts slid around intelligently beneath cotton, and I saw that she was equipped with working sun-glazed forelimbs.

“Huh.” I sat down on the bed and tried to be a good person, glad whenever the amount of suffering in a room is cut by half.

Bridge took my hand. “You are still quite miserable.”

“It’s okay. I—” My ego was jumping up and down impaling itself on its own emptiness and I began to stutter like a skipping CD: “I—I—”

“But come with me.”

I was taken to a chair by the window. I looked sideways at her face gazing out through the glass. And from the fairly, in fact extremely beatific expression on this face, I garnered a new impression of things. What a change from one moment! It was true. But I was afraid that the awful parade of successive errors would recruit this perception too, and I said to my happy impression, “Stay! Stay!” clutching Brigid’s warm dark arm in the cool dark room.

“I am not going anywhere,” she said, baring her teeth at me in that friendly way that humans have.

“Wait—do that again with your teeth?” I smiled at her without the word for it, and she caught on, matching me tooth for tooth.

At last I looked out the window. Beads of dew hung from the still spears of grass, looking as delicately placed as if somebody’d gone around setting them there with an eyedropper. Wow, was my reaction, and also to the fact that beyond the little prospect of short grass the valley swooped out into path-scored and crop-checkered hillsides, sinking down and parting away into the distance, where the miniature town popped into view glinting like some scale model done in tin and balsa wood.

“Thank . . . God! Thank God Himself for windows!”

“And for doors,” she said, her next action being to throw into my daypack her sweater, two water bottles, and two plump tomates de árbol. My mind was not so destroyed that I didn’t remember how my sunglasses were already in there, along with my notebook of to-do lists.

I was glad to leave the vomitorium behind as we proceeded semi-unsteadily down the stone steps to the main terrace. Up in the impressive sky two flat-bottomed cumulus clouds prowed through the stately air, their shadows slipping across the hillsides like swimmers’ shadows gliding silently across the floors of pools.

After some distended length of time Bridge and I came to our porch swing again. We sat down together. The speakers mounted in the trees above the crocuses and violets, the gentians and dragony orchids, were playing a song that I recognized deeply.
Making love,
went the chorus (backup singers:
making love
),
out of nothing
(backup singers:
out of nothing
)
at all. Making love . . .
The flowers bent and rocked delicately in time with the beat.

“What . . . a great . . . song.” Evidently Air Supply were visionaries suggesting, in simple harmonies, how nihilism might be overcome by baseless love! I hadn’t realized the world was so abundant with easy genius, and felt the band had suffered outrageous critical neglect. We sat rocking in the swing until halfway throughout the group’s next masterpiece—“Every Woman in the World,” but Bridge replied, “I don’t want to be
every
”—then headed off into the rest of the day.

Amira spotted us as we passed the swimming pool and gave a sly thumbs-up. I was right back at her with both thumbs. Many mostly naked Germans and Israelis, giddy/solemn on Ecstasy, were splashing around in the moiré doodlings of the watered light.

“What a really nice scene,” I said, thinking also that it would have been more nice sixty years ago.

We went walking together vaguely westward down a road of brick-red dirt. The idea was to climb up into the hills, then look around and come back down.

“That’s all?” I asked. “That’s the whole goal?”

“The goal I suggest . . . Others may be added.”

“Just go up and come down? There and back? That’s the whole point of our journey?”

“Yes, we
move.
” Grasshoppers crackled like loose electricity in the roadside grass, and glare was slapped down thickly on the still, nitid leaves of the absurdly tropical, tropical-type trees. We walked past groves of coffee plants, and it was amazing to me that the glossy berries, a glamorous red, ended up back in America as nervous black water in your guts. On the porch of a tin-roofed shack the berries—or beans, I mean—were laid out drying, and like subaudible sirens they radiated little diminishing waves of vibration in the air.

“I’m experiencing this really Van Gogh sort of eyesight. Are you? Where everything throbs in these bright slashing waves?”

The only break from constant perception was to talk. But then you can veer off in so many directions talking a language that you know! It was terrifying, especially if like me you were gullible, and believed whatever you heard yourself say.

I said, “On these sorts of days, Brigid, I feel like I’m on my way out into the open with you.” I was feeling like
existence’s alert awareness of itself,
and Otto Knittel’s half-comprehended philosophy lay under my thoughts like a watermark beneath notes scrawled on creamy paper.

“These sort of days! What sorts are these, when there is only the one? Only today are we taking this very strange, this very powerful . . .”

Unconsciously I’d come to walk ahead of her, and had stopped before a ravine or arroyo leading off and up to our right. With a doorman’s welcoming gesture I swung my arm out onto an aisle of shifting leaves with a vaulting of sky at the top.

“Really—into here? You are sure?”

I took her hand, and tugged.

“Hold the other hand. That one you have held before.”

So I took up the left one, and led her. And even as we entered the narrow arroyo I felt like my mind was becoming a wider aperture, with experiences of ever-wider bore forcing themselves through me. A decision had been made—we were going in. I couldn’t pinpoint the rationale of this decision, but the thing was done, an action undertaken, and I felt that maybe from now on I could follow my
will
through my life like a hound on the trail of a delicious scent. “Just trust me, Bridge. I trust you.”

“Hence I don’t trust you!” She too was alert to something—alert for the moment in the way of a rabbit’s ear, cocked and rotating, ready for flight—and everyone, I saw, was indeed a soft instrument, however calibrated, registering the world.

Stopping her in the dirt track of the arroyo, I hugged or embraced this Brigid person, woman, girl, certainly by now a friend; and mouth near her pink ear, with its sparse blond velvet at the bottom of the lobe’s inner rim, quietly I said: “I trust you because you’re smart and just and knowledgeable. Sorry to use such basic English, but I think you’re just so
good.
And I trust myself because I’m so right about you.”

We moved apart and she said, “Why don’t you ever touch me before?”

“I did too.”

“Scarcely once you touched me. Ah—I can’t speak English.”

“Well also I feel like you can see through me—”

“But I can’t. No.”

“—and my transparency offends me, and I would think it would you.” Was that English, those words? “So I wasn’t sure if I was so attractive to you. But I’m just here now to say with whatever words that you’re free to propose using me for your good ends in almost any way, if you want. There’s a high likelihood I’ll go along.”

“This is your next decision? I decide how best to use you? Do you reach all your vital conclusions while on drugs?”

“I’ve never done
this
drug before. The Abulinix–San Pedro combo? Come to think of it—” I began walking up the ravine again, picking up a long smooth stick and taking it at once for a staff. “It’s revolutionary, probably.” I turned around. She looked anxious. “And maybe you’ll feel better if under the influence of these two drugs I sign up for justice right now? With you? Global justice?”

“But how do you subscribe? Inscribe? Or rather, sign up, yes. Ah, I can’t talk.”

“Here.” I slung the backpack by one strap around to my chest and fished out my notebook of to-do lists.
Justice!
I wrote, a little unsteadily. “There,” I said. “Justice! Only there should be a verb, there should be—”

“
Serve justice
?”

“Okay,” and I wrote this. “See.”

“So easy? Then,
recognize—
” she gently commanded me.

“Those should probably be reversed, I mean first recognize then serve—”

She shrugged. “Do what you can.”

“I write that down?”

“You may, yes.”

I said as I wrote: “
Do . . . what . . . you . . . can . . . and . . . write . . . it . . . down.
”

“What else?” A convenient rock presented itself to me, and I sat down, looking up into Brigid’s flushed face, a rosiness afloat on her dark-ish cheeks, and her gaze wide with candor in the pupil-blotted eyes.

She said—she laughed—and I wrote, “
Care for Brigid.
”

“Sure. Done. But . . .” Slowly I wrote the words down.

“
. . . and give your enthusiasm into her.
Or rather,
to her.
Give it
to her.
”

I formed the weird-looking letters of my native tongue. “Give me a second there with that one.”

“
Stand up now.
”

I wrote and then did it, inelegantly, like some backwards-ass cub reporter of these unfolding current events.

“
Kiss
—or—no—”

I’d turned a page and was looking at the blank ruled notepad. I waited. “What are you saying? Because say it and it’s done.”

“I intended to say my name, Brigid.” I looked up at her. “But then I had an idea of Eden.”

This was a heavy word, very threatening. “Eden like as in the garden of?”

“And then I understood that in an Eden there is no third person, not a him or a her to address. There is only one other so you address the person simply as
you.
You say ‘you.’ There we have the pair only. Only you and I, I and you.”

I was like, “Whoa . . .”

“Well the surroundings make me think of Eden.” It was like she was apologizing.

“But you wanted me to kiss you,” I reminded her.

“But naturally then with Eden I thought,
a fruit.
”

We had the tomates de árbol in the bag but I hoped this wasn’t what she meant. I pulled her close to me, all trembly and excited, except—“Except,” I said, “I guess the lesson of Eden, which of course it wouldn’t be very human of us if we learned it—but in theory we’re not supposed to eat whatever fruit we’re talking about, right?”

“I have conceived a fruit for you. Tout à coup.” She smiled. “A fruit I would like for Dwight—would like for
you
to eat.”

“Hmn.” She was the fruit? Or what was up? I wondered this until a butterfly fell and lighted, along with Brigid’s and my intention, on the blue cotton of her tee shirt. “Una mariposa,” she said, naming the creature with its dark veined wings, bands of pale-ish jade at their edges, and also red dots like Hindu-type bindis in the centers of the raised and lowered, delicate, breathing, cantilevered things.

“Later I tell you of the fruit,” Bridge said, taking
my
hand now and scaring off the butterfly.