two points were starting to slide together. Eva standing behind Chip’s back, mouthing “I love you” to me and laughing. I was laughing. Chip was laughing. If she kept that up, space itself would start collapsing. There isn’t very much space between two people in love. “Two is the loneliest number.” Other things were starting to collapse. The octopus play. The fragile respect enforced by the doctor’s waiting-room furniture.
“How about this?” Christian dropped a bucket full of bricks through the Jenny Jones coffee table. As soon as everyone saw it everyone knew it was just what we needed: a nice hole to put garbage in. Spring was sliding in. Spring was sliding thousands of needles into whatever was solid, fast, or frozen. Ice, the color gray, sleep: All died the death of a thousand needles. Voices didn’t carry the way they carried across the smooth frozen spaces of winter. They sank into the mud. Or the husks melted off and released thousands of whispers: “OK just for a second or two but I hear Chip coming…”
The beach was under the sidewalk. Peace and heat rose through the holes appearing everywhere. The spring revolution. Eva had given me a light green military-style jacket and I wore it everywhere. There was a photo in a book I had. It showed a man with a peasant hat and a jacket kind of like the one I had walking along a sidewalk. He had a folder under his arm and a man and a woman on either side of him. They were obviously all good friends. The caption read: “Josef Stalin walking to a meeting of the Central Committee, May 1922.”
That was the time! When he could still just walk down the street, unafraid, unparanoid, to a meeting of the Central Committee. It became a little mantra for me: “I’m walking to a meeting of the Central Committee.” The casualness, the soft green light of revolutionary power. I was smoking a lot of pot. Wherever I was, I was also somewhere else. The picture of Stalin gave me a sort of symbol for this magic feeling: There he was, just a man walking down the street, but he was also something else! I didn’t know what else I was. That’s what made smoking pot a soft revolution. A spring revolution.
If it was a surprise to see Stalin just walking down the street, it was also a surprise to see me. A surprise to me. The spring, the end of ulcer pain, future love, love of the future, and pot conspired to blur me out. Moving through the weeks like a Slinky, spread out over April May and June like a pack of cards spread out on a table. Talking with Charlie at the rehearsal, eating lunch with Emily on the grass, sitting in Professor Morris’s Islamic Mystical Poetry class: Put a knife through any one and it would go through all three. I was never completely in one place. Except when I was with Chip and Eva. Then the Slinky folded up, the cards returned to the pack, my body didn’t cast a shadow.
A couple other people, using enough force, could still nail me to a single instant.
“Hey, Mike.” It was Charlie. He was wearing a sky-blue suit that must have been made in the seventies. Perfectly pressed, perfectly preserved. “Hey, Mike.”
“What’s up, man?”
“Do you remember the people who lived behind my dorm sophomore year?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you think of them?”
“They remind me of garbage,” I said. I laughed.
Something in Charlie’s face stopped me.
“Be serious, Mike. This is very serious. In fact,” his face lost all elasticity, “this is really very serious.” As a child, you learn very early to identify a wide range of facial expressions. These are so various, and express so many degrees of feeling, that they appear to exhaust all the possible movements of the human face. But they do not, and I know they don’t, because I was looking at Charlie, and he wasn’t wearing one of those expressions. He wasn’t wearing one of those expressions I’d ever seen before.
“Do you,” he half-whispered, “do you remember those fucking
“How about this?” Christian dropped a bucket full of bricks through the Jenny Jones coffee table. As soon as everyone saw it everyone knew it was just what we needed: a nice hole to put garbage in. Spring was sliding in. Spring was sliding thousands of needles into whatever was solid, fast, or frozen. Ice, the color gray, sleep: All died the death of a thousand needles. Voices didn’t carry the way they carried across the smooth frozen spaces of winter. They sank into the mud. Or the husks melted off and released thousands of whispers: “OK just for a second or two but I hear Chip coming…”
The beach was under the sidewalk. Peace and heat rose through the holes appearing everywhere. The spring revolution. Eva had given me a light green military-style jacket and I wore it everywhere. There was a photo in a book I had. It showed a man with a peasant hat and a jacket kind of like the one I had walking along a sidewalk. He had a folder under his arm and a man and a woman on either side of him. They were obviously all good friends. The caption read: “Josef Stalin walking to a meeting of the Central Committee, May 1922.”
That was the time! When he could still just walk down the street, unafraid, unparanoid, to a meeting of the Central Committee. It became a little mantra for me: “I’m walking to a meeting of the Central Committee.” The casualness, the soft green light of revolutionary power. I was smoking a lot of pot. Wherever I was, I was also somewhere else. The picture of Stalin gave me a sort of symbol for this magic feeling: There he was, just a man walking down the street, but he was also something else! I didn’t know what else I was. That’s what made smoking pot a soft revolution. A spring revolution.
If it was a surprise to see Stalin just walking down the street, it was also a surprise to see me. A surprise to me. The spring, the end of ulcer pain, future love, love of the future, and pot conspired to blur me out. Moving through the weeks like a Slinky, spread out over April May and June like a pack of cards spread out on a table. Talking with Charlie at the rehearsal, eating lunch with Emily on the grass, sitting in Professor Morris’s Islamic Mystical Poetry class: Put a knife through any one and it would go through all three. I was never completely in one place. Except when I was with Chip and Eva. Then the Slinky folded up, the cards returned to the pack, my body didn’t cast a shadow.
A couple other people, using enough force, could still nail me to a single instant.
“Hey, Mike.” It was Charlie. He was wearing a sky-blue suit that must have been made in the seventies. Perfectly pressed, perfectly preserved. “Hey, Mike.”
“What’s up, man?”
“Do you remember the people who lived behind my dorm sophomore year?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you think of them?”
“They remind me of garbage,” I said. I laughed.
Something in Charlie’s face stopped me.
“Be serious, Mike. This is very serious. In fact,” his face lost all elasticity, “this is really very serious.” As a child, you learn very early to identify a wide range of facial expressions. These are so various, and express so many degrees of feeling, that they appear to exhaust all the possible movements of the human face. But they do not, and I know they don’t, because I was looking at Charlie, and he wasn’t wearing one of those expressions. He wasn’t wearing one of those expressions I’d ever seen before.
“Do you,” he half-whispered, “do you remember those fucking
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