Clearly Now, the Rain (12 page)

I was cowardly: Mona was a bulwark between Serala and me just as Serala was a bulwark between Mona and me. Even before it began, I knew that Mona wasn't right for me—it was a boring redux of affairs I'd bumbled into before. As long as I was “honest” that I didn't intend anything
too
long-term, I wouldn't have to face either my own issues about commitment or the highly problematic element that my relationship with my best friend would introduce into any romantic scenario. I wasn't any closer to falling in a traditional way for Serala, but I was a long way from tranquility at the prospect of her self-destruction. I was less exuberant about walking through Mona's door than I would have been about staying in Serala's passenger seat, but I hedged and measured, and played it safe in a half-assed way. I told people who cared that my peace with Serala had come with the unsuccessful execution of her death wish, but the truth was that the whole schema was resetting in my heart as the years wore on. I knew that if I were a sincerely free agent, without a scholarship to graduate school and the obstacle of a relationship to a beautiful, exotic woman to insulate me, I might slip back beneath the stale and fruitless burden of being Serala's keeper and the failure that might imply. On the other hand, Serala's new life—her fancy Brooklyn brownstone, her corporate advertising job, her shrewd and knife-sharp business sense—was enough to cause me, at least subconsciously, to think that maybe she'd found a context in which she could manage. I wasn't quite so naïve as to think that heroin and its attendant dangers was going to be left behind along with poetry, filmmaking, and liberal arts, but there was always a plenitude of gray area and when I see myself inhaling the doses of her that I did, I think I must have only allowed myself to do because I was hoping again. The way she smiled and dreamed a little in Memphis, the absurd fun that we had on the road, the work ethic she exercised via cell phone with big-shot clients as well as employees that were remiss in their duties all smacked of a weathered woman somewhat reluctantly settling into pleasure and business—into life.

None of this is to say Mona was incidental; she was far from it—my affection for her and attraction to her were real, but the height I allowed “us” to be elevated to was out of proportion to anything I deeply expected to honor. I will have to say now that it was partially out of a need to keep Serala in a straitjacket of my own design: a “best friendship” that slipped those bonds in many moments and in many manners. In short, it was nothing definable, and so nothing that could be questioned or attacked—or resolved.

Fifteen

Luke and I share our birth date, four years separated.

That year we're in my father's living room with my father and Mona listening to the
White Album
when the June Thursday comes. Serala rings and I move to the balcony where I have a modicum of privacy and can watch the few Seattle stars with her while we chat. I miss her quite terribly though I've been rotten about expressing that in Mona's presence. As I crush out my cigarette, though, Mona starts throwing mean glances at me through the glass doors. Serala can tell. I'm beginning sentences with sighs and
so's
and
well's
, using a tone of finality. I imagine her on her fire escape, limbs drawn together inside a pashmina, hair loosed for the night and made hectic by the breeze, looking down to focus as she does during important phone calls. I see her knock her cigarette out against the wrought iron because it's too short now and she needs a new one. The embers fall, whirl, and hit the hot Brooklyn asphalt like a scatter-shot meteor finding the sea.

What's the deal? Just talk to me for a few minutes, will you?

When I manage to get off the line, somewhat poisoned by Serala's tone, Mona is cold. She crosses her arms out on the little balcony and puts her gaze resolutely on the skyline. My brother and father, intuiting, juggle light conversation to cover up the awkwardness. I close the glass doors and try for pretending.

Hey, baby. Want to spend some time alone with me pretty soon here?

I touch her shoulders but she shrugs off my hands, the muscles knotted tight.

No, why don't you just spend your night on the phone with Serala? I'm sure she's much more interesting than me, even though I'm right here, trying to celebrate with you.

So my relationship with Mona was wilting like the azaleas in coastal North Carolina before we even got there in late August and moved into a small house in a subdivision. Serala knew.

Meanwhile, Serala's magnetism of tragedy—or is it merely the spreading stain of smack in her life?—means she loses someone else I never knew: a girl named Lila.

Serala staggers into a Bronx ER with a fading girl looped in her skinny arms. The place is crowded but the urgency is bold and even injured criminals hop out of the way. I see Lila's head on Serala's shoulder, hungry just for the ultimate rest she thought she was getting, Serala cursing like a sailor as she hands her over with the facts:
junk, HIV positive, probably not a fucking accident,
all the while thinking how lucky Lila is. Wiped out by the effort of her delivery and sleeplessness, as Lila vanishes between double doors in a flutter of gowns, the world tilts on its axis and Serala faints onto the linoleum. They get busy with their assumptions and their paperwork, with their restraints and tranquilizers, and they hold her until her shrink can vouch to spring her, get her back to her impressive theater of getting by, her life where no one who loves her wants to hear about a junkie friend kicking the bucket,
no
, not now.

Not knowing, she says in an email, whether her tears are coming or going, she lets them just sit on her face as she writes me these headlines from her planet.
All in a weekend's work,
she says.

Tuesdays are my slow days. I'm awakened midmorning by a call from Mona at her new job, selling coffee in downtown Wilmington.

Wake up, turn on the news—some big catastrophe's happened in New York.

Sleeping in the shafts of Carolina sun is so sweet, that I doze again for a few minutes before hauling myself to the sofa. I twist the Venetian blinds open as I click the television on, so the horror erupts on the screen as the tranquil blades of light cut the room. My vision is swimming, and I fall back onto the scratchy sofa and hold my head in my hands as the first World Trade Center tower smokes and then buckles in real time, and Aaron Brown of CNN slowly turns damp eyes back at the camera, says quietly,
There are no words,
and drops his microphone.

My thoughts flew to Serala, but her first email that afternoon assured me her caustic survivalism was very much intact.

Serala was up there in the thick of it and more than a little bit brown-skinned. She admitted to being scared for her family because they certainly looked the same as Arabs to angry white people. She laughed it all off, of course, after copping to her anxiety. She described the short walk down the block for smokes in her Irish-American/Italian-American neighborhood:
No, really, it's just funny: these fuckers see me coming and it's like “what do I do? It's brown but it's got tits. Can I still punch it?”

But after a few days, she allowed the images tumble out in tentative fragments.

Anxiety disrupts my easy routine of books and lectures. The need to be there with her swells so I buy a ticket, a month to the day since the towers fell.

As the
747
banks a turn around Roosevelt Island and veers in, I can see the wreckage arching like bad postmodern art out of the skyline. It seems that smoke still rises from the rubble, but I'll later learn it's merely dust—composed of particles of bone, retina, skin, cartilage, and even the human heart as well as steel, concrete, glass. It's sent to orbit each time a dump truck rolls away with the gravelly ashes. Around me, all the passengers are white-faced and weeping, the plane a funereal spiral down to the tarmac.

But Serala does not need my urgency. She is calm, distant, and quite cold—not toward me specifically, just closed up. It is as if she's fought quite a battle to get her sails up in this storm, but now that she has, she's moving fast and strong over the swells, cutting a path straight away, harnessing the violence. After scooping me at the airport, she has to return to the office, and so I hop a train to survey the landscape myself, figuring that a writer should face it.

Samar is in the city, trying to find a place for herself as a volunteer near Ground Zero. I convince her to meet us in the village. Over sushi and sake, I feel embarrassed at who I used to be, mortified that Serala saw Samar and me at our ugliest stage. But I feel wizened to be so far past that era, years down the road, with the fortune of having both of them at my side. Especially in contrast to the tragedy just blocks away, all of the old drama seems pale and wasted.

I find myself smiling over a urinal, thinking back to the night Samar and I finally split, the absurd confrontation in the bathroom at the house party. When I push back through the door, I stop and linger a moment, watching the two of them. They are leaning in over the sashimi, picking at it with chopsticks, eyes bright, smiles rising and falling on their faces. There's an unmistakable love between them—and I know now, in this moment, leaning on a doorjamb in a Manhattan Japanese joint, blocks from the wreckage of American innocence, from what this love arises: two of the toughest people I have ever known, women who have survived the best attempts of bad people to erase them. They hold their heads up, and cross their arms against the world, and they recognize it in one another and show due respect.

We need an antidote to the sadness of the city. To my surprise, Serala leads us to a Bulgarian disco, packed with Eastern Euro kids, all going wild with vodka, and cocaine, and loud outfits. Weeks before she'd said to me in a lighter moment that
you've never seen me with my dancing shoes on
and it's true. She, who usually trips on the stairs and often slams her hands in doors. I don't know if it's the need to dance off September 11, her unaccountable love of the Bulgarian house music, or the desire to surprise me, but she's something. I dance with her and Samar, and sweat a lot, and pretty soon it's 3 a.m.

Out in the cold street, I stumble out to the middle of the avenue to see an apricot moon dropping pearly light down through the dust. A group of soldiers stand in the shadows, blocking entrance to the avenue; they stamp feet and blow hands for warmth. A short gust comes through the night, and lifts the dust off the ground like a fog, and we get a train for Brooklyn.

I felt the first slivers of it coming the next day as Serala drove me to JFK: a blueness that engulfed my world for the next week. We sat on the filthy cement outside of ticketing holding hands.

I suppose I could chalk up the toxic feeling that entered me to witnessing the wake of 9/11. But somehow I don't think it was that simple. I spent days fantasizing darkly, sketching sinister shapes onto notebooks, and erasing more than writing. I told her, in an email soon thereafter, that I felt as if I'd blacked out and seen something or learned something that was so horrible it had poisoned me, but that I couldn't remember what it was. And she told me, wryly,
Welcome to my world.

But, for me, the cage lifted somewhat soon, as it usually does.

I can't help but imagine the city then as a physical representation of her emotional landscape: the destruction, the terror, the militarization—the drugs, the shame, the doctors. Whether the scope of slaughter in New York City was going to forge the nail that punctured her cynicism and really send her spiraling or, rather, if it was going to simply harden her more and multiply her cynicism, I didn't know. I didn't want either to occur, I suppose, which is why I blindly flew north—as if I could have changed it. A lot of my rushes to Serala's side were, as I've said, for me. In earlier years I rode the hubris that I could somehow deflect pain from her or protect her from her own filterless eyes or the disturbances in her soul. By the time September 11 occurred, though, I was merely doing what I needed to for my own conscience. Sure, I could soothe her—or join her in self-soothing with dance, booze, and laughter—but I was pretty clear that when I retreated to North Carolina nothing would have changed for her given the astounding evidence of life's horror that was splayed across the landscape of New York.

Samar and I tried—me half-heartedly, Samar with some passion—to point out the heroism of New Yorkers to Serala, to suggest that human nature perhaps comes close to balance between the bloodlust of some and the selflessness of others. But she'd just cackle softly.
Right,
she'd say
, so you think the people who flew those planes wouldn't be “heroically” volunteering at Ground Zero if we'd attacked their country? And after seeing this, these selfless, “heroic” Americans would never support such a thing inflicted upon innocent civilians somewhere else, right?