Clearly Now, the Rain (9 page)

I scrambled for another ticket and headed north again to march with what would turn out to be seventy thousand people. My father picked me up at the airport and drove me to the periphery of the madness, dropping me off with a shake of his head. He wasn't thrilled that I was putting myself in the midst of what might turn into a frenzied stomping, and he didn't think it advisable to get arrested while I was awaiting trial for felony possession. He stopped me with a hand on my elbow before I jumped out of his Subaru. The intermittent anemia had chalked half his face and his dark eyes were a little glazed with narcotic, but they were steady. Wind coming up from the Sound, through the crowds, lifted what was left of his hair off his scalp and he smiled at me, giving up on a warning or a lecture.

Good luck down there,
he said. And I knew that if it weren't for his broken body, I would be able to cajole him down there at my side and that parts of him he'd long forgotten would have come alive.

A ribbon of humanity as wide as Denny Way, as long as a mile, was visible over the guardrail.

November 30, day two of what would come to be called “The Battle in Seattle”: I find myself on the piers of the waterfront, which is roiling. A steelworker rally draws a crowd of two thousand or more: steelworkers, college kids, street-living punks, indigenous rights activists, environmentalists, day laborers. The mass begins to march. The emotive impact of crossing the threshold into the heart of Seattle is great; shouts rise higher, faces appear miniscule in the top floor windows of skyscrapers. Construction workers lean off scaffolding with thumbs-up signs. Everything is motion and sound. There is a contingent of drummers banging out rhythms. Smiles grace even bruised faces; rage is obscured. Dance and song rule. Everyone knows that this is what the week is supposed to be about. At last we have gotten it right. And there isn't a cop in sight.

I will always be able to see that armored personnel carrier fishtailing around the corner. Like a massive, robotic insect, something from a late night sci-fi flick, it skitters, then regains its purchase and barrels forward. Commando-dressed cops cling by one arm to the speeding machine. And then it stops. Foolishly, along with dozens of others, I stop too, midway across the avenue. The faceless police level their arsenal and fire into our midst. Objects hurtle across a gulf of ten feet: “bean bag” projectiles, rubber coated bullets, CS gas canisters, and concussion grenades. A rubber bullet grazes my collarbone; a young kid alongside me isn't so lucky—a concussion grenade nicks his temple before it explodes. He spins, bleeding, onto the concrete.

Our ranks have split and fractured, the alleys and side streets alive with frantic scrambling and shouts. But, swiftly, the bulk of us reassemble along the hazy spine of Second Avenue.

As the initial clouds of gas begin to lift, the poison spins around rooftops and flocks of pigeons limp into the air. Anger replaces the terror and pain. Not a face is showing anymore; bandanas, ripped clothing, or gas masks obscure them. The screams begin to coalesce into something whole; voices gather again and rise into one chant from countless sets of scalded lungs:
Whose streets?! OUR streets! Whose streets?! OUR streets!
And we march southward, fists in the air against the rain and gas. And for some moments it is true; it is literal. They are our streets; the police have vanished.

But soon they attack again. It is an onslaught, replete with up-close and personal violence—nightsticks connect volleys of weaponry like hyphens. The end is en masse incarceration, and eventual booking and nasty abuses at King County Jail. Giddy with sleep deprivation and the tear gas fumes, I call Serala from yet another jail, wearing yet another jumpsuit. Yet again, she is not in.

By the time I am released, the protests have triumphed: the corporate bigwigs tucked their tails between their legs and left Seattle, vowing never to return. I call Serala as soon as I have my hands on my cell phone.

She appears on the edge of the scene outside county lockup, a contrast to the wet, filthy, red-faced protesters. She is wearing black again and she is sunglassed, despite the winter gloom. She hugs me tightly and we go, fittingly, to a high-end bar where she buys me a cosmopolitan and we sit, hunched together against the eyes of the bartender and the stray activists and businessmen mixing in the streets.

You know, I'm real proud of you,
she says, compensating for the sentimentalism by staring up at a golf open on TV.
You did good
.

It wasn't about me,
I retort.
It was about thousands of people standing together.

I expect a roll of her eyes, a cynical swipe, but she just nods and looks at me briefly, blows smoke past my face and leans over to hold me. She's so thin that her bones feel like knives wrapped in cloth.

I wouldn't have been strong enough for this if it weren't for you,
I say, which is true, but also an appeal. But she pulls away and shakes her head vigorously. She wants no part in the celebration. She just kills her cosmopolitan and kisses me. She wants nothing, it seems, and I feel resentful because I want to relish this. And she thinks I can enjoy it without her. And I suppose I do.

Only two and a half weeks later, winter vacation, I fill my truck with a pair of Seattle boys, Kaya, luggage, and head north for the third time in two months. My goal is to do the drive in one stretch.

At three in the morning, a stone's throw from Oregon, I am in my zone, smoking and feeding beef jerky to Kaya, playing Serala's mix tapes while my two passengers sleep. The freeway has been empty for miles, so when a pair of headlights races up on me I am certain I've blown by a trooper—going eighty—and now it is going to get interesting. I am two weeks from trial for the mushrooms and not entirely sure what my passengers might be holding. Then the approaching car splits apart in my rearview, momentarily jarring my tired mind; I think I'm hallucinating. But it's two sport bikes, one passing me on the right, the other on my bumper, so I swing right when the first one is clear, and the second rides up parallel with me. He is on a sleek, lemon-lime colored machine. He paces me at eighty; he turns his head to look at me through an opaque visor. I don't know what else to do, so I nod. He just keeps looking at me. Then he points at me for a long moment, yanks his bike up into a wheelie, and rides it for several seconds before dropping back down. He levels his finger at me again and then they slice off into the western night at what must be one hundred and ten, given how quickly they vanish from the reach of my headlights, and then from sight.

The physics of it are quite nearly superhuman: a wheelie on a dark and icy freeway at eighty miles per hour. My passengers continue to snore so I look at Kaya for confirmation—she looks back at me for more jerky. At moments I've wondered if that cat on the motorcycle wasn't a phantom messenger, sent to hurry me back to Serala. Sent to tell me of the urgency.

This is how it has come to look in my head:

She is leaving Seattle the same day I get back. The only image that remains vivid is her crying as she slams Desert Storm's trunk, in which she can now fit everything she owns. The John Spencer Blues Explosion is blasting, absurdly, through her shot speakers. Her sunglasses are so big that I can't see any evidence of her tears. She's waiting on me now, to get through whatever I need to say. I grab her close and try some bastard cheerfulness, talk to her about the therapy of the road, but she's not really having it. She's nodding to get through the moment, but my words don't mean any more to her than the Pall Mall smoke merging with the slate Seattle sky. I begin probably my fifth sentence of the afternoon with a soothing
Hey
, the forthcoming
it's not so bad
or
it'll be okay
implied in the tone, a soft squeeze on her shoulder. But this time she interrupts me, seizes my forearm, and squeezes back.

It's okay, Eli, you don't have to do this—you don't have to say anything else.
Then, quieter,
Please, don't say anything else.

I am relieved that she's moving home to Connecticut. I suppose I fed myself the litany of lies that were opportune: she needed her family, needed to be “home,” back nearer the one psychiatrist she trusted. She needed a road trip; she needed a fresh start. But it wasn't really about her, it was about me and what
I
needed that winter: to have her off my conscience.

I was so young and selfish that I didn't even understand that a decision had been made.

The velocity of her descent during those months was shocking; it was both tempting and terrifying to imagine that my absence was part of it. But I was certainly not the lone factor—there were other forces at work, and this era was the first time that I saw that clearly, however irrational it was. The death of the strange dog in her arms and the attack by the frat boy alone did not evidence some occult magnetism of darkness, even given that they occurred in the same stretch of sidewalk, one day apart. But when one totaled the number of tragedies and traumas that had befallen Serala over her life, the sum was unnerving. There was no doubt that she summoned much of her misfortune by way of addiction and the situations that ensnared her as a result, but there was also this specter of violence and tragedy that seemed to stalk her, that seemed to stack evidence in her corner that the world was full of bloodletting in the shadows and people inherently cowardly and hungry for your pain. The good times we sucked down in northern California like wine were a bulwark and I was glad for them—I still am—but they were further evidence of the unwieldy responsibility I'd grown rapidly into the past summer.

The round that I fought with Jay on the porch of my house drew a line in the sand for me and I didn't see it till I'd stepped to Serala's side of it. I couldn't make him or anyone else understand the sanity and courage—if also the weight—I found in her filter-less vision: looking squarely at the world, with no ability or inclination to turn away, to disown it, to smile at easy and fake distractions in all their ubiquity. Not to mention the other side of this coin: all the laughter that shook us, sometimes at the darkest moments, nor the fan of light that spread in my chest when I knew I was to be with her soon. The joy that she meant to me.

But my knight-in-shining-armor jaunt up north to try to keep her from self-destruction had produced an unwelcome precedent: for the first time, she'd turned on me. In the pit of wrathful despair I found her in, there was no room for love and affection, even for me. Despite that, I was there. And yet she'd accused me of selfishness:
You're here for your fucking self
. The worst part, of course, was that she was at least partly right. Of course I wanted to help, soothe, even save Serala, but ultimately that trip wasn't really for her. I had to go into final exams with a clear conscience. I needed to tell myself I'd done what I could. I needed to wrap her in my arms and hope right in her face:
everything will get better.
Consciously, I was a long way from realizing this—at the time I attributed her swipe at me to the lunacy of her blues. But silently it festered in me, another shred of selfishness in this world that she loathed and seemed to loathe her, and in this case it was mine to own.

At the conclusion of the street protests, the amalgamated progressive forces had been reasonably able to claim that we—
justice
—had triumphed, at least momentarily. But she didn't care to see that victory as a possible presage to change in the world's balance. I chalked it up to her rote pessimism and sucked hard on the consolation of her pride in me. I didn't hear the subtext, which was a common error of mine:
I do not belong amid hope—you have to do it yourself.

Eleven

She calls early on a snowy morning a few days after Christmas. I'm sleeping off another night of trying to relive high school.

Hello?

Eli.

Yeah.

I tried to die, I don't want to live anymore so I took two whole bottles of the sleeping pills because I don't want to live anymore, I'm too tired—but it's not going to work.

I slump to the floor, thinking that I've got some very quick work to do here. But then she says:

My momma, she's making me go to the hospital, but I wanted to call you and tell you. I have to go.

The tears and the hysteria that rip her voice then are those of a child. She is enraged at not getting her way, after being patient for so long. And her momma gets on the line and says very calmly:

Eli, I'm taking her now. We have to go. We'll talk to you soon.

I can see her mother then, the blank in her lovely face: emotions so tangled and extreme that they cannot be held in an expression. I can see her facing Serala like she might have when she was a child, refusing to go to school or to bed. I picture her taking Serala's hand and pulling her toward the front door, Serala's mind sharp enough despite the drugs to know that resistance is futile, that an ambulance will take her if she doesn't go willingly, her body lagging anyway. But she can't refuse to live, she can only choose to die—through this distinction flows a river of difference, she has now learned.

And me? I know that there is nothing to do. I know that it won't help to break anything. Besides, I find that I'm not the least bit angry, just sort of wrecked inside. So I climb back into bed and pack pillows over my head and stare into their blackness and try to cry until sleep comes again—some sort of tribute to Serala, I guess.

To sleep, that is.

Later, I'm downstairs in my mother's house, staring out at the rote drear of December Seattle: cold rain, early dark. I've got a pool cue in my fist, as if I've been practicing bank shots, but really it's just something to hold onto. I hear footfalls upstairs. Hugh appears, ankles first, through the slots in the winding oak staircase. His face is worried but bright, coming to care for me. He wears raindrops on his eyelashes, which at first I mistake for tears. Maybe the suggestion is too much, or maybe it has just finally become time, but I break then, drop the cue and cover my face. Hugh, wise to pain, sits me down.

The worst is over, E,
Hugh is saying, kneeling in front of me, finding my eyes.
Whether she lives now or whether she does it for real next time. Now you're ready; now you know you can't save her, you don't have to. I didn't even try to save my brother; I didn't even know.

I'm mute in the presence of Hugh's truth—and Hugh knows I hear him, too, because, like Serala, he doesn't waste words much. After a moment Hugh breaks the silence with a loud kiss on my temple, his hold on my neck becoming a headlock, and we spill our way into the shitty night on the hunt for catharsis.

The next day, writing out the last letter of the millennium to Serala, I find myself thanking her: for all that she has given me, all that she's spent trying to make my world more bearable, but also for the lesson of pain, for the wisdom and the extra layers of skin. In other words: much of it I might have written even if she had succeeded.

I decided and signed off with this:

The quantity of pills she took should have planted a bull elephant in its grave. It wasn't just that she didn't die, she later told me, but she didn't even fall asleep. I used to call her a superhero; she used to call herself an alien. There were moments when mere human physiology, however tested and re-molded by countless drugs did not explain her.

As illustration: one year before her attempt to die, on a weeknight in the Batcave, I come in late and she is weeping. The candles are burning and she is throwing her head back with a bottle of Merlot, swallowing duos and trios of sleeping pills. I am new enough to her to be very nervous, and might have dared to question her, but she offers wine and one pill to me and I am out before I know what's happened. The last thing I remember is her raw eyes on me and a smile that looks so contrary to everything else going on in her face. The first thing I see in the morning—nine hours later—is her sitting against the wall, still smoking, still drinking, still dressed in the same clothes, but now composed with makeup and sunglasses. Again she smiles and off we go for brunch.

But this was rote for her: the doctors came and went, sucked in and spat out by the revolving door of her blues. I liked to call her the Fidel Castro of patients: just as eleven concurrent U.S. presidents vowed to topple
el Papa
in their tenure, docs would approach Serala's case with confidence, even arrogance, sure they would be the one to let her sleep, to dull her pain. And after weeks or months they'd pronounce her bipolar (that catch-all), trying new scripts and following up with decreasing intensity. As she wrote to me in a goodnight message once:

The first time she mentioned electroconvulsive therapy, I didn't get it. I couldn't help but see it in my Hollywood-tainted renderings: Serala writhing on a table, wrapped in a blue electrical charge like a blow from a sorcerer's staff, eyes bulging like they did in her worst night terrors, her perfect teeth grinding right through the pad strapped into her jaw, a hint of sick smoke in the sterile air. An image to torture myself with, as if in solidarity, just like I suffered invented snapshots of her under the power of sick and violent men.

She just said it made her feel a little slow the next day, a little unsure of how she got home—not unlike a fifth of whisky might.

No success except for whatever both she and the doctors pretended. She was the sweet anomaly, the challenger and the victor, the sad girl floating free of diagnoses, shredding professional guesses, getting by with the speed and barbiturates they prescribed, or by her own measured doses of coke and smack. Getting by with wine, sex, and sometimes love, enduring batteries of tests, no longer expecting the solution to be found in this world. She claimed to have tried it all: prayer, meditation, exercise, diets, hypnosis, acupuncture—to say nothing of the psychoanalysis, psychotropics, sedatives, the catharsis of poetry and filmmaking. She said that for a while she hoped a little, she had the juice for test runs of just about any Holy Grail. When her heart sank away, she indulged the myriad attempts—even the ECT—that the hope of others still subjected her to. Caring all the while for any number of fucked-up loved ones, including me.

Sleeping a few hours a week.

Hugh had claimed the worst was over because I'd tried; with good reason, Hugh believed that. His brother had never revealed to him what was probable the way that Serala had to me. Any shrink would have said Serala was crying for help and any reasonable person would have said I tried to provide it. Of course there are troughs in my heart where the question even now lurks like a vapor cloud: did I fail her? Was it selfish to watch her drive away to Connecticut? There are no pristine truths, of course. I did fail her and there was also no way I could succeed. What might be called irony, but which I count as a great blessing, is that we both failed: me in my rhetorical attempts to prop her sagging bones up against the world, and her in her attempt to put an end to it. Because much of my tension, guilt, exasperation, and fear were erased on the frozen white slate of that winter by her hand. She had presented me unequivocally with the impossibility of saving her and so I was finally free to love her.

But the worst was far from over.