* * *
She said once, seriously (I’m not joking), “I entered college to have a heavenly revelation.”
This was before four a.m., both of us naked in bed. I asked her what kind of heavenly revelation she was expecting.
“How should I know?” she said, but added a moment later, “Maybe something like angels’ feathers falling from the sky.”
I tried to imagine the spectacle of angels’ feathers falling onto the university’s courtyard, and from afar it looked much like tissue paper.
* * *
Nobody knows why she killed herself. I have a suspicion that maybe she herself may not have known.
27
I was having a bad dream.
I was a big black bird, flying west across the jungle. I had a deep wound, the black blood clinging to my wings. In the west I could see an ominous black cloud beginning to stretch out, and from there I could smell rain.
It was a long time since I’d had a dream. It had been so long that it took me a while to realize it was a dream.
I got out of bed, washed the horrible sweat off my body, and then had toast and apple juice for breakfast. Thanks to the cigarettes and the beer, my throat felt like it was full of old mothballs. After washing and putting away the dishes, I put on an olive green cotton jacket, a shirt I’d ironed as best I could, chose a black tie, and with the tie still in my hand I sat in the air conditioned parlor.
The television news announcer proudly declared that it was likely to be the hottest day of the summer. I turned off the television and went into my older brother’s room, picked a few books from his enormous pile of books, then took them back to the parlor where I plopped onto the sofa and stared at the words printed within.
Two years before, my brother left his roomful of books and his girlfriend and took off to America without so much as a word. Sometimes she and I ate together. She told me I was just like him.
“In what way?” I asked, surprised.
“In every way,” she said.
I probably was just like him. It was probably due to the ten-plus years of our polishing those shoes, I think.
The hour hand pointed to twelve, and after milling about and thinking about the heat outside I fastened my tie and put on my suit jacket.
I had lots of time to kill. I drove around town for a bit. The town was almost miserably long and narrow, starting at the sea and climbing into the mountains. River, tennis court, golf course, rows of estates lined up, walls and more walls, some nice little restaurants, boutiques, an old library, fields of primrose, the park with the monkey pen, the town was the same as ever. After driving around for a while on the road that wound its way into the mountains, I drove along the river towards the ocean, then parked my car at the mouth of the river and dipped my legs in the water to cool them off. There were two well-tanned girls on the tennis court, hitting the ball back and forth, wearing their white hats and sunglasses. The rays of the sun bringing the afternoon suddenly increased in intensity, and as they swung their rackets, their sweat flew out onto the court.
After watching them for five minutes, I went back to my car, put down my seat, and closed my eyes and listened to the sound of the waves mixing with the sound of the ball being hit.
The scent of the sea and the burning asphalt being carried on the southerly wind made me think of summers past. The warmth of a girl’s skin, old rock n’ roll, button-down shirts right out of the wash, the smell of cigarettes smoked in the pool locker room, faint premonitions, everyone’s sweet, limitless summer dreams. And then one year (when was it?), those dreams didn’t come back.
When I arrived at J’s Bar at exactly two o’ clock, the Rat was sitting on a guardrail reading Kazantzakis’ Christ Recrucified.
“Where’s the girl?” I asked.
He silently closed his book, got into his car, and put on his sunglasses and said, “She’s not coming.”
“Not coming?”
“Not coming.”
I sighed and loosened my necktie, pitched my jacket into the backseat, and lit a cigarette.
“So, where are we going?”
“The zoo.”
“Great,” I said.
28
Let me tell you about the town. The town were I was born, raised, and slept with my first girl. Ocean in front, mountains in back, and next to it is a large port city. It’s a small town. Speeding back from the port city, you decide not to smoke, because by the time you light a match you’d blow right by the town.
The population’s a little over seven thousand. This number has hardly changed after five years. Most of them live in two-story houses with yards, own cars, and more than a few of them even have two cars. This number isn’t my vague recollection, it was the number published by the municipal census bureau at the end of the fiscal year. It’s nice to live in a place with two-story houses.
The Rat lived in a three-story house which went to far as to have a hothouse on the roof. Set into the hillside was a garage, with his father’s Benz and the Rat’s Triumph TR III lined up snugly inside. Strangely, the part of the Rat’s house that emanated the homelike atmosphere the most was this garage. The garage was large enough that it seemed like a small airplane would fit right in it, and inside there was a collection of things that had fallen into disuse or were replaced by newer things inside the house: televisions and refrigerators, a sofa, a table and chairs, a stereo system, a sideboard; with all of these things arranged neatly in the garage, we had a lot of good times sitting out there drinking beer. As for the Rat’s father, I know very little about him. I never met him. When I’d ask about him, ‘He’s a guy, and he’s much older than me,’ was the Rat’s answer.
According to rumor, the Rat’s father used to be incredibly poor. This was before the war. Just before the war started, he scraped together enough money to acquire a chemical plant and sold insect-repelling ointment. There was some question as to its effectiveness, but as the front lines expanded southward, it practically flew off the shelves. When the war ended, he put the ointment in a warehouse, and shortly after that he sold dubious vitamin powder, which, after the Korean War ended, he repackaged as household detergent. Everyone seems to agree on this point. It seems quite possible. Twenty-five years ago, the insect repelling ointment-slathered bodies of Japanese soldiers piled up like mountains in the jungles of New Guinea, and now toilet cleaner stamped with the same insignia lies toppled in the bathrooms of houses everywhere. Thanks to that, the Rat’s father was loaded. Of course, I also had friends who were poor. One kid, his dad was a bus driver for the town. There’re probably rich bus drivers out there, but my friend’s dad wasn’t one of them. His parents were almost never home, so I hung out there quite a bit. His dad would be driving the bus, or maybe at the racetrack, and his mom would be out all day at her part-time job.
He was in the same grade as me, but our friendship began with a chance occurrence. One day, on my lunch break, I was taking a piss and he came over and stood next to me and unzipped his jeans. We pissed together in silence, then went to wash our hands when we were finished.
“I’ve got something you might wanna see,” he said as he wiped his hands on the ass of his jeans.
“Yeah?”
“You wanna see it?”
He pulled a picture from his wallet and handed it to me. It was a naked girl with her thighs completely spread out, a beer bottle jammed up inside.
“It’s great, yeah?”
“Sure thing.”
“If you come over to my house, there’s even better ones,” he said.
That’s how we became friends.
The town is home to many different kinds of people. In my eighteen years there, I learned lots of things. The town really took root in my heart, and most of my memories are tied to it. However, when I left town to go to college, I was relieved from the bottom of my soul.
For summer vacation and spring break I go back there, but I usually just end up drinking too much beer.
29
In just one week, the Rat’s condition worsened. Partially due to the onset of autumn, probably also due to some girl. The Rat didn’t breathe a word about any of it.
When the Rat wasn’t around, I grabbed J and tried to shake him down for a little information.
“Hey, what’s up with the Rat?”
“Well, you know as much as I do. It’s just because it’s the end of the summer.”
With the start of autumn, the Rat’s spirits always fell. He’d sit at the counter and stare at some book, holding up his end of our conversation only with oneword answers. When the evening came and that cool wind blew, and the smell of fall could be felt, the Rat stopped drinking beer and started gulping down bourbon, feeding limitless amounts of coins into the jukebox and kicking the pinball machine until the TILT light lit up and J got flustered.
“He probably feels like he’s being left behind. You know how that feels,” said J.
“Yeah?”
“Everyone’s leaving. Going back to school, going back to work. Aren’t you headed back yourself?”
“Yeah.”
“So you know what I mean.”
I nodded. “And the girl?”
“It’s been awhile, so I don’t remember so well.”
“Did something happen between them?”
“Who knows?”
J mumbled something and went back to his work. I didn’t press the issue any further. I went over to the jukebox, put some change in it, picked a few songs, then went back to the counter to drink beer. Ten minutes later, J came back over and stood in front of me.
“Hey, the Rat really didn’t say anything to you?”
“Nope.”
“Weird.”
“You think so?”
He kept polishing the glass in his hand as he thought it over.
“He really seemed like he wanted to talk to you about it.”
“So why didn’t he?”
“It’s hard for him. He feels like you’ll give him a hard time.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“It just seems that way. He’s felt that way for a long time. He’s a real easy-going kid, but when it comes to you, there’s something there…I’m not saying anything bad about you or anything.”
“I know that.”
“Anyway, I’ve got twenty years on you, and in that time I’ve seen quite a bit. ‘Cause of that, this is, well, it’s just…”
“You’re worried.”
“Yeah.”
I laughed and drank my beer.
“I’ll try and talk to him.”
“I think that’d be good.”
J put out his cigarette and went back to work. I got up from my seat and went to the washroom, washed my hands, and looked at my face lit up in the mirror. Then I went back and spaced out as I drank another beer.
30
Once upon a time, everybody was preoccupied with being cool.
When I finished high school, I resolved to say only half of what I was really thinking. I don’t know why, but that was the plan. Over the course of a few years, I was able to stick to this. Then one day I discovered that I was no longer the kind of person who could just say half of what he was really feeling.
I don’t know what that had to do with being cool. However, if you could call an old refrigerator in desperate need of defrosting cool, that was me. In that vein, I was caught in the ebb and flow of time, and when my consciousness begged for sleep, I kickstarted it with beer and cigarettes to keep on writing like this. I took lots of hot showers, shaved twice a day, and listened to old records ad infinitum. Right now, behind me, those old-fashioned Peter, Paul, and Mary are singing:
“Don’t think twice, it’s alright.”
31
The following day, I invited the Rat to the pool at the hotel on the mountainside. Summer was almost over, traffic was rough, and there were only ten other guests at the pool. Of them, half were swimming and the other half were contentedly-sunbathing Americans staying there.
The hotel was a remodeled nobleman’s estate spanned by a splendid lawn, the pool and the main wing partitioned by a hedge rising up a slightly inclining hill, with a clear view of the ocean, the town, and the harbor below.
After racing the Rat back and forth down the length of the twenty-five meter pool, we sat in the deck chairs and drank cola. I caught my breath and then in the time it took to take one hit of my cigarette, the Rat was all alone, his gaze fixed absently on an American girl swimming beautifully.
In the brilliant sky, a few jet trails could be seen, stuck to the sky as if frozen there.
“I feel like lots more planes used to fly by when I was a kid,” said the Rat as he looked up.
“They were mostly US Air Force planes, though. Twin-fuselage propeller planes. You’ve seen ‘em?”
“Like the P-38?”
“Nah, transport planes. Much bigger than P-38s. They’d be flying really low, and you could see the emblems painted on the side…also I saw a DC-6, a DC-7, and a Sabrejet.”
“Those are really old.”
“Yep, back from the Eisenhower days. The cruisers would enter the bay, and the town would be full of sailors. You ever seen an MP?”
“Yeah.”
“Times change,” he sighed. “Not that I particularly like sailors or anything…”
I nodded.
“The Sabres were really great planes. They were only used to drop napalm. You ever see an airplane drop napalm?”
“Just in war movies.”
“People really think up a lot of things. And napalm is one of them. After ten years, you’d even start to miss the napalm, I bet.”
I laughed and lit my second cigarette. “You really like airplanes, don’t you?”
“I thought I wanted to be a pilot, back in those days. But my eyes were bad, so I gave it up.”
“Yeah?”
“I like the sky. You can look at it forever and never get tired of it, and when you don’t want to look at it anymore, you stop.”
The Rat was silent for five minutes, then suddenly spoke.
“Sometimes, there’s nothing I can do, I just can’t stand it any longer. ‘Cause I’m rich.”
“I can’t pretend to know how you feel,” I said resignedly, “but it’s okay to run away. If you really feel that way.”
“Probably…I think that would be the best thing to do. Go to some town I don’t know, start all over again. Wouldn’t be too bad.”