“Look out, it’s gonna be 2006,” Andrew says.
“Look out.”
It takes Barrett a moment to understand that he’s feeling the coke. There’s a buzz in his head, a convocation of … not bees, exactly, nothing so alive; it’s as if the buzz emanates from a flotilla of microscopic steel balls covered with bristles, whirling around in his brain, scouring away his thoughts and leaving only a stark, throbbing cleanliness behind. It is distinctly medical.
This won’t be pleasant, but it’s going to make you feel better.
Maybe, this time, it will make Barrett feel better.
Andrew says, “Let’s do one more. I mean, hey, it’s New Year’s.”
He scoops out another small mound. Barrett lifts his head to receive it. He’s worried that he’ll miss, scatter it down his chin, but Andrew is as precise as a surgeon, he guides the end of the key directly into Barrett’s right nostril, and then his left. Andrew does the same for himself.
“Nice,” Andrew says.
“Very nice,” Barrett answers, though it begins to be apparent that it is not nice at all. The steel bristles scour away. He can feel, he believes he can feel, the inner surface of his skull, ravaged, a white emptiness where his brain had been.
Barrett hears himself say, “Two-thousand six is off to a pretty amazing start, isn’t it?”
It’s only his voice speaking. He himself resides in a skull sepulcher, an ancient emptiness where some strange machinery emits its burr, metal teeth on metal teeth.
“Beth,” Andrew says. “You mean Beth.”
“No. I mean Michael Jackson getting off on those trumped-up child molestation charges.”
Andrew turns his head, looks uncomprehendingly at Barrett. As, of course, he would. Andrew doesn’t get it. Andrew doesn’t speak sarcasm. To Barrett’s astonishment, though, he doesn’t seem to mind. He feels too twitchy, too nervously discouraged, to mind. Andrew, this is who I am. I’m prone to irony and wit. I’m not a great, accidental beauty like you are but I, too, cut a shape in the world.
The steel bristles have, it seems, abraded away his self-concern, his desire to be desired; he has only this voice, which speaks like some cranky oracle from the vault that was his mind.
“Joke,” Barrett says. “I mean, yes, of course, Beth.”
“I know, man. The body can pull off some crazy shit.”
“It can.”
“And, you know, doctors have
no idea.
”
“Doctors have
some
idea. But they’re not always right. No one is.”
Barrett hears himself, wonders at his ability to speak in sentences. The mechanism is doing it, the small forgotten cleaning-machine that resides in his skull, doing the work its progenitors programmed it to do.
“If I got sick,” Andrew says, “I’d go to a shaman.”
A change occurs.
Barrett is surprised, but helpless. Some physical process, some assertion of the blood, seems to be announcing itself. Barrett’s attraction to Andrew is beginning to fade.
The change has to do, it seems, with the word “shaman.” It has to do with Andrew’s insistence on it, despite the fact that Beth has recovered without having remotely considered seeing a shaman or a psychic or a layer-on of hands; it has to do with Barrett’s own singular, visionary experience, which occurred in spite of his skepticism; and with hearing that particular word, “shaman,” delivered in Andrew’s New Jersey accent; it has to do with the very real possibility that Andrew isn’t entirely sure what a shaman actually is.
Barrett has never spent much time imagining a future for Andrew. There was no possible future that might include Barrett, and so it was better, it was sexier, to dream only of Andrew in the present.
Abruptly, though, change is occurring. Barrett can for the moment see nothing
but
Andrew’s future: Andrew an aging devotee of the improbable, living cheaply, doing some doltish job, turning by slow degrees from a perpetually attentive wizard’s assistant into one of those men who consider themselves wizards in their own right; who get their “facts” from who knows where; who are well informed about the ongoing government cover-up of the alien landings at Roswell but can’t name their state senators …
Andrew is an illusion.
Barrett has known that all along, known it since Liz first turned up with Andrew (she’d brought him along to a movie, was it
Star Wars III
?) and Barrett had gone hollow-bellied at the first sight of Andrew’s frank and uncaring beauty, the nonchalance with which he wore it, as if he were the embodiment of some lost American ideal—built for labor, newly minted, his face pure and clear; Andrew the descendant of generations of men who rode bold-hearted off into unknown territory, into the mountains and forests, while the others—the cautious, the unsure, those who were grateful for what little they had already—conducted their various businesses on the sooty cobblestones of the East, careful about puddles and piles of manure.
Andrew is an ideal, an invention, a golden cup. Billions of dollars are expended annually, by countless members of the population, on the basis of how much or how little they resemble Andrew, the son of a New Jersey shoe repairman; Andrew who got it all free of charge.
Barrett can feel his interest waning. A balance has shifted. At one moment, Andrew’s naïveté was the perfect, satyrly complement to his heedlessly perfect body. At the next, he’s a foolish boy who will remain foolish long after time has done its work on the other parts.
Barrett says, “If you had stage four liver and colon cancer, a shaman could do exactly shit for you.”
Andrew leans forward, looks avidly at Barrett.
“You don’t believe in shamans,” he says, in a tone of eager (flirtatious?) argumentativeness.
Is it true, is it possible, that Andrew has suddenly taken an interest in this new Barrett, the one who’s losing interest in him?
It is. Any other response would be the surprise.
“No, I believe in, I don’t know, almost everything. In the right place at the right time. Magic is great, magic is underestimated. But magic is not going to suck the cancer out of your body.”
“Don’t you think that’s what happened to Beth?”
How exactly should Barrett answer that?
Barrett closes his eyes for a moment, letting his brain go electric, letting it continue cleaning itself out.
Then he says, “I saw a light in the sky once.”
He’s never told anyone. How could he possibly be telling Andrew?
Who else would he tell, though? Who else wouldn’t question it, or joke about it?
And this new, dishonored Andrew, this Andrew who sits here, foolish and mortal as countless beautiful young men, over countless centuries …
“I see lights in the sky all the time,” Andrew answers. “Meteors, planets, shooting stars. Probably a flying saucer or two.”
Barrett says, “It was a big greenish light. Kind of like a spiral. I saw it over Central Park more than a year ago.”
“Cool.”
“Well, yeah, it was cool, but it was very strange, too.”
“There’s all kinds of strange shit up there. You think we know everything that’s up there? You think we got it mapped?”
“It felt … alive. In some way.”
“Stars are alive.”
“It wasn’t a star.”
“Was it beautiful?”
“Yes. It was beautiful. And kind of terrible.”
“Huh?”
“Powerful. Enormous. And then it went out again.”
“That sounds very cool.”
Barrett should stop talking now. He should stop talking.
He says, “I’ve been going to church.”
“Really.” By the tone of his voice, Andrew apparently finds this neither strange nor ordinary. In Wonderland, the customs are unfamiliar, but not repellent. Alice simply wanders through it, polite and well behaved.
Barrett says, “I don’t pray. I don’t stand up or kneel. I don’t sing. I just sit there, a few times a week, in a back pew.”
“Churches are beautiful. I mean, organized religion is bullshit, but churches have holiness in them.”
“Not this one. It’s pretty plain. And it’s just me and about a dozen old ladies, who always sit up front.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Nobody talks to me. I thought for a while that after a service, one of the priests would come over and say something like, ‘What brings you here, my son?’ But these guys are old, really old, they’re just going through the motions and, I don’t know, thinking about getting under the altar boys’ robes once everybody else is gone.”
Andrew laughs lewdly. He asks, “Why do you go, then?”
“It’s quiet. It has an atmosphere, even this crummy old church. I just sort of sit there wondering if something will … arrive.”
“Has it?”
“No. Not yet.”
“Here you are.”
Barrett opens his eyes. It’s Liz, standing in the doorway, a reenactment of Andrew coming to Barrett’s room twenty minutes ago. At the end of his life, will Barrett remember people standing in doorways, having found him in his various refuges?
Andrew says, “Hey, there.”
“It’s about eleven minutes to midnight,” she says. She walks into the room.
“There is so much
shit
in here,” she says.
“Tyler and Beth are collectors,” Barrett tells her.
“Tyler and Beth are out of their minds.”
She makes her way to the bed, settles in beside Andrew, who moves over to make room for her. Here, now, nudging against Barrett’s side, are Andrew’s right shoulder and the rise of his right hip.
It’s sexy. Of course it is. But now that Barrett’s devotion is fading, Andrew is turning from deity to porn. Barrett is relieved, and sorry. A ship is sailing off. Barrett glances at the lampshade, with its painted-on sailboats, the paint chipped away in spots.
Andrew says to Liz, “Want a bump?”
“And whose coke would that be?” she asks.
“I don’t know.”
“It’s Tyler’s,” Barrett says.
“I’ve been under the impression that Tyler’s stopped doing coke.”
“Wrong impression, it seems.”
“Whatever. Did Tyler say to you, please go into my room and help yourself to my private stash?”
“Hey, Lizzie,” Andrew says, “it’s a party, it’s New Year’s Eve …”
“Put it back.”
Barrett says, “Everything here is jointly owned, by Tyler, Beth, and me.”
“Not drugs. You never ever take somebody’s drugs without having been invited. Put it back where you found it, right now.”
Andrew passes the vial to Barrett, who opens the nightstand drawer and tosses it back inside.
To Barrett, Liz says, “You don’t do this shit.”
“Uh, it’s a party. It’s New Year’s Eve.”
Andrew says, “Barrett was telling me about this light he saw in the sky once. Over Central Park.”
Of course Andrew would have no sense of secrecy. What could Andrew possibly imagine that ought to be kept secret?
“A light?” Liz asks.
Careful. Liz asks questions, Liz is not disposed to the miraculous or the inexplicable.
“Don’t listen to me, not right now,” Barrett says. “I have no idea what I’m talking about.”
Andrew says, “It was this big sphere. It was beautiful and powerful.”
“Barrett told you he saw a light in the sky,” Liz says to Andrew.
“And Bigfoot,” Barrett says. “I saw Bigfoot, over on Third Avenue. He was going into a Taco Bell.”
Liz tucks her lips together, looks briefly at the ceiling, looks at Barrett.
“What was it like?” she asks.
Barrett takes a breath, as if he were about to duck his head under water.
“It was this sort of pale aqua color.”
Liz continues looking at Barrett. Her face takes on a scrutinizing aspect, as if she were a detective who suspected Barrett of lying about his whereabouts on the night of a crime.
“I saw a light once,” she says. “Up in the sky.”
“You’re kidding.”
“It was years ago.”
“Where? Uh, I mean, in the sky, right …”
“I was up on my roof. It was early summer, I was living on the Lower East Side then, working in Joshua’s store. I was going to bed, and I went up to the roof to smoke a joint first. Actually, come to think of it, I think it was opiated hash.”
“What was the light like?” Barrett asks.
“Well, I guess I’d say a disk. Or a sphere.”
“This kind of pale aqua?”
Liz emits a laugh with a strangely sour undertone.
“I’d say more like teal. I’m in retail, I don’t see aqua.”
“Tell me more about what it looked like.”
She levels her eyes at him, a woman of patience, a woman sufficiently weary of overly ardent men that she’s come to choose irony over irritation.
“It was this funny floating ball of light,” she says. “There was something sweet about it.”
“
Sweet
?”
“Yeah. I guess. Sort of like a satellite from the fifties. Like this little luminous has-been of a thing that had wandered in from some other time, when it used to be a marvel.”
“That’s not like the light I saw.”
“Well, then, it seems we saw different lights.”
“Did you feel anything? I mean, what did you think when you saw it?”
“I thought, This is really good hash, I’ve got to remember who I got it from.”
“That’s it?”
“Pretty much.”
“What happened after?”
“I finished the hash, went back downstairs, read a book for a while, and went to sleep. The next morning, I went to work again. Do you remember what an asshole Joshua could be?”
“You didn’t wonder what it was? The light, I mean.”
“I thought some kind of gas or something. Isn’t the universe full of gaseous elements?”
Andrew says, “Yeah, there are gasses and neutrinos and this shit they call dark matter.”
“And you just went on about your business?” Barrett says to Liz.
“What did you expect me to do, call the
National Enquirer
? I was high, I saw a light, and it went away again.”
Barrett leans toward her, his head close enough to Andrew’s that he can feel Andrew’s breath on his cheek.
He asks, “Did anything happen afterward?”
“No, I told you. Nothing did.”
“Maybe not right after.”
“This was years ago, things happen all the time.”
“Think.”
“You’re scaring me a little.”
“Come on. Think. Humor me.”