Clearly Now, the Rain (8 page)

It comes out encased in more ice than I would have chosen. But he just shakes his head again, resigned, like a recovered alcoholic talking to an up-and-coming one. And so I nod, because I'm not about to get into a philosophical debate about Serala—and because I'm not entirely sure that he is wrong.

Kaya, done with the rawhide, smacks the glass door with her paw and yips once, just a pantomime through the thick pane.

That summer is just mainly composed of fucking and eating and laughing: trying to keep our sex quiet because Cassie's in the living room and failing so we laugh instead; watching Kaya stalk Cassie's cat around the apartment; wine and hanky-panky before the woodstove of the mountain house, the Cascades' breeze as evening falls; sitting at cafés, eating and drinking; watching old movies with my father; walking my old dog Sky slowly down the block; holding each other late into the morning while Etta James albums play, whorls of dust motes in the sunrays.

I remember the good things more acutely than the bad. But I remember, also, the awful moments, when sleep was too distant for too long, when I was absent for days and, I'm sure, she bit the hook of heroin again. I remember the wild beauty of her eyes inverted into wild terror when she awoke from nightmares, the long seconds it took to bring her back. But we were glad even for this, because it meant she had plunged all the way into the sea of sleep, not merely dipped a toe and recoiled into red-eyed empty hours, as was typical—her sleeplessness was a given and she never seemed intent on talking about it much. I wrote her letters and delivered them by hand, hoping they would mean more on paper.

My empathy opened her wider to me, it seemed, imbued her with the need to explain more, better, differently. And she welcomed my love when it came in these expected containers, but she was clear that it did not alter her world.

In the last days of that August, I was in the mountains with Hugh, and my childhood friend Billy, at work for my stepfather on the homestead-turned-woodpile. On a Thursday, we quit early, swam in the river and split for a concert at the Gorge, a breathtaking amphitheater on the banks of the Columbia River. An absurd and unfortunate series of events—beginning with Billy accidentally blowing a bowl of charred weed onto the chest of a rent-a-cop—landed me in the slammer for the entire three-day weekend on a felony charge for possession of psilocybin mushrooms.

My first morning incarcerated, after forcing down the dribbling yellow mess they called eggs, I dial Serala's number. But it's sweet, morning-baffled Cassie that answers and accepts the “charges coming from a correctional institution,” instantly on task, asking what she needs to do. I tell her not to worry and put Serala on the phone. But Serala isn't in.

As I sit against the wall in my orange jumpsuit and watch the prisoners give meaning to the day in their various ways, I can tell who the junkies are—versus the tweekers, the crackheads, the drunks, or simple thugs. They slump in cells, quivering a little but bored, not playing cards, or holding forth, or slap boxing like the others. Mainly, it seems, they are just waiting.

I'd been gone for several days from Seattle and I wondered how many Serala had been gone from her bed.

It was a heady and baffling time that appears now more exhausting than alluring, but then felt like pure, uncut life flowing into my mainline vein. I sure as hell didn't know what it meant to fall in love with Serala, but it was like electrified carbonation instead of blood in me. All my life, like most people, I'd observed the opposite sex in customary straightjackets: strictly friend, strictly fling, or unhealthy, fraught, long-term relationship. It was thrilling to discover another category and that the category was real—lots of people talked about “fuck buddies” and “friends with benefits” but few of those supposedly easy affairs landed right side up. And, besides, that didn't even begin to articulate what was taking place. I was learning what nonpossession meant, enjoying the inverse of the high-octane poison of jealousy that had produced so much drama and pain in my life. I had endured a vicious blow of jealousy when I found Serala stoned and intimate with Dean at the house party, but the betrayal was intellectual, spiritual even—she'd offered her ear to a person who'd once turned against me despite my loyalty to him. If I'd walked in on her tangled naked with a random boy, I probably would have excused myself and split for a few hours.

I'd told Jay (too sharply) that
I wasn't him
when he'd issued his echoing warning—
careful man, she's very negative, it's toxic
—because I knew I wouldn't fall into the trap of conventional love with Serala as he had. For me, to love Serala was to oppose her cynicism and to hope for change, goodness, justice, salvation. I had no perspective to see what that definition of love implied: that I was suddenly and deeply engaged in a fight that would be very difficult to continue from afar—the ceaseless fight, waged with words and music, food and sex, to convince her that she was wrong and this life is worth it, in the end.

I did not have the vision to consider that when one wades into pitched battle with concepts such as “hope” as battle standards, one is necessarily conceding that they can be bloodied—and lost. That's what Jay, perhaps, was trying to tell me.

Ten

In September I followed Interstate 5 away from Serala and Seattle, back to school with a groan but some excitement too. Kaya roamed around the truck curiously, I played Serala's mix tapes and tried to convince myself I could write my thesis in one semester.

When I pull into the gravel driveway of my new home, trust fund hippies and loud girls are splayed all over the front porch. I haul my bags in through a crowd of pool players, only half of whom I know, into the tiny bedroom that has been saved for me, to find it brimming with my new roommate's overflow of belongings.

Don't sweat it, bro, I'll move it later,
he says, swaying in the doorway,
I've got a steak on the grill for you.

That charms me. Kaya charms everybody, and thus the year begins.

I met Mona, a pretty Persian girl in a hippie blouse and pigtails in downtown Riverside. I was outside a bar with Jay, drinking beer in the crisp autumn air. Mona floated down the avenue with her shy dog. The gusts of afternoon took hold of her black hair and showed me her huge Eastern eyes, which suddenly became the only things on the block. Jay called her over. She split her attention between me, him, and her dog, which she stroked constantly, like it was as natural as breathing. I kicked Jay under the patio table and was introduced, told we were actually neighbors. She smiled and told me that she guessed she'd be the girl next door.

She happened by my big, dirty party house frequently with her dog, which Kaya fell in love with. I liked the situation, but I also liked her a lot more than I was willing to admit; she was beautiful, apparently mellow-mooded, easy to talk to, right next door. She was a highly sensitive, tentative cynic with a warm heart. The fact that she was the third Middle Eastern woman to capture my attention in the last few years was curious. It was somewhat problematic as it was bound to get me shit dealt by observant friends, but not nearly enough to put a stop to the carnal momentum.

I started on the monster thesis on the national politics of Venezuela.

The police killed an unarmed black man under suspicious circumstances and a protest movement erupted among both the Pan-African Student Association and their white peers, like me, swollen with liberal guilt.

The fight began to unionize the dining hall workers.

Every time I called, my father answered the phone with increasing loopiness, tumbling further into depression, pain, and drugs.

My only response to all this was my angst-ridden poetry, which I was taking as seriously as a heart attack.

And then there was Serala's descent.

I spent hours on the filthy sofa on my porch, the cordless pressed to my head, listening with increasing alarm. I pushed her toward my father. I imagined them sharing some wine, staring out at the streetlights on the bridge, Neil Young in the background. Or watching some good flicks and making each other feel more real, more human, more hopeful. I preferred not to think that, instead, they sat around and got lifted together, sharing pills or even junk, feeling safe and easy and less ashamed for the company and maybe, also, pulling each other haphazardly toward a peace I wasn't ready to condone as their destination, like two drunks helping one another foolishly and inevitably toward their car under a moonless sky.

Serala filled her days with extra shifts at a record store, and with long, circuitous drives around all the bodies of water, playing her way through Lyle Lovett, Lucinda Williams, Nick Drake, Gillian Welch, Portishead—all the sounds that recognized the pain inside of her. But it was like trying to stop the pulsing spurt of an artery with a napkin: the autumn was cutting her down and I heard it.

Then I got a letter, which I've lost along with too many others.

First, she is followed by a drunken frat boy who hollers obscene demands as she is walking home. She lights a Pall Mall to show she's not scared, gives him the finger over her shoulder, moves under the streetlights. But he's too far gone to care, stalking her boldly, hollering crude questions. When she is near her door, he takes some quick steps and throws her against a wall.

Now you're gonna fuckin' pay attention to me
, he slurs, hands like cold fish flopping around her blouse. So she maces him and pushes him off, him screaming in agony, she says, and I believe her. I can see her white teeth clamped with rage like a jaw floating in the absolute dark, her left hand biting crescents into his chest as she holds him steady to hit him directly with the chemical spray. I can see that, but her pretense of laughing it off rings hollow.

And not two days later, the same street, trudging home from another shift, she finds a dog, crushed by a driver who has fled. The dog is crying quietly through his last moments. I can see her sit down on the curb, put her smoke out, and hold that dog, rocking, as he takes his last, heaving breaths. I can see tipsy diners, wandering back to their cars, standing over her, asking with their meager curiosity
what's happened, what's wrong,
and being treated to a hiss of warning to
fuck off
. I wonder what spirit might have been in that dog, so unlucky to die that way, so fortunate to die in her arms—like others, before then and still to come.

When we'd made plans to meet in Frisco during a school break in October, we were both relieved to have in our minds a day, an hour, a place stamped: a promise of relief up the highway.

Serala looks good when she comes through the doors of baggage claim, wearing a headscarf and jeans—more casual than usual—and her eyes are bright, not even shielded behind sunglasses. I have Kaya with me, who goes bananas, squealing and racing in circles around her legs, peeing everywhere to the chagrin of the skycaps.

We go to bed early in a trashy motel and when we make love it is different; it feels like we have been saving it up and, simultaneously, like we are trying to make it suffice for all the coming distance. And when the blanket slides away, when we wake the puppy and she cries softly, it is, perhaps, because the event is like a separate physical being in the room with us.

Those few days it was as if she'd been exonerated of some capital crime and was entering the world again, free. This was escape, vacation, and comfort; this was her respite from what was taking her apart, piece by piece. It is all images and emotions that I recall, until the very last moments, which I have still, as tenacious as a splinter, lodged in my mind:

On the sun-washed skull of parking structure C she wears black—more formal again, returning. To the north Frisco broods invisible under its shroud. Strands of freeway whine and thunder in the west. Jumbo jets lumber into the cobalt sky, so close that Serala's hair lifts. The wind blows from another direction, so her hair lifts that way too, frenzied. Gusts break the ashes from her cigarettes and hurl their nothingness against the loud canvas of the world. But she is very calm, or at least her hands don't shake when she drags on the cigarettes. Kaya runs in gleeful circles, sniffing oil spots and watching birds, giddy to be out of the cheap motel that held us till afternoon. Behind us is the trio of easy days that we carved out of places like Half Moon Bay and Santa Clara. Nothing was half or saintly or clear about any of it. I remember awaking to folds of ocean on rocks, the hiss and explosion of breakers, thinking she had just said something important. But there were only her eyes and perfect teeth, the sliver of a kiss, and she sent me back to dream. It was all lovemaking, and eating, and driving that made it feel like escape instead of a weekend.

Suddenly all that is left is a walk to the elevator. God, the frayed conviction in those eyes! The stride of those black boots! As the doors close I blow a kiss and she looks down. And I am alone on that rooftop with my dog, and my truck, and the wrath of a merciless October.

Two days later, carrying the poetry book I'd bought as a gift, I knock on the door to Mona's bungalow and we both say
hi
at once, nervous. She invites me in and her dog, Kasko, checks me out like a bouncer. When small talk falters, she grabs me with a confidence I wouldn't have guessed at. We go at each other, blowing away my notions of her as demure, sweet, somewhat passive. The dog sits at attention and gives me a chilly glare as we gasp back to life. When Mona sees me looking out the window she says:
It's okay, you know, you don't have to stay
. So I get up and split straight off, scared of the mild commitment of a few hours in her bed.

When I scale the wobbly fence between my house and Mona's, I find the lights are still up and bass lines thunder and billiard balls click. Jay is there, in town to perform with his hip-hop group that's still holding together. He ascertains where I've just been with a glance.

Booty call!
He announces and giggles in an infectious way so that all his comrades do, too. With an arm around my shoulder—
C'mon, bro, I'm almost never here, you know, I miss you!
—I agree to stay up with him for a drink. We settle onto the rotting sofa and I feel myself bracing. Prodded by Guinness and the fact that he knows I've spent the last weekend up north with Serala, he tries to draw me into a philosophical argument again.

Do you think the way she looks at shit is right, man? Do you?

Jay's skinny arms wave the question around me like smoke. The tattoo of a fat-faced sun that he got when we were sixteen peeks at me from beneath a sleeve.

I'm not going to have this debate with you, Jay,
I say and turn away to underline it.

Why not? What is it that you're afraid of?
He drains his pint and levels his eyes at me, willing me to give just a foothold.
She's all negativity, man, and I don't want to see it in you—I don't want to see you go all dark the way I did. You're a light, Eli, and you've got to stay that way
.

Soon he gives up, leaving me with a resigned embrace.

That next month, she started slipping precipitously and I fought her at every defeated phrase; I promised that it would all be better by Christmas; I returned every volley of despair with a salvo of pep, with faith, however contrived. And sometimes with guilt:
you can't do this to me, you can't do this to your momma, you've got to hang on.
I hung up and hammered the walls with fists, hurled billiard balls into the sofa, drank stabs of whatever rotgut my roommate had around. I talked angrily to her picture, which didn't talk back.

But one November night she told me over the scratchy phone line, in language slowed and dumbed by heroin, that she had a huge spool of string rolling around in the trunk of Desert Storm.

When that spool unwinds completely,
she said,
when that spool runs out.

I knew what that meant and so I bought a plane ticket.

When I got to her apartment, Serala couldn't even raise a smile to welcome me, just spun and walked away from the open door, back to the sofa from which she peered out bitterly. Soon she had traded silence for vitriol.

What the fuck does everyone want? Nobody can read a newspaper and then tell me to cheer up; nobody's going to make me feel crazy. If it's not crazy out there, whirling around and fucking covering everything, infecting everything, why the fuck is it crazy inside me? Everyone else is fucking crazy.

She flopped onto her back and blew out a plume of smoke with a couple drops of saliva. I was pacing, unnerved, and stopped over her.

I don't know, Serala,
I said, trying to be genuine,
but I came here to help you figure out how to be crazy enough to get by, I guess
.

No, you fucking came here for yourself, you came here to make yourself feel better—I know that.

She scoffed deep in her throat and turned to face the sofa, as red flapped in the corners of my mind: how dare she? Did she think it was fucking easy to love her? I stormed out of her apartment, barefoot, stopping on a cold corner and breathing steam up into the vapor lights of the International House of Pancakes, almost fighting a drunk who chuckled at the spectacle of me.

I drove Serala the next morning to a hospital because a Connecticut shrink needed her blood for tests. We walked out of there an hour later, her with the cotton ball taped over her mainline. Idly, I picked up a leaf, blood red but tinged with live green around the edges and gave it to her. She cast it aside.

It's just going to fucking die, what do I want with it?

We drove to the house in the mountains. I was happy to buy strong weed and plenty of wine. We cooked the grass into a lackluster cake and she chugged wine and took her sleeping pills, the heavy kind that would have put me out for days. She kneeled by the woodstove, her curtain of blue-black hair swung down over her face, one hand in a fist, banging a thigh, the other throttling a bottle of cabernet. She wept and talked nonsensically until her eyes got heavy and I looked into the fire and prayed that she would sleep. Eventually she did. I carried her into the bedroom and buried her beneath many blankets. I sat by the fire, pretending to study politics. I watched swirls of flame devour the last dry wood of the summer.

When she woke she was quiet, and her hands didn't shake, and I could breathe a little. And she might have even laughed once before we pulled into the city.

We were parked outside her apartment building and the winds whirled leaves and trash down the sidewalk. Pinheads of rain pocked the windshield and we were quiet, failing to be casual in our intent to not be fatalistic. I remember that Serala took the leaf I'd given her the day before from the floor of the car. She seemed surprised to see it hadn't browned and died. She offered me a nod as if to say:
It's enough, for now. Just enough. I will stay with you.

But immediately upon my return to Sage Hill there were big plans stewing. The World Trade Organization, the international regulatory body tacitly responsible for enforcing the growing gulf between the rich and the poor of the world, planned to hold a ministerial in Seattle at the end of the month. Almost every professor proclaimed support for participation in a momentous confrontation, a chance to leave the classroom and hit the streets.