White Tiger on Snow Mountain (17 page)

“Seven seven nine point three two one. Nine seven six seven two. One oh one oh one oh one. Nine. Nine. Nine. Nine. Nine. Nine.”

The police call our parents. Philip’s folks meet the ambulance at the emergency room. Mine drive me home in silence. But in a miraculous twist, we get off scot-free when Philip’s freak-out is blamed on sunstroke and dehydration. We’re lucky to be alive, the doctors say, which confuses my parents and takes the fun out of punishing me. In the end I am simply forbidden from camping, which is fine by me. I never want to see another tree.

Summer returns to normal: bong hits, air-conditioned double features, and nights playing Frisbee in the Dunkin’ Do-nuts parking lot, but looking back, I realize now Philip is never quite the same. Maybe he never really manages to rehydrate. He complains that one eye sees in a rectangle and the other a triangle, or that he can only perceive two dimensions, though he actually finds this helps his painting. There is a grumbling under his bed that he can never make out, that starts just as he is falling asleep, but when he checks, there is nothing but dust balls or the cat. I mock him, laugh it off.

Then, one weekend that August, Philip’s parents go away and we do angel dust at his house. We lie on the floor and listen to Miles’s double album
Agharta
with our eyes shut. When it’s finally over and I sit up, it’s too late—it doesn’t make any difference. I keep seeing the same thing, planets forming and imploding, the history of the universe speeding up. We go to the kitchen and try eating fun things. Ice and grapes are best
since they change state in your mouth: the exquisite torment of the melting ice, the sunny burst of a grape against the tongue. Philip goes into the bathroom to pee, and I hear him laughing hysterically.

“It’s like I have this sort of hose sticking out of my body,” he announces. He laughs so hard he pisses all over the floor. “You’ve got to try it.”

“Later,” I say. I’m not sure I am ready for that. Then we sit facing each other on the couch and do “impressions.”

“OK, I’m Humphrey Bogart,” I say and Philip immediately hallucinates that I am Bogart, complete with the cigarette and raincoat.

“I’m Eleanor Roosevelt,” he says, and I howl as I see it: the big lips, the dress, the hair.

“I’m Jimi Hendrix.”

“I’m Hitler.”

“I’m Cher.”

Soon of course, we raise the stakes and get into the scary ones.

“I’m your dead grandmother,” I tell him, and his eyes widen crazily.

“Stop it. Stop it.” He is jumping around and punching my arm. So I turn back into myself. Then he gets up close in my face and grins, looking me in the eye.

“I’m you.”

Philip decides to go to sleep, so I go lie down in his sister’s old room. I am worried. I know I won’t sleep, and the cat is giving me the creeps. It keeps growling and clawing on my chest,
muttering like a soft engine that I can feel digging toward my heart. When it leans over me, eyes aglow in the dark, I know right away: It is a demon. I remember the words of the deer and lie there, paralyzed with fear. Finally, I work up my nerve and, with a superhuman effort, I jump up, toss the beast into the hall, and lock the door. All night, I huddle under the blanket, staring into the dark, while the cat scratches and meows in the hall. Around dawn I hear crashes and screams, but I don’t dare peek. Who knows what that creature is doing? Quiet returns, but that scares me even more. Now I really do have to piss, but there is no way I am stepping out there. I get up and look around for an old bottle or a plant. There is an air conditioner in the window, so that’s out. When I press my head to the glass, the lawn and shrubs look like a black mass closing in on the house. The trees seem to float an inch off the ground. I hear the muttering that Philip complained of, from behind the door, and I understand: It’s the demon speaking numbers. Finally I just piss in the corner behind a dresser. I’ll blame it on that fucking satanic cat.

I crash out, and when I wake up, it is midafternoon. I feel a lot better about everything. I want to head to the diner for pancakes, ham, and eggs. I want coffee. I venture out to Philip’s room, hoping he will be in the mood for breakfast. Everything in there is smashed and torn to bits: the furniture, the stereo, every single record and book. The windows and mirrors are shattered. Philip is lying naked and unconscious in the middle of the floor with a hammer in his hand and blood smeared on his feet from the broken glass. I split immediately and go home to have lunch with my parents. Later I hear that Philip’s parents
have packed him off to some kind of rehab or nuthouse and after that to a special school. A year later, I will start college and move away.

Decades pass. I enter my own dark period and finally emerge, a reasonably sane sort-of-grown-up living a seminormal life. At least I learn to fake it, more or less. I move back to New York, where I find work as a teacher. Not long after I arrive, I bump into an old classmate, Christine, browsing the stacks at Strand Books. Despite loving her madly through grade school, I don’t recognize her at first. She’s a mother now, with her hair in a long yellow braid and red knuckles above the wedding ring, but up close, in the smile and the eyes, she’s the same. It’s Christine who brings up Philip. I admit I haven’t thought of him in years. She says he’s back in a mental facility in New Jersey yet again, diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. Feeling guilty, I write him a letter, raising the possibility that maybe, if he stays off drugs, he can find another, freer life, like me. I offer to visit. “After all,” I write, “you are my oldest friend.” The reply is succinct, printed on a plain lined sheet: “Glad to hear you are well. Please do not contact me again.”

I never see Christine again, but from then on, Philip, you are in my thoughts. I hear that you’ve been seen panhandling in our old neighborhood or gotten arrested for sleeping in Central Park, and although I know it’s ridiculous, I begin looking, randomly, peering close when I pass a dirty scarecrow begging on a corner, or spot a wastrel snoozing on the train. Then one night,
I am on the subway, heading home late from a party, a fund-raiser for a magazine that has just published a story of mine for the first time. It was a fancy dinner, and I am dressed in a suit and feeling pretty good for once, with a free copy of the magazine on my lap. My story is right up front, and I am rereading it one more time when I notice a bum who matches your description passed out at the end of the car. He is slumped forward under a droopy old hat, but his hair is the right brown, down past his shoulders, and his face is all beard. Leaves and twigs stick out, as if he’s only just returned from that bad trip in the woods, a time-warped refugee from the wilderness of the mind. His gathered shopping bags are all filled with paper, and I can see there are drawings in marker and crayon and pastel. Other pages are covered in numbers. As I draw closer, I see too that there are numbers scrawled on his arms and legs, covering all visible skin.

And there it is: 999, the number you cried in your agony, written on the backs of your hands, facing me now upside down, right and left, 666 666. Did only one of us escape from the evil we met on the mountain that sunny day? Or did you carry it back down with you, like a mark?

“Philip,” I say, soft at first, then louder. “Philip! Is that you?”

Then your eyes open. They are blue. Not even madness can change your eye color, I don’t think. It isn’t you. So I apologize, handing over a dollar with a shaky hand, as we pull into a station. The bum takes the bill with a grave bow, removing his hat in dignified thanks, and that’s when I see them: two red horns protruding from the storm of his hair, bone hard with sharp black tips. The demon smiles, and a black tongue slides between
his sharp white teeth. Terrified, I edge away as the door opens behind me, but a grimy claw grabs my hand.

“Hey, David,” he says, in a voice I know. “Let’s do impressions.” Then he gets up close in my face and grins, looking me in the eye.

“I’m you.”

Hawk

The hawk wheels east toward Riverside Drive, low above the playground’s shrieking kids, soft and slow but too big to eat, seeking fat rats that breed in warm co-op pipes, feeding on white garbage, brie rinds and organic fruit, writhing like muscles under black, plastic skin when you walk your little doggy at night. The river is stuck like a sleeping shark, mouth frozen open, eyes clouded. The river rolls over and shows a spotted gray belly to the sun. Bare trees pass by with abandoned nests in their throats. Old smoke drifts back down to earth, and a veil of soot spreads on the snow, like a shawl covering cold shoulders. Surging swaying riding on the trembling point of a

branch,

the hawk

stands

still.

“I saw the hawk today, over by the river,” Jack said, breathing a last lungful of ice-sharpened air into the dim and stuffy room. It was an old building, and the radiator sang and sighed like an
old man’s guts. “He was cruising the promenade by the dog park with some kind of dead body. It was crazy, just sailing along in a big V, not even moving its wings, holding like a mouse or sparrow in its claws. It gave me an idea for something.” He pulled off his hat and gloves, squeezed out of his sneakers and thermal top, and searched the messy desk for a pencil, trying to remember the lines already crumbling in his mind. “Hey, what’s wrong, why are you crying?”

She sat on the edge of his bed, facing the window, weeping with her hands in her lap. Was someone dead? His mother? The thought appeared from nowhere, a dumb and wild fear. Why would they call Janet and not him? Her family then? Her dad’s heart at last? He felt his damp hair drying, cooling his scalp as he knelt, hands on her knees.

“Janet, what is it?”

She turned her wet and shining face to him, as if in pity.

“I’ve been thinking about breaking up.”

“Us?” he whispered. The small word clawed his throat.

She nodded.

“About wanting to break up with me?” he confirmed.

She nodded again, and tears dropped from her cheeks. In a cracked voice, she screeched, as if in horror: “I’ve been thinking about sex with other people.” Her eyes were wide with shock at herself. “I can’t help it.”

“Have you slept with someone else?” Dread made his own voice sound distant, as if he were hiding under the bed.

She shook her head. “But I’m afraid that I’m going to.” With this she began to sob so hysterically that he leapt up and held her, crushing her small head softly against his chest and stroking
the knotted curve of her spine. He loved her very much at that moment. He admired her bravery.

“It’s OK. These are normal feelings. Everyone has them. You’re just more honest than everyone else.” He sighed. “Much more.”

“Do you?” Her gleaming eyes searched his eyes.

“Sure.” He answered her question carefully, as if testifying before a congressional inquiry, a tiny lawyer buzzing in his ear. “Sometimes. Everybody does.”

“What does everybody do about it?”

He shrugged. “They live with it. They just stuff the feelings and don’t talk about it. Or they act on it and then they lose their relationships and are single till they find someone else, but eventually it all happens again. Until you’re too old to care, maybe.”

“I don’t want to lose you.”

“You will,” Jack said, self-pity washing over him. He was older and he’d been through more, which gave him a tragic, fatalistic angle on life, but not much practical wisdom to go with it. Once a relationship began to turn like this, to decline, there was no way back. Or if there was, he didn’t know about it.

“Have you ever thought about an open relationship?” she asked.

“You mean dating other people?”

“No. Well. Having sex with other people. Do you think that could work?”

“No. I’ve never heard of it working. Have you?”

“No. Well. There’s that couple Rita has been dating. They have threesomes with other women and men. Or couples. Or there’s swingers clubs.”

“I don’t want to see you with another man. That sounds horrible.”

“I think it would be hot to see you with another woman.”

“It would be. I’d like to see you with another girl too. But not some dude’s hairy ballsack.”

“That’s not fair. I have to see your hairy ballsack with girls.”

“But you don’t have to. Anyway what does fair have to do with it? We’re talking about what turns us on. Thinking about you with other guys makes me nauseous. Sorry.”

“It would be so much easier if you thought it was hot.”

“Easier for you. It would be easier for me if you wanted to stay home and bake cookies while I date other girls.”

They laughed finally. A small dry laugh but some relief at least.

“I guess maybe . . .” He spoke in a measured, wary tone. “Maybe if I just didn’t know. Like if you were going on a trip and had a little fling or took a weekend off from me to fulfill some fantasy. Like wanting to fuck a guy with a strap-on. I suppose I could live with that.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“And I’d do the same. Like, if I wanted to have sex with, I don’t know . . .”

“Who? Someone I know? Who is it?”

“What? No. Nothing like that. I just mean, I don’t know, a different kind of girl.”

“Bigger boobs?”

“No. I love yours. I told you.”

“Then what?”

“Just whatever, some sort of physical variation. Something out of the ordinary.”

“Like a midget or a blind girl or something?”

“No! I don’t know, Jesus, I haven’t given it much thought. A black girl maybe.”

“Oh, I see. Or Asian. I know you like Asian girls. They’re your favorite.”

“Actually they’re your favorite. You watch those videos of Asian girls kissing.”

“Whatever. You get to bang hot Asian and black girls, and I get to stick a dildo up a guy’s butt? That’s your idea of fair?”

He laughed. “No, that’s my idea of hot. But don’t worry because it’s not going to happen. The truth is you would have a thousand guys lined up around the block in five seconds, standing at attention, and I’d be home alone watching Netflix. So stop saying ‘fair.’ Sex and desire is the one realm of life where justice is not only impossible, it’s inconceivable. What would fair even look like? Everyone you want also wants you, and no one desires anything that would upset you? That’s not fair, it’s total despotism. The fact is you are free. Do anything you want, fuck anyone you want. I’m not trying to change your mind. You’ll just hold it against me, and we’ll break up anyway. So there is nothing to lose really.”