I saw this at about three o’clock in the morning, alone in my apartment, on a black-and-white set with lots of interference. White noise and snow. He seemed to be speaking directly at me, right out of the television set. For a moment I was disoriented, seized by panic; could a ghost embody itself through wavelengths, electronic dots, a picture tube? What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star?
We were silent, contemplating the awfulness of this, me feeling as if I had experienced in these few words the entire weight and sweep of Kotku’s life, and Boris’s.
Fabelhaft. Having the best fun ever. One thing at a time. Aspirins. Cold water from the minibar.
Patch of sunlight on a yellow wall. The loneliness that separates every living creature from every other living creature. Sorrow inseparable from joy.
Not timid, not even hopeless, but steady and holding its place. Refusing to pull back from the world.
It does all swing around strangely sometimes, doesn’t it?” he said. I was silent, not knowing what to say. “I mean only – ” rubbing his eye – “I only understand it, as I get older. How funny time is. How many tricks and surprises.” The word trick was all I heard, or understood.
Before the Divine can take over, the mortal self – the dust of us, the part that decays – must be made clean as possible.” “How is that?” “Through symbolic acts, most of them fairly universal in the Greek world. Water poured over the head, baths, fasting.
I was sitting on her porch and said: You must be thirsty, would you like to come in? Portraits, miniatures, daguerreotypes, old Aunt This, old Uncle Thus and So. That spiral staircase coming down. And there I was – in my lifeboat. I’d found it. You had to pinch yourself in that house sometimes to remind yourself it wasn’t 1909.
The candles, the orange gleam of firelight where she’d been standing made me think of the warmth of the wine bar, as if the light itself might be a passageway back to the night before and the little wooden table where we had sat knee to knee, her face washed with the same orange-tinged light.
Months after I got to know the five of them, I found to my surprise that at the start they’d been nearly as bewildered by me as I by them.
At any rate, this was the weekend that things started to change, that the dark gaps between the street lamps begin to grow smaller, and smaller, and farther apart, the first sign that one’s train is approaching familiar territory, and will soon be passing through the well-known, well-lighted streets of town.
The atoms in my head were spinning apart; the sparkle of the bump had already begun to turn, apprehension and disquiet moving in subtly like dark air before a thunderstorm. For a long, somber moment we looked at each other: high chemical frequency, solitude to solitude, like two Tibetan monks on a mountaintop.
This was a different, more affable energy, with the pills: a combination of sluggishness and brightness, a bemused, goofy, floating quality. His walk was looser. He napped more, nodded agreeably, lost the thread of his arguments, ambled about barefoot with his bathrobe halfway open.
You went there?” “Yes – Dallas. Uncle Harry and Aunt Tess lived there for a while. There’s nothing to do but go to the movies and you can’t walk anywhere, people have to drive you. Also they have rattlesnakes, and the death penalty, which I think is primitive and unethical in ninety-eight per cent of cases. But it’ll probably be better for her there.” “Why?
The swish of the oars and the hypnotic thrum of dragonflies blended with his academic monotone.
By quarter of ten I was sitting on the floor of my room at Hobie’s house with my mind reeling like a spun-down top wobbling and veering from side to side.
The hedges and the acres and acres of lawn were covered in a network of spider web that caught the dew in beads so that it glistened white as frost.
Heebiejeebieville.
And if beauty is terror,” said Julian, “then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?” “To live,” said Camilla. “To live forever,” said Bunny, chin cupped in palm.
His hands, folded on the desk before him, were gnarled with veins and had a bluish, pearly sheen around the knuckles. I stared at them.