You
drove out. Towns off the highway threw whorls of light through the air like
immense, slumbering Archangels. You were the only person on this road, passing
underneath flash flood rain. Trees were down, their branches and mossy leaves
smashed on asphault, but no authority had yet been issued to remove the organic
debris. In the acceleration of headlights the contents of the sky roved
vertically like sand being windblown inside a desert of glass. Where were you
going? It’s almost impossible to remember now. Just over, under, or between a
faraway twist or lurch was your destination. There may or may not have been
someone waiting for you. A young woman, a girl. A great experiencer. She had
begun to rely on you to fulfill every need of hers save the carnal. That
responsibility belonged to a strapping, suspicious man who had nearly killed
her in at least three car accidents he caused but gave himself conveniently
temporary amnesia to forget. She was with him, had been with him, because she
was young, in the parlance of under-the-counter periodicals she was “Barely
Legal.” Somehow she had ended up in a different town accessable only by Mass
Pike or backroad. She had called you. You almost didn’t come. She had ceased
the near endless, intense communication that had developed between the two of
you over the last few months under the snowy nose of her perpetually,
void-fillingly angry inamorata. You write her off as decaying potential and
left her to their drug nest till the night of the phone call. She was alone,
she needed someone to come and get her. She told you she had missed your stolen
time together going to bookstores and telling each other things the other
didn’t know, mostly her giving you detailed information about her studies of
the occult. She missed your book recommendations and still promised to get to Survivor and Can You Feel The Silence? She had things she needed to tell “you”
and only “you.” But you had to face the trechery to get her. You got the
feeling, pulling your car into the night, that she would have called her
boyfriend if the weather was not so harsh. In these conditions, with his
driving skills, she wouldn’t make it home alive.
1010010101010
You
never planned on having a blog. In the penultimate hour of 2011 you began it
rather quickly after on-and-off inspiration. You were very sad. Two losses
weighed you down, one concrete and the other more densely ephemeral. You didn’t
have to launch it. You could have readied for another year of the same
anonymous moviegoing and erratic reading that defined the year just tipping away.
But the losses had erected choirs of chalk scratching anti-music in a brain that
always needed rescue from permanent annihilation. So you created a blog and
posted an essay about a movie that actually scared you when so few movies had.
The essay itself was hastily finished on the night for sake of content; despite
the praise it later received, you were never satisfied with it. Yet in the
process of making the blog and sharing the piece the choir was for the moment
muted. It was raining then, too. From a ghost to a ghost.
That
single essay was meant to be it. You thought about updating the blog every few
weeks, maybe even once every two months or so. There was an epiphany that night
involving a young woman who tended bar in a popular restaurant nearby. Your
family frequented the place and they kept insisting she had a crush on you. You
didn’t think about it very much, but she was nice and pretty and the few times
you spoke you found shared interests. The last time you talked she asked to
borrow a book about the Grateful Dead you had been reading. By the last night
of the year that particular volume had been finished, and after throwing
together a blog you spied it on the bookshelf and decided on a course of
action: you would ask her out, tonight, in the very now.
She
said yes. A few days later she got back with an old boyfriend. It didn’t hang
on you because you had only done it in the first place to reroute the
screams of your choir. If you had ended up together you wouldn’t have paid the
blog much thought. But you were back on your own, a planet you knew and could
thrive on. The toss-off became your new religion. You prayed and drank daily.
01001
Your
gang had made a home of sorts, congregating once a week at the Barnes and Noble
two towns over. She was a welcome friendship for you guys, however unlikely it
worked. She had a life in that broken sprawling town, and you and the guys went
there all the time to escape immediate vicinities. You saw movies with her, but
you were all never happier than when you were ensconced inside that local
plastic jewel of the chain. It was a second rate Barnes compared to the Holyoke
location, at least as your lofty standards for exhaustive inventory demanded,
but it didn’t matter as you always came with your own book anyway, and your
gang needed Starbucks fuel. She bought hotter drinks, while you and the rest
sipped candy cream frappechinos. They would sometimes wonder off together and
you would pick a plush chair as your nook to safely read your beloved pop
criticism and contemporary whacked-out fiction before gazing up to watch them
languidly pace back your way.
Your
gang wanted to make time last there. They ordered more drinks. You sat on a
bench outside together and they would talk about life and people as you fixed
your vision on a point in the distance, smokestack detritus, and when you felt
like it you joined in but for the most part you just stared and sipped.
In
your little corner of the world (-Yo La Tengo) the gang welcomed flash flood
rainstorms because that granted them permission to stay in the bookstore
longer, an extra hour, the rest of the night maybe. Each wet drop was a hand
around all of your waists. Terrors waited outside, interior terrors for you and
who knew what varieties for your companions, terrors abounded. The light and
the books were a Good Place for you all who needed one. Protection was ensured.
In little under a year the B&N would close and get gutted, replaced by a
Huck Finn’s Warehouse. She was busy and you were sick thus your gang couldn’t
make it for one last wavelength. Can a place be a nucleolus for friendship? It
must be, because you didn’t see her after they demolished the last bookstore in
the region. Your friends searched in vain--through gravel, smiles and discount hovels--for
a new Good Place. Drenched, they never found it.
10101010101010101010
Deadheads
referred to the song “Dark Star” as “IT” after the 19-minute composition became
rare in the band’s live repertoire. The shadowed mass awaited it breathlessly.
“Jack Straw” wasn’t the same. “China Cat Sunflower” wasn’t enough. “He’s Gone”
wasn’t enough. Something happened to the loyal shadowed country of amorous
ears. Select band members, Weir, Pigpen, would talk about men leaving their
women behind forever when the song began. Others would melt into the ground or
melt into each other to form gelatinous new humans. Women kissing their men
would be impregnated by that one simple kiss. Confederate soldiers would stay
and listen and not attempt to reenter the linear tear. It was a naked audience,
clothes inferior to Dark Star. Rainfall drowned them but also made them whole
and new. “It’s coming,” they would tell each other when the chords of a new
song made jetfires across the night. “It’s coming, it’s Dark Star.” Either they
would get bitterly disappointed or else they were right, generations before and
since would know Dark Star swallowed them whole.
So.
Was she the Dark Star in your life, or were you more likely the Dark Star in
hers? You know I’m not talking about just one person.
0000000000000
For
nearly three months you were a crestfallen machine. There was born a sudden new
urgency. Every opinion you’d left unsaid over the years came blattering out. Every
week brought a new essay, one finished and posted before you even realized you
had started working on it. Speculative riffing on pornography, horror fiction,
snuff films, songs, bodies, failure and planets, all coded meditations on your
own caved-in heart. You were always good at hiding.
