Rafael Yglesias - Hide Fox, and All After

In a moment the heat passed, and his lungs were lined with gray. It seemed he had something great and inexplicable to say: a powerful love that he couldn’t express, a moving, dry gray that taunted him with its mastery of him. He bowed and swung his head, the familiar movement now alien to him. For the grayness was now his body, the movement of his head a methodical deviation from a set stance. His neck needed loosening, it seemed, and he concentrated on moving his head more quickly. As he did so it took on the flowing movement of the music. A screen lit up before him, the minute details of movement charted carefully within his brain. Raul slowly, ritualistically rose and moved about the room — eyes shut, as if in a trance — omniscient, graceful. His self-consciousness was gone, he had real grace. Without — as he had thought was the only way possible — the lights and heat and intensity of the stage, the movements real and graceful through the practice of interpretation.

He looked at Alec, seated quietly in a chair. “Do you know,” he asked, his voice echoing with power, “that I am possessed by some devil? And I don’t say that as some kind of perverse self-flattery. I am not, in truth, so much a convert of the greats, but a pervert of them. It is something I shall have to change.”

“What is it,” Alec asked slowly, “that perverts you?”

“I don’t know.” Raul moved to the desk, taking a cigarette and lighting it. He looked up at Alec. “I think it’s that I use my insight into men as a weapon, as some sort of a Messiahlike power, rather than create with it. I am vicious and cruel with that that should be used to explain and heal.”

Raul stretched his right leg forward, pausing. “That sounded a bit too much like Salinger’s Seymour to suit my tastes.”

Alec laughed, Raul smiling quietly. “I love Seymour, but…I’m not putting Seymour down, man.” He laughed outrageously, picking up his cigarette.

The laughter seemed to quiver in its wake, recalling the gray, now ticklish, in his lungs. The cigarette was a great dry billow of smoke, tasting of the grass. Leaving his mouth, the smoke twisted and danced like a charmed snake, lying passive, a blue-gray mass, in the air. His voice, husky, sensuous, in both formation and tone, rose like the smoke. “Oh, God. You know, you’re right. I mean, smoking a cigarette stoned is very, very good.”

Alec, drowsily leaning forward, limply pointing a finger at Raul, slurred his words. “I told you.”

Raul broke out laughing. Alec then immediately broke into laughter. Imitating Alec’s drunken voice over and over, their laughter became uncontrollable, hysterical, and cleansing.

The record stopped, and their cackles echoed hollowly, inanely. They stopped, shocked at their ugly, drunken revelry.

Alec stood up and walked about; Raul slid himself into a chair.

“ ‘You made me look ridiculous in there.’ ”

“ ‘You looked just as ridiculous as I did.’ ”

Their voices were sharp, Elizabethan, and contemptuous.

Raul, in a half-moaning, tearful voice said, “ ‘Consistency is all I ask.’ ”

Bitter, cynical, unmoved by his own tragedy, Alec said, “ ‘Give us this day our daily mask.’ ”

And, as a return, the music began again. Alec lowered, in a slow consecrating move, his hands to the floor; Raul stretched his upward, defiant yet pleading.

Raul stood facing the window, a breeze of cool sorrow lightly brushing a hair across his forehead. The intense, empty, static theater lights rapidly passed, as the room in lights, form, and tone became subdued.

He sat on the floor, humble and at peace. Dark forms loomed about his shoulders, twisting about, and then before his eyes; and when the music climaxed, so the forms pressed hard, and when softly, lightly it played, they were brief, insupportable touches of sensuality.

He nodded, as if in recognition of their presence, their power, or their meaning. He rose, somehow the wiser. Alec looked up at him.

“Should anyone ask you,” Raul said, “what it is you do, you answer: acting is my faith.”

“That doesn’t answer the question.”

“And what would?”

“That I act.”

“You may, you may not. What you do is your faith.”

“That doesn’t follow. What I have faith in is acting. That is what I do.”

“No, you don’t catch my meaning. It doesn’t work in this language: what you do is faith itself, not what you have faith in.”

“That’s very spiritual.”

“You’re right. That’s what’s distasteful about it.”

“Then why do you say faith?”

Raul turned about quickly and swung back, his voice severe. “ ‘Everything has to be taken on trust. It’s the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn’t make any difference so long as it is honored. One acts on assumptions. What do you assume?’ ”

Alec smiled again, the satisfaction of the obscure. He moved to Raul and said, “I assume that I am an actor.”

“ ‘We pledged our identities!’ ”

“ ‘Secure in the conventions of our trade,’ ” Alec said, turning despondently away.

“ ‘That someone would be watching.’ ”

Alec’s hand went upward, curved in a bow, falling, gracefully, to his side. “A quote for all occasions.”

“Very good.” Raul smiled pleasantly. “That’s very good.”

They feasted, beginning with Ritz crackers topped with tuna fish and Russian dressing, then going to a luncheonette, eating cheeseburgers and steak sandwiches. They relaxed, smoking, the multiple tastes of the evening lingering on their palates.

Alec, cigarette poised, smiled at Raul’s smile. “Doesn’t it make everything marvelous? Cigarettes, food…”

“Poetry, thought. Yes, it does.” Raul took a sip of his Coke, lightly smacking his lips. “Do you feel with what detail the Coke’s descent is outlined?”

“The Coke’s descent,” Alec repeated, laughing.

Raul looked away. “I always thought,” he said wistfully, “that grass made one inarticulate.”

“If you’re very, very stoned, it does.”

“Yeah, I can see that, but if you gear yourself to it, it has a tendency to increase one’s descriptive powers.”

“Oh, okay.”

“Ah, shit. You mock me.”

“No, I’ll prove it. We’ll go home and get zonked.”

Raul laughed. “I see, there’s a distinction between being stoned and being zonked.”

“Yeah, there is.”

Raul’s laughter doubled. “Okay, what?”

“It’s very simple. You can get high, you can be stoned, or very, very stoned, you can be wasted, and finally that ultimate state — zonked.”

The night air was cool and breezy. Raul nodded and winked walking home, hands patting his belly — well satisfied. They entered into the soft light of the room, Raul lying on the bed, never having felt so comfortable. Alec lit new incense and searched in his drawer, coming up with a small, ornate pipe.

Raul leaned forward. “Let me see.” Raul handled the pipe carefully as Alec took a small cardboard box out of the drawer. He turned in his chair, opening the box and extending it to Raul. There were a few small gray chunks. “What is it?”

“Hashish.”

“Hash. What’s the difference between that and grass?”

“It’s the flower of the plant. Much stronger, more concentrated.”

“Good?”

“Excellent.” Alec took the smallest chunk, putting it in the bowl of the pipe, then offered the pipe to Raul.

He shook his head. “You go first. I have to see you do it.”

Alec put the pipe in his mouth, Raul holding a match to it. He inhaled much the same way as with the grass. He handed the pipe to Raul, gray smoke billowing from the bowl. Raul inhaled, a corner of the chunk burning as ember. The searing smoke was quick this time — richer, huskier. Raul couldn’t handle it for more than a few seconds; coughing, he returned the pipe to Alec. For a moment the smoke was insupportable, but he tried to swallow as much as he could. He took another toke. This time the smoke irritated a center of his lungs, producing a momentary nausea, and then penetrated to a newer depth.