Jess Row - Your Face in Mine

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It was the third-to-last day of winter vacation the following year; I was due back at Amherst on Sunday night, with a paper on Giordano Bruno in hand. Alan and I hadn’t seen each other since the previous weekend; he was working eight-hour shifts at Borders in Towson and going to NA meetings nearly every night. Called in sick today, he said, when I finally took off my headphones and picked up the receiver. I’m feeling crappy. And we’ve hardly seen each other at all, have we? You’ll be back at school in a minute and I’ll be leaving anxious messages on your machine.

There had been times, that year, when he acted like a jealous, left-behind high school girlfriend, sending me long letters and calling three times a week, wanting to know about my life, my new friends, and I’d all but ignored him, and then long stretches of silence in between, when I’d been the anxious one, calling Cheryl at work — a number I still had memorized — to make sure he was all right.

As far as I knew, as far as I had seen, he was solidly in recovery, after a month of rehab, a relapse in the summer, after graduation, and another month of rehab the previous August. He’d been in methadone treatment but had stopped, abruptly, claiming it was just the same high, that it felt wrong, and then he’d gotten seriously into NA, going night after night, spending hours at coffee with his sponsor, Charles, an ex — Hells Angel and ex-con. It was at Charles’s insistence that he’d gotten a full-time job. His letters to me were full of jargon I barely understood: Working the steps. Having a day. Crazymakers. Restitution junkies. And — not surprisingly, I guess — his tastes in literature had changed: The Road Less Traveled, The Courage to Heal, Fire in the Belly, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Be Here Now, Awaken the Giant Within . Recovery lit, he called it. When I tried to bring Bataille and de Sade with me to rehab the second time they just chucked the books in the trash. It’s like North Korea in there. But over time, hey, you get to like it. It speaks to you. It’s sweet and medicinal. Like Charles says, you’ll have plenty of time to read later if you can only stay alive.

I have this memory, though it was January, of parking my car with leaves overhead: black-leafed oaks and elders and gum trees, their branches blocking out the sullen sky. I walked across the street to his house in a tunnel of imaginary leaves. The door was open; no one answered my knock. Cheryl was at work, of course, and Rebecca was spending her senior year at a prep school in Colorado. The house felt loose and creaky underfoot, full of odd drafts, barely inhabited. Alan, I called out. Hey, man, put some clothes on, I’m coming up, okay?

Okay.

He was sprawled over the enormous overstuffed couch we’d found abandoned down the street, years before, and hauled upstairs, unscrewing the hinges of his bedroom door to fit it in. There was a slash across one of the arms I hadn’t seen before, the stuffing flowering out like a corsage, and hundreds of cigarette burns, as if he’d gotten into the habit of using it as an ashtray. And Alan in a Victims Family T-shirt with a blue-and-white afghan coiled around his waist. Sorry, he said, I would have come down, but I’m sick for real. All out of sorts.

What, the flu?

Who the hell knows. In any case, keep your distance.

You want something? Should I make you some soup?

He fixed me with a one-eyed stare. No thanks, Mom.

I mean from a can . It’s not rocket science.

What I need is your company, he said. I need your advice on an important metaphysical question. He produced a book with a streaky brown cover from underneath the afghan, a bark-colored cover.

What the hell is that?

Shut up, he said. It’s important. Listen to this: A little knowledge, a pebble from the shingle, / A drop from the oceans; who would have dreamed this infinitely little too much? What do you think that means?

I’d have to hear the whole poem.

Why?

Because, I said, a line like that out of context could mean almost anything. It’s all fuzzy metaphors. Are we talking about the tree of knowledge, carnal knowledge, scientific knowledge? For my taste it’s a little too vague. And condescending. Who’s the who ? Who are we talking about?

I could hear myself talking, snappy and dry, squeaky, an irritable pedant already at nineteen. No less of a shell, in my own way, than he was. He stared at me out of dark eye sockets that now looked perpetually bruised. At some point, without my fully registering it, a capillary had burst in his right eye, leaving a red blotch just outside the pupil. Otherwise, oddly, his face looked better, plumper, than it had a year earlier. He was finally putting weight back on, I thought, at long last.

All right, he said. I get it. Due diligence. Okay, the poem sucks as a poem . But that’s why I read it to you. I’m taking it as advice.

And what kind of advice would that be?

He flipped the book back open.

Young men, he read, when lifted up may become white swans, grandiose ascenders, “flying boys,” just as young women when similarly lifted up may become flying girls, and make love with invisible people at high altitudes. The Jungian thinkers have done well in noticing and describing this phenomenon, and the phrases puer aeternus and puella aeterna are familiar to many.

I’m reading this, he said, and I’m thinking, this is about me. This is my life. Don’t you see that?

Dude, I said, Alan, have you been making love with invisible people at high altitudes? How come you didn’t tell me? I want in on that action.

He closed his eyes.

I’m not going to respond to that, he said. You know why? You know what I think the problem with college is?

You’ve never been to college.

I had a summer, he said. Telluride. College teachers, college courses, college texts. I had my taste. And you know what the problem with it is? It’s an extension of adolescence. It’s just camp . It happens too late in life. You know what Charles said to me? By twenty-two every human being should have spent one year in the army and one year doing manual labor.

And how much time flogging Deepak Chopra at Borders?

Don’t mock me.

I’m not mocking you. I’m calling you on your BS. Didn’t you tell me that’s what an addict’s friends are supposed to do?

You’re not my friend.

What the fuck are you talking about?

I don’t mean that in a bad way. I mean it as a factual observation. I honor you. As a former friend. I mean, really, come on, can you see it another way? This is our polite visit in the museum of our friendship.

I’ll believe that, I said, when I meet your new friends. When there’s someone I can hand you off to. And I don’t mean Charles.

We’re getting off track here, he said. I was telling you something about who I really am. I’m sorry if you don’t want to hear it. There’s a word for it: that’s what I’m learning. Puer aeternus. The eternal boy. Peter Pan. Icarus. Et cetera. Listen: the name of this chapter is The Road of Ashes, Descent, and Grief . I’m grieving . But here’s the thing: now I know I’m grieving! And what you know, you can control. What you recognize you have to re-cognize.

Okay, okay. I get it.

You don’t get it yet. You think this has nothing to do with you.

Why does it have to have anything to do with me?

Because you’re more like me than you want to admit. Because a person only has one chance to get it right in life.

No, I said, I don’t believe that, and I’m sorry if this sounds arrogant, or condescending, or whatever, but neither should you.