Greg Jackson - Prodigals - Stories

M: …

G: But is there comfort in this inner circle? It doesn’t relieve whatever loneliness or despair drove you there, does it?

I told Gaby I didn’t know but I assumed she was right; I was pretty sure the aloneness was only deeper at the center, where you could hear it echo, where enfolding the contingency of your existence always was the weightless, transparent envelope of the idea of you, a public action having expropriated part of you into the social body, culture’s eminent domain exercising its claim on your soul, when all we really wanted were resting points, or so I thought — God, celebrity, accomplishment, sex — weren’t they all just pleas for arrival, for the moment sufficient in itself, that feeling of getting there , dropping your bags, pouring yourself a drink, and sitting down with an old friend on the porch? The spiritual equivalent of saying, Ah, here we are.

Gaby thought about this for the span of two unhurried sips. “But then the morning after the day of arrival.”

“Yeah. I know.”

I did. I was not only coming down off mushrooms just then and getting drunk, but also, due to a mix-up in my prescription, going off the SSRI I usually took. It had been five days since my last pill, and as we talked and drank I felt an increasingly tenuous line connecting me to my life, a line I imagined as the tether that keeps astronauts from floating away on spacewalks; I was floating, letting something go, possibly myself, possibly because I was in a different story and felt the need to sever ties with the old, test the tensile strength of the new, even as the game of musical chairs I seemed to be playing with my somatic chemistry had set off a sort of inner vibration in me, starting in my abdomen and radiating outward, a proprioceptive fuzziness, like the atomization of my cells experienced from the inside out, the feeling of what it would be like for them independently and all at once to question whether they belonged together, whether we could come to some flawed consensus that pooled our fortunes and coexist under an umbrella dispensation we would call identity. I trusted that I could ride this feeling out. I trusted that despite its buffetings I wouldn’t decompose or unspool too far, that after years of holding myself together in what felt like an act of will I could unclench, release myself, and let the environmental pressure contain me, like the ocean depths, and that as long as I had one hand on the line, like a grip on Ariadne’s yarn, I could find my way back.

I want to say that there was something comforting, liberating, ludic in this feeling, but I can’t and remain honest. As we walked the cobblestone streets of downtown, where the faux-gas streetlamps scattered yellow bands in the shadows, and the colored lights jostling on the harbor water below us were flecks of candy on its jellied skin, it was rather placelessness I felt, an indifference to orientation, the way standing on the North Pole gives you only one cardinal direction in which to head; for through the darkness paneling my mind, what I saw at the far end of my tether, far from anchor or cleat, was instead a face, not the face of any person, but the aureole-enclosed fantasy of a smiling recognition, the face that is emblem and locus of celebrity, visible seat of the invisible being, so that rather than securing me to anything firm, I understood, like the velvet rope outside a club, this line was my invitation to the sanctum of celebrated space, my invitation to let go, that is, to give myself over to the idea of me, and like an acrobat transferring lines midair, to swing up up up into the divine and unanchored Valhalla of our debased world.

I admit that this may be somewhat overstated. Grandiose vis-à-vis the facts. I didn’t mention it to Gaby, to whom, if this was true of one person on earth, I could say anything. But it was the endpoint of this train of thought, I think, that underlay the self-disgust and wretchedness that led me, when we’d shut down all the bars, to buy street drugs from a figure who appeared at my elbow calling himself Little D. I glanced at Gaby, who sort of shrugged at me, as though to say, Sure, why not? And I wondered if there weren’t a bigger D out there somewhere, whether the adjective might not be relative, because our friend looked to me to epitomize male height.

“And this is MDMA?” I said.

“Um-hmm.”

“’Cause I don’t know it from rat poison.”

Little D looked disappointed in me. “I wouldn’t play you like that.”

“Okay, sure. But someone who would play me like that would say the same thing, right?”

“Nah…” He kind of swatted the paradox away.

And with the streetlights hissing their miasmatic fire and a deeper quality of night shaking out through the city, I knew my imp of the perverse had made its decision in accordance with the folk wisdom that says maybe it’s better not to be, but to let yourself dissolve into the social body, the superorganism, enfolding ecology, the apprehensive moment itself.

I regret, D, that in your line of work you have to deal with idiots like me.

We watched him move off into the night, my fist clenched around the baggie he’d left there when we slapped hands, and at the last moment I called after him, “Hey, what’s the D stand for?”

He turned. “What?”

“The D!”

“Ha ha. ” He grinned. “You figure it out!”

The substance in the bag, upon inspection, resembled a large misshapen pebble. We rolled ourselves smokes sitting on the patio furniture of some café and passed the compound back and forth, taking turns sniffing and licking it in those most primitive forms of chemical analysis. It had no smell I could discern and either no taste or was not soluble in saliva, which may come to the same thing. I found something minatory in its inertness.

We walked back to Gaby’s car licking our little drug rock. Her car disappointingly did not seem to be where we’d left it. It was also true that neither of us knew where that was, precisely, and that technically it was her mother’s car. But the most disheartening thing was that the downtown looked to have been swept of cars, and people too for that matter. A traffic light ran through its sequence without advising a single driver. The chill wind funneled down the street between the palisades of buildings. And I wondered why I was wearing a T-shirt before remembering that it was summer, almost two a.m. We wandered around for a while, contemplating what one did without a car and just a crack rock that was probably meth. It finally dawned on us to call the police. They were terribly helpful when we got through and didn’t even seem concerned that the last thing we should be helped to locate just then was a car, and soon enough we were in a taxi crossing a bridge into the blighted outskirts of the city, a lifeless district saved from total darkness only by the sodic security lights of warehouses and irradiated signs of fast-food restaurants. Our cabbie, whose first name I had found reason to use no less than fifteen times on our short trip, did not seem as remorseful as I would have hoped about depositing us before a feral wraith of a man leaning against a colossal towing rig.

“Toyota, yep,” the man said.

“Toyota’s a pretty common car,” Gaby said. “How do we know you have ours?”

“I got Toyotas.”

Gaby and I glanced at each other.

“That’s really not the most reassuring answer.”

Now that he had stepped from the rig’s shadow I could see the man’s face. It might have been handsome if not for an elaborate pigmentary marking that gave it a marled look, streaks of dark nevi fanning out like comet tails below the stringy hair that fell across it. There was something vaguely regal in his bearing, I thought, a hunched, big-boned quality, like the awkward limbedness of a mantis.