FIRE EXPRESSES ITSELF WITH FIRE

My friends and I at the midnight service in the grandest cathedral in the city. Glass sky above us, pipe organ behind us, choir incanting. Those Celine heels. That brocade bag. Long velvet skirt the color of wine. Wine, the symbol of blood. The thing we’re not talking about: Spilled blood.

We had been drinking but not too much. There was something, some voice, that told us not to. It wasn’t propriety or respect for religion, but a reverence for our own powers of being. A desire to stay sharp, not go soft. Mostly we were drunk on each other, and the hopefulness that hopefulness can sometimes be enough.

Drunk on each other, and I had had extra. I had stolen from the bottle when they weren’t looking, and when they were. I took her spirit wisdom, took her child wisdom, took his hopefulness that hopefulness is sometimes enough, and got high on it. I let it seduce me, the way hymns and hymnals and good hard benches and stained glass windows and incantations can do.

After the service we found the church’s supply of candles without looking for them. We passed through a flame-lit room in a fuzzed-out exit-bound meander and saw two pretty girls—12 maybe—burning long white tapers over a forest of tapers stuck into sand. He stopped first. A pause that said, This is where we go off the script. This is where we offer psalms to honeysuckle, to half moons, to eagle mothers. One of us pulled open a drawer at random and there they were, so we passed them around. One lighting a fire from the other one’s fire. Like holding hands but you’re not holding hands.

We said prayers but I don’t know what the prayers were for. Or, I do know what the prayers were for but right now I can’t talk about it.

Outside we took pictures of ourselves and each other with our telephones. In one photograph (are they still called “photographs?”) we stand in an alcove filled with moonlight and leaded glass. One of the girls evokes a sort of in-control soft rock 70s; an un-blonde Stevie Nicks in an enlightened dry spell. The other girl Nordic and confident, angular and light. Her white sweater collecting and reflecting the moon. Lobbing it softly around. He’s in chalk stripes and cashmere, recalling the European 40s and Yohji Yamamoto. Me, I am just as you see me now.

The spirit dresses up. Sunday best. The night before the night before. We are all devotional in the face of need. We are not afraid to sing loudly when the organ is piping.

We all hear the same voices.

My friends and I, affirming a sort of faith in each other. Dropping into a sort of praise of ourselves. Asking for a type of grace. Strength. Lighting fire from each other’s fire.

There is a girl at a table eating iceberg lettuce.
There is a girl at a table eating a medium rare steak.

There is a girl, at a table, in a restaurant, eating the frozen pizza and cheese dust tortilla chips of her youth.

One is full, one is empty, one is longing for you to love her better, with more obsession with more compulsion with more noise with more anger with more pity with more longing with more agony. With more transgression, more gloss, more luxury labeling, more status and symbolism, more fill light, more retouching, more apathetic disregard for the banal conventions of beauty. And truth.

There is a girl at a table who belongs to your truth. I’m not telling you because she’s pretty, I’m not telling you because it’s glamorous. I don’t even know where the table is or how long she’ll be needing you this way.

I just want you to know that she’s waiting.

That I see her.

That I know what this is about.

The Shock of Emptiness.

The Burden of Normalcy.

The Black Noise of Regret.

The Forgotteness.

The Remembering.

The Black Noise of Regret.

I’ve slept in other cities and been to other towns and I can tell you that the low, rolling drone of a highway is not the prettiest or the most lulling of the white noise options. Waves are nice. Rivers are good. Wind can be lovely, as can a rain storm. Cars mostly sound like acrimony and need.

But somehow I like it.

Ana is sleeping. I am in her living room on the couch, which looks out through floor-to-ceiling windows at a churning expressway and the small city beyond it. In the house I grew up in, the windows were high and small, and couches faced televisions. This is what I’m thinking about as Ana sleeps and I watch street lights turn from red to green to yellow to red, two by two, along Harrison Street down to the waterfront.

The white noise in the house I grew up in was the television. It had a thick knob that only turned clockwise. There was no going back, only all the way around again. My father watched the local news with his tobacco pipe from a dull green recliner every night after work; when it was over I twisted the dial past 3, 4, and 5 to land on 6 for Taxi and then Barney Miller. Somewhere between the two, dinner was ready. We ate at a kitchen table set by my sister, sometimes laughing with the track in the other room, sometimes losing the plot completely.

I left my father a few hours ago, around dinner time, as an anti-convulsant drip crawled in through one of his veins and a steadier, sweeter, swifter shuffle of morphine ran into the other. There is no television in the ICU. The white noise is the IV functioning, the push/pull of a lung machine, the steady I-am-here of the heart monitor. 

Ana thinks I’m only here because her condo is much closer to the Veteran’s Hospital than the cabin is. She thinks it’s a convenience that I’m separate from, which is, for her, its own convenience.

MY LOVE IS NEVER NOT CASTING A SHADOW                      I’M SORRY

BUT THAT’S JUST HOW                  SHE IS.

SHE SHINES ELECTRIC

SHE SHINES ANGULAR

SHE SHINES SUBLIME

SHE CAN DO NOT MUCH ELSE         OTHER     

THAN               GLOW

OTHER THAN REFLECT

OTHER THAN BLIND

OTHER THAN STUN

AND SEDUCE

SHE IS LOVE.

The three women hadn’t necessarily planned to be on the same train from Berlin to Paris, but they hadn’t necessarily not planned it, either.

The first, Rebecca, told the second, Nora, who in turn told Marina, that she was leaving on the first Friday in October. That was in July. Nora remembered because it was the Friday her lease was up; Marina remembered because Marina remembered everything.

Nora and Marina had known each other since college—an inconsequential midwestern liberal arts school where girls who read Japanese poetry but lacked the courage to get to the coasts mated with boys who assumed that the best they can do was teach English and coach cross-country track.

But not them. Not Nora and Marina. Nora painted triptychs and sold acid. Marina took acid and studied the ancients. Nora dropped out and moved to Chicago; Marina went to Europe with a teaching assistant she was sleeping with and never came back. They wrote letters. In those days you wrote letters.

Eventually, for a time, the letters became like love letters. The two girls imagined they might love each other. It seemed a lot easier than loving any of the boys they knew. And so Nora went to Amsterdam to stay for a week with Marina on her boss’s houseboat, and stayed. They moved to Berlin a year later, because that was what Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, and David Bowie had done.

Rebecca was from Seattle, which made her seem intelligent, and moody, and prettier than she actually was. She was in Germany because she had traced the roots of guilt, shame, and sadness there, and she had been busy studying them ever since.

One was going to Paris for money, one for love, and the other because she had nothing better to do.

There is always someone somewhere running a leaf blower or loading a shotgun or burning a photograph or putting an old army jacket in the donation bin.

There are so many ways of saying I don’t love you anymore.

I wanted you to love me

I thought: here’s my chance

I thought: flowers and hand holding

I pictured being comforted

being cared for

I pictured a hand sweeping the hair off my forehand

there, there

Sweeping sharp moments aside

I pictured the way pain draws everyone near

the way nearness follows the dark

I thought: here’s my chance

In Indiana we locked ourselves out of the car in the parking lot of a museum honoring college basketball players. We had only stopped there to use the restrooms. In Oklahoma we stuck notes and flowers into a chain link fence that surrounded the recently bombed Federal Building. In Phoenix we slept on a carpeted living room floor while a Jay Z cassette played for seven hours straight on an auto-reverse tape deck.

In Southern California we did canon balls from the roof of a house into its swimming pool, which is what people in Southern California do. We were not aware that we were unoriginal.

Three weeks prior, before we left New York, she had chopped off my bleached-blonde hair with her mother’s kitchen scissors and I had used her father’s clippers to shear hers. He was letting his long hair grow wild.

She was a Jewish/Puerto Rican girl from the Bronx, he was the son of a stock broker, I was a white girl from somewhere else entirely with a fifth floor walk-up in Spanish Harlem. It was never clear whether or if he was interested in her or me, which is why he was allowed to come with us.

By the time we got to Crater Lake in southern Oregon it was hard to tell where one of us began and the next ended. We had stopped talking. At any given moment two of us knew what the third was thinking. And vice versa.

At a campground under a 94-degree sun a woman with no front teeth slipped off the back of a Harley and limped over to our site to ask him what he planned to do with a couple of lesbians. She grinned in the manner of trailer park horror movie villains, threw her head back, stuck her hand down her black cut-off denim shorts, jumped up and down on it a couple of times, and cackled.

We were not aware that we were unoriginal.