hiddenquantity
11-11-2008, 10:55 PM
I am a man without purpose. But I would be lying if I told you that I did not, at times, feel a faint stirring in the invisible depths of my own mind. I feel it- that faint scent of meaning- as remote and as subtle as a dream within a dream, or perhaps, the change in the air's weight before a storm.
But I did not feel that way now. Now I was in the back right seat of my friend Marco’s dented and sputtering red Camry, and my depression-the clinical kind- was giving me trouble. Beside me was the improbably named Chris Cross, and he was coughing mightily and passing me a blunt, like a joint but rolled with cheap cigar paper. I took it and inhaled, feeling a familiar sense of lightness and detachment. Joey was in the passenger seat, body twisted around to face Chris and me. He was telling a story about some minor weed sale mishap.
“Cop,” Joey said suddenly. “He’s behind us.” Everyone froze for a second, and Joey dropped the last of the blunt into Marco’s Arizona Iced Tea to avoid tossing it out the window, but the car was visibly filled with smoke.
“****,” said Marco. “Should I lose him?”
“What? No,” I said.
Joey grabbed the febreeze can near his seat and sprayed it in front of him and then toward the back. This reignited Chris’s coughing fit and he spilled his drink from its covered paper Coke cup all over himself and the back of the passenger seat.
“Aaaahhh!”
“****!”
“Chris, what the hell are you drinking?”
“It’s a Cap-n-Cap, man,” Chris said. “Cappuccino and Captain Morgan.”
Marco screamed and, grabbing the febreeze can from Joey, sprayed it backwards at Chris and me, swinging his head spastically back and forth between us and the road.
The cop flashed his lights and Marco, cursing, pulled over. I saw Joey reach for a pair of sunglasses at his feet, presumably to cover his red eyes, but I forgot to warn him.
The cop was a man in his late twenties, not much older than us, and he looked tired. He walked slowly to Marco’s window, where he stood silent for a moment, taking in the scene. Marco, trying hard to arrange his face into a look of cherubic innocence; Joey in Marco’s sister’s pink sunglasses, the calmest of all of us; And me and Chris in the back, faces glistening with the febreeze’s condensed mist, trying to stifle our coughs and dry our watering eyes. The car gave off a noxious, almost visible mix of febreeze, marijuana smoke, cigarettes (Marco smoked), coffee, and rum. The cop stared at us and we stared at him.
“You’ve got to be ****ing kidding me,” he said.
Clearly operating on reflex, he continued, “License and reg-”
“I don’t recall,” Marco interrupted. The cop stared at him. Marco’s face reddened in the rearview.
Almost subconsciously I nudged Chris, and he came to life like a robot being activated. He leaned forward. “Excuse me, Officer,” he said, hitting the perfect note between casualness and respect. “We’re just trying to get home. I won’t lie, we’ve had some night...”
Here we all are, Chris noted, at three o’clock in the morning, and us not four blocks from home. Chris invited the cop to give Marco sobriety tests. Was he going to hurt us for the rest of our lives, our careers and college chances, because of a situation in which we posed no harm to anyone, just to please his ******* superiors, who were probably in bed right now or at some bar? The cop probably would have ignored anyone else, but Chris had the kind of face you always give a few free seconds. Before long he was nodding, and I knew we were clear.
Marco had to get out of the car and do some sobriety tests, but he had a job interview soon and had had a clean night, and the cop let us go. I think in the end the strangeness of the whole encounter created its own momentum, and the policeman accepted Chris’s logic just to make some sense of the whole thing. My friends were all laughing as Marco drove us to our cars, but I had a feeling I get fairly often. I felt like I was separate from them, somehow apart, like I was a foreigner and they spoke in some tongue I could not understand. So I let them laugh, and looked out the window and waited to get home. I faked a few laughs of my own, so that they could enjoy their night, and not have to wonder why I wasn’t talking; and surrounded by that laughter a sadness slowly grew in me.
I had been to a psychologist before.
It had been four or five years before. His waiting room was full, and then some. I waited for about an hour before I was called. The psychologist was a moon-faced man with glasses, a full black beard, and a cluttered desk. He asked me how I felt. I was younger then, and took the question seriously. I told him there were three great pains in my life. There was the sadness and anger that I had blamed on everyone around me, but was now realizing had some internal cause; the guilt I felt over how my own pain was affecting my family; and the gap between what was and what should be- my own anger at being denied the life I would and should be leading, if it were not for this apathetic sadness.
He had been scribbling in a notebook this whole time, head down but nodding occasionally. When I finished he handed me what looked like a note. It was a prescription for Zoloft. I was surprised- I hadn’t known psychologists could prescribe drugs in our state. But it made no difference to me either way, because I never took any of the pills. At the time, I thought I could handle it on my own.
The next night, I went to a party at Marco’s house. His parents had gone away for a week-long vacation somewhere in the Caribbean, and Marco had wasted no time setting up a real devil’s playground. The house was two stories, with the same kind of winding driveway found in my neighborhood. When Chris and I got there, he went to go organize a game of beer pong, and I went to get a beer. When I got to the den someone smacked my back, and I turned around. “Adam! What up, bro!”
“Hey, Pascal,” I made to move on, but Pascal wasn’t ready to let me leave.
He assured me with some very serious oaths that he had “totally totally ****ed” some girl I didn’t know. But I recognized the name. Doesn’t she have a boyfriend? I asked him.
“Forget him,” he said. “That guy’s a *****.” At this point Marco rescued me, tapping on my shoulder and pointing his thumb in the direction of the door. We nodded to Pascal and went out into the backyard. While Marco smoked his cigarette, we talked about the last night, wondering why the cop had let us go.
“Adam! Marco! What up, bros!” I saw Marco cringe at this. He hated that word and didn’t like Pascal much more. But he wouldn’t have to talk to him- before Pascal got to us he was intercepted.
A guy came at him from the side and flung out his arm so Pascal walked into it, and spun him around so they were face-to-face. I sized them both up. The guy wasn’t much bigger than Pascal, who was average height and a little thin. He talked to Pascal in a low, menacing voice. Pascal kept apologizing. Then he grabbed Pascal’s arm again like he was a kid and marched him over to a group of girls nearby. “Now apologize to her,” he said loudly. Other people were looking over now. Pascal looked defiant for a moment, and then said quietly, “I’m sorry.” The guy’s grip tightened.
“Louder,” he said. Pascal complied. The guy, looking smug, released him, and Pascal walked back toward the door. A few people laughed, and one or two jeered him. He didn’t make any sign to me or Marco. But as he walked by I saw his face, and his expression was such an intense mix of anger and shame that I was surprised, even after what had happened.
Later, I met Sam, who was Joey’s main supplier. He asked me what I thought of Pascal. I told the truth, diplomatically. I said that I liked him more than I respected him. He laughed and said, “I like this guy!”, and I decided immediately not to trust him. His eyes didn’t smile when his lips did.
After the party, we all met in the street outside Marco’s house. Chris and Marco had work the next day, but I didn’t and Joey was, after all, a drug dealer, so we decided to go to his apartment and watch a movie. We each drove there, and I met him in the complex’s parking lot before we went upstairs.
Joey unlocked the door and I sat down on the couch. He went to get a six-pack of Guinness from the fridge and came back to set up the DVD player. We watched the movie in silence for a few minutes until Joey said, “I’m starting a group.” I didn’t have to ask what he meant, and shook my head.
“Joey, go back to NOVA. Get a degree, maybe transfer. Then you can do real business.”
“With what?” He spread his arms to indicate the small apartment, with its second-hand furniture and unevenly painted walls. “This place takes most of what I make. I could get a loan,” he said, anticipating my response, “but it’s harder lately. And I don’t want to work like an animal, or stay in school for ten years.”
We were silent for a minute. Onscreen, Chow-Yun Fat crouched in a small fishing boat and fired a Dragunov sniper rifle at an official onshore, then dropped the rifle into clear blue waves.
“It’ll be a small one,” said Joey. “Small enough that Sam will still supply us.”
“I doubt he’ll see it that way,” I said. We sipped at our beers.
“Jamaica will be on me,” he said. I laughed. We were always talking about a trip to Jamaica, a trip we both knew would probably never happen. So we talked about sandy beaches and blue skies, women tourist and local, and weed plantations. The place was like a paradise for us.
Joey and I were going to meet up with Marco, but Joey had business at the park and so I went there with him first.
“Should I wait in the car?” I asked.
Joey laughed. “No, man, come keep us company.”
We got out of the car and followed a paved path for a few minutes until it became a dirt trail shadowing a quiet stream. It was one of the last days of winter, when the snow doesn’t cover the ground anymore but patches it in white, fragmented remnants.
Ahead were three young men talking, one smoking a cigarette. Joey and I came up to them, and he greeted them each in turn. They nodded to me and I to them, but we had nothing to say to each other and so I quickly fell behind as they began to walk, discussing plans. I watched the stream and the trees, and the flowers already peeking up from the ground.
“What does Sam think about this?” I heard one ask. “You don’t think he’ll mind you setting up under his nose?” The other two were listening attentively.
“This is going to be small, and stay small,” Joey said. “We’d just be doing what we are now, but as a group. It’ll make us more money without costing Sam. Besides, Chase,” he said, looking at him more directly, “We work with Sam, not for him. Right?” Chase seemed satisfied and nodded cautiously. Joey and his new partners worked out details. One of the guys had experience as a salesman; Joey dedicated him as the full-time dealer and the one responsible for meeting first-time customers. The other was taking botany classes at our school, though I hadn’t met him, and dreamed of growing (weed, of course), and had a good location but no start-up money. Joey convinced Chase to lend the kid the money he needed to grow a plant, to be repaid in sales percentages. “But only one,” Joey told him. “We’re not making a cartel. It’s just for dry spells and market fluctuations.” They wrapped up and Joey and I went back to his car. But I didn’t go with Joey to hang out with Marco and Chris. I had lost any desire to go, which happens to me sometimes. If I go against that feeling, I just end up saying nothing, and staring out a window, waiting to leave.
On Monday, I was in Biology Lab. I was alone at our table, watching Chris work the room. This always fascinated me. I watched him slide into a chair at a table full of girls, tickling one and retreating when she counterattacked, laughing. He squirted the rest with a water dispenser and moved on, greeting the guys at the next table with backslaps and knucklepounds. Mrs. Jobera, our teacher, told him to get back in his seat, but she was smiling, and he extended his hand in mock handshake before twirling her around slowly and stepping in a simple dance. He finally finished the circuit back at our table. “Hey, Adam,” he said, “you should do your applications.” I didn’t understand, and he laughed. “For college, man! You have enough credits.”
“That’s true,” I said. Chris and I talked for a little, then he went off again, and I listened to the teacher, who was at the next table talking to a group of students.
“It’s like the frog experiment,” she said. I was half-listening. “A scientist named Victor Mackerow put a frog into a pot of boiling water. It jumped out immediately, of course. But then he put the same frog into a pot of cool water. It swum around, it did laps, it read Maxim”- a few half-hearted chuckles- “it basically enjoyed itself. But there was a flame under the pot.” I knew this story. I felt vaguely sick.
“Frogs are poikilothermic, or cold-blooded, so they depend on their environment for temperature. The flame heated the pot slowly” -and here she raised her hand, side edge out, in small increments- “degree by degree, until the frog was so weak from the heat that it couldn’t escape.”
By now I knew I was having some kind of panic attack. My heart was smashing around in my ribcage. It felt like a line of firecrackers in my insides, and the thought shot through my mind that everyone would be able to hear it. I was breathing quickly, too. My traitor heart needed fuel. I grabbed my bag- I saw my hand was shaking- and headed quickly for the door. When someone speaks of bones, I remembered reading, the old ones shiver.
Later, I went to the GED office. A man named Todd looked up my scores for me. He seemed surprised when he saw them. “This is in the 98th percentile,” he said. “How long did you study?” I shrugged and said that it was the GED, that the scores didn’t mean anything. He seemed surprised. “People usually say that when they fail,” he said. He printed a copy for me. Thanking him, I left. I crumbled it up and threw it away before I was out of the building.
I got out of my late class one night around eleven o’clock, and called Marco to see if he wanted to eat something. On the phone, he sounded angry. He told me that Pascal had ripped off him and Joey in a deal over about an ounce of weed. Not all of it had been of the same quality, and there was a substantial difference in prices between the grades. But I didn’t pay any attention to it- this kind of thing happened all the time.
But when Marco picked me up he said that Pascal had been bragging to everyone about what happened, saying he got the better of Joey and Marco. Marco kept saying ominously that Pascal would be “handled.” Joey was in the car too, but he was quiet, thinking.
“IHOP, pull in here,” Joey said. Marco turned in and parked. On the walk to the door Joey and Marco bounced anger off each other, getting more and more worked up. We sat down in the back. By the time we got there they were glaring everywhere, like Pascal was about to materialize in the restaurant, an insult to their manhood standing defiant and intolerable amid the tired waitresses and fluorescent lights.
“What are you guys getting?” I asked.
“I’m going to kill this mother****er,” Marco said.
“We can’t ignore him,” said Joey. “How do you want to do this?”
“Are you two serious about this?” I said.
“**** yes!” Marco said immediately. “What, you aren’t?”
“We’ve known Pascal years, man, since we were kids. You want to beat him up over a few grams of bad weed?”
Marco was practically foaming at the mouth. “He’s talking **** about us, dog! How the **** can we let that slide? Who’s going to deal with us if they hear this little ***** ripped us off and talked **** about it behind our back, and we let it slide?”
I shrugged. “Pascal’s a bull****ter. You’ve known that since we met him, or you should have. Let him say what he wants. No one will listen.”
“**** that,” he shook his head so strongly it looked like his whole body refused what I was saying.
“You should never have done business with him.” I said. Marco glowered at me. The waitress came and we ordered.
“Are you in or not?” Marco asked.
“Not,” I said.
“Then **** you too,” he said quietly. “Neutral-*** mother****er. Maybe I’ll come for you next.”
I laughed at him and Joey put a hand on my shoulder and held up a cautioning hand at Marco. “Calm down, both of you. Stay easy.” We relaxed and for a moment we said nothing, just waiting for our food.
“Adam,” he said, “I need to know where you stand on this. We won’t hurt him much”- Marco looked mutinous at this- “Just enough to send him a message, him and everyone else.”
I shook my head. “No, man. It’s Pascal. We’ve known him years, and he’s harmless. You don’t remember meeting him on the court by Chris’s house? Skipping class at the mall?” Joey seemed vaguely disappointed. I kept talking, but they had stopped listening, and Marco and Joey traded a look, the kind of look that builds walls. They talked a little about Pascal’s supplier, a man called Jones, and how he would react if they beat up Pascal. And I was surprised to find I didn’t care much either way, even about Pascal. I wouldn’t do anything to stop this. We ate quietly and left.
The next day I felt my phone vibrating in my pocket and answered it.
“Adam, you won’t ****ing believe what just happened,” said Joey.
“Tell me and I’ll tell you,” I said.
“Me and Marco cornered Pascal at the park. Wait, I’m driving, talk to Marco.”
“Adam? Adam! Pascal just pulled a ****ing knife on us!”
“Stop messing with me,” I said.
“I’m dead-****ing-serious!” I was afraid he was about to start freestyling.
Apparently when Marco and Joey had found Pascal, he was at one of the small neighborhood parks, shooting baskets alone. They tried to sneak up on him, but he saw them and ran. They caught up to him at the edge of the forest. He pulled a knife on Joey and apparently even made to stab him, but he was holding the knife too loosely. Joey punched Pascal in the face- “Instinct!” Joey said in the background- and he dropped the knife into the grass, and the two beat him up. “Pretty good, too,” Marco added. “That’s not the weirdest part, though, man,” Marco told me. “He gave us this crazy look, like an angry pitbull or something.” They asked me if I wanted to chill, and I said I’d be going out later.
The next day I went to see a movie, alone. I did this when I felt especially bad, and I tried to choose action movies. There is so little thought in them that I ended up not thinking at all, which is what I was after. But that day it didn’t work, and I was forced to admit that I was getting worse. A wave of despair swept over me, and I leaned back in my seat and accepted what I could not change.
I went to Marco’s a few hours later. He kept an open house- we could come in whenever the door was unlocked- and every once in a long while I would find him painting, using an old easel he had. He had set up this easel in the den, and I sat down on the couch and waited, not wanting to disturb him. He kept his attention focused entirely on his work. Most of his paintings, at least the few I had seen, were angry kaleidoscope abstracts, often featuring storms of orange and red and yellow, but with occasional hints of peace- trees perhaps, or calm blue lakes hidden in backgrounds and corners. But this one was different. Marco had painted an Armageddon sky, riven by comets and burdened by great dark clouds. The stars shone red and angry, though I could tell it was meant to be daytime. A man reached up from the ground to grasp the sun, the tips of his fingers reddening, a determined look on his face. Who was the man, and what was the sun? I had never wondered what the paintings meant, and now I wondered what they meant to Marco.
How could I know so little about my friend, who I had known for years? Had I been so absorbed with my own problems, spent so much of my life in my head, that I could see no deeper than the surface of those around me?
“Marco,” I asked him, “Why are you so angry all the time?” His hand stopped moving the brush for a moment, and then continued. He said nothing, and neither did I.
After a few minutes I decided to leave. I was about to get up when Marco said suddenly, “What did you do today?”
“Not much. I saw a movie,” I said.
“What movie?”
I opened my mouth to speak, but I had nothing to say. “I don’t remember,” I said. I turned to leave. When I was at the door, Marco called my name.
“Adam, wait up.” I thought I had forgotten something, my phone or wallet. But Marco was looking up from his easel at me, hand still poised, the brush dripping paint. He was looking at me with the same intensity he had been using at the easel.
“Dude,” he said. “Tell me seriously. Are you OK?”
“I’m fine,” I told him. Fine.
I didn’t go out the next few days. I don’t know exactly how long, because they all seemed the same. I read a lot, and slept a lot. Sometimes I would stare into space for minutes at a time, and only snap out of it when I started crying suddenly. I should have gotten treatment earlier, I thought. I considered getting liquor, but I didn’t trust myself with it. One day Joey called me and asked if I wanted to eat something with him and Marco, after they finished a deal Sam had set up for them. I mumbled something and he said he was coming to pick me up. He looked concerned when he saw me, and wanted to cancel the deal, but I convinced him not to and we picked up Marco and went on our way.
We drove into an unfinished neighborhood, the houses hugged by scaffolding and surrounded by building equipment, silent as witnesses. But the road was paved, and Joey drove down the street. We took a left onto the cul-de-sac. It was surrounded by trees and out of view of the main road. We saw three guys, and Marco, Joey and I got out of the car and approached them. Pascal was there; he seemed surprised to see us, or at least Marco and me. I didn’t know the other two guys, both fairly big, one looking bored and the other glaring at us. When Marco saw Pascal he couldn’t restrain himself. “Yo, Pascal!” he shouted. “Where’s your knife, you punk *****!” As he laughed, I saw the same expression twist Pascal’s face and fill his eyes that I had seen at the party two weeks or so before, a mix of sadness and anger, and something else, maybe defiance. His hand went behind his back, and he pulled out a gun, dark and lethal.
Then Pascal fired. It sounded more like a bomb then a firearm, and everyone froze like stunned deer, including Pascal, who seemed as shocked as any of us. Then he started firing wildly. I felt my body jerk- I knew immediately I had been shot, but I felt nothing.
I could not hear anything distinct, or perhaps I just couldn’t process the sounds. I watched the whole scene with a great sense of detachment, without no preconceptions or investment, like a child watching a battle of ants.
Everything seemed slower. I saw Joey’s back as he charged Pascal. I saw his elbow go back, his arm piston, and his fist smash into Pascal’s face at the precise moment that his torso jerked as if Pascal had hit him, and a red spot appeared, steadily growing across the back of Joey’s white t-shirt. Joey fell backward slowly, so slowly. In my daze I thought of the delicate fall of a house of beautiful cards; and like the child who had blown the house over, Pascal was revealed standing completely still, literally holding a smoking gun, face pale and eyes blank. Behind him, his two friends ran deeper into the woods.
I could only tell I was falling backwards when my field of vision started to tip upwards. I also fell slowly, like a cloud was between me and the ground, and I felt no impact when I hit it. I was staring straight upward and the sky was a perfect blue. It was all I could see, and I saw no reason to think that the universe contained anything but an unfathomable vastness of that ethereal blue, suffused with light and painlessness. In my last conscious moment I surprised myself by hoping the bullet had hit my heart. I suppose in spite of everything I had not thought I was that far gone yet.
I don’t remember fading out completely, but I do remember waking. Flashes: in the inside of an ambulance, a descending oxygen mask. A hospital hallway. Hands on a gurney railing, inches from my eyes. And darkness again.
For a while, I don’t know how long, I was sliding in and out of consciousness. My whole existence was a jumbled confusion I can only compare to the first few seconds after being suddenly and harshly awoken from sleep. It was like someone had thrown me and a little light and some different colors into a blender and was constantly changing the speed. People came to me during this period, but I never knew if my visitors were real or the creations of my jolted mind. Once I opened my eyes and saw my mother leaning over me, her head framed by the white ceiling above, with a terrible fearful pain in her puffy eyes and her jaw set tight as though she were holding in a scream. The police. Marco and Chris, alone and together. I saw Joey once, and he said “Jamaica,” and I knew he wasn’t real.
I eventually drifted into reality and stayed there. Chris came. Sam and Jones had set up Joey, he said. He could have got too big. The gun was just to scare him, they were just supposed to threaten him, rough him up. But Pascal flipped out, he said. He started crying then. Pascal flipped the **** out. Painkillers kept me numb. Eventually I was released.
My first day home, I was still in shock. I knew that Joey was dead. I repeated it to myself in my mind, endlessly, trying to provoke a reaction. But all I felt was a kind of incredulous blankness. It had not truly hit me. But things did seem different that day; everything seemed to possess a special quality, a uniqueness, as though I were seeing everything for the first time, like a child. On the drive to the cemetery, buildings I had passed a thousand, ten thousand times stood silent and newly significant, immovable concrete testaments. They had been there, just as silent and indifferent, when Joey died.
It was midday, and unseasonably warm. Puffy clouds floated through the sky. I pulled through the gates of the cemetery and drove into the parking area. I got out and walked, slowly. The gravestones were spaced evenly, like gruesome pebbles planted on the rolling field of well-watered grass. The path I followed wandered through the graves, and a sense of horror began to mount in me, like magma stirring in the earth’s dark innards, or some monster undulating unseen beneath dark waters; but on the surface I felt only a growing unease.
I saw the site of Joey’s headstone. It had been described to me; a clump of graves standing off from the others, sheltered between a tall birch tree and the lee of a small hill. I knew which one was his before I got close enough to read the headstone, and my intuition was confirmed by the freshly turned earth. I walked to Joey’s grave and stood before it, a few steps off the path. There was no one around. Birds chirped quietly in the birch, and a slight breeze rustled the flowers I had brought.
I placed the flowers at the foot of the headstone. I stepped back and regarded the grave. Something caught my attention: there was a cross on the headstone. That’s not right, I thought. Joey wasn’t religious, was actually almost an atheist. Whoever put this here didn’t know him. Memories began to come to me, unbidden; in high school, one of the overflow classes in trailers, the time we dropped our bags out of the trailer window and escaped by asking to go to the bathroom- at parties, daring each other to talk to girls- playing paintball- earnest, youthful debates about the injustices of the world. I stepped back and regarded the grave. “It’s a lie,” I thought, out loud. “That wasn’t Joey.” Then I realized I had said wasn’t, Joey had become a was, forever removed and banished to a static past. And I found myself screaming nonsense. “I REMEMBER! PAINTBALL! ENGLISH, THIRD PERIOD! AMY ANDREWS! THE NEW YORK DEAL!” My shouting had attracted two of the place’s employees- a white and a black young man not much older than I was approached me warily. I shot them a warning look that must have crazed enough for them to keep their distance, and I turned and left. “My friend and the friend of my friends,” I whispered, hoarse.
I don’t remember the walk back to my car, or the drive back home. I remember pulling into my driveway. I went to my room, out of reflex, and turned on my computer, out of reflex. I remember seeing, before my monitor lit up, my own face reflected on it, crying. I remember pulling up the word processor and starting to type, slowly at first, and then in a furious flood, all the memories I had of my friend. After a few hours I woke up, as if from a dream. I stared at the monitor. I had dozens of pages. I thought about saving what I had written, but before I could finish the thought I had flipped the power switch and was staring at my face reflected in the monitor, tear-stained and exhausted. I went to sleep.
The next day the depression was bad. Maybe the worst I’d ever had. I didn’t get out of bed, just wrapped myself in my blanket and clenched my eyes shut, squeezing out tears. It is difficult to describe; it was like the whole world had died and, with my eyes closed, I was floating in space, and I was nothing, less than worthless, and I waited to endure that agony of aloneness long enough to die.
When it passed, I got out of bed and for lack of anything else to do started sorting through my mail. It was bills and junk, like usual, but there was one from one of the colleges I had applied to before. I held it in my hands for a moment and opened it. I learned I had been accepted, and to my surprise I felt that faint touch of hope, the barest taste of possibility; I knew it was there like you know the sun is circling the earth…but then you know that’s inevitable, and there was nothing inevitable about this feeling, light as an angel’s wings brushing the lips.
But I did not feel that way now. Now I was in the back right seat of my friend Marco’s dented and sputtering red Camry, and my depression-the clinical kind- was giving me trouble. Beside me was the improbably named Chris Cross, and he was coughing mightily and passing me a blunt, like a joint but rolled with cheap cigar paper. I took it and inhaled, feeling a familiar sense of lightness and detachment. Joey was in the passenger seat, body twisted around to face Chris and me. He was telling a story about some minor weed sale mishap.
“Cop,” Joey said suddenly. “He’s behind us.” Everyone froze for a second, and Joey dropped the last of the blunt into Marco’s Arizona Iced Tea to avoid tossing it out the window, but the car was visibly filled with smoke.
“****,” said Marco. “Should I lose him?”
“What? No,” I said.
Joey grabbed the febreeze can near his seat and sprayed it in front of him and then toward the back. This reignited Chris’s coughing fit and he spilled his drink from its covered paper Coke cup all over himself and the back of the passenger seat.
“Aaaahhh!”
“****!”
“Chris, what the hell are you drinking?”
“It’s a Cap-n-Cap, man,” Chris said. “Cappuccino and Captain Morgan.”
Marco screamed and, grabbing the febreeze can from Joey, sprayed it backwards at Chris and me, swinging his head spastically back and forth between us and the road.
The cop flashed his lights and Marco, cursing, pulled over. I saw Joey reach for a pair of sunglasses at his feet, presumably to cover his red eyes, but I forgot to warn him.
The cop was a man in his late twenties, not much older than us, and he looked tired. He walked slowly to Marco’s window, where he stood silent for a moment, taking in the scene. Marco, trying hard to arrange his face into a look of cherubic innocence; Joey in Marco’s sister’s pink sunglasses, the calmest of all of us; And me and Chris in the back, faces glistening with the febreeze’s condensed mist, trying to stifle our coughs and dry our watering eyes. The car gave off a noxious, almost visible mix of febreeze, marijuana smoke, cigarettes (Marco smoked), coffee, and rum. The cop stared at us and we stared at him.
“You’ve got to be ****ing kidding me,” he said.
Clearly operating on reflex, he continued, “License and reg-”
“I don’t recall,” Marco interrupted. The cop stared at him. Marco’s face reddened in the rearview.
Almost subconsciously I nudged Chris, and he came to life like a robot being activated. He leaned forward. “Excuse me, Officer,” he said, hitting the perfect note between casualness and respect. “We’re just trying to get home. I won’t lie, we’ve had some night...”
Here we all are, Chris noted, at three o’clock in the morning, and us not four blocks from home. Chris invited the cop to give Marco sobriety tests. Was he going to hurt us for the rest of our lives, our careers and college chances, because of a situation in which we posed no harm to anyone, just to please his ******* superiors, who were probably in bed right now or at some bar? The cop probably would have ignored anyone else, but Chris had the kind of face you always give a few free seconds. Before long he was nodding, and I knew we were clear.
Marco had to get out of the car and do some sobriety tests, but he had a job interview soon and had had a clean night, and the cop let us go. I think in the end the strangeness of the whole encounter created its own momentum, and the policeman accepted Chris’s logic just to make some sense of the whole thing. My friends were all laughing as Marco drove us to our cars, but I had a feeling I get fairly often. I felt like I was separate from them, somehow apart, like I was a foreigner and they spoke in some tongue I could not understand. So I let them laugh, and looked out the window and waited to get home. I faked a few laughs of my own, so that they could enjoy their night, and not have to wonder why I wasn’t talking; and surrounded by that laughter a sadness slowly grew in me.
I had been to a psychologist before.
It had been four or five years before. His waiting room was full, and then some. I waited for about an hour before I was called. The psychologist was a moon-faced man with glasses, a full black beard, and a cluttered desk. He asked me how I felt. I was younger then, and took the question seriously. I told him there were three great pains in my life. There was the sadness and anger that I had blamed on everyone around me, but was now realizing had some internal cause; the guilt I felt over how my own pain was affecting my family; and the gap between what was and what should be- my own anger at being denied the life I would and should be leading, if it were not for this apathetic sadness.
He had been scribbling in a notebook this whole time, head down but nodding occasionally. When I finished he handed me what looked like a note. It was a prescription for Zoloft. I was surprised- I hadn’t known psychologists could prescribe drugs in our state. But it made no difference to me either way, because I never took any of the pills. At the time, I thought I could handle it on my own.
The next night, I went to a party at Marco’s house. His parents had gone away for a week-long vacation somewhere in the Caribbean, and Marco had wasted no time setting up a real devil’s playground. The house was two stories, with the same kind of winding driveway found in my neighborhood. When Chris and I got there, he went to go organize a game of beer pong, and I went to get a beer. When I got to the den someone smacked my back, and I turned around. “Adam! What up, bro!”
“Hey, Pascal,” I made to move on, but Pascal wasn’t ready to let me leave.
He assured me with some very serious oaths that he had “totally totally ****ed” some girl I didn’t know. But I recognized the name. Doesn’t she have a boyfriend? I asked him.
“Forget him,” he said. “That guy’s a *****.” At this point Marco rescued me, tapping on my shoulder and pointing his thumb in the direction of the door. We nodded to Pascal and went out into the backyard. While Marco smoked his cigarette, we talked about the last night, wondering why the cop had let us go.
“Adam! Marco! What up, bros!” I saw Marco cringe at this. He hated that word and didn’t like Pascal much more. But he wouldn’t have to talk to him- before Pascal got to us he was intercepted.
A guy came at him from the side and flung out his arm so Pascal walked into it, and spun him around so they were face-to-face. I sized them both up. The guy wasn’t much bigger than Pascal, who was average height and a little thin. He talked to Pascal in a low, menacing voice. Pascal kept apologizing. Then he grabbed Pascal’s arm again like he was a kid and marched him over to a group of girls nearby. “Now apologize to her,” he said loudly. Other people were looking over now. Pascal looked defiant for a moment, and then said quietly, “I’m sorry.” The guy’s grip tightened.
“Louder,” he said. Pascal complied. The guy, looking smug, released him, and Pascal walked back toward the door. A few people laughed, and one or two jeered him. He didn’t make any sign to me or Marco. But as he walked by I saw his face, and his expression was such an intense mix of anger and shame that I was surprised, even after what had happened.
Later, I met Sam, who was Joey’s main supplier. He asked me what I thought of Pascal. I told the truth, diplomatically. I said that I liked him more than I respected him. He laughed and said, “I like this guy!”, and I decided immediately not to trust him. His eyes didn’t smile when his lips did.
After the party, we all met in the street outside Marco’s house. Chris and Marco had work the next day, but I didn’t and Joey was, after all, a drug dealer, so we decided to go to his apartment and watch a movie. We each drove there, and I met him in the complex’s parking lot before we went upstairs.
Joey unlocked the door and I sat down on the couch. He went to get a six-pack of Guinness from the fridge and came back to set up the DVD player. We watched the movie in silence for a few minutes until Joey said, “I’m starting a group.” I didn’t have to ask what he meant, and shook my head.
“Joey, go back to NOVA. Get a degree, maybe transfer. Then you can do real business.”
“With what?” He spread his arms to indicate the small apartment, with its second-hand furniture and unevenly painted walls. “This place takes most of what I make. I could get a loan,” he said, anticipating my response, “but it’s harder lately. And I don’t want to work like an animal, or stay in school for ten years.”
We were silent for a minute. Onscreen, Chow-Yun Fat crouched in a small fishing boat and fired a Dragunov sniper rifle at an official onshore, then dropped the rifle into clear blue waves.
“It’ll be a small one,” said Joey. “Small enough that Sam will still supply us.”
“I doubt he’ll see it that way,” I said. We sipped at our beers.
“Jamaica will be on me,” he said. I laughed. We were always talking about a trip to Jamaica, a trip we both knew would probably never happen. So we talked about sandy beaches and blue skies, women tourist and local, and weed plantations. The place was like a paradise for us.
Joey and I were going to meet up with Marco, but Joey had business at the park and so I went there with him first.
“Should I wait in the car?” I asked.
Joey laughed. “No, man, come keep us company.”
We got out of the car and followed a paved path for a few minutes until it became a dirt trail shadowing a quiet stream. It was one of the last days of winter, when the snow doesn’t cover the ground anymore but patches it in white, fragmented remnants.
Ahead were three young men talking, one smoking a cigarette. Joey and I came up to them, and he greeted them each in turn. They nodded to me and I to them, but we had nothing to say to each other and so I quickly fell behind as they began to walk, discussing plans. I watched the stream and the trees, and the flowers already peeking up from the ground.
“What does Sam think about this?” I heard one ask. “You don’t think he’ll mind you setting up under his nose?” The other two were listening attentively.
“This is going to be small, and stay small,” Joey said. “We’d just be doing what we are now, but as a group. It’ll make us more money without costing Sam. Besides, Chase,” he said, looking at him more directly, “We work with Sam, not for him. Right?” Chase seemed satisfied and nodded cautiously. Joey and his new partners worked out details. One of the guys had experience as a salesman; Joey dedicated him as the full-time dealer and the one responsible for meeting first-time customers. The other was taking botany classes at our school, though I hadn’t met him, and dreamed of growing (weed, of course), and had a good location but no start-up money. Joey convinced Chase to lend the kid the money he needed to grow a plant, to be repaid in sales percentages. “But only one,” Joey told him. “We’re not making a cartel. It’s just for dry spells and market fluctuations.” They wrapped up and Joey and I went back to his car. But I didn’t go with Joey to hang out with Marco and Chris. I had lost any desire to go, which happens to me sometimes. If I go against that feeling, I just end up saying nothing, and staring out a window, waiting to leave.
On Monday, I was in Biology Lab. I was alone at our table, watching Chris work the room. This always fascinated me. I watched him slide into a chair at a table full of girls, tickling one and retreating when she counterattacked, laughing. He squirted the rest with a water dispenser and moved on, greeting the guys at the next table with backslaps and knucklepounds. Mrs. Jobera, our teacher, told him to get back in his seat, but she was smiling, and he extended his hand in mock handshake before twirling her around slowly and stepping in a simple dance. He finally finished the circuit back at our table. “Hey, Adam,” he said, “you should do your applications.” I didn’t understand, and he laughed. “For college, man! You have enough credits.”
“That’s true,” I said. Chris and I talked for a little, then he went off again, and I listened to the teacher, who was at the next table talking to a group of students.
“It’s like the frog experiment,” she said. I was half-listening. “A scientist named Victor Mackerow put a frog into a pot of boiling water. It jumped out immediately, of course. But then he put the same frog into a pot of cool water. It swum around, it did laps, it read Maxim”- a few half-hearted chuckles- “it basically enjoyed itself. But there was a flame under the pot.” I knew this story. I felt vaguely sick.
“Frogs are poikilothermic, or cold-blooded, so they depend on their environment for temperature. The flame heated the pot slowly” -and here she raised her hand, side edge out, in small increments- “degree by degree, until the frog was so weak from the heat that it couldn’t escape.”
By now I knew I was having some kind of panic attack. My heart was smashing around in my ribcage. It felt like a line of firecrackers in my insides, and the thought shot through my mind that everyone would be able to hear it. I was breathing quickly, too. My traitor heart needed fuel. I grabbed my bag- I saw my hand was shaking- and headed quickly for the door. When someone speaks of bones, I remembered reading, the old ones shiver.
Later, I went to the GED office. A man named Todd looked up my scores for me. He seemed surprised when he saw them. “This is in the 98th percentile,” he said. “How long did you study?” I shrugged and said that it was the GED, that the scores didn’t mean anything. He seemed surprised. “People usually say that when they fail,” he said. He printed a copy for me. Thanking him, I left. I crumbled it up and threw it away before I was out of the building.
I got out of my late class one night around eleven o’clock, and called Marco to see if he wanted to eat something. On the phone, he sounded angry. He told me that Pascal had ripped off him and Joey in a deal over about an ounce of weed. Not all of it had been of the same quality, and there was a substantial difference in prices between the grades. But I didn’t pay any attention to it- this kind of thing happened all the time.
But when Marco picked me up he said that Pascal had been bragging to everyone about what happened, saying he got the better of Joey and Marco. Marco kept saying ominously that Pascal would be “handled.” Joey was in the car too, but he was quiet, thinking.
“IHOP, pull in here,” Joey said. Marco turned in and parked. On the walk to the door Joey and Marco bounced anger off each other, getting more and more worked up. We sat down in the back. By the time we got there they were glaring everywhere, like Pascal was about to materialize in the restaurant, an insult to their manhood standing defiant and intolerable amid the tired waitresses and fluorescent lights.
“What are you guys getting?” I asked.
“I’m going to kill this mother****er,” Marco said.
“We can’t ignore him,” said Joey. “How do you want to do this?”
“Are you two serious about this?” I said.
“**** yes!” Marco said immediately. “What, you aren’t?”
“We’ve known Pascal years, man, since we were kids. You want to beat him up over a few grams of bad weed?”
Marco was practically foaming at the mouth. “He’s talking **** about us, dog! How the **** can we let that slide? Who’s going to deal with us if they hear this little ***** ripped us off and talked **** about it behind our back, and we let it slide?”
I shrugged. “Pascal’s a bull****ter. You’ve known that since we met him, or you should have. Let him say what he wants. No one will listen.”
“**** that,” he shook his head so strongly it looked like his whole body refused what I was saying.
“You should never have done business with him.” I said. Marco glowered at me. The waitress came and we ordered.
“Are you in or not?” Marco asked.
“Not,” I said.
“Then **** you too,” he said quietly. “Neutral-*** mother****er. Maybe I’ll come for you next.”
I laughed at him and Joey put a hand on my shoulder and held up a cautioning hand at Marco. “Calm down, both of you. Stay easy.” We relaxed and for a moment we said nothing, just waiting for our food.
“Adam,” he said, “I need to know where you stand on this. We won’t hurt him much”- Marco looked mutinous at this- “Just enough to send him a message, him and everyone else.”
I shook my head. “No, man. It’s Pascal. We’ve known him years, and he’s harmless. You don’t remember meeting him on the court by Chris’s house? Skipping class at the mall?” Joey seemed vaguely disappointed. I kept talking, but they had stopped listening, and Marco and Joey traded a look, the kind of look that builds walls. They talked a little about Pascal’s supplier, a man called Jones, and how he would react if they beat up Pascal. And I was surprised to find I didn’t care much either way, even about Pascal. I wouldn’t do anything to stop this. We ate quietly and left.
The next day I felt my phone vibrating in my pocket and answered it.
“Adam, you won’t ****ing believe what just happened,” said Joey.
“Tell me and I’ll tell you,” I said.
“Me and Marco cornered Pascal at the park. Wait, I’m driving, talk to Marco.”
“Adam? Adam! Pascal just pulled a ****ing knife on us!”
“Stop messing with me,” I said.
“I’m dead-****ing-serious!” I was afraid he was about to start freestyling.
Apparently when Marco and Joey had found Pascal, he was at one of the small neighborhood parks, shooting baskets alone. They tried to sneak up on him, but he saw them and ran. They caught up to him at the edge of the forest. He pulled a knife on Joey and apparently even made to stab him, but he was holding the knife too loosely. Joey punched Pascal in the face- “Instinct!” Joey said in the background- and he dropped the knife into the grass, and the two beat him up. “Pretty good, too,” Marco added. “That’s not the weirdest part, though, man,” Marco told me. “He gave us this crazy look, like an angry pitbull or something.” They asked me if I wanted to chill, and I said I’d be going out later.
The next day I went to see a movie, alone. I did this when I felt especially bad, and I tried to choose action movies. There is so little thought in them that I ended up not thinking at all, which is what I was after. But that day it didn’t work, and I was forced to admit that I was getting worse. A wave of despair swept over me, and I leaned back in my seat and accepted what I could not change.
I went to Marco’s a few hours later. He kept an open house- we could come in whenever the door was unlocked- and every once in a long while I would find him painting, using an old easel he had. He had set up this easel in the den, and I sat down on the couch and waited, not wanting to disturb him. He kept his attention focused entirely on his work. Most of his paintings, at least the few I had seen, were angry kaleidoscope abstracts, often featuring storms of orange and red and yellow, but with occasional hints of peace- trees perhaps, or calm blue lakes hidden in backgrounds and corners. But this one was different. Marco had painted an Armageddon sky, riven by comets and burdened by great dark clouds. The stars shone red and angry, though I could tell it was meant to be daytime. A man reached up from the ground to grasp the sun, the tips of his fingers reddening, a determined look on his face. Who was the man, and what was the sun? I had never wondered what the paintings meant, and now I wondered what they meant to Marco.
How could I know so little about my friend, who I had known for years? Had I been so absorbed with my own problems, spent so much of my life in my head, that I could see no deeper than the surface of those around me?
“Marco,” I asked him, “Why are you so angry all the time?” His hand stopped moving the brush for a moment, and then continued. He said nothing, and neither did I.
After a few minutes I decided to leave. I was about to get up when Marco said suddenly, “What did you do today?”
“Not much. I saw a movie,” I said.
“What movie?”
I opened my mouth to speak, but I had nothing to say. “I don’t remember,” I said. I turned to leave. When I was at the door, Marco called my name.
“Adam, wait up.” I thought I had forgotten something, my phone or wallet. But Marco was looking up from his easel at me, hand still poised, the brush dripping paint. He was looking at me with the same intensity he had been using at the easel.
“Dude,” he said. “Tell me seriously. Are you OK?”
“I’m fine,” I told him. Fine.
I didn’t go out the next few days. I don’t know exactly how long, because they all seemed the same. I read a lot, and slept a lot. Sometimes I would stare into space for minutes at a time, and only snap out of it when I started crying suddenly. I should have gotten treatment earlier, I thought. I considered getting liquor, but I didn’t trust myself with it. One day Joey called me and asked if I wanted to eat something with him and Marco, after they finished a deal Sam had set up for them. I mumbled something and he said he was coming to pick me up. He looked concerned when he saw me, and wanted to cancel the deal, but I convinced him not to and we picked up Marco and went on our way.
We drove into an unfinished neighborhood, the houses hugged by scaffolding and surrounded by building equipment, silent as witnesses. But the road was paved, and Joey drove down the street. We took a left onto the cul-de-sac. It was surrounded by trees and out of view of the main road. We saw three guys, and Marco, Joey and I got out of the car and approached them. Pascal was there; he seemed surprised to see us, or at least Marco and me. I didn’t know the other two guys, both fairly big, one looking bored and the other glaring at us. When Marco saw Pascal he couldn’t restrain himself. “Yo, Pascal!” he shouted. “Where’s your knife, you punk *****!” As he laughed, I saw the same expression twist Pascal’s face and fill his eyes that I had seen at the party two weeks or so before, a mix of sadness and anger, and something else, maybe defiance. His hand went behind his back, and he pulled out a gun, dark and lethal.
Then Pascal fired. It sounded more like a bomb then a firearm, and everyone froze like stunned deer, including Pascal, who seemed as shocked as any of us. Then he started firing wildly. I felt my body jerk- I knew immediately I had been shot, but I felt nothing.
I could not hear anything distinct, or perhaps I just couldn’t process the sounds. I watched the whole scene with a great sense of detachment, without no preconceptions or investment, like a child watching a battle of ants.
Everything seemed slower. I saw Joey’s back as he charged Pascal. I saw his elbow go back, his arm piston, and his fist smash into Pascal’s face at the precise moment that his torso jerked as if Pascal had hit him, and a red spot appeared, steadily growing across the back of Joey’s white t-shirt. Joey fell backward slowly, so slowly. In my daze I thought of the delicate fall of a house of beautiful cards; and like the child who had blown the house over, Pascal was revealed standing completely still, literally holding a smoking gun, face pale and eyes blank. Behind him, his two friends ran deeper into the woods.
I could only tell I was falling backwards when my field of vision started to tip upwards. I also fell slowly, like a cloud was between me and the ground, and I felt no impact when I hit it. I was staring straight upward and the sky was a perfect blue. It was all I could see, and I saw no reason to think that the universe contained anything but an unfathomable vastness of that ethereal blue, suffused with light and painlessness. In my last conscious moment I surprised myself by hoping the bullet had hit my heart. I suppose in spite of everything I had not thought I was that far gone yet.
I don’t remember fading out completely, but I do remember waking. Flashes: in the inside of an ambulance, a descending oxygen mask. A hospital hallway. Hands on a gurney railing, inches from my eyes. And darkness again.
For a while, I don’t know how long, I was sliding in and out of consciousness. My whole existence was a jumbled confusion I can only compare to the first few seconds after being suddenly and harshly awoken from sleep. It was like someone had thrown me and a little light and some different colors into a blender and was constantly changing the speed. People came to me during this period, but I never knew if my visitors were real or the creations of my jolted mind. Once I opened my eyes and saw my mother leaning over me, her head framed by the white ceiling above, with a terrible fearful pain in her puffy eyes and her jaw set tight as though she were holding in a scream. The police. Marco and Chris, alone and together. I saw Joey once, and he said “Jamaica,” and I knew he wasn’t real.
I eventually drifted into reality and stayed there. Chris came. Sam and Jones had set up Joey, he said. He could have got too big. The gun was just to scare him, they were just supposed to threaten him, rough him up. But Pascal flipped out, he said. He started crying then. Pascal flipped the **** out. Painkillers kept me numb. Eventually I was released.
My first day home, I was still in shock. I knew that Joey was dead. I repeated it to myself in my mind, endlessly, trying to provoke a reaction. But all I felt was a kind of incredulous blankness. It had not truly hit me. But things did seem different that day; everything seemed to possess a special quality, a uniqueness, as though I were seeing everything for the first time, like a child. On the drive to the cemetery, buildings I had passed a thousand, ten thousand times stood silent and newly significant, immovable concrete testaments. They had been there, just as silent and indifferent, when Joey died.
It was midday, and unseasonably warm. Puffy clouds floated through the sky. I pulled through the gates of the cemetery and drove into the parking area. I got out and walked, slowly. The gravestones were spaced evenly, like gruesome pebbles planted on the rolling field of well-watered grass. The path I followed wandered through the graves, and a sense of horror began to mount in me, like magma stirring in the earth’s dark innards, or some monster undulating unseen beneath dark waters; but on the surface I felt only a growing unease.
I saw the site of Joey’s headstone. It had been described to me; a clump of graves standing off from the others, sheltered between a tall birch tree and the lee of a small hill. I knew which one was his before I got close enough to read the headstone, and my intuition was confirmed by the freshly turned earth. I walked to Joey’s grave and stood before it, a few steps off the path. There was no one around. Birds chirped quietly in the birch, and a slight breeze rustled the flowers I had brought.
I placed the flowers at the foot of the headstone. I stepped back and regarded the grave. Something caught my attention: there was a cross on the headstone. That’s not right, I thought. Joey wasn’t religious, was actually almost an atheist. Whoever put this here didn’t know him. Memories began to come to me, unbidden; in high school, one of the overflow classes in trailers, the time we dropped our bags out of the trailer window and escaped by asking to go to the bathroom- at parties, daring each other to talk to girls- playing paintball- earnest, youthful debates about the injustices of the world. I stepped back and regarded the grave. “It’s a lie,” I thought, out loud. “That wasn’t Joey.” Then I realized I had said wasn’t, Joey had become a was, forever removed and banished to a static past. And I found myself screaming nonsense. “I REMEMBER! PAINTBALL! ENGLISH, THIRD PERIOD! AMY ANDREWS! THE NEW YORK DEAL!” My shouting had attracted two of the place’s employees- a white and a black young man not much older than I was approached me warily. I shot them a warning look that must have crazed enough for them to keep their distance, and I turned and left. “My friend and the friend of my friends,” I whispered, hoarse.
I don’t remember the walk back to my car, or the drive back home. I remember pulling into my driveway. I went to my room, out of reflex, and turned on my computer, out of reflex. I remember seeing, before my monitor lit up, my own face reflected on it, crying. I remember pulling up the word processor and starting to type, slowly at first, and then in a furious flood, all the memories I had of my friend. After a few hours I woke up, as if from a dream. I stared at the monitor. I had dozens of pages. I thought about saving what I had written, but before I could finish the thought I had flipped the power switch and was staring at my face reflected in the monitor, tear-stained and exhausted. I went to sleep.
The next day the depression was bad. Maybe the worst I’d ever had. I didn’t get out of bed, just wrapped myself in my blanket and clenched my eyes shut, squeezing out tears. It is difficult to describe; it was like the whole world had died and, with my eyes closed, I was floating in space, and I was nothing, less than worthless, and I waited to endure that agony of aloneness long enough to die.
When it passed, I got out of bed and for lack of anything else to do started sorting through my mail. It was bills and junk, like usual, but there was one from one of the colleges I had applied to before. I held it in my hands for a moment and opened it. I learned I had been accepted, and to my surprise I felt that faint touch of hope, the barest taste of possibility; I knew it was there like you know the sun is circling the earth…but then you know that’s inevitable, and there was nothing inevitable about this feeling, light as an angel’s wings brushing the lips.