Work Text:
1.
1964
John got sick first but was over it within a week so that later when Lou was in the hospital with the same illness, literally relatives of the same virus having reproduced divergently inside each body, there was a nonzero amount of time spent lying awake staring at the ceiling feeling like his insides were melting going through the age old internal self-flagellation of the cuckolded. John had to have been out doing it with someone else and wasn’t that thought just untenable even if Lou himself was, all the time in fact, including and especially with the guys he copped from, the guys waiting in the stairwells, guys on the street slipping the little baggies into pockets. It was easy enough, much easier, for instance, than to go all the way back down to the Lower East Side, on the fucking Lexington Avenue line at rush hour no less, to follow someone up into whatever dank S.R.O. and cook the stuff up and share a single syringe. These things were different when they were impersonal or were out of having to and not wanting to or when they felt dangerous—but not enough to matter. It was like how some girls always said they were saving themselves for someone they really loved. As soon as you’d done it the other way once the bandaid got pulled off and all the moral rhapsodizing you had once done seemed very silly.
Anyway, John got sick first. That week was very cold. It was already starting to get dark again by the time Lou had roused himself sufficiently to discover there was nothing left to burn in the fireplace. The door to John’s room was ajar and as usual darkness seemed to bleed out of it. Like standing on the threshold of a cave full of bones. Lou pushed the door slightly further open bracing himself for something to be thrown at him but the dim foggy hall light cast a wedge across a dissolute tableau. Just a lumpen shadow shivering in the corner on his bare mattress, under his moth-eaten wool blanket.
Lou assumed dopesickness. “You’ve got to pull yourself together,” he announced imperiously. “We have to find stuff to burn or we’re gonna freeze to death tonight.”
John made a very undignified, thrilling sound. Just a few strands of his greasy hair visible where he had pulled the blanket tightly over his head like a child.
Lou didn’t go in this room very much. John was in Lou’s room a lot more often, because it got sunlight. He had been coming in here recently a little more often than had previously been normal because of an interesting development, which, like many things that had happened to Lou recently especially things having to do with John, was not exactly what he had been hoping for but was close and therefore almost unbearably tantalizing. This was the fact that John had said almost too casually yes I would take a little but you’ll have to help me because I don’t like needles. Later they would both look back on that and laugh about it, he knew that even then.
John’s room looked a lot like Lou’s room except it was darker because it faced the alley and it seemed even darker than it was because of the various plastic milk crates full of black clothing. That he folded his clothes and put them away and even occasionally took them to the laundromat was truly a sign of high insanity in their social milieu. On one such crate his viola and its bow rested naked as a satisfied lover. He had been playing in the wee hours, Lou remembered as out of a dream, not plugged in or anything because the landlord would have killed them, just these tasteful mournful noises, up and down and up and down and away across a long flat driving at night somewhere the sun took hours to go down and a thunderstorm could be heard rumbling far away across the everything-nothingness… He took a step in and then another and did something he had done a lot lately but not in any kind of way he’d ever thought he’d do it which was kneel by John’s squalid little bed. Pinched a lock of greasy hair between his first two knuckles and tugged it softly. Just John’s left hand was visible and it was clenched whitely in the blanket and he was breathing hard. “Alive in there?”
“No,” said John.
“This is really an incarnation of being you gotta get used to, you know.”
“Not that.”
“I hate to break it to you Cale but — ”
Under the blanket John made another noise and got smaller.
“Well what’s wrong with you?”
He threw the blanket off so violently that Lou flinched. Dead white but there was sweat in his hair. He had a lot of bones, John. They had just piled him together out of bones in that strange place beyond the veil from whence he had come. Maybe girls liked him so much because there was something of the Celtic pagan effigy in his build and aura. Like if you set him on fire you would have a plentiful harvest. On top of the bones his skin was roughly the color of old milk discovered in the back of the icebox. Dark nipples, underarm hair, bruises inside the elbow, all a rich purplish. He rarely allowed himself to be this undressed in front of Lou. Maybe that should have been a sign that something was actually wrong.
“I feel like I swallowed a ball of yarn,” said John.
So Lou was rubbing off on him. Maybe not in the way Lou would have liked to but these other ways were more permanent anyway. Perhaps equivalently satisfying only cumulatively like one day he would look back on it and say alright well now that’s done thank you baby that was fantastic…
“Well,” said Lou, “did you?”
“Jesus fucking Christ Lou.”
“You’re always saying you’re hungry.”
John buried the heels of his hands in his eyes for a second then rolled half over again on his side hugging his concave belly. Lou reached to pull the blanket back over him and the look he got for his trouble might have been withering were it not coming from someone in such sorry condition.
“Your eyes are yellowy,” Lou noticed.
“Are they?”
“Yeah, like piss.”
John tried to swat him but was too sick to be very quick. Lou fled the scene, then the apartment wholesale, down into the snow-smelling streets, where he set about trawling up and down the usual alleys in the vivid dusk. A few weak snowflakes eddying in the crisp stillness. People on the sidewalks hustled home from work and hustled toward work and generally hustled. He listened, as was his wont and indeed his duty in this world. Snippets of conversations floated toward him and he connected:
“I told Robert he can’t keep it up like this. She’ll find out soon enough.”
“She went to Connecticut. Yeah, her typist friend told her about some doctor.”
“I told him I’m not coming for Christmas, no matter how many times he asks, I’m not coming again, not after last year. Nobody likes to be humiliated.”
“I can hardly believe how expensive lemons are, can you?”
“He said it was cashmere. Honey, I know the look and feel of cashmere!”
In doing this he was a sort of salvager, which was something people in the more working class parts of his hometown had honestly done. There was somewhat of a whiff of science fiction in the role of the salvager, whose job was to recover garbage that had once been considered the apex of human technology. There was also somewhat of a whiff of postmodernism or whatever in the consideration of how quickly beautiful things became trash. Sometimes on Long Island you heard about a particularly bad storm in which someone’s beautiful yacht moored in the harbor had gone down and instantly become worthless. The phrase the professionals used for this was “total loss.” The same thing happened regularly to ideas and people. Relevantly now, the same thing happened to fruit crates and cardboard. They had contained something of middling but undeniable value and now themselves were worthless except that the act of their destruction could warm the human worthless.
Now this was turning into a story. Lou knew what to do with that. He thought about the stories he had heard about John’s hometown. When sober, John would talk about the townspeople and the various customary human drama which seemed particularly alien only because of the constant allusions to coal mining and ancient circles of standing stones. When high John was always on about the mist on the dark green hill and the rain. It was a place, not that Lou had ever seen it except in dreams or near-to-dreams, seemingly characterized by deep abiding greens and grays. It seemed like the kind of place where you might waste away from a chill. Many interesting things had happened to John because he was an island on an island and these things had bestowed upon him the sort of gothic air which everyone was surprised to learn was not an affectation. These things simply did not happen to somebody from the New York suburbs. Long Island was only an island in the physical.
The kind of story he was imagining, scavenging for wood and songs on the frigid streets, was one that would have to happen in a place like John’s hometown. In the story, one of the lovers was ill in the freezing garret so the other went out to find food and combustibles. In the process of stealing a loaf of bread he was arrested and six months later released from a squalid work camp to find a decomposing corpse at home by the cold hearth.
Just around the corner from home, tempting fate perhaps, Lou pocketed an orange from the fruit stand while the proprietor’s back was turned.
At home. When compared to any popular conception of home in the mind of any reasonable person this place was a pale facsimile with no heat and hardly any furniture and brown liquid running from the taps and a toilet that never quite stopped flushing and water bugs and a neighbor who screamed bloodcurdingly on occasion and yet it was home because it was theirs. John had managed to get himself and his wool blanket into the living room and further wrapped himself in a rug. He looked like a ragamuffin in a Dickens story but had arranged his lanky bony body on the moth eaten and well stained velvet chaise before the ashy fireplace like a nymphomaniac consumptive and like they had not gotten the thing off the street, probably surrendered by some kind of underground bordello.
“Help me break these up,” said Lou.
John coughed weakly. He was most certainly playing this up, Lou thought every minute of every day up until he had it too. John was normally in the unfortunate position of having to amplify his own weakened self-preservation instinct enough to also keep Lou alive. He was probably testing if anything about that was reciprocal, Lou figured with a spike of rage. Now he felt stupid for having stolen the orange for someone so spiteful so he threw it across the room roughly in John’s direction. He was so out of it that it hit him in the head and bounced onto the floor.
“Ow,” said John. “Jesus. What the fuck.”
“You’re welcome.”
John reached for the orange across the filthy hardwoods. The rug had slipped off his shoulder and the rancid light was carving deep shadows in his hollow chest. “How’d you get this,” he said, turning the orange over in his stupid huge elegant hands like it was some kind of mystical orb. Against the binary shades of his hair and skin the color seemed electrically bright.
“Put it in my pocket.” Lou tried to break apart a crate with his foot with a very butch confidence and failed miserably. “Picked the prettiest one.”
“Wow,” said John, “my hero.”
John would always endeavor to peel an orange in one piece and it was a great effort of focus carefully winnowing a finger under the skin and making minute adjustments. With his lips parted a little, like they were when he played viola, or when the junk hit the bloodstream. The sound of them unsticking or being wet with his tongue which Lou often heard beside his ear when they were playing music together was not unlike the skin of an orange being pierced by a fingernail. Lou experienced all this imaginatively because he was trying to build a fire, which was something else John normally did. It took him a while to get it going, by which point John was asleep on the chaise with the orange peel loosely dangling from his hand.
Lou sat there on the floor for a while, listening to the fire start to click and pop and roar, thinking about a number of things. He thought about burning John’s viola. He thought about peeling away the wool layers and shoving his face in John’s armpit or his crotch and if it were possible to do this gently enough so as not to wake him. Instead he went into his room and got the junk and gear. Really this was quite a sensible decision with almost no consequences compared to those of the others, he figured.
It had been a strange couple weeks since John had asked if Lou would be so kind as to aid him in the act of shooting up. In doing so he had dropped a mystifying claim that as a child he had been prescribed opium-laced cough syrup for years so this really wasn't anything new. Except of course it was. Maybe he really didn't know what he was doing but that was difficult to imagine. Sitting on his bare mattress, back against the wall, wary eyes, rolling up his sleeve. The uncalm surrender, breath getting steadily faster unto the moment of truth, penetration, the collapse of various barriers in being and consciousness and selfhood, blood furling into the chamber was just ordinary red, the needle closed, he melted. The inky lashes that seemed to smear across his face. Lou pressed his thumb into the droplet of blood inside John’s elbow. Holy hell. Was that how he himself had looked, years ago now, when Delmore had done it to him? Delmore would have quickly indulged the immediate urge to get his cock out and get off before the new initiate came around. Lou was starting to when John stirred.
“Lewis,” said John now from the chaise. He must have woken up with the sounds of the spoon and lighter but his voice sounded half asleep. High needling note of almost childish need.
“I’ll get you, baby. Just hold on.”
“Me first.”
“No way.”
“Have a little sympathy for a dying man,” said John. There was so much natural music in his accent, especially when he was tired or high, that the jealousy could hardly be borne sometimes.
“You’re not dying.”
“How do you know?”
He wasn’t really making sense but never did while doing this, the focus, the anticipation. “It’s only me who’s allowed to kill you.”
John managed his coughing laugh. Lou heard at the edge of mind and yet suffusing everything he was the soft rasp of the fine stubble on John’s face against the velvet. A clammy hand landed on his head for a second and then moved away.
“Alright,” said Lou, not wanting to, hating in the absolute that that had worked, “fine. What are you gonna do for me?”
“I do enough for you already.”
“I brought you an orange.”
“I’ll bring you one tomorrow.”
A cold hand touched the back of his neck. He jolted and with effort stilled. “Don’t make me spill it,” he said. “Then I really will kill you.”
John didn't say anything. The pad of his thumb pressed against the top button of Lou’s spine. All mental faculties were briefly swamped by a moment’s indulgent fantasy, the little bed in the neat dark room, grappling against each other. He didn't even know what John’s dick looked like which seemed tremendously unfair and yet almost irrelevant beneath the weight of related imaginings, his hands, shoulders, his smell…
John’s fingers closed toward Lou’s pulse, as though he had heard that through Lou’s skin. Which perhaps he had.
“Fine,” said Lou. “Fine! Don't ask me why I do these things.”
“Hmm,” said John. With great dignity he folded the rug and blanket away from his left arm. It had gotten warm quickly in the little room but there were goosebumps standing up on his chest. He was looking at the needle the way he always did, like he had come to this place to do battle with it. “Be gentle,” he said.
“You’re acting like a baby.”
But he was very gentle, first with the belt, then with the needle; he was never anything other, in this at least, perhaps in this alone. He hoped that it would make John feel better, and it seemed to, for a while. He said something in his funny tumbly breathy language which meant he was away dreaming. In the firelight, drifting, he just looked beautiful like a normal human person. Just a human person like any other who had been hauled across the sea to this auspicious place by force of his own wounded ambition.
Firelight had a quality that was like the ocean, Lou thought, prepping his own shot. It was hypnotic and it rippled. It produced an insistent white noise which served a function of erasure. When out of control it could be terrifying. Otherwise it was as a companion in the dark. There was a little residue tinged with John’s blood still in the syringe when he sucked up the liquid from the spoon in it and flicked the barrel to settle the air bubbles.
Here come the waves.
He wondered what John heard. Judging by what he liked to play on Lou’s guitar when he was high he heard “All I Have To Do Is Dream” or maybe “I Only Have Eyes For You.” Lou heard this very loud noise screaming out of space that didn’t so much halt as became beautiful. It was not unlike certain unnameable other possessing or washing or erasing noises of memory except the feeling inside and after was abundantly good. There was something to that, maybe; after all this was the stuff they gave you for palliative pain. Like this he sometimes thought about how the first time at that party he had heard John. Admittedly he had taken LSD. He had turned his head and there was suddenly this sustained and glorious shrieking just hovering in the room.
--
A couple days later Lou was sick too. “Not funny anymore, is it,” said John, wrapped in his rug in the doorway. The competition for receptacles that could be thrown up in with low consequence became violent and occasionally brutal. So as not to add insult to injury John who was in somewhat less dire condition was obliged to go out and cop drugs and perform all the various and sundry preparations while Lou provided detailed if evidently confusing instructions. Thus some semblance of equilibrium was regained. The way he was supposed to take care of John was by being the person John needed to take care of. That much had been abundantly obvious since the beginning and it was a great relief now that the wrenches in its natural function had been removed.
Angus came over in states of concern when neither of them had been heard from for days. By this time John was steadier on his feet and Lou heard them talking in the door from his bower of extreme suffering. Angus took one look at the yellowy tinge lingering in John’s eyes and said well why didn’t you say it was hepatitis? That was the first time Lou had heard the word. Well it kept coming up again after that, that was for sure.
---
--
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2.
1967
Home had felt like living a thousand years ago, much of the time, especially as a kid, running up in the hills, cold air burning the lungs, looking for places to hide. Finding them, tiptoeing into the darkness so as not to disturb the ghosts, pressing an ear to the earth, imagining that he could hear history. At dusk, running home, past the standing stones. Men streaming out of the ground with dirty faces and lunchpails as the streetlights flickered on. Spoil tips growing and growing each month until they changed the shape of the horizon. Just last year one of those had collapsed in a village not far from where he had grown up and slurried down the mountain and killed a bunch of schoolchildren. There but for the grace of god, etc.
New York had no such history unless you wanted to imagine standing in the place where the Dutch had made the great trade of all their honor and dignity in perpetuity in return for the island of Manhattan. The feeling which was present in New York was a sensation of various intersecting futures that joined at neat dovetails like the streets and avenues. That feeling had been present in New York when New York was only an idea in his mind.
What he had always been looking for in music was time. More time, new time, other-time, proof time was going by, the scalpel with which to re-cut time… the city offered eternal time.
Lou touched his thigh because he knew it made John flinch. “What are you thinking about.”
It was in these kinds of places, these kinds of hours, in this kind of company, he had been thinking, that time sort of got loose, disjointed, wobbled, shook apart, offered various alternative linkages, maybe pieced them together, if only in dreams. All night dim sum joint in Chinatown, three AM. Gerard and Mary had ordered completely at random off the menu by pointing to attractive configurations of Chinese characters. Plenty of the stewed organs and tripe that thus arrived were semi-familiar from John’s grandmother’s cooking and he was obliged to explain them to most of the assembled. The kimchi and tofu skins however were new to everybody and though they all normally ate like birds because of the speed they had polished off everything which was so unusual that John had started wondering what were the odds they had spun off somehow into a different configuration of reality where they were all hippies smoking marijuana? Stranger things had happened and in fact tended to reasonably often when you were on potent amphetamines in the wee hours.
“Nothing,” said John.
Lou didn’t buy that for a second. John caught glimpse of their smeared reflections in the foggy window. Beyond them on the street thin shadows shifting against the rainy streetlight. “You look raptured,” Lou said.
“Thinking about time.”
“Tripe taking you back?”
“Well, it always does.”
Susan was watching them talk. Someone always was these days. Lou had a fantastic ability to sense this. His boot pressed against John’s under the table. Nobody would see that but they would see if John recoiled and they would see if he didn’t. Sometimes he felt as though he were being slowly poisoned.
“What are you doing after this,” said Lou.
“Going home and going to sleep.”
“God,” said Lou. “Why do you insist on being pathologically boring.”
“Because we have a show tomorrow night. Or, I guess, tonight.”
“I can help you with that,” said Gerard, honestly probably out of the badness of his heart. He patted the breast pocket of his jacket where there was a little lump that had to have been a baggie of speed.
Mary faked a dry-heave. “That stuff you have is shit. He’s trying to foist the shit off on you, Cale.”
“Duly noted.”
“Well you should just come over,” said Lou, “because I have good shit. Alright?”
Why did he go. He certainly couldn’t blame that on Lou, though his powers of persuasion were legendary. Walking uptown together at dawn, the sky turning red, then gray, hookers stumbling home, greengrocers stumbling to their storefronts, bakery vans already making rounds, bridge rattling, just a chain of lights stretching high above, street breathing steam from the sewer grates—amid the tuning symphony, waiting in silence for the curtain to rise, he could feel each of them making similar mental notes. That was why he went and why he kept going regardless of anything and why he was beginning to understand he would be going probably until one or both of them died. In that he had not much of a choice.
At Lou’s place, they sat around the kitchen table while the sun came up, stumbling through semi-silences. On the table: needles in a Dennis the Menace mug, a little baggie of junk, the trusty old spoon, an apple, a fully browned banana that John took at first for a human turd. He was well accustomed to junkie squalor, living in it himself, but Lou could be reliably depended upon to take everyone else’s debauchery to highly shocking extremes.
Not that it had been very easy at all when they lived together, the opposite, in fact, and not that he was usually vulnerable to nostalgia, but things were different then, when nobody was looking at them for anything except the landlord coming around to pick up rent with his gun. They spent days sitting quite close on that horrible chaise (what had happened to that thing?) writing down words that sounded nice together on a piece of cardboard they had taken off the street. All the possibility and potential in what they were making was characterized by the simplicity of a child’s dream, sitting in front of the radio: certainly everybody else who is hearing this is also changed? They got high and talked about the radio. It turned out they had listened to some of the same programs, which only had to travel a couple miles to get to Lou and had had to refract off various atmospheric bands to get to John and yet had arrived to both their young ears at the same time. They hopped turnstiles or walked miles in the driving snow to find a street corner or quiet subway station where they would alternate between playing folk songs and making an absolute racket of atrocious noise to see how long it would take until someone threw something at them. Then they would run away laughing pell mell into the welcoming darkness. Terribly, horrifically alive. He lay awake sometimes wondering why things were so intensely strange. Perhaps it was just that he had never really had a friend.
New York was a panoply of futures. One night on the street they were struck by a bus and killed. One morning around dawn they passed out in an all-night movie theater and were arrested in a bust and carted upstate to squalid prisons. After enough engagements playing grating drones around the corner from Gracie Mansion the mayor himself had them committed to Kings’ Park. Lou’s attentions were monopolized by the insipid heir to the talcum powder fortune and John was deported and sentenced to the mines. They were picked up by a dark limousine on a corner in Times Square and never seen again. Their bones were scattered somewhere on the island. They wrote songs. They formed a band.
“What are you thinking about,” said Lou.
He had to shatter even every fond reflection with his damnable need to be front and center in everyone’s mind at every minute. “Why do you always wanna know?”
“Well I invited you here to make conversation, after all.”
“Did you, now.”
“What were you thinking about?”
There was no point resisting. Or he couldn’t think of a lie fast enough. Or he wanted to pick the scab, see what the blood looked like. “Old times,” he said.
“What about them?”
When we liked each other. John bit his tongue. He wasn’t sure that was true. Sitting with his viola by the last embers in the fireplace, nearly dawn, he watched Lou writing in the last corner of the sheet of cardboard. God only knew what he was writing because it was too dark to see. He listened into that sound which was just creation. Lou’s pen scratching on the paper. When he got something good, when he was pulling it hand over hand out of the rarefied ether to which only he had access, his eyebrows would shoot up his forehead and his shoulders hunch in toward his collar and his non-dominant hand would close in a tight fist. Like an electrical transformer he was himself passive shifting massive energy between circuits. Incredible noise was coming in and going out of him which most people would have heard as only silence. John tuned against that sound and played and was thus himself swept up in this tremendous maelstrom of birth and destruction. Maybe it was only the heroin, which back then at the beginning had felt like an unalloyed good, but something like that was enough to make all other human connection feel like a pale imitation.
“Just… beginnings… loom in the imagination I suppose.”
“Wow, Cale,” said Lou, “that’s deep.”
“You’ve got the words, not me.”
“Are you saying you wanna live together again,” said Lou, smile winnowing deviously across his face, “because you seem so very happy with Sterling. You’re glowing, really, both of you.”
He never thought he was close to the edge until he was there. He consciously unfurled his hands from fists. “Why do you keep on doing this to me?”
God damn it, Lou was delighted. Of course he was. “Doing what to you?”
“Constantly fucking… insinuating!”
“I like winding you up,” said Lou innocently. “It puts color in your face.”
“Oh my fucking god.”
“No, you know, it’s just that I know you, John.”
For a second, unbidden, and shocking himself, which was rare these days, he did something he never did, ever, not since he was a child—he covered his ears with his hands. Hadn’t he trained out that reflex through extensive exposure to the sonically ransacking? Perhaps for everything except Lou. All he could manage through the veil of sudden humiliation was a pathetic rejoinder: “You just think you do.”
“Baby,” and the poison honey was in Lou’s voice, and in the dark eye, so this was a real read as the queens said, “you strut around like a real liberated man. But looking like a medieval alchemist and trafficking in the avant garde do not equate to liberation. Go out to Patchogue on the last train tonight and you’d be hard pressed to find even the meanest deckhand who’s as repressed as you.”
The back of John’s neck felt suddenly unbearably hot.
“And if you find one,” Lou said, “give him my number.”
John swallowed, parried, landed something only glancing: “Not everybody’s idea of sexual abandon involves a tub of Vaseline on a table in the back room of a bar.”
He should have known that would be too easy for Lou to turn around and indeed it was. “Well,” he said, “that would probably loosen you up some if you could ever bring yourself to do it.”
“Lewis, I am not like you.”
Lou just laughed. He was right to, because it was probably pretty hilarious, John later figured, watching him flop around desperately like a caught fish or a trussed victim. Finally, thank god, and was this some twisted act of mercy?, Lou reached for the junk and gear on the table. There was something numbingly calming about watching him do it after all these years, the same as it was to watch him play guitar. Methodical ease, like an experienced surgeon. John watched him, horribly feeling like he might start to cry. The denouement of speed did that sometimes; that was why they knew so many people who did it just about every hour of the day. He thought about leaving; he thought about flipping the table; he thought about finding Lou’s guitar and breaking it, but any of those things would have made Lou laugh again. He had always liked the sound of Lou’s laugh and envied its natural music but couldn't hear it again or something very bad would happen and he did not want to know what that was.
Instead he did something probably equally unwise. He said, “You couldn’t stand it if I went to one of those places. You’d fucking die from jealousy.”
“Well, don’t let that stop you.”
He had to consciously unfurl his fist again. The creases in his palm were dead white. “I don’t understand what you want from me.”
That was a mistake. He could hear how loud his own voice had been reverberating in his skull. Lou looked up from the preparations with an expression that chilled the blood. Deep, vicarious, almost wicked sadness. It was not far from the look he’d given Andy when Edie said she was never coming back. It was the look one might imagine he had given his parents when the psychiatrists had told them they’d done all that was inhumanly possible. “I don’t want anything from you,” he said.
The matador dropped the red flag all of a sudden and the world was still. The room was almost unbearably cold.
“Lou — ”
“John. Calm down. Here.”
Lou passing over the needle across the table like an olive branch or a surrenderer’s sword, holding the point inside his palm. This was a signal refined now over many years to bring things back from one extreme of their partnership to the other. The heartbeat raced in wild rage and longing and then it slowed to a gooey crawl. It was in their songs.
“I don’t want it,” John lied preposterously.
“Don’t fucking kid yourself.”
“I only wanted to make music with you. That’s all. I don’t know why you have to make it — ”
“You wanted something from me and you got it,” said Lou. “You got it. It got you this far and you want to give it back. How do you think that works?”
You wanted something from me too. Didn’t you?
Suddenly now the way was clear. John took the needle from Lou’s hand and got to his feet. The kitchen was so small and poorly arranged that his head bumped the unlit chandelier. “Give me your belt.”
That knocked him off his footing a bit, fucking finally. “What?”
“Your belt. Come on.”
Lou pushed his chair out from the table and lifted his hips a little to get it off from around his waist. “You have your own,” he said, brandishing it in John’s direction.
“Yours is nicer,” said John, but he snatched the belt from Lou’s hand. The leather was warm. It was from a thrift store, he knew because he'd been there when Lou had bought it, but it was of pretty fine quality. There were a number of other things that could be done with it, some of which came to mind when your shadow was falling on another person, but those could not stand to be imagined further and anyway were not as immediately fulfilling. The same way he would do for himself he put the barrel of the syringe in his teeth until he got the belt tight around Lou's upper arm. At first Lou flinched when John touched him. His hands must have been cold. Then he got still. Then, under the table, at the periphery of John’s vision, he stretched his skinny legs out luxuriantly as a cat in a sunbeam.
“I get it now,” said Lou.
“Took you long enough,” said John.
“Whatever happened to primadonna tryphanophobia?”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“If you ever become a drag queen, you should call yourself that.”
John let that roll off his back. None of that mattered anymore now. Why hadn’t he thought of this earlier?
Lou cuffed his sleeve up with uncharacteristic care. His fingernails were torn and bloody, which was probably an indicator of the extent to which he had lately been favoring speed. Everyone had gotten bored of diet pills and started shooting amphetamines too because the rush would hit you faster, which explained why the ditch of Lou’s elbow was such a mess. “You ought to take better care of yourself,” John said, kneeling beside him on the filthy tiles.
That made Lou laugh and then John was laughing too. It was all really very funny when you thought about it, all the last years, at least in the context of this when nothing else mattered. It did take him a minute to find a vein especially with both of them laughing so hard but then he did. Braced his spare hand against the lean and trembling muscle in Lou’s upper arm, bore down, watched for blood, pushed. It was different than doing it to yourself. His own heart was racing just in anticipation with the familiar movements but then it just stayed going hard and fast while beside him Lou collapsed into a long sigh. He was still laughing for a while in these thin breathy giggles bubbling out of him in aftershocks. Like John had punctured him and all the hot air was slowly coming out.
“That’s nice,” he said eventually, like he was talking about a hot bath John had drawn for him. “Oh, that’s very nice.”
Across the table John was cooking up his own shot which simply could not happen fast enough, never could, but especially not then. “You’re welcome,” he said.
Lou turned his head against the back of the chair with great effort. “Come over here,” he said. His voice broke a little and how did that work on everybody, every time? “Come here.”
John did. He was not very strong. He sat on the fucking floor at Lou’s feet and did it. It was indeed very nice, so that he too said, “That’s very nice.” He might have said it in Welsh and was later aware of Lou trying to reproduce the sounds. They were not quite in the same place but in parallel sorts of states like soap bubbles that misshaped where they pressed against each other. Maybe Lou touched his head, traced a not ungentle finger back and forth along the part in his hair. He had the idea that perhaps they were always forgiving each other for unforgivable slights because they had experienced together something on the verge of human understanding that dwarfed all considerations of pain in this world. Something like the universal infinitude of creation. That was the kind of bullshit heroin would have you believing.
Eventually Lou got up to get a glass of water and the flimsy chair on its own would not hold John’s weight so he ended up flat on his back on the floor, watching the light move on the ceiling, absently giggling. The stuff was really so good that this wouldn’t have been a problem, except that a cockroach crawled across his neck.
--
“You’ll never guess,” said Sterling in a week’s time, hovering in John’s doorway. “Lou’s sick too.”
Information filtered brutally through the beleaguered bloodstream toward the suffocating brain. “Same thing?”
“He was amusing himself elaborately cursing your name.”
John turned over with effort onto his back in bed. It didn’t feel so much like a ball of yarn in his stomach this time as like a cat playing with the ball of yarn that was his intestines. “That sounds like Lou.”
“You oughta just smoke it, man,” said Sterling, shaking his head. “I don’t know why you both have to act like real heavy cats.”
---
--
-
?.
????
The sickness burned through the hospital over the course of a couple weeks due to a nursing error discovered much belatedly. At first the staff thought it was norovirus, or otherwise something was dastardly wrong in the kitchens. Conspiracy abounded among those patients with sufficient mental faculties. John was not one of them, because he was in a coma. He was in a coma a few days a week so this was normal. When he was not in a coma, he was kept sequestered from most other patients for some reason never elucidated. He didn't really think he was dangerous but then didn’t remember how he had gotten there and remembered less and less of where he had come from before. Because the treatment he was subject to, massive doses of a potent sedative, was delivered via syringe, he was one of the first to get sick. The doctors believed at first that he was experiencing heretofore unreported side effects from the treatment and were starting to get very concerned, but then everybody else started getting it too.
He stood in the window watching across the dingy courtyard into the other wards. Were the people over there more or less insane? It was hard to tell sometimes. He didn’t feel insane, but probably nobody did. He had been sent here because too much had happened to be contained in his mind so it spilled. That had scared everybody, or so he thought he remembered. His memory was going away so maybe it was working, but then it would come back in dreams.
One day he came around and there was another person on the ward. He was at first concerned this was a hallucination, which had not happened before that he could remember. This person had been deposited in a wheelchair in a heap like an abandoned doll. He had a doll’s face, with big, exaggerated features melted into an uncanny expressionlessness. The way a person captured in a painting or a photograph is not really a person. There was a little red mark at his temple and it was easy enough to guess what was the cause of that. John had been frightened that they might do it to him but they hadn’t, yet at least, god only knew why. He waited. He let his own consciousness pool again slowly in the hollow of his mind. The sedative they gave him: he sometimes remembered a diagram of the water cycle from an old science book at school. Something was drawn up out of the well of himself, evaporated, broken down to component parts, held inside a cloud, and manifest again, diminished some, as a cool, thin rain.
“Hello,” said the person across the room after perhaps many hours. A wedge of dishwatery daylight had moved very slowly across the floor and at last touched his socked foot.
“Hello,” said John.
“Where are we?”
“Hospital.”
“Well,” said the person very slowly, “I know that.”
“They never put anyone else in here with me,” John confessed for some reason.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
In another hour or so they had both collected enough wits about themselves to move closer to each other and converse some. The other person’s name was Lewis. His face was growing back its natural animation slowly and with it developed a certain seeking guilelessness. His voice was somehow both warm and sardonic or else this was the effect of his accent, though he claimed actually everybody talked like that. He said normally he just came here for the day for the treatment which happened in a windowless basement room. He was surprised that John had been in here for at least a couple weeks. At first John thought about saying did you think nothing else was going on in this whole big hospital? But he himself had sat in the window at dusk and watched how few lights came on in the great cavernous building. It served a subtle but effective contrast to the blazing electric city just visible on the distant horizon. That was where Lou came from, so he said. As it got darker outside he began to become quite concerned about why he had not been allowed to go back there.
“Maybe it's because of the sickness,” said John. “There’s a stomach virus going around. Maybe if you were exposed, they can't let you back out into the general population. And I already had it, which is why they put you in with me.”
Lou thought about that for a minute. John watched his battered brain working through the battered eyes inside the battered skull. Then Lou said, “That’s a nice metaphor.”
--
The nurse came the next day an hour later than usual with the things for John’s shot. She brought the muscle with her and he stood in the door with one hand meatily clasping the opposite wrist. Lou asked them both many times what was going on and when he was going home which they both clearly struggled to ignore. When the nurse got close enough with the big syringe John could see how pale she was against her pressed uniform. It was wilting at the collar from her sweat which he could smell even beneath her violet perfume. He busied himself thinking about what the implications were if she were sick so as not to focus on the needle which was unbearably huge and the fact that it took her a few moments to calm her shaking hands and find a decent vein inside his elbow. All the delicate machinery in there was by now fairly badly torn up. “What are you doing over there?” Lou was saying now, both aggrieved and genuinely curious. “What are you doing? What are you doing to him over there?”
If the nurse was sick too they were all going to die in here maybe. This whole thing was going down like a ship. As a child he had seen in a book a print of a painting called “The Raft of the Medusa.” All the worthless human flotsam in this world grappling against itself for a last fleeting vision of light. He held that image in his mind as long as he could, and then it was swept away, stroke by stroke, like sand by an unseen hand, lingering at the last on the desperate faces.
--
At the very beginning everything was no bigger than a grain of sand. Before that, there was no time. That was sort of a cop-out for the scientists, so they didn’t have to articulate how so much energy had accrued in that grain of sand that its inevitable explosion was still sending immeasurable quantities of mineral and flesh hurtling into eternity. If the scientists who studied this kind of thing could have been injected with potent anti-psychotic sedatives, they might have been more curious about what had been happening to the grain of sand before. For eons he was floating inside this great white nothingness with it hearing it make a high thin sound like a teakettle on the edge of boiling. That sound was the current of dreams. That was the beginning thread of music that had gotten into our world.
Eventually he was let out through an unseen trapdoor into the interminable process of remembering his body. The hospital developed like a photograph. By now he was very much older again. He was sort of out of it, drifty, weird for a little while. Then there was a voice directly in his ear. “It’s terrible what they’re doing to you.”
He jolted. But it was only Lou, who was very close at hand.
“To me?” He was confused. His tongue felt barely sensate, like someone had cut it off and sewn it back on. All of him felt like that, in fact: limbs, lungs, head. He tried to sit up straighter but his heel skated weakly across the floor. Eyes rolled toward the ceiling and closed. The dim watery light was blinding and the information gushing in by each sense was so effusive as to be painful. “It’s not…”
“You don't even know,” Lou said, “because you’re not awake. But it's the same, only different.”
Clammy, cold hand wrapped his wrist. His brain screamed. With effort he turned his head against the back of the chair and opened his eyes. Went tumbling not without relief into Lou’s. It was warm in there, wired, alive, too much, thank god, too much, suffusing everything he was, this great flood of ecstatic feeling, the tips of his fingers were tingling—
“We’re the same,” said Lou again, shaking John’s wrist. That emotion in his voice might perhaps have been called thrilled. “We’re the same. Only different.”
--
Lou’s parents said it wasn’t about that at all actually. You’ll get over that right away when you meet a nice girl. It was actually about the depression and anxiety, they said. Lou said I’m Jewish born and raised on Long Island and you expect me to have a healthy relation to anxiety? Nobody thought that was funny. Everybody made meaningful eye contact with each other and shook their heads infinitesimally like he couldn't see. You simply had to laugh.
The funny thing about the treatment was that it was antithetical to memory. The next day you were always thinking, well that wasn’t that bad. Then you went back and laid down on the table and they put the thing in your mouth and the lights in the room flickered and it was indeed that bad. Noise and light came rushing at you out of space like a demon from history and ate your brain in a series of gouging bites. And you felt each one, then nothing.
The stuff they were giving this guy John was different. Lou watched across the room, wondering absently if this was violating certain codes of doctorly conduct. The hospital was devolving into anarchic states because of this stomach bug or whatever and one patient intimately watching another being sedated while entertaining perverse thoughts must not have been high on their list of priorities. They had really done a number on his poor lily-white arm. Experienced junkies in the Village would by now have started injecting into their dicks, if not with that syringe, which looked like they might have also used it on horses. John was looking bravely up into the high stucco ceiling and then he got rolled up like a carpet. He just went away. His body gave a few weak jerks. The human being wasn’t there anymore after that, which was the ironic disgrace of psychiatry as an institution.
When the nurse and her enforcer were gone Lou went over and gently turned John’s sleeve back down. Tried to shut his eyes, which didn’t work. The lids were purplish and quite soft and the lashes dark and sweeping as a girl’s. What was he doing here? He looked and talked and even moved like a time traveler. To wit, he said he was a musician and composer. He was one week younger than Lou. He was very badly lonely and had been for some time. That was something you clocked instantly in others when you had felt it yourself. Lou had asked him why he was here and he had given the abstract non-answer of nervous breakdown. That could have meant anything. He had then asked Lou why he was here and Lou had been tempted to tell the truth: that some would rather dissemble the human brain to dust than trust in the purity of its most essential realities. Instead he said, “Because I’m crazy.” And John said, immediately, reflexively, “You’re not crazy.”
Maybe he meant this as reassurance. Lou heard it as an acknowledgment that he had found a kindred spirit. He sat there for a while in the bolt of weak sunshine, enviously watching John dream.
--
When the sun went down they stood together in the window and watched the city come on against the bruisey dusk. Then the lights in the hospital, which were few. “There are never very many,” John said. “There aren't very many people living in this place anymore.”
“Yeah, because of the decades of well-documented neglect and abuse in psychiatric institutions. Warehoused kids living in their own shit. Beatings. Rampant sexual molestation.”
John swallowed. A shiver passed through him and into Lou. The shiver said something like, twenty years from now perhaps similar conclusions will be drawn from what is presently happening to us.
“Want to do something fun?” said Lou.
John’s eyes turned toward him. And the corner of his mouth, which as of yet in the thirty-six hours of their acquaintance was the closest thing to a smile that Lou had witnessed. “I don’t know if I like the sound of that.”
“You will.”
“What if we get caught?”
“Sedation,” Lou floated. “Solitary confinement.”
“Oh, so the usual.”
“Exactly.” He didn’t tell John that restraints were probably in the cards if they were labeled flight risks. He was already halfway across the room, toward the door. “Are you coming?”
The door wasn't locked, so that they could get out in case of a fire. Otherwise, Lou had this theory that a madhouse was self-enforcing. Its retaining power was partly constructed by the belief of those confined that they belonged there. “There’s normally someone in the hall,” John said warily behind his shoulder, but there wasn’t. They slipped out one and then the other. It was quite cold in the hall indicating the hospital must have turned off all but the most essential heating. There were a few more wards on this floor but the windows were all dark. At the stairwell Lou was careful opening the door, worried they might trip some alarm, but nothing happened.
“Everyone’s down for the count,” said John. He sounded delectably uneasy.
“Something's definitely fucked up out there.”
“Where are we going?”
“Basement.”
“Oh, god. Lou, you can’t go into that room, you’ll…”
“We’re not going in there,” said Lou, shuddering at the thought. Maybe John thought he wanted to destroy it but he wasn’t sure how that could be done to appropriate satisfaction. Simply unplugging everything from the wall would have done the job but seemed painfully anticlimactic. “There’s something else.”
On to the descent. On a couple of the busier floors, simply out of morbid curiosity, they stopped and pressed their ears to the doors before they went on. A couple shill screams, a haunting power-drill drone, running footsteps, running water, endless retching… the situation was evidently disastrous. Lou entertained the thought that perhaps this was the dawn of some deadly global pandemic that would finally end this whole failed experiment for good. Then he remembered, not without disappointment, that John had already survived it.
In a trash can in the basement hallway Lou found a paper clip attached to some typewritten pages. With this he jimmied open the lock on the supply closet by the electroshock room while John stood guard by the stairs. Somewhere around here was probably a morgue, which might be interesting. But not as interesting as what was hopefully behind this door.
“I can’t believe anyone actually knows how to do that.”
“My sister used to hide candy in her room.” It was a very satisfying feeling, the lock falling into place in your hands. He opened the door, waved John over, switched on the searing overhead light, and closed the door behind them. “Better than candy, in here.”
“What are we looking for?”
“You look for syringes and I’ll look for… well, anything good they keep around in this dump.”
It didn’t take John long to find a box of clean hypodermic needles on a high shelf. Lou quickly found a few decent amphetamines but held out crossing fingers for something better and finally found it: a single delicately rounded vial of morphine which he waggled in John’s direction.
One dense eyebrow shot up the long forehead. “Can you dose that without killing us,” said John.
So he was at least somewhat initiated. Lou found himself unsurprised. “Think so,” he said. “Wanna risk it?”
“You’ll have to help me,” said John, indicating his bloodstained sleeve. He sounded embarrassed to be asking, like the mere imagination of such an act was not profoundly titillating in Lou’s mind. Otherwise perhaps that was why he was embarrassed. “I’m on the outs with needles these days.”
“Well, they must have gotten the one they use on you at veterinary supply. I think it’s what they use to inject racehorses with gorilla testosterone.”
“What!”
“I read about it in the Daily News.”
Together they cleared various boxes and cleaning supplies away from a little nook in the corner of the closet and sat down there together close. The cold was bleeding up through the tile and the whitewashed cinderblock, through the identical thin cotton clothes they wore. “So easy,” said Lou, wheedling the syringe through the meshy cap of the vial. “Don’t even have to cook it or nothing.”
“So you do this all the time, do you?”
“Heroin isn’t as potent,” Lou decided. He thought he remembered he’d heard that somewhere. His heart was slamming; it had no smell, a light viscosity, like a fine spirit. “So I’m giving myself half of what I would, and you a quarter, alright?”
“Alright.”
“And we’ll go from there.”
“Alright.”
He looked up. John was cuffing up his right sleeve, where the veins were somewhat less destroyed. “You’re very trusting,” Lou said.
John laughed. “I’m just bored.”
“You let a lot of strangers stick you with pointy things?” Lou asked. He did have the delicate and sinister bone structure to be a rent boy in Elizabethan Scotland or perhaps one of the child-murdering concubines of Gilles de Rais.
“God, no,” said John. “But this isn’t real. It’s a dream.”
That was instructive. Well, Lou wouldn’t disabuse him of that notion. Didn’t want to interrogate it very hard himself. “Make a fist,” he said, maneuvering carefully to get a better angle on John’s right arm whilst only sitting on him as much as could be innocently excused. Lou could feel his heart beating, or otherwise it was his own. “These are much better. Tell them they ought to do it over here. Better yet, tell them to do it in your ass.”
“Oh my god.”
“You won’t feel a thing.”
Their faces were very close. He could smell John’s unwashed hair. Not exactly good, not exactly bad. Surfaced the struggling little vein with his thumb. “Take a breath,” he said. That was what they told him before they flipped the big switch, not that he really could, because of the rubber in his mouth and all the wires.
“I know how to do this,” said John. “It happens every day.”
“Not the same.”
“No?”
“No. Sorry. You keep distracting me. Hold on. They’re trying to take something away from you. I’m trying to give you something. Get it?”
“What are you trying to give me,” John whispered. He sounded like he didn’t really want to know.
“Yourself, baby, I’m trying to give you yourself.”
There we go. Point to the vein, click. Blood shot into the dropper in that beautiful gradient like a long sunset. A little moan, a little sigh, amplified to high exaltation by the tiny room and their excruciating proximity. Lou knew nothing about this person except that to give him pleasure was a saintly errand. He dared to kiss just once and chastely the cool, slack lips which shifted a little in response not kissing back but saying something unintelligible perhaps not English unheard music time was getting shuffled up collapsing by desire thank god this was so much faster than normally just the needle crowned with a diluted garnet of John’s blood back into the vial and half filled again he pushed his sleeve up and flicked inside his elbow talking to it a little come on come on needing to go after him more than he had ever needed anything in his life not even particularly to be close to him but so as not to be locked out of whatever it was he was experiencing did not think he would survive that kind of envy got the vein thank god got the needle in it pulled the trigger.
--
His head was on John’s shoulder. John’s head was on his head. The light overhead had gone out, so either the bulb had blown or some poor fucker had really got fried down the hall in electroshock. For a long moment they shared a tandem weightlessness in the feeling and freeing and anonymous dark. John’s hand furled thrillingly against his. Outside somebody was running up and down the hallway with a flashlight. Lou recognized the strange movement of the light. It was only a matter of time now until things changed again.
It was good when they needed each other to transcend the unevenly meted material lot. It was good when there was this potent attraction and revulsion between them which sang and stung. It was best and worst when each had something that the other lacked. This bred a great competitiveness and jealousy which belied a humiliated dependency. Each refused to crawl back on hands and knees but thrilled to the imagination in dreams.
The door creaked from its rusted hinges. John threw an arm across him. The light flared, swamped all creation, a bucket of cold water thrown over the external universal expansion, all space time everything-nothingness at last routed and collapsing in on itself back to the beginning—we just might get another chance again— unbelievable, illimitable sound—John pushing the crate of dishes down the stairs onto the flagstones, looking up, nervous elation crossing his face—“Did we get it?”
---
--
-
3.
1975
Now who is that knocking
Knocking at my chamber door…
The light went on which was the first reminder in a while he was not alone in this world. Muted gasps from the living room. John shut the door. Aw, what the hell man, come here. Give that to me, alright? You alright?
He crouched down. His face was close. As of late Lou found himself feeling sorry for everyone who had fucked John in the mid- to late 1960s. They had just barely missed something extraordinarily. He had gotten exponentially better looking with every passing year if that was possible. He’d also discovered cocaine, which had made him fairly annoying the way it did everybody and had certainly informed his marriage to the mental patient currently in the living room trying to make conversation with Rachel. It was good to see John with a mental patient again, at least, that being where he belonged and where he generally was best suited. Lou had almost said something about it but Rachel had elbowed him. It was all he had talked about on the way over in the car.
“What do you mean you didn’t make it with him?” Rachel had said. She had been telling him he just ought to take the obvious rebound as a compliment. Lou had begun to dread the inversion, which was that Rachel was also a tall severe brunette with enviable cheekbones, dire grace, and anger issues.
“I mean I didn’t make it with him,” said Lou. “I tried!”
“I could’ve sworn you said you did.”
“Well, I didn’t. I highly doubt I said that. You’re imagining things.”
“It’s too bad. You always made a nice looking pair.”
“We definitely would have killed each other. We almost did anyway. And if we hadn’t, you wouldn’t’ve let us come over here tonight because you’d be too jealous!”
Rachel scoffed. “We’re on our way over right now, aren’t we?”
Truth was he probably had told Rachel that he’d fucked John. As had happened many times he’d been trying to shock her and had wound up impressing her. Besides it was indeed difficult not to apply various erotic metaphors to his and John’s early friendship. It was kind of like the begrudging respect you couldn’t help but have for the person to whom you had given your virginity. They had opened each other up to their respective potential and gazed into each other’s souls and there was a little of the other left deep inside each of them now. John had started writing fucking pop songs that were not half bad, not that Lou would ever admit to that. As for himself, even before he’d met John he'd written parts for strings and reveled in orgiastic noise. That he had not had the confidence to try to make it on his own with his music was wholly irrelevant.
The syringe in John’s hand caught the light roaring from above the sink. Blood slicked his fingers. Eyes very big and dark but always had been. Much history struggling to formulate into words in Lou’s brain. Don’t stick yourself and get fucking hep C again and blame it on me again. Just do it why don’t you and get it over with. Aren’t you embarrassed, you must be humiliated, why do you keep trying, why do you keep letting me, when does it stop? And then the memory of John looming imperiously like Nosferatu over the Vox in the studio picking out various evil tones much to Sterling’s extreme chagrin; even Mo’s jaw had dropped and she was laughing at them all while somehow keeping up the beat; Lou had the idea of another meaning present in the word organist, one of those old timey witch doctors reading fortunes and futures in animal livers and kidneys…
All that could escape his lips was “Oh, man.”
John’s face twisted when he stood. Vengefully he pulled Lou’s belt tighter around his bicep even though his fingers were already numb. The foggy helplessness he had felt unto that moment was of the striking sublimity of the ritual object, sacred and profane or whatever it was people said, ancient and futuristic, serving only ever purposes of delivery yet retaining as a sort of container and conduit its own iconic significance… Helplessness in the knowledge, having been messing with this stuff for nearly half his life, that the greatest pleasure and excitement was in the fraction of a moment just before it hit, that that was what you dreamed of when you were clean… Helplessness in the certainty he had written this all before when he was twenty years old. That transformed quickly into something else, pinned dazed and bleeding between John’s body and the wall. There was something quite liberating about feeling like a prey animal sometimes. He could feel John struggling to control his breathing. How warm he was through his thin t-shirt. A drop of Lou’s blood on the white fabric now, thank god.
“Oh, man,” said Lou again.
“Fuck,” said John, “shut up.”
He smeared away more blood with his thumb, looking for a good vein. Anyone else would have been looking for a while but not John. Lou watched his eyelids, deep purple, wildly fluttering, then watched his teeth sink into his bottom lip. There was a second’s flash of pain in which he was aware of John’s brow tightening, his hands shaking. Then—well, all extant warmth and color and beauty in that little room became instantly irrelevant. The light above the sink exploded and he was captive to another helplessness that transcended even the need to be defined.
John took an uneasy step back as though from a corpse. Like a wartime medic he rinsed his hands of blood quickly in the sink. For a moment he leaned against the door and studied Lou, which Lou watched from somewhat above and beyond them, like this was happening in a dollhouse. What was he thinking? John was always thinking about time whenever Lou asked so that was safe to assume. He noticed the blood on his shirt. He said something in Welsh; something he said a lot, actually, since long ago, and especially high; it sounded like carry chi. Lou probably could have figured out what it meant but never had in case it was something horrible. Then he disappeared back into the living room, where the conversation, at first stilted, slowly resumed its previous warmth undercut with feminine laughter. Eventually the other highly influential needle in all four lives, the one on the turntable, dropped again on Side A Track 1 of the Beach Boys’ Holland:
I sailed an ocean
Unsettled ocean
Through restful waters
And deep commotion
Often frightened
Unenlightened
Sail on, sailor…
Nobody else who wrote songs about the ocean had Maureen on those cymbals. It was laughable to imagine. Nobody else had Sterling, who alone could play the spangling of the silver light on the water. And they had had to call John in to play organ, and he had showed up looking very beautiful and cut it in one take. Lou made him do a second just because he could, even though Maureen clocked him easily and leveled him with a withering look.
Like this he only felt the pain as the cold numbness in the socket of a missing tooth.
As time and mind congealed Lou briefly amused himself imagining coming out of the bathroom eventually to find the three of them fucking. That would have been hilarious. The sunny California soundtrack provided by Brian Wilson and company would certainly make the debaucherous and frenzied late-night joining of three coke-lean jagged bodies even sillier. He doubted John and Cindy made it much anymore, not together at least. That was the way it went in long relationships. He tried curling his toes. Thought about going out there and stretching elaborately and saying something like That sure was good for me baby, was it good for you? But that would only have upset Rachel. Cindy probably would think it was very funny. As for John, it had been more than ten years. If he didn't react anymore there was no point. Lou would sooner have died.
By the time he stumbled out of there they had moved on to Big Star’s Radio City. He beelined straight for Rachel on the sagging pink loveseat. Her face was instantly concerned. She reached up and grasped his elbow and he leant toward her ear. He could have gone to his knees and collapsed in her lap but he could feel John watching him from across the room. “I’ve gotta fuckin’ get out of here, Rach,” he whispered.
“Okay.” Her eyes found his. She squeezed his arm. “Come on. Let’s go.”
If goodbyes were exchanged he did not quite remember them later. Outside it had begun to rain. The driver was idling across the street. Luckily Rachel was adept enough in heels to half-carry him over there across the cobbles and throw him in.
In the backseat of any car the city was like a dream. Big Star had a song about that. Music so loud / can’t tell a thing… Rachel pulled him close. “He’s no good for you,” she said.
“Honey, neither are you.”
She clasped his left hand tightly between both of hers. Her hands were warm except for her cool rings. His fingers were numb and cold. “That’s not why you’re with me, though,” she said, “is it?”
---
--
-
4.
1986
It was very cold and gray on Coney Island. Everything was like a black and white xerox of a Rothko painting. The sea, the beach, the boardwalk. The run-down amusement park rides and freakshows. The massive brutalist apartment blocks going up just inland where someday soon some hurricane would be very pleased to gently wheedle them off their foundations and sweep them away. Old and new colliding uneasily as had perennially characterized the city of New York since time immemorial. All of it at the tender mercy of the sea.
John found a bench and sat down. Within a few minutes he was obliged to pull his coat tighter around himself. He was feeling better lately but still felt thin. The wind was seeping through the cracks. This was the furthest he had been from home in a while. Gulls wheeled overhead. Not far out a line of container ships idled, waiting to get into the port of Newark, even the colorful boxes muted by distance. It looked and smelled like rain, far out and away toward the blurred horizon. Here and there the dark water had caught a cottony tendril and set about trying to pull the thin clouds down into itself. John returned to the mantra he had been entertaining the entire subway ride here from Manhattan, until it started to take on rhythmic significance, like one of the Steve Reich pieces that had transfixed him as a young adult: He won’t show up. He just absolutely won’t. He won’t. There’s simply no way.
The trouble was that then John was wholly unprepared when he did.
“Why do you look shocked,” said Lou. “You thought I wasn’t coming?”
“No, I just — come on. We can go for a walk.”
Lou parked himself on the bench in the warmish spot where John had been sitting. “We are not going for a fucking walk,” he said. “I barely made it here from the subway.”
He could have walked away and probably should have. But that was something of the story of his life. Was it a need to stay at the scene of a car wreck to help the injured person or a need to see the mangled corpse? That much he did not know. The ocean had fully ensnared the clouds now, off toward the horizon, pulling a thick gray curtain of rain down over one of the container ships. The wind picked up. A plastic bag blew across the beach. He sat down again. Not as close as they had sat once upon a time on the horrible chaise in the Ludlow Street apartment nor as far apart as Lou probably would have liked.
“Are you still feeling poorly,” he said.
“You could have asked this on the phone, Cale.”
“Well, I didn’t and I’m asking now.”
“I don't know what you think you know about anything.”
He could feel himself getting sharp. No wonder they had done so much heroin—to blunt the edges. “Lou, could you stop being so fucking prickly for one fucking minute. What’s the fucking point? We’re old now.”
Lou shook his head. “Yeah,” he said, “I feel fucking old.”
“Sterling told me you had the same liver treatment I did,” John told him. “The interferon shots.”
His face changed like the weather. A cold raindrop touched the back of John’s hand.
“I guess it’s over now, huh?” said Lou.
“What is?”
“We don’t share any blood anymore.”
This was rapidly going wrong but always did so that somewhere in the spiraling awareness of imminent disaster was also a deep familiar relief that it might always be the same and would never change. “Excuse me?”
“You’ve successfully done it. Good job. Some might say it took you long enough.”
“Lou, I don’t understand. You did it too! That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I thought we could commiserate. That’s all.”
“It certainly was misery,” said Lou. “Did you know the ancient Greeks thought human emotion came from the liver?”
“Oh my god.”
“No, that’s real.”
“Well, ours really needed a cleaning from that too.”
“Exactly.”
“I did a lot of thinking,” said John. “Did you realize it’s been twenty-two years?”
“Since what?”
“Since we met.” He had to have known that. Didn’t he? “Since we gave each other… well, since…”
“It was definitely me that gave you hepatitis,” said Lou, in a striking gesture of magnanimity. “At least the first time.”
“I know. I didn’t do it with anybody but you. It couldn’t’ve been anybody else but you.”
“That’s what they all say, John.”
Two gulls landed one after the other on the boardwalk railing between them and then took off again as though nothing had happened. Another raindrop hit the back of John’s hand, then the back of his neck.
“Well, listen,” said Lou, “maybe it’s a sign. Maybe we can be done with it now, huh?”
“Done with what?”
“Trying to finish what we started.”
This was the worst possible outcome imaginable. This was roughly what it might feel like to be shot in the gut. All John could manage was “No.”
“What do you mean no?”
“I mean fucking no, Lou, I’m not done. Neither are you. I know you’re not.”
“You don’t fucking know me at all! As has been well established, I mean well established Cale!”
“You go ahead and keep telling yourself that. You’re absolutely delusional if you think you do your best work on your own.”
Like that, Lou was off. “Even if that were true there are a hundred thousand other musicians in the world who would do terrible things to work with me and I would have any of them, literally any of them, literally Hall and Oates, over you. Because I don’t need you, I don’t need any of you, and I never have! I never ever have! Since the day we met! And you know it!”
“Lou, you would still be at Pickwick if you never met me. Or maybe your mother would have won out and you would be a typist. Or more likely you would be in a fucking mental institution.”
“And you would have died in a gutter delivering drugs for La Monte Young. What the fuck, it’s irrelevant.”
“I literally made you what you are! You couldn’t even live on your own. You didn’t think the stuff you were writing was any good. You hated your singing voice. You sounded like fucking Bob Dylan.”
“Don’t you dare say that again.”
“I certainly will. You sounded like fucking Bob Dylan and it was awful. And you would have been fucking Bob Dylan. You would have been an also-ran Bob Dylan with the Vaseline-smeared album cover going for a buck in the bargain bin unless you had me to tell you you were good and make your shit interesting. And this is what I get for my fucking trouble.”
“Don’t even get me started! Did you honestly think you would have a career if not for me? I hate to break it to you but you would have actually had to let Aaron Copland suck your dick if you wanted to play in a real orchestra after all the shit you did—”
“—oh my god—”
“—and because of your fucking pride or trauma or whatever you never would have done that so you would have had to go home and work in the mines, John, I mean it. Alright? The mines. And fuck up your hands. And never play music again. And I saved you from that. And you should never forget it.”
All of a sudden the rain was coming down sideways. Rage had driven them further from each other down to opposite ends of the bench. Down the boardwalk, the ticket-taker for the freakshow was watching with vague interest. Out past the beach a raft of birds had gathered on the calm gray water beyond the waves to weather the storm.
“Come on,” John said. “Let’s go, it’s raining.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you.”
“You just said you could hardly get here from the subway. Come on. We’ll go together.”
“Absolutely not.”
“You’re just going to sit here in the rain?”
“Yes!”
“Don’t be fucking ridiculous, Lou. Come on.”
It was frigid cold. It must have been one step above sleet. The container ships in the bay were no longer visible behind the mist or perhaps they all had sunk. In their respective weakened conditions it was not unlikely they would both catch their deaths like this, or so their mothers would have said. Lou watched the waves for a while, trying quite valiantly to outlast John, but couldn’t. He faltered when he got up so that John was obliged to catch him and then refused to let him go. Looking very like drowned rats they went walking, arm in arm, very slowly as concession to Lou, up the boardwalk toward the exit for the subway at Stillwell Avenue.
“Why did you even want to meet here when we both live in Manhattan,” said Lou. “Couldn’t we have gone to fucking Central Park or something?”
“I kind of wanted the excuse to get out of my house.”
Lou sniffed. “I’ve told you I’m not satisfied being your mistress, Cale. I need you all to myself.”
“Fuck off.”
“Well I’ve been trying for twenty-two years. I’m starting to think there’s something wrong with you.”
They were soaked to the skin when they got to the subway. Lou’s hands were too numb to find his subway tokens so John gave him one. The air conditioning in the car was working overtime for some unbelievably horrendous reason so they were obliged to sit very close in the corner of the car furthest from the fan and try to find a little warmth in each other to keep from dying.
“I can’t believe you wanted to do this,” said John, teeth chattering.
“It was your fucking idea!” said Lou.
“Yeah but,” and was that actually a note of panic from Mr. Calm Cool Collected, and was he actually paler than usual when he pushed his long dark hair away from his face, “I think my fucking viola’s ruined and — ”
“It’s fine. Put it in front of the fire when we get home and it’ll warp and sound outrageous.”
John thought for a minute. Then he said, “That’s not a half bad idea.”
“Of course it’s not. How much did we make?”
John was always responsible for money because John was responsible. He’d put everything in his boot and wouldn’t look at it until they got home. “Twenty bucks,” he said.
“Ugh,” said Lou. “That means we were actually good.”
“Well, unfortunately you write good songs, Lou.”
“It’s a living nightmare every day, John.”
It was a long way home now, but the subway made all that wonderful noise. John fell asleep before Lou did but still they missed their stop.
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