22

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Site Designed by Melissa Bishop/DoIT Last Modified 03/10/2003 09:29:36 AM EST

And so the world must tum upon its axis
And we turn with it heads or tails
Work, make love and pay our taxes
And as the veering winds shift - shift our sails
The king commands us and the doctor quacks us
The priest instructs, and so our life exhales
A little poetry, wine, fortune, fame
Fighting, devotion, dust - perhaps a name.
-Lord Byron
Don Juan, Canto II

There are two rivers. The Great Bear and the Minor Beaver, and between them runs, ever so gently, the Umbilicus, swaying, curving, meandering, so as not to introduce anything more than the most unenthusiastic of rapids to the solitary bather. The local fauna have come to know it as a great source of clear and sweet Northern water, and in the folic hall of records, the fiery descenders of Autumn celebrate Gerard and Giselle, the only two leaves, he oak and she willow, known to have traversed the entirety of the Umbilicus intact. Deer sip from, and swallows bob and shimmy dry in shallow pools, smooth basins of polished stones. A dogleg bow just South of the Northern Fork is a traditional spot for the clumsily upright and naked things to come and wash their young in a sacred post-parturition ritual. And large and lazy brown bears wait downstream for distracted carp and the occasional placenta.

And this is how a channel is carved through rugged terrain. Fluids, as any geologist will tell you, are a powerful source of erosion.

But, what might have become a mighty river like the Hudson or the Saint Lawrence eventually trickled into a dry canal of stones. It became a popular path for whitetails, bobcats, and peripatetic elk – and later the Iroquois and Algonquin Indians. Five hundred years later, European surveyors picked it free of rocks, graded it, raked it, and eventually, in 1921, paved it. It had been known for years now as the Albany Post Road, although many people on a small island to the South knew it – still know it – as Park Avenue. Others began calling it the Grand Concourse. Even more banal names such as One Hundred Tenth Street or Main Street are employed to describe the path of the once promising Umbilicus. But in 1945, the Great State of New York officially named it all…

Iroquois legend speaks of an ambitious beaver named Saksari - which means Frank - who, in an attempt to win the favor of a lovely she-bear, endeavored to cut down most massive tree in the forest. For twenty-two weeks he gnawed away at the trunk of a giant oak around which twenty-two open-minded braves linking hands would have only just reached. Finally, on the last day of the twenty-second week, the trunk creaked and whined and suddenly cracked open in an explosion of pulp and bark and sap. Such was the noise that every creature within twenty-two miles of the tree was permanently deafened. And such was the cloud of dust thrown up by the falling tree, that the sky was blackened for twenty-two days. And when the air finally cleared, Frank the beaver looked with horror and saw that among the many things across which the fallen tree now lay were his own tail, his beloved she-bear, and the Umbilicus itself.

Today I did something I haven’t done in a long time. I sat back and daydreamed about the future. Here is a fairground behind a firehouse. At the foot of my hill there is a softball field and attendant backstop, but there is no one playing softball today, only a group of purple martins darting around the horn in a mating season mockery of the less subtle human game. In the distance, over the hills in Connecticut, horses are whinnying. In the other direction, to the West, the foxhounds are crying in Goldens Bridge. The air is cool and dry, and the sun low and orange, and it is a veritable portrait of tranquility, the pines, the swallows, the unseen whitetail deer gathering in the woods surrounding the fairground for the hallowed ceremony of sunset.

If only commencement could have been carried off with such quiet dignity.

My friends and I, we all graduated this Spring from Sisyphus University, which is right here in the center of one of the wealthiest parts Westchester. There is Matt and myself, and the twins, Vitus and Philo, and Kevin. And some sort of gradient now exists – had begun to exist – maybe halfway through our senior year. A gradient, like this hill: at the top, teetering, is us, in a decidedly unstable equilibrium. At the bottom, in the valley of the shadow of life is whatever is closest, safest, whatever offers the least resistance as we tumble helplessly out of university: marriage, the military, the clergy…madness. A job. We all sort of gravitate towards serfdom, attractive in is potential for bawdiness, if not income. And alcohol. This Summer has been virtually pickled. Me and Kevin, for instance, work as bartenders at Blind Brook Country Club.

Now, working in a country club is about as close to Feudal living as you can get without going back in time. I’m not talking about the dinky little tennis club down the road, I’m talking about Blind Brook Country Club…one of the most prestigious and exclusive clubs in Westchester. You have to be the CEO of a major multinational corporation to join this elite society, which compels an initial fee of one-hundred thousand dollars and an additional twenty-thousand dollars a year in dues, not to mention a monthly minimum in the dining room. But for that you get world class cuisine, a golf course on the PGA tour, waitservice in the locker room, private offices for business meetings, private chambers for other meetings, and a clubhouse manager who lies to your wife more willingly and more convincingly than your secretary of thirty years.

A number of such clubs can be found along 22. As for itself, Blind Brook includes among its roster of bigshots the heads of such locally headquartered megaliths as Pepsico, Texaco, Dow, Union Carbide, and General Foods. Not to mention George Bush’s brother. Hanging over the fireplace in the main reception area is a painting of FDR. He is smirking, and I’ll tell you why. When Roosevelt was just a nobody financial lawyer back in 1905, Blind Brook wouldn’t grant him membership…because he was not the CEO of a major multinational corporation. So, when Roosevelt became president a few years later, he went back to Blind Brook and ordered them to not only give him a membership, but to commission and hang, prominently in the lobby of the clubhouse, a portrait of him and the uncharacteristic smirk – which for all intents and purposes could be a raised middle finger.

Scott MacGregor is the General Manager of Blind Brook. He has installed video cameras in every conceivably violable space in the clubhouse, which is small enough to be retain its teak and mahogany quaintliness, and yet large enough to entertain all sorts of late night adventures. We enjoy parading the girls we regularly abduct from various locales in neighboring Fairfield County in front of the security cameras for Scott to enjoy the following morning on videotape.

Now, I want to tell you, in case someone asks you, what is involved in picking up a teenage girl in Connecticut. We will discuss the bevy of Celts shipped over every Summer on J6 visas for the pleasure of everyone from the most distinguished member to the most illegitimate Guatemalan busboy, but for now, a good example can be found in Stacy who Kevin met at an ice-cream parlor in Ridgefield. Bobbed straight brown hair, skinny, fourteen, delightfully flatchested, and in possession of a phosphorescent quality it is so easy to crave like heroin or chocolate. She bounced back and forth between us for awhile, but Kevin is always on to new things, and Stacy from Ridgefield seems to either understand me or not care that she doesn’t. It’s not the kind of thing where I teach her about the world and she looks up at me with doe eyes and believes every word I say. It’s almost as if she requires no further stimulation than to accompany my existence, at whatever proximity I require.

It is a misdemeanor to transport a minor across a state line. Specifically, if you are from New York and wish to seduce a girl of, say, sixteen, to comply with all the regulations, she would have to be from Connecticut, not New York, and the seduction would have to take place in Connecticut. If it were to happen in Mew York, you would be guilty of transporting a Connecticut girl who is a minor in new York across state lines into New York, not a crime in her home state of Connecticut, but certainly a crime in New York.

In the case at hand, the girl is fourteen, a crime in both states, and considering the logistics of a liaison taking place at a New York country club, Tom might conceivably be charged in New York with transporting a Connecticut girl, now a minor in every state except Delaware, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Utah across state lines commanding a sentence commutable pending extradition to Connecticut, whereupon he would be charged with transporting a minor across state lines and second-degree sexual assault -- of attempted statutory rape, depending on how well his Dad knows the Fairfield County DA.

It is of course a cliché to covet innocence. But if you have managed to acquire thirty or forty or sixty or seventy years – and you have been a decent man, husband, father, CEO, analysis patient – and never crossed the Humbert Humbert line – then Stacy from Ridgefield never looked at you with big watery brown eyes on a windy Summer night brimful of starlight and potential and said…

We could just sit on the golf course and watch the comet.

Sunrise.

There is a horsefarm straddled by common land. The Vail Farm…a horse farm in North Salem – here at the very top of the county. It’s owned by a man named Fred Paine, and Philo is his maintenance man, and Fred lets us all live there this Summer. The house becomes a sort of spiritual center, and the surrounding common land is studded with various locales rich in romantic ambience – seemingly calculated to inspire poetry – a cove within which one might win the heart of a fellow traveler; a dark and mysterious path along which one might make profound and vain speeches about the cosmic significance of particular numbers; a stone wall beset on all sides by glorious super-rural vistas upon which one might experience sublime moments of transcendence, spurred on by the eerie howling of foxhounds which penetrates a warm blooded evening like a bolus injection of ice-water.

A typical evening on the porch of the farmhouse finds meaningful discourse trailing off like wisps of smoke into the nether regions of inanity or into the certain witty discourse of close friends. Stacy from Ridgefield is usually curled up on my lap or on one of the beds with Philo’s dog Tasha.

Matt is a musician, and he inevitably breaks out his guitar – he writes these sad, slow country ballads. Vitus is usually there with his girl, Jennifer. And this Summer, Philo goes through a period of dating older women, and most of them are, as they say, damaged goods.

When you bury a brother
You bury your heart with him
And if you don't have a heart
You don't have any rhythm
And if you can't keep the beat
The music doesn't matter
And losing music, to me
Would be like burying a brother.

For instance, Stacy from Ridgefield and I go skinny-dipping once with Philo and a woman called Evelyn and her seven-year-old daughter, Colleen. And Evelyn has terrible looking scars on her chest and back. She has a fantastic body, except for these ghastly purple knots just above her right breast, and Stacy from Ridgefield is fascinated.

Tom, did you see those scars?

Philo tells me they are old gunshot wounds, courtesy of Colleen's father. Philo is a storybook character, a sort of Heathcliff in J. Crew clothing. Indeed, whenever we do anything with Philo, it’s always something terribly Romantic and anachronistic, like reading Yeats under the tree at the top of Baxter Road, or – well, skinny-dipping is sort of timeless, isn't it?

You want a powerful image? How about Stacy from Ridgefield emerging naked from the Titicus Reservoir, pushing the crumpled water up ahead, standing, pouring like a waterfall in the blinding sunshine of late afternoon.

As far as identical twins go, Vitus and Philo are not very much alike...or anyway they’ve never looked that much alike...of course they have identical faces, but it’s their dress, their hairstyles - Vitus always wears glasses, Philo only when he’s trying to look intellectual, or drive. They are very, very goodlooking, very manly, but only Philo seems to really cultivate that aesthetic...Vitus is sort of clumsily easygoing and apparently unconcerned with appearance. They both studied the Humanities at Sisyphus, but Vitus elected Philosophy, while Philo took to Literature, so while Vitus is ever in search of veracity, Philo was on the neverending quest for the sublime.

Both are equally fond of the dialectic.

Vitus and Jennifer are one of those couples whose relationship is necessary only to round out the most pathological limits of the definition of the word relationship. There is a violence, a subtle hatred…everyone respects a relationship that is tragic, but this one is sinister. When they finally split up – and this Summer has fragmented so many things – I ask Vitus what happened.

The space between the lovers

he says

that was once composed entirely of ether, that was once the positively charged stationary phase of their regard, that approached a vacuum, that offered no resistance, that seeped into the corners of their mouths and curled under their arms, that lived and breathed, that intoxicated, that chided them, that encouraged their softening, their wakefulness, that was as consummate as it was primordial, by which the logic of their union transcended two frontiers, and where its sublimities remained suspended, incarnate, wherein desire set upon doctrine, what was bountiful yet diffuse, had at first become cloying, and then began to agglutinate, and in doing so, what had been clean and ephemeral became gluey and restrictive, and hints of resentment, once vapors to be assessed only as they dissipated, became reckonable coacervate entities that festered on the rich agar of contempt, and there, in the space between the lovers, in the swelling pulp of disappointment, bound by the thin film of commitment, in the convolutions of discord, in a squall of distraction, in the moment that would pass before the kiss about to happen, they parted, having grown weary of a doomed collusion, having grown weary of the spoiling of the space between the lovers, having grown weary of the space between the lovers, having loved and having received love, bid a bitter farewell, and clumsily, balefully, cracked the resin of their endeavor, leaving each with only a negative image, a contour, a wax impression of the other.

My own girlfriend, Kelly, is Irish Catholic. She’s angelic, both in her countenance and her demeanor. A year ago, on our third date, on a beach on the south shore of Long Island, I try to get into her pants, and she stops me, and in the wee hours of the morning, there we are in my car in front of her house in Massapequa, and I ask her why she was so shy on the beach, and we’re both scratching the hundreds of mosquito bites we got, having sequestered ourselves in the far reaches of the sand dunes, and she hesitates to answer, but I persist, and she gets this look of resolve on her face – a sorrowful resolve – and she tells me she is a virgin. And at once I know from that look that she is bracing herself for a sort of repeating history, a pattern to which she has regrettably grown accustomed, wherein she confesses her chastity to this man who has made her blood rush (and she’s only so stirred by sinful men, perhaps), and they look at her, and are perhaps decent enough to camouflage their disappointment. Perhaps they even see her again a couple times, not wishing to appear cold-blooded, but she understands her confession for what it is: an ultimatum, one that is distancing, oftentimes cleaving.

So I make it my business to break the chain. I will pursue her as if sex were not the ultimate goal. Anyway, she’ll crack.

One Saturday in August, Kelly and I pass North Salem and the farm and just keep driving up Route 22, and eventually we find ourselves in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. We sit on the porch of the Red Lion Inn and drink hot cocoa, each with a shot of Tia Maria, and we pretend we are rich Manhattan snobs come up for the weekend. We drive to Echo Lake and sit for two whole hours watching a family of deer sip the bright blue water from the opposite bank. Kelly looks beautiful, resting on her elbows, her head tilted up and cocked to one side, with that smile – her teeth resting on her lower lip – in an old pair of jeans and a brown sweater, and I think

If I’m ever gonna fuck her, it’s gonna be this weekend.

I suggest staying in a bed and breakfast that night, and almost as if I’ve suggested something as innocuous as staying in a bed and breakfast that night, she assents – there is a flush to her face, a moistness to her lips and eyes, and I let it simmer awhile – liquor and live music at the Red Lion Pub. And when we get to the place, this quaint colonial in Great Barrington, we rush the check-in, forego the unpacking, and make for each other on the bed like starved and clamoring squirrels.

Now, I have mapped the progress of such liaisons to the extent that given its initial velocity, I can gauge its momentum well enough to know how far a particular impulse will carry the process. For instance, when we first met, and she was considerably more Catholic than she is now, I knew that venturing below Kelly’s belt would bring things to a rapid and frustrating close. In any case, back then, it was clear there was to be no consummation of any kind – not for her because it may have actually been psychophysiologically impossible, and not for me because she thought it profoundly icky – she got over even that, thanks to my persistence. (She eventually came down to my significantly low level of squeamishness, and then progressed even further to the extent that she announced one time with gleeful astonishment, and not a little relish, that the viscous effluent of my passion had somehow arced over us and into her ear.)

Anyway, it became commonplace for her to rid me of my primal urges, but her beltline was this infinitely large potential energy barrier. Until tonight in Great Barrington. It just keeps going, the kissing, the nuzzling, the undressing, the murmuring, the giant exploding planet of sadness that accompanies ecstasies that are forbidden. And for a moment I catch this look of resolve on her face – a sorrowful resolve – and she drops her pants…

…and takes off her panties…

Frontal nudity is electrifying. It never seems to get old. And then, very slowly, very deliberately, she turns around.

cw=p where: c=cars per meter per second and w=wildlife * seconds per car

Someone’s been picking off businessmen along Route 22. A lone sniper. He seems to favor Mercedes – men in their fifties – wealthy – no one knows if he stalks these particular commuters, following them, learning their driving patterns, or if he just very quickly assesses through a pair of field-glasses that this is a wealthy businessman in his fifties – I mean throw a round of ammunition in some parts of Westchester and you’ll hit a wealthy businessman in his fifties – but there is a precision to his sniping that smacks of design. Well, the road has been empty for a time – people are using 684 or one of the River Parkways – and I’ve discovered a constant for which I have yet to select an appropriately humble name and affiliated Greek letter. It amounts to the quantity of squished wildlife along a given length of road, it has the units of pelts per meter, let’s say. The data seems to indicate that it is entirely independent of traffic volume, and – this is sort of a handwaving argument, but – it seems that for a given frequency of passing cars, there is an inversely proportional frequency of intrepid possum, squirrels, et cetera, and the constant of proportionality is this – I’m gonna call it rho – so even as the traffic along 22 dies down to almost nothing, the massive increase in the number of woodland creatures who are inclined to amble brazenly across it ensure that the value of rho – which is considerable for Route 22 – remains constant.

In fact, Blind Brook employs a pack of highly trained border collies whose job it is not only to chase Canada geese off the golf course, but also to pick free of carnage the portion of Route 22 that runs alongside the club.

Just before school lets out, planeloads of Irish nationals begin setting down all over the Eastern Seaboard. One such plane brings no less than twenty young girls to Blind Brook on temporary work visas. And Kevin begins to tremble.

In the locker room, just outside the sauna, piled to the ceiling, are thousands of white bathtowels with Blind Brook embroidered across them in green. It is a soft morning in July when the towels become more than just mere rectangles of fabric, when they become a symbol of a new philosophy, one of bawdism. Kevin keeps a dozen or so under his bed in his room at the club to wipe up spills, and having, on this morning, employed the same Blind Brook towel to wipe up vomit, blood, and semen, he looks up at me from the aftermath of a Roman orgy – Roman in the sense that he seems to have, in one night, conquered the whole of the British Isles.

I love the way these kids look, with their small breasts and their fair skin – some are that bronwyn semi-affluent type, and others are practically Travelers, pug noses and red blonde hair and freckles, and the musical lilt that is too fresh and sweet yet to call a brogue. On Sundays, they all go to Mass together at Corpus Christi in Portchester, a gaudy Italian affair where the Stations of the Cross look like images from Tarot cards, and they kneel, lips pressed to their rosary beads, and damned if some of them don’t occasionally weep for God knows what – great, great grandfahrs lost in great, great fahmine, I suppose.

Right now they are piled up two or three deep on Kevin’s floor, like a great and sprawling sculpture of limbs, and Kevin standing in the middle with stains of varying colors splashed across his nakedness. I look at him and he just begins to laugh – almost hysterically.

So, we snatch a wheelbarrow from the greenskeeper’s shed and we proceed to shuttle these invariably waifish Gaels, two or three at a time, off to one of the rooms in the girls’ section of the servants’ wing. When we’re done, Kevin is shaking, and still smiling a manic sort of smile. He sits down among the towels.

I’m going to go to sleep now

he says

I’m going to go to sleep now, and I don’t know if I shall ever wake up. There is something wrong with my body. I can feel it. I’m going to go to sleep now, and if I die in my sleep, I will be grateful. I have done something wrong, Tom, and I – I am paying for it. It was desperation, you see. It was desperation that made me behave immorally, and now guilt is tearing me into many pieces inside. I do not think I am strong enough to withstand this pain. But I will fight, Tom. But right now, I’m going to go to sleep. Because I need my strength to continue the fight tomorrow. There is nothing I can do, today. My heart, Tom. My heart is gushing blood, because – because it is broken. It is I who have broken my heart, and it is smashed and it is gushing stuff. It is scary looking. It is a disgusting mess. My limbs are on fire. I have a funny taste in my mouth, like the cloudy water back in the dorms, you remember, Tom? I’ve brushed my teeth, a lot. Still, there’s this taste in my mouth. A funny taste, Tom. Vaguely peanut-buttery. Cloudy. Remember, Tom? They found a dead animal in the pipes. I used to think I was a good person, but – but now I’m scared. Shitless. I’m tired and unhappy. I’m going to go to sleep now. I’m still young, right? But I am a monster. My limbs are on fire. My hair is a disaster. I’m gonna be ripped apart, Tom! They’ll find an eyebrow in the ivy – a vagina in the heather – a dead animal in the pipes. Tom, if you’re bad enough, they don’t wait ‘till you’re dead to send you to Hell. Nobody cares that I’m sick. I am a sideshow. I am being tormented. I am tormenting myself. I – I think I sold my soul, Tom. Somebody paid good money for my soul. I’m going to go to sleep now. I feel hot. And sweaty. I’m afraid. I’m afraid of the Devil, Tom. And niggers, I’m afraid of niggers. I hate myself. I hate myself. I really fucking hate myself. My emotions are corrupt with showmanship. I will never love. I am part of evil stuff. I am nothing. I’m going to go to sleep now. I have no hope. I am a sick fuck. I have let everyone down. I have let down my curtains – my façade. I have exposed a monkey-eyed beast. I have webbed ribs. And teeth in my armpits.

The day at the reservoir is a sunny, blurry frenzy of swimming and drinking and lovemaking. Colleen sits on the bank like a child of the sixties, and plays with a dead fish that Tasha caught earlier, and as Philo and Evelyn are monopolizing the raft, Stacy from Ridgefield and I discover to be impossible what young people throughout history have discovered time and time again to be impossible in deep water.

I continue to experience anxiety about the remarkable dependence upon depth exhibited by the temperature of the reservoir, and I lay on my back and float, preferring that some part of me should to poke out into the sunshine rather than down into the freezing sustenance below. Stacy from Ridgefield is amused at this, but she is barely five feet tall, and another foot or so down, the water is like ice. She darts around me, nimbly, at home in the water, and when she surfaces to my left, and squeegees her brown hair back against her scalp, and blows the water off her upper lip and smiles at me, I

Rejoice! Rejoice! Call out the early warblers extra early to announce that the great counties of Wayne and Susquehanna, in their infinite benevolence, have once again, due to a gross overpopulation of whitetail, extended the hunting season!

The predawn purple cavern of upstate sky shakes
With the grumblings of four-by-fours rumbling awake
The great and flannel faux lumberjack grabs his finest possession
His gun
His prize Smith and Wesson
His forty-four magnum
His slight and faggotty son
Who tears a sleepy sister from her teddy bears
(She has the deep brown eyes of her brother
The arresting smile of her father
And the silence of her mother)

And all three are tossed into the cab
Of a green pickup
With a coil of rope
And the sister falls asleep on the lad’s tense lap

Rejoice! Rejoice! Ye purveyor’s of game
We will ride like steel belted gladiators across the hills of Pennsylvania
And when we return
And you hear our mighty pistons
Straining against the weight of three ten-pointers on the hood
And a grizzly in the flatbed
And a woolly mammoth on giant marble casters
Carving twin ravines
Into the soft belly of Route 17
Then bring out the hot cider
The grateful Queen
The big cigars and the brilliantine
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

I don’t know how she got there
But there’s a doe in my crosshairs
And Papa is whispering in my ear
Cut her down son
Fire the gun
Let there be venison
For everyone
And in my heart I am crying: “Run! Run!”

Sunset.

It is heaven to be drunk all the length of a sunny day. Colleen is a little cooked and has fallen asleep in the arms of a gracefully bowed cedar, and Philo reads from Wordsworth as we rest on the bank of the reservoir. Stacy from Ridgefield walks delicately, nakedly around in the shallows, occasionally bending over to spy on brightly colored fish, and Evelyn is carving a cold and blood-rare filet mignon into sandwich-sized slices while Tasha looks on wetly. There is sourdough bread and olives and a bottomless jug of wine. I build a fire, and as the evening settles in around us, I light it. Colleen, shivering now, cuddles up to her mother, wrapped in a down comforter. We eat and talk and all of the sudden a full moon leaps into the sky, taking us all by surprise.

Suicide.

Such cowardice, they say, humbles the Beast himself. I—I’ve never seen anything like it. It hits a community like a hurricane…years and years to clean up the mess, and the old town is never really the same. It spreads woe across the planet. The day of a cheerful little old lady reading about it in a newspaper in Adelaide, Australia, is blackened by a suicide in New York. The last time I see Matt, we are sitting together in a coffeehouse in Mount Kisco, listening to an almost-eighteen-year-old almost-Rickie Lee Jones. I'm gonna say I remember Matt trying to talk to me. I'm gonna say he got on my nerves. I'm gonna say I made up an excuse to leave – ah, what the fuck, you know the guy has this hair, it was out of control. Always just piled up on his head kind of like Lyle Lovett, and it annoys me.

You know why people resent suicide – because life's a fucking job, and when someone leaves work early you just can't help hating them a little bit for it. The essence of any suicide note:

You can't fire me. I quit.

We all go to this funeral, this memorial service, and this Episcopal minister, this woman preacher, gets up there and gives this sort of nonpartisan eulogy: well, he's going to Hell, but maybe not really, maybe they'll make an exception, maybe he's the millionth customer this week…and each naked hypocrisy sends another shock-wave through the crowd. How are they to be reconciled, these fair people of Katonah? They sit through the sermon, and pick out what comforts, and reject what alarms.

And they become what religious people become when they are forsaken.
And they become what religious people become when the rigors of religion get a little too rigorous.
And they become what religious people become when nobody's watching.
They become human.

Human.

There's this kind of African monkey, a small one, lives in trees but forages on the ground, and they have these warning noises they make when they – when one of them spots a predator. And you can actually observe them, field biologists have – a large python is approaching, and one of the monkeys sees it and makes a series of noises…and all the other monkeys... they look down and around. But if it's an eagle that's spotted: a different sound…and all the other monkeys look up. These are the rudiments of language. Direction, objects, etc. Come back in a few thousand years, and you’ll find…actions, feelings.

Rage, lust, and a considerable range of primal emotions are included in the basic package, but soon they will be able to refer to complex emotions such as lust mixed with rage. Gratification mixed with revulsion. Thirst mixed with nausea and a headache. The big step will be grappling with the abstract. Now in addition to…

That snake there...

they will be able to say

Hey Frank, remember that big fucking snake yesterday?

But as language develops, so must – this is sort of a puzzle – as language develops so must consciousness...is that the right word? And before one of these monkeys actually takes it in his head to jump out of the highest branch he can find or throw himself in front of an oncoming tiger, there cannot be a word for it. Or can there? Which came first?

The evolution of the act itself is interesting. The first monkey to commit suicide will perhaps be one who is mad, or one trying to escape some kind of extreme physical discomfort. But as the primal urges of food, sex, and sleep become abstracted into money, love, and a beach house in Amagansett, monkeys will begin dropping off like Japanese politicians for lack of one or the other.

Goodbye, cruel world.

Anyway, it becomes commonplace for Kelly to rid me of my primal urges, but something I never thought I would tire of, this heavy petting – I mean I have it mixed up in my head with this fantasy that we are brother and sister, and we are about nine or ten, and that our father is a preacher, and it is a Sautrday night, and he is downstairs writing his sermon. It’s a powerful fantasy, but you have to be really deviant to ignore the message that millions of years of evolution are sending you. Sometimes, you just wanna stick it in. But always there is this infinitely large potential energy barrier.

Until tonight in Great Barrington. It just keeps going, the kissing, the nuzzling, the undressing, the murmuring, the giant exploding planet of sadness that accompanies ecstasies that are forbidden. And for a moment I catch this look of resolve on her face – a sorrowful resolve – and she drops her pants and takes off her panties. Frontal nudity is electrifying. It never seems to get old. And then, very slowly, very deliberately, she turns around.

A friend of Kevin’s brother was down in the Bronx the night that Matt jumped in front of the Metro North. He didn’t know Matt, but he was there. And he didn’t actually see it happen, but he saw the train backed up from the station, and he saw a small crowd of people gathering. He says that when he walked up and looked down at the tracks, at first he couldn’t figure out what he was looking at – like it took his senses a moment to adjust to such striking new input – like your brain saves space by automatically assuming that when you see a head, a torso, and legs, that they are all connected.

I feel the same way looking at Kelly’s tail. And she looks back over her shoulder at me, because she doesn’t hear the reaction she expects…which is I guess a shriek of horror or maybe just a thud. I look up and shrug. This makes her frown. She switches her tail back and forth quickly to make sure I am seeing it, which I – eventually – I am.

Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.

What do you mean?

I’m suddenly very cold.

I’ll shut the window.

Tom.

Kelly.

What are you trying to prove?

What do you mean?

What do you mean, what do I mean?

Do you want me to light a fire?

Tom, you’re frightening me.

That’s rich.

Tom. Please – please…react.

I didn’t learn a goddamn thing in college. None of us did, as far as I know. I mean, Matt studied theology, but he somehow missed the part about

Thou shalt not

[throw thyself in front of a fucking train]

Philo studied poetry, but instead of writing the next great epic, it’s as if he’s waiting for someone to write it about him. Vitus, too, still regards human frailty as something you can avoid if you merely make it your life’s study. Kevin – I don’t even know what Kevin’s degree is in, and he’s my best friend – but all he knows from college is that never again will any of us be so deeply immersed in pussy. As for me…I studied biology, and I can tell you that Kelly does not have an abnormally pronounced coccyx, or a distended perirectal abscess, or a vestigial caudal appendage owing to prenatal exposure to incident radioactivity.

She has a tail. An eighteen inch long, brown, foxlike tail growing right out of the top of the crack in her ass, and she can wag it, stiffen it, curl it up between her legs, and swat flies with a fair amount of accuracy.

It’s like we all missed something. The point maybe. They—a professor back at Sisyphus once told me to avoid pronouns: the educated world, certainly academia, conditions you to look beyond the thing itself. I feel like that’s even a quote from something. That if our philosophy is too concerned with the plight of the individual, then it is biased and non-empirical. That if our poetry is too focused on the thing itself, and not what the thing represents, then it is pedestrian and sentimental – no more than an exercise. And a civilized God, like a Catholic God, is one who juggles all the balls at once – it is pagan to imagine that bears or maize or the weather might each have their own individual deities.

Kelly told me once that men have souls and animals don’t. I guess that depends on how you define a soul. It seems to me like a soul is just an all-consuming need for some kind of explanation for everything.

We burst out of the indoor ring in a full gallop onto the rising slope of the common land. Sixteen hooves pound the hard turf and the sound is like thunder. The sun is setting and it is unusually cool – almost cold, and tears whip out of four pairs of eyes, an accidental camouflage. We didn’t ride enough this Summer – we didn’t ride at all – and we lived on a horsefarm. I feel this huge, powerful body between my legs, and all I ever used her for, or any of her company, was to lather up girls like Stacy from Ridgefield.

Late waking under a tree at the top of Baxter Road
Some stains
Some breeze to blow
Some red leaves around the remains
Of some once-chaste pugnosed doe
I am risen
And in that cheery position
Of having here at hand a sky of unimpeachable blue
A Northward urging – and nothing directly to do.

And I am, if not clean, at least revived
From having slept outside.

So I walk…I just walk up Route 22. Not hurrying, and not spending too much time in one place. And along the way, I encounter memories as conspicuous as roadsigns and seemingly as palpable. Here is the curve where Stacy from Ridgefield and I are driving, on our way back from the reservoir…we are hungry, and we want lobster enchiladas from the Diamond Back in Scotts Corners, and it is a casual time, I’m in a satisfied, kind of docile frame of mind when…something comes spinning, sliding towards us along the road in the headlights of an oncoming sedan. We remark later: “I thought it had looked like a large bag of leaves…” Stacy from Ridgefield thought it was, I don’t know, a tree trunk or something. We realize together it is a deer. This kid in his parents’ Mercedes screeches off the road. I pull over, and I run to check on this kid and Stacy from Ridgefield runs to check on the animal. The kid is fine, but the Mercedes will need a couple thousand dollars work – the flash we saw was headlights reacting explosively to the sudden compaction of the fender and grill. We join Stacy from Ridgefield on the opposite shoulder where she is crouched over the mangled deer, crying. I get a special kind of arousal out of seeing a pretty girl sob. The job here is to execute the animal because the thought of dying painfully on the rocky shoulder of the road with a gaping hole in your chest is too much for any of us to bear. So, at a nearby cottage I inquire as to the owner’s possession of some sort of firearm.

Another one, eh? Aye…suicide corner I calls it. Three or four every month in that same spot.

You see, there are still some roads in Westchester that know nothing of blacktop, broken lines or snowplows. And this one happens to be a major thoroughfare. Much as you would come across a filling station or a café along Route 22, you might expect this other road to have its own accoutrements. A particularly bountiful oak is a supermarket of sorts, and to hear the hullabaloo of the starved and clamoring squirrels, it is hardly distinguishable from a Sunday afternoon at the Food Emporium in Rye Brook. To a rabbit, an invisible column of gaseous urea rising from an oft replenished stain on the forest floor is a black and yellow striped pillar – a wolf is perhaps a squad-car.

The point is, this trail, which may have once borne an Iroquois name and indeed as much traffic, correcting of course for population and transportation modes, et cetera, as Route 22 which it now intersects, which may have once been a trickling stream, which may have once been the fetus of a majestic river that never was…it now intersects Route 22, as effective an abortive as the trunk of a great oak tree.

All around me is the sunlight in foliage, that same sublime sunlight which reduced so many impressionists to wagging heaping brushfuls of arsenic green and cadmium yellow across their canvases, crying out in their defeat:

To mimic her is to defile her!

I – I am of a nature to become as suddenly suffused with mirth as the treetops are with this afternoon light. If I was singing, now I am singing and laughing. If I was with a girl, now I am kissing her and, pucklike, winning her over with empty charms…and if I was walking along Route 22, now…I am dancing…

But how often do we see a thing we have, all our lives, longed so desperately to see?

If it weren’t for Philo, I never would have read Yeats’ early work – the stuff he wrote when he was in his twenties. He has this poem about all these woodland creatures offering their definitions of divinity – a duck says that God is a great big Duck in the sky, a flower says He’s a Flower, a Peacock says God is a Peacock and that the many million stars are merely spots on His enormous tail which is the heavens, et cetera, et cetera. And then there’s a deer whose conviction it is that God must Himself be a Deer, for who else could conceive of a such a sad, sweet animal but another sad, sweet Animal…

So clearly defined – such a perfect, clear, crystalline definition. This is not your run-of-the-mill semiotic transformation, this is not pointing to a long and obtuse black marble furrow in the lawn

THIS IS THE SCAR FROM THE GASH IN THE BREAST OF AMERICA MADE BY THE BUCKNIFE CALLED VIETNAM

…or a silver Mercedes crashing into the ribcage of the Great Whitetail to make sure it is mortal – to make sure it is dead! I gaze up at the cross at Matt’s funeral and I think to myself: If it is possible for one man to mistake this chunk of wood for salvation, is it not possible for another to mistake salvation for a chunk of wood?! And the High Priestess of Katonah sayeth unto the people:

This man who hath taken his own life is privy now to a justice we cannot fathom.

His parents: two aging wolves, their marriage already long ago torn asunder by alcohol and maddening boredom gaze up blearily at this robed and mannish would be dyke whose liturgical obligation it is to tell them:

Matthew. Ye loved Matthew. We loved Matthew. Matthew is gone away. Matthew hath opted out of Life and His Way, and in his unequivocally Selfish departure hath condemned hisself to an Eternity of indescribable Christless Horror.

this is not verbatim

If thou seekest Matthew, if thou art looking for him, check thee in the Corners of the World – the Dark Places, the cobwebbed and dusty Attics of long forgotten Houses whose Families knew only the deepest manners of Psychic pain…look ye not under the average Rock, but into the Sunken Grottos of Man’s most Profane Heresies – places so Black that even to Sin there is to cast a faint Glow of Commandments unremembered.

You see, a purging comes to us all, and not often does it take the form we might begin to expect, even if such a thing crosses our minds. For example, Vitus and Philo stand atop a hill in late Summer, identical, beautiful creatures seemingly born of a fairy-tale. By the time they reach me, Philo has become Yeats, somewhat obfuscated by tiny luminescent winged creatures darting about him in helical trajectories. And Vitus has turned into Heidegger, swastika and all, and between them they drag a young girl, not a dryad like Stacy from Ridgefield, or some kind of abomination like Kelly, but an innocent, a lovely princess, a sweet and real human girl. With deep brown eyes. And a chest pierced by the effortless precision of a .22.

I miss Matt. He said to me once, or maybe it was a song…

When you bury a brother, you bury your heart with him
And if you don’t have a heart, you can’t have any rhythm
And if you can’t keep the beat, the music doesn’t matter
And losing music, to me, would be like burying a brother

Now, I just hear him singing through the cracks in a once adamantine faithlessness.

But I cannot go
Beyond the confines of this road.
I have become
A particle in a box.
I am caretaker of the ultimate boundary,
So treacherous to cross…

A line exists
Between clenching your fists
And walking upright, forever tired forever terrified…
Or disappearing fawnlike into the briar – your essence forfeit…

The line is kept clear of those who would walk it.

It’s Autumn, now, and most of the Irish girls have gone home, except for one named Johanna, who Kevin now claims to wish to marry. Philo has given his notice up at the Vail Farm, and he and Vitus are heading out West…Santa Fe, I think. Scott MacGregor says I can stay at the club this winter, he needs a bartender for corporate outings – Kevin and Johanna will be there, too. I don’t see Stacy from Ridgefield much anymore – she has tenth grade to worry about – and I haven’t called Kelly since…Stockbridge.

I tried once to imagine an invention, a machine that could be implemented to translate the crude human pounding of feet into the flowing motion of a gazelle sailing through high, golden grass. Gazelles, who don't often turn an ankle, and who rather simplemindedly amble up behind a snowy-rumped doe and touch her flank with a foreleg. And she walks on ahead. And he trots apace and does it again – just a rueful fetlock on her furry little ass – until at last she succumbs into a majestically arched and supine capitulation. I admire inventors because I get too bored with an idea too quickly to wade through the morass of mistakes that must be starting a technology from scratch. Perhaps nothing I ever came up with was that inspired.

Or as soon as I have it I don't want it. Like girls. Evidence of the pure genius of evolution, if you ask me – at once subtle and striking – there is a gaze that is at once shy and: I-dare-ya, Tom. I-dare-ya. But it is, like so many other things, as fragile as it is precious. The trick is to find a girl who can keep that look even after you come in her mouth. Fluids, as any geologist will tell you, are a powerful source of erosion.

I’m twenty-two.

And my steps are light and my eyes are clear
And blackbirds wing by in the violet air
It’s well on evening, though afternoon
Still lingers
Like some irritating kid sister
Refusing to leave Autumn alone with the moon.
This is the time when the road is most lovely
When darting deer are most prone
To leap
Bank to bank – at this hour themselves so comely
And so difficult to see.
Perhaps we are
Near the reservoir
And a loon – that who can say
Is at hand or far away – casts a high Gaelic longing quaver
Lasting an instant or an October
Over the deep water
Into the warm wind rushing
Through the elms and maples – a subtle breathy percussion.

The Indescribable Christless End