Sixteen. Taken Away
I was a dot. A dot in the middle of a giant abyss. Sprinklers shot glistening light over the neon toys scattered in the grass. Flags billowed softly from clean white porches. Nothing was significant. Nothing connected. And I was invisible again.
The more things change the more they stay the same. Ainsleigh was even back again. She had fallen in love, gotten pregnant, married and divorced – all within eighteen months. And I thought I had a big year. That night at dinner we stared across the bowls and breads, daring each other to speak.
"So Add,” my father said. I stared at my food. “Tell us about class.”
I made up a few things.
“Ainsleigh.” I volleyed the attention over to her. “What are your plans?” She shot me a look.
“Addison,” she smiled sweetly back. “Tell us more about class.”
“Now, before we eat.” My mother opened a Bible. “I would like everyone to select a passage that reflects something they are thankful for.”
My father started, citing work and a strong family.
Ainsleigh shooed at the Bible. “No passage for me.”
My father sighed. “Just say something.”
“It would be disrespectful to read from a book I don’t believe in.”
“Read it anyways,” my mother said.
“I won’t.”
"You have to believe in SOMETHING.” My father burst. “Use it to think about SOMETHING."
I told them nothing about the island. It’s not like it was without reason. How could I explain it? I was very aware that on the whole it sounded rather bad, but there was something important under the surface. Or at least I was certain there was, if only I could find it.
I just wanted to dream and be back again. But how could I? Go back to New York? What then? Go back to the same dead ways, the same solemn lines? Returning to that place would feel like ripping an arm off, or going back in time. If I abandoned the island, what then? What awaits us in the rest?
I headed to my room to see what was left. There were stacks of clothing still dirty, rumpled and smelling of the beach. Neglected sheets of paper fluttered helplessly in the breeze. I stood in the center of the room and felt nothing. I was free. Yet all I wanted was to be on the island again.
Surely New York didn’t have kids like that. Then again... maybe I could find them. I was sure they were out there somewhere, if I looked for it with eyes open. It's all out there. You just have to be willing to find it. America, where anything is possible. I was ready to return to the battle.
I packed up my one bag and hugged Ainsleigh goodbye at the station. I forgot to buy a flight so I was boarding a train instead. I turned my collar up at the station and headed off back east.
The slough shakes off your life if you’re gone a long time. The incidental friends have forgotten who you are. The excess falls away. And all that's left is the purest parts of your soul, because no stale routines stick to a rolling stone. I always liked that about travel.
The New York summer was ending and yielding those last few days of bright sun where anything seems possible. As the cab ripped up the side of the road, I stared at the buildings as they flashed by. It was as if the city had a new shine, dripping rich under the reddening sky. That’s the magic about New York – it can turn another surface to you every time.
On campus I gazed at the bright floods of eager faces gripping worn copies of The Iliad, and for the first time I didn’t feel like knew more than them. And how my heart swelled, when I passed that tree, and caught my first glimpse of the library! It was like the city of bright green fantasy that I had seen on my first eager visit.
The whole campus looked clean and new. I felt an ambitious itch for the books and was ready to work.
The only thing that felt wrong was that Katrina had left while I was gone. New York had finally done it. She had fled for the west. I wondered if she would ever come back.
My room was above a Broadway deli on the outskirts of campus. Everything was clean and sterile – the kind of unnatural tidiness that acquaints strangers with the bitter idea of living with one another. It was the land of forgotten students, the fringe deposits of campus for those with no links to the past. I wandered through the lonely long white halls chewing meditatively on a raisin bagel with strawberry cream cheese. It felt like I was resting up for something big.
One little afternoon I headed down to the park and sat by the lake with floating petals and willows weeping on the bank. The breeze swept warm through the air, carrying hints of hot dogs and pretzels from the carts and happy sticky fingers near the castle.
I decided to ditch the subway and walk instead under the soft pink sky of the late summer afternoon. Golden scents danced over the turning leaves. The red brick on campus glowed in the summer heat. The island was far off and like a dream. I had the uncanny sense everything was around the corner.
It was around such a corner that evening that I found Alex. We wrapped arms round each other and tumbled out into the wet black night, looking for something to take over.
“How about the West End?” Alex suggested.
I shook my head. “I don’t go there on principle.” It had a certain amount of notoriety in the Fifties for being the drinking hangout of the school’s artistic elite. Now it ran on the fumes of that reputation and the dollars of drunk first years who didn’t know any better.
We sat in the amber glow of a little pub on 105th where fat blue collar bellies hung over bar stools with baseball caps and stubble. I liked its sailor atmosphere. Alex liked it because they didn’t card and tequila shots came with a beer chaser for only a dollar. The beer tasted like corn. But that could be cured with another tequila. Which needs some washing down. And so on the carousel spun.
“Here’s to real weapons of mass destruction.” Alex pounded another empty tequila glass onto the bar.
The beer was foul and made my mouth sour, but appealing taste isn’t really the point, so I drink and, but I’m all right, I tell myself, and get through the ordeal one swallow at a time.
Alex stared at the coverage on television with disaffection. “Remember how teachers used to say to you in grade school, ‘You could be the President of the United States?’ It was supposed to inspire you, make you study harder. But somewhere along the line you realize that would actually be a terrible job."
“Any job is, compared to solving the great Herodotus mystery,” I smiled at Alex. It had been his project since he was seventeen.
“No time for that now. I’m working a hundred hours a week.”
“On Wall Street?” I guessed.
“Nowhere else worth going.”
“You know," Alex mused as he refilled our our glasses, "when I got into this school... I thought, 'This is it. I'm going to be surrounded by only interesting people for the rest of my life.' Then I got here, and realized... the world isn't like that. It's a capitalist’s world and we're living in it.”
Turns out after hating college, Alex had graduated a year early and wrote the great American novel, dreamt of raising dogs on a farm, Labradors, enormous and husky with white fur – but then, suddenly, stopped. Now a year on, Alex was an up-and-comer.
“I’m a glorified secretary,” he bemoaned, still dressed sharp, and the waitresses were being particularly attentive to our table, particularly attentive to the suit, their gaze lingering on its turns. I sat on the other side of the table, a fork twirling between my fingers.
“I got to bed at ten every night, so that I can get up at five, to be at work by six, and it is the most boring thing I’ve ever done.” Alex tugged at his collar. “I’m going to have to get a haircut too.”
I stared in sorrow at my fallen comrade. “Et tu, Brutus?”
“I just want to not have to worry about money.” Alex sighed. “Is that so bad?”
“There are other ways to make money.”
Alex shook his head. “I have to. If China asks for its money back, we’r
e screwed.” His nails tore at the label on his beer. “At least it keeps people from asking me what I’m going to do.”
He was all right with his life, until he saw me, breathing heavy and chirping about the wildness of that fantasy world across the ocean. Alex’s eyes glazed over as he stared vacantly out the window, exhausted by the wide gulf between that world and his own, and his inability to reach it.
It was as if all my life I had been carefully setting up the outlines of who I am or what I do – and it was always contingent on past events and future plans. I had spent years bouncing between the past and the future – reading old books, planning out my next steps – and for the first time I was feeling the rhythm of the present.
I asked him why he had enslaved himself to such a miserable lifestyle – his words, not mine – and he replied, near tears in his eyes, “I have to.”
It didn’t have to be like this! Life was no longer about staying in your one box room in that big box city in the greater globe box, all plugged into one tidy massive grid of purpose and distribution. Everyone had traded a portion of their possibilities for security – just like Freud said.
I gave Alex a sideways glance. “What if you didn’t have to be practical? What if you could major in anything?”
Alex leaned back and sighed. “Music, poetry and philosophy.” He smiled. “Can you imagine any subjects more pure?”
“Poets are liars,” I replied. A hundred years ago Coleridge pledged we were on the verge of a millennium of Enlightenment. “Even Aristotle said so.”
I watched him gaze at the empty bottle in sorrow and wondered how many others were out there like him, growing stale in quiet desperation, playing along with the system only because they couldn’t think of anything better to do.
“This stuff can't last,” Alex agreed. “No one else is going to look out for you.” He reached for the bottle of champagne with a smile. “At least I have this.”
I imagined him with his hair cropped, shaking hands and stole drags from his cigarette.
“You know, I never would have pegged you as someone who smokes.”
“I don't,” I replied. “But I’ll smoke with you.”
Perhaps that old path is the right track, perhaps I’m in the process of falling off the face of the planet, but if so, I couldn’t be happier. There is no way you could have dragged me kicking and screaming back to that world. It did mean I was now more or less alone. But what did it matter? I was on a hunt for the solo.
The clock was now eking on three am, and I was hungry and drunk, and Alex was complaining about some girl he had been hitting on all night, declaring, “She won’t crack! You can’t get in there!” I decided I was officially bored when his arm slid around my shoulder, and I stepped up to go home.
On my way to the door I caught sight of a boy with his top hat tipped low slouched in a corner. Next to him sat a girl in a red dress, her satin gloves caressing a cigarette. In the other hand a green bottle tipped towards her glass.
“Last one to finish this shot,” she said, “has to cover my next shift.”
The boy shook his head. Thick black curls tumbled round his forehead and hung over his ears. There was something familiar about him, like I had known him for years.
“It’s only a matter of time.” The girl threw her head back and slammed the glass down on the counter. “You may as well give in now.” She slid a shot towards him. “Six in the morning isn’t that far off from four, you know.”
“There is one very large difference – the sun.” The shot slid back. Then the boy rolled his eyes upwards slow, and the way he did it made you believe there was nothing in the world that couldn’t be taken in the same languid way. Where did I know those eyes? Maybe it was from the part of you that exists outside of time and already knows about the years spent asleep by his side.
“I’m Addison.” I stuck out my hand.
The girl looked me up and down. “I’ve seen you before,” she slowly said. She didn’t look familiar at all. I would have remembered the screaming red eyeshadow or the colossal mountain of hair. I told her I didn’t think so and her face settled in concentration. She snapped her fingers. “Last year! I found you passed out in our bathtub at a party.”
Had I? Was this true? The boy nodded his head. “You were wearing rainbow toe socks.” Oh yes the socks. Now I remember.
The girl held her arm next to mine. “You’re so tan.” She grabbed the boy’s arm. “I’m tanner than you, Pete.” Then she turned her attention back to me. “Where have you been?”
“I’ve been on an island,” I said.
Pete hesitated. “An island?”
“That’s right. One with a thousand hills, where all the animals roam free. And there are waves to surf on, and dolphins in the sea.” Pete and the girl exchanged a look.
“I think you’ve been on something else,” Pete said. “And I want some.”
The girl pulled out a chair. “I’m Sera. Have a seat.”
Pete and Sera met in South Africa. Sera was there visiting her grandmother and Pete was tagging along on an archeology trip with his professor parents. Turns out the two knew each other through mutual degenerate friends. They had joined forces in the spring to get into a nice apartment. We bonded over the blues and Lee Friedlander photographs.
“Were there pirates on your island?” Sera asked.
I shook my head. “It’s not the Amazon.”
Sera frowned. “Were there sharks?”
“Only well-fed ones,” I admitted.
Then she paused. You could almost see the wheels turning in her head. “Where are you living?”
“Nowhere much. Some hole on Broadway.”
This seemed to please Sera. Her fingers danced. “You should come over and see our place,” she said, her fingers crawling up the arm of a stiffening Pete. “We’ll have some drinks.”
And so I set out on one of my last college adventures, with Sera and Pete wrapped in coats long and black, I in a furry gray debacle from the flea market.
Something magical happened as we strolled over the cobblestones that lead back into campus. The red buildings with white trim began to fall behind us, the expansive lawns came into focus, and an emerald lady appeared, with garments tumbling over her sinuous curves and mighty throne. Giant pale white steps cascaded all around her like a wide milk stage, and shadows spilled over her curves along with the warm summer light. Everything sparkled with a renewed colour, dripping rich under the red night summer sky. I closed my eyes and willed the island from my mind.
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