Chapter 28
THE BRIM
We were in the tenth story of an apartment complex, out on the back porch, gazing at Richard's infinity pool. There was cocaine in the salt shakers and wild hibiscus flowers in the champagne. They tasted like dried mango. We had just arrived, and people darted around us like ants among sugar.
"You want a little..." and Richard tapped the side of his nose gently, asking both Patrick and me. Richard was tall and thin with brown hair and brown eyes. His hair was elegantly messy, and I could read in silver "Armani" on his black shirt and jeans. There was a short blonde with long hair that hung on his arm, and she wore the thinnest blue silk dress and no bra. The tips of her nipples tentatively jutted against the cloth. She kept rubbing her nose and shaking her head voraciously.
Patrick was there to enjoy himself. "You mean a little Snow White? Aye." He headed to the glass table to the left of the pool, and sat on the empty yellow couch beside it.
"Alright!" Richard said. "Maybe get a little Dopey, Sneezy, Happy, Grouchy."
"Maybe go for a magic carpet ride later," Patrick replied and winked.
"Oh-oh!" exclaimed Richard. "Yeah... after this shit, you'll have so much wood they'll start calling you Pinocchio."
"Aye," Patrick said solemnly, "and then you get a reputation for splinters. Start having to polish yourself off."
The blonde was laughing, and I was forming my own perfect lines of Snow White.
Eventually, I whispered in Patrick's ear the unnecessary words, "Let's get fucking high."
We already were.
And then the whole night was glasses clinking together, and woman laughter, the sound of red high heels against concrete, and wet silk swishing in the water.
Patrick and I had fallen into the pool fully-clothed and headed straight to the infinity end, overlooking the city. The water was warm. I touched his arm through the wet linen, and every muscle in my body tightened. His wet lips found mine until I pulled away and leaned myself against the glass, propping my arms on the ledge.
"What is it about you," he said in his lyrical voice. "What is it about you that makes everyone feel safe?"
I almost laughed. "I don't know what you're talking about," and I went to kiss him again, but he stopped me.
"If I had to subsist on the things you let me know about yourself, I would have starved to death by now."
"You wouldn't be the first Irishman to do so."
He put his hands about my throat, jokingly. "I ought to strangle you." When he let me go, he grabbed my hand. "But really. You are a striking individual. Just as striking as when I first met you.
"There is something different in you than in any other person. I want to know what made you. I want to know your life."
I did not like these questions, and I darted from them.
"What about you, Patrick?" I asked. "What made you. And why are you here?"
"Why am I here?" he repeated and smiled, grabbing at me in the water.
"Yes." I looked around, surveying the scene. "You are it - the real fucking deal. Millions in the bank. Connections. Everything. And you're getting a degree you don't need, with these thirty-thousand-dollar-a-year-millionaires."
I saw the dimple in Patrick's cheek come alive as he smiled, and again he took my hands in his. "Maybe I have performance anxiety."
"You don't have performance anxiety," I said.
"How would you know," he asked, "when you've never seen me perform?"
"Cute," I replied. "But not what I want."
He sighed and sobered his speech. "There is no doing better. There is no such thing as it. As for the rest," he looked back towards the men and women, "we'll talk about it at my loft."
It was hours later when our conversation continued, and when it did, Patrick had started a fire and had given me a pair of his Grinch pants and a long sleeved undershirt to wear. We pushed the couch close to the fireplace and sat together on it, defrosting our numb limbs.
"You want some heroin?" he asked, and I shook my head 'no.'
But as he was beginning to prepare the syringe for himself, and I saw the needle glint in the flickering fire, I stopped him. "Not till you tell me," I said, "why you lower yourself."
Patrick leaned close to me, sighed, and said, "I don't need anything. I don't want anything. At any point in time, my Father can send me off to rehab, lock me away. So, I keep my grades up. But... I'm just like you and everybody else."
"How so?"
"Escaping." He said this word like he was smoking it. "Twenty-four seven." He took his long and slender fingers and ran them through his hair. "Jerk off, shoot up, snort, smoke, drink, sleep, dream, fuck, read, watch anything to get away from it."
"What is 'it'?"
Patrick's eyes flicked to me, and I watched his face in the pale light, the shadows of his high cheekbones flickering darker and lighter, his maroon hair casting grassy looking shadows on his forehead. "That is the question, isn't it?" he asked, and I knew he would not tell me.
I reached for his arm and pressed lightly across his creamy skin, on his blue vein, watching it puff up ever-so-slightly, knowing that soon it would be torn.
"One day we won't be anonymous," he told me. "One day we'll talk about my Father and Mother and God, and the people you knew and know now. Where you came from. And all the..."
"Trauma," I finished for him, and the weight of the word drew my eyes across his bare chest and to his face.
"trauma, yes. We'll spend days talking. The outside world will disappear. Not a single lie will be told, and things won't feel so stagnant. It'll be quick - a rush - and then it can never be like we never knew each other."
I pressed again on his vein. "Yes."
He shook his head. "If I could trap you in this room and force from you that knowledge, I would Jack, but you won't tell me, so, for now, we're at an impasse. Now, if I could please have my vein back, I'm going to make it a very happy vein."
I let his arm go. "If you were a drug," I said, "you would be an upper."
"Why thank you," and he sat upright, grabbing a lighter, a spoon, and cotton.
I touched the hand that held the syringe. "I just want you to know that what you are makes up for what you're not."
He looked at me squarely. "Thank you," he said, and there was no joking this time. No facade of humor.
He tapped the syringe as though deliberating on what I meant or waiting for me to say more. "I am not lying when I say that there is an energy in you. I sound crazy when I say it, I feel crazy when I think it, but there is just something about you..." he stopped. "I have never felt safer in my life."
He looked down and, eventually, used the needle to puncture his skin, a speck of blood poured, and then he was in bliss, and I was beside him.
I touched the dimple on his cheek, and he smiled, kissed my hand, his rough beard scratching my tender inner wrist like a burning perfume. I slid my hand down his neck, touched the inner lines of his collarbone and remarked how flawless his pale skin was, noted the sparse freckles about his shoulders. I placed my palm against his abdomen, and he grabbed my hand.
"Cold," he said with closed eyes.
I pulled his feet up onto the couch, laid him out on his side so that his back was against the sofa's back. I took my fingers and pressed against the needle tear.
Eventually, I put another log on the fire and curled up next to him, felt him breathe in my hair, felt his cold feet against mine. And then, soon, I too drifted away.
A noise startled me. My eyes shot open.
A man in black stood between me and the bright fire.
I turned my head up quickly.
"Shhhhh," he said quietly and brought a finger to his mouth. There were two others in Patrick's living room.
I recognized all three of them. Not from the old days. They were the new ones - the ones who had taken me the night of Patrick's party and needed my help in searching for their unknown client.
I peered into the eyes of the man I had tal
ked to only three weeks before, and they sparkled like cats' eyes. He pointed to the door of the loft.
"It's time," he whispered.