saying goodbye to R.E.M.

I find that I’m missing R.E.M.–missing the idea of R.E.M.–more and more as each day slowly passes us by (it hurts, and everybody hurts). I miss Michael Stipe’s surrealistic early lyrics, the Rickenbacker jangle of Peter Buck’s guitar, the inventive counter-melodies and melodic bass of Mike Mills. For the first time since I was a sophomore in college, I face a world without R.E.M. The breakup took me completely by surprise: I’m bereft, uncertain, tentative, as if I just lost a lover or a child. I think I’ll take a week or so and listen to little else than R.E.M., trying to touch that part of myself that fell in love with them in the first place.

They shifted the statues for harboring ghosts
Reddened their necks, collared their clothes
Then we danced the dance till the menace got out
She gathered the corners and called it her gown

I’m having trouble dealing with this. R.E.M. has been a sort of spiritual touchstone with me, one of the few bands able to give me chills for creating the perfect moment on record. Their music has always been perfectly economical, nothing wasted, like a musical prose poem. I always felt that R.E.M. was a secret shared between me and other like-minded fans, a club with it’s own rituals and signs. I always believed that it took a true fan to understand just how great they were, whether in their murky, early eighties incarnation, or the glam blast of their mid-1990s output.

There’s a secret stigma, reaping wheel.
Diminish, a carnival of sorts.
Chronic town, poster torn, reaping wheel.
stranger, stranger to these parts.

Watching R.E.M. from the second row during a 1995 concert, I nodded at Michael at the conclusion of “Country Feedback.” The performance seemed beyond applause, beyond simple admiration. Applause didn’t seem good enough. So I nodded at Michael, and he nodded back at me.

I wish I knew what came next. I hope that individually they’ll keep making music, and that someday far in the future, they’ll walk out together onstage again. But I know in my heart that they won’t. That day is done, and we’ll keep on living as best we can without them.

There’s a problem, feathers iron
Bargain buildings, weights and pulleys
Feathers hit the ground before the weight can leave the air

I will never be that young or that much in love again.

talk about the passion

As one diarist sums up in the wake of R.E.M.’s decision this week to call it a day, the band was dedicated like few others to “making music on its own terms.” Respected by their peers on a level enjoyed by few other bands, R.E.M. forged a 31 year career out of a handful of exquisite influences: the glistening, Rickenbacker-driven janglepop of the Byrds, a melodic take on seventies’ glam, the d0-it-yourself ethos of punk. R.E.M.’s peculiar alchemy was called many things over the years (college rock comes quickly to mind, the band being “alternative” before there was such a genre), although the band stubbornly defied categorization in releasing such stylistically disparate albums as Out of Time, Automatic for the People, and Monster (all released during the midpoint of the band’s career, a period which coincided with their critical and commercial peak). Part of the “fun and fascination” of being an R.E.M. fan, as Rolling Stone once reported, was never knowing what direction the band would take next. To their great credit. R.E.M. never made the same record twice.

“We have always been a band in the truest sense of the word,” writes bassist Mike Mills on the breakup.” Brothers who truly love, and respect, each other. We feel kind of like pioneers in this–there’s no disharmony here, no falling-outs, no lawyers squaring-off. We’ve made this decision together, amicably and with each other’s best interests at heart. The time just feels right.”

According to a carer summary in The Atlantic, “R.E.M. released 15 albums, an EP, and one early rarities collection (Dead Letter Office) between 1982 and 2012 (sic). Six of these went platinum. In terms of critical and eventual popular acclaim, R.E.M.’s run between 1982 (their debut EP Chronic Town) and 1998 (the chilly, buzzing Up) ranks with the peaks of any great American rock band.”

I came to the band a bit late, I must admit, not becoming a huge R.E.M. until the release of their fourth album, Life’s Rich Pageant, in 1986. I wore out three cassette tapes of that album, though, memorizing every Homeric twist and turn of favorite tracks such as “The Flowers of Guatemala,” “I Believe,” and “Begin the Begin.” I drove and sang along to the album countless times, so much so that even now the songs sometime seem to play on permanent repeat in my mind. This was my first R.E.M. album, and in many ways it has remained my favorite. It’s the album I go back to to remind myself of why I became such a big fan to begin with.

birdie in the hand
for life’s rich demand
the insurgency began and we missed it

Guitarist Peter Buck: ”Mike, Michael, Bill, Bertis, and I walk away as great friends. I know I will be seeing them in the future, just as I know I will be seeing everyone who has followed us and supported us through the years. Even if it’s only in the vinyl aisle of your local record store, or standing at the back of the club: watching a group of 19 year olds trying to change the world.”

twentieth century, collapse into now…

I’ve been trying for months now, and at times trying pretty hard, to dislike the latest R.E.M. album, Collapse Into Now. It’s admittedly a rather odd position for this quarter-century+ fan to be in,and I’m concluding that it’s a position which doesn’t quite fit. I like this record, as much as I tried not to. I like the reminiscent touches of mandolin, accordion, and Rickenbacker jangle and drone. I like the varying styles and points of view found in Michael Stipe’s lyrics. I like the reliability of Peter Buck and Mike Mills, and the certainty that as much as the sounds and songs sometimes seem to come from left field, they all have their antecedents in R.E.M. history.

In fact, it’s that very diversity which makes Collapse Into Now such a rewarding listen in this era of cyber-noise and hypertext attention spans. From the “Turn You Inside Out” drone of the opening track, “Discoverer,” to the choral sweep of “Me, Marlon Brando, Marlon Brando and I,” this seems not so much a departure as a reckoning of all that came before (and apologies for all the hidden references to the R.E.M catalog). It makes sense somehow for R.E.M. to be releasing this record in 2011, as much as it made sense for them to release Fables of the Reconstruction in 1985 or Life’s Rich Pageant the following year. This record and it’s predecessor, 2008′s Accelerate, make it fun to follow R.E.M. again. It’s not a landmark record; it’s just another twist for a band whose point has always been the journey, not the destination.

And the best part? R.E.M. never makes the same record twice. In a couple of years, God willing, there will be another new album to come to terms with. And we’ll begin the begin, all over again.

season of mists

It rained last night/early this morning. And now it’s cool out (or Cool ‘n’ Out, as the Joe Strummer song goes), probably in the low to mid sixties. I’m hoping, of course, that the rain and cool temps here in mid-September will help us to have a colorful autumn; I’ve always thought that a cool and wet September helps somewhat. We’ll find out, I suppose. We’ll find out one way or another.

I’m listening to Joe Strummer, obviously. Adam had mentioned to me on the phone a couple of days ago that he was listening to Joe; he’s been on my mind ever since. I’ve even been texting Adam some random Strummer lyrics, or rather, the lyrics to songs which have been playing on repeat in my mind.

 Me: I’m with the coma girl and the excitement gang.

Adam: I’m in class. Listen to Joe and stop texting me! 

Me: I will, sir!

Adam: Ha! Talk to you later.

And now, suddenly it seems (at 1:54 PM), the clouds have parted somewhat and there’s a hint of sunshine on the landscape. Which means, of course, that the front which brought the rain moved through rather quickly, it’s effect quite fleeting and perhaps not truly measured until high autumn days.

Dreams So Real

I’m to the point now where I’m frightened of my dreams. I am not, I must say, particularly frightened of what happens during my dreams; I’m frightened of waking up to discover that my dreams are not real, that reality is something very different, that the life I remember in my dreams now seems as if it happened to someone else a long, long time ago. I no longer wish to say, “Speak to me, dreams, speak to me of what I cannot see or hear during the day.”  I do not seek (or find) inspiration in my dreams; I wake up now nearly every day in a cold, cold sweat.

It’s nothing new I suppose. I’ve always seemed to dream of the past, of love and life long lost. And it all seems so real, so very real, so much so that it comes as a shock when I awake to find that what I dream of no longer exists. The shock is so vivid, sometimes, that my heart seems to already be racing when I realize that I am no longer alseep.

As Rilke wrote:

And if the earthly no longer knows your name, whisper to the silent earth: I’m flowing. To the flashing water say: I am.

No One’s Sleep (Chapter Two)

Just north of the intersection of Eutaw and Fayette is Lexington Market, founded in 1782 and once a true produce market for the expanding city. I can see it if I lean out one of my windows, just as I can see Camden Yards to the south. There are still grocers and restaurants inside, but I start spending time there after hearing it described as “the world’s largest outdoor heroin market.” If they’re dealing heroin, I think, then hooking up with a steady supply of Xans and even pain meds should be no problem at all. I’m making enough money to buy off the street, at least for a while; I’m desperate enough and making enough money to be a danger to myself.

The first warm Saturday after my desperate visit to East Baltimore, I cross the street to the old Western National Bank building (I live in the heart of what used to be, in the 1920s, the city‘s financial district), walk across the intersection, and make my way through the crowd standing around in front of the market. There aren’t that many people in front of the market, actually; the police try to keep that part of the sidewalk clear, so most people stake out spaces in front of the businesses further up the street. “Bupes,” men say loudly as I pass by: later I learn that they mean buprenophine, a drug which along with methadone is used to treat narcotics addicts. After a while I begin to see an odd logic in it: you can buy all sorts of drugs around Lexington Market, and then they’ll even sell you pills to get you off drugs. Got all the bases covered, I think. No matter where you are in your struggle with addiction, here at the market we have a designer drug just for you. In Baltimore, even the drug dealers are marketing experts.

I walk all the way to the end of the street, not looking at anyone, trying to get some sort of feel for the way business is done here. It’s more of a feeling than anything else: something is going on here. There’s a definite urgency in the conversations, almost an excitement. Something palpable. Someone, somewhere on this street, has what I need. But once again, a little more wary this time, I’m not sure how to make it happen. I have to stop for a moment. I have to think.

“You can’t stand there,” someone says. I look him over: about my height, slender, neatly dressed in a blue silk shirt, dark pinstripe slacks, and glossy black wingtips. Well, you’re standing here, I think, but I don’t say anything and just walk back the way I had come. I’m a block away from my apartment building, but I might as well be in a different world. I don’t belong here: I know it, and somehow I feel that everyone else on the street knows it, too.

Not having a better idea or anything else to do, I walk inside the market and look around. It’s crowded with both people and businesses: restaurant kiosks, grocers, butchers, seafood on ice, produce. I buy myself a crab cake sandwich and a Coke, then walk outside and sit on the concrete steps that lead to the parking lot next to the market. I’m not really concerned at this point about being asked to move along, not even by a cop: I’m a paying customer now, just someone enjoying lunch outside on a warm morning in May. I eat slowly so I’ll have plenty of time to watch and listen, time to figure out how to do business here. I have two hundred dollars in my pocket, and this time it’s money that I simply won’t lose. I’ll spend what I need, get what I want, and I’ll walk straight to my building before anything can possibly go wrong.

Two women walk out of the market while I’m finishing my sandwich. I recognize the slender, prettier, well-dressed one: LaDonna. She sees me, whispers something in the other woman’s ear, and walks over and sits beside me on the steps.

“Didn’t go very well,” she says, more of a conclusion than a question. “Or so I hear.”

“Guess not.”

“How much did they get you for?”

I look her in the eyes, not willing to say what I’m sure she already knows.

“I’m not really sure. Too much, anyway.”

“I should have come back to check. You made it home, though.”

“Apparently. Not a night I‘d like to repeat anytime soon.”

“No, it’s not. You live close?” LaDonna says.

“Just down the street. Across from the Hippodrome.”

“Nice building. Show me your place, then. I have some things you might like. And I wouldn’t mind to chill for a while, anyway. You know. Be out of sight for a while.”

“Tired of doing business today?”

“You wouldn’t believe what I put up with sometimes,” she says. “Sometimes it gets…old. Maybe you won‘t believe it, but I‘m thinking about getting out.”

“All right, then. We can hang at my place. But what if I fall asleep? Be there when I wake up?”

LaDonna smiles. “You know it, hon. I feel really bad about what happened. I want to make it up to you. Maybe you could say I don‘t want to lose your business.”

She stands up, still smiling, adjusts the purse strap over her shoulder, and we walk down the street to my apartment. Part of me screams: don’t trust her, don’t trust her, don’t trust her, don‘t have anything at all to do with her. The only reason she’s talking with me is that she knows I have money. I don’t buy that line about her wanting to come back that night and check on me; I don’t buy it at all, just like I don‘t buy that jazz about her wanting out or wanting to make it up to me. Just tell her you have something else to do, someone else to meet, somewhere else to be. It’s that simple; just tell her. But she’s lovely and her hand is soft, and I’ve been looking in more ways than one. I’ve been hungry in more ways than one. I haven’t met anyone outside of work since I moved to Baltimore.

“Where you work?” she says.

“A bank. On North Calvert.”

“Posh. What you do? Loans?”

“No, I’m in corporate.”

“Aren’t you lucky.”

“I sure wasn’t lucky the other night.”

LaDonna laughs. “No, you sure weren‘t,” she says. “But let‘s not talk about that anymore. It‘s over now. You learn anything?”

“Yep. That I won’t be back in East Baltimore any time soon.”

“Why should you?” LaDonna says. “Especially when I know what you like and I can come to you?”

“And why on earth would you be willing to do that?”

“A woman always has her reasons. And believe me, I have mine. I don‘t like to spend every day in East Baltimore, you know. ‘Scuse me for saying so, but you live in a great building, hon. Maybe we could be good for each other.”

I touch my electronic key to the sensor and we walk into my building. LaDonna glances up, uncomfortably, I think, at the lone security camera as we make the short walk to the elevator. I honestly don’t know if it’s recording anything at all, or if it’s only there for show. I wonder about that sometimes, but never bother to ask.

“Live here long?”

“No, not very long at all. Just a few weeks, really. I’ve only been in B-more since late March. I started work two days after I got here.”

“That was quick. Charm City. ”

“Just the way it worked out,” I say. “It all came together pretty quickly. Anyway, I really needed the money. It helped a lot to jump right in. But I sure haven‘t seen much charm yet.”

The elevator door opens, I gesture with my hand, politely, I hope, and we step inside.

“Where you from?”

“Kentucky, actually.”

“Yeah. I can hear it in your voice. So, how you like it here?”

“I like it that the ballpark’s just a few blocks down the street. I like it that I can walk to work. And it‘s a good building, like you were saying. And today, at least, I‘m not wandering around in East Baltimore.”

“Yeah, hon. I thought you might like this much better.”

She ends up staying the night. LaDonna is in my arms as I awake and the sun is just beginning to cover all of Eutaw. There’s a hint of a breeze and I remember other spring mornings in bed, spring mornings with my children, spring mornings during college, spring mornings when I was young and less damaged and newly married, all the spring mornings, all the seasons of my life, good and bad, that have somehow led me here. LaDonna is awake and we begin to make love, again, love only minutes removed from dreams, love by chance, love by convenience, love by right, love with an urgency I feel from her mouth, lips, and hands. We stay in bed most of the morning, and she kisses me and lightly brushes her nails against my face as she leaves.

LaDonna begins coming over two or three times a week, sometimes unannounced, sometimes after plans we’ve made in person on my lunch break, sometimes after a late phone call, sometimes right after I get home from work. I like it that she’s pretty, that’s she young, that she dresses and acts as if she works in an office herself. I take her next door to Lucy’s, or to Brewers Art on North Charles Street, for drinks or dinner and to show her off. Mostly, though, we listen to Miles, Thelonious, Bill Evans, and Coltrane, play a rather intoxicated game of Scrabble, look out the window and watch the street, make love on the couch and on the bed, and enjoy what she brings to my apartment.

It isn’t long,not long at all before I discover the big comedown which happens after we finish smoking her pipe: it leaves me fatigued, sick, anxious, and depressed. So LaDonna makes sure we have other things on hand: Percocets and Xans, mostly, although sometimes she‘ll take a Fenergan or two before we get started. “Makes it last longer,“ she says. I remember reading a William Gibson novel where he calls such a mixture “going lateral.” I really don’t think about the danger of mixing different narcotics; I just know that having something else on hand takes the edge off the comedown. I need something else, I think, because even though I feel good while we’re smoking, the minute it’s gone the buzz goes right with it. It’s the most fleeting thing I’ve ever known. The comedown is frightening. No wonder people spend so much money on crack. If you don’t have it, you’ll die.

Somehow I keep going to work, though it’s becoming harder to get there and harder to stay the entire day. I keep looking at my watch while I‘m at my cube on the ninth floor; I keep looking at the clock on my computer monitor. I chew gum, chew my nails, chew on ink pens, drink fountain Cokes from the lobby shop, crunch the leftover ice, and wonder if LaDonna will be at my apartment when I walk home (she’s had keys since a couple of weeks after we started sleeping together). And it isn’t long until I decide that I won’t pay rent with this check; we can buy a lot of product with that money. For the next couple of weeks, at least, I won’t have to worry about anything. I won’t have to stay depressed. I won’t have to think. And to me, not having to think is the greatest high of all. I don’t think about the reckoning or the consequences; I just want to get away from myself and my worries and my loneliness for a while. I want to get myself a little oblivion. I don’t want to be me anymore, with my faults and my grief and my worries and my loneliness. I’m tired of thinking about it. I’m tired of thinking about myself.

By this point I’ve been consciously dealing with depression every single day for the last twelve years. At one point I think it’s a result of my (very) unhappy marriage and abuses both taken and given, but the longer I live with it the more I believe that depression has been with me, in one form or another, since I was very young. I was diagnosed, as it were, rather by accident. My ex, a nurse, talked with our family physician without my knowledge. He was concerned enough to ask me point blank: “Are you depressed?”

“Yeah, definitely. I probably never would have come right out and said it. Thank you for asking.”

“For how long?”

“I’m not really sure. It’s certainly nothing new.”

The doctor puts his hand on my right shoulder. “I want you to understand that you’re not…crazy. And that we‘ll get you feeling well again. Depression doesn‘t discriminate. It doesn’t choose, although it does seem, based on what you’ve told me, to run in your family. That’s actually fairly normal. And it‘s not your fault at all. It‘s there, it‘s interfering with your life, and we‘re going to treat it. And you will feel better.”

“I hope so.”

“You will,” he says, writing me a prescription for Prozac and also Ambien, for sleep. Sometimes, after not sleeping for days, I cry with frustration when I look into the mirror, seeing the lines etching themselves deeper day by day into my face. I’m tired, unbelievably tired, achingly tired, always tired, and even though I usually begin the morning without an overwhelming sense of melancholy, by the end of the day I’m so morose that sometimes I sit on the stairs at home after work, staring off into the distance for what seems like hours. I’m in a place, at those times, where no one else can reach. I can’t even reach myself.

Sitting on the floor in front of my couch, LaDonna and I go through a hundred dollars worth of tens in a little over three hours. We rarely have sex anymore, and we no longer ration the coke as we did before; we now smoke greedily, each wanting to run as far as possible from the worries and disappointments in our lives. That’s what I tell myself, anyway, but I know there’s a word for people with this kind of habit: addicts. As long as powder remains in the pipe, we’re fairly content, but the minute the bags are empty we both become sullen and withdrawn. We hardly even touch each other anymore; getting high, not fucking, is the only thing we care about. Truly, it’s the only thing we have in common. I’m spending thousands of dollars to keep us supplied, digging myself a financial grave; there are no longer groceries in my apartment apart from an occasional cup or two of yogurt that I buy from the Seven Eleven on the corner of North Howard and West Baltimore, Instead, there are only drugs. And the drugs, as every addict realizes sooner rather than later, don’t last forever. Actually, they don’t last long at all. We use what we buy in a single night; we now spend as much time trying to score as we do getting high. It’s more than a little ironic, when I think about it. My expensive apartment, across the street from historic and massive buildings, has become a private crack house for two.

“Damn,” LaDonna says as I manage to use my pocketknife to scrape a little more powder from the seals of two of the black bags. It’s my idea to do that: I‘m catching on. “Damn. Time to get a little base crazy.”

“Come again?.”

“I mean search the floor. We’ve been smoking here for weeks. There must be a lot of powder in your carpet.”

“Here’s some,” I say, lying on the floor and sifting through the weave of the carpet with my hands.

“We’ll put everything we find on the coffee table, then see how much we have.”

“Not nearly enough to fill a ten, but there’s quite a bit down here.”

“We’ll have to go out later,” LaDonna says. “But we should be able to keep going another hour or so.”

She takes the knife and pushes the chewy through the pipe, then pushes it back to the other end. “There’s always a coating in the pipe, too. Just by doing that we can get two or three hits, easy.”

Sure enough, she holds a flame under the pipe and the tip of the chewy glows orange once again. “Take it, hon. I want you to go first.”

Not expecting much, I place the pipe to my lips and draw the smoke deeply into my lungs. But my lips quickly go numb and I instantly relax; LaDonna was right about the residue. There’s a lot more coke in there than I thought.

I hand her the pipe, heat the tip for her, and she hits it like something rare and worth savoring. I suppose it is worth savoring now that we’re combing the carpet for stray bits of powder. Part of me realizes how pathetic it is to be crawling around the floor looking for a few hits of crack, but all I really care about right now is where that next hit is coming from. I want to keep smoking. I want to hide from the world for as long as I can. I want the world to just go away.

While LaDonna leans back against the couch, I stand up and walk over to one of my bookcases; there’s a framed picture of my sons on the top shelf. I turn it around because I can’t stand the thought of them watching me as I do something I never could have imagined while I was living with them and their mother. There’s still enough good left in me that I’m ashamed of what I’m doing, truly ashamed. I’m ashamed of what I’m doing to myself; I’m ashamed of what I’m doing to them. I’m scared to even imagine what they would think of me now. My life with them, and our once unyielding love, seems like an illusion to me now. I’m not sure if they’ll ever learn to love me again. Among all my nightmares, that’s the worst one of all.

“We’re dry, hon,” LaDonna says.

“Guess it’s time to go out, then.”

“If you want.”

“Sure,” I say, picking up my keys and wallet as we walk toward the door. “It’s ten o’clock. Think we can find anything?

“Yeah, but I’m not sure, at this time of night and in this part of town, exactly who we’ll be dealing with. I know some places, but I don‘t know the people. We‘ll just have to go for a walk and find out.”

“Thought you knew everyone.”

“Not exactly. Not everyone. Especially here in West Baltimore.”

“Anything to worry about?”

“There’s always something to worry about,” LaDonna says, “when you’re dealing with people you don’t know. And sometimes even when you‘re dealing with people you do know. Sometimes I don‘t know which is worse.”

We take the elevator down from the third floor and walk out onto the sidewalk along Eutaw. There’s a group of young women, probably medical students (the University of Maryland Hospital is only three blocks or so to the southwest), standing outside Lucy’s, wearing short pants, sandals, and summer dresses on this warm night. They’re laughing and talking, and pay us no mind at all as we cross the street and head west along Fayette, toward Poe’s gravesite four or five blocks away. The city darkens as we walk further from my apartment; there’s not a soul on these streets and only an occasional car. I feel that anything could happen, that danger could step out of the darkness at any minute, but I keep walking out of hunger and need. LaDonna knows the city a lot better than I could, even if I had lived here all my life. I just hope she knows what she’s doing.

“Over there,” LaDonna says as we stop to wait out some traffic heading north along Martin Luther King Boulevard. “Go ahead and hand me the money.”

“Never been this far before.” I hand her my last eighty dollars; I won’t have a paycheck for another week. “Still looks deserted to me.”

“It’s not. But you won’t see very many people just walking around. Cops like to pretend there‘s a curfew over here. They‘ll stop you for nothing. Have your bank ID with you?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“It might make the difference between being arrested or being sent home.”

“Hope it doesn’t come to that.”

“Yeah. Me, too.”

“Nervous?” LaDonna asks.

“Just a little…cautious.”

“Good. That’s the sort of thing that keeps you alive.”

Keeps you alive? Oh, fuck, I say to myself. What the fuck did you get yourself into, Edward? Why the fuck are you still taking chances like this? Didn’t you learn your lesson weeks ago at that fucking crack house? With this sort of hunger, no, let’s be honest about it and make that addiction, I realize that I don’t know myself anymore. I never dreamed when I was younger and helping raise two little boys and wearing a suit to work every day¾I never dreamed¾that I would become as pathetic and desperate as I am now. I was a reporter. I coached baseball and basketball. I came back to a lovely home and family every night. I worked for the governor and attorney general, for God’s sake. People like me don’t do things like this. I’m beginning to hate myself as badly as I want the drugs.

Without holding hands, LaDonna and I cross the street and once more leave the light behind.

LaDonna leads the way into a small parking lot beside a single row of one-story apartment buildings. Hidden from street view by an evergreen hedge, three men are sitting on the curb in the sallow light from the apartments.

“What you need, girl? You need the Ready?” says the one on the left as we walk toward them. I see that he’s just a kid; he doesn’t look a day over eighteen years old.

“Looking for Tens,” LaDonna says.

“Tens we got. Heron, too, if that’s your thing.”

“No, not that. Just the Tens. The Tens are fine.”

He nods and one of his…friends…stands up and walks toward the apartments. The other one goes to stand by the hedge; I can’t imagine how many times they do this in a single night. Or, for that matter, a week.

Then the kid that LaDonna is talking to looks me over. Even before he says anything, I take it that he doesn’t like what he sees.

He looks back at LaDonna. “Who’s your bag bride?” he says. Unfortunately, I’ve heard enough by now to know exactly what he means: whore. He’s calling me a crack whore.

“Who’s yours?” The words are out before I can even think about it.

“What the fuck? What the fuck did you just say to me?”

“Just chill,” LaDonna says. “Everybody just…chill.”

He’s up in my face now, probably what he wanted all along. I can smell the sweat and some kind of cologne, no, make that lotion, on his skin.

“Step,” he says.

“Step? What the fuck you mean, step?”

“Step out of my way, motherfucker.” He starts to reach toward the small of his back, but then the world seems to explode and there’s nothing but a loud ringing in my right ear. Then he’s lying on his back on the asphalt with a dark stain in the middle of his chest. LaDonna is still holding the gun at arm’s length, a gun I didn’t know she had.

“Run,” she says. “Don’t just fucking stand there, fool. Fucking…run.”

I crash through the hedge, running back the way we came, scared now in a way I’ve never been scared before. I haven’t made it thirty yards before I hear two more shots, the last seemingly louder than the other. Although I want to, although I try, I can’t make myself look back. I run until I want to throw up, I run until I do throw up, and then I keep on running toward the lights of downtown . No matter what else happened back there, I know that I’ll never see LaDonna again¾unless it‘s in court. I have no idea if she’s being questioned right now, or even if she’s alive. Without asking around on the street, or maybe reading the Sun in the morning (they publish a map showing the location of the city‘s homicides), I don’t even have a way to find out.

Back in the apartment, I drink straight from the kitchen tap and splash water on my face. Expecting a knock at the door any second, my legs trembling from running and fear, I walk quickly and compulsively around the apartment, looking out the windows again and again and again. Oh God: the carpet. I run the vacuum, twice, emptying the canister down the garbage chute each time. Then I wash the canister inside and out with hot water, wipe down the coffee table and throw the cloth away along with two glass pipes and some chewy left in a coffee cup on the kitchen counter, Wait, that’s not good enough: I throw the coffee cup away, too. Something in my mind tells me that I’m missing something, or worse, that no matter how well I clean the place any rookie cop in the world could find traces of coke without looking very hard at all.

Double-checking and then triple-checking to make sure that the apartment door is locked, I walk into the bathroom and look in the mirror, wondering if I was seen by anyone else, wondering how they would describe me. Yes, that’s him, officer. Slender guy, dark hair, dirty blond maybe, five-ten or so. What was he wearing? Really can’t say; it was dark and he was running toward downtown. That’s when I see the blood on my tee shirt. I very nearly rip it off, then take a hot shower and change into different clothes. I make sure to put the jeans and shirt I was wearing into a garbage bag, throw it down the trash chute as well, then turn out all the lights and sit in a chair I pull up to one of the living room windows. It doesn’t escape me that the act of throwing the shirt away is itself a crime, another charge to be added if the police identify me as being there when that boy was shot . But then, what am I supposed to do: keep it?

I sit there all night, watching the occasional pedestrian or car heading north on Eutaw. I startle at the sound of every siren, even though there’s a fire company down the street and the ladder trucks and ambulances race past my building every single night. At one point one of the unarmed safety officers I’ve seen before, wearing a yellow vest, stands across the street at the intersection with Fayette. She looks around slowly as she talks on her radio; it makes me even more anxious even though she’s only there for show. Something to make the tourists feel safe, I suppose. At least those tourists, though, brave or foolish enough to leave the sanctum of the Inner Harbor and end up here at the edge of the Western world. It’s fucking Somalia out there. Fucking Mogadishu. More than once, I rush to the bathroom and throw up again. I’ve just seen someone shot dead, and for all I know, he might not be the only one. For all I know, LaDonna might be on her way to the morgue, too.

I’m Not Sleeping Anymore…

You can learn to accept almost anything if you live long enough: hunger, rejection, failure, pain, regret. But what you can never accept is the sleeplessness, the inability to escape from yourself. Augustine knew this, and wrote about it; so did the many others.

“After all it is probably only insomnia,” Hemingway said. For a long time those words unnerved me, and yet I could not understand why. Now, though, I realize that it’s the hint of darker terrors, the suggestion that there is something worse than the insomnia itself. It would frighten anyone, I believe: the realization that there is actually something worse than your greatest fear.

It amuses me when I hear people describe their sleeplessness, how they rise from their bed at two a.m. and settle into an armchair with a book and a cup of flavored tea. That’s not insomnia: insomnia is despair, looking at yourself in the mirror after lying awake all night, again, and crying at what you see. Insomnia is not being able to remember the last time you slept through the night. It’s being on the edge of sleep and suddenly feeling your heart begin to race, knowing that your best chance for true rest has just passed you by. It’s the realization that you’re finally going to sleep, that you’re relaxed enough to finally go under, only to wake an hour later and be assaulted by your racing thoughts the rest of the night. Mostly, it’s fatigue. It’s being so tired and so run down that you couldn’t get out of bed to read a book and make yourself a cup of tea even if you wanted to. It’s wanting to go outside, to experience the night, and having to content yourself with remembering the places that you’ve walked in the past. It’s about being tired, so tired that it makes you shiver and makes you physically sick.

There’s a state, when you have it bad enough, where you lie every night in the purgatory between sleep and wakefulness. Dreams, when they visit you at all, are fractal and silent. What sleep you achieve is like found poetry, such random luck that even when you do lose yourself you awake with a start, believing that you haven’t slept at all.

 

No One’s Sleep (Chapter One, Continued)

I turn around and walk back to my building, all the while carrying the two Xanax in the palm of my hand. I’ll try to save them, I tell myself, trying not to cry, knowing they‘re the last ones I‘ll have. But they’re in my mouth before I reach Eutaw, and by the time I pass Lucy’s Irish Pub next door to my building, let alone take the elevator to my third-floor apartment, I have nothing at all. In a few moments I’ll fall asleep for a precious hour. But the Xanax doesn’t work liked it used to. I’ll awake needing more, always more, all the time, always more, still sick, always sick, and I won’t sleep again for a week. And by that time my job and my great Baltimore experiment will be over.

I had no intention when I moved to Baltimore, truly, of buying Xanax or any other drug on the street. I had been taking Xanax for anxiety for years¾by prescription, of course, as a complement to the medicine I take for my depression. But doctors are reluctant to prescribe across state lines, naturally, and I knew that once I moved to Baltimore I had to find a new doctor¾and fast¾before my limited refills ran out and I faced the likelihood of intense and painful withdrawal; even, as is warned, seizures and death. So I set a March 31st start date for my new job (as a web analyst) at a bank on Calvert Street at the intersection with Fayette, just across the street from the courthouse and only four blocks or so from the Inner Harbor: this will allow my insurance to take effect the following day. Finding a doctor in Baltimore, I thought, would be no problem at all. In fact, I never even gave it a second thought¾not at first, anyway. After all, isn’t Johns Hopkins, one of the most famous psychiatric hospitals in the world, located on the east side of town? How could there not be adequate medical care in Baltimore–especially psychiatric care for those suffering from depression and anxiety? Johns Hopkins, I imagine, must employ a hundred and fifty doctors at least. Quite possibly, even a lot more. But I had no idea it would take the bank until the last days of July to issue me an insurance card, when it was far too late to do me any good. By then I was in full blown crisis, long out of medicine and money, and was truly beginning to believe that I might not survive. The physical¾not to mention emotional pain¾had become, putting it mildly, unbearable. As badly as I loved Baltimore then, and miss Baltimore now, I was so sick that I couldn’t stay there another single day. That’s not an exaggeration: not another single day.

By that point I had tried everything I could think of to find a doctor: walking to the emergency room at the University of Maryland hospital a few blocks southwest of the apartment, even making an appointment at a clinic on nearby South Paca Street. The doctor I saw there was most pleasant, of course. “Do you know you’re a junkie?” she said. “No,” I said, “I didn’t know that. I didn’t even know what Xanax was until it was prescribed to me. Am I dressed like a junkie?” I asked, assuming she would notice my pinstripe suit, white French cuff shirt and blue Hermes tie with gold ringlets.

“Are your hands shaking?”

“Yes. Just as they have since I was very, very young.”

“Do you feel that you need Xanax to make it through the day?”

“Yes. It helps.”

“Do you feel that you need one right now?”

“Yes. I would like to continue the medication which was prescribed to me by my family doctor.”

“Then you’re a junkie.”

“Oh. So that’s the way it is, then.”

Then she made me wait in the lobby while my medical records were faxed from Kentucky. When they finally arrived, she handed me a one week prescription (with no refills), for half the dosage my body was accustomed to. Peach Xanax, they‘re called, because of the color. Only half a milligram. Looking her in the eye, I tear the prescription in shreds, let it fall like ash to the floor, and walk toward the door. There went another eighty dollars for the office visit, for nothing.

“Good luck screening out the junkies,” I say, turning to stare the bitch down without blinking. “I’m sure you’re very good at it.”

“You ever come back here again, I’ll call the cops,” the doctor says.

“Do it, bitch. Tearing up a scrip and refusing to take any shit from you is probably a Class D felony. At least.”

“I’m calling the cops right now.”

“Do it. I’m walking to work at Provident Bank on Calvert Street. And after work I’m coming straight back to my apartment at 11North Eutaw. You have the address. Use it.”

Back out on the sidewalk and walking to work, in the shadows and beneath the awnings on the east side of the street, I begin to think of a song by the Rolling Stones: “All my friends are junkies…that’s not really true.” You are a junkie if you’re foolish enough to walk into a clinic in inner city Baltimore. Yes, you certainly are. Even if you’re an officer at the city’s largest independent bank. Even if you’re paying $1500 a month for a 650 square foot apartment (with a full-on view of the upscale and lovely Hippodrome Theater) just a few blocks away from your office. “I’m a monkey man,” Mick Jagger sang. “Are you a monkey woman, too?” He was singing about heroin, of course. But I know what he’s talking about. I live with that sort of monkey all the time.

In late April, with a five-dollar tip for the driver, I exit a cab at a white clapboard corner store in east Baltimore at the intersection of Jefferson Street and North Montford Avenue. Three women, probably looking much older than they actually are, stand around the door and stop talking among themselves as I walk up the steps and into the store. I’m aware of how silly and out of place I look (even in my torn jeans, black Chuck Taylor’s, leather jacket and R.E.M. tee shirt), and how this little cab ride could turn out to have a very messy ending. But there’s no turning back now. The cab is long gone, and I couldn’t find my exact location even if I had a map. If something happens to me now, it’s rather likely that I’ll never be found. I’ll just become one of the disappeared, just another statistic; if I’m lucky, really, really, lucky, they’ll find my body in a week or so floating in the Inner Harbor. There’s no one here that I know, and I have two hundred dollars in my pocket. Knowing that I have the cash makes me feel even more vulnerable and frightened than I already am. I’m a mark, an opportunity, a target. But I have no choice now but to see this through. I’ve come too far and I’m too sick from withdrawal to back out now.

I walk to the back of the store, take a Gatorade out of the cooler, and pay the cashier behind the window. Shatterproof glass, I assume. Honestly, the extra security precautions in the store make me even more nervous. It isn’t hard to picture a gun pointed at the cashier, and endless cashiers before her. With nothing else to do, I walk back out of the store, into a cold and overcast afternoon. I have no idea what to do next. One of the men who moved the furniture into my apartment said he had a cousin who worked this neighborhood. Hook you up with some Xans, he said. They’ll know what you’re there for. Give ‘em a minute to check you out and you’ll be in business. And with no more than that sketchy bit of information, I walk the two blocks from my apartment to the Radisson, get into a cab, and give the driver the name of an intersection where, judging from the look on his face, he’s rarely asked to go.

“What you want?” the shorter of the women says as I stand, rather self-consciously, to the right of the door. She’s wearing a dark gray parka with a faux fur-rimmed hood and is looking at me, understandably, as if I just beamed down from the starship Enterprise. Her hair is done up in dreads, but she looks as if she’s been sleeping on the floor-o-r the street–for weeks.

Just meeting a friend.”

“Friend? What friend? I ain’t seen you before. You ain’t got no friends here. What you want? What you really want? Everybody come here want something.”

I say the words while I can still get them out without choking on my own voice. “Maybe some Xans or Klonopin.”

“Xans or Pins,” she says, smiling now. “Why didn’t you say so?”

She takes my hand and walks me deeper into the neighborhood, past endless boarded-up row houses that, maybe eighty years ago, were probably rather handsome. I notice that the streets are deserted, the stoops empty, lacking even the occasional face in the window in the few houses that actually look as if they may be occupied. I’ve seen and walked neighborhoods with this kind of dangerous vibe. But I’ve never seen one this…deserted. It makes me even more nervous and certain that something very unpleasant is about to happen. I feel as if we’re being watched, never mind the fact that I haven’t actually seen another soul since we left the store.

“I’m Tara. What you called, hon?”

“Depends, I guess. Eddie. Ed. Whatever.”

“You’re in the right place, Ed. I know everybody here. You gonna take care of me, right?”

“Sure,” I say. “You take care of me, I’ll take care of you We in business?”

“That’s my man,” Tara says. “Of course we are. That’s my man.”

We walk another block, still holding hands, and notice an older gentleman wearing dark framed glasses, a fedora, and a tan suit walking towards us on the other side of the street. I notice that he seems to be walking very quickly and isn’t bothering to look around as he makes his way down the street. He’s in a hurry. Too big of a hurry, I think.

“That’s Miller,” Tara says. “He live here, too, He always know what’s going on.”

We cross the street well in front of him, though the distance seems to close rather quickly. “Miller,” Tara says, “Where you going, hon?”

“Gotta see a man,” Miller says. “Who’s that with you?”

“This is Ed. He’s my friend.”

“Friend,” Miller says. “Cracker sure don’t look like no friend.”

No, I tell you. He’s taking care of me today.”

Miller won‘t so much as look at me. “What your friend want?”

By this time we’re following Miller down the street. I always walk fairly quickly and even I’m having trouble keeping up with him.

“Maybe some Xans or Klonopin,” I say.

“Well, which one is it?” Miller says. He laughs, rather unkindly, I think. “The man don’t even know what he wants.”

“Hold up,” Tara says. “You wearing me out.”

“Can’t stop,” Miller says. “I’m dirty.”

Even I know what that means. He‘s carrying heroin, or as I would hear it called later, heron. “Well, ya got any benzos,” I say.

“I don’t even know what that is.”

“Xanax. Downers. Nerve pills. Maybe some pain pills.”

“Ain’t got none of that stuff on me,” Miller says. “No money in it. Gotta see a man.”

“That’s what I hear. You already said that. Later, then.”

Miller hurries down the street, sort of shuffling as he walks. He must be carrying a lot of stuff, I think. He moves like a man who thinks something might fall out of his pockets or his waistband at any second.

“I’m sorry, baby,” Tara says, leaning now against my right arm. “We can still find some things. You still gonna help me out?”

“Sure,” I say. “I’ll still help you out. But you gotta help me first. I can‘t go back with nothing. I just can‘t do it. The hell with it…I‘m jonesing.”

“I know it, baby. Tara won’t leave you. Just walk with me for a while.”

“I don’t even know where I am. I don‘t know a damn soul.”

“You’re with me, baby. You know me. You’re with me.”

I have to stop and think a second. Downtown is on my right, to the west. I could just take off walking on my own and eventually run into one of the north-south streets, like the familiar Calvert and, further east, North Charles. After all, I walk east from Eutaw to Calvert every morning. But I have no idea who I might run into before I get there, and at the moment I don’t want to be walking around alone. It’s not dark yet, like Bob Dylan wrote, but it’s getting there.

“Just what, exactly, can we get?”

“I know you got money,” Tara says. “Money talks. We can get anything we want.”

“Pain pills, then?”

“Depends on who we run into. And there are always…other things.”

“What other things? I’m not so sure I should be here, Tara.”

“But you are here, baby,” she says. “You’re already here.”

Just for a minute I picture myself with a needle in my arm. The thought makes me shiver, makes me nauseous, and I try to imagine what the endless row houses looked like when people and children actually lived here and the houses were still new. The people who helped build this city lived here, I suppose. But if there were once children, families, or even ghosts here, they disappeared a long, long time ago. They disappeared a very long time ago. And now I’m just another ghost, wandering aimlessly down an empty, dangerous, unknown street with a stranger and hunger and fatigue and worry while the spirit-spring wind is blowing cold in a city I hardly know. I’m walking in a fog. Where no one notices the contrast of white on white.

Tara and I watch as a woman exits a row house and walks, with an ease I don’t share, in our direction. Tara laughs and calls out: “LaDonna. What you up to, girl?”

“Hey, baby girl. What you need?”

“You got the Ready?”

“Ready?” Add confusion to my growing anxiety.

“You’ll like it,” Tara says. “It’s just crack, baby.”

“I got what you need,” LaDonna says. She’s pretty, I think, and young, with small features and small breasts and slender hands that don‘t appear as if they‘ve done a single day’s work in her life. In her red blouse and black slacks, she looks as if she’s heading to an office downtown. She looks like the sort of person I’ve been hoping to meet in the pubs. But since I moved to Baltimore, I really haven’t met anyone at all.

“You got Tens?”

“Fives or Tens. Whatever you need.”

Tara looks up at me. “Tens are always better,” she says, a little more animated now. There’s something different about her eyes. She can taste it now; she can taste the fix she’s been wanting all day, or perhaps even longer. Unfortunately, I know that feeling.

“Come here a sec,” I say, and walk up the sidewalk just a few yards so we can talk.

“I’m not really …following…this.”

“Dollars, baby. What we’re getting either costs five dollars or ten dollars. So, how many you want?”

“Tens are good? Eight of them, then.” I reach into my left front pocket and try to pull out four twenties as casually as possible. “Think that’s enough?”

Tara puts her hand on mine. “That‘s good. Real good. But not here. We’ll get off the street first.”

“I have things to do,” LaDonna says.

“Let’s walk up to your place, then,” Tara says.

LaDonna’s place¾or what she says is her place, as I doubt she really lives here¾looks habitable from the outside, but once we walk in it’s all wreckage and detritus, human and otherwise. There’s no heat, no running water, and the couch and two chairs are like those you usually see abandoned on the curb. Two men are asleep on the couch, one of them a very large and athletic looking man with a needle and syringe hanging out of his arm; a woman sleeps with her mouth open on one of the chairs. An older lady sits in the other chair watching the flickering and snowy television, occasionally holding a lighter under the end of a glass tube, inhaling slowly, holding in the smoke, and then blowing languidly it toward the ceiling.

LaDonna walks upstairs and returns with a handful of black re-sealable bags; it would probably take three or four of them to cover the palm of my hand. “Give Ed a taste,” Tara says. “He’s new.”

“Just put a little on your tongue,” LaDonna says.

I open one of the baggies as she says, putting a few grains on my tongue, which instantly goes numb.

“Did you feel that?”

“Um, yeah. I think so, anyway. It‘s…different.”

“It’ll get even better,” LaDonna says. “You haven’t even done it right. She’ll show you how. Time for you to bust your cherry.”

Tara smiles, leans against me again as I hand LaDonna the money, takes the baggies, and leads me by hand to an empty space along the wall by the couch. She takes a glass tube out of her parka; I notice that one end is filled with something that looks like copper wire.

“What’s that stuff?”

“It’s the chewy,” she says. “It keeps the powder at the end of the pipe.”

I notice that the end of her pipe with the chewy is charred and jagged from being broken. Maybe more than once.

“The heat,” Tara says. “Sometimes a piece will just break off. After a while you just get a new one.”

“I’m really not sure.”

“Just chill, baby doll. You like downers, right? You’re gonna feel real good in no time at all.”

Tara measures out a few grains of powder on the chewy, takes a lighter out of her coat, and places the flame under the end of the pipe. She takes a draw as the powder glows orange and melts, and closes her eyes with the pleasure she gets from it. The odor is hard to describe: it’s definitely chemical, with just a faint sweetness. After a few seconds she exhales; I’m surprised at the amount of smoke that drifts up toward the ceiling. She didn’t seem to take in that much at all.

“Your turn,” she says. “Here, I’ll help you. There‘s still some in there. Just let me melt it for you.”

I don’t even smoke, I think. And I can count on a single hand the times I’ve smoked pot. In fact, I’ve only bought one joint in my life. And now…this. I take a light draw like Tara tells me, hold in the smoke for a few seconds, and exhale lightly, almost like a sigh. Tara takes back the pipe, loads up some more coke, and we share hits until the first bag is empty.

“You good, baby?”

“I’m good. Relaxed, maybe. My lips are a little numb. Wish we had some music or something.”

“Maybe next time we chill at your place.”

“Maybe.”

“I know we will, baby. Here,” Tara says. “Have some more.”

We go through the contents of five more bags as people wander in and out of the house. The man with the syringe awakes, stands up, stretches, and walks upstairs with the needle still in his arm¾and even though I‘m curious about who or what might be upstairs, I‘m not about to follow him and find out. The older woman remains in front of the television, still smoking only occasionally, not even bothering to look as the people come and go. Women arrive, on their own and in groups and with men. But tonight, in this place, in this city, there is no one talking of Michelangelo. I fall asleep, finally, still against the wall, my head on Tara’s shoulder. In the morning she’s gone, along with the two other bags, my Seiko watch, wallet, and the six twenty-dollar bills I had in my left front pocket.

No One’s Sleep (Chapter One)

Baltimore, a bright Saturday morning in early August. All my nerve endings on fire, in pain that becomes more intense by the hour, sleepless for days, unwashed, sick from withdrawal, sick with worry, and sick in heart and body, I step out of my apartment building on North Eutaw Street, take a wistful look south at Camden Yards a few blocks away, and then walk the half block to East Fayette.

“Yo, Ed,” Outlaw says, standing down the street at the intersection with North Howard. The blue and white light rail train clatters by, maybe on its way south to the airport, I think.. “Hurry up. I told you I have to catch the bus.”

I give him a brief wave, more of an acknowledgment than amity (I‘ve paid him more than enough when we‘ve done business before that he doesn‘t have the right to tell me to hurry), and walk across the street toward the KFC and the pawn shop on the corner–the pawn shop which already holds my notebook computer, Citizen Eco-drive watch and lovely, beautifully-grained, hollow-body Epiphone guitar. I haven’t had so much as a dime in over a week. I’ve been drinking tap water just to stay alive.

“You bring it like I told you?” Outlaw says.

“It’s here,” I say, glancing down at my boxed Blackberry in a blue plastic shopping bag.

“Show it. Open it up.”

I show Outlaw the charger, the manual, even the disc with the synch software. He takes the bag, holds out his hand, and drops two football shaped pills into my palm. Xanax. Blue. One milligram each. I can already taste the familiar and pleasant bitterness underneath my tongue.

He starts to walk away. “I’ll call you,” he says. “I’m gonna bring you some Percocets and some other things you like. Some more Xans. Yeah. I‘ll bring you some more Percs and Xans.”

“What the hell is this shit?” I say. “Since when is a Blackberry worth a measly two goddamn Xanax?”

“I’ll call you, man. I’ll bring you some more stuff.”

“I have a better idea. Give me back my fucking Blackberry.”

“I’ll call you, man, Chill out.”

How can you fucking call me, I think. You have my fucking phone, motherfucker. I can’t even fucking call my family. I can’t even remember the fucking numbers; they’re stored in the fucking phone. And then I have an actual moment of clarity: I’ve just traded my Blackberry¾my only connection to my family and the outside world¾for a mere two Xanax. Street value in Baltimore: maybe five or six dollars. And although we’ve been doing business for a few weeks now, I know that I’ll never see Outlaw or my phone again. No more Xanax when my hands are trembling so badly that I can‘t even type, no more late night phone calls when he’s so strung out on heroin that I can’t understand a single word he says. He’s just ripped me off, and I stood there and let him do it. If I had felt up to it, I should have kicked his fucking ass. I sure as hell was angry enough, in spite of the cop standing in front of the bank on the other corner (who paid absolutely no attention to what we were so obviously doing). But now Outlaw will stay as far away from me as he can. Dealers have this thing: they never take another dollar from you after they’ve ripped you off. It is, I suppose, part of the code they live by. And believe this: every buyer gets ripped off eventually.

Outlaw stops, briefly, before rounding the corner to the bus stop. “What’s this,” he says, the synch chord dangling from his left hand.

“It connects the phone to your computer. You can back up all your data Synch your calendars. Synch your contacts. Whatever.”

“Don’t need that,” he says. And then I realize what I should have known before: Outlaw has never used a computer in his life. Stupid, uneducated motherfucker. But really…who’s the stupid motherfucker now?

much too late for goodbye

“I get the feeling that you’re hiding something,” Holly said, “that there’s some part of your life that no one else can reach. You’re dealing with something, something serious, and I don’t know what it is.”

“Maybe it’s just a case of the right person, wrong time,” I said. “Anyway, I’ve told you things that I’ve never mentioned to anyone else.”

“Maybe. Yes, I’m certain that it happens all the time.” Holly took a drink of her latte and then drummed her fingers on the tabletop. “I just don’t understand you sometimes. If at all.”

“Well, neither do I. Understand myself, I mean. And if I don’t, then I suppose it isn’t fair to expect you to understand me either.”

“Then who are you, anyway?”

“Someone who thought that things would work out for us. Obviously, I was wrong.”

“Don’t put it that way. It’s no one’s fault, you know.”

“Then why do I feel so guilty?”

“Who says that you’re the only one who feels guilty?”

“Fair enough. I had no idea.”

“I’m going to walk over to the counter and pick up a copy of The New York Times,” I said. “It would probably be a good idea if you weren’t here when I got back.”

“I won’t look back,” Holly said. “I’m not sure I could take it.”

“Then don’t. Go with luck and love and the knowledge that someone will always care about you, no matter what.”

“No matter what.”

“Yeah. No matter what.” But even then I knew it was a lie. I knew that I didn’t love her, that I would never love her, and that letting her go was the right and only thing to do.

I’m not even sure if I can love anymore, I said to myself. I don’t know if there’s any love left in me at all.

Holly sipped the last of her latte; the cup made a hollow sound as she placed it back on the table. I didn’t look back when I walked over to the kiosk for my copy of the Times, and I suspect she didn’t look back, either. But I couldn’t concentrate on the paper; all I could think of was the last thing that she said as she was leaving. And the days go by so fast.