second-hand light: ii of iii

known problems: i wrote this story last year when i was reading lolita, so there's way too much stoned erudition. pointing out especially dense parts would help me out. thanks y'all.

ACT II

Driving aimlessly lost its adolescent tinge of freedom by the time snow’d begun collecting near the feet of the mountains, and the more they drove every road in town the more each road felt like a tiny sub-box of the town, so they’d taken to just parking on new roads up the South Hills along which suburbia had yet to spring, looking out on the crust of lights of Missoula. Delailah pulled an old newspaper crossword off the floor.

“I don’t know why I always try to do these things. I suck at them, and usually end up pissed off.”

“You do it because you want to solve the world’s problems, like nuns and pharmacists and deluded mathematicians.”

“Fucking hell. First two clues are pop culture references. How’m I supposed to know this crap? No wonder our world’s so screwed up when even these minor mind exercises are full of that same gossiped-out wank-rag bullshit that coats the labia majora of check-out lines at grocery stores. I don’t get it, you know? Who really gives a shivering shit?”

“They put those magazines with beautiful women on the cover because it stimulates the human need for the phallic, which makes people buy candy bars and chapstick and other cockshaped consumables.”

“Oh shut up, you act like that kind of shit doesn’t happen. Why do people even think those scrawny harlots are attractive anyway? It’s fucked up that we call stereotypically beautiful women bombshells, but it’s fitting. The ones on the magazines are atom-bombs with their explosive, carcinogenic, airbrushed sense of beauty, and they leave the wasteland fallout on the eyelids of every slut who’s caked too much glittery eyeshadow there.” Delailah put the pen in her mouth.

Luke had learned long ago to let the topic of fashion die when talking to Delailah. As much as he loved to lather her into a fury about petty topics that had zero bearing on his own happiness, Delailah clung hatefully to the fickle creases of fashion. He couldn’t figure how someone who could cleverly untwine “bombshell” could still get so pissed off about it. Sure, Luke agreed with her, but he didn’t care enough to ever rant about it. Such emotional investment in the vanity of others only reflected her own vanity.

Delailah took the pen out of her mouth. “Corn mush. Five letters.” The pen returned to her teeth.

“Gruel.”

For a while, just the sound of the wind on the car and Delailah chewing the butt of the pen.

“So do you like any of the girls in our grade?”

“You mean romantically or whatever?”

“Or just want to fuck.”

“Well I’d fuck a lot of girls at our school if fuckability were the only criteria. But it takes a fair bit more than fuckability for me to‘like’ them. I’m not particularly interested in most girls our age.”

“Most?”

“Yeah. There’s one.”

“Who is it?”

“I’m not telling you.”

“Fine. You should know this. Lawn bane.”

“Weed?”

“Nine letters.”

“Crabgrass.”

“Why’s your dad so hardcore about your yard?”

“It’s like his kid. Sometimes I think he loves it more than me.”

“Except he actually sewed those seeds.”

“Oh shut up.”

“You don’t look like him, you’re all of your mom.”

“I’m seven months younger than my parents’ marriage.. Do the math.”

“Shit. Shotgun Luke. I can’t really imagine Rita Laney having sex out of wedlock.”

“Yeah, especially if you’ve seen pictures of my dad from back in the day.”

“What? Was Stu a drugged-out disiple of the counterculture?”

“Let’s just say he probably went to at least one Dead show.”

“And now he lives in the Rita Laney kingdom. No wonder he’s obsessed with the yard. It’s his zen garden. Guitar effect, four letters.”

“Fuzz.”

“Is it Erika Norris?”

“No.”

“African Country, abbreviated. Three letters.”

“Central African Republic. CAR.”

“You know so much random shit.”

“I used to read National Geographic a lot when I went to my grandparents’.”

Delailah got a phone call that ended with her saying “Kickass. We’ll see you soon.” She turned to Luke. “Erika’s parents are out of town and her brother’s going to buy her booze. She says we should go meet her if we want to get anything. Drive fast.”

Erika’s house looked like interior design magazines, filled with warm-looking stuff and colors on the wall, except the colors weren’t quite vibrant enough and the warm-looking stuff was too glossy, like the magazine. Photos of the family beneath various European monuments hung in the living room and a showy spice rack sat in the kitchen, the glass containers all still full.

Luke and Delailah hadn’t driven fast enough, but Delailah had that hitchhiker’s charm that made people want to give her things, and she’d been working on a bottle of whiskey with some people she’d just met, laughing too loudly like the stoned guy in the theater. Luke was talking to Erika Norris, his body at a consciously oblique angle to hers as he tried to counter Delailah’s earlier suspicion.

“So what do you think of my shirt?” she asked.

It was unexceptional. “It’s pretty rad.”

“I know right! My parents got it for me in Maui.”

“Sweet. I wish my parents traveled.”

“Why don’t they?”

“They’re paranoid. The threat of an unchecked coffee pot or a water heater’s sudden anarchy is too great for them to consider leaving anything, including themselves, alone long enough for it to go its own way.”

A group of people came in screaming and took Erika with them, saving the conversation from the pessimistic depths towards which it sank.

Delailah handed the bottle off and walked to him. “I saw that. It’s her isn’t it?”

“You saw it eh? Did you see how she cringed when I said my parents were paranoid? Like I slapped her with a tube sock full of old mustard, the moldy stink and mustardy sting at the same time.”

“I bet she wouldn’t get that,” she said. “Hey, come, I have something to show you.”

Her hand radiated whiskey-heat as she lead him to the cramped laundry/bathroom in the back of Erika’s house. Her cheeks swelled as her drunken smile heaped her face on her cheekbones. She held the fingers of both his hands with hers like a new cellist learning the French grip. “Close your eyes,” she said. Her breath was nothing but vapors; the aromatic burn of whiskey and the thin wisps of her personality the alcohol threw off as it vibrated her strange bones, an aching faintness that Luke could feel so well now, pinned between her and the vanity of the bathroom and of his heart.

“OK, look!”

She held a small bag of pot and her chillum already loaded. “I got this for us to share. You can take greens.”

Luke’s chest fell, like old buildings dynamited to nebulous grey. “Sweet. Thanks.”

As they smoked, Luke’s disappointment ran off his body like a pissing drunk’s dignity. “Why do you think I like Erika? She’s as dull as a bunch of tacks you pour into a metal box and then roll the metal box down a hill and it goes into a lake and rusts for twenty years and then a kid finds it and throws it down the next hill he finds.”

“Oh she’s not that bad. I mean, she’s throwing this party.”

“Yeah, she’s fun to talk about stupid drunk things with, like what a prick Mr June is. But have you ever talked to her in a supermarket or something?”

“No,” she said. She held out the chillum. “There’s an ass hit in there if you want it.”

He took it. “I saw her in the Safeway across the river once. I was looking for saltwater taffy but they didn’t have it. She said hi to me and asked me how I was doing and I said I find myself more and more dissatisfied with the capitalist system every time I come into a store and they don’t have what I want they know I’m probably just going to settle with the next best thing I can find but today fuck it I’m not going to settle I’m not going to keep feeding their bullshit freedom-of-choice-by-approximation machine motherfuckers talk about free markets giving choice well what a crock of shit when none of those choices are anything you really want. She just kind of looked at me with dull eyes and giggled the way little kids do when you tell them to do something they’ve never done.”

“Well, what do you expect laying some heavy anti-capitalist shit on a girl who just came up to say hi to you?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying. Why would I be attracted to someone I can’t drop things like that on?”

“You can’t fuck anticapitalism,” she said, then as the silence grew awkward, “I’m joking. I need a drink.” She opened the door and the external world ran into their intimacy like violent water. Delailah swam back into the bottom of that whiskey bottle with a salmon’s accuracy. Luke, too stoned and now dwelling on the overwhelming loneliness that is coming only so close to someone, found an electric wall heater and sat by it.

A lot of people never noticed him sitting there as they focused their eyes on their goals and their shaky muscles on not falling into the lamps on the end-tables, and those who did notice him talked to him every time they passed with a social compassion, saying “you’re still sitting there?” in an effort to get him to circulate or offering him something to drink, offers he declined, saying either “I’m fine” or “I’m blitzed already.”

The third time Carla Cavendish noticed him, she sat down on the other side of the heater. “So do you not drink or something?” she asked.

“No, I do. I just don’t need anything right now.”

“Are you sure? We’ve got some beer in the back of the truck.”

“I’m fine.”

“So I hear you have a crush on Erika.”

“Who told you that, Delailah?”

“Yeah. You should tell Erika, she’d think it’s sweet.”

“Even if it’s not true?”

“Probably. She’s a romantic at heart.”

“Did Delailah say anything else about me?”

“Yeah, she never shuts up about you. Sometimes I have to tell her ‘I don’t give a shit about Luke’s car’ and shit like that. No offense.”

“Really? What kinds of things does she say?”

“She talks about things about you most people don’t care about, no offense. But does she really think I give a shit about the smell that comes out of your car’s heaters, or the funny way you always smell like mowed lawn? It’s always about smells. She says you have a smell.”

“Do you think she likes me?”

“The more I talk to that girl the less I understand her,” she said as she got up. “But she’s weird and you’re weird. Why you’re not weird for each other I don’t know. I’m going to get more beer. You sure you don’t want one?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

He watched as a kid in his grade whose name he didn’t know stumbled into one of the lamps. He’d reached the drunken state where he couldn’t regain himself after falling into the lamp, and he fell over it, over the end-table, and rolling somehow into a ball between the couch and the wall. The lamp hit the carpet softly but the lampshade let out a screech and so did Erika.

“What the fuck Steve? If you fucked up this lamp up my parents’ll fucking kill me.” Erika’s skin flinched back and bared her inner teeth, sharp, vulgar, self-preserving.

“It’s ok,” Carla Cavendish intervened, picking up the lamp and re-adjusting the shade, “the lamp’s fine. Steve, you need to come sit down.” She reached for his arm.

“Ifuckinhmmph—” He fell again.

“He’d better fucking get his shit on lock,” Erika said.

“I got him,” Carla said as she lead him out of the room.

People began to disappear. In ones or twos they found their nights’ ends, in coital sweats or awkward unconsciousnesses. Carla spent the night keeping Steve from drowning in puke. A girl named Theresa had curled under a blanket, sober and early and wondering in the quiet of her mind why none of the males she knew loved her, on the couch directly across the living room from Luke. Erika, at some point in the night, became overwhelmed by her hostessly responsibilities and passed out in her room. When she woke, she found her lamp in pieces where she’d knocked it to the floor.

During this early morning depopulation, Luke sat in the living room by the heater, looking at the cock-eyed light coming out the lamp’s crooked shade. It was the kind of detail the jackass dad in the sitcom would use as proof their daughter had betrayed their trust with a party. But Luke couldn’t think that far— there was nothing after the light that entered his eyes right then— no light before, no light after. The light left the lamp so fast that it was impossible to not be seeing the light of the present. At the same time, though, that light stretched back forever, traceable back to the blinding beginning; light whose electric-arc roots grew from the fire-glow of the burning bodies of ancient animals, who themselves grew from the dust who cooled in the afterglow of something only as comprehensible as what it left behind. All that energy had happened so that he, Luke Laney, could stare into the incandescent light through the lampshade.

Delailah came into the room. She kneeled, then sat on her calves in front of Luke, smiling too brightly, and so full of whiskey that her hands and cheeks and eyes swelled red and tender, and her voice lengthened with alcoholic drawl. “Hey you.”

Luke felt the words fall all over him, drenching him the way he’d, as a child, been drenched knocking one of Rita Laney’s vases off the table. Every time it rained or he showered he could feel his pulse in the scar just into his hairline where the vase’d sliced him open, and now as the slow soak of the words went into him, he felt his own words form in polyps that began to sweat out his own skin, following the electric lines of nerves up his body. But his dry mouth couldn’t accept the starchy wafers of his words, and his mouth simply fell into a “Hi.”

Her eyes were geothermal ponds in full algal bloom, fluid blue-greens swirled by the movements of the unevenly-heated water. Her Incan teeth, with their whiskey-film, stood out of the normal mist of her lips like mossy battlements on mythic Scottish outcrops. Her nose and cheeks stuck up at the arrogant angles of peaks emerging from glaciers, sheer and sharp and, though you can’t quite make them out from a distance, thin lines showing the fracturing stress. The zipper of her sweatshirt was open, and the deep v of her shirt showed her cleavage half-heaving as if she’d been running a couple minutes earlier. The skin of her chest had taken the embarrassed blood-rush it took anytime she bore it to the world. Considering Delailah talked about her periods at the lunch tables and pissed in alleyways and parks without hesitation, he’d always found her skin’s modesty odd.

They didn’t speak for several minutes, but they drifted into lying on the floor facing each other. Delailah ran her skyward hand through Luke’s hair. A sun rose in the cosmos of his mind, the hundred constellations of thought vanishing as this new yellowish light appeared from some backwater coil of his brain. He’d meditated on this same sun in those nameless hours he sat in Herbert after dropping Delailah off at her house, or watching her leave a seat next to him, or otherwise slipping again out of reach as he reeled in the sludge of his apprehension. Now that sun’s nuclear ferocity raged more than ever, focalizing to a point so dense he could have used it to light ants aflame as he had in his youth with the real sun through his grandfather’s magnifying glass. So bright, in fact, that he felt he must close his eyes to block out the glare, so he closed them, and it left phosphenes flickering behind his lids like so many green paper lanterns.

He slept until that hour just before dawn garnishes the night with its red stringers, the waking-and-pissing hour. Delailah was gone, and only the stinging light of the florescent bulb in the kitchen marred the dark. Even the pukers and the girls who had to prove they could outlast everyone had, in their own words tomorrow, passed the fuck out. The gilding haze of stonedness had faded, and his throat was as swollen and dry as the bones of travelers and their stock pitted by the incessancy of sand over them. He pissed in a bathroom where someone’s puke had overshot the bowl and splattered into that arcane realm in the corner behind the toilet, where Erika’s family rarely dared a cleaning tool and the secret grime of a feminine bathroom collected, the residues of hairsprays and perfumes set to the air, the escaping fuzzy bits of tampons and cottonballs, and the stray coily hairs razor-liberated and drifting away into the lost corner. Luke looked down at his lonely dick, thinking with a grimace he should go find Delailah, before deciding he’d rather not have to find her curled next to some other less apprehensive, tactless assbat. He returned to the exact spot he’d risen from, laying down and letting his arms flop in an apathetic, distended mess. He wished he hadn’t given her the pot. He reluctantly closed his eyes. She had his pot and she had his happiness, and she was lost somewhere in the secret, dirty guts of a dead party.

When he awoke again, the dense grey of an inversion masked the late morning sky, and everything had an awful glare and lack of contrast like overexposed pictures of mountain lakes when the sun’s pushing in the point-and-shoot lens. He felt as though a grainy flurry like untuned old tv screens had permeated everything, and this fuzz flickered just behind the liquid skin of existence. Everything pulsed as though the constructive tendons that link the material world into its sinewy web strained to contain its own boundlessness, and Luke could hear the awful sound they made as they filled with tiny cracks, like tight rubber bands slowly shredding as they slip over bricks. He could feel, in their future, the pop in which they’d eventually break, and all reality would vanish, the way Sarah Rice’s scholarships and future had evaporated one night, her ACL tearing under the lights of the gymnasium, the crowd suddenly growing silent except for that damned crying baby. Disgusted that he’d reduced his omnidimensional experience of unhappiness to a sports metaphor, he walked to the kitchen to drink some water.

Theresa had left. Luke could imagine her walking home early, waking at her trained weekday hour, tiptoeing through the passed-out house, and zipping her hoodie all the way up, putting the hood on, and walking briskly and leaning into the fall chill as though the ambient temperature is affected by the angle at which you approach it. She walked below the Norway maples, maybe looking up as they shook in the morning wind, the sound like a foliose dance-party, and she wondered why she hated dancing, wondered how she could hate all the things she really wished would happen to her one day, wondering, without fulfilling conclusion, why everything had to come later, why tomorrow even mattered when today was walking home cold and alone, not dressed for the hour, unhungover and unloved. Luke’s feet had taken such walks.

He forced Theresa out of his mind, walking through the dining room to find snoring people scattered on the carpet. The guy who’d fallen through the lamp (what was his name again?) lay on the floor with his lips comically pulled up by the ottoman he’d apparently tried sleeping on, and Carla slept sitting up, hovering over the kid in her vigil.

In the kitchen, Erika sat at the table, a cup of coffee shrouded by both hands, her thumbs holding her face a thumb-length away from the surface, hoping the vapors might give her the strength to take a sip of the invigorating motor-oil.

“That bad eh?” Luke said to her.

“Pretty much.”

“Have you seen Delailah?”

“Not since last night. She was out back with Annie, killing that whiskey that was going around. Uggh. It’s like my thoughts ”

“You should drink some water.” Luke went out the back door, and in the screen porch he found Delailah, Annie, and the empty whiskey bottle each about five feet from the others. Annie, who absorbed alcohol like fictional tanks absorb the rigors of war, had crawled into a blanket on the couch. Delailah simply had her hood cinched tight around her face, curled into a ball against the couch to keep her back warm. Luke crouched and woke her.

“What? Luke?” She sat up. “Fuck, man, I just fell asleep.”

“Come inside, it’s cold as shit out here. Let’s smoke a bowl.”

“What? Oh god.” She sat up slowly and pushed her fingers into her temples “I’ve never read The Unbearable Lightness of Being but the title’s a goddamn perfect description of how this sun business is breaking my eyes.”

“You know what the perfect hangover cure is? A taste of ye olde chronic.”

She pulled the once-neatly folded bag and the chillum from her hoodie pocket. The bag was empty save a meagre bowl and a sugary residue of trichomes. Delailah looked at it the way she’d looked at the crossword puzzle yesterday, a starving desire to know all the answers immediately, but drawing too many blanks to figure it all out.

“Holy shit. You smoked that whole bag last night?”

“Looks that way.” She unrolled it and quizzed it further with a squint. “Oh yeah. No one else had any. They all said the town’d gone dry, kept coming up to me asking to smoke them out. I guess I couldn’t say no.”

“Well, sharkdicks. Let’s smoke the rest of it. I feel hungover and I didn’t even drink.”