Chapter Thirty: Cafe Bereshit

Veronica would not let him alone. He couldn’t stand another minute of it. There was no respite. Insects, birds and even rats turned to look at him, messengers from the other world, spectres of her wayward spirit sent to bring him back. His resolve to scatter her ashes came and went by the day, by the hour, and yet he could not empty the little coffin of its contents. But finally one afternoon he left the apartment and took her with him, in a small black shoulder bag, along with a book, an apple, a bagel and a bottle of InstaCold water. He was not thinking now I will go do this, he was just doing it. Moises called after him, Where are you going? but he pretended not to hear. He took the Ninth Avenue line to Spitting Devil and changed for an amphibatrain to Yonkers.

It was a short walk from the station to the levee park he used to play in as a child. This was the first levee ever supervised by his father. The grass was bleached, the bamboo shivered in grey-green curtains, the tan stalks of pampas grass crackled in gusts of wind. He climbed the steps cut into the tall, sloping levee wall. He and his friends used to come down here and pretend it was the Great Wall of China, playing warriors from space engaged in a cosmic battle between good and evil. The Hudson flowed along against the incoming tide, churning. He watched eddies and spurs, the water turning upon itself. The force of the ocean and the moon were the same force as the descending river, divided against itself and in the clash, spirals were born. Veronica had another home but this river was his home. It had swallowed the bodies and ashes of his people, absorbed his river of flesh and blood as it descended in time through generations of men and women, dancing up from infancy to death. He knew no other certain thing. It beat against the fused stonewalls, blackish grey, cold, with chunks of foam. It smelled vaguely of tar, like huge ropes of salted hemp and tugboats, of railroad ties, of iron wet with rain and drying in the sun, of dead fish.

He cradled the coffin in one arm and lifted off the lid, hunching to shield the contents from the wind, which whipped around, paused and rushed in again. He gave them a shake and moved to pour them out but gagged. They were no different from incinerator waste and yet he knew that all that was left of her in the universe lay in that little box. How could he dump them out? Even if she couldn’t or didn’t or wouldn’t care…he didn’t even know what state to posit for her, how to characterize her cares and wishes. A dead woman has no desires. Yet her desires lived on through him. He was the only being who could satisfy them. They were suspended now, words had left her mouth to settle in his heart and issue their dicta.

He closed the coffin lid, put it back into the black shoulder bag and hopped down off the wall. Up ahead was a small boat rental place, closed for the season. There was a chain link fence between the park and the piers. His father used to rent a motorboat here and they fished for stripers and blues off of Manhattan, or went up north in the spring when the shad were running. The wind numbed his face. An amphibatrain hissed by.

He sat down on a bench by the tennis courts, in the middle of the park, beneath tall oaks and maples and a stand of black locust. For three years he had played every day on these courts. He was o.k., but he only played because his best friend Niko Tiber was on the tennis team. Niko Tiber was a rich boy, son of Belgian diplomats exiled first to the Congo and then, after the coup there, New York.

The family was a little down at the heels. Their apartment, on the fifth floor of the identical building adjacent to his own, was Felix’s first attachment away from home. He was nine or ten. He spent whole weekends there. Niko had younger and older siblings. There was a sense of bedlam in their apartment. It was brightly lit and loud, with several televisions on at once, and music. The furniture was shabby and his father only shaved every other day. People got mad and yelled. Pubic hair clung to the soap in the shower and adhered to half dried piss on the toilet rim. The mother drank a lot, starting at noon with cans of beer. At five o’clock they all took a break from smoking alone with a book to drink martinis. And there was Paola, the older sister, the one with the biggest tits ever.

They made his family look abnormal. It was his first perspective, the beginning of something that took years to develop. They were the seed.

So those became the years they played tennis together as a family, wherever they happened to be, indoors in the winter. Then he stopped being friends with Niko. He couldn’t remember the reason exactly. There was the girl down the hall, Allesandra, a child of Polish ballet dancers. She was fourteen and they were twelve. Her pants were so tight her crotch looked like a cloven hoof. But he never slept with her and neither did Niko. You could populate a sterile planet from the DNA he spilled in mental pursuit of her. Anyway, he never played tennis again.

The memory depressed him. The park was terrible. He looked at the leafless trees, the fused stone paths, the upturned hulls of boats, the banks of rhododendron and azalea and forsythia. In spring there would be a rush of color and bees. In the open field along the levee they flew kites and families came to bike and run and picnic along the overgrown verges. At night they got drunk on the benches. Men gave each other blowjobs in the shadows. He smoked his first and last cigarettes on the swings. He finger fucked a few girls there and vomited on the levee more than once. The sky looked like a smudged and scratched piece of paper, from which the park was being slowly erased. It was a reminder of a past he didn’t care to know. After Veronica’s death all he did was remember things he had put from his mind.

He walked slowly back to the amphibatrain stop. The only place to go was home. An inflatable mattress on the floor. Yet it was the most normal thing in his life. He loved that mattress. It was his home.

They had taken him in, allowed him to stay. He felt no closer to Peter than before, when he was just his bartender, yet Peter had said, after he had been there for a few days, “Why don’t you stay for a while?” They were seated at a dirty table in Cafe Bereshit drinking coffee. It was four in the afternoon. The sun had come out, just before sinking beneath the horizon, and shadowed recesses of the cafe were lit up a dark orange. A distorted scarlet orb was reflected in the mirror behind the bar. “We talked about it. It’s o.k. We want you to stay.”

Felix could not speak. He didn’t know what transfixed him more, the light or the words. “Thank you,” he said, and they finished their coffee without saying much more.

Sometimes he and Peter walked around. One warm Sunday they walked down to Battery Park and sunned themselves on the base of a monument. Seagulls circled the Statue of Liberty and garbage scows headed out to sea.

At Edsel’s they sat together when they were over for dinner. Edsel was an actor and director. He had a loft, which he shared with a set painter, some sort of a man/woman named Daen, and a woman named Iseult who was a stage manager by night and studied Holographic Projection at the School for Media Arts by day. It was different from their apartment. People drifted in and out there too, but they were older, more established, and the atmosphere was charged with politics. Dangerous arguments raged back and forth.

Edsel was a fine cook. They often ate there, but Sunday nights were different. Then he prepared elaborate meals, which they ate around a long wooden table with antique chairs he found in the garbage. He made pork roast with rosemary and polenta, braised brisket and mashed potatoes, lemon and garlic chicken, and baked fresh bread. He roasted boneless veal shoulder rolled with spinach and pine nuts and served it with pasta with porcini mushrooms and tomato sauce. Felix stood in the open kitchen and watched as if hypnotized as Edsel sliced and chopped his way through onions, garlic, celery and carrots, all the while keeping up a steady patter. “That play sucked, that director gets drunk, the police are going to shut down this block, there’s talk of a mayor….” At dinner they drank red wine out of juice glasses and afterwards there was usually a staged reading of a friend’s play, or poetry. Sometimes they read Finnegans Wake aloud.

Peter was a remote man, beautiful but insecure. He was acting now in Life on the Mississippi. It made him a little less morose. He was an understudy for Jim and Huck, but the role he usually played was the riverboat pilot who taught Young Sam Clemens how to navigate the Mississippi. The part consisted mostly of cursing, which the audiences found very funny. “Damn it all to hell you shit eating bloody cunt,” was a line certain to draw a hearty chuckle from the mostly retired, provincial crowd that fed into Milt Spahn’s chain of dinner theaters.

He got off at 42nd Street to walk. The ashes pulled his shoulder down. He just didn’t understand why he couldn’t have dumped them out into the water. It was as if she had gripped his arm and stopped him from doing it. They would have poured out. The wind would have born away the light dust and cinders while the heavy remains would have fallen straight down into the swirling water. Then contrary currents would have drawn them apart as they settled into the old industrial mud. That would have been the end. But she would not let go.

He walked down Eighth, past their corner to Cafe Bereshit. It was Christmas time. The soggy Santas and flea bitten reindeer cheered him up. Ninth was glitzier but even that was relative. Up the river, the towns would be decked out in full Christmas Tradition. Neon Santas and reindeer weren’t torn dirty things jerking on fire escapes; they acted out scenes. Holographic crèche’s with neighing horses, mooing cows, fretting Josephs and full-breasted nursing Marys. The baby Jesuses babble and coo while Zoroasters draw their horoscopes.

It started to rain. It got colder, grayer. The canals were rising. Sometimes the garbage blocked them so completely it would flood. The foul water spread disease across the streets and sidewalks and into basements. Eventually it would back up all the way to a good neighborhood and then the crews came in to clear them of junk with articulated barges designed to pick up, crush and grind anything, spewing the result behind them. Next came the scrubber with its flood of blue digestive fluid and massive brushes.

A few nights earlier a little snow fell. For an hour or two people ran out onto the sidewalk to watch. Junkies, homeless old ladies, bikers, whores, punks, everyone transfixed by the fat descending flakes.

He was used to it now, all of it. He could distinguish the smell of shit from decomposing meat. Rats didn’t make his heart pound. Roaches he brushed away in irritation, not revulsion. The only thing he hated was the eyes. Everything alive, aware. Roaches sat thinking their roach thoughts and rats had rat thoughts. They watched him pass by. He could feel their black eyes moving slowly in the shadows, following him as he went from street to street. They whispered to each other. Reported back to Veronica. The world was full of spies. The world was waiting for his next move. The world wanted him to do the right thing but he wasn’t moving in the world, he wasn’t doing the world’s work, or any work at all. He was simply moving through it with his cargo of chaos.

Cafe Bereshit was on a side street. The sidewalk out front was swept clean but inside it was rundown with tipsy tables. The overhead fans turned slowly, creaking. It was lit just enough to read. On the green walls were old movie and theater posters, all print. The entrance was a wide hallway. To the right was a short, composite bar with four stools, where they made drinks and rang up checks. The tables were in the back, where the room opened up enough to have a pool table. Behind that were the kitchen and the bathroom, a room almost too gross to enter. The flush liquid couldn’t handle the volume. By the end of the night it backed up, breached the bowl and sent a blue puddle of ScatAway across the floor.

It was a place to be alone, mostly, but anyone might come in. Sometimes he’d start to read and then Edsel or Peter would sit down for a half hour or so, or any one of a dozen or so people he had met at Edsel’s, or parties and private performances, would join him. Some nights he found himself in a loft space lit up like the firmament, in a corner half concealed by objets d’art. Oh, paralyzed particular, unhinge/greet this my determining eye with guilt/ descend and stop/ be organ to my despise/ hurl. Promethea rolling her eyes and sipping champagne from a blue glass, looking at him over the rim. Peter glaring as he always did when they spoke. It was obvious he did not like her to talk to him and yet Peter never touched her. His agon was with Moises. What it all meant was unclear to Felix, what their relationship was. Edsel tiptoed around it with little poking jests.

A few older workers were eating lunch. He took a table against the wall and ordered coffee from the owner, Mrs. Giordano, a fearsome woman with murderous eyes. He drank the burnt liquid down and read his book, Emerson’s Essays. Circles. There were a few hours a day when he enjoyed a truce, when the eyes and ears and whispers were turned away, when Veronica slept. He loved the loopy prose, the grand pronouncements, the confidence of Emerson. He wanted so badly to be convinced of his own soul’s authority to recognize truth. Even to be convinced of his own soul’s existence might quell the voices. But that was not to be. He would only take a seed from the voice of Emerson and plant it down next to Veronica’s and hope it would grow. Finally, for a while, it became so, as his mind, the voice in his head, became the voice of the essay. Whatever voice spoke through the lungs and throat of the nineteenth century man called Emerson, now spoke in his. It too was a river, pouring down through the mouths and ears over time.

A couple came in and took a table near his. She was late middle age and nicely dressed, with white hair and a ginger complexion. Too nicely dressed. No one in the neighborhood dressed like that unless they were buying drugs, and that trade was on Eighth. Mrs. Giordano didn’t allow it. A few mornings a year she could be found hosing brains and blood off of the sidewalk to prove the point. With her was a frightening little man dressed in a rumpled, dirty, cheap suit. He fit right in, with his rough face, mean mouth and scarred cheeks. When their eyes met he felt a chill in his neck. He looked away quickly hoping to disappear back into Emerson. Their presence was disruptive. Cops, he thought. This was a new kind of thought, one he picked up from his new family, distrust and suspicion of outsiders, especially the police. In his old life there just weren’t any outsiders. The police carried that fear for them. That’s what police did, filtered out alien carbon masses. Cop osmosis filters. There were few intrusions and little fear.

In midtown the police were concerned about the mixing of elements. Gangs, drugs and pornography were beginning to blend-in seamlessly with the theater and art worlds. Certain individuals were crossing back and forth. Proxies were vanishing. There were places like Fallopia and Metatron and Gametria where gangsters and lawyers and secretaries all sat in close proximity.

The woman and man ordered some food. Mrs. Giordano was almost deferential. She smiled when she handed them the menus and polished the silverware with her apron before placing them on their napkins. Her smile was awful. All of her teeth were gold and they made her look like a crude folk puppet. Her nose was a patched bone.

Felix looked at the woman. There was something powerfully attractive about her. Their eyes met briefly and he felt a kind of stirring in his groin. It was like staring into the sky on a cloudless day. Then the man looked at him and again he looked away as quickly as possible. He listened to their conversation. Paregane and Lucky Day.

“We’ll never get in,” the man sneered, blocking his mouth with his hand.

“We’ve got to see inside,” she said.

“Bugs maybe. Real ones.”

They think they’re so smart, he thought. If he wanted to, in five minutes it would be all over the street. They’d get nothing. The Lucky Day place would be gone.

“No one will know,” she said. “Now what about those diamonds?”

The next afternoon Moises poured whiskey into his coffee and lit a cigarette. He had a way of doing these things, which made them look casually glamorous. His hand gestures were slightly extravagant. Every action could be improved by art and deliberation. He shivered and sniffled and said, “I haven’t slept yet and I can’t decide what to do.” He ran his fingers through his mussed hair and rubbed his nose vigorously.

“Well, mixing coffee and whiskey won’t let you do either,” Promethea said.

“It’s yin and yang,” Edsel said.

Felix sipped his coffee and picked up the bottle. It had bumpy frosted glass and a canary colored label with red script, Whiskey, 80 proof, Product of The Philippines. He glugged some of the caramel liquid in. “I didn’t sleep either.”

“You went to sleep early enough,” said Promethea.

Felix shrugged. It made no difference what time he went to sleep. Lately he had been trying to close his eyes while the others sat up, hoping the noise of their voices would ease him into a forgetful sleep. But it was no better than the hiss of wet wheels and disembodied voices. Promethea looked at him and touched his cheek. It was a strange gesture. She had been touching him more and more. They sat close together on her bed. Sometimes he emerged from the groggy hinterland between nightmare and consciousness, a sort of marshy transitional zone that allowed neither rest nor observation, to find her feet in his face or, more alarming, to realize he had begun to cuddle with her calves. His outstretched hand found the hollow behind her knees or rested on the warm back of her thighs. When she greeted him with a kiss it was on the lips. And her whole manner was more animated when he entered the room. He could see the lights of her eyes. A sort of pinging excitement between them was apparent. The crush that was circulating between them was something he perceived more than felt. How could that be? It was a phenomenon, like grass or sky. Something he saw, something he smelled, the current of sex flowing between them. But it wasn’t restricted to them. He had become a part of an erotic circuit. It included Moises and Edsel and Peter. They looked at him, laughed at his jokes, touched him. No one said a thing. But a game of looks and sighs flashed around him. It was pissing Peter off too. He had said as much. There were comments. In Bereshit, he stirred sugar into his coffee and stared at the carved and scratched tabletop. “Promethea’s been hurt,” Peter mused, dumping in some CReaMaTe. “I don’t trust Moises. I feel so scattered, between the show and Jardeen.” He grimaced. “People you love should be trustworthy.” Peter said it without emotion but he looked up from his stirring to investigate Felix.

His time in the apartment was probably running out. The emotions were building. The excitement caused by his arrival was mutating into lust. The longer he denied them his body, the more intense their desire. And Peter was vigilant. No one slept anymore it seemed. The humping stopped. Promethea no longer stared at Peter with pain. She shifted around to Felix. They walked down the street and she would lay her hand on his arm. They walked like a couple then. He felt a great comfort in the arm, the hand, in her calves and thighs. The nearness to her flesh was nourishing. But he would not sleep with her. She hadn’t asked. The thought was in some way sickening. He wanted lips to graze his lips. He wanted her eyes pricked out with concern and desire to rest on his. He wanted to blend in with her emotionally. He liked being the node through which their lust circulated without satisfying it. But the thought of an orgasm caused him to shrivel up. As soon as he got an erection he felt stricken by weakness. It was like keeling over to vomit. All the air was let out. He sagged and shivered and vanished.

They were silent. Promethea brushed his cheek and Moises looked at Felix as if he were drinking him.

“A weird thing happened,” Felix said. “At Bereshit.”

“Weird things are always happening there,” Edsel said. “I mean, does a Bereshit in the woods?”

Moises groaned.

“Well, it wasn’t the usual weirdness,” Felix continued, carefully. “There was a couple there, a man and a woman, and I think they were cops. They didn’t belong.”

“You see?” Edsel said, standing with agitation, bending slightly at the waist. “Like I told you last night, they’re coming. We’ve got to be ready. What were they talking about?”

Moises interrupted. “What do you mean by don’t belong. All kinds of people hang out. Just because they’re pigs doesn’t make them cops. Maybe they were producers or something. Who are we, anyway, to say who does and doesn’t belong?” He glared at Edsel. Edsel didn’t relent.

“They were talking about a Lucky Day parlor.”

Edsel nodded knowingly and then shook his head. This was all clear to him. “You’d know all about that, Felix. What did they say?”

“Uh, something about trying to get in and not being able to. They were going to set up across the street. The woman was scary, like a Japanese ghost, with this wild white hair, and the guy looked like he had crawled up out of the canal. Scars on his face and a nasty look about him.”

“Well,” Edsel said, “I wish them luck. Everyone wants a piece of that operation. Where are they?”

Moises said, “Lucky Day?”

“Glad to see you’re paying attention.”

Promethea said, “I think it’s Gametria. Someone told me they were closing.”

“Those people are very particular,” Edsel said, sitting down again next to Moises, knotting and unknotting his long fingers restlessly on his knees.

Promethea stood and went into the bathroom. Water splashed dimly behind the walls.

“They can smell you out,” said Felix abstractedly. He felt like he needed to stretch. It was as if they’d been sitting there for a week. Edsel and Moises looked at each other and exploded with laughter. Felix hated when this happened. It made him feel old, like an outsider. There were things he didn’t understand. In-jokes. Innocent phrases could cause train wrecks of laughter. They were like children. For all their cynicism, their innocence didn’t allow them to see their cruelty as cruel, it was merely fun and fun was the object of their lives.

“What?” Felix asked, helplessly, as their laughter died down.

“Oh nothing,” Edsel said, dismissing it with a wave. “It’s just–”

“Tell him. He wants to know,” Moises said, still shaking a bit.

“Well, that first morning when I met you, I walked into the room and could smell it right away. The boys had been at it, and not just Moises and Peter either. It was fresh in the air. Didn’t you notice? My god Felix, you smelled like sex. It’s hard to describe. Not like spooge but just like hard-core lust, it was like, I don’t know, spring fever or something. I got a hard on the instant I walked into the room.”

“It drives Promethea nuts,” Moises said. “I didn’t think she gave a shit for sex anymore. She was off men.”

“Told me she was a nun,” Edsel said.

“Not anymore. You primed her pump, Felix. Ever since you showed up, it’s like a viral horniness.”

“Spring fever in perpetuity.”

“Hormones galore.”

“I didn’t know,” Felix muttered. It was a lie. He was ashamed now, for the lie and for the truth. He remembered what it was like to be in Veronica’s presence before he had started taking Paregane. How her odor tortured him. How impossible it was to get it out of his head and how overbearing her superiority was. Like being suffocated in flowers and ripe fruit. How frightening ripeness was. How full the flesh became before the bruise or bite. How the seed swells before it sprouts.

“You sure didn’t,” Moises said.

Felix got his bag out of the wall unit and sat on the cushion. He wanted something to do. He pulled out a wad of electraweave.

Moises and Edsel looked at each other rapidly and Moises, licking his lips with uncertainty, ventured to speak with a little noise that almost budged into a word. He and Edsel were having a silent conversation, which Felix, intentionally preoccupied with the electraweave and shuffling of his duffel bag’s contents, didn’t note. A moment had occurred, a breach in the silent conversation all of them had been engaged in since Felix’s arrival. They were mysteries to each other. There was so much they didn’t know about Felix. Between them, between Felix and Peter, Peter and Edsel, Edsel and Moises and Moises and Promethea, the stories flowed, but the whole of it was unknown. Here a piece was being revealed. Moises had wanted to ask, since first noticing the box, what was in it. When Felix was gone he had been tempted to look but it was a law among them that certain private places could not be entered. There was no other way to live in such close proximity. One’s bag, one’s corner of the closet, were sacrosanct. He would have violated the sanctuary if the others had allowed it. He was curious beyond agony. But he still lived in their community. Peter refused to allow it. Promethea was scandalized. She stood guard over Felix. And how Peter hated that. Yet Peter’s ethic was absolute. He would not violate it even to get at Promethea.

Edsel prodded Moises with his foot and Moises, clearing his throat, voice cracking a little, asked, “What’s in the box, Felix?” As he did so Promethea emerged from the shower smelling of coconut. Her hair was wrapped up in a towel and she had a towel around her waist. Steam poured off her body and into the room.

Felix lifted the cherry wood casket out of his bag and shook it. “Veronica’s ashes,” he said matter of factly, then put it back into the bag and messed around with the electraweave.

They were silent again, only now disturbed. They had known death, violent death, untimely death, arbitrary death. But they were young. “Don’t you like, scatter those out at sea or something?” he asked.

Promethea dried her hair briefly with the towel and it fell dark and wet against her bare shoulders and breasts. She put on a green bra and red underwear and began her tortured search for something to wear. “I have to buy some clothes,” she said.

“I guess,” said Felix to Moises. “I tried to yesterday but couldn’t.”

“It takes time,” Edsel said, quietly. He got up and peed without shutting the bathroom door. “My father,” he yelled, “kept my mother in the closet till he died. Every year at Thanksgiving he told us that next year,” he flushed the toilet, rinsed his hands and came out patting them dry on his pants, “he was going to bring her up to Mackinaw, on the day of their anniversary. We were going to have a picnic, the whole family, and a little memorial. The next Thanksgiving would come around and nothing. My sister’s got both of ‘em in the closet now.”

Moises rubbed a marijuana bud between his fingers till a pile had formed on the table. This he carefully rolled up in a cigarette paper and lit. “I want to be laid up in a mausoleum covered with calla lilies,” he said.

“Oh come on!” Promethea shouted. “Be more original than that.”

“The Bower of Adonis,” Felix said.

Promethea scoffed. “And then am I to play Venus?” she asked.

“No,” said Moises. “Zeke will.” And they all laughed.

Felix stared into his bag. It was ridiculous, idolatrous, perverse, to carry her around like that. Like a bone in a reliquary. But he missed her so terribly. He said, “I just miss her so terribly, I can’t let go. We…. I can’t describe to you, what it’s like. There is something gone from me, cut away, like a color missing from the world. I spent half of my life with her, my entire adult life. We were still growing when we met. All my thoughts and feelings and hopes and dreams are bound up with her and it felt like I would be scattering myself on the waves.”

Moises passed the joint to Edsel and said, “Why don’t you go find her?” Felix looked at the bottle of Paregane at the bottom of the bag. Promethea settled on an antique lace blouse, which allowed the bra to show through, and a strawberry pleated skirt that fell to her knees.

“Find her? Where would I find her?”

“Well, if she died in the garden, couldn’t you take Paregane and go find her? That’s what I would do.”

“Ts, Moises!” Promethea cried.

Edsel shook his head with disgust and passed the joint to Felix. “Don’t be an idiot, Moises. The man is hurting, can’t you see?”

Felix smoked a little and passed the joint to Promethea who waved it off.

“Well,” said Moises, taking the joint from Felix, “I think we should all go. I’m dying, dying to try Paregane.”

The three looked wistfully at Felix. He had described the garden to them individually many times. It was a favorite topic of conversation. He found himself elaborating on paradise. His own words enchanted him. They were intoxicated by it, by the feeling, the beauty. It was like his words had some power to evoke reality. Or rather, to abolish reality and put in its place something more real and true. Wherever he went he felt he had to dim the world around him. Everyone felt that way. The disagreeable smells, the horrendous dying and suffering, the ugliness of the buildings. The noise of living, trucks, voices. Even in parks and resorts most of reality had to be ignored. But the garden opened the senses. The sun was not a nuclear inferno frying skin cells, it didn’t spew waves of energy inimical to life, rather it poured energy into the heart.

They felt instinctively that this world could not be their home.

There must be a place from which they had been exiled. It was the only explanation. And Felix filled in this X with a value they understood and knew. Their hopes centered on the little green pill now. They had exhausted the other possibilities, spent their dreams in dancing, amphetamines, African toad skins, mushrooms, Paleolithic shaman rites, medieval heresies, medical manipulations, cortical correction, exercise. They Rolfed and centered and gestalted themselves. People drank their own urine. They learned to masturbate without touching themselves. The young practiced lesbian autoasphyxiation. There was a castration cult in New Mexico syncretizing Berdash and Hindu devotees of Kali. Even Catholics chanted in Koine hoping to invoke the word and feel the door creak open to the pressure of human wind in the gales of heaven.

Promethea brushed her hair, spritzed herself with jasmine water and sat down next to Felix. Now he felt almost desperately in love with her. It came and went in long, slow accelerations and decrescendos. She was frightening. He wouldn’t make it; there was no way. He felt himself poised above her, her head thrown back huffing air as he danced in and out of her cunt, the water working up slowly from the well bottom. Physical proximity was what he craved, he wanted to play the drums with her, be privy to her inmost rhythms, her menstrual floe. He loved to watch her dress and wash up, brush her teeth. The smell of her coffee in the morning awoke him and he sighed with pleasure for a moment as if Veronica were agitating the grounds. Lately he met her at the end of her work shift at an expensive east side restaurant, PaRDeS. The bar was tiny, full of wicker and antique bric-a-brac. He stuck out in his rumpled artichoke suit, slumped over an expensive cocktail. It took her a while to change into jeans and a T-shirt and then they walked, arm and arm, through the virid mist and the tall cobalt lamps to the Deco PCP stop at 59th and Second. Bony women in metal wraps stood on the platforms with their ghastly tuxedoed partners, glaring at Felix and

Promethea. He was like an anchor as she circled him in almost giddy afterwork agitation; unloading the insult she had acquired serving haut cuisine to the vulpine, surgically sculpted doyens of the ancien regime.

Promethea said to Moises, “Peter would kill you. He’d kill us all.”

Moises scowled. “He’s afraid. Afraid to live. I don’t know what happened to him. He’s like an emotional sinkhole these days. All the ecstasy is gone. He works and grumps about and tries to tell us all what to do. It’s like living with a crossing guard, a little nanny in a red suit with a gold sash telling us not to go against the light. But that’s what we are, the people who go against the light. Fear. Puh.”

“He has reason to be afraid,” Edsel said. “People take that drug and next thing you know they want to drop dead. Angry to be alive. What’s that?”

“It’s exciting, that’s what, not knowing if you’ll wake up or not. And the garden! Imagine. Why would anyone want to leave?”

Promethea stood and stared at them. “I can’t believe you’re talking like this.” She turned to Felix. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s o.k.,” Felix said. He didn’t want to cause any dissension among them. That would ruin everything. He got up and gazed into the brown soft eyes of Promethea. He looked at her slightly parted lips, her wet, curling hair, the tips of her teeth, her small nose. “I’ve got to take a walk.” Walking was the only thing that relieved the buzzing in his solar plexus.

After they left, when the door was closed and Moises and Edsel had sat for a few minutes in a dazed bubble, Moises said, “I don’t know about you Edsel, but I can’t stand not looking in that bag. I don’t care what Peter would say.”

Edsel collapsed into a prolonged, disappointed, resigned sigh. “Don’t be a child Moises.”

“Come on, tell me you aren’t curious about those ashes.”

“Leave it Moises.”

Moises grabbed the bag and pulled out the cherrywood box. He tried lifting off the lid but it wouldn’t budge. “Damn,” he said.

“What’s the secret.”

“Just put it back.”

Moises slumped and rubbed his third nipple. His face looked old when downcast. Three days growth of beard was on it. He scratched his cheek and moved his lips in and out, licking them. Then he put the box back in the bag.

“He’ll know,” said Edsel.

“It’s our house. We have a right to know. What if he has a gun?”

Edsel threw up his hands. “So what? Who doesn’t have a gun? The man has a right to protect himself.”

“All we know about him is what he’s told us.”

“And what else do you know about me?”

Moises rubbed his nose and sneezed. He peeked in the bag. “Christ!” he said bitterly. “What’s wrong with us?” He started to cry. “Look.” He reached in and pulled out the pills. “Look what I’ve found.”