The Night

Part 2

In Upstate New York, fifteen minutes north of Albany, there is a town called Clifton Park. It has grown in two decades from an insignificant rural space between the capital and Schenectady to become a prevalent commercial town with a leading high school and a tumorous growth of retail businesses. The school district was named in the language of the Iroquois tribes that lived in the area centuries ago; Shenendehowa, or "The Great Plains". Only the campus was built on flat ground, the rest of Clifton Park was a series of hills.

In autumn, the sunlight would fall through the thick trees and paint the roads warm colors, as light shines through the stained glass windows of cathedrals, past the crucifix and altar, onto the holy marble floors and wooden pews. By the middle of November the leaves would all be dead, and the trees gray and naked. The snow comes like magic until Christmas. By the New Year, the winter loses any grace or dignity, and the snow accumulates like the layers of bricks forming a wall. It covers everything and frames the roads, stagnant, becoming hard and icy and blackened by dirt. There was an aesthetic in the death of autumn that I never felt in the resurrection of spring. I loved autumn in New York, and I loved the winter. Humankind is sedated in the cold, and easier to understand. With the colder months I would find meaning in myself and my movements. I drank a lot and took many other things. I read the classics and worked hard in school. My junior year I had Nicole as well, although I drank her away soon.

There were at least ten shopping plazas in Clifton Park and one mall, where I worked. Once school ended, the teenagers would congregate at the mall. They would smoke weed and drink cheap vodka out of emptied soda cans. Others would go to the cafe to study together. There was an abundance of drugs for the wealthy young, but my friends and I were not as fortunate. When we could not afford drugs, we would sell them and smoke our profits. We made some money as well, and some of my friends were arrested. Drugs were different when I had to work for them. They began to feel more valuable. It was just recreation, like playing video games, to rich kids. To us it was our reward, and eventually a necessity in our lives.

“Sweetheart, you're getting away from yourself,” Victoria says dryly. It is cold now. I have gin in a water bottle I haven't tasted yet, so I drink from it for a long time, then light another cigarette. The gin is warm and blood flows hot through my face. Although my head is still cradled in her lap, we are separate now. She is cold and quiet, but accepting the silence. I brush her cheek with the back of my fingers and drink again.

“I'm just thinking, Babe.”

She smiles, kisses me, and tells me to carry on. I take a few more drinks while I finish my cigarette, recalling that autumn of my junior year to myself.

Nicole and I hooked up for the remainder of October, and each time she showed me new feelings and I was becoming more comfortable with her and her body. She did not drink, but she loved me when I wasn't sober and she loved to taste the liquor on my tongue when we kissed. This made me feel even closer to her. Our restaurants closed at the same time, but I always stayed later, cashing out the register. Nicole came in after she finished closing next door with dinner for the both of us. We would sit alone in the cafe in silence with the doors locked and all the lights off but the one over the counter as I worked. My music, connected to the speakers in the ceiling would play soft soul and passionate rhythm and blues. Nicole would make me strong drinks from my stash and I would drink and work. I would finish work, drink more, and make love to her in the dark with the music. We would lie naked and exposed on the couches in the back corner of the cafe, silently feeling each other and staring out at the moonlit, empty parking lot; feeling a need to not say anything; fearing it would ruin the perfection of the moment.

One night, she broke the silence finally and ruined everything. We were lying naked in each other's arms, her head buried in my chest, when she looked up at me and stopped my heart in the depth of her eyes.

‘Why don't we ever do this at your house? Or my house?’

‘Well, we aren't dating.’

‘I know that.’ She tightened her lips and looked at me with more affection.

‘Your parents are Irish Catholics from Boston. I don't think they would like their daughter to bring over random guys and look the other way.’ She laughed.

‘What about your parents?’

‘No.’

‘Okay.’ She paused in thought for a moment and asked, ‘Why aren't we dating?’

‘I don't know. I'd love for you to be mine.’

She pushed me away from her a bit and saw me more seriously. ‘Would you be the same if you were sober?’ I could see in her smile, she was proud of herself for that question. Then, very suddenly, she was deeply sad. She had made a horrible realization. ‘Can you even be sober?’

I looked at the space between our bodies. The world at that moment was the parts of our skin that touched, the suede cloth of the couch, and the parts that didn't.

‘I don't know,’ I said. ‘I've been like this for four months now.’

She touched my face with her delicate, warm fingertips. ‘We’re so young. How does this happen?’ She looked into me, gorgeous and careful, and she wrapped her arms around me. She pulled me tight against her breasts. My chest pressed up against her and my hand on her thigh, she buried her face in the curve where my neck meets my shoulder. My skin was wet and I realized she was crying. She was so quiet and strong that I could not understand. She took a soft, long inhale.

‘I love you, Omar.’ I reached over her body for my scotch and finished it. She didn't move. She expected nothing. I picked her head up from my shoulder and kissed her for a long time.

‘I love you more.’ I lied. I thought I felt it. This was the first time I would invalidate the sanctity of such valuable words in a blind state.

The weather in the month of November was cold and tense. The snow had fallen on just a few occasions, quietly through the nights. During the days, the air was dry and restless. If you were caught in the wind, it felt as if your skin would either harden and c***k or blow off your face like sand. The sky was perpetually gray and ice lined the curb of the concrete sidewalks and road. Life had been drained from everything on the streets, except the cars which only drove faster.

In Nicole I had a fire that kept me warm. We spent the month in each other's arms. It is true that the first of anything is the best. I drank her like a new cocktail. She tasted like fireball and gin on ice. She stayed in me for hours after and my head hurt more than ever when I came down.

We spent our time together in the basements of our homes on Saturday afternoons, in her car after dusk, in the cafe at midnight with classes in the morning. The minutes we were holding each other close were hours and the hours passed like seconds. The month was short and expired quickly for me in a blur of passion and drink.

The end of the month was very cold and still very dry. The day before Thanksgiving I had been drinking bourbon in school since the morning. Walking back from school under an overcast sky, snowflakes fell gently like ash floating in the air around a bonfire: the inarguable admonition of a storm through the night. The whiskey kept me warm, but I walked quickly to get home nonetheless. My aunt, uncle, and cousin were up from Brooklyn for the holiday weekend. My cousin and I would be secretly drunk through Sunday and enjoy our family's company. I had a date with Nicole that night, and then I was spending the rest of the weekend at home. We had discussed earlier that week never having been on a date together, which was strange because we'd become so close in such a short time.

Walking brisk in the flurry, I turned onto my street and saw my house at the corner of the next intersection. My aunt was standing in the driveway, arms crossed, one hand holding her phone to her ear. I smiled, excited to see her, and started to walk more quickly. I breathed into a cupped hand and inhaled through my nose, checking I didn't smell too strongly of bourbon, as I approached the driveway. Nearing, she saw me but did not wave. She started to walk toward me but did not smile, or put down her phone. She was nodding quietly, trying to understand what she was being told over the phone, avoiding eye contact. She said, ‘I understand, but I have to go right now.’

She put her phone down slowly into her pocket, crossed her arms, and then finally looked up at me. I was expecting a hug, but she seemed very tired and troubled, and I wasn't sure how I should act. She took a deep breath and said to me, with a strained voice and admirable strength, ‘Your Grandfather is dead.’

She had lost her father. My only response was, ‘That's a shame.’ The comment seemed to pain her, as if my apathy was meant in spite. She told me she would be leaving with my uncle and cousin, as well as my mother, in the morning to bury him on Thanksgiving. I nodded, and expressed how great it was to see her again as I moved past her uncomfortably to the door which led into the garage.

Inside the house it was warm and unbearably somber. The air was thick with rosemary and simmering broth. All of the lights in the house were off and there was no sun in the cloudy sky to illuminate the house through the open windows. Everything was grey in the limbo between light and darkness. My mother was frantic in the kitchen. I asked why she was cooking, but she didn't hear me. I walked through the kitchen, over the dirty, white, tiled floor. Past the cluttered wooden table, I found my uncle-in-law and cousin in the dining room, setting plates and silverware in the shadows. From them I learned we were having an ‘emergency Thanksgiving dinner’ that night to make up for their absence tomorrow. How childish, I thought.

‘Will you come upstairs with me?’ I asked my cousin. She looked to Stefan, her step father, who produced a sympathetic smile with no conviction and offered to finish the dinner preparations by himself.

My cousin, Hannah, has been like a sister to me my whole life. She was less than a year old when her father left her and her mother. She had lived with my family for much of her childhood as her mother pursued a medical education. They finally moved to Brooklyn together when Sandra accepted a residency there. Hannah attended a performing arts school in Manhattan. We resented each other as children, but as we grew older, we found a connection together in drugs and alcohol, and eventually came to love each other as friends, cousins, and something like siblings.

‘Shut the door behind you,’ I said to her as we entered my bedroom. I turned my lamp on to light the room with a dim, orange glow pouring over my dresser onto the floor around it. I dropped my backpack onto the bed, heavy from textbooks and the thick glass bottle. I took the bourbon out of the bag and filled an empty glass that was on the nightstand. I handed it to her and drank from the bottle, then sat on the bed.

‘Thank you. Have you been drinking all day? That's really not healthy.’ She took a small sip and struggled to swallow it without making a face.

‘It's just the holiday weekend. It's not a big deal.’

‘Okay. How are you holding up?’

‘About grandpa? The last memory I have of him is from last summer when he yelled at my mother over some conservative ideal. Then he made me watch Wimbledon with him.’

‘He really loved tennis,’ she responded. I smiled, recalling the tournament the year before. There had been an upset during the final match, and the cup was taken by the underdog over the Brit.

‘He taught me so much about the sport and the players. I still watch tennis often.’ We were both quiet for a moment, and each took a long drink. Then I asked, ‘How's my mom?’

‘She's still trying to process it, I guess. She'll be sad tomorrow. I think we'll all be okay at dinner tonight, and tomorrow we will begin to feel something.’

I topped off her drink, took a swig, and said, ‘I won't be at dinner.’

She sipped her drink, glaring at me over the rim of the glass. Lowering it from her lips, licking them gently as she did so, she asked, in a controlled but interrogative tone ‘What do you mean?’

‘I have to go out with Nicole tonight.’

‘Who the f**k is Nicole?’ She asked in a monotone.

‘I love her.’

She sighed and looked into my eyes, her face disgusting with pity. I reached out and took her empty glass, saying, ‘He was an awful, ignorant, hateful man.’

‘I know.’ She laughed to herself and started to leave, shaking her head as she walked out.

By the time Nicole was outside my house in her car, the bottle was almost gone and I couldn't walk straight. I brushed my teeth and splashed water on my face. As soon as I was in the car she told me to get out.

‘I'm fine. I'm not that drunk.’ She was staring at the snow in the headlights falling on the long street in front of us, silent. ‘My grandfather died today.’ Her gaze shot to me, disgusted.

‘Get out of the car. Now. Be with your family.’

I left and that was the last time I ever talked to Nicole.

It is still windy and cold. I am starting to feel a little drunk. Victoria is quiet and has noticed how much I drank, but I know she won't say anything. “It's only ten. Would you like to get some food?”

“That would be wonderful.”

We walk down Franklin Hill, slowly descending from the fog into the shadow of a cloud. We step heel first to the ground, then lay our toes down, in place with each other, as we had both been programmed in Basic Training to walk. We like to run down the really steep block, as if we were going down a slide in a park. On the way back up though, we know it will seem like an asphalt and wall, obstructing our journey home, that we will have to climb over. Things in this world are like that sometimes. Just as tobacco smells so sweet and soft before it is lit, then after it is bitter and harsh and strangely erotic in its discomfort. It is the same as the careless freedom of the night that is followed by the duties and restrictions of the day. Things in this world have a tendency to cycle between extremes.

I think perhaps this will happen to the relationship we have. In fact, I am certain. I can only hope she knows this as well. That is how people fall apart. Love is not always destroyed by a lack of love, or a lack of effort on one or both parties. If two people love each other very much, they can still fall apart just from the ignorance of one basic principle: Things cannot always be good. The bad lasts the same amount of time as the good. It is only fair.

“Will they take your phone from you once you're there?” Victoria asks as we walk down the hill.

“I was told they wouldn’t. But I doubt I’ll be able to talk to you during the day.”

“That shouldn’t matter because you’ll be on East Coast Time anyway.”

“Where should we go?”

“I just want to sit down somewhere. I want to be alone around other people. Does that make sense?”

“Of course.”

“It’s nice to be around other people that you don’t know. Just to be acknowledged for your existence.”

“Yes, that is nice.”

“I think it is.”

We walk down Franklin and then turn onto Alvarado. In exultation,the retrospective street lamps lining each measure of sidewalk illuminate the restaurants and people in a soft, golden light as we walk down the street. Thermal Blues' music partners with a forte of bright lights strung over each dining patio like a frieze, and around everything voices of comfort and enjoyment paint the scene. Tonight, we absorb the amorous streets of Downtown Monterey differently than we had before. We pass down a street of normalities that had once been impressive and provocative. Dusk slipping into darkness strikes a chord of melancholy that now resonates through the lights and each note of a Miles Davis cover, scoring Time, to whom we are forfeiting ourselves in useless hours.

We sit in a coffee shop I never cared to remember the name of. It is owned by Israelis. The cappuccinos are dry and smooth and the espresso is sweet. The milk calms my nausea from all the gin. I sip mine while Victoria enjoys a chocolate crepe.

“I always feel awkward ordering certain things from people of a different culture than those that created the product,” I say, attempting to provoke conversation.

Victoria separates another portion of crepe from the main body with the side of her fork, pierces it with the prongs and places it in her mouth sensually. While responding to my comment with her eyes, she chews slowly and analytically.

“That’s because you’re from Brooklyn, where you go to certain neighborhoods and a certain type of people live there and they serve the food from their countries.”

That makes sense. I drink the cappuccino then order a tonic water from the Jewish cashier, drink a third of it, and refill it with gin. Victoria says nothing and I am grateful. I drink my cocktail and listen to her talk about her cats “back home”. This phrase means nothing to me. There is Clifton Park; a seventeen-year stain in my memory. I will not return there until I have to bury my father. I had not lived in Brooklyn long enough for it to be called my home. I love it too much for it to be a home to me. Pain is home. Home is where I learned from mistakes and was beaten into the form I've become. That is not what home is supposed to be though. So I do not have a home then, or home is wherever I am. This makes sense to me. I always call the barracks “home”. Victoria calls it “her room”, like it is a hotel suite, not a dormitory. Home is a place of warmth for her. Yes, there are bad memories embedded in the walls of every room in her old house, but she has a family that expressed their love for each other and in there lies the familiarity and desire to be in that place called home.

We sit silently while she finishes eating and for some time after. It is nearly midnight now and we are the last patrons in the café. We watch people walking outside the glass windows on the sidewalk. Anyone still out after eleven is either drunk, about to be drunk, or tired and heading home.

“I really don't mind this place,” I resolve to Victoria.

“It is nice. The coffee is strong and no one bothers you.” I smile and finish off my drink, then stand up.

“We should go before it gets too late.” I declare.

Suddenly dismal again, Victoria nods solemnly and follows. We walk out and down Alvarado, holding hands, wordless. The silence is better than conversation when the reality is unbearable. In the morning I will be gone. How awful it is to think about that. Better to walk silently with nothing but our love between us than to ruin it with the foolish talk of reality.

At the intersection of Franklin and Alvarado we take a taxi up the hill to the gate of the post. We swipe our military ID cards in the magnetic scanner and pass through the turnstile. It is evident in Victoria's body language as we walk that, nearing the barracks, we will need to discuss the coming month.

“It will be good for me. I mean I don't need it, but I don't have a choice so maybe I'll make the best of it.” I say, feigning optimism.

“How can you say that right now?” She demands, no longer calm.

“I'm Sorry?”

“You're talking about rehab and you're drunk right now.”

“Oh, shut up.” I regret this immediately, but I can see in her expression that it is too late. I stop walking and let go of her hand. She continues on but stops eventually and turns around, several yards ahead. Looking at me with eyes wet from pain and love, she stands with her arms crossed as the moonlight dances in her mahogany hair, flowing past her shoulders nearly to her waist, glimmering like the stars above us.

I walk towards her and wrap my arm around her waist. Pulling her body close to mine, it is as if she forgets everything in the world except us and embraces me tightly, pressing her face into my chest. We are fickle in our passions. Let us stand here in the moonlight among the trees and forget the world together. To love like we do in this moment is rare and must be seized without hesitation. Hold tightly to it for it will slip away as quickly as it comes. I sway a little to the sides and she sways with my drunkenness. There are no tears yet. There is no happiness. We are both appreciating this moment as if we are admiring a painting together.

I bury my nose into the curve where her neck becomes her shoulder. Her hair smelled of memories of love and the passions we share. I settle myself in this moment, it will fleet away soon, I know. I know.

I release her. I loosen my hold on her and take a step back. Her head held firmly by my unfaithful hands, her moist eyes looking into mine, we exchange souls for a brief moment, then look away almost immediately. We begin to walk on again. The soft brush strokes of a breeze sweep the cement sidewalk before our feet. A few dead leaves slide along the width of the sidewalk in front of us. Past these leaves, like dead memories fleeting through my mind, onward into the inevitable end of the night: we carry on.

We have been flying by for years. All of us, accelerating and strengthening, we jump ambitiously into the current with conscious neglect for the rocks and crags embedded in these rapids. In our pursuit of a wizened and memorable youth, it seems, we have forgotten we are mortal. In a way, we have been searching for relief in everything we do, which has produced only disappointment. It is too late for us when we realize together, all at once, humans are polar animals, with fragile rage and chronic pain. We are radicalists, servicemen to our own emotions, and- above all- lost. We are constructed of measures of thread, suspended as we grow until wrought to their limit, and when they snap apart they all break simultaneously. When we witness this in another, the damage is crippling. Those that do not snap are stretched tighter afterwards and it is too late to repair what had broken. Then everything halts. We witness multiple breaking points shortly following one another and everything burns to ash around us. When it has finished, we steady gradually to a fulcrum and stand ourselves up, and we try to make sense of it all.