Chapter 17 ~ Claustrophobia and the Mirror
April 5, 2010
Ivvy had got hold of this book from somewhere: The Earth from the Air.
We’d spent most of an evening poring over the pages, diving into the most amazing photos. When we’d first flicked through them, they looked like postcards or pieces of fabric. Nothing special.
Like one of them, a jagged stripe of orange against a black background, modern art at best; simple, inconsequential concept. Then, looking closer, there’s a small plane flying above the orange stripe and I’d found myself thinking: no way… that can’t be… And I’d realize over and again that these were pictures of the Earth. Of people. Of nature. These tiny, tiny pictures of enormous, breathtaking scale.
We sat on the couch, getting high, looking at the pictures, falling ever more deep in their thrall.
“Can you believe this?” Ivvy said and pointed at a shepherd and his goats, clustered within a rickety fence. From where I was sitting it looked like dried grass piled up ready to burn in the midday sun.
“Wow!”
“Understatement…”
I looked at her, she smiled.
We were quiet together for a moment, taking a hit off our shared joint, pausing, snickering smoke out into the room.
“Jesus!”
She was back to flicking through the pictures.
“Huh?”
She pointed at a grid of multi-coloured squares in the book.
“Mondrian, right?”
Lazy days wasting time in the Guggenheim, an education through avoidance.
Ivvy shook her head.
“Dye pits in Iran,” she explained, patient as a toad, “you don’t know how it works yet?”
I smiled, a little laugh escaping me. “Maybe…” I said, “and then again, maybe I don’t want to know how it works. Maybe I’m just playing with you.”
She stared at me. Smiled. Stuck up the middle finger of her left hand.
We both erupted dope sniggers.
“It wouldn’t work if it was the world,” I said when we were back to breathing normally, making no sense, not even to myself.
“Huh?” She was flicking through the pages.
“If it was the world. You know… those pictures where they show whole cities as smudges on the globe. You know? The lights at night, the roads in-between just dotted lines. You know what I mean? Right?”
Ivvy looked at me. Didn’t nod or shake her head.
“Right?” I repeated, certain that she was just playing me.
She slapped the book shut and tossed it onto the couch between us. It was heavy enough to make me bounce a little.
“Whatchoo talkin’ ‘bout, Willis?” she said, frowning, and we were both laughing again before we could stop ourselves.
“When I luh… look…” I started but the giggles were in the way, choking my words. And suddenly, taking me by surprise, a knot in my throat, my laughter in danger of turning to sobs.
I grabbed my beer and drank heavily, almost gagging as bubbles rushed up the back of my throat, into my nose.
“There’s… enough to care about,” I said, staring at my beer bottle, “you can see enough. If they were more distant… It would be easy to, you know, just take a glance and move on. But there’s something about them that makes them… me…”
I couldn’t say another word.
Not one word.
She grabbed the bottle from my hand, drained it, threw it down by the side of the couch at her end.
“Ken,” she said, taking my hand, “what the fuck is up with you?”
“I… I don’t know… I just…”
She squeezed my hand.
How could I tell her? How could I tell her that when I looked at those pictures, at the depth of them, at the little people and animals and cars and houses and farms and planes and all the other collected shit, I could almost taste the lives, almost know what each and every one of them went through every day? How could I tell her that? How could I tell her that looking at those pictures just brought the reality of my shitty little life crashing home like a punch to my stomach; the empty, barren plains between wherever I was and wherever my parents wished I would be? That when I looked at those pictures I could almost smell wherever they were taken, Iran, China, England, Arizona, New York, wherever? How could I tell her that the pictures made me feel smaller than a mosquito and just as easily smacked into oblivion?
How could I tell her that it didn’t matter where I went?
Because no matter how far away I might believe I’d escaped, no matter where I might run, the truth was that I would still be there. No matter where I went, I could never get away from who I am.
The pit of my stomach roiled with these thoughts. I felt like puking.
The pictures made me think of my father.
For no reason. No cause for this effect.
Just my father.
How could I tell her all this and not sound like I was tripping?
Ivvy. I wanted to trust her. I wanted to tell her all this shit.
But I couldn’t.
I stood up.
“Where are you going?” she asked, voice hardening, confused, losing its warmth.
“I can’t,” I said and headed towards the door. I heard her behind me, following, throwing things out of her way; she kicked over her glass, a chair rattling on the wooden floor as she threw a cushion at it.
“Just you wait a fucking minute!” Ivvy yelled but I was moving.
The door was open and I was out, heading down the stairs. Three flights and I would be out into New York’s oblivion.
Behind me, I heard her again.
“Fuck!” she yelled, “not the great, disappearing Ken show again!”
I kept walking.
And heard her on the landing above me.
Kept walking.
Heard her scream: “WELL FUCK YOU, YOU ASSHOLE! DON’T COME AROUND NO MORE, I WON’T BE HOME!”
Kept walking.
Down the stairs; resolute and steady.
Needing a hit.
The buzz.
One little rush of adrenalin and the chase.
Of risk.
Of fear.
Of success.
One little hit.
Even before I got to the street, I knew that I was heading to New Jersey.
To steal a car from a gas station.
While the owner was inside buying a soda or a doughnut or a strip of beef jerky or a lottery ticket or whatever other shit people buy at gas stations.
I hopped on a bus to Port Authority.
From there to my fix. Over the river.
Jersey.
