Garden State by Rick Moody.

[midnight_birth]

Title: Garden State.
Author: Rick Moody.
Genre: Fiction.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1992.
Summary: The novel traces a group of friends in Haledon, New Jersey, through one spring in their rocky passage toward adulthood. They are out of school, trying to start a band, trying to find work-looking for something to do in the degraded terrain of their suburban hometown. It captures the lyricism of stark lives in a story of friendship and betrayal.

My rating: 7/10
My review:


♥ Rail lines marked the perimeters of Haledon, this isosceles triangle in the flat Eastern part of the Garden State. Freight trains ran through it like blood cells, carrying unpronounceable compounds and toxins. They rumbled past the accidents at crossing gates, past the crime scenes and late-night waste burials.

♥ Evelyn Smail sat down herself. She rifled the bag at her feet. Again, amid fears of product tampering, she found she had bought an open package of aspirin. Once her daughter had dared her, in the supermarket, to drink from a gallon of water without a cap, and while she pretended the suggestion was ludicrous, she had gone back to seize the bottle while Alice was in another aisle. She had drunk greedily from it. The effect was bracing.

♥ He had been coming around the Smail's place at nighttime for months, since about the time her father had moved out. It was to sleep together, really, or so he thought, and though they did, there were long stretches between encounters. With him it was a need, a persistent rash of need, but Alice had strange rules governing these things. Dennis was helpless to produce the language that produced the act. There was a language, but he hadn't learned its idioms. There were some indicators with Alice, and sometimes he was able to kiss her, to entwine a finger in her belt loop: when a train was passing, when Alice was wearing blue, when there were sirens, when there was no moon, when amphetamines were spilled and rolling on the carpet. But this kind of stuff was by no means certain. Even though this afternoon Alice was wearing blue: a torn denim skirt.

♥ It was messy and awkward and it look a long time. Fucking was nothing that would change the world. After, they lay aside and waited out the slowing of pulses.

♥ Sex smelled to Alice like industrial byproducts. It must have involved equally potent chemicals, those that were both organic and dangerous. She sometimes hallucinated the smell of spermicidal jelly in the course of the day. There was its faint redolence in guacamole or in fresh ink. In words, too, sex leaked outwards-laughter and fright, with their silent consonants, always reminded her of diaphragm. Try to ignore a thing like sex, and it turned up in everything.

♥ "I don't know. I guess he's homesick or something."

"Homesick for here?"

"Well, so now he'll get better I guess. Unless now he's homesick everywhere."

♥ Alice felt lower than she had in years. They were into the rave-up Devil Train chorus, and that was right when she realized that nothing had come of the years since high school and that nothing would come of the years ahead. Nothing had ever been worse than this, not her parents splitting up, not Mike Maas' death, no global horrors-none of that made a difference. Maybe it was the drinks.

♥ Flummoxed, he woke again in his room, still not recognizing it, not feeling himself to be named as he was, Lane, not feeling himself to be son or stepson or stepbrother, beloved of each, not feeling himself removed from the barely furnished cave he had formerly struggled to pay for, not feeling himself to be himself. How had he come here? The color pink was superimposed over everything; the sensation of nausea and of being constantly late for an appointment, these were fixed in his awakeness now.

He was in retirement. It was coming back to him.

Now the flowered wallpaper in his bedroom was not flowered at all, but covered instead with the double helixes of genetic information. His sudden ability to read these ideograms didn't surprise him. The blinking red light in each pattern, the gene for his madness which had waited in abeyance all through childhood, stood out in the patterns he saw. So this was him now.

While lying there in bed, he waited for details to return, as if his life were immersed in a photographic developing solution. All was elusive at first. He knew he had called his mother, after weeks of avoiding her, after weeks of ignoring what was sitting right in front of him-his ruined self-and he remembered that the explanation was like pulled teeth. Please come and get me, he had said at last.

And now he was drugged, sleeping sixteen hours a day. More to come.

♥ Sure, this rebellion was general in Haledon and sure she was part of the trend. The kids dropped like flies in the teens and twenties in furious explosions of mortality.

♥ She guessed that the lives of the men and women she had known over the tears-in the Garden State and out in the open spaces-were largely given over to sudden departures and humble returns. Marriage and divorce were like that, for example. Everywhere things looked better everywhere else. Everywhere a hunger for some simple old conversation.

♥ Alice, on her knees by the edge of the bed, reached to shake his hand. Through erroneous shadows, amid uncomfortable furnishings, his touch was foreign, stern and lifeless at once.

♥ "Wait," Dennis said. "Hold on. Lemme just drive you-"

"Forget it" she said. She smiled when she said it.

They stood like that for a second, hands dug deep in empty pockets.

♥ From Scarlett's house to her own after midnight on a Wednesday was probably faster walked, but you'd have to traverse the cliffs, traverse that festering wood, and it was all uphill. So though the buses only came every half hour between ten and two, Alice sat on the bench on the corner waiting. She watched Scarlett's lights go out. She watched the traffic on the streets vanish.

When would the night come when she wasn't out waiting like this, when she didn't worry about passing out on the bus or losing her keys, or puking, or saying something ridiculous? When would she stop forgetting to get into bed or to undress? A lot of stuff that had receded when she first threw a switch on an amplifier just never would come back now. But there were things that were still okay, like when the tiny wizened bus driver opened the doors at last, she asked him if he would wake her when they reached the heights, and he nodded and smiled.

♥ He had got thinking about drugs. It was the medication. Just remembering-the bad times especially. Good times on drugs were hard to pin down.

♥ Doing dope was like driving on an expressway for the first time. It was like driving fast on the New Jersey Turnpike. But just that one time.

♥ He shivered on the step, waiting. Imponderable ideas swarmed around him, and they had actual shapes and velocities like moths on the outside of a screen door. He shivered on the step until the church door swung back of its own and all that was left was to announce himself. He launched himself into the arms of the minister, raving.

Five, six, seven hours he lay underneath the small breakfast table in the rectory kitchen. That was when Lane learned that time was a rigor learned only in the outermost layer of civilizing thought. He remembered only a few images-a giant tangled rose bush whose bloom was shaped into a human mouth from which spasmodic groans of erotic release issued forth. That kind of thing. God actually appeared to Lane that night-or maybe it was just the holy spirit-to tell him his torment was justified.

♥ It worked for a while and then it stopped working. A period followed when his mother's kindness disgusted him. Now he saw right through her assurances, but he needed her anyway. Another sad thing about getting older.

♥ The commotion of payment and departure distracted the crowd, and amid this distraction, Max set a small plastic zip-loc bag on his Garden State map placemat. A dozen tiny pink pills, the whole batch no larger than a pencil eraser. They had the imperfect shapes of homemade manufacture: they weren't rounded or stamped with milligram strength.

At one time Dennis would not have asked about the content of the bag, would have simply swallowed what was proffered. At one time he ingested things on no more than the rumor of disorientation-nutmeg, morning glory seeds; in this period he guzzled vanilla extract, feigned stomach ailments in hopes of having paregoric administered. And the allure of the flimsy zip-loc bag and its contents was strong. He hadn't done Dust in maybe three years, but still. It was the times, it was the weather, it was the way things seemed to be going lately.

♥ Ruthie drew back the lion's head knocker. The paint was peeling badly at the Smail's house. Some people's lives drew near to tragedy. In fact, they clotted the suburbs. They spoke at parties, these ones, only of nuclear stockpiles, beaches littered with severed hands, industrial spills, space junk, designer drugs, and all who had died in extremis. Ruthie wanted to shake them by the shoulders and remind them of the moment after their marital vows, of their graduations, of their first infatuations or of bird calls and uncontrollable laughter, but she knew too how sympathetic she was to their point of view. Lower down, Ruthie loved disaster.

♥ Lane had blinders on now. He had eliminated all but a tiny extract of memories. If she sat him down and reminded him of his smile as a young boy, or when he stood for the first time, or when he spoke his first words, he would deny all of it. He would call attention to all horrible things-his father's disease, every blunted incoherent syllable his father had uttered since his institutionalization, and he himself would duplicate these monosyllables with the rich oratorical precision of the abandoned.

♥ Lane was a good example. He had tried to hold it together in those teenaged years when a father is so valuable-the obstruction and censure of a father-but Ruthie had seen the seams. His was a life established through guesswork.

♥ He begged for help with the wordlessness of infancy, bobbing aimlessly in the doorways muttering about wanting to go home, wanna go home, until he stopped even that, until it was a simple wordless want.

♥ All over Haledon, as over the nation, Lane observed this movement of need. Addictions, blossoming in personalities like parasites. All over Haledon, kids were coming apart. They bounced back for a while and then they stopped bouncing back, and surrendered to the whisper of their cells. Addiction was the counterintelligence of the flesh, the double-agency. The statistics revealed a swelling outwards, like some kind of ink spill-the guys he knew, and the guys after, just kids, still wet behind the ears, resorting to bad ideas-sexual asphyxia, self-immolation.

And he knew what had happened. It was biochemical transformation. It was genetic engineering. His own body had changed. His body included these substances now the way it had a pancreas or a uvula. There were no turns, tributaries, no parallel lines, no exit ramps, nothing but where this road emptied out. In bed, wasted. His solemn vow, his solemn effort, was to try not to drink while he was on his mother's tranquilizers.

♥ "Max is gonna die," Lane said. "Everybody in this town will. I wouldn't be surprised."

"Yeah and that's not all either." Dennis said, "Just let me have your pillow okay?" Lane plumped a pillow from his bed and then set it under Dennis' head. "Nothing's working out with Alice, that's the thing. Nothing is working out."

Lane didn't say anything.

"I don't know-"

"Well," Lane said, "she'll be pretty wiped out about now. Her mom-"

"What about her mom?"

And Lane told him. And it didn't make much difference, Dennis was going to fall asleep whatever happened, if there was an atomic strike on the Garden State he would have slept. Like his father, Dennis was a born sleeper.

♥ With visitor's passes displayed, they searched for the room, ventured down dead-ends. No one attended to their comings or goings, though they might have been on a mercy mission or crime spree. The only honest hospital was a locking one, Alice thought.

♥ Scarlett set the jar of sleeping pills on the floor beside her bed. Angels smiled on the well-rested. God loves sleepers and those who wake.

♥ Max Crick was perishing for what he loved. The seduction of fecal muck in the Garden State's redolent swamplands, the seduction of lovingly pronounced abbreviations of chemical contaminants, the seduction of the fabulous desolation of the Jersey City landfills-blocks of mashed appliances piled like the stepping stones of the great pyramids, swirling tornadoes of airborne scavengers-this seduction had replaced his regular instincts and he was perishing. And he didn't know it.

Plus, spring demoralized him. Daylight Savings Time, morning glories, dogwoods, spangled fritillaries: they moved him like paper cuts or dental abscesses. This was no mating season. Instead, he invited a deep cold to settle in his chest each year at this time and threw himself into the pursuit of his calling-the calling of drug dealer. An interdiction against all reminders of spring. Love in lovelessness only. Anyway, what did he know about alternatives?

♥ When the elevator stopped, finally, they were on the roof. Evening faded. It was pretty obvious to Max that whatever had bound them together, that furious affection of high school, was gone now. If it was the drugs that caused it, the drugs weren't causing it now. The drugs were all worn out. Nails was preoccupied with all this stuff that Max hadn't even gotten to. And that fact that he was white and Nails was black, it seemed totally different form how it used to be.

Max knew he had his own problems-he wouldn't, for example, tell abject terror from erotic obsession (phrases like murder-suicide stirred him in the loins), but to him these problems seemed like good ideas.

.."It isn't the same, Nails," Max said, "that's all."

Nails produced a flask from his back pocket-of a moment it looked like he was reaching for his firearm-and it was the smart kick of bourbon that Max tasted when it came around to him. It should have felt like something was passing between two friends, but it just felt like something was passing away.

♥ Max was joyous and distraught both. Which was which? The modern world was strange and unfinished, an abandoned project. Its effects were subliminal. Max was the kind of guy who would find a neutron bomb explosion beautiful, and that was about all he understood about himself.

♥ They called each other names like Flash, Stretcho, Jewel, or names that were simply a jumble of numbers and digits, like serial numbers or license plates. Once you believd you recognized a pair, or a foursome, they dropped out of sight. Their distinguishing marks were always shifting, the aluminum baseball bat, the catcher's mask, the walkie talkie or pellet gun.

Ten, eleven, twelve years old. They came out of nowhere. They crossed out the l's in public. They had all these uninformed opinions, staked whole friendships on flimsy data, refused to speak to one another one day and conspired the next. They rang doorbells and ran, tripped and handicapped, snickered at the word love. A lot like people in their twenties, in a way.

♥ Dennis reached down for another handful of rocks. The thing about figures on the horizon was that Dennis always imagined them to be of great help or great harm. These figures of myth weren't supposed to be mediocre. He thought about hopping a freight train.

♥ He leaned in against the doorframe. Children were all around the house, up and down the block. Spring blossoms.

♥ Kids knew about riding handlebars, Lane remembered, it was a right of passage. Riding on handlebars, heavy petting, shoplifting, stealing drinks and sleeping over.

♥ And then they were arguing. The word stepbrother did it. No big surprise. Alice unburdened her heart. Her rage was aphrodisiac. She loved it. She loved to insult him, to call him a plumber, to muddle him with arguments he had overlooked, subtleties he hadn't understood. She didn't stop there either. She reddened. She started way back at the beginning. All the little moments that had failed all the way along. They all came out.

So Dennis got scared. He started talking it all back.

"You aren't going to like break up or anything, are you?" he said. "You wouldn't just-."

Most of all, she hated him for not seeing the answer to this himself. "Well, I don't know," she said. "How could I? Maybe I will, maybe I won't. How the fuck do I know?"

In his features there was a combination of fierce bloodthirstiness and transcendent joy. Somehow she was pleasing him. She knew the fight things to say were in this direction. Dennis hadn't seen yet that he was basically a nice guy. Only injustice got him going.

♥ The road down into Haledon was strewn with wreckage and trash. Burnt-out cars, burial mounds of shattered glass, flattened, indistinguishable bits of biology, torn pavement, potholes full of ominous black soup.

His heart rushed a little as it did in the old days. He loved destruction. The freight train coming around the bend was his ticket to the world of fiendish industry. He could jump it. He could jump it, or he could wait for an hour for it to pass. It wailed and surged by, like a cinematic train, some hulking icon of the last century.

♥ "I'm doing something wrong," Dennis said.

"What you're doing wrong," Alice said, "is thinking about it, thinking that you're doing something wrong. Don't cave in, that's my advice. No one can stand someone who caves in."

♥ The ruin was empty now. Alice and Dennis were unchaperoned. The Capture the Flag game was a dreamt mirage. Never again, maybe, would the kids get anything together. They would plan things in high school and after; they would plan drunkenness and fornication with the premeditation of serial killers, but they'd never act in concert again. Soon they'd be looking over their own shoulders at the generations to follow.

♥ Her hand was outstretched. She was waiting to be helped up. Nothing subtle about it. What changed her mind? It didn't matter what she thought, really. She could work it over, leave him feeling blue; she could get off. It would be easy. It was some modern, civilized idea about what was primitive. They flung themselves on a slab of concrete, kissing, fumbling. Something was falling out of the sky, rain or hail or ash or debris. Evening rallied around them. Alice groaned: she fabricated a groan. She was untangling her pants. They were all inside out. She held his head between her legs. He was like a wasp darting around down there. She was worried about someone seeing, but then she wasn't. Soon she hoped someone would see.

"Fuck it," she said. When his head started to come up, when it seemed he was going to take this advice literally, she forced him down again. "Fuck it."

A train was galloping past.

"More pot maybe," she said. "More something."

Dennis was mumbling to himself. Why? And a figure was walking along the tracks. Dennis had three fingers inside of her and was licking the side of her thigh, and she was waving to the guy, getting ready to shout something, to really curse from the bottom of her heart. Then she realized it was Lane. Lane was walking past. Alice reached down to try and push Dennis off, to try and cover herself. They were out in the open. Everything was all messed up. Then she just lay there. She felt dead inside. The world knew all her crimes.

Lane ran. Alice faked an orgasm. Dennis tugged at her in some regularized four-four rock and roll rhythm. He was jerking himself off. He wanted more. Did he see, and just ignore it? Later, she figured it out. He was trying to forget.

♥ Max figured that Lane was about to cry, that Lane was too old to cry, that Lane would not want to cry in front of an old friend. He responded honorably. He walked off. Ten paces off, he watched Lane shudder, as though it were nothing at all.

♥ It had nothing to do with girls sleeping with girls, the way L.G. saw it; it had to do with a man trying out this thing that had been on his mind only to realize that it wasn't on his mind anymore. Fantasies are like ideals: they're out there just to prevent dead reckoning. Close in on them and they move. Further out, mostly.

♥ L.G. begged her not to cry, because the girl was coming back and she was maybe sixteen. He begged her not to let the girl see. The least they could do-he was whispering-was to treat the girl right. She was just a kid. Scarlett wasn't having any of it. Scarlett bawled. It had been a shitty idea right from the start. It had been a drunken idea. Just people taking advantage of people. Dehumanization cubed. Three people getting what they thought they wanted and then not wanting it. Same old fucking story.

♥ Lane lowered himself into the bathtub. In this temperature-at the high edge of bearable-the heavy metals would be leached from his body. In the Northern countries where melancholy was prevalent, Lane thought, the sauna originated. The light was bad, and the citizenry drifted into truculent silences, until the hour of the sauna.

♥ And he remembered how he lost his virginity in college. It was with a woman in his philosophy class, in freshman year. She was sullen, homely, fiercely opinionated in class. He had seen her, had tidied himself for classes on her behalf. Without ever having even spoken to her. She was simply someone else preoccupied with philosophy, who argued persuasively against some things, against moralists, for example. Lane wondered if by now she had forgotten about all of it, or if she remembered with the detail that he did. Anyway, Lane had figured since she had presented a paper about the absence of inner lives, that she would do anything. He figured she had no shame.

♥ "Oh, Mom." He wanted to say something else, but he couldn't think. Ruthie listened. Nothing came.

In her arms, his dampness, his damp hair, his clammy, pale body. There wasn't much left of him. Right under everyone's eyes he had given out.

His hurried explanation, when it came, didn't make much sense. He didn't know, didn't know. He mumbled in fits and starts. Something terrible was going to happen, something really terrible.

Soothing words came to Ruthie. She called hims sweetheart, darling, told him everything would be all right, all while she plotted phone calls, plotted avenues of advice and recourse. Categories from psychiatric texts, words and prescriptions, these routes, through traffic snarls, over bridges, through tunnels, to nearby hospitals, all this while pretending comfort.

♥ Parties have a middle portion, between when everyone is nervous at the beginning and where everyone is passed out at the end.

♥ Max and Dennis were rooting around on the third floor. The doors to the offices, all vacated, swung wide, and in each room they circled around absently. Trespassing as a kind of ownership. It felt good. Max carried two beers. Dennis carried two beers. They were talking about how there was nothing going on.

♥ Nothing as timid as acoustic guitars after you have played electric for a while. Like using a bayonet against an army with submachine guns, Alice thought. The sound of that lonesome strumming of open chords-that sound that immediately brings to mind campfires-it's so pathetic because it's so near to silence.

♥ ..they were just looking for one empty room on the whole second floor to smoke it in, a room without a girl in it giving a blowjob to somebody. These things were on Alice's mind. There was something about fucking. Fucking was out of favor. It was an era of barter, or blowjobs and handjobs and stuff. Guys would try anything to avoid fucking. They would persuade you to accept ropes or shackles at the bedposts, while they went to masturbate in the other room, or they would want you to masturbate in front of them, or they would want you to pose for photographs, or they would want you to submit to mild cruelties, or to shave yourself in front of them, or to put things in yourself. And all because they were afraid to look you in the eyes and say you were pretty swell.

♥ Alice noticed that Dennis' voice didn't get raised in all this planning. She could see he didn't like any of it. In the silence right then, the five of them standing there, Max and L.G. were passing a joint, the sound of an acoustic guitar somewhere-badly in need of tuning-in this lapse when it felt as though nothing had happened, when everything was just the way it had been for a decade, Alice slid down three steps to where Dennis stood. It just seemed right. He looked okay. She didn't want to lead him on, but she didn't necessarily want him out of the picture either. It was one of those moments when a trivial question bore a lot of weight.

♥ Max asked if there was any more beer. She handed him her cup of foamy dregs. Max smiled, and Alice noticed his teeth were all dead, all cemented in. From when he'd broken his jaw. There was an especially low form of bankruptcy in his smile.

♥ Lane had learned to trust her, or maybe he just trusted her first and learned about it later. But as she came to the examining table, where he was sitting, he felt okay.

♥ No sharp edges: it had nothing to do with harm to the self (like J.D. proved, you could always figure a way). It had to do with sharpness in general. In the Motel, nothing sharp. Everything was free of that kind of keenness. Everything was regimented casually, calmly, totally.

♥ ..and then he passed back and forth in the hall, on specious pretexts, unable to enter. Why not? What kind of fear keeps you from your friends when they are hurt?

♥ He hadn't raised his voice, but a sort of a conviction formed in Lane, and it was a novel feeling, to have conviction. It was right and good, Lane thought-and he thought those very words, right and good-that Thou Shalt Not Kill Thyself. And he wanted to let J.D. in on this, even if he didn't even know where to start.

♥ At ten-thirty the residents of the Motel proceeded in an unruly column to their rooms, where each and every one of them faced up to the fact that they were afraid of the dark.

♥ Valdez brought more pills for J.D. Lane listened for the deceleration of her breathing, after she swallowed them. He just waited, listening. Reflex or no reflex, breathing predated the most ancient of writings; it was older than the oldest civilization. There were theories of transit from wrong breathing to right, but no rules.

♥ No days were as provisional as these.

♥ He told her he had called before. She told him she had been unpacking things. He told her he had called twice, and then Dennis told her he would keep it short, that he didn't want to get involved anymore. But he didn't want to not talk. Everywhere people were having those feuds; at every gathering you could count on two people refusing to speak who used to be close. Silence prevailed. Somebody had to put his foot down.

♥ ..Ruthie confessed the whole story to her, her new version of how he had evaporated before her eyes where he had been so promising, the new story about how, frankly, she had known all along it would happen. She might have been a reader of evidence, might have seen it, and read its cryptograms. It was a failure that would take a while to expiate. She cried noiselessly, daintily, in subtle unassuming rivulets. She directed blame, without choking up, at Lane's father. Maybe Lane's blankness-because that was the right name for it now-was an homage to his father, who had himself slipped through all gradations of self to be all but entirely gone. Lane's unavoidable love of his father. You could take the father out of the town, Ruthie theorized, but not the dad out of the son.

♥ Ruthie seemed to have forgotten all about Dennis. Or maybe it was Dennis himself who had forgotten about her. Perhaps in this juncture of sunspots and orbits the opportunity to leave had come to him. And Evelyn wondered what would do it for Alice. What had it done for her, Evelyn, in the past? What was the calculus that finally enabled youth to pass, for good, out of youth? This generation never seemed to leave home. They grew up to a certain point and then spent the next decade, until collapse, trying to recapture the novelty of adolescence, that pulse of youth that seems, in its fullest bloom, permanent.

♥ Gentility hung on. Sunlight streamed across the dusty surfaces. A beautiful afternoon, an afternoon that smiled on the suburbs. Evelyn gathered up the tea service-china rattled on silver-and headed for the kitchen. The mysterious simplicity of boiling water, the primeval chemistry of tea steeping. She would make more.

♥ That was the end of that. They stayed for two or three more selections on the jukebox, the usual racket, for a couple more drinks. There was compensation in this world: Max would just drink fast, drink in silence, drink-whenever he could-in solitude.

♥ She hauled Max into the trailer, when they got there, and spread him out on the floor. He was mumbling and protesting. But even when he grabbed her tights, she didn't pay any attention. She left the lights on, the tape deck playing swamp music, and then she took off. No one would take advantage of Max Crick where he lay. No one could take more advantage of him than he had himself.

♥ He climbed aboard. And since it was not an electric train-because there were no high tension lines there, no pyrotechnical sparks-he climbed right up on top. He thought about highway overpasses. New Jersey was the world's longest running silent comedy. Standing straight up as the train started down the hill now, Dennis was the owner of all he saw, circling back around forever. It wasn't a way out; it was just a way to see the sights.

♥ She just wanted to set things right before getting older. It was that time.

♥ Where Alice might have let the guy go, figuring that he wasn't going to answer, that he didn't want to, that he didn't talk to a girl in fishnet stockings after midnight in Haledon, N.J., but she just didn't want to. It was proof of the fact that you could have a change of heart about one small thing and still have deep pockets of poor behavior remaining in your personality.

♥ Human bonds all broke up, fragmented, shattered, exploded, she thought right then, resolution or no resolution, according to whatever explosives were at hand, and that was what she really wanted to tell Lane, but she didn't see that it had much to do with him, especially because it was she, Alice, who was a breaker of bonds, a violator of families, a dead soul on the eternal Garden State Thruway of dead souls. Just seeing the two Italian or Greek or Turkish guys, whatever they were, two guys with a homeland, stacking chairs and telling jokes in their language about pussy or something, it made everything worse. Only the immigrants in America seemed to have homes. Only they knew how to speak of the past.

♥ "Oh fuck," Alice said.

And she walked back to the stool, to the pad there, and she whispered to herself-and scrawled it right afterwards, right on the midst of those scribbled circles and triangles and bits of forlorn geometry-"Oh well, I fucked everything up and I'm really sorry about it. I never thought that maybe the best thing is just to leave people alone sometimes. I never thought I was hurting you just because I was lonely. So that's that and maybe I'll see you when you get out.

♥ But that was New Jersey innovation. This was the state where professional baseball was first played (in Jersey City), where the first trade union was organized (in Haledon, of silk factory workers from Paterson), where Aaron Burr had his duel (in Weehawken). It was the state with the most traveled pavement in America. An historical place. The state that first sold malted milkshakes and filtered cigarettes. Lapels were narrow then. Parking spaces were wider. Shopping bags were made of paper.

♥ ..the interview had gone well, and the guy-with his balding pate, red nose, reddish swellings under his eyes-had a firm handshake. The guy shook L.G.'s hand like he knew quality. A life spent on a certain business, though it might be an unglamorous business like carpeting or power tools or sportswear or health and beauty aids, could have a certain dignity. What other conclusion could he come to now? What other choice could he make? The Garden State, in fact, was totally founded on guys like L.T.D. Carpet Company. He could see how it maybe didn't fit with this plan to be a rock and roll personality, but one day you just trusted what you had fallen into and went on from there.

♥ And L.G. sat, and they were both sitting there thinking then, with as much room as they could get between them on the bench, the way guys will, guys being together.

♥ Or you could go Against Medical Advice, which took three days and they'd let you out the front door. Invite you out. It was the upright escape, the calm way.

All this because the scary thing was to do your time and keep your mouth shut, and do what they told you. The scary thing was to get better, to change. Because then they sent you back into the world. To try again.

♥ "I don't know," Lane said. "Maybe you oughta stay out of it, Tony. Nobody says anything to anyone's face anymore."

♥ They talked again about how she was leaving. He said he was sad she was leaving, and he said he wished they had done this sooner. He said it even though he didn't mean it the way it sounded-sort of greeting card. He was just sorry. Scralett told him she just got feeling like she wanted to be back home. And Dennis could understand it, except that he was home already and things still weren't going right.

The food came and went. The night came and went. It was just another date. It was no big deal. Dennis paid, even though he was trying to save money. Scarlett put up a fight and then gave in.

♥ And then they parted. The biggest victories in the smallest things. Nothing else to report on this for the time being.

♥ There was too much noise really. The neighborhood was too noisy. On the other hand, her house was like a tomb. Since Alice had moved out. The past was buried under this emptiness. There was noise in her head. Neglect accumulated. Evelyn drunk.

♥ Another twenty-five years might pass before her faith in the world would be restored. It would be worth it.

♥ He dialed the number. It rang. Alice picked it up.

"Hi," he said. "This is Lane calling."

There was a fumbling on the other end, a gathering or regathering of forces.

♥ There was no way to start all the conversations he owed. He didn't even know where to begin. Books might be better than people.

♥ Hot, hot, hot. So Lane was having trouble concentrating on cognitive therapy which was dealing that day with anxiety. They were dealing, in fact, with some of Lane's fears, which he had enumerated while he waited to be summoned: conversation, nights with clouds, murder and murder with struggle, clocks, laughter, poetry, and technology. He was afraid of the elderly (and of becoming elderly), of Africa, of air-raids. He was afraid of the genetic pool and primogeniture and inheritance. He was afraid now of parties and of gods or the lack of them. He was afraid of pugilism. Of liquor stores. He was afraid of Paterson, New Jersey. He was afraid of any kind of marital situation: married, unmarried, widowed, or divorced. He was afraid of any good day and the responsibilities implied therein and of what he might say and of what expressions others wore when he spoke with them on the telephone. He was afraid of what was to come and of getting out. And mostly he was afraid of his own life and opinions, of his past which came back to him in an incremental battle of inches.

♥ It was comic, but not to J.D. Lane had come to see that matters of life and death could lurk in the most routine appliances or activities. People could stake their very lives on the act of riding an elevator or going out for a newspaper.

♥ Down the hall his mother was saying, probably, it's not like he's telling you, it's not like he was always miserable, it's not that he couldn't get along with anyone. But if not, how was it? His mother's wishes were as much wishes as his own. Which memory, twenty years later, did not retain the traces of wishful thinking? No assemblage of evidence, of snapshots, would help now. When the poison in his head vanished, he would come around. No revisionism was necessary.

♥ The social worker brought him up to date about his past-he was neither well-liked nor unliked as a child, his parents' marriage had been neither cordial nor violent, he had done reasonably well at sports and reasonably well at his studies, and so on, these assessments had none of the garish colors he remembered, the brilliant moments of humiliation and degradation. It wasn't life as he had lived it.

..A huge space widened between himself and any discussion of the past. He was supposed to absolve her, absolve his father, absolve his town, and he couldn't do it yet.

♥ He didn't want to be touched.

In the meantime, the social worker was talking about love, about declarations of love like they were the easiest kind of talk, some little bit of language you could enter into like may I please go down to the lounge and play chess with the guards. He couldn't say these things. And after all this time of sitting in front of the television out in Haledon, and stealing booze and prescription drugs, hiding out, playing dumb words weren't going to bring him around instantly.

But there his mother had said it, and he heard.

♥ They were both embarrassed. Some days just came and went. They were mustering hope an courage, but it wasn't all there yet. Scarlett didn't like it necessarily.

♥ Scarlett turned off the television set. She went into her bedroom and lay down. Then, because she and Alice were in that part of roommateship, of friendship even, when mutual disappointment was a must, she waited for the front door to open, for the preliminaries to take place, and then she went back out, pretending she'd forgotten something.

♥ The street, someone had told her, was where you went to live when you no longer felt comfortable anywhere else. It was a system of thought as well as a circumstance.

♥ Who could say? Who had these arguments anymore? The days were gone when being in a bar band was a state of grace. The days without moral consequences and without wasted lives were all gone now, and Dennis and Scarlett were remembering. When the tape came to an end and the conversation came to an end, there was a long silence, and Scarlett sighed and they both realized how bad the traffic was.

♥ The Rest Area was empty, and the van had barely rolled to a stop before they began again. Gentle kisses, nothing carnivorous. Kisses which did much, now, to purge regret.

..She was wearing this torn tee shirt under a black cardigan sweater and he crept under the layers like he was throwing off a legacy.

♥ Dennis felt how rivers commanded so much myth, so many stories. It was the kind of expanse that could not help but be dignified. And then there was the north end of that island. The color of slate, the color of tombstones. So much activity, none of it visible from that distance. So much disappointment. That's what Scarlett said. Its spires were jagged insistences; its churches subscribed to alchemical philosophies, heretical rituals. Its universities protected abandoned, discredited theories, like the theory of the flat earth, the theory of the earth-centered universe, and the Pleasure Principle. They were glad to be on this side.

♥ He took up his silver again. Inarticulated by remorse. He flung his things down on the plate, and remnants of dinner scattered out around him. Because you checked yourself into the Motel, you got out, you took your medication, and still you had only made the smallest dent.

♥ It was late. He was here way beyond any reasonable expectation. So much peace now. So much to look forward to.

♥ Alice didn't snore. She was as still as if deceased. What made slumberers unique, Scarlett realized, was that they have no choice but to trust. No way around it. Therefore, when you prepare for bed, make sure your affairs are in order.

♥ No one had turned out like they guessed, but no one had turned out half bad, if the trick to being okay in that decade was being reasonably straightforward and not coveting anyone else's property or station. That second-to-last night with Scarlett they stayed up for a long time and watched late night television and talked about everything-how flat this country is, whether religion will make a late comeback, whether Lane slipped or jumped when he fell onto the fire escape, what made Mike Maas do it, how long until the recession, whether rock and roll was really dead.

♥ Resolution is ephemeral. You're more likely to win Lotto than to experience revelation. Get yourself in order for revelation, nonetheless.

♥ Thoughts about the weekend eclipsed the subtle activity of growing old and growing shrewd, that incremental willingness to compromise.

The long weekend, and the inevitable gatherings of family and friends-parties at the shore, dinners at the air-conditioned restaurants on Haledon Avenue-these didn't ameliorate, even as they concealed, the real problems. Maybe language couldn't even speak to tell what troubled us, though the torrents of language-discussions of change and probability, decline and fall-always blasted away at the silences somehow. The sound of trains, for example. That's why the sound of guns on Memorial Day-those saluters to soldiers lost in wars most people don't remember-are so moving, and why the rhythm of drill sergeants is like hip-hop and why rock and roll sounds medieval sometimes and why all the great plots are used up and why everyone at the parade feels they have lost something.

♥ And he thought about what happened on the roof, and that moment when he thought that Alice had pressured Lane up there. And he thought about going down the fire escape and picking Lane up where he was passed out with his arm all bent around like he was some puppet that had just been cut loose from its strings. Lane all passed out. Trying to wake up, and thinking of him then as brother, brother, close to death, picking him up, dusting him off, persuading him to go back up the ladder and face all those people who were peering over the edge, face all that silence, all those people trying to figure things out. All those people attributing causes and effects as fast as possible. Remembering all that. Wondering if you could ever relate again to someone you had seen in those circumstances. Wondering, and wanting to talk to Lane like they used to talk sometimes, like people who are not related still giving a shit anyway. Wanting to talk about anything, about what Lane was thinking about, whatever he thought about things, wanting Lane to tell him stuff, teach him a few things. Tell him about painting. Wanting to give Lane a piece of his mind. Liking the guy and hating the guy. Wondering, and hoping.

♥ It was going to be nice to get one thing back, even if you had to lose some other stuff to do it.

♥ But Evelyn Smail, waiting for Ruthie, was unnaturally happy. It had nothing to do with anything, really, not to do with the sound of a train passing, with the ample sunshine, with the hummingbirds on the feeder in the backyard, or with the fact that she was packing the last of these things for a likely departure within the next month, by, say, the first official day of summer, but just because. It was the same feeling she had had that day, when merely out for a spin up into the hills, she had realized that any moment she might just keep going. But the sentiment had deepened. Evelyn climbed the stairs to what had been her daughter's room, and she danced a dance there along the empty floorboards. She had lost everything.

♥ Lane and Alice talked about bus rides they had taken, times they had been in the city, how the fares had gone up over the years, how the buses were nicer than they used to be, the best routes into the city, and late night drives across the county when they were younger, and how dangerous the roads were late at night, and people who had driven off the bridge, and people they knew who were dead, and then, avoiding names of people they knew well, they talked about drinking.

After that, there was a long silence.

It was a conversation like that old handkerchief trick. The more they said, the more there was to say, but none of it did anything, none of it made either of them feel that they were understood, that human companionship could quench the intensity of loneliness. The conversation was like so much pavement under the wheels of the bus. It was like landscapes crisscrossed a thousand times but known, except by billboards. Still, it was worth it.

♥ That week in the western part of the state, a man had opened a radiotherapy device and pronounced its glowing contents to be religious artifacts. That week in New Jersey, a man ad dive-bombed his private plane into a football stadium during a track and field contest. That week bookies in Atlantic City had taken bets on the likely crash point of a government satellite. Nothing was a prise anymore, Lane argued, except human kindness.

♥ Up into the mountains, down to the harbor, that vast river. When the bus came down from the bridge, onto the cloverleaf, it circled around and around a rubble of shattered glass and abandoned automobiles. City of narcolepsy, city of machinations, city of public executions and prerecorded accompaniments and prenuptial agreements, city of basis points and in vitro fertilizations and squatter's rights and electroconvulsive therapy and dreamlessness and aberrations of need. The bus took a right turn at the university and headed down along the river.

♥ Even the stairwell was crowded with bodies. That was the first thing. They lay sleeping head to foot at the top of the silently scrolling escalator, and the commuters each picked their way through that gauntlet of bodies. Lane and Alice did, too, wary of trampling an ankle or a hand stretched out casually across the floor. There were four guys sleeping at the top of the stairs, but they didn't look like vagrants. They had the right sneakers, expensive basketball sneakers. They were American and the place was air-conditioned and this was where they lived.

It was a maze of nests and habitations. The stairs opened out onto a newsstand, and on either side of it were the billiards room and the betting parlor. Emaciated shades stood by O.T.B. with carefully folded newspapers, checking and rechecking the figures. They scanned the passers-by and then returned to their work. Nobody moved. The bettors took a step this way or that-interrupting the transient populations with questions or needs-and then they rested again. Confidence games abounded, games about credibility. Panhandling was the career of last resort, but the language that characterized it was as precise as legal language and as persuasive as a public relations campaign.

There was a gigantic sculpture in one wing of the building, a haphazard array of wires and fixtures, through which the same five balls-duckpin bowling balls-rolled, day after day. The transients marveled at the sculpture. The residents detested its regularity.

♥ People rushed in around them.

And Lane left off thinking about the past right then, when the doors opened.

"Alice," he said.

With all that in front of them, they looked up.