Afterlife (an excerpt)
My entranceway into Afterlife was harrowing. I don't know too many who can say otherwise. I was drinking that last night on earth.... a lot. I was twenty-four. My arms were covered in tattoos. I was wearing a black v-neck and my brown hair fell in feathered lengths over my forehead and ears.
And all around me, gather this:
A Manhattan sidewalk: a merchants' riverbed beside a rushing tide of glinting luxury cars, taxi cabs, and graffitied trucks spitting odorous fumes. When Siddartha Gautama Buddha sat beside his river in the quiet woodlands of India he heard it call out to him the sacred OM. And walking alongside those New York City streets you could have heard that same sound if you had the ears for it.
The steel and glass towers of Babylon rose from the ground toward the starless sky. A smoky Halal cart fumed on every corner. The people were rushing and drunk and wheeling and ogling. You'd scarcely feel surprised to see a woman spitting fire into the air and even less so to see a wheelchair bound homeless man desperately relieving himself before the massive crowd. This was the city where the world came to put on a show.
Adrienne withdrew her hand from my back pocket and left off spinning with arms wide through the oncoming crowd. She was singing, and swaying her hips. Me and Pedro watched her, not responding in any way. We were getting older and we'd learned that acting outwardly unimpressed did not mean you were not impressed. It just meant you'd seen it all. That there was nothing new under the sun. It was a way to quietly demonstrate your vast accrual of experiences and we basked in our understated expressions of superiority and in the association with this fine little creature who was so free and charming.
She came spinning back toward me, threw her arms around my waist, and thrust her hips into mine. I picked her up, spun us around and set her down. And Pedro and Adrienne and I walked on.
“We'll be able to make it there by, I'd say, 11:30, maybe?” said Adrienne. “We're probably going to miss Beats Antique.”
“Eh, their music blows anyway. The belly dancer's the only cool part of the whole act.”
“Their music doesn't blow, but she is the whole act.”
“They wouldn't be anything without the dance.”
“We wouldn't be anything without the dance.”
“That's deep, yo.”
I reached into the dark denim back pocket of Adrienne's pants with two fingers and stole out a pack of Marlboro 27s. I withdrew a cigarette with my teeth, lit it, and handed the pack to her.
“What the fuck, Damien?”
I smirked at her.
“Cute. You're cute.”
She took one out the pack with her slender fingers which were tastefully tattooed and done up in black nail polish and lit one for herself.
Adrienne stood maybe 5'0 tall. If that. She had short black hair and her eyes were so dark the pupils seemed to entirely swallow up her irises. In contrast to her personality she was very soft and feminine looking with thin wrist bones and she was not overly done up with ink-with just touches of work placed here and there.
“Y'know you're gonna teach me how to do that at some point.”
“I'm not teaching you how to pickpocket. It's wrong. I've learned that it's wrong.”
“Yeah, when some guy clubbed you in the head and broke your dumb tooth.”
She was right. I did have a dumb tooth. One I'd never fixed. It was one of the front bottom teeth and was severely chipped.
“Yeah,” I said smiling, with an elbow out and finger pointed toward the tooth. “We live and learn. I'm not stealing from people anymore. It's fucked up.”
“Whatever. I'll steal from some dumb suit.”
“Just learn how to pickpocket on your own. Go take that guy's wallet right now.”
She frowned and crossed her arms.
“Yeah, that would go over well.”
“Excuse me sir, I was just practicing is all.”
“You guys are like a dysfunctional Bonnie and Clyde.”
“Bonnie and Clyde French kissed cyanide into eachother's mouths daily just to up their immunity to it but got riddled with bullets in the end. They climbed fire escapes with eyes painted like raccoons up and through God's teeth to play water park in his entrails. We on the other hand peddle measly pounds of marijuana. We're nothing. We'll never be written in the pages of history. That Bonnie and Clyde comparison is a trite and failing analogy, Pedro, and I won't stand for it.”
“Your drunken poetics leave me desirous. Unsatisfied.”
“FUCK you, Pedro.”
Pedro withdrew a flask from his inside jacket pocket and shwilled the fiery whiskey within. He dragged the back of his hand across his lips and passed the flask to me.
“Drink, your poetry will get better.”
I did drink.
“Here, we'll hop on the uptown f.”
I handed the emptied flask to Pedro.
He rattled it around with his fingers.
“Goddammit, Damien.”
We descended the staircase together, staring at the transients ascending on our left. Upon reaching the landing we fished for our wallets, thumbed through them for our metro cards. The floor beneath us was alive with filth. The world around us was alive with variety and severity, the sounds of a violin and the imminence of death.
We passed through the turnstiles.
And the ferocity of the violinist turned me to her.
She was old and small with skin like leather. A purple scarf was draped around her straight white hair, which fell in lengths toward her waist. She wore a necklace with some piece of animal vertebrae for a talisman. And it was the ferocity with which she played that drew me to her, such that I left my friends to stand in their places on the platform while she drew me closer until I was a foot from her nose, as though I could block the sound from reaching anyone but me, selfishly stealing her crescendos, stealing the perfect dragging of her bow across the coiled strings and its fierce friction. Staring into her side swept eyes I stood lurched with my hands hanging at my belly like the paws of a fox.
Give her everything. Every dollar. Every fiber of clothing you have adorned yourself with. Take it off and give it to her. Stand naked before her as a testament to the rebirth she has given you.
I took out my wallet and threw a twenty dollar bill into the case.
She finished with three sweeping drags across the minor tonic chord.
“Beautiful, you're beautiful.” I told her.
She smiled warmly and began again, chin poised, hand raised, again with slow, soft notes. The sound of an uptown express train behind me was heard from the tunnel. “Goodbye,” she seemed to mouth. I squinted to see this better, but time had erased it and it could not be seen again.
I turned from her to wander drunkenly. I closed my eyes, conducting toward the sound of the barreling train. I conducted bravely. I conducted and conducted like the train conductor was conducting.
Andy Warhol said, “Dying is the most embarrassing thing you can do.” I think he's kind of right.
I don't know what I tripped over, but I know it surely hurt when my ribs collapsed against the rounded, filthy steel corner of the express train. I remember vaguely the horror, the inversion of space as I fell hands out, sliding face first down the face of the train. My legs were uselessly dragged along the platform, then up and over the platform, my hands were held out toward the tracks as I fell, as though they might stop me from being sucked under the train.
All my life I've survived by being smart or agile or strong, but I am going to die no matter what I do. My stupid hands hit the tracks pointlessly and I scream. I scream though my ribs are sticking through one of my lungs so there is blood sprayed everywhere and my teeth run red. I am being sucked under the train and that is why I am screaming. There is no light under the train and there are wheels and friction like the violin bow and I will surely die and that is why I am screaming. My whole body is sucked under the train and the violin bow wheels play my skin and bones like the strings they are cut up into.
And so I die a violent, torturous death.
THE END
I remember when I was I alive being really stoned out of my mind splayed out on Adrienne's bed and reading Finnegan's Wake. I remember just flipping through it randomly, forever failing to understand it, but forever relating to it better than any book I'd ever read. And in my perusals I'd come across a little phrase I really enjoyed:
"Reveil the night."
That madman Joyce said three little words and it meant everything at once. To reveal the night, to bring the night into being, and to put a veil over it once more, to bring about the day.To reveil the night was to do two antithetical things at the same time.
To die and to be born.