MANHATTAN 4

 

Barbara had managed to turn that year's Christmas party into a magazine party, and I ended up going, even though Berman had backed out at the last minute (whether he had felt it or not), the night before, I was off duty and wrote the craziest letter a man has ever written to a woman in the English language: "Barbara, up until now everything I have done in my life has ended disastrously I'm not even sure what I'm writing right now. I don't condone lies, and this irritates people deeply; this annoyance leads many to defend themselves against my behavior. The phrase "Why not write to her?" plunges me, as it has since the first day I saw you, into a quagmire of irremediable confusion. I've always written driven by the desire to free everyone's imagination, because (I think) without the support of the entire world, without an imaginatively unified world, the freedom of the imagination becomes a vice. That's what happened with literature and contemporary art. But I don't miss at all the hope of communicating with others. I've never seriously concerned myself with the question of genius: I've read about the lives of revolutionary poetic geniuses, and they were despicable leeches, feeding on the blood of life and people; the most important thing for Rimbaud or Lautréamont was to make themselves useless, to be absorbed by the common flow and colonize the human unconscious. Whenever a writer shows himself to be better than the others, attacks come from all sides: The wildest flights of poetry, the deepest dreams, the most hallucinatory visions are nothing more than crude hieroglyphics chiseled in pain and sadness to commemorate an event that is intransmissible and often unintelligible. Great works of art serve to make us dream of that which is a fluid expansion of consciousness. Of great states of altered consciousness. The art of... (continued) I put the letter in my backpack and lay down on the bed with my eyes wide open, searching the darkness as if seeking to see their own future; but I could only see Berman walking around half-drunk in her blue high-heeled shoes, and her pupils were dilated (in the dream, later on, a Times photographer was photographing Barbara photographing Victor photographing Berman photographing Melissa photographing me, while I was working behind the bar, and she was saying: – Well, you're going to have to get ahead in life by fucking people you don't want to fuck, reward: a Bulgari snake watch, nothing more. – And I put heroin under my nose (riding the dragon for the second time; and I remembered that car passing by on a dark side street on Convent Avenue, in the Harlem, as I'd never seen it before that night. The headlights illuminated the street for a moment, and with the dashboard light, I could see the three men inside and the same girl: a beautiful African woman with bright eyes and a white smile contrasting with her dark skin. I felt a chill: it was Betty again. At first, it seemed impossible that my Sassafras would be in that car with dealership plates, alongside such unreal figures. Through Betty, I had become someone with a reputation as a good dealmaker among those guys; a "magician." "Your little friend" (the driver said to Betty) "is doing us a great service." "He's passing me several 100-gram bags of skunk and 30 grams of heroin." "Be careful not to 'self-medicate,' K." Betty said, laughing with a surprised expression on her face, accompanied by a quick turn of her head. I got in the car, and she stood between me and the hood in the back seat; the next moment, she was kneeling on the seat, looking out the back window. "Someone's following us," she said, "don't look!" But I was too happy to care. I thought it was just a little hysteria, watching her intently as the men exchanged quick, alternating orders to go this way or that. The streets were dark, and it wasn't just nighttime. The car was black, and Betty was dressed in black. I took her hand and squeezed it gently. She smiled, as if to say, "You know, K, business is business," and I was suddenly aware of the danger, connecting the facts in my crazy way. I reflected... no one was following us... all coke and bad-time paranoia: but someone was after her again, out there. This will never change, I thought (nothing she said ever made sense, and maybe I was getting involved with a monster, the most delicious monster imaginable). In the apartment on 125th Street, Grave and Ed were at the table near the stove, their overcoats draped over the backs of the wooden chairs, beads of sweat standing out on their scalps and running down their Latino faces. Ed already had gray hair and a crescent-shaped scar on his face, one Grave had given him with the barrel of a revolver. "He was freaking out about having acid thrown on his back," Grave said, but Grave's rough, lumpy face was no exception; he sucked the cartilage from the last chicken wing and added the small white bones to the pile already on his plate.