Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,248

in check. Rourke staggers forward; one step, two steps, each time getting closer to Vargas. Every eye in the house is on him. He arrives at center, finding it despite his confusion. Time seems to stop; the ring hangs from his feet. He turns at an angle to face Vargas, as if to say to some acquaintance on the street, Oh, and by the way—then out of nowhere, Rourke hauls his right arm back and cracks Vargas across the jaw. Vargas flies, stunned. Rourke takes the moment and moves in, starting on the body. Clear and sure. Again, again, a machine.

From where I stand, there is light, a spilling visionary light, from where it comes I don’t know, possibly my imagination. The light spawns globes about the heads of the fighters like the pre-Renaissance halos of Giotto’s saints, like these are men of sacrifice, like they are martyrs, though in fact there is nothing epic about them. They are common, common because we all begin with dreams but end with nothing, nothing more than what we, in our battered humility, can make of ourselves.

And voices, a hot sea, chaos rising. Rourke, Rourke, Harri-son, Harri-son.

June 1984

Farewell! Thou art too dear for my possessing.

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

47

The last time I saw him was on Broadway, half a block north of Houston. It was dark and cold, and Mark and I were walking downtown to an opening. It must have been my third year at NYU. In the middle of the street, a junkie was blocking traffic. There’s a gas station with a car wash right there—anyway, there used to be a gas station, by now it may be gone—and the fluorescent pink light it produced made the street into a kind of theater. In the vortex of this enormous auditorium was a hunched body—Jack’s.

“How disgusting,” Mark yelled above the car horns.

Jack. Death-like and emaciated and stalled in a choke of municipal chaos. Mark was right, it was disgusting. I could almost see the venom through the sheerness of Jack’s skin, like a million insects crawling.

“C’mon. Let’s go.” Mark tried to steer me away.

Would he come to me, would he know my voice? There was a way I used to say his name; if I used that voice, maybe he would come. If I tried to lead him from traffic, to a storefront, to a doorway, to some place of relative safety, would he let me?

But Mark didn’t know Jack or anything about Jack, and it would have been bad if I’d run out onto Broadway and reached for Jack’s hand, and Mark shouted not to touch the stinking filth of it. I would not want Jack to feel filthy or stinking in my eyes. If there were trouble and the police came, Jack would be taken into custody, not Mark. Never had I wished so desperately for a friend, for Rourke or Rob or Denny, for someone who trusted me. Usually you think of a friend as someone you trust. I’d never thought before of a friend as someone who trusts you.

Mark got me onto the curb. “You really are a sweetheart. The way you worry about people. And birds.”

Jack is so small, I thought as we walked to the corner. Perhaps it wasn’t fair to think that way when his version of manhood resisted dimension. Usually, you had only to look into his eyes to locate the power of him. But I had not seen his eyes; they’d been closed. Later, if there was to be a later for him, there would be shaking and profane rocking, a triangle of city streets to navigate that would seem to span miles—a stoop, a fire hydrant, the bumper of a car, and after that, a feeble search through some garbage cans, for what, not for food, he would not want food, a little leftover wine, maybe, in a precipitately trashed bottle. Later, in the ruthless and overbright morning, there would be a dilating consciousness more odious than I had ever encountered, as it labored like a half-chewed animal against the withdrawal of the pacific state he had found in his high.

Before turning west onto Houston Street, I looked back. I saw Jack bend lovingly into his addiction as debris from the street whirled like a symphony around him. The seat of his jeans was black. I wondered if he smelled like vomit. It occurred to me that I was fascinated by the look of him because the look of him was the feel of me—we