despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it’s possible to play it with a kind of joy?
To try to make some meaning out of all this seems unbelievably quaint. Maybe I only see a pattern because I’ve been staring too long. But then again, to paraphrase Boris, maybe I see a pattern because it’s there.
And I’ve written these pages, on some level, to try to understand. But—on another level I don’t want to understand, or try to understand, for by doing so I’ll be false to the fact. All I can really say for sure is that I’ve never felt the mystery of the future so much: sense of the hourglass running out, fast-running fever of time. Forces unknown, unchosen, unwilled. And I’ve been travelling so long, hotels before dawn in strange cities, so long on the road that I feel the jet-speed vibration in my bones, in my body, a sense of constant motion across continents and time zones that continues long after I’m off the plane and swaying at yet another check-in desk, Hi my name is Emma/Selina/Charlie/Dominic, welcome to the So-and-So! exhausted smiles, signing in with shaky hands, pulling down another set of black-out shades, lying on another strange bed with another strange room rocking around me, clouds and shadows, a sickness that’s almost exhilaration, a feeling of having died and gone to heaven.
Because—only last night I dreamed of a journey and of snakes, striped ones, poisonous, with arrow-shaped heads, and though they were quite near I wasn’t afraid of them, not at all. And in my head a line I heard from somewhere: We being round thee, forget to die. These are the lessons that come to me in shadowed hotel rooms with radiantly lit minibars and foreign voices in the hallway, where the boundary between the worlds grows thin.
And as an ongoing prospect, after Amsterdam, which was really my Damascus, the way station and apogee of my Conversion as I guess you’d call it, I continue to be immensely moved by the impermanence of hotels: not in any mundane Travel-and-Leisure way but with a fervor bordering on the transcendent. Some time in October, right around Day of the Dead actually, I stayed in a Mexican seaside hotel where the halls flowed with blown curtains and all the rooms were named after flowers. The Azalea Room, the Camellia Room, the Oleander Room. Opulence and splendor, breezy corridors that swept into something like eternity and each room with its different colored door. Peony, Wisteria, Rose, Passion Flower. And who knows—but maybe that’s what’s waiting for us at the end of the journey, a majesty unimaginable until the very moment we find ourselves walking through the doors of it, what we find ourselves gazing at in astonishment when God finally takes His hands off our eyes and says: Look!
[Do you ever think about quitting? I asked, during the boring part of It’s a Wonderful Life, the moonlight walk with Donna Reed, when I was in Antwerp watching Boris with spoon and water from an eyedropper, mixing himself what he called a “pop.”
Give me a break! My arm hurts! He’d already shown me the bloody skid mark—black at the edges—cutting deep into his bicep. You get shot at Christmas and see if you want to sit around swallowing aspirin!
Yeah, but you’re crazy to do it like that.
Well—believe it or not—for me not so much a problem. I only do it special occasions.
I’ve heard that before.
Well, is true! Still a chipper, for now. I’ve known of people chipped three-four years and been ok, long as they kept it down to two-three times a month? That said, Boris added somberly—blue movie light glinting off the teaspoon—I am alcoholic. Damage is done, there. I’m a drunk till I die. If anything kills me—nodding at the Russian Standard bottle on the coffee table—that’ll be it. Say you never shot before?
Believe me, I had problems enough the other way.
Well, big stigma and fear, I understand. Me—honest, I prefer to sniff most times—clubs, restaurants, out and about, quicker and easier just to duck in men’s room and do a quick bump. This way—always you crave it. On my death bed I will crave it. Better never to pick it up. Although—really very irritating to see some bone head sitting there smoking out of a crack pipe and make some pronouncement about how dirty and unsafe, they would never use a needle, you know? Like they are so much more sensible than