Clearly Now, the Rain Read Free Page A

of Blue
rocking the stereo. Jay’s collapsed on the floor, tears and butts and straying splashes of Jack Daniel’s mixing in the ashtray in his lap. The wreckage that I’d anticipated is in the foreground. All of Jay’s bright presentation has inverted into a disaster of mucus and tears, all of his plumage knotted in disarray. He uses his fists on raw eyes that won’t stop.
    And I would see Serala then, too, on one of her midnight campus rambles, the slow way she’d look up when I ran into her, the sleepy smile in the sleepless night. I’d see her vanish from a smoky crowd and return far calmer. I sit down on the ratty carpet and can see her at that very moment, even as Jay cries softly and the clock tower does its five o’clock song: strolling angrily off to her car, or placidly into her dorm, depending on which side of the score she is on.
    There is nothing to say to Jay in those moments—I had already learned that much, ironically, from Serala, about wasted words and the moments when language would fail.
    I can’t do it,
he says, between slugs off the bottle,
I can’t fucking pull myself up by my bootstraps this time.
His broad brow and thick lips are contorted. I join him for a drink and start assembling ad hoc wisdom in my head. But he continues.
She’s with that motherfucker right now, I know. That motherfucker came in here the other day calling himself my friend and told me he that he wouldn’t do this to me—came of his own free fucking will.
    Jay hits the bottle, harder than he has yet. The moderate light of an autumn evening comes in muted by curtains and the stir of shadows grows in the corners. I hate Serala then. And it isn’t only because she is hurting my friend. It is mostly because I think that she can, and so eventually will, turn her back, that she might not be the person I’ve been casting her as—and that I don’t want to consider.
    Samar: I first saw her high in a tree, dancing wildly above a party of a thousand undergraduates. Her legs secured her on a bough, muscular suggestions under a red skirt, dreadlocks whipping against the polluted sky. A security guard pulled her down from her perch and I followed her into the night. She stayed late in my room, chaste but taunting with her eyes, and borrowed a knife with which to walk back to her dorm. She came from a childhood in the meat grinder of Beirut, escaping through Mediterranean islands with her mother, eventually to an upper-middle-class existence in Massachusetts. I was ridiculously smitten; she rose like a phoenix as all the girls of my adolescence turned to ash in my head. Samar was a survivor but not a victim, roughened but not incapacitated by the wrongs of her world. She gave me a place to put all the bitterness that crowded in me. The militancy with which she spoke against imperialism, the indignation that she wielded after seeing powerless people cut down as a child—it tapped directly into my anger, which I still couldn’t explain to myself. Even when she tried to image herself as a fasco-feminist, tried to be masculine, gruff, drinking heavy beer, belching and refusing to shave her legs, her sex appeal made me stupid with desire. I lied to myself, I resisted, and I talked my drunken way into other girls’ beds. But when Samar put it to me, smoking cigarettes one October day under the brutal sun,
Should we just say we’re seeing each other until we say something else?
I rushed in with my heart bared.
    Maybe two days after that, Samar and I are finishing a frustrating, passionate tussle in my bed (she is postponing sex for some cryptic reason). The dark is finally complete outside the glass and the sounds of life and party slip under the door: popcorn popping, TVs blaring, the Beastie Boys thumping along. I light a cigarette and see her profile in the brief orange glow.
    She kisses me again and says,
I’ll be back later—I’m going on the hunt