Clearly Now, the Rain Read Free Page B

for weed.
    Later didn’t come before sleep, and later didn’t come before dawn. Later came at the end of the next day, when she called me down to the quad and took a deep breath and told me she’d been with Jay. I slammed two doors. And then I went to Serala.
    Our first meal alone in California: Denny’s on an offshoot of Route 66. A hot Sunday afternoon in late October 1996. She has Coke and coffee and fries; I’m forking some kind of nasty omelet. We discuss poetry, especially the Beats. We discuss Jay, Samar, Serala’s new man, Monty, and the emotional incest of our little college. She adds a big breath of carcinogen to the restaurant’s stratosphere and cuts her gaze at me. I swallow omelet quickly.
    What?
    She narrows her eyes and leans closer to me. I didn’t know at the time why I saw the flicker of fear along with the hesitation. But her voice shakes when she says,
Eli, I want to let you in
. Then she takes a drag because her throat has caught and surprised her.
I carry so much around.
    I have the sense to nod attentively and steal a French fry.
    It’s not that I need help, you know,
and she looks over my shoulder and takes another drag.
It’s just that I think I want you to know me.
    I nod again, but that isn’t cutting it.
    I want to know you,
I add stupidly, but it’s true. After a moment of staring, just a hint of vulnerability in her face, she changes the subject.
    We climb into her Honda, the absurdly named Desert Storm, and crank the windows down, open the sun roof, light Pall Malls, turn on the radio, and drive like mad, like we are tackling the American road, like we won’t stop till Mexico, like this is all we need—even though there are really only three miles between us and campus.
    As we pass through the last stoplight she starts fiddling with the radio. She tusks Pall Mall smoke through her nose in frustration at the lack of good choices, her jeweled wrist and fingers close enough to my leg to make me nervous. She finds the opening bars of “I Can See Clearly Now,” and she twists the volume and turns her opaque shades on me and shows her perfect teeth and we say, both at once,
I love this song!
    One night in late November, when California has finally given up the ghost of summer, Serala comes to visit my room. Late at night, more often than not, my room was candle-lit, Pearl Jam songs floating out of the speakers, windows open for the Santa Ana gusts. It is her birthday—and Louis’s too, incidentally. She has been celebrating by eating very strong ecstasy. She’s like mercury, or quicksilver, like the loops of jewelry she will, in later years, take from her neck and wrists each night and pour from one hand to the next like water. I can barely get her properly seated on the bed. She tips sideways and forwards, drops her lit cigarette, giggling and
oopsying
! It’s as if only love and innocence remain in her. It’s like the first times I got stoned: the hilarity overpowering, the uproarious, childish jokes. Her face is contorted and illuminated with laughter, eyes running, mouth wide, a loss of control that burns through her awareness every few seconds and causes her to clamp a jeweled hand over her face. But then something else gets us going and she is gorgeously wrecked all over again, so far from her cage.
    She staggers to the stereo and starts pressing buttons.
Dylan
,
I want to hear Dylan, I want to hear Dylan!
She’s like a toddler, demanding her way. I try to explain we’ll have to load a Dylan disc, but she isn’t hearing it, just trying to work magic with her clumsy fingers, her face lit neon blue from the digital readout, pieces of ash floating free from her cigarette.
    Hours later I lay sleepless in my sheets, smiling at the image of her smiling, eyes heavy lidded, half-toppled over, giggling. For her birthday I gave her a stainless steel ashtray, wrapped in purple paper. It gained me a slurry