Prodigals Read Free Page A

combusting. I had learned at the expense of a great deal of forearm hair to be careful with the ghostly blaze, which finally settled to dance above its moraine of shattered glass, as though a flame could be entranced by a hearth of ice.
    It was the night before New Year’s Eve and we were playing games, full from another exquisite meal, sipping Sazeracs and eighteen-year-old single malts, looking for just that elusive shade of irony or absurdity to surprise even ourselves in laughter. We played Cards Against Humanity. “______. Betcha can’t have just one!” the prompt read, and Eli answered “Geese,” which made me laugh, and my thoughts ran to Mary Oliver, as they always do when geese are mentioned, and I wondered why we couldn’t just let the soft animals of our bodies love what they loved. Then I remembered that we were too busy being witty to have any idea what we loved. And if you closed one eye and found yourself in a moment of some perspective, I thought, maybe within the yet-uncracked genetics of the witticism, you could hear a hollow and performative laughter echoing down the swept streets, floating into Sammy’s and out, tripping down the decades, the stone-wrinkled valleys of the San Jacinto, a sound constructed and dispersed on the Santa Ana wind, cleft by giant windmills turning in the lowlands, coming through on radios in Calipatria, in the kitchens of trailers and rusted-out meth labs, sparkling like the Salton Sea—that bright veneer happiness as flat and shimmering as the scales on a dead fish.
    This was not a human landscape. None of California is, but this place especially, with mountains as bare and rubbled as Mars, days identical to one another and so bright they washed out. The wind farms blinked red through the light-spoiled nights. It was that particular California melancholy that is the perfect absence of the sacred.
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    I awoke on the morning of New Year’s Eve on a deflated air mattress without any memory of having gone to sleep. It turned out I was not licking Julie Delpy, but holding Lyle in a kind of Pietà. When he saw I was awake he began chewing on my hair, and I thought about going and getting into bed with Lily, then decided to conserve goodwill. I don’t mean to give the impression that sex is all I think about, but I am goal-oriented. I need goals. And I felt cheated out of something. Lily’s car kept breaking, and so did her toilet, and she needed water and grapes like several dozen times a day. I was getting all the bad boyfriend jobs, I felt, and none of the good.
    But in retrospect I know it wasn’t really about Lily, this sense of being cheated. I needed something to happen . Something new and totalizing to push forward a dithering life or to put a seal on the departing year like an intaglio in wax. I needed to remember what it was to live . And drugs were not just handmaiden or enabler but part and parcel of the same impossible quest, which you could say was the search for the mythical point of most vivid existence, the El Dorado of aliveness, which I did not believe in but which tantalized me nonetheless, a point of mastering the moment in some perfect way, seeing all the power inside you rise up and coincide with itself, suspending life’s give-and-take until you were only taking, claiming every last thing you ever needed or wanted—love, fear, kinship, respect—and experiencing it all at the very instant that every appetite within you was satisfied.
    It is a stupid dream, but there it is. And not a bad agenda for a day, as agendas go, as days go.
    Lily turned out to be up already. She was sitting in the patio sun, reading the latest New York Review of Books , which we talked about over my first smoke. It had articles about our bad Mideast policy and a pretty obscure seventeenth-century Italian painter and the comparative merits of Czesław Miłosz translations and a book that said