The Sky Below (8 page)

I was Brian's creepy, skinny, snide roommate. I was also the campus drug dealer. In some odd way, I felt like I was repaying Jenny for all the time she did in juvie by running the risks alone that she had run for us—driving to Phoenix to meet my sad-ass connection, a red-headed guy with a birthmark on his forehead who lived in a leaky condo and looked like I would in twenty years, post-melanoma; driving back with excessive caution; delivering the goods to various dorm rooms. There was just one other student on campus who was gay, or admitted to it. We had sex now and then. His name was Tim, he was small-boned and inquisitive, and he liked to talk about the universe: how big it was, when it started, when it would end. I didn't mind lying next to him while he talked about time and space, but I didn't love him, and he didn't love me, either. He was in love with Brian, actually, and I sometimes suspected Tim was having so-so sex with me to get closer to the earnest, damaged penumbra of my roommate. I dyed my hair flat punk black. I wore combat boots with chains around them and, on a fairly regular basis, eyeliner. I looked the part of whatever it was I was pretending to be.

One of the people on my route was Arroyo D'Orado College's sole art history teacher, a slightly burned-out guy named Bill Bauman. He was a regular, so I took his class—Introduction to Modern Art—and he showed us slides of Joseph Cornell boxes.

They struck a chord in me I had barely known was there. I sat in the darkened room, surprised. Clanking over to the art room, I began constructing my own boxes. They were like Cornell boxes, but weirder. More intense. Moving parts in some of them, and peculiar hybrid plastic animals I melted together out of kids' barnyard sets, scraps of type from books, fossils, elaborate pop-up apocalyptic landscapes, Mary Jane
candy wrappers, snot in a tiny brown vial that I'd found between the sofa cushions when my connection went to take a leak. There were remnants of a white powder inside. I snorted the powder. The snot was mine.

The art room was the best thing about Arroyo D'Orado; it was a small, well-sited geodesic dome, donated by some hippie alum who'd gotten rich making mesquite-flavored corn chips, and at the top of the dome was an oval skylight. The graduates of the college tended to go into accounting, marketing, or medical schools in the Caribbean, so, needless to say, the art room was mostly empty. The easels had never been touched. The tables were eerily immaculate. An enormous triangular window at the back of the dome framed a picturesque triangle of mesa, creek bank, and a cottonwood tree on the other side of the creek.

One afternoon during the rainy season of my sophomore year, I was in the art room alone, as usual. I was tinkering with one of the gears from a broken pocket watch, using a tiny screwdriver to bend the tiny brass teeth in an alternating pattern. The art room smelled of chalk and new plastic; the air was cool, dampish; the overhead lighting was very bright. I put down the tiny gear and the tiny screwdriver and rubbed my eyes, focused on the cottonwood tree across the creek. I walked over to the great triangular window and flattened my left palm against the glass. Between my fingers, the tree twisted upward toward the sky.

I needed a smoke. Pulling on my hooded sweatshirt, I left the art room and went around the back of the dome. I had tossed a few cinderblocks into the creek for occasions just like this one; I crossed the creek block to block, teetering, pleased to see that I was getting my chains wet but nothing else. I took a giant step up the bank and leaned against the tree, carefully striking a match in my cupped palm. Across the creek, through the triangular window, the still life of my momentarily abandoned project was scattered over the art table: the tiny
screwdriver, the broken watch, the brass gears, a soda can. I contemplated it, smoking. It looked like a sentence to me, like a rebus
—screw time circle bubble.
I couldn't quite make it out. Was it a line from a Morrissey song? I squinted. No. But I felt the space between the random items on my art table as a bar of music, and I felt this odd opening in my chest, as if the smoke from my cigarette had turned white, cold, and propulsive. My left hand began to feel as if it was burning.

Down the creek, something was whirling. The air darkened, bent; it made a low, booming sound. The whirl was wrapped in rain, like the invisible man. It was the wind in the arroyo, became two whirls. Three. I could see them all rushing, keening, moving rapidly up the creek. My left hand burned hotter; my ears popped. I was afraid, but I couldn't move. The hair on my arms stood up as if yearning. The whirls, and everything around the whirls, rolled toward me, thundering my heart, my ribs, my knees. They weren't my sister's cloud of golden birds; they were bulls, they had hooves; and yet they weren't animal at all. They were something else. They were enormous, nearly pushing me over. But when they arrived, I couldn't see them. Instead, a heavy, warm rain strafed my face. I desperately grasped the trunk of the cottonwood tree with both hands; I clutched it to me like a lover. I didn't care what I looked like or who saw me. As their massiveness descended, they filled me and moved me, they pressed at my eardrums and hardened my cock. Instinctively, like a smaller animal caught in a stampede, I pushed myself up into the tree, the rain falling hard on my face, falling on my hair and inside my collar, slithering down my spine. I made it onto a low branch, climbing roughly, scattering bark with my boots as I went, digging awkwardly into the tree. My left hand was still burning. More or less perched in the tree, holding on to the trunk as hard as I could so as not to be blown into the air and lost forever, I closed my eyes. I let the whirls talk to me.

I surrendered. I took their breath into my breath,
shivering, my cheek pressed so hard to the bark that I nearly became the bark, stiffening and cracking. They filled me, and then as quickly as they had arrived, they swept up out of the tree and away, leaving me drenched, shaking, and cold. I made my way down from the tree. I crossed the creek, wading right into the water, my chains tangled with mud and silt. In my wet jeans, my wet sweatshirt, I trudged back across the creek and into the dome. I took my wet boots off and the muddy chains smacked the floor. I took my soaked socks off. In my bare wet feet, I stood with my head bent in the center of the art room. My left hand was cool. I began to cry. I thought it had happened—that I had been changed.

From that day on, I nearly lived in the geodesic dome. I felt like I was in my own space station orbiting another planet when I was in there. I was full of inspiration. I brought in my father's old transistor radio. In Arizona, it got a mixed schedule of born-again rantings, call-in advice shows, and oldies. I listened for hours and hours at night as I carefully taped and glued in tiny watch gears or pubic hairs or teeth or little heads I cut out of tin, or I wrote a sonnet in an interior corner of the box in minuscule handwriting that couldn't be read unless you were a mouse hanging upside down. I made a Tereus box out of feathers and bones that I'd found along the trails outside, plus some arrows I pulled out of a souvenir Indian maiden's tiny suede quiver. I made a Phaëthon box with a half-melted Ken doll and a Hot Wheels car in it. I built the boxes myself out of manzanita that I cut into thin strips, planed, sanded, and nailed together with delicate, expensive nails I ordered from a supplier in Belgium. You can't get nails like that anymore; they had been used to make wooden microscopes. I spent all the money I earned from drugs on those nails. It seemed like a fair trade.

Praise the Lord.

You're on the air. Can you turn your radio down?

Oh, my love, my darling, I've hungered for your touch.

I assiduously collected interesting junk, filling my pockets with pebbles and wire and old nails: the stuff of transformation. I didn't care if I ended up living in a tin shed, or if no one discovered what I'd done until after I was dead; I didn't care if I became a hermit who never shaved. I toyed with the idea of dropping out of school to go live way out in the desert and do my art all day, and I almost did it. Professor Bauman said it was a great idea; he knew some great people who lived in the desert. But ultimately I decided that I liked the dome too much. No one was ever in there, and anyway, my mother was happy enough to pay my tuition. I thought of her as my first patron.

I bent to my boxes. Calluses grew and toughened on my hands in the tender junctures where I gripped my tools. Looking at myself in the mirror one day, I realized that I now bore more than a passing resemblance to the smart boy with shaggy black hair whom I had once imagined as I lay on the floor of the ratty girl's rec room next to the pinball machine. I was elated. That boy, I realized, must have been my vision of my own future.

One afternoon in the rainy season of junior year, the door of the geodesic dome opened and a girl in green wellies blew in on a gust of rain. She was carrying a small paint-stained leather suitcase with silver buckles, which she set on the floor. Her face was a long, pale oval; she had a high forehead. Her wavy hair, damp from the rain, reached to her waist; it made her look like a pioneer. Her skirt was long and shapeless. Her sweater was strange. I wondered if she had it on backward.

“Yo,” she said. “Who are you?”

“Gabe.”

“Are you in here a lot?”

“Yes,” I said proprietarily. “All the time.” I put the dried cicada I'd been moving from spot to spot in a new box all morning in my pocket. “It's not locked.”

“Good,” she said. “I'm a transfer. Sarah.” She looked around. “Jesus Christ. Look at this place. It's like a church. Can we open that?”

I turned the crank on the triangular window. I turned it patiently, as if I were humoring her. Sarah sniffed, held out her pale, thin hands in the wet air. “Cattle. Love it.”

“What?”

“Can't you smell it? There must have been a ranch here.”

“Here?” I took a deep breath. Sage. Gasoline. Glue. “Cattle?”

“Yes. A lot of them, I think.” She tilted her head. “Maybe there was a fire.”

I sniffed again. “I don't know.”

“You've felt it,” she said. She heaved the suitcase onto one of the immaculate tables and unbuckled the silver buckles. “They know you're here.” Inside the suitcase were myriad crumpled tubes of paint, brushes, rags, pencils. “I like cows.” She began taking everything out and busily spreading it across the table as if it were some sort of puzzle, or maybe the parts of a car that could be put back together. “Let's bring them some sugar tomorrow.”

“Cows like sugar?”

For the next two years, we piled sugar cubes for the phantom cattle on every surface in the room, listened to the radio, and watched the sun and the moon pass back and forth over the oval-shaped skylight. The accreting walls of sugar made me think of the bus station and how happy I'd been there on those long, humid afternoons. Though the guys I had been with generally didn't say much; there was often a wink, a shared smile, a sense of affinity. Being inside the geodesic dome with Sarah was a little like that, an echo of that kind of being together and not being together at the same time, working away in silence. I dreamed about the cattle. They jostled me, they lowed, and in my dreams they not only had a thick cattle scent, they had names, too, like minor deities.

Soldier Boy.

Louie Louie.

Michelle, ma belle.

Jesus.

By senior year, Sarah had moved on to sculpture. She built—or tried to build, it was an ongoing epic with many verses of lament—columns that reached from the floor to the top of the dome, while looking as if they had grown from the dome downward, like stalactites. I remained devoted to my laborintensive Cornellesque inventions, but I began to sense something else, something larger, though perhaps not literally, that I wanted to do. I hung around the cottonwood tree a bit, waiting to see if the bulls would come again and lean down and touch me, tell me what the next thing was, but they didn't.

Still, I could feel it humming at the edge of my consciousness, and of my ability. I didn't think it was painting, though it had the thick sinuousness of oil paint; I didn't think it was sculpture, though it displaced air, made gravity visible, the way sculpture did; I didn't think it was drawing, though I dreamed sometimes that my hand was opening and I was looking at the lines in my palm. In the dream, my hand was burning, as it had burned that day of the cottonwood tree. I knew that I was meant to see something in my hand, and I tried very hard, without success, to make out what it was. Sometimes in the dream my hand burned away entirely as I stared at it; at other times it became transparent, outlined in black, like a cartoon hand. I had no idea what those images could mean, and when I woke up I clenched and flexed my ordinary hands, relieved.

A month before graduation, Sarah and I sat in our favorite bar, the Flying Horse, drinking Coronas with lime. It was the beginning of April and already 95 degrees by lunchtime. My jeans were heavy on my sweating legs; my elbow dripped sweat on the laminated fake-wood table. The Santa whose light was always on stood merrily on top of the bar, next to a few of his variously wounded and tilting reindeer. A few flies buzzed
slowly around the leis and Mardi Gras beads hung around Santa's neck. The television over the bar was turned to QVC: diamonds! sparkled on red velvet.

I moved a red checker. “San Francisco,” I said.

Sarah moved a black checker. “My family lives there. No way.”

“But maybe I could fall in love there.”

“That's a cliché.” She peered at the board. “Did you steal one of my checkers?”

I took the black checker—half a black checker, actually, maybe one of Santa's reindeer ate the other half—out of my pocket and held it up. “Santa Fe.”

“That's worse than San Francisco. God, you're pale. Don't you ever go outside?” She leaned over and wiped a smudge of eyeliner under my left eye. Her thumb was heavy.