Indecision: A Novel Read online

  TWENTY

  The wool-upholstered modernist couch in Alice’s living room had been so forbidding-looking, the night before, when we’d gotten to her apartment after such a long day of hanging out with mom at Dr. Hajar’s place and watching the footage on CNN, that she’d said I might as well sleep on her bed. I’d flopped down on top of her comforter with my clothes on, had fallen asleep on a plumb line and slept deeply all night, like nothing had happened; and now I had opened my eyes and was looking at Alice—her mouth went tight for a second with the idea of a smile—in the early gray light of the following day.

  “There’s you at least,” she said.

  “Exactly. I mean about you.” Looking into her kind blue bloodshot eyes, the big tenderness-based sensation of two nights before revived somewhat, and pushing forward my neck I kissed Alice lightly, with a laugh, on her actual lips.

  Next thing I knew I was on the floor—and my head hurt from hitting the wooden chest beside the bed.

  “Ow,” I said. “Ouch!”

  Alice had turned on the green-shaded banker’s lamp by her bedside. “What is wrong with you? Who raised you?”

  “I’m sorry, Al.”

  “No, go!”

  I got up to my feet. “Come on. Kissing’s just a physical sensation—come on!” Nevertheless I had started looking for my shoes. “I’m sure there are cultures where it’s totally fine to kiss your . . . And it’s not like, you know, second or third base was on the way. I was just—”

  I sat in her fancy Aeron desk chair and started lacing up my shoes.

  “You’re just too weird to deal with.”

  “One kiss was going to be all. The other night on Chambers St. we all took a bunch of Ecstasy and everybody kissed everyone else! So it’s not like . . .”

  “Oh, just a slow Monday night before the country is attacked, so you and your Chambers St. buddies find some girls and take a bunch of E. ‘Hey dude it’s Monday night, dude!’ Yesterday must’ve been a really fun day for you. I thought you seemed more out of it than usual.”

  I was standing up shod and groggy, ready and reluctant to go. “Look I’m sorry Alice—let me try and explain something.”

  “I’d like to see that.”

  “Nothing is normal to me. See? In human life . . .”

  “What are you saying, you’re immune to acculturation? Fine. I guess it’s partly my fault—we’ve been too close. Go kiss somebody else.”

  “Just as long as you know that my tongue, for example, would never have been involved. . . .”

  “Thanks. Think of me as banishing you for your general estrangement from all human customs rather than for any specific perverted act, okay?”

  “I am sorry.”

  “Thursday’s off. Psychotherapy’s off. I can’t believe I thought—”

  “It was useful while it lasted.”

  “Not very.”

  “All right. Good night. Or I mean have a nice day.”

  I went into the bathroom, pretending to use it for its sanctioned purpose, and actually looking into the mirror instead. Alice possessed one of those illuminated cosmetic mirrors that, flipped to one side, allow you to study up close the precise eccentric course of a nose hair straggling out your left nostril, or to determine exactly how much urban grime (even on a day of normal smokiness and no ash) has been slugged into your pores. I leaned into the mirror looking into my questionable eyes and porous complexion, and like the exact reverse of God when He could see His Spirit on the face of the deep, I felt my features kind of blending back with chaos, and I had to resort to some words. “What is your problem?” I watched my magnified lips form the shapes. Then I flipped the mirror over, and on my way out flushed the toilet.

  Turning around in the living room I said, “Al, I’m never going to get over you, you know.”

  She bolted up furiously in bed. “What do you think it means to be in a family? We’re the people we never get over. Now go!”

  Entering digits into a pay phone on the corner, inhaling the tang of pulverized industrial materials in the air, watching the morning unroll down Sixth Ave., and punching myself repeatedly in the thigh, I called Vaneetha Trivedi.

  “I’m . . . glad to hear from you. Even if you are waking me up—at God, what time is it? Are you all right? You didn’t know anyone?”

  “Not so far. You?”

  “I don’t actually know too many people in New York—I’ve realized. Do you have anything to do just now? Or would you like to come over for some breakfast?”

  I went down into the subway—amazed that it was still running despite the carnage downtown, and that I continued living my life, doing everything I did, despite the confusion involved, like it was somehow regular and automatic—and got on a train to Brooklyn. In less than thirty minutes I had rolled off naked Vaneetha and was lying beside her, naked myself, in her big white bed. I had taken the express.

  Part Three

  TWENTY-ONE

  We said goodbye to Edwin in the dim shop decorated with photos of rare jungle animals we hadn’t had the luck to see. Also there was a picture of a watchful hairy spider which Edwin presented me as a mock gift. I asked Brigid to thank him for everything else instead and wish him good luck. Heading out toward the street I called back a fond and useless “Adiós.”

  Brigid stepped out of the shop with her sunglasses on. “He seems rather shaky.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “He made a promise to update me on his decision. And you—back to Quito?”

  “What about you?”

  She shrugged in her Brigidesque fashion. “I would like to go on to Cuncalbamba—if only to remain on vacation from my future for a while.”

  The trouble with going on living would seem to be the mortifying implication that somehow you approve of yourself—and I’d started to wonder if instead of waiting for the prostate cancer (or car accident, or large-scale terrorist attack) I should take things more into my own hands and set about making firm plans to kill myself. However this was a question I wanted to postpone dealing with more conclusively until I got back to New York.

  “Cuncalbamba?” I said. “I’m there.”

  “After twenty-four hours on the bus maybe you are there.”

  It was more like twenty-seven and I should probably say now, unless I should have already, that travel in Ecuador can’t really be recommended in good conscience to anyone who dislikes buses or hates listening to endless loops of the same vallenatos and cumbias (words I would here translate freely as crazy mountain bus music) or who resents having to hold on his lap a squalling child, handsome of face but with a shitty diaper, loaned to him by a peasant woman; and if you’re inclined to take umbrage at a bus driver’s willingness to stop for anyone who flags him down, then it’s also the wrong country for you.

  Yet at last we came over the final pass and began to drop down into the Cuncalbamba valley. The bus crested a hill, its engine sighed, and we began to descend into a glowing green valley along the swinging curves of a potholed road. The shoulder of the road was planted at random intervals with rude home-style crosses apparently commemorating roadside fatalities and these, being white, stood out particularly against the hazy vista of graduated hills in the dimming light of this or any afternoon. “Your life is still passing before your eyes?” Brigid asked.

  Back in Baños, I’d told her about my memories but hadn’t said which ones they were. Basically I hadn’t said anything at all.

  “Or will you tell me what you have been thinking of? I am sure it’s not so fascinating that it must remain a secret.”

  I figured at this point I didn’t have much to lose by the truth, and went ahead and admitted that my inappropriate feelings for Alice would seem to have ruined me for love.

  She scoffed: “Nothing so obvious could be true.”

  I confessed furthermore that the memory of the abject circumstantiality and total contingency behind my relationship with Vaneetha led me now to mistrust what I had previously been inclin
ed to consider my “impulses.”

  “But this is nonsense—you are the most impulsive person!”

  Moving right along, I informed Brigid that I’d had the misfortune of taking lots of Ecstacy in the early hours of 9/11; that I’d submitted therefore to an orgy of reckless optimism, soon disproved; and that this had caused me to doubt the truth-revealing features of drugs in general.

  “I can hear from how you say it that you don’t believe it. But really you ingested these drugs on September the Eleventh? Not a good idea.”

  “Well we didn’t know what was going to happen—or we would have given our E to the terrorists!”

  She looked at me with either admiration or dismay.

  “Well just to sum up, I’ve come to doubt the wisdom of my behavior in general. I can never decide what to do, so I just end up doing it—or something else instead.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Honestly that’s just as well,” I said, and vaguely wished to have lived a different life.

  At least all the hype about Cuncalbamba looked true. We climbed off the bus on the early side of dusk and went to find a room in the beautiful hillside pensión/spa that Brigid’s guidebook apparently praised. They had only one habitación left: this stuccoed cottage, yellow-orange on the inside like a peach, and boasting a perfectly matrimonial-looking queen-sized bed, as well as a finer-quality couch than we’d enjoyed on Chambers St. The cost was thirty-five dollars a night—thirty-five dollars in quasi-bankrupt and increasingly sad-seeming Ecuador—and the sum should convey some idea of the luxury. I’d never been to a spa before and wondered if this would become something for me and mom to bond over.

  I went out onto the porch and settled into a plastic deck chair. The Valley of Longevity . . . That was what the guidebook called it, since its inhabitants were supposed to be these mestizo Methuselahs cradled over the course of their absurdly long lives in the permanent equatorial summer of this gentle, fertile valley where on most days the high averaged out at seventy-eight. I kicked my feet up, cowpuncher-style, onto a wooden railing and took in the view of the valley. I heaved a sigh and rocked back in my chair, watching the spreading, forward-folded hills get filtered into definition by a falling saffron-esque light. Now Brigid came out in a fresh tee shirt, her harem pants, flip-flops, and sat down too. The light went gold, then coppery, then more like roseate—with all these stalled clouds a lurid coal red on the undersides—and we just sat there as the sky powered through the spectrum with as much sunset grandeur as I’d ever seen mustered in one place. There was this last long throb of violet light, then—bang—night, stars, crickets.

  “Wow. That was some coucher du soleil there, Bridge. I feel like I could grow old here.” I was trying to be more nice and less sullen, while alive.

  “I have empathy,” Brigid said. I looked at her. “I feel the same? Oh I am sick that my English is no better. It constantly improves if you will talk to me. Otherwise—”

  “On peut parler le français, si tu veux. Je comprends—plus ou moins.”

  “Beaucoup moins que plus! You are nothing in French. And in English you have no strong wish to be clear.”

  “I like your English, Bridge. ‘I have empathy’? I’m serious, that’s a nice expression. It deserves a wide currency.”

  Down on the terrace we ate some great organic food—a main dish of nothing but quinoa and carrots, but somehow spiced to be good. Maybe Episcopalian vegetarianism really was the thing, or so I considered as we sat munching among the usual suspects: the American, German, Israeli, Scandinavian, Norwegian, British and French backpackers who apparently haunt all the cheap idylls of underdevelopment and paradises of neoliberal neglect. Next to me was a suntanned and boyish young Israeli lady with her hair cut short and a dusting of freckles across her nose. I asked what was fun to do around here.

  “Drugs,” came the firm unhesitating answer.

  “Really? I like drugs.” So maybe I’d just been maligning drugs to Bridge—but whatever.

  “There is a drug here called the San Pedro cactus. You drink a boiled juice of it and then you vomit. But don’t worry—afterwards you become insane.”

  “Hey, Bridge, you hear that?” I thought it might be nice to try one more drug. Then to the Israeli girl I said, “I’m on a potent drug right now. It’s meant to cure your chronic indecision, although to be honest—”

  “This should be very popular in Israel.”

  “So where do you guys live in Israel? You live in the part of Israel that’s Israel or the part that’s not so much?”

  “Does this drug make you very inquisitive?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I guess it does. So what did you guys do in the army?” I was entertaining the last-ditch idea that conscription into some force might do me some good. They must have a whole regimen of calisthenics and mental training.

  Brigid elbowed me sharply in the ribs.

  “Brigid is from Belgium,” I told everyone in order to encourage a shared curiosity among nations. However this seemed the wrong line too. I felt bad about my mysterious gaffe(s), and tried to make up for them by inviting Amira and the others to happy hour at the bar. It was reported that there you could get two drinks for the already scandalously cheap price of one, and I began to tell the Israelis how they all ought to take Abulinix, if decisions ever gave them trouble, and not only for that reason, but also because it was a potentiator with regard to alcohol. “Basically at happy hour I’m going to be getting four drinks for the price of one.”

  “We don’t like drinking,” Amira’s male companion said. “We’re more into drugs.”

  “Sor-ry,” I said later on as Brigid and I sat swaying together on a porch swing in the dark. “I was only being friendly. I don’t even know what’s going on over there in Israel and the other parts. I wash my hands of the whole thing.”

  “You wash your hands of everything.”

  “Look I’ve known people who’ve known things about the Middle East—and it was never any good.”

  Brigid ignored this concern—and as we sat together on the swing, sipping doublefistedly from our four mojitos, there followed from her what I really hope was an exhaustive account of the traded crimes of Palestinians and Israelis, as well as American connivance in the mess. And when I asked whether Belgium was so wonderful in comparison, she was ready with tales of the evil Belgian adventure in the Congo, and a handy analysis of the not-very-helpful Belgian division of Hutu and Tutsi into separate administrative castes in Rwanda.

  “You’re a real student of atrocity, aren’t you? This is the most beautiful place I’ve ever been—and it hurts and pollutes my mind to know all this stuff which I couldn’t have done anything about. Sorry if our presence here was paid for by a bunch of atrocity coupons, but I mean . . . What good does it do if we have all this knowledge and no power? That’s poison. Don’t you think? And who wants to drink poison? Except Socrates, of course.” And maybe me too. (I sipped at my mojito.)

  “But what do you mean when you talk? Perhaps this drug you are taking disrupts your mind.”

  “What I mean is this. So you’re interested in human happiness. Good for you, Brigid. But you’re kind of human too. So your happiness also figures in the basic global tally. And it doesn’t seem to make you very happy to consider all the massacres and thefts and frauds ever done, am I right? Or am I right?”

  “Tu es nul!” She stepped violently off of the swing and left it lurching askew in the dark.

  “I’ll sleep on the couch,” I offered.

  “I can’t tell you how little I care what you do. I have been with you for a week and while sometimes you are very productive of bizarre things to say, have you ever mentioned this drug to me? But then to tell a stranger?”

  “I was embarrassed.”

  “This is a drug for making decisions with? If I were to swallow this drug I would decide to hit you. So you will masturbate in front of me but you won’t tell me about the drug in your mind?”

  A blaze o
f embarrassment more existential than onanistic went through me, and I couldn’t talk at all.

  “Oh don’t be so arrogantly ashamed. Don’t you think I masturbate as well?”

  I sipped from the right then sipped from the left mojito, just to do something with my mouth besides talking. Eventually I said, “How do you enjoy masturbating?”

  She made a sound of exasperation. “Frankly I find it rather second-rate.” And then she was walking up the stone steps, going from terrace to terrace until she was gone, and formulating by her absence as much as by her presence a number of questions, starting with: to run after or not to run after?

  In my experience when a person doesn’t know what to do with himself, he will check his email. So with a blank and troubled mind I strolled into the office of the pensión, and stood in line waiting for the one super-slow email connection. When it was my five-minute turn I logged on and found my inbox mostly choked with offers for penis enlargement and longer lines of credit—but also there was something from Vaneetha.

  FROM: [email protected]

  TO: [email protected]

  SUBJECT: [none]

  You may wonder how I’m feeling. But you’re not coherent enough that I feel anything much.

  On our first date remember we discussed karma. Now I wonder: what is the karma produced by meaningless actions? An interesting question—perhaps you have simply placed more nonsense into circulation.

  But would you like the pop psychology post-mortem? Here is what I tell my friends: “He was a screen. I projected hopes. It was right after 9/11. The night before had been so blissful and I suppose I always imagined something like that might be recovered.” And in fairness—to me, not you—I will acknowledge your better-than-average looks, your infectious enthusiasm (the appropriate cliché?), and I will say that you gave the impression—it took some time to wither—of being quite responsive and attentive. You also seemed so American. I believe this made me feel more at home here.