Page 69 of Night Songs

When the show was over, we hitched a ride in a truck bed to the after-party. As we sailed over the scrubland, we spotted fireworks exploding over the horizon, and I remembered the time I’d watched them with Hess on the roof. Even with all the booze and drugs and the high from singing, nothing ever felt quite as magical as it had with her.

By the time we arrived at the house, I was ready to do some damage. I’d been sipping tequila all day to avoid sobering up, but now it was time to really descend. Someone poured a mound of blow on the coffee table, and Tate and I did lines in between swigs.

At one point Tima pulled me into a bedroom and locked the door. She was a bit hazy in the dim light, and I had to sit on the bed to steady myself. She took me by the shoulders and asked me to look her in the eyes.

“Lou, I’m going to be honest with you. I’m worried.”

“About what?”

“Martha told me you were in trouble. But damn, girl. I wasn’t expecting this.”

“Wow, that’s real nice of you.”

“You know what I mean. What’s going on? Is Tate treating you right?”

I couldn’t believe I was getting this from her. We were artists. We were supposed to allow each other the space to experiment and live outside the lines. Instead, my friends had been talking shit about me like some dirt child they had to take care of. I stood up to go. “I am completely fine. Tate is a great friend, unlike you or the rest of the girls. Y’all can stuff that shit where it don’t shine.”

I didn’t see Tima after that. She probably went back to the hotel.

At some point, we all got naked and jumped into a makeshift pool in the backyard. I wrapped my legs around Tate and we floated around, making conversation with clusters of people. We were all hurling mad gibberish at each other and having a great time. My memory of the evening dissolves there in the water, fading to black.

I dreamt I was in a grassy field bordered by trees. Soldiers in tattered uniforms fought with rifles and muskets in the sunshine. It was my job to tend to the wounded and distribute supplies where needed.

One man was laid off to the side wailing and clutching his leg. It looked like it’d been shredded by a bear. I needed to stop the bleeding, so I tied a tourniquet and wrapped the wound with dirty cloth torn from my apron. It was the only thing I had.

Another man called for ammunition, and I ran to him, pulling metal balls from a bag tied around my waist.

Then all of the soldiers disappeared from the field, except for one man by a large, twisting tree at the edge of the clearing.

I went to him, skimming quickly over the grass as if I were flying. He was faceless, indistinct. I laid him down on his back like he was wounded, and I pulled down his white trousers. I hiked up my skirt and straddled him on the ground, guiding him inside of me. I rocked back and forth in the grass.

A sound trickled into my mind like it once had, and I thought,Is this the music? Has it finally returned?But as it grew and developed in the darkspace of my brain, it became a deformed, chilling piece. It was pure, uncut despair, with nothing to balance it out. No flicker of hope. No love or beauty to pull you back from the edge.

I looked down at the man between my legs, and I realized I knew him. He was the man in the white suit, the one from my vision behind the shed all those years ago. I could see the outline of his features now, but they seemed to shift with each movement, from round and womanly, to broad and craggy.

I ran from the man, stumbling to my knees in the field. The large white dog appeared, glowing in the dying light, and he padded over and sniffed my ear with his wet nose. Desperate for comfort, I sat up and put my arms around his neck, and he patiently stood there, letting me hold him.

I put my cheek to the dog’s and smelled salt and rust. At the very edge of his black gums, the fur was stained dark red. He opened his jaw, and the iron smell wafted strong and thick.

The volume in my head turned up, the terrible music screeching through my mind, and I was lost to blackness once again.

Then I remember waking before the sun had risen, naked and still messed up but aware of a tense soberness at my core. The space between my legs burned.

My eyes acclimated to the dark, and something caught my attention across the room. It was the vulpine angle of Tate’s nose. He was naked and lying on a futon, asleep. There were heaps of nude bodies strewn around us.

I tried to remember what had happened, and who I’d been with, and while no images came to mind, a feeling lingered, of my body no longer under my control.

Beneath the chorus of breathing in the room, I thought I could hear a voice echoing from a forgotten corner of my mind:

Eight years.

Eight years.

Eight years.

At the first hint of light over the dusty, jagged peaks, I searched for my dress among the mounds of clothing. I found it balled at the bottom of one pile, but I couldn’t find my underwear or my shoes. I crept quietly outside in bare feet to the desert-cooled air. The gravel cut into the bottoms, and it was a simple, easy pain.

My black Gran Torino waited for me in the driveway like the devil’s chariot. I got in and blazed out for the open road, the only car on the two-lane highway surrounded by miles of dust and cacti. It was too open, too exposed. I thought I might lift into the air and drift like dandelion fluff to an even more desolate place.