Work Text:
Sandra
by ecknick
We had just seen her buried, Kris and I. She had been our friend. An old friend. Older than the fixed duration of life between birth and death in the ineffectual unrevealed present.
Sandra, tall and black, ethnically beautiful in the tradition of Africa, with the 'open secret', Yet with no female lover to leave behind, to mourn her considerable beauty.
I am at the wheel of the Ferrai sports car at a good pace, Kris' smiling, handsome round face laughing a child-like chuckle at nothing and everything in particular, beer in hand. I am only slightly buzzed, intoxicated as much by him as by any alcohol.
"It's funny," Kris said in his unaging tenor voice. "You playing something else besides Jazz."
"How is a funeral funny Kris?"
"You playing the organ. Organ. Your organ,' he said and laughed.
"Kris be serious. Are you going to write anything about Sandra?"
" No. I'm betwixt jobs. And I can drink."
"All sorts at the funeral."
"Yo dog. I mean dawg. Dog.'
"You are so white."
"But you love me anyway."
"Lucid at last. You could write something about her work with Haitian children."
"I wish I could work with children."
You're not over that love?"
Kris stopped laughing, drawing himself up like a child who has just been found out in wrongdoing and swilled the lawsst of the beer from the can in his hand reaching for another on the floor of the car.
"None of this no mores of this for Sandra,"
"More of it for you; and you'll be next."
"Well said Socrates" He tossed the beer can away.
I kept at the wheel, happy to be with him, happy to have 'saved' him as someone worth saving. Now we drank only at funerals, and in shifts even then(although I had had one small glass of white wine at the wake). And we never drank on New Years or Independence Day. The debauchery of these events viewed through a lucid frame of mind always instructed.
"Where to?"
"You know I have no idea where we are, I think I missed the turn a hundred years back."
The road gave way to a path barely navigatable of loose stones and we were passing by what looked like an antiquated black factory of some sort, when the car blew out a tire. We were in the middle of nowhere, and the factory looked like something out of Dickens and I felt as though I were dreaming. Maybe I was. Because I remember opening my eyes and being in the car all alone.
The memory of Sandra became dense and unbearable. I thought of her in Haiti so determined into her first year htere to forget love and teach underprivileged kids for whom she must have held so little hope, given by the pessimistic, optimistic martyr- like tone of the letters Kris and I poured over trying to decipher.
But I decide I am dreaming , and there is no danger in going into this factory with black smoke billowing out of the stacks like dancing amorphous shadows alive yet dead in the mysterious alchemy of a full moon which lends reality to the lifeless and macabre.
The door slams shut behind me.
Against the dim light, I make out children-prepuberty- working with hammers and anvil against the glow of forges and furnaces and women dressed in gestapo-type uniforms with S&M whips in their hands and I realise they are absurdly costumed men.
I think of where I am. In that moment there is no love. I yearn for Kris remembering his 'thing'with children, his failing- which I had saved him from or which God had saved him from through me.
There had to be a way out of the half-human circle, this doomed group of stark pink faces projecting fear and power, all around me now their intimidating stares.
I pretended to faint and closed my eyes. A bright flash of light. Again and again. I awoke still driving. Kris was taking picturres of me with a disoposable Kodak camera. My head was throbbing in waves and I looked dully at bottles of Gin, Beer, half-empty, half-potent and sad.
"No," I said, as we drove green trees on either side encasing the light of the full moon with shadows swallowed up by and lost in the quiet drone of the car and it's engine."No," I said.
'What?" he said , dropping the camera in his lap.
"Not even at funerals."
"Drinking?"
"Drinking. Kris I just saw a nightmare. I know what it means."
"One of your Rosicrucian waking dreams?"
"I know what it means. You were there with children."
"Those dreams are nothing."
"You're not a Rosicrucian"
"I don't want to be a Rosicrucian."
"No. I've had it. The alcohol worsened the asthma attack that killed her.
"I don't have asthma. I thought it was hypertension. Your people have that a lot."
"My people?"
"I'm sorry did I offend you?"
"I've had it Kris."
"I'm sorry.'
WE drove in silence for a while. I flipped on the radio.
"You haven't been talking to kids on the internet?"
"No."
"Steven."
"My God Robert, forgive me. You know."
The intuitive impulse had prompted me to turn the radio on. A Rosicrucian trick
"Kris. I know now. I didn't before."
"Please don't leave me. Please don't lie. I didn't go to far with him."
"Jesus Christ Kris, When I said Steven it was because Steven Tyler and Aerosmith are on the radio right now that is'Crying'.
"Please don't leave me"
"Were you drinking?"
"Just one. I swear."
"Never again, not even at funerals."
"Never".
"Sandra is here. I can feel it. She's alive" he said
"She's dead. It's her death that"s alive."
When we got to the door, I opened it and blocked the doorway
"Call a cab Kris. I've not decided anything. But I know you worked hard to beat the impulse."
"Will you have lunch with me tomorrow?"
"I think..........Yes."
He walked down the driveway his cellphone in hand and turned.
Remember Robert." he said "I was Steven once."
He was a beautiful man-child silhouetted by sympathetic waves of light, wavering as a cloud passed over the moon intermittently/
"I remember," I said and closed the door. But I stood there watching him through the blinds until the cab came and I stood there long after it had driven off.
end