Plain old grass, Indian strawberry, the occasional clover—invasive, incidentally, he thinks, and so he can’t help but like pull it out—and all of this and too much more emerging from small cracks in the asphalt, or maybe it’s cement, but regardless the ground he’s sitting on, once more, again, naturally. The feeling from a metric ton of Instant-Release Adderall is leaving him, and he’s slumped against a brick wall behind the BMA Sculpture Garden, sweating buckets, and the moon is at half-past ten, and he is here.
What’s happening is that the Great Observationist is rolling his back against the bricks, and he’s thinking about frogs and how some species can inflate themselves to try and lodge in the throats of frog-eaters. And about how he feels so very much like a true American Citizen for some reason, tonight. About how he’s got the shakes, and about how in maybe five minutes he’s going to have the worst headache of his entire life, again, just like yesterday. About how Rachel used to call it his “Stimulant Thumper,” and about how she actually made the whole dependency thing sound pretty silly instead of really very sad, and about how he could desperately use some silliness right now. Rachel never needed to see it all. Never felt compelled to break the world down into a telephone book of sensations. This is blindness he can’t afford. There’s an ant on his leg right now. Chilling. “Cold-Lamping.” He can still feel everything there ever has been to feel, but he can tell it’s all waning. There is no worse feeling for him. It’s worse than death.
The Obster’s got a wen on his neck, and he’s really digging at it. It might be a pimple. It might be squamous cancer. He bites his lip and can feel his own teeth. One of his shoelaces is threaded through the wrong eyelet. Indian strawberry is non-toxic and tastes like nothing, they say, but the leaves are like lettuce. He has a mustard stain on his crotch. Four-leaf clovers aren’t nearly as rare as you think they are. His skin feels like it’s peeling off in layers. If you pull one of the fibres in a wart, the whole thing bleeds for some reason. He doesn’t have a wart, but he’d prefer one to squamous cancer. You can’t crack your back on a brick wall the same way you can stretch out each individual vertebrae on say a linoleum floor. The corners of his mouth are a little irritated, split and raw; whenever he opens his mouth, it hurts. He flexes his left leg until it nearly cramps, and his foot tips over a top-heavy dandelion.
So he’s got the shakes, and what’s happening now is that he’s watching a trespassing party, for someone’s birthday, for which they hopped the sculpture garden’s fence and are now just lounging by the giant red structure thing maybe forty feet from here. Over there. And he’s got a footprint on his shin because one of them tripped over him like an hour ago, even though he is very obviously right here, and has been, for almost three hours. What they call a wastoid. Observing. Flushing amines down the neurochemical toilet. They don’t understand the work he’s doing. He doesn’t know them, but he might as well, because he sees them and their invariably patterned polos tucked into their pants, and those sort of lip-curling looks you get from contemporary Beatniks, and he’s hearing their voices now. And but so he likes to imagine that he’s there instead of here, impending crash. They’re all teeth. Mashing junk food and like stripping matte hoagie wrappers of mayonnaise—demolishing the occasional J-bird, which he can definitely smell. But seriously masticating regardless. He’s not very good at imagining. The gap between tapering buzz and head-splitting meltdown is a moment—not long and shortening every week—a moment of something, but he can’t describe it without getting very anxious—and but so it hurts him to try.
They’re lying in hammocks attached to the trees over there. By an orange streetlight, close to the patio but still in the grass. There’s a birthday cake, half-sliced and half-eaten, divorced from plastic packaging, on a blanket next to a boombox. The Great Observationist’s ears are rumbling, just a little bit. Accompanied by this guy buried in fabric, free-swinging, fingerpicking a Bob Dylan tune in a way that isn’t irritating.
They’re talking about whatever it is you talk about when you’re with aggressively congruent friends. About old classmates who peaked in high school, vacations to be taken in three-years time, nearly-totaled credit cards, the doldrums of working in corporate advertising. It’s background noise, but trying to focus on it gives him images of lives he can’t touch anymore. He aches like he’s watching television. A discarded piece of plastic wrapper blows toward him and lands in the grass right there. He need to look at it, but wonders if anyone would ever notice its absence. One of them is talking loudly now, gesturing toward the big red sculpture thing as though it has some deep meaning only he can grasp.
And this whole time, the G.O. has got his little steno pad in his trembling hands, blank, again, except for his heading, “Observations and Corresponding Feelings,” and his pen is on the ground and is rolling away from him, again, and he’s broken off the shirt-clip that keeps it (the pen) from doing that. And he’s in full spiral because he’s drowning in it, again, but can’t stop and might never.
Right now he’s thinking about how there is one dry-erase marker in his apartment, and it’s completely dry. About how the ant is back, running laps on the ground and ducking into tufts of grass. About how the pen is, out of nowhere, so heavy. About how they don’t tell you how heavy pens can be. About how many sores he’s got on his face, and how the one between his eyebrows won’t go away. About how he’s seriously teetering on the brink of cranial annihilation. About how when it comes, the headache will flatten him, but not as much as the dullness. About how the only thing worse than the headache and the dullness is the fear of never feeling anything again. About how withdrawal is an artistic mandate. And about how he misses Rachel right now. He can’t decide whether he’s meant to capture life or succumb to the noise. Somewhere, he’d lost the line between the two, and now he’s just floating. Taking everything in, but missing the point. The ant’s running into the plastic wrapper now. Trapped at once in an unsatisfactory metaphor, is what he’s thinking.
And now he remembers.
He remembers, kind of out of nowhere, one of his last birthdays as just Obie Michaels, pre-Observationist, maybe two years ago, just before the Adderall thing started to get a little out of hand. In Rachel’s backyard (Rachel, who looked very much like a rabbit, who tended to be periphery incarnate) her backyard, in late January, where they sat by the fire pit and warmed cold hands and talked about something. The G.O. kind of forgets how it started. She traced little shapes on his knee without thinking. He was pretty sure he liked it.
And Rachel had her legs over his, and they were making little interlocking rings out of their fingers. Said something like you’ve got the twitch again, tilting her head toward his jaw. He never noticed this, and he couldn’t decide whether it was unconscious or subconscious, or if it was just the ‘rall. And but what Rachel kept meaning to ask is where does Obie think he’ll be in two years, maybe.
He said he didn’t know. She had this way of paying attention that unsettled him, deeply, where she’d hold his hands and like look at him. He said he’d like to be published somewhere. Big, maybe. She nodded and drew circles then, small and careful.
She asked him a question but the only thing he gathered was that the inside of her nose was like cavernous. He looked there instead of her eyes, usually, because nostrils are easier to digest. He said something to the effect that he wanted to be a sort of creative institution somewhere. The Great Campus Writer. Or like the resident Noticing-Machine. He said he wanted to be voracious, and the word tasted like tin. She traced the word “voracious” on his leg, and another word too.
He asked if that was too much to ask.
None of the four adjacent fences in Rachel’s yard were hers; each belonged to a neighbor, each built with a different wood (the one on the right made of chicken wire, actually), and each painted a different color. One of them was spanking new. Another had been standing, rotting, bug-infested, since before she was born. She tabulated splinters-per-year and kept the figures in a notebook. She liked numbers, and also things that were falling apart but still standing. She kept the notebook under her bed. She kept everything under her bed. The G.O. is pretty sure Rachel died last May, but he can’t remember how.
Her thing was that she needed to tell him, between these short misty breaths, that there should be a way to know if all love is worth anything in the future-tense. A big yellow notice mailed upon first-sight: “all of your love will have been wasting on me.” She laughed when she said this, but it wasn’t a joke. He didn’t laugh, but said something about future-perfect-progressive tense.
The fire didn’t seem to contribute anything other than light. At some point, it began to snow. But not enough to warrant attention. Between word-tracing and pieces of sentences he let slip between her fingers, she said she loved him dearly. To which he said he knew. She shivered for some reason.
He noticed the birds had flew. The porch light was dim, and it was orange, and there was an abandoned spiderweb threaded between the bulb socket and the siding, and in it was a moth that’d been dead for who knows how long.
And he said maybe something like actually, now that he thinks about it—and so but like one of his greatest assets is that he’s good at feeling stuff, and that he’s actually a feeling factory. Rachel said she didn’t have a clue about where she might be in two years. Obie kind of started pulling at his hair a little bit and asked if Rachel thinks this is something an artist has to have in order to make it: this compulsion to feel what there is to feel, always, constantly. Rachel said nothing. He said artists who can’t feel never make anything worth masticating. Chewing on, he meant.
He was still conscious of her leg on his, and about how stiff her hands were. He was feeling indeed, he decided, right then. Oh yeah. Her pants were burgundy. Wool socks intricately patterned. Sneakers with frays near the toes and worn treads. And then the soreness of his tailbone. The tightness of the corners of her mouth. Inaccuracy of the voiced lateral approximant when she tried to pronounce “love” just then, in a sentence that he’d missed because he was entirely too busy feeling. She said something about observation, and also courage. Have the courage. But like he missed that too.
And her mom opened up the kitchen window, upstairs, and stuck out her head. Like a haunt of “back then,” or like an artifact of the time. Experiencing in the second-hand. She had nasolabial creases and glasses. He can’t really remember what her voice sounded like anymore, which makes him feel something indeed, but he can’t decide what. And she asked if either of them would like hot cocoa or tea. Obie said he wouldn’t mind some warm milk, and she kind of blinked at him.
Rachel kept tracing the word “voracious” on his leg like she was trying to remember how it felt.
And that’s how it goes and goes and goes.
