New Moon (35 page)

On the Beach
was no aberration or quirk. It was part of a general awakening. Suddenly, it seemed, everyone in my circle was hearing the sirens the way I had for years, awaking to their implications with newfound horror. That December in the auditorium the whole of Horace Mann was addressed by a visitor from a group called Moral Rearmament. I had no idea what the name meant, but a number of clued-in intellectuals were incensed, so I joined their group indignation. A sour man in a blue suit evaluated in chilling terms how vulnerable we were to an attack by the Russians. He said that they had submarines lurking offshore even as he spoke. “They mean to do it. Have no doubt about that, young men.” He wanted the United States to expand its arsenal and strike first.

The fatal pronouncement having been uttered, I sank into my familiar holocaust gloom—a dull, defiant paralysis, as the speaker droned on, itemizing the type and degree of weaponry we’d need to defend ourselves. I felt sullen and defeated. For years I had been afraid of air-raid sirens and confrontations with China or Russia, but I hadn’t fully grasped the sort of world we were in, that nuclear war
was taken for granted,
that everything special or important was a diversion from the inevitable clash of warheads. It was so vast and overarching that it hardly seemed worth trying anymore. What did Shakespeare or the pennant race or the Hit Parade matter? All that counted were those two-bit radioactive canisters by which all outcomes would be reduced to the same cipher, though not before—we had just read John Hersey’s
Hiroshima
in English class—flesh was burned off and eyes melted. Why were we even born?

Then partway through the inventory Bob Alpert rose to interrupt: “So what you’re saying is that they can wipe us out four times over and we can only wipe them out three-and-a-half times!” The auditorium erupted in a spontaneous ovation.

“Are you a Communist, sir?” asked the speaker. He was drowned by hisses and catcalls. Each time he began again the uproar resumed.

We were all secretly on the same side! We were cheering for Tinkerbell to get relit! I had never before felt so proud of my generation.

The next day Headmaster Gratwick reprimanded us about
courtesy to guests, but it was unclear why this speaker, so different from anyone else Horace Mann had ever invited, should have been allowed to plague us with his misanthropy. Bob’s stand was a heroic moment, not an incivility. He should have been given an award. Not only were atom bombs horrendous weapons that could incinerate our lives in an instant, the invocation of their reign of terror
was itself a lethal force,
neither exemplary nor neutral. It had the aim of browbeating us, whipping us to venom while turning us numb and helpless.

Moral Rearmament was a sales pitch fueled cynically by fear. When one of us seized back the power in all of our names, I realized that my dread of this man was greater than my dread of the bomb. I would rather not live at all than be in his thrall.

Even the holocaust had a human mask. Its terror was mutable.

The Moral Rearmament speaker faded. Life returned to its rhythms, patterns, and moods. The minutes, hours, and days resumed their spell, as the things that had occupied them became real again. The intruder, who had briefly seemed larger than reality itself, dwindled into a shrill nobody, a mouse in suit-and-tie that roared. Existence was too dense to be coopted for long by an Idea.

All that winter I was enchanted by Keith. Hardly understanding the impulse, I honored his presence as that of a mythic being: Cupid the boy. He was my amulet, his light brown hair combed in a self-conscious wave across his forehead. When I glimpsed him in stray moments I would commemorate these as omens and signs, for they changed the color of daylight. It was as if Athena suddenly revealed her true nature to a mortal, turning autonomously from a woman into a goddess. Of course, only the chosen one saw.

Keith was ostentatiously booting his schoolbag in front of him. With a heraldic flourish he was Mercury delivering a message to my class. The rest of the hour vibrated at a different frequency.

One Monday I arrived at school feeling itchy and sore, every blackhead burning, subway stench in my pores. At lunch a voice from behind the desserts said, “What do you want?” I stared, for a moment, into the eyes of Keith.

In chapel choir Keith’s Latin solos filled the auditorium, transmitting hope and consolation. In myself I found only his shadowing—flat and unlivable. In him, it was realized, vibrant.

The name I gave this event (when I described it in my writing or talked to Dr. Friend) was borrowed from how I thought of Rodney once: Keith was my “idol”—today I would change it only to its Greek root:
eidolon:
“apparition.”

One afternoon he starred in a Gilbert and Sullivan production. I brought along a small battery-run recorder. That night, after everyone else had gone to bed, I took the machine into the bathroom, ready for a numinous performance.

Most of the windows in the courtyard were dark. There was an old man reading a newspaper, a woman in a black evening dress, part of a body at a kitchen table with flowers—all made memorable by the fact that Keith was about to manifest, all frozen in time by the hissing blank at the beginning of the reel. Then, I heard him.

I have no idea what words he sang, but I made my own lyrical gibberish out of them, then turned to the terse magnetic strip again and again, for luck and confirmation:
“They are, they are, the quarums they seek. / They are, they are, and they are. / They are, they are, the quarums they seek. / Statitimski is hidden afar, yes afar.”

At Christmas I hung out at the Grossinger’s Nightwatch, but there were always cooler, quippier guys. One afternoon, in fact, the whole rock-’n’-roll group The Tokens who sang,
“Hush my darling, don’t fear my darling,”
swaggered into the room looking like a street gang and declared themselves in their Brooklyn accents, “Where duh girls?
The lion sleeps tonight, baby!
” The “girls” were totally snowed.

Departing the tattered social realm, I took my martyrdom to a more pagan temple. I fetched my skates and snuck into the closed rink. I switched on full floods, picked some pop music from the rink’s limited repertoire (“Witch Doctor” and the score from
West Side Story
were my favorites), and raced around for a half hour or so in the frigid black. It was my father’s hotel and I could do what I wanted, break the rules until he found out. He would have been appalled at the electric bill and insurance liability, but no one else
dared stop me.

Stars above the golf course, the glowing crystal became a chapel, its frozen surface mine to inhabit and strafe—my track of Martian-canal ice. I was racing alongside Ray Blum, ready to make my final charge into the lead, Grossinger’s written diagonally on my soul. But this wasn’t any ordinary meet or trope of Silver Skates. I was at one-third terrestrial gravity, flying above the surface, igniting and outstripping my melancholy, converting it to pleasure.

The threads I cut were the grooves of my life. Almost mechanically I set before me figures of my life: my mother, Jonny, Rodney, Karen, Keith; I blended with them to enact greater swiftness, ripping the ice in quickening steps, pushing tempo beyond breath, beyond agility, beyond stamina:
“I told the witch doctor / I was in love with you / And then the witch doctor / He told me what to do.”

Zoom, clip the corner low, trust the blades, make myself one with my own velocity.

“He said that / ooo eee, ooo ah ah, ting tang / Walla walla, bing bang.”

I invoked and dispelled the fog of studying, the core loneliness, so many unrequited desires—all translated into an orbital dance. Those I wanted to defeat I defeated. Those I wanted to love became part of me. Those I didn’t understand my feelings for, I tested.

“Tonight, tonight / won’t be just any night…. ”
was my absolute theme song, when I could get myself up to my fastest. Turntable to loudspeaker to skates, it was Keith and me, dark sonic arcs hitching breaths of ice, hollowing my skull, blades rasping, tearing for a quickening grip at corners. They held my fury and apotheosis. It was euphoric, if a bit hyper.

I wouldn’t have begun to understand the psychic proposition of chakras, but I recognized their effects in my being. I was raising the overall vibration of my aura, changing the color of my feelings from brown and black to indigo and phosphorescent violet. Plus, this was an era when athletic accomplishments were a mark of being a guy, a viable human being; I was graving an indisputable male signature.

I was north of Horace Mann, north of New York City, north of Westchester and its parties, north of the subway, beneath the Milky Way. And then, soaring to epiphany:
“Tonight there will be
no morning star…. ”

That was the droplet at my heart—a faraway sun that gave light to unknown worlds.

On New Year’s Eve I sat at the teen table dateless. When the lights went off and “Auld Lang Syne” began, I imagined time itself evacuating through the walls. These were famous seconds, rustling by like pages of old books. I ducked through the fire door into sub-zero night. From roofs and trees, snow glistened. Icicles hung in moonlight as if on Luna itself. A sudden wind shook frozen pods like rattles on the uppermost branches, as frigid a plaint as I had ever heard. When the Earth performed such a requiem, I was a mere ember, a speck of carbon sustained by desire. I took off my jacket and tie and unbuttoned my shirt and collar. I let in the icy serpent. Then I ran, the Hotel’s din fading under my escape velocity.

Through frost flowers on my bedroom window a single streetlight radiated delicate grains. I lay there, engulfing Keith in my warmth, or was it I in his?

I spent the winter trying to call Keith’s attention to me. I typed up slides for Wednesday sings, putting unusual lyrics on them, which I submitted anonymously with symbolic messages (which, of course, he would never decipher). I joined the carnival publicity committee and set up an exhibit, using a battery-operated guzzling monkey with a beer can, a banana, and an expanding stomach. Keith came by, stood and watched, then said, “Isn’t that sexy” to a friend. Puck the imp! A score!

Another time, I heard him mutter as he was walking down the hall, “Don’t tell me he’s done it again.” Each syllable and cadence was precious.

But Keith was changing inside me. I tried to keep him innocent and unsexual like the kids in my old spaceship drama, but he had an implicitly androgynous quality. Four months after I transfigured a pixie-like schoolmate into an eidolon, the other shoe dropped. I imagined him driving a car and picking me up outside my apartment
building on a Friday afternoon. He would laugh and look into my eyes. As I played with his hair, his smile melting mine, he became something that was neither boy nor girl and lay atop of me, swallowing my desire in his icon.

Beyond this vision a scenery formed on its own, a cornfield and haystacks, moon-yellow—the shade and fragrance of straw I associated with him. He was wanton and luminous; he arose from a leather trunk in the attic; he played the panpipes. He held me prisoner in his room, drawing me unto himself. In this fantasy he was no longer Keith my friend and guide; he was the resolution of my ungauged desire.

I wanted to lose whatever was left of myself in him. He could jump on me, beat me up, and that would be okay, for soon enough I would be burnt away and nothing more than part of him. I was a shred of steel filing, and he was a dense, raw magnet, drawing me forever unto himself. He was still elfin, but gamy and seductive too. And now he knew my reckless hunger for him.

I checked the sperm from such fantasies to see if it was bloody or dark.

I arrived five minutes late at Dr. Friend’s, so the door from the waiting room was open. I walked in and placed myself on the couch, fixing my eyes on the photograph of broken pottery.

“I’m sorry I’m late. The train was incredibly slow. It just took forever getting to l68th Street.”

“There’s no need to be sorry.” His voice as always detached.

“Of course there is. I wasted some of your time.” I was parodying a tone he often took.

“If I were you I would think more carefully about whose time is being wasted.”

“Okay. One point for you.”

“My, aren’t we angry today. Angry, sarcastic, and bitter. What’s all that about?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing at all.”

“Well, what are you thinking about?”

“Only about how the damn train slowed me down.”

“Was it all the train’s fault?” I didn’t answer. “Was it really all the train’s fault.” I stared at the second hand sweeping away our time within the clock on the far wall. The radiator hissed, the odor of its steam musty, trite.

A few minutes passed and then I said, “I hope you didn’t think I was going to sit around here and answer stupid questions about trains all afternoon.”

“You were the one who brought up the train.”

“Well, you always tell me what I’m thinking. You do, don’t you? Well, if you’re not going to talk, I don’t see why I should.”

I lay there quietly for a while and then unwittingly closed my eyes. A drowsiness engulfed me….

I awoke with a start—it was dark outside. I was totally disoriented, my hour almost up. I felt instantly contrite. “Hey, that’s the first time I ever fell asleep here.”

“There’s always a first time.”

“I feel better now.”

“Well, you escaped. You used up the whole session without talking about the thing that’s bothering you.”

“I feel sad.”

“Good. Maybe we can use the remaining time and accomplish something.”

“What should I talk about?”

“What did you dream? Do you remember?”

“Nothing really.”

“Oh come now.”

“I was in the country somewhere with Keith. Late afternoon. The light is very green.”

“Any perceptions.”

I saw the second hand erasing my last minute. I recalled an apple tree, Keith beneath … as if Keith were me. Then I remembered. “It just faded into a bunch of cartoon characters dancing around and jumping in and out of the back elevator shaft of our building.”