Cigarettes in the Pool

I was sitting with Willy in the corner of small cafe when he remarked about the recognition of death as the beginning of life. The sun was coming off its midday zenith and had begun its slow descent toward the west, bringing shafts of light down through the steamed windows and through the waxy tendrils of snake and aloe plants huddling in the light above the door, and which came to rest finally on the long sweep of Willy's shoulders.

A few nights later I was standing in Charlotte’s apartment. It was after midnight, the city was twinkling quitely in the dark beyond the threshold of her balcony and a quiet stream of cars flowed along the distant bridges in little luminous processions, like so many ants dutifully bringing back precious cargos of starlight to their queen. Charlotte’s dog, also named Willy, was gazing at us from the center of the couch, where she had been sitting relaxed and happy in the soft ambient glow of the lamps to either side of her, the lamps now filling the entire room with their tangerine warmth. An anonymous soul on the dark, cold winter street below looked up with a yearning.

Willy is a little over three years old. Doctor says happy and healthy. She is smaller than a lab but bigger than two apples and a chair. She is slender and quick with a curious disposition, affectionate but not annoying. Her dark coat has a sheen that reflects the moon and her eyes are black and trusting. Charlotte said that she is already grieving the death of her. She said she feels it as a necessary and inevitable weight. That this grief has emitted from its dark center a warm and passionate glow of love and appreciation for Willy. The cost of her love.

I think back to the previous morning in the cafe, with Willy, as we tossed back and forth our ideas about the nature of things and the importance of death to life. I have never known death. To Charlotte, with Willy behind us on the couch in the glow, I said that it was far away from me. To Willy, in the sunny afternoon cafe, I said that death is the essential consideration. This is the problem with words. One can just say anything.

I haven't taken a heroic dose of mushrooms yet. It's called a heroic dose because that gives some kind of idea of what it feels like to throw off the yoke of identity and to slay the many dragons which lay in the wilderness beyond the fenced confines of our ordinary conscious experience. Another common description is that of an ego death. Your individual self dies so that the multivariate and innumerable beings which populate the wild ranges of our souls all get together in a chorus of primordial laughter and dance around the fire and point towards the moon. Or so I am told. I haven't taken a heroic dose. I've danced, but not like that.

Charlotte thinks it'll help me with all this mind stuff. Willy has the sense that I kind of got the gist already. There's this parrot that lives in one of the apartments above my patio and every once in a little while it lets out a brief and throaty caw, which sounds like the erupting laugh of a women but gets cut short and carried no further. A quick expression with no extra artiface, no social signal to send. She has her laugh, full and clear, and then she lets it go completely.

I sense that this is a woman who knows the value of a cigarette and a beer in the sun and who has felt the black touch of death acutely. I picture her blonde and smoking in the pool, wedged comfortably in the center of an inflatable pink flamingo while the chlorine waves lap her freckled shoulders and behind her black sunglasses, behind the red painted lips turned up at the corners, and behind the big laugh there remains an unspeakable hurt and horror at the center from which the depth and reverberation of her laugh gets its power. Everyone feels that she is a very good time. I don't know her name and I know she smells it on me; my distance from that place she has known and now can't not know. She tells me to come back later. She insists that there is no rush.