I am looking around the room and there is a little mug half-full of orange juice and don’t even get me started on where the mug came from because it’s another memento that should have died in the fire, the fire that never was. And I think a lot about this trend, this policy of not seeing drinks as a binding contract, something that must be finished; I’ve never felt that way about plates or meals but somehow always have felt that way about drinks but she doesn’t, which is completely fine of course, little collections of Coke and water and OJ to be dumped out in the sink when they’ve grown too stale, and bang, it takes me back to a little girl in a movie and the phrase “It’s contaminated.” The contaminated drawn out in the overly scripted way that smart children use to simulate being less smart children who don’t know a word or can’t get it out properly, the fake-child cheese that I definitely remember pulling out on occasion in early acting gigs because how could you not. And I remember where this comes from, the movie Signs, the movie I saw on my first or second night in New Orleans (I could look this up and will in a minute), the night I had concluded, we had concluded let’s be honest, that New Orleans was not for me (us), that this city that was so vaunted and talked up was really just a hall-of-fame for drinking for frat antics, for the kind of life that I (we) had rejected so early in college, which was why I (we) spent my (our) whole time debating instead. New Orleans was such a washout (oh God, that pun, really Storey, do you even listen to yourself sometimes?) that we had given up on it on night #1 (night #2? don’t look, it’s too painful) and said “Do you want to just see a movie?” and the other had been so relieved that we didn’t have to spend another night trying to make Bourbon Street work for us and we really thoroughly enjoyed the movie, even though it was maybe just slightly too scary for her and we walked out into a warm night under what I remember being a fullish moon and thinking that we would be able to get through anything together because we could jointly make decisions like this, of course. And now I know better, not about her frankly, because fuck that, but about New Orleans, that we were so unprepared to look for the real gems of the city, that the meme of Bourbon Street being The Place To Go is just silly and of course what any 23-year-old would know, but it’s not real, it’s not true, it’s not enough, and we could have seen so much more then just before the storm, before both storms, ha ha, not funny, how can you even compare, but there it is, and that theater became Canal Place, the same general location in the same mall, but nicer, more mealy and sit-downy and with overly fancy food and there will always be two reasons you don’t like going there, even though it’s where you took refuge in extreme moments of anger because you don’t cut yourself and you really try not to hit your head, just those two times really, so instead you do things like going to places where the memory is there. And you can ask, reasonably, well why the hell come to New Orleans and it’s like, don’t you understand this whole country is haunted? Because that’s what you try to do when you love someone, you take them everywhere, to places of memory, to new places, like some feral animal trying to mark your territory with the scent of love because you’re so damn happy to have it or so damn proud or you just want the whole country, planet, all your friends to smell like that person or because you don’t even think of it because that’s just who you are and what you do and what you love and you want to share share share everything and no one is there on your shoulder saying to reserve this place just in case, even though you remember wishing you’d done that in high school, though strangely that set of pilgrimages was to go back everywhere and make a new untainted memory except for perhaps that damn tree that you could never return to because really, there are limits to these things, aren’t there? Aren’t there? Where are the limits? Other than the limits that you can set yourself that you somehow miraculously manage to follow, while driving altogether too fast past Mardi Gras World, never ever Googling the day after blocking and never ever Googling the guy before because you know what kind of retinal damage would be done, that honestly the spots from the head-banging are nothing compared to that kind of injury, what you have to try to live up to and never can because you don’t have a chance in hell. And you tried so hard to block out all knowledge, but you couldn’t and there was a wedding on the day you were goddamned going to a wedding, you’ve got to be kidding me, and you couldn’t pull your eyes off of that one fast enough, no way, nohow, and are you really contemplating going to the Ballpark in Arlington (or whatever corporate bullshit name they’re calling it these days) ALONE, what kind of idiot are you really? That was that same trip, just a few days later (you could look up exactly how many, but don’t, not yet), and you want to spend three days there alone just because the Mariners are in a pennant race and they’re chasing Texas and you have a flexible schedule now in part to do things exactly like that, but are you thinking about this really, thoroughly? But then again, is it any different than anything else, really? Than the mugs and cups and glasses and papers and pictures and books and stuffed animals and posters and furniture and clothes and clothes and clothes that you literally surround yourself with? Really? Even your friends, your most supportive friends who have been so helpful and tried so hard trip over things all the damn time, because how can they not? When your whole life is a minefield and they want to be closer to you than seventy-five feet, they’re going to hit mines, them and especially her, her who is trying so hard it hurts, who you are desperately trying to repave places with her scent instead, but you have that sneaking suspicion in the back of your mind, put it away, no, it will be different this time, won’t it? Won’t it? You haven’t earned relating to this character enough, isn’t that why this book is in your life, this book you relate to more than you can almost ever remember relating to anything, isn’t it here to show you how much harder things would have to be to earn this kind of self-hate, this kind of self-doubt, this kind of aversion to everything. Or is that just more self-hate talking, that even your misery isn’t sufficiently earned because it’s so inferior to someone else’s misery, imagining the Damage Olympics and you’re up there with all your limbs intact and all your privileges strong and everyone’s laughing at you and your pain like you are the equivalent of the fat swimmer whose father was on your Olympic Committee so you got to go and party and finish last and expose corruption in your country for a day before American corruption stole the headlines back where they belonged. Why can’t you get out of your head? Why can’t you just MoveOn.org? You know, deep down, it’s something to do with your memory and its vividness, angels and demons, the curse of being able to imagine settings and recall them, plus of course the obsession with documentation (you could look up so much, just scratch that itch now, it’s nothing like Googling, the great unforgivable divide that you’ve honored all these years, it’s just your own archive, c’mon), after all even DFW took himself into electro-convulsive eventually, but of course that also killed him, just about literally, because it nuked his talent and he couldn’t work and this is just one of the many cautionary tales you dredge up when your friends pound you so hard to just go to therapy, just talk to someone, what’s the worst that can happen, we are insufficiently equipped to help you with this, your family is, your girlfriend sure as heck is (what are you trying to do to her, anyway, and are you really going to post this diatribe really in public where she and everyone can read it, really, what kind of catharsis will that give her, honestly, are you trying to kill everyone here?)? And it’s like well, the worst that can happen is you take your brain away through various chemical and electrical means and it’s a little silly to care so much about me getting through all this if the brain isn’t going to be intact, isn’t it, because that’s basically all that matters, it houses all these feelings and the belief that life is So Serious which after all is what may have separated you from all these people in the first place and made it unlivable, in the end that’s what it comes down to, isn’t it? That you care so much, too much, and that’s not meant to sound like the job-interview weakness, oh I Just Work Too Hard and Care Too Much, it’s the same kind of aggressive honesty that DFW talks about in Infinite Jest, no one actually wants that level of stifling, insecurity-bound self-reverberating honesty because it’s too much to be confronted by everything that’s going on behind someone’s eyes when they really spill it all out, there’s a reason that spill-your-guts is a cliche, because they are bloody ugly entrails and no one wants to see those and there’s a reason we have a visceral reaction to seeing and smelling that, our animal nature kicks in and says this is Wrong, I must Get Away, nature is upside-down when I can see innards and after all they are called innards for a reason, use the language you love so much you idiot. There is nowhere to run to, really, unless maybe you just move to Kazakhstan or somewhere else that isn’t contaminated (“It’s contaminated!”), burning all your stuff right before, I mean all your stuff, really, and shutting down pictures and memories and Facebook, you just go and it would look a little like the monastery plan in 2011 (God, how this book has made you re-look at that idea in a new and entrail-colored light) and you could go an volunteer somewhere and just try to cleanse all the memory away without actually excising it chemically, waiting to get old and senile and only have the memory of what’s in front of you. She would come with you, if that’s what you needed, you know she would, and isn’t that enough, maybe, to make it worth it, to know for sure? Or are you just another idiot human who believes there is a test for faith out there, you don’t need to read a book as brilliant as this one to know that faith is not there to be tested, that the whole notion of that is wrong, that this is the PTSD talking like it always does, the loudest and most explosive voice in the room, shouting down the reasonable elements because it is always behaving like the wounded animal it is. And like, yes, we get it, you need balm for your wounds and you just want to be heard, but maybe let someone else talk sometimes, maybe let someone else have the floor, we haven’t heard from Hope in a while, over there in the corner, smiling shyly at all these boorish injured guys in the room, don’t you have something to contribute to this discussion? And Hope looks down meekly, then looks up, and she admits that she just has the same platitudes and cliches that she’s always had, but maybe if you say them enough, they’ll work, and her voice tilts up at the end and almost squeaks, almost fades out, and you go over and try to hug her to the point where you’re almost crushing the wind out of her, and this is the problem with Hope, you can’t hold on to her like this or you’ll kill her, so you back off sheepishly and grab the back of your hot neck with a hand and then some other angry voice takes the floor and she just shrugs at you like she doesn’t even resent you almost strangling her with your embrace just now and you know Distraction will have the floor soon, the same Distraction that almost took over that dark desperate night in your dorm room in the Castle, the pulsing music of Cholmondoley’s blaring up and urging you to do drugs, to go to the equivalent of Bourbon Street that you have access to, to join the throng and the slippery phrase “self-medicate” because this is one of the real, tangible reasons that your memory is so much stronger and clearer and brighter and they have ways of fixing that. That every night you ferry people along their corridors of this decision, sometimes coaching them through the little memories that pop up and poke through, like the leg of an alien in the grass, just a glimpse that startles and the music is almost that dramatic in the background, whenever there’s a reference, an image, something you Did Not Google but have to see anyway, the world really does move beneath you, and for the wrong reasons and that shot of adrenaline shoots from your heart (sure, adrenaline is probably not literally stored in the heart, I guess it’s a jolt of blood or something) and jams in your brain and briefly fogs everything on landing and then it becomes clear, all too clear, so much clarity, and you just can’t wait anymore, you have to remember even clearly, distilled, like the vodka you won’t have, clear as a damn bell, what you were thinking at that moment, it will feel good to scratch the bite (mosquitoes, everything I own is a souvenir of Liberia), to watch it swell in size three times, because sometimes then it pops and the poisonous pus emerges and you can start to heal, yeah right, ha ha, have you even been paying attention?
