The Seven Visitations of Sydney Burgess by Andy Marino

Author:Andy Marino [Marino, Andy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780316629461
Google: MccTEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2021-09-27T23:00:00+00:00

24

—“Done?”

Trevor stares me down with a single blazing eye as I return from the bathroom at the Cat’s Paw. It’s located at the end of a corridor lined with framed black-and-white photographs of cats outfitted and posed like wild west gunslingers. Some of the cats’ features are droopy or missing. They’re frozen in discomfiting postures and contortions. I think they’ve been poorly taxidermied.

“Haven’t even started.”

Once you actually have cocaine in your pocket, there’s a certain deliciousness to withholding and then parceling it out in stages. The desperation of the hunt is gone—you can keep drinking and dole it out as you see fit, contented by the promise of a soaring high to cut through the haze. And today, the nine-year lack is massed like a thunderhead, ready to unleash the deluge.

There’s more where that came from.

I’ve switched to vodka sodas. A desiccated lime wedge rides the rim of my glass. This drink, my eighth or ninth, wrings out any residual hostility from the walls, the stools, the mirror, the bottles, the bigmouth bass. Despair puddles on the floor and sluices away, a vanished forgotten thing. I’ve reached an understanding with the world at large. Bar scenery and jukebox music and scattered bits of conversation blend so that everything moves toward both continuance and stasis. Of course, there’s never any resolution. Of course! The liminal state is the way of the world. Only now, at this holy moment, my hand curled around a chilly drink, do I realize that grace lies not in the attempt to resolve the maddening blur but in accepting the blur as the truth. I down half the drink and savor the fizz. There’s no more burn, only a slight uptick in my swoony perception.

“Anything can be knit together,” I say to Trevor. “You can knit your depression to a lampshade, or a sense of déjà vu to your neck. They always tell you that matter can’t occupy the same space as other matter, so when something becomes you, it can’t be made out of matter. At least not like we know it. When you knit yourself to something that’s been with you all along, you become more like yourself, and it’s beautiful.”

He lifts his glass. “Even after what happened, I always missed you.” We clink and sip.

The bartender materializes and Trevor deals with her. I’m vaguely aware of what’s hashed out: the next round is on the house. Outside it’s pouring. A water stain spreads along a ceiling tile. I shudder at the sight of it and drown what it evokes in the dregs of my drink. Here I am, elbows on the scratched wood of a bar on a rainy weekday afternoon. I imagine yet another me, the Sydney I’ve become, far from this forsaken blot of a town, working at her standing desk on the thirty-eighth floor of a glass-walled tower, scrambling to finish up so she doesn’t miss the 5:35 train home. Our free round arrives. Clink, sip. The grad students play an endless stream of Billy Joel and laugh at each song as it begins.

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