The Sea
3
“What in the world is this?”
“That’s the Red Book—”
“Well, I know. It says the Red Book,”
Alexis took it from Rulon’s long hand and said, “It’s the Red Book of Carl Jung, Everyone knows him for psychology and dream analysis, but he wrote this book from his dreams and his fantasies. The original is embossed with his calligraphy and the art from his dreams. It’s an amazing book. And it’s…. on sale. We should get it. You should get it.”
“I’ve got nowhere to put it,” Rulon put the book down beside Alexis who was kneeling on the ground in one of the crowded aisles of the old bookstore. “You take that, buddy. I’m just looking.”
Alexis realized that there was actually no need to pry. Rulon would tell him everything when he was ready, and when that everything came out it would be a lot.
“How do you like that Michael?”
“Darius’s friend?”
“Darius’s fiancé?”
“Really? Doesn’t seem likely. Does’t seem like they’d get on. Doesn’t actually seem like they’d even speak to each other.”
“Well, it just seems like they belong to two different worlds.”
“That….” Alexis thought as he sat on his rump and opened the red book on his knees, “is a very apt way of putting it.”
“Like, we are different, in a way. But we live in the same world,” Rulon said. “Neither of us fits into this world. We make the best of what we’re given. I feel that Michael guy, he could fit anywhere.”
“Yes,” Alexis acknowledged. “Oh, a fresh Upanishads!”
“Do you think I’m an asshole,” Rulon asked.
“Yes,” Alexis said, wondering what had brought that on, “And you’re my favorite asshole at that.”
“That is a beautiful church,” Rulon declared. “I would love to stop in there.”
“I’m sure it’s closed,” Alexis said. “But we could look in.”
“It’s enormous,” he said as they walked the street, peering in through side doors that only showed marble steps leading up to the main church. The façade was almost as wide as it was long, high and stately with a great rose window, The patterns of the walls were almost spiky as if to ward off the evil of the world, and now they went up the steps and Rulon, like a child, spread himself across the front door and looked in.
“It’s beautiful,” he declared.
“We go here sometimes,” Alexis said. “We could go to tomorrow or something.”
Rulon nodded eagerly, looking at the high pillars and the lanterns swinging high above the pews and the glossy floor..
“I promise I would be completely respectful.”
Alexis thought there was no need of that promise.
“Do you want to stop at a witchcraft shop?”
“No!”
“It’s overpriced anyway,” Alexis said. “I don’t much believe in it. All the shit they have for fifty dollars there, you can go to a Mexican grocery store or a botanica and get for three. And then they have a bunch of Buddhist shit too. Overpriced little amounts of incense… They should really just call it an appropriation shop.”
Across the street was an apartment building whose yard was filled with water features and little statues, and they crossed Broadway to look over the iron gate into ponds where fat goldfish blinked as they swam under bridges and by pagodas. Little gnomes and little Chinese people under fine bronze temples greeted one another.
“Wow,” Rulon murmured.
“I know. It’s so splendid and so ugly,” Alexis said.
As he watched a minnow gulp and shimmy under a bridge wound in false lotus blossoms, he thought, “A perfect metaphor for Chicago.”
“We probably could have walked this.”
“We probably could have,” Alexis agreed. “If we had to. But we didn’t have to, and I feel like the walking we’ve done so far is more than enough.”
A good four or five blocks up a light incline to Clark Street. The tree lined streets were mostly quiet, and in the school yard of one old limestone brick building, kids were skipping rope a dignity Alexis had never seen. On one side of the street was a huge brick church, and across from was something like a hotel, and a gate opened onto a short yard with a tree lined walk that led up the steps. There were shoes on the tile floor of the quiet midday lobby, and Rulon took his off when Alexis did, and they both went through the doors into something like a great ballroom. Well, it was a great ball room, and in the midst of it was a pillar, Rulon thought, but then he saw that inside of it was a glass case and for a moment he wondered if the little brown Indian man inside was dead. But it was a statue, and he didn’t try to pronounce the man’s name. He just sat down by Alexis who had found a space on the floor and was facing the curtained stage. He looked around, saw there were great windows to his right, like church windows, and to his right there was a balcony. He heard tingling bells.
The curtain opened, and as it did, music, not ordinary music like he was used to hearing, he was a guitarist after all, but music from the East, as he would say, began playing, and there was a gentle drumming, an occasional ting of cymbals, and he thought what good music this was, why didn’t they hear something like this more often, and then he was rising with Alexis, and the curtains revealed the most beautiful tableau, the strangest thing he had ever seen, stranger and more beautiful than what he’d know in the Temple ,stranger than what he’d seen in Catholic churches when he visited them with friends. There were three dioramas and the central one was of an elegant man, completely black, with white patterns over his face and around his eyes. He wore a golden turban, and one foot was positioned behind the other while he held a flute, and beside him, enraptured, was another figure as white as he was black, with jet black hair, most of it hidden behind a silken veil. Around them were various flowers and to the other side there were figures he understood less, but now he heeded the music.
Hare Krishna Hare Krishna
Krishna Krishna Hare Hare
Hare Rama Hare Rama
Rama Rama Hare Hare!
Some were swaying and singing, some were turning about slowly. The room was nowhere near full, but it didn’t seem like a place where you could possibly embarrass yourself. It seemed more like a place where you got over embarrassment, where you realized you weren’t the deal you thought you were. Some of the people seemed to be Indian, or from that part of the world, Some of them seemed to be monks or priests or something in white outfits with almost bald heads and little tiny ponytails. Some of those were white. Some black, some even Indian. Some were in normal clothes, like he and Alexis. Alexis sat on ground now, meditating with his hands closed, so Rulon decided to do the same.
Hare Krishna Hare Krishna
Krishna Krishna Hare Hare
Hare Rama Hare Rama
Rama Rama Hare Hare!
Occasionally, as Rulon understood the very simple song, the verses changed, and now he listened.
Shanti Hare Hare
Shanti Govinda Jai
Shanti Hare Hare
Shanti Govinda Jai
Some put their faces to the floor, and some spun softly, and on the stage, which Rulon now understood must have been an altar, one woman veiled in expensive scarlets and purples was fanning the images with a great blue peacock feather, and others were some setting bowls of food before the images. All were singing.
Hare Krishna Hare Krishna
Krishna Krishna Hare Hare
Hare Rama Hare Rama
Rama Rama Hare Hare
Now the music was changing, and it seemed to all be ending as soon as it had begun, the curtains closing over the images, the room filled with the smell of nag champa, which reminded Rulon of Alexis and Darius’s apartment.
People smiled at him. He smiled back at them. Alexis nodded as if they had only gone to K Mart, and in his Alexis way, offered no explanation. The day was at once warmer and colder was the way Rulon thought of it. Whatever they had been through in there, he needed it. They began to walk back toward the El and away from Clark Street, and this trip seemed quicker. But they did not stop at the El. Instead the continued on, through blocks of old apartments buildings and broad streets lined with trees. There was a way in which row after row of places in Chicago looked similar, but not entirely the same.
“Where are we?”
“Rogers Park,” Alexis said.
It was funny how Rogers Park managed to look quite different from Edgewater and the street where Alexis and Darius stayed, and yet he couldn’t say just what the difference was. When they made their way to the first busy street, Rulon looked up and saw they were on Sheridan. There were others walking up and down the street. College students he thought, there are people who live here, live in this. All the time. They crossed Sheridan and continued walking, and when that street came to an end, they walked through a park where old people were sitting on a bench smoking cannabis, and Rulon thought, “Well, everything about the world isn’t bad.” And there were skateboarders and women on phones walking dogs, beautiful brown men, all in white, some wearing robes and talking rapidly on their phones and, at last, he saw the band of darker blue lake, big as a sea, touching the lighter blue sky. The asphalt path they walked on became sandy and then lowered to a long walk, and across from it was a wild field of tall grasses, and the path to the pier, and the dark grey strip of beach. It wasn’t the most beautiful beach, but here it was, and Alexis took off his shoes and Rulon followed suit. They padded through unimpressive sand till their feet reached the water. Alexis stood up to his ankles, moved further, let the waves, much calmer than Rulon had noticed them the night before, wash his calves.
Before them the water stretched to no end, but when they looked south, Rulon could see the skyline of Chicago, the high towers in the distant Loop. Up close he could see what he thought was Edgewater. Somewhere down there was the rocky beach with the crashing waves where he had walked amidst wonders and slept in his van all night, stepping out, occasionally, to view men getting what they needed or longed for from each other.
They walked back onto the long sidewalk which began at the beach and traveled along the park under a wall that was also a bench and the stone bench had been divided into sections and in each of the sections a different scene was painted, mermaids, the skyline, an exploding spiral, an image of the Great Goddess, aliens hanging from a space ship, well made unicorns, poorly made turkeys and now and again someone was sitting the benches, and along it and under the art were painted signs and mottos:
If I had not made my own world, I would surely have died in someone else’s.
My tongue is a divided country.
There is nothing to fear but boredom itself.
“The only thing I don’t like about this beach is the beach,” Alexis said. “I mean, the one we were just on.”
“What about the pier?” Rulon said.
“Yes. Let’s go there.”
On one side of the pier was the deepening blue water, but on the other side was the sand grass and a path leading off into it, and at last the sand grass ended and revealed, over the cable ropes that were on either side of the pier, a fresher, longer, cleaner beach, and Rulon said, “You were holding out on me.”
Alexis looked surprised and said, “Sometimes I don’t understand my mind. I knew this place was here, but I had forgotten.”
They walked further out to the end of the pier which was painted roughly and decorated with beer tabs and debris as if magpies had overseen the work and approved. Rulon remembered the beach from last night with its rainbow pier, and he thought, well if that was the gay pier this is the pier for… there were scraps of trash and a raggedy bike tied to it, and past that pier men talking in loud voices and he thought, “the pier of trash?”
They went down the pier to where the second beach began and followed a Mexican smoking a joint, by stepping over the cable. In the almost privacy, Alexis took off his trousers and underwear, and slipped on his shorts, and they made for the water. As they approached the beach, a blond retriever came bounding up to them with the requisite white woman, shouting, “Don’t worry, she’s friendly.”
“And a good thing, I like dogs,” Alexis said in a gentle voice to the dog as he stroked her head. “But what if I didn’t?
The dog licked his hand, and then went bounding off to other business.
“I suppose they’re people too,” Alexis decided, “with their own stuff to do. Still…”
When they were close enough for the water to wash their feet, they sat down in the sand, and Alexis reached for his cigarettes, and the juice he’d gotten at 7-11, and Rulon did the same.
“Where was that? Where we were? Up the street?” Rulon asked.
“The Hare Krishna Temple.”
“I knew it was something like that. We always go interesting places. All the churches we passed, and we ended up at the Hare Krishna Temple.”
Alexis barked a laugh, then said, “We passed all these churches, but the Temple was what as open.
“You know, a long time ago when I thought religion was politics and that the world was more black and white than it is, I became an Episcopalian. And I thought I would never set foot in a Catholic church again, it was so backward. And then, almost as soon as I had changed churches, I realized there was a problem. Episcopal churches are always closed. Every time you feel like going to one, it’s closed, unless it’s Sunday. Maybe Friday, maybe at noon. If you have religious leanings any other time of week, put them away till Sunday. And the Catholic church, which may have not been perfect and certainly wasn’t what I wanted it to be, that fucker was open every day.”
And last time I went to a meeting a at Saint James, they were talking about being an open and affirming church—”
“Open and affirming?”
“It’s fancy speak for they don’t care if you’re gay. In fact, they kind of encourage it. Well, anyway they were talking about it and how they didn’t understand why more liberal Catholics didn’t come this way, you know over to Saint James and the Episcopal Church. But by then I was already going to Saint James on Sunday, but Saint Ita’s the rest of the week.”
“You were a Catholic in Episcopalian clothing?”
“More or less, and the answer, as far as I could see, to why Catholics stayed Catholic no matter how liberal they were was because your church had to actually be open before it can be open and affirming. If you wanted to practice your faith every dy, you were out.
“God gets bigger and bigger. He’s bigger than Sunday, so it sends me to Saint Ita’s, and he’s bigger than all the things I was told and all the lies the Vatican rolls around in, so it sends me past Saint Ita’s, and I end up in a Kirshna Temple, and then on this beach with all this endless water. And he’s still too big. So big.”
“Are you ready to hear about Tartaria?”
Alexis frowned.
“You mean that bullshit you keep talking about?”
“You always think I’m hooked on a conspiracy theory.”
“Because you are. Because every conspiracy out there you choose to believe in.”
“Are you calling me stupid?”
“I’m saying don’t be stupid.”
“We should change the subject.”
“The moon landing was not faked—”
“I never said that it was.”
“You did—”
“I—”
“And changing the subject is not a bad idea at all.”
Rulon’s flat, almost Asiatic face narrowed until lips and nostrils and eyes were all geometric slits like some ancient artwork, and then he said:
“Do you wanna get really, really high tonight?”
And Alexis said, “Yes.”
“Where on earth is Darius?”
“Probably with that Michael dude,” Rulon said when they walked into the apartment and he crashed his long form over the futon.
“He… Maybe. Or maybe he had some shit to do. Well…”
Alexis went to the fridge, took out two Cokcs and handed one to Rulon. Rulon took out a cigarette and a small bag of pot and began, slowly, to roll an enormous joint.
Alexis went into his room and came out with a plastic canister. He opened it and took a little knife and cut a blueberry candy in two.
He handed half of it to Rulon and took half of it for himself.
“That’s a fucking good gummy. I love these. They put me in the good place. I don’t think I’ve ever bobbed my head and sang so much to myself as on a gummy. How strong is this?”
Alexis pressed the last of it against the roof of his mouth and swallowed.
“Two hundred fifty.”
“So half of that.”
“No. like two fifty for both of us. There’s almost five hundred milligrams in one of these.”
“Fuck.”
“Does that mean you don’t want to make that blunt.”
“No,” Rulon said. “That’s precisely what it doesn’t mean.”
He honed a blunt of great beauty, and was gently firing it while Alexis took a great gulp of soda.
“I would have liked to go to the sauna today,” Alexis said.
“You’re supposed to go in a towel, right?”
“You can go in with a towel. To sit on. But you’re supposed to go in naked.
“When I went in I had shorts and underwear, but then I looked around and just felt stupid,” Rulon said. “So I took them off.”
Alexis took a very long, fragrant hit from the blunt Rulon had just lit and handed to him, and as he coughed a little and exhaled, passing the blunt back, he said, “Naked is the only proper way to go.”
After that, neither one of them said anything for a while and, at last, Alexis said, “I was going to go the evening Mass over at Atonement.”
“Is that the Catholic one or the Episcopal one?”
“The Episcopal.”
“I wanna go. How far is it? Doesn’t matter, I can drive.”
“It’s like four blocks down. And… when I was planning it, I hadn’t taken a gummy and started smoking a giant spliff.”
“Well, if you feel tired it’s fine, but I feel great. And I think we should definitely go.”
Alexis slapped his knee and laughed a little too loudly.
“Then let’s go.”
The church was close and the weather as fair. They walked laughing, and around the third block, leaning on each other.
“Fuck,” Rulon declared, his arm about Alexis who was leaning against him, “I didn’t realize how strong this was. I literally feel like I just got punched.”
“But in a good way?”
Rulon laughed and fell across Alexis, chuckling.
“In an excellent way.”
The sat on the red stone porch of the church, smoking cigarettes before they went in and saw something Rulon pronounced as, “Really beautiful and like a Catholic church. But still not quite a Catholic Church. There was a small altar to Our Lady of Walsingham, filled with red votives, and three other people had come to evening Mass. The priest, to Alexis, resembled a Lego man, especially when his eyes shut tight while he made a small joke, and Alexis laughed out loud so the priest told another joke, at which Alexis saw his face widening, becoming a giant Lego head, making him laugh more, and the more Alexis laughed, the more the priest added jokes and laughed himself until Rulon laughed which made Alexis laugh which made the priest laugh which made the other three people at church perplexed until, at last Alexis stood up and went to the rest room to put himself back together again.
By the time he came back, everyone was kneeling for the consecration except Rulon who was sitting in respectful silence, and suddenly Alexis was filled with so much love for his tall friend that his body heated.
“…And also with you.”
“Lift up your hearts.”
“We lift them to the Lord.”
“We give Him thanks.”
“It is right to give Him thanks and praise.”
Alexis stopped himself from laughing, made himself reverent in this little house of worship. He could feel Rulon breathing beside him.
“I’m going out, do you want me to pick up mil—”
Is what Alexis heard as he and Rulon entered the apartment, but it immediately stopped because Michael had been asking the question, and he was standing naked in the middle of the living room when he said it.
“We’re not alone, are we?” Alexis heard Darius’s voice.
“Not anymore,” said Michael, whose hand went to his crotch, then he shrugged because he looked more ridiculous doing that, then just standing there.
“Why don’t you just come back to bedroom,” Darius said, bored.
Alexis frowned.
“I didn’t know you were so hairy. Or that you had tattoos. They’re very nice.”
“Thank you,” Michael said.
“I mean, you’re very nice. We’re very high, but you’re very nice looking. Like I didn’t know you were that hot.”
Michael made something like a laugh and said, “Thank you, and now I’m going to…. Go.”
We walked backward for a moment, and then turned around and walked back to Darius’s room.
“Michael,” Alexis stage whispered.
“Yes?” Michael rurned around.
“You have a very, very nice ass.”
Michael ducked his head and disappeared behind the door.
“Well, you do have a nice ass,” Darius was saying from behind the door.
“They seem occupied,” Rulon said. “Is that sauna still open?”
“It is. I never go this late. Cause I don’t like traveling by myself after dark, but—”
“Let’s go. You’re with a six foot five giant now.”
“I thought you hated these things.”
“I changed my mind.”
“I’ve been fucking everybody lately.”
“Good.”
“Is it?”
Rulon unwound his towel and spread his legs, feeling the sweat from ten minutes in this dim lit sauna spill down his chest.
“Yeah,” Rulon said, scooching over, and rolling his neck and shoulders.
“Roar your roar. Do your thing. Not like the way we were told, where everybody’s afraid to bust a nut or feel an orgasm.”
“Up until recently, it had been a long time for me,” Alexis said. “I had just been… not doing anything.”
“Do you ever get the idea that none of this is real?”
“None of this is….” Alexis began. “I get the feeling none of it is real or worth being real half the time. No, not half the time, almost all the time.
“How long are you staying?”
“Do you want to get rid of me?”
“Only when you ask me questions like that.
“I can’t believe you were out there in that van last night.”
“Well, it was late and the weather was nice. Stuff happens out there.”
“Stuff?”
“You know,” Rulon nudged him in the shoulder.
“I absolutely know.”
“Alright,” Rulon nodded.
“I was feeling, you know, sexy. The same way you said. I hadn’t felt sexual in a long time either.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, I just felt like a dead piece of wood, recently. Sometimes that’s okay. Sometimes it’s for me to get the stuff I want and I don’t always want it.”
“I don’t feel that way. When I feel sexless I feel kind of dead, a little sick, not myself. Like I know I’m not truly high until I’m horny.”
“I hear you. It’s just that. On marriage two, after you get burned, you’re not eager to be doing any stuff too soon.”
“When’s the last time?”
“Last time what?”
Alexis raised his water bottle. In the dim light of the sauna, moisture rose on Rulon’s browning skin over the patterns of the tattoos, Archangel Michael, the crossed bats, the star on his lip at the line where his leg folded to his stomach and the small of his back turned to the roundness of his ass.
“Don’t start.”
“Last time I had sex?”
“Yeah.”
“Last night. This morning,” Rulon said. “In the park. Met someone Got sucked good. squirted on the grass.”
“Really?”
Alexis closed his legs over his budding erection.
“Never done that.”
Rulon, standing and stretching, said:
“I don’t believe you.”
“Never.”
“With all the shit you have done, though,” Rulon shook his head as sweat dropped from his damp black hair to his broad shoulders, down the line to his trim stomach.
“I have been sucked and sucked in the sauna of a gay bath house,” Alexis said. Those saunas don’t have the heat up like in real saunas. You can do shit like that in there.”
“I bet you could do shit like that in here too.”
“In this… in this heat? That I’m surprised you’re still in?”
Rulon mopped his brow.
“It’s not as bad as I thought.”
“And,” Alexis continued, opening his thighs and adjusting his balls, “I’ve been fucked in that sauna, at the bath house, and fucked in the locker room benches. But… I have never had sex in a park.”
“Well, you really ought to. You really should. All you do is take out your dick and spill your seed all over the concrete by the bench.”
Rulon ran his towel over the hot back of his neck.
“I need to get my shit together. I need some new perspectives. And I’m sure I have a shit ton to tell you. I have so much to tell you, and I didn’t even get around to it today. So much to tell.”
“And time to tell it. Me and Darius are working most of tomorrow, but that’s in the house.”
“I’m high as fuck,” Rulon said, “and I think I’m horny as fuck too.”
He blew out his cheeks and the dimmed room went spotted before him. He saw red spirals against the dark background.
“You’re here?” Alexis said. “For a while? You're staying in Chi? Not headed anywhere soon?”
“Not if you don’t want me to.”
Alexis shook his head and sweat ran down his face.
“I don’t,” he said.
“Can I tell you something, and you don’t laugh?” Rulon whispered in the dark, where his arms were wrapped about Alexis’s waist and his face was pressed into his back.
On the other side of the little room.
“I never laugh at you.”
“True,” Rulon assented.
“Once, when I was here on my mission, me and Owen looked into Lake Michigan. Here. In Chicago, and we saw something. We saw something like… a kraken. Enormous. It was there, and then it was gone. And back in Utah… the things that I saw. I want to talk about them, but I need someone who’ll listen. Will you listen?”
Rulon’s hand went on stroking Alexis, and Alexis reach back and put his hands in his hair, pressed his body against his. In the night their legs twined, Rulon’s arms wrapped about Alexis. As they smoked, Alexis’s eyes widened and his senses softened. He passed the joint to Rulon who sat up and watched the smoke leave his nose, then lay back down beside Alexis again.
“I’ll always listen,” Alexis said. “You know that.”
Rulon kissed him on the back of his neck.
“Can you read Tarot cards?” Rulon asked.
“No, but I know someone who can. If you want.”
“I do.”
“Alright then,” Alexis agreed, feeling himself float away.
“Alright.”
“No,” Darius said.
“Then you think…?”
“I’m a dabbler,” he said. “You know exactly who to go to.”
“He’s all the way on the Southside. Damn hear as south as you can get.”
“Who?” Rulon looked from Darius to Alexis, sitting between them like a great grasshopper.
“Adonijah Dunharrow.”
“He sounds like a witch!” Rulon said.
Darius shrugged.
“He kind of is.”
