Radiant Apples and Infernal Cigarette

Her racing pulse pounding hot summerblood, the clunker sings down a dark highway in the middle of the night. The sky is black, the road is grey and the embankment is green, a forbidding jungle. Teeming with life, a radiant of bugs chart their courses through the charging highbeam as the road sluices through life amidst the darkness, radio blaring cheers and beats, a stolen tape from an underground concert long ago. Rock and Roll is about getting it wrong.

Mistakes aren't worth anything unless you learn from them.

Laying upside down on my bed I am reminded of mistakes in summers past. She packs her suitcase and I watch the ceiling of the world sweep the dust clouds away into the candy apple sun, left out all day and now melting into a caramelized sky.

When we were really young Nigel and I used to play a game called Greek Gods where we would take turns finding new ways to destroy each others worlds. "I'll blanket your tall grass with winter!"
"Loathesome demon, your snow cannot rest on a surface of Vulcan's fire. I command the sun to burn away that boulder where you stand. Flow lava!"

She wraps up my present in her sock, my world again slipping away now and suddenly I am reminded of 10 years before. The afternoon mom and dad had left and taken our sister with them. She and I were sitting in her room while she packed and I loitered idly, afraid to be left alone with Nigel for the weekend, and I came across my journal.

"I've heard this story," she says.
"About how we are all insignificant?"
"You told it to me when we first me."
"I did?"
"Yes."

Another mistake. I was high when we first met. Everything made sense to me then. I'll tell the story again anyway. But first the party:

The house to ourselves, that night, Nigel had called everyone he knew and I called a few friends too. The house was throbbing. Bill and Eddie built a fire around back and grilled hotdogs. Somebody kept the music going strong. More and more cars piled into the drive, the street, the field, encroaching on the neighbors'. Nameless faces most of them, but when she showed up Nigel and I took notice.

"Can I get you a drink?" Nigel asked. Rare, his courtesy and attentions. One knew he wanted something.
"Got any beer?" There was a keg inside.
"Follow me," he said, taking her by the arm. I doubt she even noticed I was there.

My best friend, she'd taken to seeing Nigel more and more. The greedy God intent on siezing the best offerings his underlings had to offer. She was my pretty friend and as soon as he noticed, he took her. The night grew dark and the party quavered with castaways and adolescents. Boys leaking in and out of the house with balls in their hands. Beating them around and laughing. The atmosphere was like a static charge, everything happening all at once and you find your own happy wavelength and try to ride through it as best you can.

"Hey man," she said. Nigel was conspicuously absent.
"He let go of you for a minute?" She laughed. That faraway in-love look in her eye, staring at the idea of Nigel in her hot pubescent mind.
"Oh your brother. Boy he sure is crazy. He's showing the guys how to play some song. Just thought I'd check and see how you were doing."

My chance.
"How about some solitude?" I say. To my surprise she takes my hand and we briskwalk back behind the house, past the apple trees and into the tall grass of the field. Idly now, the music dulls and is distant, and is gone. Lightning bugs spark and fly their aldis lamp languages and somewhere someone in the sky hits a switch and we are awash in a blue sea of stars.

"Where are your parents?" she asks, gripping my hand tightly and looking sublime. Her hair shining like moonlight. Her skin radiant and aglow. I should have told her right then and there.
"Gone." I say. "They only took our sister this time because last time they took just us boys."

The story. The same story I'd told my sister that afternoon. The same story I tell her now, the one packing to go with my present tucked away in a bundle. The story I told in that field filled with glitter and doom.

"We went to Zion. Nigel was intent on getting his Junior Ranger badge before I could and so he was running all around, collecting rock samples and pinecones and animal footprints to draw. Mom was buying trinkets and Dad was gone and I got stranded all alone. I was lost for a day out there. Those red sandstone cliffs towering above me on all sides and the green valley floor below, such a slim and delicate sliver of life, and then the sun went down and it was just me. Me all alone, sitting upright in the darkness, with those towers of rock piling up so huge and domineering, holding me in place as much out of fear as geography. And seeing the heavens open up high in the sky I had an epiphany. When they found me, hours later, my Dad will tell you all I kept repeating was 'we are all so insignificant. We are all so insignificant.'"

"Yeah. You told me that story when we first met."
"I don't remember."
"That figures," she zips up her bag and puts on her coat to go.

And I told the story then, on a summer night 10 years ago, to that other girl, my friend, just before Nigel lashed out at the calm, evaporating our oasis. She let go of my hand. Ran off with my brother, giggling at his promise of sweet nothings. I followed slowly, letting the scent of burning meat fill my nostrils. I could see them go back in the house, up to his room. Could see silhouettes in there, taking hits.

The night spun and I lost my control. The music rocked the house to a magnitude unheard of. Bill and Eddie started taking shots and burning oil. Some of the older guys started burning books, burning unattended shoes, burning their minds. The fire erupted in spurts and some trees caught fire. The lights in the house went out. Someone ran to get a hose. A massive effort launched and luckily only a few low branches were singed but they put them out before the fire spread and slowly it dawned on everyone that it was time to start winding down. I just sat and watched. I'd lost her. The light was still off in Nigel's room. There was no sign of either of them anywhere.

"I smell smoke," Bill said, and Eddie slapped him and laughed. They were taking turns finishing abandoned beers. "No, I mean smoke smoke, not our fire. Different smoke." Suddenly this observation became the overview of the scene. I could see a light up in Nigel's room. Flickering fumic red and toxic. We ran into the house. Up the stairs. Caught her topless on the bed, Nigel naked on top, the room enveloped in smoke and a corner filled with flames and the two of them wasted and oblivious.
Nigel screamed. "Get the fuck off me you cockblocker! Just cause you can't make a move yourself doesn't mean you have to ruin it for me too!" Bill and Eddie poured beer on the flames and stomped on a blanket that they threw to cover the bong on the carpet in the corner. Laughing until the passed out.

Somebody drove her home. The corner of Nigel's room was blackcharred. The whole house stunk of smoke, and when we woke to disarray in the morning, nothing was said. Nigel and I didn't speak again until Mom and Dad returned a few days later. Brother Gods silent, in the force of truce.

Everything is a self portrait.
Mistakes aren't worth anything unless you learn from them.

I pull myself tentatively upright on the end of the bed while she turns, finally to go. The sky through the window is cautious, hesitant to begin the checklist of night, and I think of all the things I can say as she slams the door behind me and is gone without a word.

And so I wait. I wait until I cry, and I cry until the sky is black and I see the stolen tape of rock, rolling promises in song of getting it wrong. Mistakes aren't worth anything.

Get in the old clunker and race down the dark highway into the forbiddenness of jungle. Her racing pulse pounding hot summerblood to the barren underground beats of long-ago time. The pavement is gray and the line down the middle is yellow and the road sluices through all this life amidst the darkness where somewhere out there someone is getting it right tonight. Maybe it'll be me. Maybe I'm not too late to find her.

I roll the window down. The wind rushes through my hair.