Jimmy was in one of the chairs, looking through an art book. “What’s wrong with the kid?” he asked. In the light, the intern was horribly pale.
“He did the pile,” I said. “Is there a bedroom I can put him in?”
“Right through that door and down the stairs.”
We managed to find the door and descended some white-carpeted stairs. I turned on the light and saw a large four-poster bed; no curtains hung from the posts, it was a kind of cube, a work of modern art. I got him to the bed and lowered him into it gently and helped him get under the covers. “Now go to sleep,” I said.
“Don’t leave me.”
“You’ll fall right asleep. I have to go home,” I said.
“I saw all these things. I’m fucked up. I feel like if I shut my eyes I’m going to die.”
“You’re fine, I promise.”
“Please,” he basically sobbed. He was desperate. I lay down on my back on the soft carpet and asked him what he’d seen. We were both staring at the white ceiling.
“I was sitting there in the chair. I could feel the chair. But it wasn’t pressing against my back, it was pressing against the front of my chest. Pressing hard. But I knew it was behind me. I can’t explain. My back and chest had become the same thing. No front or back. One thing. I couldn’t breathe in, wasn’t any space. No in to breathe into. And you and everybody else started flattening too. It was like Silly Putty.”
“Silly Putty?”
“Yeah, when we would flatten it and press it against newspapers and pull it off and it would have the image. I thought of it and then that’s what you were, everybody out back, just these images of yourselves against this flattened stuff. You were putty. Worse: meat. With your image on it, talking. Distorted. And I knew I’d made that happen because I thought it. I thought it was like Silly Putty and then it was Silly Putty and then I knew that if I thought something was like something else it would become that thing. I was trying to move and I felt like I was moving but the view wouldn’t change. My vision was locked. I remember I thought, ‘Locked like a jaw.’ Lockjaw. And then my jaw was locked. And then I thought like with rabies, like rabid dogs get. Like the Guzeks’ dog they had to put down when I was a kid, and then I could feel it, the foam at my mouth. Or I couldn’t feel it, that’s wrong, I could see it. Foam pouring out of my mouth, doglike. Pink for some reason. So where was I seeing it from? And I knew before I thought it that I was going to think: It’s like I’m dead, like I’m a ghost looking at my corpse, and I was trying not to think that because I would die if I did. But then I realized that trying not to think about something is like thinking about something, know what I mean? It has the same shape. The shape of the thought fills up with the thing if you think it, or it empties if you try not to think it, but either way it’s the same shape. And when I thought that I just felt like there was no difference between anything. And then there was no difference. Because nothing is like nothing. And there wasn’t any space.”
“The drug didn’t agree with us,” I said, to say something.
“I still don’t feel like I’m here.” Another sob. “Will you just talk to me?”
“You’re right here,” I said, and reached up from the floor and touched his shoulder, forehead, and then, a little surprised at myself, I sat up and smoothed back his hair, remembering how my father would do that to me when I had a fever as a child. Whitman would have kissed him. Whitman would have taken the intern’s fear of the loss of identity as seriously as a dying soldier’s.
“Keep talking,” he said, so I lay back down and did. I began by describing my response to the Judd, but he groaned, so I fished around for a subject, and decided on the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, having watched a documentary about it on my computer a few nights before. I talked about how Hart Crane had written The Bridge in a Brooklyn Heights apartment he only learned after the fact had been occupied by the bridge’s engineer, Washington Roebling, where he’d retreated after getting decompression sickness. (I wanted to describe the men laboring in poorly lit caissons, in danger, if they surfaced too quickly, of developing nitrogen bubbles in the blood, but I thought it might disturb the intern.) When the bridge was finished, the celebration surpassed that marking the end of the Civil War, I remembered the narrator saying over still images of crowds and fireworks. That was 1883, the year that Marx died at his desk. The year that Kafka was born. I talked about Kafka for a while, about how I had only recently learned how successful the author had been as an insurance lawyer, betting on the future. I repeated the phrase “pooled risk” a few times, said how lovely it was. Then I moved on to 1986.
When the intern was asleep, breathing regularly, I kissed him on the forehead and walked back upstairs to the living room to find that various young people were lounging there again, having presumably returned from their bike ride, no sign of Monika or Paul. I asked the redhead, whose eyes I now saw were the same green as Diane’s friend’s, and whom I was not ashamed to desire, how to get to 308 North Plateau, and she told me to turn right out of the driveway, then left when I couldn’t go any farther.
Relieved to be in the cold air and increasingly sober, I felt stupid about the drugs and drama, but I was happy I’d helped the intern, felt a tenderness for him. As I walked I heard the whistle of a train and imagined my dad was on one of its decommissioned cars. I thought of the dimly gleaming boxes in the artillery sheds, and then I imagined a long train of them, each car a work of shimmering aluminum, reflecting the moonlit desert it was moving across.
When I turned onto what I hoped was North Plateau — I couldn’t see any signs — an electric car quietly passed me going the other direction. It doubled back at the corner, the headlights now illuminating the street in front of me as I walked, and pulled up slowly beside me. Creeley was driving, his posture awkward because the seat was too far forward. He stopped and rolled down the window and said hello, that he was going to see the Marfa Lights, and he asked, in touchingly formal, accented English, if I would care to honor him with my company.
Thus the author found himself, his body still a little heavy with the traces of a veterinary dissociative anesthetic, driving nine miles out on Route 67 so as to catch a glimpse of the famous “ghost lights” with a man on whom he’d overlaid the image of a phantom. After about twenty minutes in the dark, we arrived at the viewing center, a platform faintly illuminated by red lights next to a little structure with restrooms. We shivered on the platform and looked into the westward distance.
What people report, have reported for at least a hundred years, are brightly glowing spheres, the size of a basketball, that float above the ground, or sometimes high in the air. They are usually white, yellow, orange, or red, but some people have seen green and blue. They hover around shoulder-height, or move laterally at low speeds, or sometimes break suddenly in unpredictable directions. People have ascribed the Marfa Lights to ghosts, UFOs, or ignis fatuus, but researchers have suggested they are most likely the result of atmospheric reflections of automobile headlights and campfires; apparently sharp temperature gradients between cold and warm layers of air can produce those effects.
Finally, I did see something — but it was in the other direction, and there weren’t any spheres. Far in the distance to the east I saw an orange glow on the horizon and, here and there, patches of red. At first I thought it was the light of a town, but then I realized they were wildfires or preventative controlled burns. I drew the poet’s attention to them and he nodded.