EPHIPHANY

                        LONDON, 1991

                        I left the building and turned onto Tottenham Court Road. Toward the Burger King, with its smells of charred Colombian cow, oil soaked fries, and imported apple pie, I was covered by the cold blanket that the half empty Centre Point building cast across the intersection of Charring Cross, Oxford, and Tottenham Court. Traffic, both human and other, contorted into its usual Five O'clock knot. The sea of waving overcoats, sheathed umbrellas, and worn hats gave way momentarily, absorbing me to into its mass.  We, The Haggard Crowd, descended into the depths of Tottenham Court Station, the mob of a thousand, thousand persons pressed tight through the tens of tens turnstiles. Like drops passed through a dripping faucet, each flowed in time with the flimsy yellow cards bribed to mechanized guardians at the portals of twilight's passage.

                        Most days ended like this: The long trek, the turnstile, the endless flights of stairs, the rushing to the platforms, the waiting for the orange neon signs to flash the arrival of the next train. Doors opening and shutting, people pushing, elbowing, slipping, into any available crack on board the home bound trains. Countless stops.  Day in and day out. Then as always the last leg calls. On through portals marked "Way Out," We, now paired down to a few worn out individuals with sagging hearts, waning energies and crumpled copies of The Evening Standard, proceed out of the subterranean depths.  Like lost Morlocks, we blink fast farewells to the closing rays of sunlight, to the herald of the night, of rest, of home.  Sometimes through rain, sometimes snow, sometimes wind always through cold, on We go. Day in and day out.

                        I now included myself with this lot, this tired and dreary bunch who moved with all the enthusiasm of the condemned proceeding to the gallows. I had come to question the exuberance with which I had taken this job. Four years ago, as an undergrad fresh with degree, being offered a news production assistant slot at NBC News was a dream come true. Wading through a mass of political science classes for four years (with a year of study in London itself) had paid off with a job that was the envy of my friends and an easy mark to better things.

                        At least I thought so at the time.

                        Graduation, London, Life--there was a time when all of this was new and I was so full of energy and excitement towards whatever these things brought me. Then at some point, some marker I passed not seeing, some alarm I failed to hear, Life slowed, graduation became boxed on a wall in my bedroom and my job fell into routine. I scurried about, contributing a bit of copy here, watering down the complexities of European affairs to a lowest common denominator there but mostly making copies, getting coffee and earning the "fondness" of a "reporter/producer" from the make‑dumb-ass-me‑look‑like‑I‑know‑what‑I‑am‑talking‑about-and-I'll-take-you-places school of journalism.            Everything was replaced with an allure of something slipping away. Like the existential despair that my silver haired college philosophy was so found of preaching about, I found myself longing for something more.

                        It's not that life was all bad. (Hell, I'm in my 20's and in London, right?).  I had two cats‑‑ that always counts for something-- and I was still in Love, which was more than most people my age could talk about, right?  The flat Darby and I had managed (#316-E the crookedly hung numbers announced) was a real steal. Located in a semi-decent part of the city, it had lots of room, a kitchen with a close approximation of a skylight, plumbing installed in the last 25 years and a quaint, exposed outside staircase that I had to climb, up and down, every day.  All in all, a reasonably safe refuge to return to at the end of the day. 

                        And yetÉ

                        Of late the climb up those stairs felt more and more like a bad re‑telling of the Sisyphus myth.  Each night, worn out, I trudged up worn stairs, carrying groceries or work or both. The next morning I was moving in reverse, rolling back down those stairs, the boulder of my life too heavy to stop.              Am I really only 25?

                        After breezing through the market (why is it that in a city once the capitol of a global empire every refrigerator available is dwarfed by the three foot high model I used in college?) I trod up the stairs, balancing precariously a roll of paper towels, the groceries and my briefcase in my left hand while fumbling for the doorknob with my right.  Funny. Tilted this way, with my head aslant and my body leaning off balance, the numbers on the door actually look straight.

                        Now, if Darby will just take care of the‑‑

                        Bump

                        Stuck. The door was stuck.  "Alacazam," I mumble, then bump it with my butt.

                        Two little eyes peer out from around the expanding crevasse. Oh shit. 

                        "Thatcher!" I shout, trying to scare the cat back.  The door began to drift open (of course) so I try to stop her advance by placing my leg in the ever-growing expanse.

                        "Darby! Honey! Get the cat!" I call into the flat.

                        My shoulder slipped in, my body pitched forward and my leg sent the cat shuffling backwards into the room. Tripping into the kitchen, it was all I could do to keep the contents of the paper bag from tumbling out. I simmer a look across the apartment. 

                        Thatcher raised her tail, turned in a huff, and disappeared into the confines of the back hall.

                        As I entered the kitchen I tripped over yet another cat.

                        "Reagan...you lazy good for nothing...son of a..." The psychological benefits of owning animals is highly overrated.

                        The fur covered ball of fat that nominally resembled a cat bat its eyes up at me. From its perch atop a heating vent he uttered an audible "Meworwa," promptly dismissing me and returning to its lazy rest.

                        "Oh, right. You're home," came Darby's soft twang.

                        "I hate your country," was all I could manage.

                        "It's my country now, eh?" He began without missing a beat. Light red, his hair blew slightly as he moved from the back bedroom to the kitchen. The faded jeans and brown dotted shirt hung loose around his thin frame. "Seems as though it was your country not more than a week ago."

                        "Your refrigerators are too bloody small," I griped.

                        I opened the refrigerator and tried to find room inside.

                        "What does one need a large refrigerator for? We're not all gas‑guzzling, ten gallon hat wearing, pancake eating imperialists like you." Barefoot, he crossed the last of the distance between us.

                        "The size of a refrigerator bears a direct relationship to the greatness of a culture, " I said in my best scholarly, bullshit voice.

                        We kissed.

                        "What does it say then when those refrigerators are made by the Japanese?" His eyes lit up. An evil smile crossed his lips.

                        "Don't poke holes in my analogies." I cautioned as I kissed him again.

                        He poked me in the ribs. 

                        I poked him back.

                        Poke fest!! A constant motion of fingers extending and contracting, striving to hit as many body parts as possible. I thought I heard one of us call "Truce!" in the middle of the melee of digit dancing, but nothing much came of it. A couple of kidsÉ

                        I was suddenly struck by how unlike a child's game our passion filled one really was.  Neither Darby nor I were kids.  Rents, jobs, stresses, decisions and a host of other concerns tore through the simple enjoyment of the poking game that now had become even more erotic as we tumbled into the sofa. We weren't kids anymore. I wasn't the twenty one year old American, fresh from University, with a paying job, dreams of becoming the next Edward R. Morrow, and the energy that allowed me to work all day and party all night. He wasn't the nineteen year old artist, in the last weeks of his classes, with an art store job, a fantasy of painting the next Mona Lisa, a muse that sketched fantastic images on parchment pages and the driving desire to make love all night.  Life had managed to do what it does best: age us forward, fill us with distractions, and draw us away from the immediacies of the moment.

                        We parted lips once again and I asked, "Hey, did you get the job today?"

                   That took the wind out of his sails.

                   "Damn. You always do this."  He left me and pattered across the floor, mixing into the darkness of the back room. It isn't just Life that can draw passion from a moment.

                        I picked myself up, zipped my fly, and followed.

                        As usual, Darby had taken up position in the unused room, behind the easel, next to the large window overlooking the busy street below. As usual, framed in the window, Thatcher, the cat that constantly tried to upset the balance of my life, stared, teeth clicking, at the cars below.

The room was littered with half finished sketches, paintings, drawings and photographs. A few completed works adorned the peeling walls, offsetting the dark black stripes of the yellowed wallpaper.  Two of the paintings, both of me, were finished. One was made when Darby and I first met three years ago  ("You look good enough to model," he teased.) The other, the last thing I think that I remember him completing, was a four month old painting ("The put upon writer," he remarked with that same twisted smile.) Several other pictures, photographs of the night sky really, filled out the collection.  He said those reminded him of the night he wished on when he was a boy living just outside of Melton‑Mowbry. For him, they were both a link with the amber-cased past of memory and a symbol of the winged future of imagination.  I never told him that they too reminded me of being young, when imagination was all I had and a desire to grab a star occupied all of my waking thoughts.

                   Darby was ignoring me, letting off steam, working on the canvass before him. The charcoal, held loosely, outlined a picture.  On the off white canvass he drew a framing of the cat on the windowsill starring out the window and of himself drawing that. It was just like standing between two department store mirrors and watching as, boundless, one is reflected both forward and back. A cat staring out a window and a man painting the cat staring out the window painted by the man painting the cat staring out the window...

                   "I'm sorry." I said.

                   His hand moved gracefully, arcing a circle, finishing a line. Fingers, thin and narrow, added to the outline of the cat.  The sound of the clicking of the cat's teeth, the rolling percussion from the back of Thatcher's throat that was directed at moving life below her, was somehow there, in the picture, outlined along with the animals' fur.

                   Darby's hand curled slightly, giving more definition to the hint of the easel in the corner of the painting. "Do you wonder what she is thinking?" He said.

                   The clicking of the teeth, the rigidness of the back, the twitch of the tail.

                  "Sometimes."

                   He filled in another line, shaping an image, giving definition to the indefinite. "I think she would go out if she could," he continued. 

                        I kissed his neck.  It was the only thing I knew to do.

                   "She's gonna have to. She has an appointment with the vet Tuesday, " I joked.

                   Darby put the pencil down.

                   "Are you going to be able toÉ finish it?" I ventured. Darby, his soft eyes locking mine, seemed to cry inwardly for a moment in fear. He hadn't completed anything in months. The apartment was littered with undone works, half started, half realized, half-lived.

                       He paused, seeming to question the canvass. He turned to me. "I didn't take the job. I don't care to work in another art store."

                        He stood and rapped his arms around me.  It was up to me to be responsible, to be the adult. I do it so well, after all. 

                        There was a time once when the freshness of love was enough. It buoyed hopes, allayed fears and covered a frightening existence with a quilt that kept the chill at bay. Now it seemed that blanket of love was full of holes. Nothing, not even the motion of those beneath, could keep the chill from touching us. He kissed. I kissed.  We walked me backward, he forwards, room to room. My legs felt the bending presence of the bed.  I reclined...the bed was absorbing, comforting. Yet, as before, my mind ran. Tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, I was still elsewhere. Not fully here. Detached.

                        Is this an adult?

**

                        Later, his body pressed against mine, warm sweat mingling between us, my eyes followed the lights of the cars across the ceiling and down the wall.  Thatcher had awoke from her slumber and sat on the slim ledge of the room's window.  Her gaze was intense, staring out into the night.

                        "What do you think she is thinking about?" Darby asked. The filtered sounds of the street below echoed softly about the room. I wonder if he knew he had asked me this once already?

                        Pulling close to him I said, "What's beyond."

                        Thatcher licked lightly the back of her leg.

                        "That was deep. For an American." He laughed.  I looked into his eyes. Kissed. Warmth.

                        I love him.

                        "What about Reagan?" He asked.

                        "He doesn't care. He just goes through the motions; as long as there is food on the table and a warm place to sleep, he's fine."

                        Darby teased: "You have a keen grasp of the feline mind."

                        "Thank you. It comes from eating all those pancakes."

                        He laughed.

                        Again the quiet.

                        "I get scared Adrian," came his voice, soft from sleep or fear I didn't know. "Scared that I'm not going to cut it. I mean, I can't hold down a job. Shit, I can't paint anymore. Who am I kidding?" I quieted him with a kiss, distracted him from his pain with a touch from my passion. Yet my concern for him, and me, couldn't be so easily stilled.  How could I, in good faith, my face a mask of strength and solitude, continue to hide the like‑same fear moving 'round the edges of my soul?

***

                        At Two AM the phone rang.

                        Loud and cutting, it split our dreams and brought us back.     

                        "Hullo?" I croaked.

                        "Adrian? Adrian Connor?"

                        I could barely make out the voice through the din of music in his background.

                        Darby stirred. "Who is it?"

                        "Yes. Who's this?" I looked over at Darby, sleepy eyed. 

                        "It's Dave Tyrrand from the office." Ah. The make-me-know-dumbass-reporter so fond of me.

                         "God, Dave. It'sÉwellÉ late. Is there a story?"

                         "Settle back big guy. I got great news. I've just been assigned to the State Department desk!"

                        "Wonderful." I tried to mean it.

                        I heard him laugh. The protestations against whip cream by a woman's voice in the background were lost on me.

                        "I knew you'd be as happy as I was." He laughed again.

                        "I'm glad Dave but--"

                        He said something about chocolate sauce and then: "You're coming with me."

                        "What?" I said, suddenly awake.

                        "I want you to come with me. I need a second man. A junior reporter. A stand in. And I want to make sure that the people who write for me have your same flair."

                        "You do?" It was hard to hold back my enthusiasm.

                        "Yeah. No need to rush your decision. You got 'til Monday.  Just let me know, KO?"

                        "KO." I said before I could stop myself.

                        From there, of course, everything moved so fast. I bounded from bed, ignoring the draft on across my bare thigh, speaking a mile a minute in Darby's general direction. "It's my break, Darby! A reporter! Dave--the dumbass--bless his heart, wants me to be a reporter too. God I---jeez we've got to packÉ I've got to call my parentsÉ I've got to tell Scott to try to find an apartment for us in WashingtonÉ" When he didn't move to join me, I looked back over at him, my eyes questioning that fallen look on his face.

                        "We've talked about this before. You know there is no way that I can immigrate to America."

                        I slammed back to the real world. He was right of course. We had talked about this once or twice. Darby explained to me that extended Visa's to America were hard to come by (unless you were an "important person") for Brits and that immigration quotas were so low that his moving to either the USA or Canada was a virtual impossibility.

                        "I don't want to go without you." I said. My dreams, a siren's song, once soft in the distance, grew louder the more I played Tyrrand's offer through my head. And too the anger, ever present, flowed fast for the cracks in my soul.

                        "This is your break. You have to take it. They don't come around again."

                        "Spare me the cliches. " I snapped. "I've seen Dead Poets Society too."

                        "I can still work at the art store."

                        "You told me---" I began.

                        "I know. I don't want to take the jobÉ but if I can't paint maybe I'll show others how to."

                        "That's not what you want."

                        "No one could give me what I want." He said. "But you. Damnit, you---"

                        "No." I said firmly.  "I am going to turn him down on Monday."

                        "Adrian, you can't turn this away just because of---"

                        "I can and I will!" I shouted. Thatcher, spooked, moved from her perch and fled the room.  It was easier to turn out the light, ending the conversation, than to try figure out why I hated Life so when it had just given me nearly everything I had ever asked of it.

****

                   As the last of the city slipped by and I found myself faced with the rolling greens outside of London, there was little I could do but think about what was going on inside me. Darby had suggested we rent a car and go out into the countryside, into the greenbelt of park that surrounded London. I started the morning sulking, avoiding every opportunity for conversation. As he packed a picnic basket, a bedroll and a few other odds an ins, he made the  "suggestion" for the drive. It quickly became an ultimatum. When I acquiesced, I did so with the mistaken assumption that I'd be able to push away what was going on inside me, what was going on between Darby and me. Yeah, right.

                        All that I could see was that flowing anger inside of me. It was anger directed at Dave, the dumbass who dared to drop a bit of my dream into my life. It was anger directed at Darby, my lover, my friend. Someone I knew wouldn't last ten minutes in the real world without my help. Darby, a child who dreams on shooting stars; a boy who paints life with feeling; an artist that creates worlds from imaginings; a man who leaves me so torn inside.  My anger was directed at Life. It dared to present me with a choice.  I could have my future, my dreams, and leave behind Darby to fend for himself, or I could refuse to grow. I could be adamant and stay here, doing nothing and dying a little bit more each day.

                        I could become a Morlock like all the rest.

                        Later that evening, after we had found a small grove off the side of the road, away from the traffic and behind a large hill, Darby and I sat staring into the night sky. I thought about being a boy again, with life so new, so unexpected, when dream and fantasy combined together to paint a picture of such intensity that I couldn't take my eyes from it. Like a child, I sought shelter in the warmth of his breast. I brought him to me. Our lips met.  Fingers fumbled for buttons and buckles. There was a quiet cool that slipped across the hillside.  Flesh exposed, the night air raised the hairs on my back. The chill was around me, in me. The heat of our bodies was all. I felt the pounding of my heart. The dirt against my back.  The reeds rolled, the dark greenery waved as if in announcement.  Frenzied...fast. More and more. Rubber opened, unrolled. I felt him close, drowning the chill. My heart beat faster and faster. I could hear the blood racing. The roar that rose in my ears, the echo from something far, far away, drowned out the chaos in my head.

                        jump

                        jump

                        I let go of my mind. Finally lost in the moment, I ran from myself. The passion that played forth in the field, our two bodies cramming against, within, with each other, the warmth juxtaposed against the cool night, tried to keep me away from the aching of the silence. His, no, My ache. My silence. It was the echo of the night through the emptiness of my soul.

                        Jump!

                        Jump!

                        And even in the after, with the bedroll pulled near and our bodies pulled close, I could still feel it. My eyes cast skyward, my fingers playing with a lock of his hair, and still I could hear it. I closed my eyes, trying like mad to push it away.

                        JUMP!

                        JUMP!

*****

                        I trudged up the stairs. I hadn't talked to Dave all week. I avoided him, kept him at bay. Away.  The newsroom was a big place; schedules were tight, extra time fleeting. If I did nothing perhaps things would stay the same.  I reached the door, with key in hand, bags balanced on my arms.  My mind was elsewhere. On the job maybe, or on me. But not on the door. Not on what was in front of me. The key was in the lock, the door was twisting open, and I was entering into the room. 

                        Unrestrained, Thatcher dashed.

                        Touching, grasping, reaching. The bag slipping from my grasp.

                        Splitting, cracking, fracturing. Jam flying across the floor.

                        Dropping, falling, plunging.  The milk, boundless, striking the parterre.

                        Breaching, bursting, emptying.  Liquid forming a puddle around the container.

                        Tripping, staggering, stumbling. The pattern of tile expanding, meeting my face with the smell of linoleum and a taste of blood.

                        Paining, burning, hurting.  Cool wetness washing around the outline of my prostrate body.

                        Lapping, slurping, licking.  Reagan does its best to clean up the mess.

                        Darby entered the room. He almost screamed.  His arms pulled me up, resting my hurt form against his. The blood trickled from my nose. I sat, wet, sticky, in the mess caused by emptiness. He wiped the blood from me then moved some of the broken glass from the area. Reagan stared at the open door, then turned and moved off. Thatcher was gone. 

                        I walked towards the bedroom and past the easel, missing for the moment the completed picture of a man painting a man painting. I opened the window, looking out into the city streets.  I fell onto the bed, eyes resting in the blinding glare of the white light set into the ceiling. I heard Darby shut the door, then walk on bare feet to the easel in the next room.

                        I felt for the phone that rested nearby.

 

Even in our sleep

Pain that we cannot forget

Falls drop by drop upon the heart

Until in our own despair

Against our will

Comes wisdom

Through the awful grace of God.

 

‑‑‑Aeschylus