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Elysium

Michael Summerleigh

    Isn’t it curious how some people’s lives unfold in front of them in such a way that even the disasters and disappointments all seem no more and no less than what we are taught to expect them to be—the moments and milestones by which we mark the winding paths of our existence. So ordinary and common to most of us are these events that while they disrupt and sometimes make misery of any given day or period of time, they still are weathered, and then pass quietly into memory, where they assume the quality of a worn, perhaps faded photograph, yet remain capable of evoking bright often stark recollections, but now softened by virtue of our having simply survived to remember them. Such lives require no scrutiny, no introspection from the vantage point of our present; they are smoothly and comfortably filed away in our pasts.
    And then there are the souls who have gone through more than their share, the Sturm und Drang, the shitstorms and anger on a scale that seems to exceed our so-called normal capacity to deal with them rationally or otherwise. The snapshots in these family albums often show no sense of rhyme or reason, remain jagged jigsaw images that haunt those who have lived through them. These lives are never settled, always in flux, pasts that will always require the time and effort of the present in order to keep them in their place, and will forever be in need of being revisited. That’s how Raff and I came back to Elysium...
    It...Elysium...was a fin de siècle estate in the middle of Westchester County, willed to the state of New York by the family of early industrial robber barons who were trying to live down their past. Set down on fifty acres of still-pretty-virgin woodland that ran along the shores of the Croton reservoir, well-meaning politicians in Albany converted it into a sylvan refuge for troubled (some said troublesome) children from the inner city. A dozen stables and outbuildings converted into living quarters and classrooms accommodated the hundred or so refugees from all five boroughs; the administrative work was done in the main house, a rambling thing that easily could have been a small castle transported from somewhere in Germany, with a totally inappropriate but nevertheless equally impressive greenhouse attached to it.
    Most of the kids were young, ranging in age from seven or eight through to about twelve years old. You weren’t supposed to grow up there, just stick around long enough to be taught how to get along with other humans beings before being tossed back into the shit-pile that made you a problem in the first place. A small percentage ended up as the lifers, wards of the state until they turned eighteen. I arrived just after my thirteenth birthday, and I guess I was destined to be one of them...a late arrival...but someone who stood out from everyone else the moment I arrived. Literally. For two reasons that were obvious.
    By that time, before I even knew that Elysium existed, my tits had made me a magnet for anything in pants, including the men my mother brought home on a regular basis. Fear and outrage just as quickly became a part of my resume, belligerence and an unbridled temper part of my defense arsenal. One of my mother’s friends tried to rape me on my birthday and now he can’t rape anybody anymore. That’s how I ended up in the more often than not hell-hole called Elysium. Most of the people there were trying to save us, give us some kind of perspective so we could survive in and deal with the world outside; but the predators and the sickos always had the last word...always seemed to be the ones who turned out the lights at night...always found the ways and means to fuck us up even more. Some were volunteers; some were supposedly professionals; some were men and women of the cloth...God’s very own servants on earth. It was all the same to those of us unlucky enough to get noticed...for any reason...
    The summer that Elysium burned to the ground was also the year that most of the major cities in America went up in flames. Negroes—as they were called back then, in the days when overt racism in the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave was just something else for the evening news—for some strange reason went a little bit wacko. One brother too many got pistol-whipped by a police officer; one sister too many got cornered by the husband of the woman who had hired her as a housemaid. The whole damn country got lit up and most white folks really had no idea why black folks was so angry...why it was that they were so goddamn tired of it all that they burned their own neighbourhoods before they even thought about maybe takin’ it to White Bread Town instead.
    But all of that was just a backdrop to us kids, hangin’ in Elysium, our very own West Side Story story in the woods with nothing but barely-pubescent sex and piss-poor local reefer to bridge the gap between the blacks and the whites and the latinos and the too-fucked-up-for-any-of-it to intrude on our daily round. On site we went to state-funded junior-high and high-school classes that made regular kindergarten look like Ph.D prep work. You could read the sorrow of the ones who cared in their eyes; the other ones sat behind their desks like sharks, waiting for one of us to drift a breath too far from the shoal so they could move in for a quick meal.
    Raff. Rafael. I was sixteen then and he was so pretty when I saw him for the first time I got wet just looking at him. All the girls wanted him. All the girls got him. But not after I did. Once I decided he was gonna be my guy I let him know I was ready to party all of them into the ground before I’d give him up. He wasn’t happy about it, but there was no way I was willing to catch something from some idiot too stupid to look after herself.
    So the summer wore on...and ended badly...and eventually all of us got scattered to the winds...

1.
    I’d always wondered what happened to him, and now here he was, looking at me from the other side of my desk with his head to one side the very same way he did on the night we fucked for the first time. He gave me a fifty-year old little boy look that was so contrived I wanted to kick the shit out of him for thinking anyone with a brain would fall for it. I could see the spark of recognition in his eyes, see him struggling to recall the name on the door behind him, to see if it matched up with his hazy fucked up recollection of me. I said:
    “Yeah. It’s me, Raff. Don’t play me, okay? You need some help, we’re here. You wanna come back from wherever you been, we’re here. But don’t play me with that little-boy- lost shit. You’re not that pretty anymore.”

    There were so many lines on his face. So much grey and white in the hair on his head. Underneath all the bad road you could still see back to the day when he could’ve melted your heart with one look, but now, one look in his eyes and in all that once-upon-a-time mysterious black you knew there wasn’t anything warm anymore; that Life had burned up all the pretty in Rafael and now he was just fakin’ it in a snowstorm...livin’ on crack, and memories tucked away in cobwebs so old they belonged in history books. He said:
    “Candy.”
    And I nodded. Hated myself for doing it. No goddamn woman in the world ever really wants to be Candy. For a bunch of pounding heartbeats I wondered how my mother had ever even found a name like Candace for me. I hadn’t been Candace for fifty years, ever since that night. The nametag on my desk read Beverly Milford. Rafael slouched in his chair on the other side of my desk and I could feel the stink comin’ off of him...the pure unadulterated cloud of drug addiction.
    “Why’re you here, Raff?
    He grinned with black-edged teeth in amongst the ruin of his beautiful face.
    “Now that I know you’re here, chica, I don’t need no other reason.”
    “Do you want t’get clean? D’you want t’get a new start? Or did you come in here just to get whatever you could get for free without any sweat before you went lookin’ for your next fix?”
    He looked at me like I’d insulted him, but we both knew what he was about, and at that point he realised it wasn’t in his best interests to try and bullshit me.
    “You can’t cut me some slack...throw some influence my way?” he said quietly, trying not to, but I could hear the whine in his voice. “We meant somethin’ to each other once upon a time.”
    “Raff, you’re talkin’ a lifetime ago, when the only thing mattered to us was finding something pretty to fuck so we could get distracted from the fucked-upness of where we were. I can guess where you’ve been, but I haven’t been there for a long long time, and I sure as hell am not inclined to walk backwards.”
    “So you married up now.”
    “No I ain’t married up,” I said. ”I ain’t never been married up, Rafael...but I smartened up, soon as I spent a few years cut loose from that place. I can see you went in another direction.”
    I could also see I’d hurt his feelings, sense the petulance, the righteous indignation rising up to meet somebody who knew the Truth and didn’t have any problems with speaking it.
    “You think you’re so smart,” he said. “You think you’re better than the shit you come from.”
    I smiled at him, shaking my head.
    “No, Rafael,” I said to him. “I’m just still tryin’ t’be better than the shit I come from... which cannot be said of you...”
    He sulked in that chair in front of me, put on a pout that any five-year old would’ve been proud of, except it looked stupid on his face.
    “I can help you if you lookin’ for help, Raff...but if you’re just after another free-ride t’get you a little bit further down the road to wherever it is you’re goin’, then you’d best just move on along and forget we had this conversation, or that you were here at all.”
    “I can tell you what happened,” he said. “I can show you...”
    And that’s how I got snookered back into a relationship with the wreckage of the boy I’d known as Rafael.

2.
    That weekend I rented a car, listened to traffic go by for twenty minutes as I waited for him in front of the office because there was no way in hell I was gonna let him know where I lived. When he finally showed up he’d had the decency to look for a shower and some clean clothing beforehand; when he opened up the passenger door, slid into the seat beside me and said he wanted to drive, I told him there was no way that was ever going to happen.
    He got pissy. Made a big show of lighting up a cigarette that I pulled out of his fingers and tossed out my window.

    “Another part of my rental agreement—besides the one where I’m the only driver— is where I promise not be smokin’ anything in this car. You don’t like that we don’t have t’go anywhere at all today and whatever bullshit you’re throwin’ at me can end right now.”
    Rafael sulked. Once upon a time it had been an iron-clad no-fail guarantee to get him laid. He’d just sort of fold in on himself and look so desperately miserable that whatever it was he’d just done to fuck you over seemed like the worst kind of cruelty to hold him accountable for it. It almost worked. Deep down inside me where there was still a little bit of girl-child lookin’ for Love, Raff’s puppy-dog play-acting was an invite to feel like maybe you was all grown up and doin’ good things for the welfare and care of your man. Once upon a time I’d’ve been all over him on account of it, racked with guilt for nothin’ at all and oh so willing to believe it when he would whisper Oh baby, yeah, you got all the honey this king bee need...and it had been bullshit then like it was bullshit now. I tried not to laugh too hard where I’d hurt his feelings, not even all that surprised to find there was still some sixteen-year old Candy livin’ inside me that was willing to be stupid for him all over again. I ignored her, and a strained silence descended upon us.
    I took the FDR along the east side of Manhattan, crossed over Randall’s Island to pick up I-278 long enough to get me onto the Bronx River Parkway heading north to White Plains. Raff didn’t say anything, sunk down on his side of the car, staring moodily out at the Zoo...the Botanical Gardens...AOC country...suburbia once we were past Mount Vernon.
    I couldn’t consciously remember if I’d ever been this way before, but driving along in summer sunshine seemed to me about as comfortable as I’d even been; that all the places along our way—Bronxville, Tuckahoe, Eastchester—were familiar, and as we drove deeper north into Westchester County that feeling only got stronger. There was resolution in the wind, carrying both of us along in a Honda rental.
    In White Plains I moved us on over to the Taconic State Parkway, up past Valhalla, the Kensico Dam and reservoir...Hawthorne...and as we got closer and closer I could feel fifty years falling away...sucking me back down into the maelstrom of what had passed for Life in Elysium....

3.
    “...You got a visitor,” said Shiny, without lookin’ at me.
    Her real name was Sinead, a tiny Irish cunt from Hell’s Kitchen who was my roommate. She was also forever pissed off at me for makin’ Rafael monogamous where she couldn’t have him no more, so I started singin’ Too busy thinkin’ ‘bout my baby... down low, where I knew it would make her crazier than she already was...long enough for me to slip out of my bra and into a t-shirt, so I could show her my two best reasons why Raff wasn’t interested in her skinny little Irish ass no more. I smiled her a big Thank you bitch and sashayed my way downstairs.
    Rafael was standing in the front hall, casually smokin’ a cigarette even though we wasn’t supposed to smoke in the dorms, and pretending not to notice half the little girls in the place droolin’ all over his boots.
    “Hola, hermosa,” he drawled...and smiled...and flicked his cigarette ash down on the floor beside his boots. “Come and take a walk with me.”
    “We’re both supposed t’be in class in about five minutes,” I said, knowin’ I wasn’t goin’ but wishin’ I was anyway.
    “Never mind that bullshit, chica, they just finished up in the Jungle. We could have the place to ourselves for at least a half hour.”
    The Jungle was the greenhouse, up beside the Admin building, a couple of tennis courts’- worth of plate glass and sprinklers and so many different kinds of flowers and orchids and shit that you could get dizzy from the smell long before whoever it was you was sneaking in there with ever got round to makin’ you dizzy with his dick. Mostly we all went there after dark, so the girls who couldn’t come quietly didn’t have to worry about office personnel next door catching wind of their moans and groans and the jive you always gave your guy so he’d know there wasn’t nobody in the world could come close to doin’ what he was doin’ for you.
    “Not now, Raff,” I said, doin’ a big bounce off the last step. “I’m already in trouble for cuttin’ classes...and besides, I got a headache named Shiny upstairs.”
    Rafael looked smug.
    “That’s’ cause you’re gettin’ what she can’t have no more,” he said.
    I gave him a long kiss and rubbed my front up on him, said, “And that’s how it’s gonna stay, right...?”
    “Nobody but you, baby,” he said, in that way you just knew was a big lie as long as he could figure a way to get round it without me findin’ out.
    “Yeah well if it stays that way maybe you and me can make some sugar t’night. Right now I gotta go to my biology class...”
     “Where’s your books, then, chica?”
    I kissed him again and moved away, gave him a hip-shake goodbye.
    “Just ‘cause I show up don’t mean I need no books t’bring with me.”
    I could hear him laughin’ soft behind me as I went out on the porch, could hear him already back to sweet-talkin’ the stupid girls who believed in the off chance one of them could take him away from me...
    That was when I thought the best rack in Elysium could hold any boy I wanted for as long as I wanted him.

4.
    Up past Millwood, still not talking, lost in the gush of the car’s A/C, we drifted by the IBM complex. I started looking for Route 134 in the late morning light, took the exit and minutes later found Arcady Road, that ran up along the western edge of the Kitchawan Preserve. We were minutes away now; I could feel Rafael getting antsy on his side of the car...fidgeting...pulling another cigarette out from the pack of Camels rolled up in his sleeve...looking over at me so I could shake my head at him before he put it back. It took us twenty minutes to find the wreckage of the sign beside the overgrown road that once upon a time had wound its way into the woods. Rusted steel stanchions stood on either side, a net of chain link stretched across where it used to be. Another sign stood off to one side, from a developer, three years old, announcing the imminent construction of a new upscale hideaway for one more generation of wealthy émigrés from the city
    “Guess we’re gonna walk from here,” I said.
    Raff went back to his smokes before he got out of the car, lit one up to pay me back for being so cruel to him. Out in the sunshine it was blazing hot, the air gone thick and heavy with moisture, sleepy birdsongs up in the treetops, the constant buzz and whirr of insects humming in the heat. I’d had the good sense to bring some bottled water with, tossed one to him over top of the rental and had the satisfaction of watching it knock the Camel out of his mouth.
    “Sorry,” I said. “I never could throw anything where I wanted it to go.”
    He glared at me, knelt to pick up the cigarette and left the plastic bottle of water where it had fallen. Still the stubborn little shit underneath everything else he’d ever been.
*            *            *
    We trekked in. We both were in long pants and it was hot as hell, but neither one of us said anything about it, dead certain that dripping sweat down our legs was better than dealing with all the poison ivy we went through even if we couldn’t see it. My own recollection of that driveway being maybe a quarter mile long took a serious challenge. We didn’t come out from under the canopy of oak and maple that grew over it for an hour, and by that time we were cranky as hell and totally stunned with the heat.
    I pretty much ignored Raff, kept my eyes down on the ground trying to skirt the red-tinged trefoil leaves that had claimed the shaded portions of the drive, but I could feel his eyes on me, the same feeling from back when we were kids and just getting noticed by Rafael felt like he was already inside you.
    The ruins of Elysium lay spread out in front of us. The newspapers had reported that the gas lines shared by most of the buildings—the ones that had provided heat and light when it was originally the summer estate of the rich people who built it-had literally exploded, and even after fifty years it wasn’t hard to imagine what was left as being a lot like London during the Blitz...or Dresden...
    “Why are we here, Raff?” I said.
    We stood on the edge of maybe an acre of stick-frame skeletons covered by grape vine. Bricks leached white by a half century of sun, rain and snow. Concrete and paved pathways lurched apart by Time, overgrown and treacherous...and the broad open space in the centre...enclosed by the outbuildings...now a sleepy meadow covered in Queen Anne’s Lace, black-eyed Susans, purple loosestrife and thistle as high as your shoulders. Bits of dandelion fluff danced with dragonflies; mosquitoes zeroed in on us, little insect vampires out for blood.
    Raff didn’t answer me. He didn’t have to. He took off across the field, wading through the waist-high weeds and wildflowers. I followed him and the thin wisps of smoke from his cigarette, even though I knew exactly where he was going. Halfway to what was left of the “castle” we started crunching through what was left of the greenhouse—shards of glass and sharp-edged bits of the torn rusted steel and aluminum that had held it all together until the exploding gas-lines super-nova’d the entire thing into an inferno... along with the fifteen kids who got way more than the blow-jobs and finger-fucks that had brought them there in the first place, and another twenty-odd when the dorms went up.
    “You think bringing me back here is gonna re-kindle the flame of our love, Rafael? Is that what you think?”
    He stopped and turned around to look at me, but maybe knew better than to try any of the things that had worked when I was sixteen. He looked incredibly old and broken and I almost felt sorry for him. Almost.
    “You’re still the best pair of tits I ever met, chiquita.”
    I shook my head, looked down at my feet, smiling to myself.
    “I’m not a little girl, Raff,” I said. “I stopped being a little girl once they showed up. Guys like you made sure of that.”
    “Tell me you never thought of me...tell me you never missed me up inside you...”
    “How about you tell me what happened first,” I said.
    Raff got quiet, seemed to think some thoughts over before turning back to our pilgrimage across the field of Elysium. When we got to where the house and the greenhouse had been, he faced me again.
    “Somebody opened up one of the bleeder valves,” he whispered.
    “Somebody did,” I said.
    “Left a cigarette burning close by.”
    I nodded. “It was an unfiltered Camel, Raff. One of yours.”

    “And then it was one big chain reaction, but it started here and—”
    He stopped, looked up at me, startled, and I hit him in the face with a brick I’d picked up on our way to the end of what was left of Elysium.
    He went down on his knees, bleeding badly, seemed surprised that I knew he knew jack-shit; that everything he’d said had been reported in the investigation. He didn’t move when he saw the syringe I pulled out of my purse. Never made a sound as I shot him up a near-lethal dose and dragged him to the cliff that overlooked the reservoir... waved a brief goodbye as I pitched him into the water fifty feet below.
    “The only question I’ve ever had about all of this, Rafael, is how you managed to get out when Shiny...you remember her, don’t you?...my roommate...the little Irish bitch you were fucking that night?...got turned into a crispy pile of Belfast barbecue.”

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