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Three days of reckless revelry had settled deep into my body.
What had we even been doing, never once going back to the dorm?
Drinking, inhaling gas, listening to jazz—you are drunk beyond repair.
When I come to my senses, the corpses of three days are piled across the floor, and I am sitting in front of a typewriter.
This isn’t Jack’s place—that much I know.
So whose apartment is it?
People are sprawled all over the floor.
What I do know is this: wherever we are, sooner or later you’ll stir on the sofa, sit up suddenly, and say, “Come on,” and then something—
Let’s go to a party, or something very much like it.
Until then, while you sleep through the morning, I face the typewriter, scrape together what little reason I have left, and type.
The excitement and elevation brought on by alcohol are long gone.
My mind is filled instead with a hollow emptiness I have chosen to call clarity.
And yet—no matter what state I’m in—when I think of Lou, something always rises up inside me.
Words appear, like the very first leaves budding on my favorite street tree in spring.
Lou—
your thin-ice-colored eyes shimmer like a shallow shore…
when they cross the boundary between green and blue…
when your head rests on my shoulder…
when I feel as though I am flowing through your veins,
I almost feel as if I own you.
May I have this beautiful jewel?
May I take it for myself…?
I think so…
On the morning after a party, every word is made of Lucien Carr.
He begins speaking on his own, flying from my fingertips, hopping, dancing.
I can faithfully write down what he says.
I can even write words you haven’t spoken yet—about things we haven’t discussed.
As I write, it all begins to feel as though it truly happened.
That’s because we can share more than other people do.
Whether we actually share anything right now is highly questionable, but once we decide to—
we could become that way in an instant.
Don’t you think…?
When I ask, you stare back at me from the typed page.
I startle.
Your eyes are colder than the North Atlantic where the Titanic sank.
And you invite me to a party.
You invite me—sitting on a sagging chair in a dorm room, writing—to a party.
Come on… let’s go… don’t stay in a dusty place like this…
Lou says, “You either swing, or you don’t.”
Those eyes are terrifyingly cold.
Compared to what happens next, how very cold they are.
I pick up the typed pages.
I feel the words turn into fairies and fly away into an unfamiliar world.
Just then, Lucien—wearing a dying emerald-green gown—gets up from the sofa, walks over, sits in the chair beside me, and smiles.
“Is that my report?”
A chill runs through me.
The Titanic…
I smile vaguely, crumple the pages in my hands, and shake my head so even he—surely suffering from a vicious hangover—can see it.
“It’s… not very good.”
Lou keeps smiling, nods a few times, and pulls the half-full bottle of whiskey toward himself.
He looks away from me and stares at the label, glaring at the morning sunlight reflecting off the glass through a gap in the curtains.
Eventually, without a word, he disappears into the kitchen and returns with a sugar bowl.
“Now then—Finland-style cocktail, coming right up.”
Using the typed pages as a funnel, Lou pours as much sugar as possible into the whiskey bottle.
He’s rough with it.
Sugar spills all over the table.
He stuffs the crumpled pages into the mouth of the bottle and says, “Done.”
Then he sits back down and stares at the finished cocktail.
“I’ve got a great idea, Allen. Let’s light this on fire and throw it into the professor’s house.”
I smile vaguely.
“Then the report won’t matter anymore…
We’ll both get expelled, go to prison.
How does that sound?”
“How does that sound?”
“You either swing, or you don’t.”
Lou has the eyes of the North Atlantic.
I ring the warning bell three times.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
I can see an iceberg twenty meters tall.
But I don’t know how such an iceberg is made.
This is how it goes—after a party, I often return to my senses like this.
And then I find myself staring back at him, confused, feeling utterly miserable.
*
When he crumpled those pages, I was furious.
The sickness in my stomach wasn’t just from drinking too much.
Allen—you’ve only just entered college.
There are things you still don’t know.
That is to say: you can choose.
What you wrote—you can crush it in your hand.
Because you can write it again.
What gets crushed is something I want so badly my throat aches for it,
but you can so easily say, “Not yet.”
You can do that.
You can choose—this, or that.
You can even choose not to choose.
That’s because you have talent.
People say all kinds of things about talent, but its true essence—its real privilege—is this:
the ability not to choose.
Crushing your own writing like that—it’s a feat I could never pull off.
I have to have someone else write my reports.
And when someone writes my report, tonight’s bed is decided automatically.
Who I love is decided.
There are no options.
Allen…
That’s why sometimes you have to look at me with such aching eyes.
People without talent lack many things you take for granted—
especially the things that seem utterly ordinary.
When David Kammerer asked me, “Can you live without me?”
I felt almost amused.
Of course I was in pain.
Deeply so.
Yes, I needed David.
I needed his love.
But that’s a lie that only works on children.
I’m an adult now.
I understand that what ordinary people call love…
is something you can choose not to choose.
There is no love that is absolutely indispensable, impossible to leave.
No matter how deeply in love a married couple may be, if they want to, they can part tomorrow.
In a jazz bar—if you find yourself liking one of the patrons, if they look at you with burning eyes—you can love them that night, and be free again tomorrow.
To love someone means you can always leave.
But David taught the child I was a complete lie.
This is what people who love each other do.
I do this because I love you.
Love makes it impossible to part.
You must never leave each other.
A love that ends tomorrow is a fake.
Love hurts.
That lie has side effects.
Even once you know it’s false, love in its true form—always able to leave—sometimes feels empty.
True love is always a little lonely.
Reality feels like the bigger lie.
I wish David were right about everything.
I wish he had given me eternal love.
I can’t choose anything.
I can’t choose to write or not write.
To love or not love.
Not even a psychiatric ward could save me.
This is probably how I’ll be for the rest of my life.
Allen—
sometimes your eyes look terribly wounded.
As though everything were my fault.
But you are nothing like me.
You’re a genius.
Even if you weren’t a poet—
even if you were anything else at all.
Even if you went to parties.
Even if you were a pianist.
Even if rude customers barked orders at you—
Play this, play that.
You could choose.
You could choose whether to play Kreisler’s Vienna Trilogy,
or whether to swing.
You can choose.
You have everything.
—The End—