Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(97)

Even the most vague desire is a fire, and as soon as the words pour out of my mouth I hear the slight shift in the room, feel the hitch as if for a second everyone stopped talking, stopped breathing, a slight skip in the record that no one would notice unless they knew it was coming and even then they might miss it, but it’s there just the same, and everyone around me keeps talking and most people haven’t even heard the question, everyone’s broken off into couples and triads and quartets of discussions and debate and manic musings, but the tone has slightly changed, as if my saying the words added a layer of sound, as if everyone’s still getting their groove on without realizing that their needle’s been bumped into another groove. And the guy next to me with the long sideburns and wispy moustache who keeps grabbing the knee of his wild-eyed girlfriend nods for a long time as if the motion is dredging up the information like an oil derrick, and finally he says, yeah, man, I think I heard something about that my freshman year, I think, I think, yeah man, it’s some old basement storage locker or laundry room that a couple of dudes on the basketball team turned into this wild sex pad, yeah, yeah man, with carpeting and mattresses everywhere and they painted the walls and ceiling with all this black light paint and shit and they replaced the fluorescents with black lighting and the whole room was like, whoa man, so when you were making it with your woman and you were coming it was like you were tripping into another dimension or something with all the purple lights flashing and glowing, yeah. His girlfriend nods the entire time, mouthing the words no way man over and over again in between drags on her cigarette and pulls on a bottle of whiskey, and when her boyfriend is finished she stubs the cigarette out on the sofa arm and says you are so way off you’re not even on the planet anymore, man, not even in the fucking planetary system, I heard a bunch of religion students spent the summer in Tibet back in ’64, and when they came back they made a meditation room in the basement of their dorm with purple walls and lotus flowers and lidless eyes everywhere, and when you’re in the room and you start meditating and chanting, it helps you astral project right to the pyramids or wherever you want because it’s built in the middle of a power line, man, this line that’s part of a network of psychic rivers that run all over the planet and flow through time and space and all these dimensions, and you connect your pineal gland to the road, you just hit that astral road, man, you just chant your spirit straight to Stonehenge or some temple on the moon. She pauses to catch her breath and take a long swig of the whiskey while her boyfriend shakes his shaggy head and mutters no way man, no fucking way, and I ask her if she’s ever seen the room, does she know which dorm it’s supposed to be in, but she’s already deep in disagreement with the boy, and they’re lost to me in the seductive reflections of their discord, so I turn to the woman sitting in the chair to my right, all limp brown suede and faded paisley cotton under a body-length cocoon of half-removed parka, a beaded fringe tied across her head weeping bright glass seed beads into her damp flat hair, who’s been quietly listening to us the entire time with a growing furrow between her barely open eyes, and I ask her if she’s ever heard of the room. She blinks slowly, several times, and says in a low monotone, yeah, maybe, I think so, it’s one of those things everyone hears about but no one’s every met anyone who’s been there, one of those campus stories everyone tells each other, and every time someone tells the story a little bit changes, like those round robin gossip games we used to play at summer camp, remember those? Yeah, but the story I was told was that it’s a nest, a nest in the basement of one of the dorms, a room with purple walls all slick and wet and waxy-soft like a honey bee hive, with a door made out of twigs and branches and lost laundry and old books no one reads anymore and worn-down candles and incense sticks and glass sun catchers and the rib cages of lost chicks who stayed up too late and wandered through the halls past curfew, a jumble of things people threw away that block the door to protect the room, dead and lost things that warrior raptors who cry like sea gulls and fuck like wolves place against the door as protection for the void-queen that lays pulsing and birthing behind it . . . it’s holy work . . . we have no choice . . . Her voice trails off and her head rolls back against the chair, tiny seed beads scattering across her cheeks and shoulders as she passes out or trips into oblivion, and a delicate ribbon of stamps falls from her uncurling hand, and I realize as I reach over and slide the ribbon from her fingers and pop one square onto my tongue that I’ve come full circle and am right back where I started from. Just like two hours ago or three or four, the stamp melts against my hot saliva as I sit in the middle of a party watching people talk and laugh and drink and get it on while I stare at all of them, wondering where my place in all of it is or if there’s a place at all for me or if I really even care, because the one thing I wanted that night was to make it with that beautiful grad student, the one with the ragged black hair like torn silk brushing against his snow white forehead and cheeks and wide thin mouth, the iridescent mysterian who shows up in all my trips and nightmares and dreams, the black-eyed raptor in burgundy velvet who’s across the room opposite me right this moment, sitting on an olive green couch between a guy with one hand underneath the skirt of his wriggling girlfriend and an older woman with graying hair who’s hunched over and weeping into her hands, and I know he wasn’t there a moment ago, that the spot was empty, that he fizzled into life only when the acid disappeared on my tongue, as if he’s just always there waiting behind the high.