Free The Sky Below by Stacey D'Erasmo

creepy, skinny, snide roommate. I was also the campus drug dealer. In some odd way, I felt like I was repaying Jenny for all the time she did in juvie by running the risks alone that she had run for us—driving to Phoenix to meet my sad-ass connection, a red-headed guy with a birthmark on his forehead who lived in a leaky condo and looked like I would in twenty years, post-melanoma; driving back with excessive caution; delivering the goods to various dorm rooms. There was just one other student on campus who was gay, or admitted to it. We had sex now and then. His name was Tim, he was small-boned and inquisitive, and he liked to talk about the universe: how big it was, when it started, when it would end. I didn’t mind lying next to him while he talked about time and space, but I didn’t love him, and he didn’t love me, either. He was in love with Brian, actually, and I sometimes suspected Tim was having so-so sex with me to get closer to the earnest, damaged penumbra of my roommate. I dyed my hair flat punk black. I wore combat boots with chains around them and, on a fairly regular basis, eyeliner. I looked the part of whatever it was I was pretending to be.
    One of the people on my route was Arroyo D’Orado College’s sole art history teacher, a slightly burned-out guy named Bill Bauman. He was a regular, so I took his class—Introduction to Modern Art—and he showed us slides of Joseph Cornell boxes.
    They struck a chord in me I had barely known was there. I sat in the darkened room, surprised. Clanking over to the art room, I began constructing my own boxes. They were like Cornell boxes, but weirder. More intense. Moving parts in some of them, and peculiar hybrid plastic animals I melted together out of kids’ barnyard sets, scraps of type from books, fossils, elaborate pop-up apocalyptic landscapes, Mary Jane
candy wrappers, snot in a tiny brown vial that I’d found between the sofa cushions when my connection went to take a leak. There were remnants of a white powder inside. I snorted the powder. The snot was mine.
    The art room was the best thing about Arroyo D’Orado; it was a small, well-sited geodesic dome, donated by some hippie alum who’d gotten rich making mesquite-flavored corn chips, and at the top of the dome was an oval skylight. The graduates of the college tended to go into accounting, marketing, or medical schools in the Caribbean, so, needless to say, the art room was mostly empty. The easels had never been touched. The tables were eerily immaculate. An enormous triangular window at the back of the dome framed a picturesque triangle of mesa, creek bank, and a cottonwood tree on the other side of the creek.
    One afternoon during the rainy season of my sophomore year, I was in the art room alone, as usual. I was tinkering with one of the gears from a broken pocket watch, using a tiny screwdriver to bend the tiny brass teeth in an alternating pattern. The art room smelled of chalk and new plastic; the air was cool, dampish; the overhead lighting was very bright. I put down the tiny gear and the tiny screwdriver and rubbed my eyes, focused on the cottonwood tree across the creek. I walked over to the great triangular window and flattened my left palm against the glass. Between my fingers, the tree twisted upward toward the sky.
    I needed a smoke. Pulling on my hooded sweatshirt, I left the art room and went around the back of the dome. I had tossed a few cinderblocks into the creek for occasions just like this one; I crossed the creek block to block, teetering, pleased to see that I was getting my chains wet but nothing else. I took a giant step up the bank and leaned against the tree, carefully striking a match in my cupped palm. Across the creek, through the triangular window, the still life of my momentarily abandoned project was scattered over the art table: the tiny
screwdriver, the broken watch, the brass gears, a soda can. I contemplated it, smoking.