Free Clearly Now, the Rain by Eli Hastings Page A

corners, tubes of paint and brushes, projector and screen in the center, huge woofer speakers against the wall. The faculty members are seated at their card table, smiling anticipatorily. Serala rises from her own table and grasps a microphone hard enough that no one can tell she is shaking. I hear it in her voice, though, and happily count it as evidence that I know her best.
    Okay, so what I’m going to be doing tonight is basically splicing together all these filmstrips of my work, based upon or in response to whatever you all are doing. Thanks.
    Not a lot of preamble. No outgoing-filmmaker/poet-speech; no nostalgia.
    Then she sits, the lights go down, the beat drops and a lot of kids on a lot of drugs go at the room. Shirtless hippies smear their torsos with acrylics and roll across the floor; a crew of ravers start their weird dancing. The faculty smiles and scribbles. Jay—who wants her to know that he still cares—kicks the first freestyle raps. And she goes to work—head down, fingers flying, weaving a filmstrip of cached footage to the rhythm of the present madness she has invited.
    There is part of me that thinks she conjured this project as a cloaked scoff at Sage Hill, at the fetish of “interpretive, cutting edge” art that people in liberal arts schools tend to wax grandiose about. On the other hand, maybe it was real inspiration, a piece of evidence that despite her derision of the world she inhabited she was very much
of
it—as an artist, at least.
    I don’t know because I don’t remember the final filmstrip. I just sat, watching over her through her discomfort and her art, feeling proud as hell because I had some nascent notion of just how tough it was: to stand under the acid burn of the limelight, believing all her scars and bruises visible, to simply be public, to be gracious—to be wide-open by way of art.
    It was only days later, the golden hammer of May dropping hard, that she asked me to follow her and Monty across the country. I’d made plans to pick up two old friends from the end of their college careers in Boston and New York. The prospect of looking at the back of Monty’s and Serala’s heads over a series of days and nights was not one hundred percent appealing. But the ability to decline wasn’t in me. She packed up the Batcave in less than an hour, I folded her futon into my new-used Pathfinder (Louis kept the Buick), and we went out for one last Californian night.
    I say farewell to Samar at a house party hours later, at the cracked front door. She leans into the rectangle of light and grins and kisses me, mimicking all the goodbyes before—only different. We haven’t acknowledged a truce, just somehow moved on. She takes off the hooded sweatshirt I’d coveted and pushes it into my arms.
    Take it; it’s still cold where you’re going.
    The next morning, I struggle to keep sight of Serala’s Desert Storm, weaving in and out of the traffic, over the ruts and potholes of I-15, blasting north, under the razor wire–wrapped exit signs, the billboards for bail bonds and plastic surgery, the exhausted sky. I feel some of the freedom that Serala and Monty do, even though I’ll be back for my own senior year soon enough. Only minutes down the freeway, she sticks her skinny, scarred arm out the window and starts flashing numbers at me—5, 0, 3, 4. I have no idea what this means. It is hours later in a Nevada truck stop, the sun bleeding away in the land we’ve left, that I ask.
    A radio station, retard,
she says, sweetly.
It was just that
KXPR was playing “I Can See Clearly
Now”—one last time.
    It’s peculiar to consider the willingness with which I made myself a third wheel to Serala and Monty. But then again, Serala was skilled in a good number of dynamics, not least of all presenting absurd—if interesting—plans as perfectly logical. I was headed to the East Coast to pick up