Free Clearly Now, the Rain by Eli Hastings Page B

friends? Perfect—I’d just caravan with her and Monty, share some road meals, safety in numbers, maybe a few parties along the way, et cetera. The fact that I was proud to a fault is only a further testament to her ability to frame things compellingly. But all that was only scaffolding; the deeper truth is that I was already deeply under her spell, hungry to gobble up time and space and the world itself in her presence.
    I’d shot off for Mexico to smuggle drugs without a second thought; I’d swallowed those drugs with glee. I’d joined Monty in ripping my brain with a mystery substance, and I’d lost weeknights when I should have been studying to loud, sad music and too much wine. I’d done these things not only because I was in a reckless and unbalanced phase in my own life, but to stay in her orbit, to make that orbit tighter, even. It’s ironic that I’d do so because Serala was always responsible when it came to others and would have hated to think she was influencing me to damage my liver, fuzz my brain, or bury my blues instead of confront them. She never pushed a drop, or a drag, or a line, or a single capsule on anyone, so far as I know. But the instant that anyone expressed interest in altering their head, she was up for it—searching, supplying, sharing.
    Eventually, she enabled years of pleasant fog for me, some of which I regret. If I asked her in the late morning, as I did sometimes as a test, if it was time to start drinking, she always grinned and said,
fuck, yes,
and I’d have to make some lame excuse for why I couldn’t really do so. She never bothered with justification.
Life is rough enough without fucking guilt,
she’d say with a cartoonish sneer, cracking the seal on whisky, crumbling hash, throwing back a pill. And I joined her in the measure that I could without derailing entirely because I wanted her to know I was near and that she was not judged, either.
    I wasn’t overly eager to introduce anyone to my father at that time—he was too broken, too addicted, too sad, and there was a part of me that wanted to protect his image from those who had no point of reference. But the inverse was true of Serala. I wanted her to know my father as quickly and as deeply as possible; I wanted, for both of them, a chance or two to feel less strange and alone, to glimpse the beast of sadness—to say nothing of addiction—turning over inside another soft but durable person. There was bound to be an automatic and genuine kinship there, beyond that which I could share with her because he had lived as an addict and as a manic-depressive for decades. These things alone do not form a kinship of course, but the unconditional love they offered to those around them and the hazardous wide openness to the world it indicated certainly did.
    What did not occur to me then was whether their darkness would metastasize within reach of the other’s—if by presenting them to each other I was perhaps accelerating my own coming loneliness, the sad charter for my looming adult life.

Part  Two

Eight
    So we drive.
    The vulgar flash of Vegas lies ahead. At first, though, it’s just a glitter blanket, like a scrap of desert sky cut out and dropped. As we get closer Serala starts to tailgate me, then passes. She’s eager, I suppose, to get through Sodom without temptation—God knows what kind of mess she and/or her man might be able to get into there. So we bypass the whole nightmare: the tall billboards proclaiming the cheapest prime rib, the highest stakes, the best cabaret; past the casinos shaped like pyramids, pirate ships, teepees; past the pawnshops with their twenty-four hour neon promise of
next time, next
time you’ll win
; the marquees large enough to read from an airplane:
Elvis Lives!
    About the time we pull into a trashy motel, I am interrogating my desire—my reason for agreeing to this journey—to be closer to her. What