Back in 2018, I went for the first time into the liquor store on Holloway to buy a pack of American Spirits at 9 am with shadowed eyes and my face aching from longer nights. And the man working there, so much older and with so much less hair and so little patience, so very Greek, looked me right in the eyes and cut straight through me. A wagging finger, so slowly, the revelation wandering through the air and his shaking head. And he said:
“You know. You already know. If you choose one or the other, you will choose wrong—every time—and this time too. With the women. You cannot choose one or another or choose the other: You can only be yourself. And then the one or the two or the other will know you, and will follow you, or will not.” Then he handed me my American Spirits.
And I’m aghast and amused and shocked even recounting this now after the death of the Oracle. That he could cut my heart into fucking quarters knowing the conflict within me without me saying it, the mess my life had become, the woman who’d returned and the woman who’d taken my trust, how I loved them both so much so differently, how wrong I had been, how lost I was, how I’d lost everyone.
“Young man,” he laughed. “Young man. Stop thinking in spirals and just live on lines!”
I shook my head then. “What? And how? Because—how could you know? How could you know why?” Since he’d correctly read my thought and my silent reaction after. A brilliant, razor wire parlor trick from a cosmic deck, the cards paper cut with heartache.
But he turned back to his shop and his lottery tickets. He said nothing. He looked at nothing.
I want to tell you that the Oracle on Holloway had just thrown dartfulls of happenstance through my eyes and landed simply by luck. That this thing he’d said had been hardly better than a two-bit tarot card read and four ounces of tincture. I’m not a romantic—I used to be, raised that way by three Latin women drunk on Barefoot and hopeless hearts. But this was different. His prophetic quips popped from thin air and reading the veins in my neck. He repeated this feat over and over, and it shocked me, this master reading. He read me even when others feared me for uncanny perception, even when I lied and hid it from everyone, hid it all from my face better than anybody else. When things were falling apart with us, he knew the whole fucking thing. Every pack of cigarettes or bottles of wine or chocolate coming with this wagging finger, and always—
“Ahh, yes, young man, she will come back to you again”—“ahh, young man, find your way back to the beginning” —“young man, anger comes from care, anger comes from love”—“young man, she leaves you because she loves you.”
It was all always true to that point because you really had come back. Every single time, you’d come back. So yes, yes, it was true to that point. And then something happened.
I went into the liquor store to buy some M&Ms and some condoms and a bottle of Robitussin.
His look was so different than before. His look, something like he already knew the outcome of the decade from future prayer denied, lost in the pines.
He shook his head. So slowly. But with certainty. As though his own efforts had betrayed him. “You will not see her again,” he said.
And I had no retort that time. I had nothing to say at all. But even the next time, and the time after, all the same—his shaking head, his look of frustration and resignation—“you will not see her again”—“you will not see her again”—“this time, you will not see her again.”
But no. No, no. That was the time I knew he was wrong. He was dead wrong. He was dead wrong because I was right, I would see you again, and I did, and I do.
You see, I keep having these dreams. I’ve had them again and again maybe for a year—maybe for a year so far, no matter who remains in my bed, I still have them so many nights, a cold sweat at 5:30 in the morning and wide-open eyes and the ice cold drinking stone we used to spit between us buried deep in my lungs.
I dream about you in the 1980s in Tokyo, or in a blown-out future that looks and feels just like the 1980s in Tokyo. It’s got to be the future because most of the city is evacuated into the grandstands, and everyone’s got popcorn and Coca-Cola and a safe viewing distance, where they are preparing to watch the empty part of the city evaporated by an atomic bomb dropped on purpose. This is apparently the spectacular first step in a redevelopment plan of a feckless, laughing billionaire that the elders elected, someone who doesn’t give a shit about any of us, someone who wants publicity and condominium high rises for his friends. The poor and the broke and the drunk among us can’t afford the ticket. We hide in subways and basements.
The blast is like sunshine that burns holes through the world for six minutes, and after the hot winds pass, survivors crawl, and I wander through the wrecked city into flames and a landscape of ruins submerged in this river of silver dollars and tiny white rocks. And then, that’s where I see you again.
That’s where I see you again: You rise out of the rocks and silver dollars, laughing, on your phone, a silver crop top and pants and amazing jewelry, garnets, platinum, so tan, French braids. You are so deliriously happy. You laugh in haws and squeaks like I remember. It’s so hard to talk to you, so engaged with your phone call. But you take my arm anyway.
We walk together again. You walk easily on top of the silver and white rocks, and I trudge knee deep, and you push through the flaming door of a ruined building to reveal the interior, this full party of old time pub people applauding as we enter, derby and top hat and full suit, cigar smoke, and laughter, cheering louder and louder. I feel so self-conscious to walk arm-in-arm with you in my tattered clothes and my bloody face.
I have another dream about you. A dream about you with somebody else, the common thing many people dream in the times after love has worn or walked away from them both.
The round table is set for five courses, and everyone is there for dinner—everyone we knew together, your best friends and mine, the thirty three people who knew us together, and we are all laughing like we’ve finally won something.
Except you. You look so serious. You look so pained, or so lost, or so much like something was on the tip of your tongue for so long and the words never came so you just swallowed them, and the words tasted even more bitter than déjà vu on days like today, the era of staring out windows.
You keep stepping outside. So finally, I follow you out.
It’s almost like you are waiting for me. And I see you there, like waiting for me, standing beside this person with shaggy long hair in an emerald green bomber jacket.
And you just say to me, I’m sorry. I had something to say. I forgot what it was. Now nothing is left to tell, and I’m sorry.
There’s something about this person in the green bomber jacket. So I touch them on the shoulder—hey, I say—I want to see their face. I shake them again. Hey. What’s up? Look at me. I finally try to push their hair back. There is just hair. I turn them around and around and around, and it’s the same, I swear to god. They don’t have a face. They are nobody at all. They’re a body. No: They’re a body; They are somebody. But they’re somebody else.
You don’t even laugh then. This whole world is somewhere fucking else. This whole thing is nostalgia, and nostalgia is a hard set of blinders for a world turning on us all. For trying to see through my reflection in my own window.
There are many dreams I have about you and about others. But those were the ones I had lately that proved the Oracle on Holloway was dead fucking wrong that I’d never see you again.
