Part 24 (1/2)
Clive hears this, and he thinks about it, but I can't help him. He is young and he is hearing a terrible truth. That life is about painful realization. It's about parties for a long time, and then someone has to pick up the tab. He sees the tab but he can't reach for it yet. Seeing the future is so much more difficult than not seeing it. That's what Isaac Newton would say. Maybe it's even what Hallie would say. Maybe it's what I would say if I weren't glimpsing something more real.
”I'm sorry about that,” Clive tells me. ”I'm sorry for you.”
”Don't,” I say. ”Don't do that to me.”
”Don't what? Feel badly for you?”
”Bad,” I snap. ”You feel bad, not badly. If you feel badly, it means you have no nerve endings in your fingers.”
He just stares at me. I realize two things: that I have veered off into parts unknown, and that I have rejected an honest emotion. It makes me feel bad. Bad, not badly.
I stub out my cigarette and kneel down in front of him. I take his hands into mine. He avoids looking at me. I have shamed him. I don't know why I do that to people.
”I'm sorry,” I say. ”But you can't go around making people into victims. You can't pity people. Especially if you love them.”
He lifts his eyes to mine. ”Why?”
”Because the goal is to elevate the people you love. You know, make them better. Make them strong. Expect things from them.”
While he is thinking about this, I feel my mind racing back, again, to Hallie. I expected things from her. And I drove her away. I turned her into something monstrous. I devalued her with my expectations. I negated her. I did that.
But I couldn't have done that. I wanted everything for her. I wanted to help.
The thing I didn't see back then is that people can be destroyed by goodness. Damage can be done by hope. If people aren't ready for hope, it's a cruel trick to put it on their doorstep. Like a bag of s.h.i.+t on fire. They stomp it out because they don't know what else to do.
I don't know how to say this to Clive, and I am glad. Glad that I can't say it, glad that he wouldn't understand it. Glad that our relations.h.i.+p is so off balance that I cannot disrupt it any further. All I can do is be in it.
He sighs and rubs his eyes, the way a kid does when he is past the point of exhaustion. He blows the breath out of his lips, and they drum together as if he's trying to make bubbles or create a new sound.
He says, ”I don't know, Pearl. I feel kind of lost sometimes.”
”Yeah,” I say.
”Like, I can close my eyes and see my whole future coming together. I can see me in a band or writing songs and recording them in a studio. At the same time, I see me being this totally conventional guy, with a wife and kids and dogs and stuff. They're both me, but in a way, neither one of them is me. It's just a guy I'm imagining.”
He stops talking and stares. I know better than to speak.
Then he says, ”Sometimes I can't see my future at all. Like it's a complete blank. I try to picture it, but nothing comes.”
I nod. He waits. There is nothing to say.
”Do you ever think about the future?” he finally asks.
”Not much,” I answer honestly.
”Why?”
”Because I don't believe in the future.”
”Oh, right,” he says, with a slight eye roll. ”There is only now. Don't get Zen on me.”
”But there is only now. It's not a Zen thing. It's something I believe. It's more like physics.”
”Tell me,” he says.
”Well, some scientists believe that everything is happening at the same time. The past, the present, and the future. It's all the same thing. It's one big cosmic soup. It's a kind of perpetual motion. Do you understand?”
He shakes his head, but I keep talking.
”It's the idea that there is no linear time at all. It's all just a perpetual state of now. Like billions of TV screens with the same program on, but at different times. Past and present both affecting each other, but the moment itself never changes. It just is. And there is nothing else.”