what if a much of a which of a wind
gives the truth to summer's lie;
bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun
and yanks immortal stars awry?
Blow king to beggar and queen to seam
(blow friend to fiend: blow space to time)
--when skies are hanged and oceans drowned,
the single secret will still be man
what if a keen of a lean wind flays
screaming hills with sleet and snow:
strangles valleys by ropes of thing
and stifles forests in white ago?
Blow hope to terror; blow seeing to blind
(blow pity to envy and soul to mind)
--whose hearts are mountains, roots are trees,
it's they shall cry hello to the spring
what if a dawn of a doom of a dream
bites this universe in two,
peels forever out of his grave
and sprinkles nowhere with me and you?
Blow soon to never and never to twice
(blow life to isn't: blow death to was)
--all nothing's only our hugest home;
the most who die, the more we live.
-e.e. cummings, what if a much of a which of a wind
The rustling of pages accompanies the silence as he leans his elbow against the window.
"So," she's saying, adjusting her seatbelt, "What was Othello's tragic flaw?"
"Have you ever heard of Flogging Molly?"
She looks at him blankly. "What?"
"Flogging Molly. Hard edge Irish punk rock band. They're new, but they get some of their stuff from the Pogues. You'd like them. I have their CD. I'll leave it on your porch by tomorrow morning."
"What does that have to do with Othello?"
He shrugs. "He could've used some punk rock? And," he adds as an afterthought, "he could've gotten laid more."
She stares at him for a moment, blinking. "You are positively shameless."
"The only way things ever get done in this world," he agrees.
"Jails are full of shameless people."
"Well, well, well," he grins, turning to look at her, "Been reading a little Arthur Miller lately?"
"Maybe."
"It's a good play."
She smiles. "One of the best."
"Never could relate to any of the characters, though."
"What?" She asks in disbelief, accidentally losing her place in the textbook and letting it slide to the floor. He expertly and silently tosses it in the backseat. She notices but doesn't comment.
"How can you not relate to them? They're the apex of desolate America!"
"I don't know. They just didn't get to me. No one gets self-realizations from a fountain pen. And that whole 'shoeshine and a smile' thing? Please. Give me a break."
"But everyone can relate to Death of a Salesman."
"I just break the mould," he says carelessly. "What about you then, oh literati princess? What character did you relate to?"
She ponders this for a moment, her nostrils fluttering like they always do when she thinks deeply. He watches her as a man dying from dehydration.
"Happy, a little. This ignorant stubbornness. I've seen a lot of people go down because of it. And Linda. I just liked how she could remain sane and good throughout everything."
He scoffs. "What? Linda? She was the most delusional of them all!"
"She was not. She held things together."
"Or just kept everyone in agony longer by refusing to let them break apart."
She begins to go through his tapes. There's no CD player in her car, but there is an ancient tape player, so he brought a cardboard box full of cassettes that he keeps underneath his bed. He watches her, his dark eyes flickering from her to the road and back.
"Pearl Jam?" She asks, fighting valiantly to keep the corners of her mouth turned down.
"I got half that box for free two years ago. Didn't really inspect the contents all too much," he answers defensively, checking his rearview mirror and realizing there is no tail on them, no tracer, no burning red path as he tears the princess away from her castle, just her and him and tapes and napkins spotted with ice cream.
"Where did you get all this for free?"
As an answer, he smirks and stares stolidly ahead. Her eyes widen in disbelief (but not really disbelief, after all).
"Jess!"
"Yes?" He inquires innocently, his fingers tapping a melody on the steering wheel (maybe, maybe, maybe).
She exhales in frustration, but says nothing and half smiles to her darkened window, instead. She thinks he can't see her but he can, and he grins.
"Just pick a damn tape, will you? But not Pearl Jam."
She complies contentedly as he stares at the cold velvet asphalt stinging before them, melting into the blackness of night that is a different color but kind of the same. It makes him feel a little like he's dead. Not in a bad way, just an otherworldly way, the sacred silent being whose aching bones have finally found rest. The world that has pulled him and grinded him and tore him has suddenly narrowed into something he can control, the inside of his car with someone sort of like a girl but not sitting next to him.
"The Sex Pistols," she finally states decisively, yanking her hair back violently in a black elastic to get it off her neck.
He grins. "Sorry?"
"The Sex Pistols."
"Just checking to make sure that word escaped Rory Gilmore's mouth."
She narrows her eyes at him, but it does not escape him how her cheeks redden even in the darkness. He likes that he can make her blush.
"We could just go back to Shakespeare," she threatens, reaching behind her for his mammoth God-awful useless piece of shit textbook (his words, obviously, not hers).
"Oh no, I like the Sex Pistols."
Satisfied, she pushes the tape in the player.
"If you need me to explain any of the terms they use, let me know."
"Stop it!" She exclaims, biting her lip to keep from laughing, and smacking his arm.
"Jeez, no need for physical abuse. I'm just offering my services as your own personal encyclopedia."
There's a double meaning behind his words that she picks up on. His eyes look intensely with hers. Hesitantly, she meets his gaze and searches his face before fear overcomes her unhidden anticipation and she hastily drops her gaze.
Dammit, he chastises himself instantly. Stop it, stop making it so hard for her, stop, she's confused, she's scared, she doesn't know, just stop -
He understands the virginal flower doesn't know what to do when it first tastes water. And he understands it's not his place to teach her. But he has never been one for rules.
"The stars are so pretty," she says abruptly, craning her neck back to look out the window. He presses his lips together, surprised she didn't chastise him for what he just insinuated, and glances upward. Thousands of white pebbles scattered on a river bed.
He doesn't know what to say.
"Did you see stars like this in New York?"
"No."
There's a heavy silence, punctuated by droning punk ("When there's no future, how can there be sin? We're the flowers in the dustbin," he mutters under his breath, "We're the poison in your human machine. We're the future, your future).
"Could you ever see stars in New York?"
He shrugs, a careless jab of his shoulders. Instead of telling her that he never looked, which is the truth, he evades, "I saw Heath Ledger in Washington Square Park once. He was playing chess, but he accidentally sat on my book."
"Really? Heath Ledger?"
He nods in affirmation. He wonders if she will ever catch on that he tells her little pointless parts of himself because he is afraid to tell the big ones. "Heath Ledger."
"Oh my God! What did you say?"
"I said," he begins dramatically, "'Move. You're on my book.'"
She laughs. "You probably did."
"I did."
"What book was it?"
"The Stranger."
"Camus?"
"That's the one."
"I can't believe he sat on Camus," she muses indignantly. "How can you not notice you're about to park on one of the most prolific French writers of not just the twentieth century, but all time? Is he stupid? Or does he usually sit on other people's belongings? Maybe he's just accustomed to it. Maybe he -"
"Maybe he had sunglasses on and it was hard to see."
Her eyes cut over to him. "Stop being so practical! You're ruining my fun," she pouts.
He smirks. "I am your fun."
The way she looks at him tells him he is much more than that. He wishes he could smoke.
She turns away and, fidgety, strips her hair of its black elastic so that it falls untamed and messy around her face. He is completely without words under this sky.
"Where are we going?" She asks.
"Don't know."
"You need to study more."
"You," he returns, glancing over at her, glorious and new and exotically different in the dark and the silence and the car, "You need to just relax more."
He feels her weighing her words carefully before she speaks. "I can never completely relax when I'm around you."
For the first time, they are nearing the issue they always fake blindness to. He doesn't know how to handle it. He's never been good with handling things, not broken mothers or drunken stepfathers or high best friends, and he can't handle this fragile thing that is trembling while she extends herself toward him.
In the end, all he says is, "I know."
She smiles bravely. The moment is broken.
"You still hungry?"
She studies him carefully. "You want to smoke, don't you?"
He shrugs, smirking. "Maybe."
"You're going from marbled lungs to chocolate."
"Tasty."
"Well, lucky for you, mister, I am a Gilmore and will take any opportunity to eat."
"God. Let's hope you never race your kids to a buffet line. There'd be causalities."
"Race my kids? Of course not. We'd all lock arms and charge down the competition. Do you think my mother taught me nothing?"
"Don't make me answer that."
He earns his second smack that night.
When she gets out at a pizza place outside of Hartford, he leaves the car on for an extra second before joining her, just to see her profile bathed in the red taillights.
She stands pristinely by the peeling door, waiting for him to pay the bill for three slices of pizza. He does so, grumbling about a damn, crazy woman eating him out of house and home all in one night, but since she let him smoke twice he doesn't think he has much a right to complaint too much.
"Did you ever consider the possibility that maybe you have a tapeworm?" He asks with mock sincerity, strolling with her outside in the parking lot.
When she doesn't respond, he turns to where she's standing a little bit behind him, staring transfixed with a slightly tilted head.
"What book is that?"
"You do know you were just staring at my ass, right?"
She jumps up immediately, her fingers fumbling and locking together. "What? No! I just, I was, you have a book and I -"
"Rory, Rory, it's okay. Not all of us can be strong in the face of temptation."
"But I -"
"Admit it. You were checking me out."
She's speechless for a moment. Defeated, she asks in a whisper, "Was it the blinking thing?"
"What?"
"My mom says I - What book is that?"
He grins in disbelief, realizing that Rory Gilmore just kind of admitting to ogling his lower regions.
"Lolita," he says, presenting it to her with a flourish. "Rather appropriate, don't you think?"
"Jerk," she mutters.
"Nymphet."
She's about to answer when her phone begins to beep.
"Dammit. If that's your mother, tell her Kirk got stuck in a tree and we had to go save him."
She rolls her eyes. "Crazy boy," she mutters, before flipping her phone open in the filmy, dusty air under a streetlamp.
"Hello?"
He leans against the trunk of her car and watches her facial expression, how her eyes widen guiltily and she looks at him once, only once, before shifting on her feet and moving away a little.
"Oh, fine. I'm fine. I'm good. Great, actually. How are you?"
Pause.
"You know. Just . . . umm . . . over at Lane's."
Pause.
"Well, her mother's out at Bible study tonight, so we're . . . redecorating her room."
He shakes his head and kicks gravel at his feet, amused, but only a little.
"Um, yeah. Mrs. Kim . . . said . . . she doesn't like the pictures of flowers in Lane's room. Too . . . provocative. So we're . . . moving . . . furniture . . .?"
"Yeah, we can move furniture together if you want to," Jess murmurs under his breath. Thankfully, she does not hear. Another car pulls out and obscures her voice for a moment.
"-tomorrow. Okay. No, I've just been really busy. Love you too. Bye."
When she hangs up, she can barely look at him. He has no problem staring at her.
"I didn't know Neanderthals knew how to use phones," he comments coolly, etching the toe of his Converse into dirt.
Her eyes plead desperately to him for some nameless thing he didn't grasp, after all. "Jess -"
"Provocative flowers, huh?"
One tiny step toward him, one attempt at amends, a futile offering in her sloped shoulders. "Jess . . ."
He bites his bottom lip. "We should be getting back. You want to drive?"
"No, but-"
Without looking to see what she does, he crosses around to the front of her car and gets in. His head is pounding all of the sudden, an immediate hangover from being drunk on ignoring reality. It was stupid of him, really, and he always knew that. He knew it. He did, dammit.
She slams the door hard when she sits beside him. He turns the key.
"I'm still with Dean. You know that."
Not so much as glancing at her, he answers, "Yeah."
"I've been with Dean for a long time."
"Huh. I'm surprised you can still form sentences in recognizable English."
They pull out of the parking lot and he still refuses to look at her. He has one hand draped casually over the wheel. The neon pizza parlor sign flashes in the night.
"Don't. Don't do that. Don't knock him like you're so much better than him," she hisses, crossing her arms.
He says nothing.
"You aren't. He's safe, he's what I know, he's there for me. He always has been."
He still remains silent.
"You just blow in her, one motorcycle short of Marlon Brando, and expect me to leave everything I know for some guy who wants to run out the door the moment his handcuffs are off? Are you insane? I can't do that, I don't even know how to leave people, I've never done it before, and I think that if I leave someone for you, you'll just end up-"
He feels her freeze - every part of her, blood, bones, hair, lips - at the realization of what she has said. Her fingers clench her seat and she turns to him, mortified, as he regards her with untraceable fear.
"Oh God, I'm sorry. I didn't mean it."
He rolls down his window and lights a cigarette while she numbly apologizes again and again, a lost little Alice, not a Lolita at all.
"I didn't mean it."
"Yes, you did," he argues tonelessly, flicking ash out the window.
"No, Jess, I didn't, I-"
"Rory," he interrupts calmly, for he has always been used to little pieces of himself getting broken like this, "Rory."
She stops babbling and stares at him.
"Rory, it's okay. I know."
She still can't respond.
"I know, alright?"
"No," she says, softly. "You don't."
Too many things are tumbling to the tip of his tongue, dangerous things, deadly things, reckless things. He keeps his mouth shut but he wants to run his hand through her hair.
"I don't want you to leave."
"I'm not leaving."
She looks at him with unspeakable sadness, her fingers wound around her seatbelt. "You will."
He is going to kiss her. He really is. There's nothing else left to do. This rawness is new to him and he likes her naked like this, totally his, solely his because no one else knows her like he has since the moment he stood in her bedroom, and he can lay his claim wherever he desires until she becomes once more the other Rory whose coffee he pours. She'd let him. She's not crying but her unstable mouth is worse. He sees the red light coming and the way he looks at her lets her know he's about to reach across the gear stick and attack her. She inhales sharply, and that sound is his, too, only his.
That's when he sees it. Or doesn't see it. A dark shape scuttling across the road, right between him and the light. His buzzed body, the body that always reacts and always sees, doesn't react at first.
He squints. "What the fuck is that?"
Her scream scares him ("Don't hit it!") and makes him swerve. Instead of being able to pull out of it, which he normally would do, he feels the car fishtailing. Son of a bitch didn't put on tires with good traction, is the last thing he thinks before the sickening crash and split telephone pole envelope him.
Silence. Horrible, awful, unspeakably ghastly silence.
The light blinks green.
"Rory."
She's not moving. The car is smashed in everywhere. Her door is jammed in.
"Rory."
Nothing.
"Goddammit, Rory," he hisses, unable to raise his voice.
The strangled little cry she emits, like a broken dove, makes him forget the throbbing in his shoulder from where it slammed on the steering wheel.
He kicks open his door and vaults over the roof of the car to wrench on hers. It doesn't give. He pulls and pulls, but it won't open.
"Rory, come on, tell me what's wrong, tell me what's wrong!"
"I . . . my . . . car . . ."
"Forget about the fucking car," he commands, reaching through broken window, terror pumping through his blood like crude oil in fresh water, poisoning him, choking him (he did this, he did, with his own stained hands, he did this, God, he did), the beginnings of another burden he will have to carry the rest of his life.
"But . . . the car is . . ."
"Rory."
"The car . . ." She murmurs hopelessly. "It . . . Dean's car . . . you broke it . . . how appropriate . . ."
"Rory."
She looks up at him, her eyes like bedroom eyes, dazed, confused, lethally beautiful. He cups her face in his hand and forces her to keep her eyes on him.
"Forget about the car. Everyone has a car. They're nothing. Just pay attention to me. Are you okay? What hurts?"
He watches her look over her own body and back up to him. He lets go of her.
"Everything." She pauses a minute. "My wrist." Suddenly snapping her head to him, she asks urgently, "Are you okay?"
His breathing is labored. "What? Your wrist?"
She gingerly tries to move her left arm and has to bite her lip to keep from crying out.
"It's not that big of a deal," she says. "I was just surprised. It just hurts."
"Shit," he whispers under his breath. She wiggles her arm again. "No. No, don't move it. Here, just keep it still. And don't move. I'm going to get this damn door open."
"There's a telephone post in the way," she remarks.
He climbs up on the mangled hood of the car and shoves the splintered shards of wood away.
"Not anymore," she amends.
The stars are ugly now, thousands of eyes watching his fall from false grace, his final tumble into the abyss as he fights and sweats for a moment. The adrenaline kicks in and he finally manages to tear open the folded door. Its hinges are still intact.
He would've forsaken the hinges for some fucking treads on the tires.
"Alright, now, here." He drops to his knees in the broken glass. "Let me see."
She moves her body into a slightly more comfortable position.
The light continues to turn. No cars go by.
Her wrist is swollen and purple and blue, but he doesn't touch it. He knows what it means. When he was six, his mother punched a wall and had many of the same injuries. He clenches his hands.
"Where's your phone?"
"Hmm?"
"Your phone," he demands, eyes flashing.
"In my pocket." She shifts to get it.
"No, don't," he orders. "I will."
Gently, ever so gently, trying not to come into contact with secret sacred skin, he slides his hand into her hip pocket. Her leg trembles beneath his palm. He doesn't look at her until he slips the phone out.
"I don't think you should call my mom. I should."
"I'm not calling your mom," he says calmly, despite the fear that boils under the outermost layer of his body.
"Who are you calling, then? Judge Judy?"
"Close," he answers. He punches in three numbers.
"Yeah, I'm calling to report an accident. A car accident. It's on Route 13. Right past the Waterfield intersection. Near Hartford. Everyone's conscious, but there's a girl who's pretty banged up."
The operator asks him what's wrong with the girl. His nerves, already on a wire's edge, snap.
"How the hell should I know? If I was a damn doctor, I wouldn't be calling for one, would I?"
Patience please, sir. Help is on the way, sir. Stay on the line with me, sir.
He hangs up.
"They'll be here soon."
She tries to stand up, but he shakes his head.
"You didn't have to call 911," she protests, but closes her eyes from a wave of pain.
"Come on Rory, look at you." He swallows to keep his voice from shaking. "You're going to need more than a band-aid."
She raises an eyebrow. "Why? Do you have a band-aid on you?"
He smirks. "No."
She nods and he continues to kneel beside her in broken glass, his knees getting sliced.
"So what was that thing that ran out in front of us, anyone?"
"Hell if I know. Bigfoot?"
"Yes," she says, nodding. "He was a lot smaller than I thought he'd be, though."
"Ah, well," he says with a wave of his hand, "propaganda always lies."
"And I want to believe the word of man."
"Living will fix that in time."
"Cynic."
"No," he argues. "Realist."
She smiles. Her hair is stick to her face but she can't move to brush it away, so tentatively he does it for her. When their eyes meet he feels true honesty for the first time in his life.
"God," he says, his hand lingering at the back of her neck, "I didn't mean it."
"I know. It was Bigfoot."
"I'm -"
"I know you're sorry." She licks her lips. "Remember to drop off Flogging Molly sometime tonight, okay?"
He doesn't smile. "Yeah. Sure."
She appraises him for a moment. "I'm still glad. That we went, I mean. The cone made up for all. And the pizza."
He shrugs. Blood stains his jeans.
"It was crappy pizza," he reminds her.
"Good conversation, though," she says.
"Your mother is going to kill me."
"No," she corrects, and then, upon consideration, "Probably."
"And Luke."
"It was my fault that we were out here, anyway. He'll believe me."
"And kick my ass anyway. He likes to do it. Any excuse will make him happy."
She laughs, winces, and then drops her gaze from his face to the ground. The light is green again.
"You're bleeding!"
He doesn't look. "Glass tends to do that."
"You should stand up."
"No."
She searches his face and lets it drop.
"I'm scared of hospitals," she confides. "Ever since my grandpa . . . well, I'm just scared of them."
He wants to touch her again, so he does, just a simple bump of his arm against her knee. "It'll be okay," he whispers. "It will."
He's never whispered to a girl before.
"It would hurt less if you'd relax and concentrate on your breathing."
She looks at him once, questioningly, and then closes her eyes, in, out, inhale, exhale, one, two, one, two. He watches her chest rise and fall.
His shaking hand rips a book out of his back pocket. "Do you want me to read to you?"
She nods.
"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh, when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns."
The sirens are wailing in the distance. He has heard sirens many times before, but not for this reason. He wasn't as scared the other times. Her eyes snap open as blue and red lights begin to swirl around them like whirlpools. He doesn't look away from her.
"I like your voice."
"I practice twice a day in the mirror."
"I'm glad you're here," she states gravely.
"I'm not."
And he realizes she was right, Dean is safer, he is dangerous, and he has broken her in every way.
"You'll be okay," he tells her as the ambulance parks. "One piece of advice: if any doctor tells you to take your clothes off so they can check your wrist, just say no."
She grins. "Thanks, Oh Vast Holder of Knowledge."
"Glad you're finally catching on."
Two paramedics rush over to them wheeling a gurney, blonde-haired, light-eyed. They look at him suspiciously.
"She can walk," he says, because she wants to walk. "It's her wrist."
"Jess."
He has never heard his name like that before. She pulls on his sleeve, and he looks at her.
"You don't have to stay here. You can go."
He chews on the inside of his lip, lightning forking and dividing his path, guru, time to choose one.
"Don't worry about me. Go get mended."
"Police will be here soon. You should just go."
"Rory," he says, looking her straight in the eyes. "Call your mom when you get there. Don't move around too much."
They put her on the gurney, anyway. He watches her get wheeled into the ambulance, her hair swinging off the edge of the headboard.
Once the ambulance is gone, he walks down the road. All is quiet and nighttime. The aching, diminished scream of crickets pulsates in almost-warm-but-not-quite air. He stands under the light for a few minutes (yellow, red, green, yellow, red, green, yellow-) and kicks a stone. About half a mile down he hears the police sirens. He hitchhikes in a red Explorer to Hartford.
It's late, but not that late. Easy enough to buy a bus ticket. He buys two, one into Stars Hollow, the last bus for the night, and one headed to New York tomorrow morning. He sticks the later one in his pocket.
At three in the morning, he slips the Flogging Molly CD onto her windowsill. She's sleeping, soft and pretty and covered by sheets. There are five words penciled on the CD cover:
"Keep it. You'll like it."
He was going to write "I'm sorry," but it would be rather anticlimactic.
"Liz," he says into the phone receiver only two hours later. "It's me."
"Who?" She asks tiredly, slightly slurred, bruised and wilted.
He kicks the storage room wall. Luke will be waking up soon.
"Me."
"Me who?"
A lick of the lips, a sigh, hunched shoulders. He answers:
"I don't know."