Masters of the Universe

Has this ever happened to you? You’re going about your humdrum day, nothing special — and all of a sudden, it’s like the channel changes. No, not changes. More like it becomes clear in a way you hadn’t noticed before was out of focus.

The first time this happens to me, I’m in high school. Hollywood, Florida. Probably 11th grade. I’m sitting in my high-school lunch room. I’m by myself on a plastic chair against the wall; I don’t know why I’m not at the table with my friends. I can see them now, laughing with a kid I don’t recognize. I do remember he’s wearing a Blue Öyster Cult t-shirt. Kids start getting up, throwing out their bags and cans and wrappers, wandering off to fifth period. For whatever reason, I’m not feeling rushed.

And then it’s like at the eye doctor’s, when they ask which is better. Click, one; click, two? 

Click, normal lunchroom on an average day with the usual people; click, all that same stuff seen through the eyes of what I would describe as a calm, beneficent, generous god. I am flooded with love, understanding, kindness. Pure contentment. A cozy soul-satisfaction you never get in the normal course. 

I am aware I am experiencing it. I realize it’s amazing. And know it’s weird. I don’t want you to think I’m some kind of space cadet. I’m a regular 16-year-old, B-student. Not popular, not a loser. And no, I did not consume any intoxicants that day.

The second time, upstate New York. I am capping off a college freshman year of self-loathing. It’s that nowheresville time between finals and leaving for summer; roommate’s already packed up and vamoosed. But here I am, sprawled on my stripped mattress in the attic room of a long-dead rich person’s house turned dorm. I’m re-reading an ancient paperback edition of “The Sirens of Titan.” My sprained ankle throbs, wrapped in an Ace bandage that barely covers the purple-green bruising.

And then, click. Everything is good. You are good. Deep softness and forgiveness as I look out the window, the tree tops swaying in the delicious breeze. A small black bird lands on the sill outside the window screen, flits off with a chirp, and I’m all, wow. And something along the lines of — I am wiser than I know. I can handle anything that comes. I will be fine.

I don’t remember how the feeling ends. Either time. Is it sudden, or a slow fade? I have no idea where I went after, what came next. Ordinary days that otherwise would’ve faded to nothing.

I’ve never talked about these trapped-in-amber moments before. But as I’m talking to you now, I realize my eye-doctor analogy is kind of perfect. Like when I’m nine and put on my first-ever pair of glasses. We’re in the red Camaro — my mom driving me home from the optometrist — and it’s like, “Holy crap. This is how the world is supposed to look.” Cars all shiny and clean. Letters so sharp and crisp you can read every sign. So this is what the world is like — and I had no idea the whole time!

Does this sound stupid? Like silly navel gazing? Probably. But then there is this other time.

Two or three years out of college. Early 90s. It’s a swampy Tuesday night. I open the thick wooden door of O’Connors, a couple blocks from my Queens apartment, and breathe in decades of cigarettes, beer, and wet mop. The AC stuck in the wall may or may not be functioning, and the jukebox blares “La Isla Bonita.” 

It’s a tad brighter than usual. Maybe they changed out a couple dead lightbulbs? A few older guys at the bar glance to the door, look me up and down, and go back to their drinks and conversations. As I walk in, I catch a glimpse of the TV behind bar. Some Roswell bullshit’s back in the news. 

Opposite the bar, my friends hunch towards each other over a booth table, deep into their own discussion. Long-neck Rolling Rocks and vodka tonics sweat onto the formica.

Click.

Maybe this is heaven. I float to the booth, boundless love for my friends washing over me. I squeeze in. Deb must be fresh from one of her SDS meetings, going on about social constructs, how “it’s incumbent on the powerful to cede power to the powerless.”

“But who’s the arbiter keeping track of it all?” asks Joan. “You’re gonna trust the government?”

I listen for a while, contained and expansive like the patient mother of bickering children.

The sweaty backs of my thighs slide against the vinyl as I get up. “Anyone want a drink?” 

I drop off drinks at the table, and carry my own beer to the jukebox, now playing George Michael (“I gotta have faith, faith, faith”). I feel someone approach as I browse the CDs.

“You go ahead,” I say. “I haven’t decided.” He’s about my height, five-foot-nine, with straight black hair long enough to tuck behind his ears. Black t-shirt. 

He pushes the turn-the-CD-page button. “And how are you tonight, my dear?” he asks, not looking at me. I detect an accent. Irish, I think.

“Doing great. You?” 

“As good as you, I’d imagine,” he says, uncreasing a bill, feeding it into the slot and punching in some tunes.

Now he looks at me, with a sideways smile. His eyes are an intense yellow, like a cat’s. Beautiful with that dark hair.

“We’re not alone,” he says with a conspiratorial smile, looking up to the TV and then back to me. I watch as he walks behind the bar, opens the trap door and disappears down to where they keep the ice and extra booze.

That Friday after work, I walk from the subway to my basement apartment. (I’m renting from an old Greek couple in Long Island City, or Astoria, depending on who’s drawing the map.) But I don’t go home, and instead turn the corner onto Broadway. I don’t make it a habit to go to bars by myself. But it’s hot, and I have no plans, and — real reason — I have been thinking about this Irish dude and what he said.

The same crew of old men talk quietly at the bar, jukebox off, and, lucky me, Irish Dude is tending bar. It feels weird and sad to sit alone at the bar so I stand at the far end, where it’s empty, and lean my elbows on the ultra-varnished wood. I feel awkward. Heart beating fast.

He comes over, puts down a worn Budweiser coaster. 

“Hello, darlin’. What’ll you have?” 

I make a show of scanning the shelves of bottles, like I’m trying to decide, avoiding those yellow eyes. 

“Um, gin and tonic please. With lime.”

He mixes the drink, squeezes in a slice of lime, and sets it on the coaster. A second later, he puts down a saucer with more lime. “You must be a mind reader,” I say with a laugh. “I was going to ask for extra.”

He tilts up his chin, winks. He goes off to chat with the guys down the bar.

I must be parched. Within three minutes, I’ve sucked up the whole drink through the little red straw. I tip up the glass to get an ice cube. 

He reappears. “Another?”

I spit the cube back into the class. “Sure. Thanks.”

The alcohol has calmed my heart a little. It doesn’t feel so weird/sad to sit on a stool, and so I do. 

He sets down a fresh drink, and leans over the bar. “So Leah, where’d you get those lovely green eyes?”

I smile. “How’d you know my name?”

“Heard your friends callin’ you that.”

“Wow. Observant. What’s your name?”

“Kieran.” 

“Kieran from Ireland. Are you a legal alien?”

“You going to check my papers?” That flirty wink. Those eyes. Yowza.

But I had a question for Kieran. “Remember when you said you knew how I felt?” I asked. “The other night. When you said ‘as good as you.’ What did you mean?”

“You remember everything people tell you, do you?”

Oh god. He must think I’m so lame. Storing his every word, like a squirrel worrying over its acorns. I couldn’t think of what to say.

“I read people,” he says. 

“You seem very sure of yourself.”

“That I am, Miss Leah.” He lowers his voice. “Can I tell you a secret?”

“You can.”

“I’ve been with you, Leah. Whether you knew it or not. The whole time. I guided you to live here.” He gestures to the door with a wrist-flick. “To get a job in New York. To come to this bar, to meet me here now.”

Is this guy creepy, or kidding?

I opt for light-hearted flirtation. “Who knew the Irish were so romantic?” I’m curling one of the straws into a tight snail’s coil.

“Come downstairs,” he says. “I want to show you something.”

He beckons me behind the bar, and pulls up the trap door. I glance at the regulars, but they aren’t paying us any attention.

“Ladies first,” Kieran says. He follows me and shuts the door over him.

It’s cool down here, despite the heat up in the real world. The smell of damp basement is mixed with heating oil and maltiness from the spent kegs. A couple bare lightbulbs dangle from the ceiling, but you can’t see into the corners. At least until your eyes adjust.

“Come here,” he says.

He wraps me in his arms. The rational part of my brain flashes scenes from the true crime books I’ve been devouring. But what I’m feeling is, this is just so delicious. I never noticed how comfortable it is to hold a man my exact height; it feels like coming home. He smells clean — I imagine a tidy stack of laundered black t-shirts.

“Now we’re alone,” I say. He smiles, kisses me lightly on the lips. I let him kiss me more.

His mouth feels golden and liquid, and as the kiss deepens, that gold liquid spreads into my mouth, up into my brain, down my spine, through my torso and limbs, and pours out of my fingers and toes. Electric pleasure engulfs me, even the space around me. And this the weird thing — it’s not sexual. It’s a thousand times deeper and more powerful. 

I pull away to look at him.

I’m holding the boy in the Blue Öyster Cult t-shirt. I stagger back.

“What did you give me? What did you put in my drink?”

Kieran is himself again, tucks his hair back behind his left ear. He smiles. That little sideways smile. “You’re okay,” he says, all calm quiet now.

Before I could process any of this, Kieran is gone again. A little black bird, head cocked, looks up at me from the ground. Then a baby in a striped onesie is just lying there looking around. Now it’s a fat bullfrog (the kind my brother and I used to save from drowning in the pool). And then my sixth grade math teacher, Miss Kass. 

It comes faster now. A old stringy-haired Yorkshire terrier, a middle-aged man in a seersucker suit, one of the bar guys from upstairs. More quickly. Strangers, and some who look familiar but I don’t have time to place them. They just keep changing, faster and faster. A young man with a brown backpack, a little girl licking a strawberry ice cream cone. More animals. A tawny moth struggling in a spider’s web, a capuchin monkey, a rat. A brown speckled sparrow flying off, one of its feathers drifting to the ground.

And then there he is again, calm Kieran.

I have to go home right now. He’s given me some crazy hallucinogen, and I, completely freaked, need to get the fuck out of here. Now. I turn to run up the stairs. 

“Those were just a few of your guides,” he says. I freeze, my back to him, holding the banister, foot on the first step. “You’ve encountered them at one point or another. You won’t remember most.”

The small hairs stand up on the back of my neck.

“This is your crossroads,” he tells me. “You can be of us, with us, throughout all space and all time. Knowing all and understanding all. Your little moments? Those were just the merest of glimpses, the flimsiest of suggestions, of the wonder and vastness and completeness and lovingness of it all.”

I turn to look at him, not letting go of the bannister.

“Or, you can go back to your life and grope about as best you can. Soon enough you will die like the rest of them, and that will be the end of what is known as you. What do you want, Leah?”

Epilogue

Freddy is frantic. He will be late for his job interview, this one arranged by his dad. He slept in (again) and now the goddamn subway is frickin’ stalled at West Fourth. Passengers exhale loudly, shake their heads. 

“Thank you for your patience,” loudspeaker says. Read the room, lady.

Five minutes, ten minutes, thirteen minutes. Freddy does the calculation, and bolts. If I run, he thinks, I can just make it. 

He’s almost up to the street when his eyes come level with those of a homeless woman. She sits against the chain link fence of the basketball court. A straight line runs from his eyes to hers, a line that remains unbroken as he climbs all the way to street level. Her eyes are green, so bright it’s like she’s lit from the inside. Maybe it’s just the contrast with her filthy face. She could be 50 or 70, hard to tell. Not a smart move, he knows, looking into strangers’ eyes. Especially crazy homeless people talking to themselves. Frickin’ Bill De Blasio.

He makes out some of her jabbering as he gets closer. “… a magic little black bird… it’s all so beautiful… limes! … oh no, we’re certainly not alone.” Her laugh is joyful.

He averts his eyes, stepping around her splayed legs, and notices that she’s placed a curled up red cocktail straw on the dirty bandage around her ankle. 

Freddy turns right, and now he’s jogging up Sixth Avenue, his backpack bouncing like a happy baby. He can’t help but smile. Maybe it’s the spring air, the trees showing off their new leaves. Maybe it’s endorphins from running (he’d never before achieved that mythical runner’s high), but Freddy feels so frickin’ good. Dodging cars, delivery bikes, men and women holding coffee cups and staring into their phones. He feels love for them all. For this morning, for this city. Even for the ratty pigeons pecking the sidewalk, and that old guy with the walker blocking his path, and the teenagers smoking weed in the doorway, and the white-haired lady bending to up her little dog’s turd. Unbounded goodness and love.

And no matter what happens with this job interview, he thinks, I’m going to be fine. Just fine.