On top of Montrose, to the left of Downtown, in a building whose bohemian fourth story peers up the long glazed skirts of The Heights.
The clear liquid explodes from within. A single, fat drop of dense and matte green that holds itself contained for a moment, perfect as a bead, then furs its curves and begins to sink slowly down through the center of the bowl-like glass, its circumference expanding, the furred tips billowy, then spidery, the color lightening from blackest green to lincoln to evergreen, unrippling well short of jade and ready to drink.
The first taste, no longer a tentative or fussy sipping but a serious lap and swallow and the floor gives way to a rubbery stairway that springs lightly and in its liquid way allows the senses to right themselves, to orient the body’s passage, having dropped through the hardwood or the Persian or the shag to note (distantly and inadequately) the floor’s regrouping as a ceiling a long cathedral away and above.
The ritual itself (the glass, the vial, the dropper, the possible though purely voluntary spoon) is a simple one as rituals go. But one follows these rules in order to swim towards (or through, or under, though rarely above) the clock-and-yardstick kingdom where anarchy reigns in this cliché of a dark palace, a star chamber interior where tears are a calmative, where laughter has a sobbed and sinister edge, where bloody thigh-highs are merely a vase of freshcut flowers glanced at too obliquely and for the wrong amount of time. Nothing startles, everything begins to feel very old, even the brusque and awkward underagers set aside their masks of self-imposed alienation long enough to take a slow deep interest in a string of colored lights, the pattern of their blinking (both bulbs and eyes) a counterpoint to whatever spins on the candlelit turntable. Shared cigarettes are passed as if in slow motion and everyone turns to watch the spray of embers when cherry accidentally collides with sleeve or ear. And when someone gets up from the pile of cushions to strip off what remains of their clothes it seems to take as long as if one were describing it in a language long-studied but here being spoken out loud for the first time.
But now Mary leaves the room (however much the reality continues to be here still seated, or perhaps languorous in a stylized slump of odalisque-like repose, on a time-bedazzled sofa floating on the imaginary cathedral’s shadow-collared tip). And in the corridor where she finds herself there is now nothing to prevent her from moving forward, or backward, although the nature of the corridor (narrow, flame-paneled for a bit before opening up with what looks like tile or white stucco rather than heavily made up wood or sheer fabric stapled flat and taut) almost implies that any refusal to move will lead to disappearance (of her, the corridor, the stairwell that she imagines fluttering up behind her like a pigtail).
But again she leaves the room, floating, like a parti-colored and quietly expensive tropical fish, the flame paneling close on either side, the padded ceiling close enough to smell, the certain possibility of a recoil or a stumble should her soles touch the ground. What appeared at first (in the candlelight and the shifting camouflage of wispy and ruffled shapes or shadows (merely layers of fabric loosened from their once-tight staplings and only now noticing the breeze from a doorway left open onto a balcony some rooms away)) as some sort of entrance or portal or archway, she sees now, standing before them, as mirrors rising full-length and more in height. That they are mirrors means a sudden double something. Security, for one, though that only just-felt breeze means there’s further to go and further may not always prove an increase in this present pleasure. And she feels disappointment looking into the mirror, seeing herself like a white-robed ghost where another room should be, a possibly mysterious room, or dangerous, or enticing, or innocuous even, but above all another room, and now it’s just not there and never was.
A motorcycle guns from a direction that remains unclear even when a second engine joins it and then sudden silence, which she imagines as an intervening hill which, once the bikers have slipped down its far side, will rise up as huge and deep black against the less utter black of the night sky. The interruption is a tribute, and in her idiot slowness she takes an age to form the name in her mind, behind her eyes, on the back of her tongue, in the quiver of her throat, on the round flat edge of her tongue, spelling it out on dry lips: Maria Caseres. If she had with her those French gloves she could put them on and pass effortlessly through the receiving glass, feeling the cool movement of her skintight passage meshing into wind and music. The mirror sucks her in, even though she doesn’t move from where she’s standing.
And how long ago did she leave the room? Had she said anything, to anyone, had there been words, or a movement of eyes or chin as she went out? Is there someone with her now, who’s just come along from one side or the other, or who’s been beside her all along, floating with her, tethered by the ankles to the powerful bronze nails driven into the rug at irregular intervals and intended for just such a moment as this? She is certain that the required gloves exist, is certain she might find a dusty box in the back aisles of an otherwise innocent hardware store. Mexico City or Marseilles seep into her mind as entirely plausible places to begin her search, to end it as well, hopefully. The hands on her waist are a comfort, everything now being in a state of unworried, unhurried peace. The indolence of sound, the prolonged nature of the rush, slowed down so that the creep of ecstasy in her body, lightening over her face, is visible and measurable and the submarine quality of Mary’s non-movement in the midway of floor and ceiling in this non-corridor is the truest part and the most joyous element of being this high.