IN THE MAGAZINE

Photo by Jerry Hsu

ABSINTHE - PART 2

By William T. Vollmann

Birds swim across the sun, which hangs from crystal trees like a ball of glass. Summer grows high within iron fences. Summer gives birth to green-clad soldiers lounging in yellow doorways. I begin to remember how much the Summer Garden’s branches remind me of a dancer’s arms.

Now it comes to me that all winter I refrained from leeching off a certain barmaid who has sometimes been good to me in a pitying way. Perhaps I could coax a drink of summer out of her.

I ask for just one more favor, and she makes me promise that this will truly be the last time. I want my summer, my summer! Inside the green bottle I will taste the blue flame whose leaves are trees, whose trees are forests forever. The song of the bird is the sound of a little spoon upon a glass.

Pouring sugar and blue flame, oh, yes, a waterfall of blue flame, she teaches me one more time the color of an absinthe flame. She knows better than anyone how to set the sugar spoon on fire and dip it in the glass, then pour blue flame. The noise of sizzling sugar makes me so happy that I no longer care that she won’t kiss me anymore.

Some prefer to drink it quickly down before the sugar crystallizes; others would rather inhale the hot sweet absinthe breath trapped in an overturned glass: the breath of all the women I’ve loved.

The bell of one glass rests within the bell of the other. In other words, she pours the blue flame-stream back and forth between the two glasses, then blows it out with her own delicious breath and immediately inverts one bell upon another. We watch together, she and I, until the vapor has risen into the topmost glass. Already she has prepared a napkin with a straw protruding through a hole in the middle of it. Lifting the topmost glass just a trifle, she slides the napkin underneath it, trapping that blissful mist as I once trapped bees when I was a child. Then she flips the glass upright and gently presents it to me.

I rush my lips to the straw, sucking absinthe-mist into my lungs as ravenously as I would anything from a woman’s nipple. Now here comes summer.

(I do remain aware that winter and summer are icons, the same few scenes repeated over and over from biblical stories, colorful yet oppressive like the plaster texture beneath an old fresco. But if it ever came to seem to me that there was nothing else, wouldn’t that be my failure?)

Already I have begun to rise out of my ever-heavier body; before I have passed through the ceiling and lost the residuum of my joy, I snatch up the lower glass, the one with hot absinthe liquid in it, and drink it down. And in that instant, as the glass comes almost level with my eyes, almost everything else happens:

Within the glass I see people passing over the shadow-sea, passing over sun-islands. The liquid now on the verge of tilting into my mouth remains for that first and last moment a green world of its own, flecked with water-light and softened by the Summer Garden’s shaggy shadows. If I could go inside the glass, I could stroll down the long canal of sand that is really sugar; and become no more or less than those other pale-dressed souls going in and out of shadow. Life’s yellow and white churches, death’s black and white clocks hidden behind iron fences, these I shall drink within a single glass of absinthe, which must be the Summer Garden itself. How could I have ever been anywhere else?

I wander past the girlette in a bonnet, the indulgent-lazy blonde who pushes the baby carriage; now here are wandering ladies in the white dress of sunlight. This is the time to look upward, until midnight when courtyard-light falls pearly gray. The branches in the skies become capillaries in the eyes; I am gazing into my own retina, behind which my saddest, most perfect memories have hidden like the women who smile, so that they would not cause me pain. They are out of focus, white ovoids shifting on dark trees.

I wish I could be one of these people who are clad white in clothes of sunlight; dwelling among them within the glass of green summer, I forget myself; and, as I did this winter, I forget you, or believe that I have; and then, thanks to the medicinal properties of absinthe, I find that I see you here among the ones in sunlight-dresses, and although you are one of many, no closer to me than any of the others (and never will you be again), I see you without sorrow, not even wondering why the sun is whiter than your hair. The canal is out of sight, the dark water hidden but its openness white beyond the trees.

Copyright © by William T. Vollmann


TO BE CONTINUED
ABSINTHE | 1 | 2 | 3 |

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Comments

Anonymous, on Jun 4, 2009 wrote: sometimes. it seems as if your writers are nerds with too much creative writing college.