I often had these elaborate fantasies about saving Max. I fantasized about selling my first novel and becoming a famous author overnight. All the big magazines would interview me, the morning tv shows, radio shows, everything. I’d get rich in a hurry. The first thing I’d do with my money was buy back Max’s Berkeley house for him. I’d fix the place up and move in with him in and live upstairs in the old sunroom I’d once rented where I would have all the peace and quiet I wanted in which to write.
Max’s animals would be cared for and never go hungry. They’d have the best to eat and drink and Max would have the best of those things too. We’d drink the best wines, go out to the best restaurants. I would hire top notch private doctors and nurses for Max, splurge for all the most expensive, up-to-date AIDS medicines.
We’d have first class tickets to Paris. We’d travel Europe, hit London, visit the zoo, go to Poland, drop by the Nemerov ancestral estate. He’d show me all the places he knew, all the monuments and architecture he loved.
We would sit together in the living room of his Berkeley house and share stories and laugh just like we used to. I’d fly his Hollywood friends up for big wild parties and have a projector set up so we could watch reels of his old films. We’d make it through in spades.
One night I had a dream about Max. We were living together in a house in the woods with two women. It didn’t seem that the house belonged to either of us, that we were just visiting, but it was a house we knew well. The woods were full of fallen leaves. The women were close friends of Max’s and through Max they had become good friends with me too. They were older women, middle-aged, closer to Max’s age. Early in the dream one of the women entered a room where I was dressing and caught me naked. But there was no embarrassment about it between us; we even laughed together.
I sensed that these women were more important to me than I knew; that they were connected with Max and through love for Max in some mysterious way and through him they had come to love me as well.
At some point the four of us were walking in the woods together. Suddenly one of the women let out a scream and fell to the ground. We crouched over her, amazed. She was dead.
From a hole in the ground at her feet a giant golden snake emerged. The snake coiled itself about the dead woman’s body. We were outraged at what the snake had done and so we killed it, cutting off its head.
Max held the snake’s head in his hand and brought it close to his face, looking into its eyes. He began speaking to the snake. The snake’s eyes began to enlarge and turn colors. The colors reflected Max’s own eyes. The colors began to revolve and merge, growing larger and larger together. Some sort of mysterious, powerful charge was passing between Max and the snake. The charge filled the air with brilliant spinning light, increasing until the charge filled my eyes with one vast kaleidoscope of dancing colors. Then suddenly everything went black.
I was returned to that quiet house in the woods. I was with the other woman. Max was not with us. We were standing together, not saying anything, wordless as two people might be after a funeral.
I slowly reached into my pocket and drew out a set of keys. I laid the keys down carefully on a wooden table. They were the dead woman’s keys. They were the keys to the house we were standing in.
I said to the woman, “You know, up until this moment I never really felt that she was dead.”
And then all the grief in the world flooded my soul.
For Nick Zinicola
1981-2010
R.I.P.
