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The way I recall it, the days spent at West Egg were some of the best of my life. It was an easy sort of living, an unbridled taking of pleasure that fell on our doorsteps. The ageless Sundays rolled on, the days burning out and falling away like ash from the end of a cigarette. Sometimes we went out onto the bay on his speedboat, cutting white crests across the water. Other times we lay beneath the sun doing nothing at all.
Nobody on Long Island ever spoke a single word of truth. I grew accustomed to it quickly, and learnt to speak their language. Over the course of the summer, many strange words were exchanged — oblique, wonderful words carried on feather-light breaths, and spoken by wan, red mouths. That wasn’t even the half of it. I grew to see Gatsby, really see him, in a way that others could not. The others only looked, and though there was certainly a lot to look at, they never saw.
Gatsby won me over without ever having to do anything. Gatsby, master of a world built out of clay, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. Gatsby, who loved and fought so fiercely that the force of his desire could have swept all the boats on the marina. The dream he staunchly guarded was like a prayer more than anything else. There was something of the ecclesiastical about him, and towards the end I felt nothing for him but ardent admiration and a deep sorriness. I was certain no one else could see him as I did. My gaze alone preserved something inconceivably wondrous.
On Fridays, with growing abandon I fell into the liquor-soaked parties, the nights loose with laughter and promises that would promptly be forgotten. I let myself be dazzled by gypsy dances and alchemical concoctions; I moved through Gatsby’s fantastic manor as if I were in a dream. For a time, other people became inconsequential to me — whenever I closed my eyes, the faces of strangers I had just spoken to would dissolve, then I’d turn to someone new and repeat the whole process again. It was as if everyone at Gatsby’s parties tacitly understood that our interactions were no more than brief, spirited amusement, and we were content to let things stay that way. And so, it transpired that each night was another heroic venture, another romp into the unknown.
Gatsby, the stagemaster, was like the sun around which our exploits revolved. His very presence was the force that held the entire affair together, otherwise we ran the risk of jettisoning off in different directions like supernovas. He never drank. Towards the tail end of my indulgences I would sometimes catch a glimpse of him in my periphery, tall and unmoving. Against the mass of drunken bodies, all of whom had lost their equilibrium and were beginning to fall, he was a striking figure, alone in a room full of people, his eyes raised to the invisible ether.
In those moments it almost seemed as though Gatsby’s dream had detached from his body and become a tangible vapour, and as it diffused through the manor, we, the partygoers, naturally became intoxicated by it. For Gatsby, though, it was the opposite — watching his dream materialise only seemed to deepen his sobriety. I still recall that image of him standing alone on the balcony, like a saint, overlooking a sea of pleasure-seekers. In those moments I wore the identity of one of those pleasure-seekers, someone whom he would exchange casual banter with and never speak to again.
There were things I wanted to say to him. What could I have said? I still remember the way he was: his flushed mouth, his proud, sad eyes. I remember the day he died.
When we found him, the sun was coming down over the hills and the pool was just beginning to be suffused with blood. I remember queer little details here and there: pulling him out of the water, the waning light on his brow the colour of cheap metal. Through the hazy sheen of panic I checked his neck for a pulse, and only then was I ever close enough to notice the few strands of white starting to show on his hairline. It was all useless anyhow, useless to try, useless to do anything at all, because he was already dead, and I had the feeling that all the golden dreams and ugly messes were now laid to rest.
The next morning, I woke to the sound of cicadas, knowing that the world had been irrevocably changed.
Suddenly, everything that I once found romantic about the East became charmless and grotesque. It was if life before Gatsby’s death had all been a morphine-induced fantasy, and when he died the fantasy was abruptly broken. Once all my affairs had been sorted, I returned to the Midwest, trying to get away from the rottenness of the East, and the lingering injustice of Gatsby’s death.
I didn’t know what to do with myself. The images of my life at West Egg resurfaced in my dreams like some sort of crazy daydream, and like all dead things, Gatsby passed into the backrooms of my memory. For a while I nearly drove myself mad trying to hold all the strings inside myself together, while at the same time contending with the tremendous burden of remembrance. I knew that some part of myself remained forever lost to the phantasmagorical carnival-world of the East, and I desperately scavenged for the remaining pieces.
Gatsby never left my mind. I could hardly bear to think — the purveyor of violent delights, having met his own violent end. Yet the thought possessed me nonetheless, and did so for a while, though ultimately it was stemmed by the passage of time and I began to make my peace.
It could not have ended any other way. I now know this to be true. Perhaps even Gatsby knew—in the blank space of time that he lay afloat in the pool, all those wasted years ago—that the phone call would never come. Perhaps in the rearview mirror of his mind he saw his dream receding into the distance, the dream he had fought so stubbornly for, if only to possess for a brief, gorgeous moment. Then the moment was gone. He was alone. Tangled in the threads of time, more alone than he had ever been, except for a smudged shape in the trees, moving to shatter his wire-thin world.
All that remained of him, I still keep within me, even now.
The dust of a whispered word. The crashing tide of a first meeting.