Afterwards I’m lying there staring at the ceiling and thinking about other women that I’ve had sex with. She asks me what I’m thinking. I tell her humanity’s inevitable future is a technological evolution, a sort of digital hive mind. When we run out of space we’ll find a way to become it, shedding our mortal skins and moving as pure energy. There’s a rolling snicker and she slips her arm under my neck. I love the way you think, she says. No you don’t, I think. I count to thirty and start again. Obsolete bodies and expended energies.
I push the wad of tissue up my nose and say, ‘I said pineapple.’ Laura looks at me and shrugs, putting on a coat of indifference. I watch a blood drop drying on the sheet, its vibrancy dyeing a stiff brown stain. My tongue feels dry and swollen, the wrong kind of meat in my head. I point at the water bottle and Laura hands it to me. She tells me the music was too loud, what’s the point of using safe words in unsafe conditions. It’s a coded message. I can hear the house moving through the walls.
‘Me and Sash,’ Colt says, ‘we just want you to be happy.’ He stubs his cigarette into the sawn up remains of his steak and sighs in a paternal way that hits just shy of condescension. ‘I’m not your father,’ he says, reading my face. ‘Do whatever you want.’ I don’t know what I want. It’s a problem, it’s the problem. I try explaining this between beers, using more words than I needed and finding less meaning than I wanted, stop-starting so many times that he offers to wind me up. I tell him my gears are broken.
Second coffee, third cigarette, I’m playing one of those iPhone games where you tap on things and wait to tap again. Hours wither and die while I tap and think about what I’m not doing. Sasha texts me later in the day asking how often I think about killing myself. I’m not sure if she wants to talk about me or her. Every day, I tell her, serious or not. Glad she’s not alone, she thanks me for being miserable. I try to be grateful for her. It feels like I’m diving without a full tank of air. Tap.
Wicks has a hard-on for tapping his pencil today. Ratatat tapping against the top of his clipboard, the sound of a busted metronome trying to eke out the time for Beethoven before it dies. I can’t tell if he’s doing it on purpose or being annoying by accident. I tell him I like Mozart and he raises one of his rabbit warren brows at me. Tap tatap tap tatap tap. When I tell him not to worry he curls his gashed out little mouth and asks me about the pills. I say that they remind me of him.
He holds the pistol southpaw and quickly cocks the slide, ejecting an unspent cartridge like a downed fighter pilot. Mayday. He traces the bullet’s arc with his right hand and catches it mid flight between thumb and finger, circles down and flourishes it in front of my face. ‘I can do that ten times out of ten,’ he says with smug aplomb. ‘Imagine how easy it’d be for me to put one into you.’ Inches from my eyes the bullet mocks me, steely and resolved. I push my wrists against their bindings, hoping the ropes break before I do.
I saw a pregnant lady relishing a cigarette today, her free hand absently cradled beneath the swelling responsibility in her belly. The man beside her strode and chatted casually. I found his nonchalance bothered me as much as the chemicals coursing towards the woman’s umbilicus. Maybe he talked to her already. Maybe he’d already lost that battle. Maybe he didn’t care. She didn’t seem the type to give a fuck. Her doctor would know. A doctor will tell you that smoking is harmful then stand at the base of your womanhood waiting to catch the embodiment of your mistakes.
‘Jesus is my homeboy,’ I insisted, tap-dancing through the crowd the way a seamstress threads a needle. I bet my shoulders against the drunkards for another view of the prophet Brad. ‘He has the stigmata,’ I wailed, pointing to the sores that scourged the prophet’s palms and wept quietly in the creases of his elbows. From his cardboard enclave Brad watched, beatific, munching day old Mexican alms from a takeaway container. A half witty hand written sign propped against his feet read; Consider a Contribution: Consider Yourself Saved. The Prophet’s silence said it all. I wailed, ‘Hey Zeus.’
I find myself thinking of her, walking through a furniture store showroom floor and comparing all the comforts. Trying to find one that breathes, that won’t stain, that will last. Something that endures and matches the decor I’ve got in mind. Everything looks so good I’m scared, it’s been so long since I’ve had something new. I never know what’s going to fit my life until it becomes such a part of it that I no longer bother to notice. Sometimes I think I should just sit on the floor, wait, and make myself comfortable in my own body.
I place my thumb in her dimple and she squirms a little, unsure of how ridiculous to find me. I pluck my thumb free sideways and make a popping sound with my tongue like over inflating gum. She giggles softly with the sound of patinated velvet and I catch her eyes like emeralds set on fire, holding them as long as I dare. In the moment before the embarrassment of intimacy I push my tongue out through my lips, segueing into scrunch faced lunacy, diffusing the depth of my affections. We both laugh then, equal shares in different truths.
I keep on crying while she sighs, my head pressed hard against the porcelain. ‘Do you remember Esperanto?’ she says. I try to respond but my neck’s bent wrong and my mouth keeps making this gluggy, short-cut sound like a wail that’s been harpooned mid moan. ‘It’s dead now,’ she tells the ceiling, ‘nobody used it.’ The faucet dribbles and the air vent mutters. ‘Language is universal, only there’s no universal language.’ Somewhere behind her words is the white noise humming of electric beetles thrumming through our walls. ‘Funny, I just don’t understand you.’ My ducts feel dry.
Caleb leans back in his chair and fingers the neck of his beer, threading me with his hook. I’ve met magnets with less pull. He smiles at me with dentist perfect teeth and says, ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ which means I’ll want to, ‘but you strike me as the kind of guy who always gets the bill.’ Sure, I say, I get charged a lot but I rarely have to pay. Fisherman eyes, he slides a fifty at me over the table and points towards the bar. Somehow, under his patronage I feel like I’m the one being used.
Folded arms across my waist, she tastes the sweat upon my belly and looks at me with feline eyes. ‘I wish that we could be together,’ she says. Dulcet, matter of fact. She hums. Sinatra maybe, though who knows. Between the air con thrum and traffic’s rumbling, not to mention my heart’s fierce pumping, I can’t be sure of anything. ‘Sing,’ I ask, but she just laughs like sunflowers fornicating, coruscating facets. ‘I have a wish,’ which she confides, ‘that you were only mine. That time were dead and distant. Folded in upon itself and doled out more consistent.’
We sat on the old corduroy mess I called a couch, a third or fourth hand Salvation Army salvage, watching something indie I’d dredged up from the net, eating takeout Thai and drinking winter wine. I poured myself another glass and enquired my eyes at hers. She shook her head over the quarter serve and I didn’t fill it in, just sipped my own and soaked in the mundane. After dinner we smoked cheap tobacco cut with weed and listened to Tom Waits wail his whiskey etched Americana epitaphs, promising never to forget what it felt like to remember.
The condom she gives me doesn’t fit and I’m too embarrassed to say anything, so I just deal with it, but it keeps slipping away whenever I pull out. I end up wedging my fingers either side of my thing like a backwards version of the knife game, perpetrating the thrust instead of avoiding it. My free arm aches from balancing and I wish I’d done more push ups, ever. I can feel her body growing tense beneath me as she moves towards the edge. I see myself fading from her world, a vestigial body attached to an appendage.
A Few Short Words 