Right after I cum I’m rolling a cigarette, wondering if I got anything on my hands, and I think about jumping out the window. Five stories down and that would be it, hopefully some beautiful nothing. Game over and put down the quarters, I’m not playing anymore. Sasha told me she thinks about doing it all the time, only that something always holds her back. I told her it was hope. There’s just enough good shit that happens to make you think that life could have more good shit. Hope is a lie that you wish would come true.
I tear my shirt up climbing the metal picket fence surrounding Bates Catholic, just so I could shortcut where I’ve never been. I get to the pub too early, pouring drinks into my self-esteem before the boys even arrive. Intricate intercoms squirt retro classics into the atmosphere, the decades grinding against each other beneath an apathetic DJ’s ministrations. Sad couples and collared shirt degenerates mill together in clashing cliques. I smoke too many cigarettes and wait, picking at impatient seams every time a stranger stares and measuring my time in cider swigs. Nobody comes until I’m already drunk.
I get hooked on the weirdest things. French horror films and Japanese Chip-tune and shit like that. For a while I couldn’t stop eating those orange flavoured vitamin C tablets, the kind you give kids when they’re getting a cold. I could sit down and eat a whole jar. I get hooked on ideas too. I can’t stop chewing until there’s nothing left and I’ve pissed away all the nutrients. I’ve had time on my mind lately. Rolling it around and sucking at its surface, looking for the centre of an infinite jawbreaker. It makes my teeth hurt.
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.
When I get up she’s playing Xbox in her underwear. Sitting on the couch and distracted, an empty mug wedged into the hollow cross of her legs. Coffee, she says, trying to make it sound like an offer, not looking up from the screen. I can hear the buttons clicking while she doesn’t look at me. I pace around behind her while I wait for the kettle. Window to bench, bench to couch, couch to table, table to window. Checking into the corners with measured steps. I walk over and ease the mug from her lap.
‘What do you want to do today?’ she asks the screen.
The kettle screams.
I don’t know, I say, whatever you’re into.
Something scratches at the back of my mind, some fragmented dream wanting to come back into consciousness. I try not to think while I fix our coffees, letting a little bit of Zen seep in with the sugar and instant granules. There’s too much immediacy and the dream nags.
‘It’s nice out,’ she says.
Pieces of dreams float in and out, thoughtless nothings that fail to catch. I walk over and put the mug down in front of her and she reaches out, wrapping her hand around my forearm. Her fingers are cold and I find myself looking at the shadows of the room as though they hid an explanation.
‘I love you,’ she says, and I lean down into her kiss.
In my dream I say, I love you, and then lose some small McGuffin. I spend my life searching, asking familiar strangers for directions to places I’ve already been. Go on, they say in idle tones, and I walk on until I wake, scattering hopes around me like sand thrown at the wind.
I heard its going to rain, I say, and walk out onto the balcony.
I totally wasn’t going to go home with him. When he sat down I thought he was one of those boys with more ego than equipment, a big bow on a little package, you know. Cleo was doing her usual Claude Rains impression, so I let him stay and talk to me, figuring I’d rather be alone with company than altogether lonely. It was fun for a bit, letting him Quixote my windmill.
It’s easier to ignore a noise than succumb to a silence. After he steamed out I noticed something sad in him that sang to the sick in me. It was the eyes, like a deep green lagoon, hidden and still, that you just want to throw rocks into. I’ve got a weakness for the wounded and weird, in a totally selfish way (fuck Flo Nightingale). It probably makes me messed up but people’s twisted shit makes my brain hard. I just want to wrap myself up in it and see how long it takes to suffocate, like drowning in one of those blanket shawls they sell across the late night TV wasteland.
So, after a few chivalry inspired cocktails I told him he could take me home.
He held my hand on the cab ride over and didn’t even try to make out with me, which was sweetly depressing, not knowing if it was nerves or patience. His place was one of those apartments grown in the remains of a plantation mansion that the invisible rich carve into single servings for multiple rents. It would have made a swell bordello before it got dissected and had its nooks stuffed with bachelor types, imported students and low income independents. Still, it had a rusted out opulence that was sexy in a decayed sort of way.
We had to go right to the back and up an infinity of stairs to get into his unit. The door was cut into the guts of a built-in wardrobe, it was like walking into Narnia if it had been written by Kerouac, with an eerie Spartan starkness to it that made me feel exposed, as though I had skinned his personality and was looking the intimate muscles of his life. There was kind of nothing there. The whole thing would have screamed serial killer if it wasn’t for the books. They were mounded everywhere, tucked up in corners and piled along the walls, stacks of them higher than my head and neatly disordered enough that it took the sting out of the Dahmer decor.
I lapped the room looking for something like peace of mind amidst the indecent Dewey Decimal wallpaper, a thirty second prowl that only left me restless. It’s hard to get comfortable without any comforts and I wasn’t sure what to do, which was new for me. I gave in and sat on the bed, it wasn’t a big step. I guess that’s the joy of studio living, the sections of your life aren’t even far enough apart to be considered walking distance.
Fiddling with a laptop upon a plinth of yet more books, he asks me over his shoulder if I’d like another drink. Sure, I say, as The XX start to play, and he tells me he’s got scotch or water. I take the malted option without sighing and ask to have it iced. Plumping myself into his pillows, I build a little fort away from my hesitations and watch him mine the ice from the kind of snack size fridge they stock in hotel rooms. The drink comes to me in an old jar and he shrugs without apologizing, telling me he doesn’t really entertain. It’s not much of an explanation, but the scotch was smooth and made excuses for him.
-through the wrong end of a kaleidoscope. One of the Davids hits me again and then I’m on the ground, a weight on my chest so heavy that it feels like my ribs are being pushed through the concrete into the hard-packed soil beneath. Fifteen grand, he’s saying, fifteen grand. Over and over until the words have no meaning.
‘I don’t have it,’I say.
Laura looking at me from the kitchen of our shitbox redbrick apartment. Oil fire eyes summarizing years of disappointment. Her long dark hair hanging about her face in lanky clots. Mascara streaks and unwashed dishes. Somewhere else a baby cries, uncared for. Laura’s crooked smile, a smothering.
‘I can get it for you,’ I say.
Floating ribs sunk into organs. Something creaks and brittle parts are being stressed. The Davids coalesce above me. One man, larger than possible, viewed at this treacherous angle. Baring lupine teeth, he snarls, I want what’s mine. Angry perspiration planing down his face, opalescent beads caught under fluorescents. I can almost hear them sizzle as they drop onto my skin. I want what’s mine, he says again.
‘I need more time,’ I whimper.
The crying stops and Laura barely rocks, like leaves anticipate the wind. Her lightly shaking head and a sighing in the silence soughing through the house. I don’t know how much longer, she falters. I move to her for comfort. My hands have only ever hurt when held in other places. Amateur dancers, they only know the rhythms of her skin. We stay like this for hours as the minutes fade away. I listen to the pleading as her words vibrate upon my cheek. I need. I need. I need.
‘Ok,’ I whisper.
Two days, he barks.
Today, she pleads.
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.
A Few Short Words 