After the nurse calls her in I’m stuck sitting with Dana’s stepfather. There isn’t much for either of us to say in the bloated sterile silence. Part of me expected to detect a seething anger from the man, some sudsy fury carved out of a telemovie melodrama or maybe something more cartoonish but certainly palpable to the point of being very nearly visible. Instead he wore a sheet of nothing coated with small checkboxes and faintly drawn labels that listed normally gratis human manoeuvres; fatherly concern, conciliatory hug, softly stern but knowing look. Very few of them were checked.
Graham, suffused with marijuana smoke, reads his lines from cards held in the ether. ‘The truth has never been real,’ he says. The cumulous pall built about his skull grants the manufactured mysticism of a Himalayan diorama, peaked ideas clotted with cotton wool clouds. ‘What is shown is shaped by the hands that reveal it. What is known is flexible enough to snap.’ The words fall out of him with strange waylaid purpose, a bundle of skydiving knives, inevitably swift and dangerously misdirected, building momentum and heading towards a pointless incision. ‘I mean, have you even read the data?’
Trouble breeds in the miasma of awareness. It’s a flyer for indigenous rights. I show it to Mikey and he cocks a lazy fist by his head like a slot machine arm. ‘Powah,’ he says, grinning in his iceberg way. When he drops his arm I wait for the coins to spill out but he just clicks his tongue with mechanical emptiness. ‘We shouldn’t celebrate diversity. People wouldn’t bothered if they didn’t know they were different.’ Ignorance is bliss and knowledge is power. I tell him somebody said that but he already doesn’t care, telling me ‘I get it.’
Sebastian’s decrepit little face was like a hollow object that people pumped their desires into, inflating it into some bloated resemblance. He loved it too, running around with his valve primed, ready to be filled up by fatuous gasbags and high floating lowlives. It was an effective symbiosis of defective personalities, each party weighed and lifted of their excess and Sebastian desperately trying to absorb some character. Poor little guy, irradiating himself in the glow of those around him, face contorted with the effort, and taking on such poisons. One day he will pop, engorged on other people’s lives.
Dana puts her hand on my knee and looks at the tip of her cigarette, a yellow red corona in the dim night. There’s the sound of evening bustle aching wearily over the hills, tired commuters and the wheels of industry, endless trains with spliced punctualities that blend the rumble of their schedules. There’s no wind and the air feels one step removed, not coy nor cautious but aloof, distant in the way of oblivion, had it cause to notice I would be as dust. Dana squeezes, biting at my jeans with her nails, and looks into the light.
Posters and stickers mark the walls in history, if I run my hands across them they will tell me a story in the way of Parisian cobblestones. The time before me is fascinating. I try to picture the establishment of things, the scope becomes so vast as to be vague. My eyes start to hurt from looking into it. I squint, breathe, and wonder briefly how to proceed. Caleb looks at my profile with defiant silence and scratches his balls. Because I’ve noticed, I don’t say anything. I drink my water and nod, agreeing with all that has happened.
When Sarah talks I picture a knife made out of glass being pushed between my ribs. What seeps forth is a bloodless letting of sins, oozing black and oily thick. Each utterance angles the blade perfectly. The pain is fierce though administers a certain lightness in the wake of its incision. I hated her once, before I learned to love the sharpness there. In time, no doubt, the edges will dull, the sins will build again in calloused pores, slathered onto my skin and ground upon with pumice into vicious mettle. Then the real blood will start to flow.
The cashier gets to sit in a little chair and think about nothing while he pushes my items over the scanner like a cyborg metronome. Toilet paper, soap, coffee. Rough night, I tell him. Something sparks inside the black part of his eye, a dying star at the back end of a telescope, dead before it’s seen. ‘Twenty four sixty,’ his stripped out voice with all inflections sanded off. I hold up my card and smile awkwardly into his abyssal face. There’s no echo. He says, ‘do you need cash?’ and I say, thanks, but I should have enough.
Papier mâché honesty, delicately finished in porcelain and poise, she wears herself like a mask and nobody notices. Such life draped upon her shoulders, where for once it glimmers, and nobody asks how she got it, though she aches to be revealed. From behind herself she smiles and sadness pours out, pooling at her feet and staining the ground. Revelling in revolt, she shreds the world with her eyes to let the ribbons float. When the truth finally leaves her, it’s light and swift and devastating, yet flits about unnoticed. Everybody nods and says it simply can’t be true.
They’re not other voices, they’re my voice. They don’t sound like me, they sound like what I sound like on the inside of my head, speaking in the narration tones I’m all twist-wired up to trust. I don’t know if other people get that, probably they do. And they say all sorts of shit that I couldn’t possibly have thought. Fathomless dark, so dark and playing constantly in surround, only wrong somehow and static in the round like radio in vacuum, too loud without sound though and it makes it hard to think. God, sometimes I just wish I could be alone. Proper alone, they way silence feels unheard. I want to sit somewhere and be empty. I can see it, myself by the beach, sat up high in the dunes with my legs folded below me and the tree line running at my back. Even the waves are reverent, their flagellations hushed into the sand and soaked up inside the earth, the waters of the world behind it backed upon the sky so too perfect shades of blue kiss out a horizon. I sit in this, amidst all this, and I am empty. Nothing touches me, not so much as air disturbs the tranquility of my skin, and I do not need it, I am sustained by my own absence. Removed, so far removed that I float. Inside and out, scaled to infinity inside existence, sealed by convergence in the void of all things, I am absorbed absolutely. The purity, such nothing. And then the sharpening of the knives, they tell me I must die. The sky withers and the waves start to squall, sand burns to glass before an ever screaming maw and the blackness widens its breach upon the distance. Consumption all consuming, they take me apart with their presence and I feel so isolated. So alone with myselves, caged in paralysis by the binding of my insides. I can’t do anything from here and though I sit with a passive face, I die inside in myriad and the screaming could be mine but it’s impossible to tell when all our voices sound the same.
Diana talks to me as a splinter gliding across my heart. There’s nothing sharp as emptiness, high contrast edges. Standing in comfort even under duress because paired is right and more to tame the boundaries fight. That darkness though, frontier hunter, seeping in from hunger, inevitable, so they say. And the splinter landing, stuck with improbable weight, doesn’t go aweigh but sinks, forced to rock. Singing sirens out of reach, some doomed cantor confided and the poison supplied worked in candour, assuring you good night. In time you’ll learn to die, where nothing, sharpened emptiness, will wait for you.
They told me to. I don’t know, I didn’t really want to do it. Sometimes I have these other thoughts, ones that aren’t mine, telling me what to do. I mean they sound like me and I know they’re just in my head, but that’s worse I think. They turn up without warning and say things I don’t agree with, hounding me with torturously precise intimacy, and I know they have to be just as real as I am because my voice is in here too. If they don’t exist, how can I think therefore I am? Who’s left?
She doesn’t look at me much while she’s talking but there’s lots of casual touching, bumping her shoulder into mine and that sort of thing. It’s endearing, even if it’s a bit sad and transparent. ‘I don’t have much luck with guys,’ she says in tone of incantation. Her fingers graze upon the back of my hand, indelicate and openly hungry. ‘They’re never as nice as they seem.’ I tell her I’ve seen, ‘wolves dressed as sheep, your men,’ and lambs throwing themselves under the tooth, both prey and predation. ‘Do you want to eat?’ she says, ‘I’m starving.’
Through the distance of space and the closeness of technology we discuss the dissipation of relations that never were. I tell myself I did the right thing, then apologise to her for not making any promises. Thinking of the future and ignoring the past, I tell her, I don’t want anybody to get hurt. She calls me an asshole, it’s true enough so that I pin it to my heart beside my other still-beating disappointments, a sodden general’s medal array. None for valour. I’ll a see you later, she says and then it’s done, because nothing ever happened.
Dinah yanked the last hair free and took it between the thumb and ring finger of her left hand. She set the tweezers down, held the hair in front of her and looked right past it to the truth within the mirror. ‘I always get so red,’ she said. Flicking at the iPad cradled in her yoga posed legs, Juliette didn’t look up but stiffened slightly and pulled in a breath, ‘It’s your skin babe. Porcelain marks easy, but it’ll fade.’ Dinah blew the hair away and wished, wondering if an eyebrow would work as well as an eyelash.
A Few Short Words 