Kaori looks at me with abject innocence and something wistful I can’t pin down. I wish I knew how to talk to you, I tell her. I wish I could share something of myself with you and you with me. ‘Wakarimasen,’ she says, but I don’t understand. We listen to the cicadas chirrup for a while and I can’t help laughing at their joke. She smiles and pats my hand, a gestural lament that carries something I still can’t grasp. I want to speak, but Kaori presses a finger to my lips and opens her palm beneath the horizon.
It’s a strange expanse of introspection, but I get bummed sometimes that I haven’t killed myself yet, like it’s just another unrealised dream. Problem is, I was born with the ambition of a much more talented person, somewhere out there is a should be physicist blissfully calculating tax returns and enjoying my ignorance. I feel indentured to an amorphous personal dissatisfaction, a sense that whatever I accomplish will never be as good as I know it could be were I not me. Not that I want to be someone else, just that I’m not the me I never am.
The gap is insurmountable. I don’t even speak, knowing the space is too thick and vast to carry meaning, all she might hear is some mewling that won’t even carry the conscious fidelity of echo. I lay a hand sometimes, in opportune occasions, upon bared skin betrayed by movement, always so soft and impenetrable. I’m allowed to feel then and the joy of it is dark enough to lose myself inside. I would cry out, to be chastised for my childishness, but it would only bother and I love her too much to dare disturb the wall she’s built.
Lilly came barreling up and threw herself on my lap. I had to start tickling her, it’s in the mandate, so I got right in under her armpits and made her squeal. It’s a gorgeously ugly sound, giggles and gasps mixed with abridged shrieks, the most pure thing I’ve ever experienced. I recorded it on my phone once, so I could keep her close. It used to be that I would listen to it whenever I was down, but I don’t have to anymore, it’s enough knowing that she’s in there, her innocence digitised and protected from the future.
I wish my skin were hers. I pry beneath her wrist, slipping my nails into subdermal territory. She doesn’t flinch. I think I’m not there so I squirm. The pain she notices, an irritation. ‘What are you doing,’ she says. Love, I say, love, over and over until the words are in her veins. Love, love, love, love. ‘Stop,’ she says, ‘you’re full of shit.’ And I let her say it because of smiles, but she doesn’t realise how much I give away and what flows in to fill the void. Love, I say, and listen for a pulse.
‘Nah, man,’ Jessie says, ‘it’s not like that. She still loves you, of course she does, she just wants you to love you too.’ He rubs at his nose idly and watches the other patrons mill. ‘It’s gotta be hard for her,’ he says, ‘I mean you’re pretty fucking annoying.’ Anyone else might have gotten under my skin, but I know what he means and how he means it. I’m told loving me is like living with an unscratchable itch. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ he tells me, ‘I’ll always love you, just ease up on the torment and so will she.’
I’m terrified I’ll never be anything, I tell him, that I’m not capable or special or anything and I’ll destroy my life pining after somebody I’ll never be. Damien puts his hand up, a palm out pause, and starts rummaging through his desk, overturning papers, shuffling drawers, and rifling with a bandit’s abandon. I let it last long enough to appreciate the theatrics before asking for the punchline. ‘I’m looking for fucks,’ he says, ‘I swear I had some for you but it looks like I’m fresh out.’ His words sound sincere but I listen to his eyes instead.
I’m on my knees at the foot of the bed staring at a point above Shelly’s head where the window moulding’s loose. ‘I don’t understand why you’re so fucked up,’ she says. ‘You’re too smart to be so fucked.’ Her voice sounds like pressed flowers. I tell her, being able to describe a hole doesn’t mean you can climb out of it. ‘But why’d you have to tell me,’ she says, ‘we were doing great.’ Inside the crack is a darkness that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the room, I crawl towards it until there’s nothing of me left.
He looks at me with an almost destitute seriousness and sighs longer than lungs have a right. ‘I want to fuck them all,’ he says, almost aquiver. ‘I can’t help it.’ Tense to the point of pain. ‘It’s killing me. It’s destroying me. I can’t see them as people anymore. I can’t see people, just fuck things and the rotting blackness inside me.’ And after, I ask, when you’ve fucked a thing? ‘Nothing,’ he says, ‘beautiful nothing for long enough to notice, then horrors again.’ He closes his eyes and looks at something I’ll never see. ‘I feel monstrous.’
Caleb doesn’t look at me while he talks, it’s like he can’t spare the processing power. ‘I’ve automated my relationships,’ he tells me. ‘I started by scheduling updates, you know, cute little memes and shit, fluff. So I designed a chatbot that integrates with all my mail and social media. It’s got to the point now that the thing is even picking out gifts for me. It’s got better taste than I do.’ I ask him what happens when he goes out on dates and he just shakes his head. ‘I’m not doing this to meet people,’ he says.
The lily’s leaves are browning. I don’t know how to help. I’ve moved it in and out of sunlight and watered it more or less. It doesn’t want to thrive. I understand. It’s old now, half a decade at least, the roots must be knotted and cramped against the terracotta hull. Does it imagine there’s more to be had while it curls against its cage and feeds upon itself? Does it know open fields and boundless soil? I’ve never said anything, but the knowledge must be inside it, the pent potential of all living things trying to live more.
There was glass in his cereal, so his wife wrote a letter and won them a settlement, enough feed for the debtors and moderate respite. One morning after, they woke to find the floor covered in shale. She reported it to the police but they were dubious and unhelpful, though tested the couple for substances at her insistence. His results were negative, hers were complicated. When her water broke nine months later they rushed to the hospital. After a length of agony and effort, all that she could produce was an occluded amniotic sack filled with nails and sand.
That was the moment I loved him the most I ever would. Drenched in his own sugary cynicism, with just enough smile eroding the sneer to make him seem beautiful. Things would get difficult later and I knew it, but the future was something that happened in Blade Runner and I didn’t much care to see it. All the times I’d ever need fed into each other like film moving through a pinhole camera. I would have loved myself back then if I could’ve been me now. And him, if I saw him, I’d know there was no future.
Standing there in Batman’s silhouette, an itch over my skin. Her laughter saws against the night, sharp and disquieting. I slip the cowl off and sit beside her on the bed. The stiff synthetic mask, cold clutched in my hands, is dead now emptied, caved into a rictus grin. Smirking, as if my intentions mock me. ‘I thought you’d like it.’ She softens her laugh and lets it taper so that it slips away soundlessly, leaving mirth and supplely dimpled humours in its place. Expressions play acting emotions with silent cinema grace while searching for a genre of reaction.
Gritting his teeth, he watched it draw closer. Watched the monstrosity drag itself across the cold linoleum floor. Watched it working at words through a palpating mess of blood and gore, what once was a mouth. He listened. A raspy hiss, a sound like cutter but more familiar, slurred and husky, sickeningly percussed by a slippery snick of teeth on bone. It was trying to say his name. He tightened his grip, shut his eyes and brought the axe down hard against his wife’s freckled neck, a mottled target. ‘I’ll always love you, Sunshine,’ he whispered into the silence.
A Few Short Words 