‘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.
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 