Love - Lorn
He tilted his head back, drained the rum from the glass and swallowed four morphine tablets. Felt it creep in slowly at first, the altered state of infection, a slippery mind.
Sleep came in a half gesture; eyes half closed, rapid eye movement sleep began, but his lids remained slightly open. The fever caught and his mind, no longer his own, played the movie in real time.
******
She paused, letting out the slightest moan. Their bodies flowing like bloody – river water into one ocean. Minds operating on the same basic function; fuck, fuck…all they do is fuck. To make it all go away. Make the Rayn stop. Dry the tears. Hold back the unsaid truths that now claw to replace with lies.
“What lies,” she asked.
“Never mind,” came his abrupt reply.
“Baby… tell me the truth.”
“I’d love to darling, but I haven’t the slightest idea anymore.”
Holding him close, she steadied his head on her bosom, caressed his cheek, lips, and exposed ear with her soft, tiny hand.
He paused, brooding silently while her electric finger tips traced lines that burned his skin like a laser cutting scars. He imagined by morning, to wake and find his face hideous with scars.
“I knew the idea of truth, once, before you and I took shape in real time; perhaps before me and anyone… when the thought of it mattering, occurred to me or shook me to my core…” he paused, drew a deep drag from his cigarette, “before she came and left her unrelenting, growing mark within me. She remains, untouched and very alive from the years fed by my ignorance. I am far too pitiful to love you right, if at all; too wasted in my own decay to set things straight just yet.”
Sobbing, she pulled him tighter as though to pull him beneath her skin. In those moments of truth she could envelope him, as she wanted nothing more than to absorb, steal him from his own misery, and let him fester safely inside of her own; sucking him softly into her long dead yet burning womb.
“To hell with her,” she cried, “to hell with you and truth.”
Dropping tears like enormous rain drops onto his face.
Stuttering now between sobs, looking, eyes burning holes through him, she said, “I’ll take our love, our sickness to our death… or mine.”
Focusing through the barrage of salty tears with one squinting eye; he noticed the perfection of her nipple, the absolute supple beauty of her breast. He could see pictures as a child growing through the stages of any boy, seeing a naked breast for the first time and knew that hers were the ones every boy dreamt of having near them.
The remnants of spoiled – spent desire emanated from the sex between her legs, tickling the hair, as it danced in his nostrils. When she spoke, he failed to catch the weight of the words released. Instead, he was lost in the magic she held for him, the dreams and fantasies from boy to manhood. Total ignorance of her intent, thinking idly of every fight or argument they ever had, knowing sex would come if they could simply stop the slide… he spoke harshly and evenly.
“Love my darling! You do not love me…” he allowed a second or two to pass in order for this to sink in, “No more than I love you. The days will pass and you’ll find another, you always do. I too will rest my weariness elsewhere, lest we die here, strangled in the desperation of our sickness. Being here, we live in an illusion of where we want to be, that it is right here in the simplicity of lust masked as love. We’ll never wish to be here again, once we find ourselves free, instead we’ll wander with heavy hearts and twisted minds through the maze of the lost world outside of our seemingly settled personas.”
His words bore deep into her, as though he had taken the hunting knife she once held on him to keep him there, and he slammed it through her breast plate striking the heart with such an impact as to freeze her instantly in the shock and reality of death. The dream she had clung too; normalcy, belonging, loving, and beauty had been dismantled in a fleeting second with his strong, indifferent voice smashing the eardrums of his desperate lover. He destroyed the very dream, he had helped her cultivate in his moments of awkward kindness. The monstrosity of his actions was not lost on himself. She felt the coldness and it trickled down to him through her touch.
She looked down at him, eyes shining with recognition. Though the rage was rising inside of her, and the pain was near unbearable in her; she could see the tears welling and slithering down his face, which told her all she needed to know about the truth. Allowed her to know without question that his resolve had been set and he would soon be gone.
Slowly the curtains brought shivers of light with the dawning of mourn upon their weariness and lost days. His eyes found an inability to remain open; a burning behind, around, and within them. His head lay resting in her lap. He could not see her face any longer, as his eyes pinned themselves closed as though someone had sewn them shut with needle and a dark thread, his mind raced with the sensation of the thread being woven through his lids… while her eyes burnt with a fire he would never again see.
He woke slowly, eye lids clinging to one another as he attempted to separate and pull the tightened threads apart. His eyes fixated on the ceiling yet could not focus right away. He imagined he was dreaming as the once white stucco ceiling seemed to be covered in blood red splatter. Dreaming, he shook his head to clear the cobwebs from the morphine, weed, and rum. Still the ceiling was splattered in what was clearly blood. He attempted to raise his head from Dawn Rae’s motionless lap and splayed across the wall behind the bed was more dark blood filled with what looked like bone and flesh… his brain began to focus quickly now, as recognition flooded him.
The gun sat clenched between her upper and lower teeth, portions of her upper lip had been caught in the slide when the semi-automatic handgun ejected the spent round onto the bed near our bodies. Most of her head from the ears back was gone. The pieces of flesh and wash of blood were supplemented with clumps of wasted brain matter as he examined the ghastly scene before him for lack of anything tangible to grasp onto - he sat in stillness, staring at her lifeless corpse; soaking in the blood that covered the bed, the room, his body and his mind. The front door crashed in on him, followed by loud and hostile voices…
*****
“Fuck…” he shot up in bed.
Breathing heavy and thick with panic. He lay back down and stared at the ceiling.
She rolled over and touched his shoulder gently.
“What is it baby?”
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he said, his eyes filled with tears.
“Again?”
“…yes…” beneath his eye lids the water welled finally sliding down his cheeks like snakes as he sat back up in bed and looked around the same room.
“Oh baby…”
She moved to him, kissed him softly on the forehead, and stroked his hair. She ran her fingers across his ears, mouth, and face; whispering, “It’s okay. It’s okay,” over and over again.
His body tensed and grew clammy.
“I need you to leave,” his chest heaved, “it’s not ok, and it won’t be ok, not now, not ever…” His breathing began to slow and steady, “I need you to go and now please…”
He was shaking, shivering deep beneath the skin, and his body grew ice cold. Her hands and arms, feeling the change wash through him, released their hold and she moved away.
“I’m…sorry. I need to be alone.”
Her face showed the pain that crashed in on her entire being. Her lips formed a sagging, tight pout, the muscles in her jaw locked, and her forehead burrowed into deep cavernous lines to illustrate the knotting in her stomach he knew was there. Of course, the tears welled and she shook her head; trying to clear away the images she knew were in his mind. Those that now writhed and slithered within her own.
“I’m sorry too,” she whispered, looking down at her naked body, which now appeared gruesome before her eyes. It often did when they were finished, or better said when he was finished with her for that time. She closed her eyes and imagined him being able to get past everything and let her in, but she knew that all she got was all that she would be getting and in the end it was better than what she was used too. The beatings, the yelling, the breaking of a once stoic wall and shell, turned her into an open, raw wound walking on tip toes through the rest of her life.
She felt his helping hand though, through his brutal honesty and genuine kindness when he could show such a thing. It was these moments however, when she wondered if perhaps he would make it another day. How could he live this way she wondered as she unrolled her balled up panties and slid them up her smooth as silk thighs until they were snug and in place around her high waist.
She moved from the bed, as he watched her calmly. She eyed him nervously as she gathered the remainder of her clothes and went into the bathroom. He could hear her sobs from his propped up position in bed. Instinctively, he squeezed and groped his partially stiff cock, but the tears would not stop and nothing resembling sex flooded his body. He rubbed his face and buried it in the pillow. The flow of tears ebbed and stopped with the heavy burning left tormenting his skin. He got up, put sweats, a sweater, and socks on. He made some coffee and lingered anxiously in the living room smoking a cigarette quickly with deep inhalations.
The image of Dawn Rae flashed through his mind once more... then she appeared from the bathroom, hesitated briefly at the doorway; she looked into his eyes, smiled, flung her arms around him and began kissing his soft lips. He held her awkwardly; kissed her as passionately as he could muster, but all that spread was cold empty bloodless history.
“Call me later…”she said. He looked as though he would not answer. “Okay?” She asked as she stroked his face and wiped away the returning tears.
“I’ll try. I’m sorry.”
“I know.”
She laughed, pulled away, and as she closed the door he could hear the cries start towards the top of the stairs. Dawn Rae’s picture settled heavily into the back of his brain. The fever, with threat of returning in force, found reprieve. He locked both doors quickly before either one of them changed their minds and looked back.
He sat down at his computer, waiting for the coffee to finish brewing when he heard a knocking at the door. He looked up with a start, as though he had been in the middle of something, although his hands still rested quietly on his lap. The coffee maker buzzed beneath the knocking. He stared blankly at the half filled white page on the screen in front of him. When came, another knock, louder than the first. He swung around in the swivel chair and glared towards the door. He walked to the coffee maker and stopped the frantic buzzing. The knock repeated several times, heavier with each wall shuddering clack.
Perhaps it was a neighbor, he thought? Perhaps it was the asshole from upstairs, whom walked like an elephant although he was short enough to be considered a dwarf and was also none too fat either! David grimaced loudly. He was in no mood for that little fucker’s bitching about music that never played above a whisper in his small apartment.
He got up from the computer desk, hissing as he walked to the door, looking through the peephole, he saw no one. The asshole was woken up because of the buzzing and then, as it ceased, he decided not to speak to him, deciding it was not worth another fray. He looked again to make sure; there was no one there; so he turned and started to walk away.
The knock thundered, shaking his spine from the root of his lower back to the base of his skull. He closed his eyes and saw her face, gun clenched between teeth and he shuddered, racking his bones so he could hear them rattle together. Blood ran cold; skin tingled, as though on fire – as though he had bathed in acid from the inside out. His stomach locked, twisted, and released a horrid gas into his bowels and out his tightly puckered asshole. He steadied himself on his feet. Propped his hand on the wall for balance and took in deep breaths to fill his lungs, which had stopped taking air for some time.
His stomach settled and the smell of coffee brought him to the kitchen. He poured a cup and sat on the couch, unable to look at the computer screen, which sat mocking him to his left. Instead he chose to stare at the blank television; the large surface reflected his squatting, hairy faced image back at him. Sipped his coffee, he felt her coming again so he sat back on the couch, closed his eyes, and let the terrible tape play all the way through.
There she was; half lying flat, half propped broken against the wall. Still naked with his head atop her lap awkwardly from the impossible contortions that her dead figure had taken. There was blood everywhere, as two officers pulled him moaning away from the bed and corpse.
He was trying to clutch her. Trying to revive her but she was gone. When the police first entered the bedroom, they caught him trying to push the brains and matter back into her head. He gave her mouth to mouth, chest compressions, and more mouth to mouth. He cried for her but they pulled and her blood had become the hue of his skin.
He was naked, covered in blood, and they simply clothed him before putting the handcuffs on. His repeated pleas of innocence and to be cleaned went ignored. They violently hauled him from the apartment. They finally broke him, as they stuffed him heavily into the backseat of the cruiser. They told him he was screwed. He laughed at them. He cried and laughed at the same time. They thought he had gone insane. They told him so. He laughed harder. He told them about their qualifications to diagnose anything beyond the syphilis they had given each other. He laughed and they hit him as hard as they could. Hesitate, and then repeat punch.
At the police station they beat him more. They lied to him. They held him down and promised things they could not deliver. They promised him it would be alright if he told them what he had done. He tried. He told them he did not love her. He told them that it was not what he had done but instead what he could not do.
They laughed at him and they beat him some more because of their inability to understand. Because they thought he was being clever. They thought he had the capacity to be clever in such a time. They thought he was a monster. They kept him awake forty-eight hours thus. They wanted to know about the gun. They wanted to know how he could have slept through it. He told them sarcastically about the need for gun registration in order to have a gun and how they could wipe their ass with his permit. They hit him. He explained the morphine for when he needed sleep beyond consciousness. They beat him for his perfect lies. He wanted death but it deserted him. They watched him constantly and left him sitting isolated in a safe cell dressed in nothing but a paper jump suit. No belt, no ties, nothing in which he could strange himself with should he decide to join his voluptuous dead girlfriend as she had come to be known through the interrogation.
They told him it was suicide. He laughed and told them to fuck themselves. He told them it was a broken heart and nothing else. The gun was simply the tool she chose to end the suffering.
And then the doctors came and went as they observed him. They were worried about what he would do. He did not. He could not do what they imagined he should. He took his time and then he passed their tests. He wrote them off as sideshow attractions for children and gave the answers that all standard psychological tests require for a passing grade. He laughed at their “good intentions” and their high educations. He poked fun at the very existence of such tests when played on the borderline sociopath. He mocked them, and cursed them for trying to manipulate him into submission. He swore that they would pay no matter how they treated him now. He would not forget what they had done.
He was in the newspapers for weeks.
Lawyers wanted money from the city over his mistreatment. He laughed because lawyers are the opposite evil to stupid cops if there is such a thing as evil existing on polar opposites of the same pendulum. It stands to reason however, due to organized religion being one of the first examples of ultimate evil. What! Ask the victims of crusades, oh wait, you can’t not many of those poor fuckers lived. Mind you, the victims of the Jihad experienced much the same thing.
Regardless of his personal opinions and half baked ideas, he decided to turn the useful, lying – blood hounds loose with no restraints. They gave him lots of money and he laughed. He wanted them to hurt like he did, but instead he got paid and they went on not giving a shit. She was in the ground and he was newly rich. Life is not fair. Death is even less fair. For those who are dead anyways.
He blinked his eyes and saw the television sitting in front of him. He sipped from the coffee cup and closed his eyes again. She was gone. The door was locked from the inside - always from the inside. He played with the idea of being able to shut her out, but he knew that she held all the cards.
He sipped coffee and lit another cigarette. He moved to the computer and sat in the chair, setting the coffee cup down on the desk next to the monitor. The ashtray was full and coming over the edges when he pushed the burning butt into it. He blinked, thought of emptying it, but left it sitting on the desk spewing ash and burnt tobacco over its edges.
He stared at the screen. The words were starting to come now, but too fast. They strung themselves together like puzzle pieces only to flutter apart when he closed his eyes to focus on the keys in front of him. He stared at the last sentence that finished page 236. There was a moment when I loved her. One moment in a year of our affair. He read it over and over again. Connect the fucking thought, he thought… but still, the words moved too fast. He grew nauseous by the speed in which they illuminated inside his mind. They swam in circles, danced, broke apart and spewed behind his eyes like lava bursting from a volcano.
He stood up and walked to the medicine cabinet. Satisfied, he opened the cabinet and selected the bottle of Valium. He opened the bottle and took two, one hundred milligram tablets. He ran the water in the tap, put the pills in his mouth, and drank from the faucet with his lips. He stared into the mirror briefly, “fucking stupid druggy,” he thought; then he turned and walked away chuckling, “who cares, it means nothing. You must write you scared bastard, write something down or you will die.”
He retrieved his coffee cup from the desk, refilled it, and sat back at the computer. The page stared at him wile he smoked a cigarette and sipped from his coffee cup. It took a few minutes but the words, like puzzle pieces, finally came together and started to hold long enough to type them one after the other forming what could be construed as coherent sentences. His eyes adjusted to the light and shape of the picture formed. He cracked his knuckles and ran his long and skinny, shaking fingers over the keyboard without looking. He started typing, never looking down. Instead he watched the words string together and a joy, much like one’s first breath after being submersed beneath the water for a long period time, filled his body clearing the smog and cloud of death he felt mere moments before.
The Valium did not hurt I am sure, but he did not care one bit… so why should I? I am just a recorder for him after all is said and done. His fingers were in full glide and he was alive for the first time that day. He loved those moments as though he would never see them again, each was treated like the last he would be given and his focus was beyond intensity. This was how he took the beatings, took the dying, the death, and all the criticism. His focus was on something no one could take away, on something only he and God had any hands on.
He could not stop to look. He could not imagine the words escaping him. He could not live with it. The pressure mounted and the words flowed like a winding river. Turning past rocks disguised as brief disbelief and the shore line that sat as disgust, reached out to dislodge the words he knew to be true. Fast enough to cramp fingers yet slow enough to disregard the mounting pain. The obstacles were unable to thwart the perfection of his fingers. He did not type so much as play the keys like a piano.
There was a moment when I loved her; one brief and fleeting in a year of our affair.
The light shone through the curtains with razor sharp slices, cutting slits across her tanned bare skin. Her short but muscled right leg was crossed over in front of her left as she lay on her side facing the table where I sat writing and often watching. The precise scars that ran down the inside of her left thigh stood out in pale contrast to the rest of her skin, as though she had cut them immediately before going down for a nap. Her right arm was folded under her breasts and her left arm was tucked beneath her head and pillow. Her lips formed a sedated smile. Her eyes fluttered beneath the soft skin of her lids.
The soft breath of her sleeping could be heard within the sound of Beethoven playing throughout my mind.
I had never seen her so beautiful; the tautness of her skin, the lines of her muscles cut so deeply down her side, arms, and legs, the lazy crook of her faint smile, the perfect round ass, and the intoxicating smell emanating from between her legs.
It was as though she posed for me in sleep. As though she knew that I would grow distracted from my writing and steal glances at her with my lustful eyes. Unable to rest again on paper, I would falter in resolve and go to her. I would take her and she would moan in a half awakened state, pulling me deeper instinctively and without words.
I sat watching.
There was no sound but her breathing and the music playing through my ear phones. I took them out of my ears. The air hung motionless in the cabin. The smell of us from hours of over – stimulation and depravation filled the space between her and I. It was sweet like honey and somewhat stale at the same time. Her breathing was shallow and slow. My pace quickened with every inhalation I stole from the air.
I lit another joint and took her in.
I was submerged in her moment of perfection. I imagined for the first and only time that I loved her more then I would ever love another. That in fact I knew what love might be. I imagined that my love for her would carry me for as long as we had together. I wanted that moment to become eternity.
I fought every urge to wake her and let her consume me once more in coitus.
I watched.
I cried as I was reminded that our time would not last. Knowing that she would wake again and all that lingered between us would surface and destroy this image of her. This image of me that lived and loved her. I loathed her waking, despised the need to talk. I envied those who were ignorant of such devices as emotion and the need to respond to their calling. Perhaps the moment of pure love would exist beyond our days together, but the moment, this moment would fail me in my precise inability to live.
I went to her and stripped myself naked. I spooned her from behind, moved her hair from her neck and kissed her softly; my erection pressing on the small of her back woke her with a gentle moan.
She took me in and it was gone. I was no more.
LOVE: a feeling of passionate emotion for another.
He stared at the words finishing the novel and lowered his head. The tears bounced from his glasses and ran onto is shirt. He looked up, moved the mouse to the save data icon, and pressed it. Two hours had gone by since sitting down to write. It was noon and he had nothing really to do but kill time.
He rolled a few joints while watching Taxi Driver. The Valium slowed every movement of his brain and body. Each joint took a life time to roll.
He sipped his coffee and wondered where he would go. He did not know but knew only that he had to get out. With the hostility of memory locked in him, he needed to walk from here to there and mingle silently with the human race at some point or he would suffer from shock when work came around again.
He had slept and screwed away four days and now he needed to move. His torpor was lifting but threatening at the same time to take him fully and leave nothing but the shell he lived in if he remained isolated.
He paced from the living room to the bedroom, into the bathroom, and then the kitchen and back into the living room. Stood and watched the movie for a second and then went into the bathroom for a shower; dropped his clothes on the floor, stepped into the tub, and closed the curtain. The water ran hot immediately. It was hard water. The water burned his skin but he stood beneath it, cleansing the night from him; the remnants of his desire. He toweled off, hung the towel over the curtain rod, and went into the bedroom.
Naked, he stood in front of the tall, thin mirror and traced his hands down his muscular, scarred frame. The scars that sat in a perfect pattern on his chest and stomach seemed new. They seemed as though they were growing ready to release the tiny pellets that had lodged in him so long before. The ones that the doctors missed, but swore they removed. He chuckled and looked further down his body with his eyes and hands. He caught sight of his wrists, where the vertical razor marks served as a reminder, causing a shudder to move through him and he could see his parents crying over him as a boy. His wrists turned instinctively away from his eyes.
His hands moved down to his crotch. He squeezed his cock until it grew erect, just to make sure it was still capable of the action. Satisfied, he let it go and smiled. He imagined himself at eighty and still going strong. He smiled again because he could not imagine making 40 let alone 80.
He turned away from the mirror and opened the middle drawer of his dresser. He moved the shirts to the side, removed the blackened automatic, and the magazine full of ammunition. It scraped the wooden bottom as he lifted it from the drawer. He sat down on the bed and rested the pistol on his lap. The metal was cold. He shivered, picked the gun from his lap, and put the magazine into the handle. He pulled back on the slide and watched the bullet glide into the chamber. He put the gun on the night stand next to the bed and stared at it.
Her face rammed through the door. His body tensed, his eyes narrowed, and his head jarred back from the intrusion.
He saw her smiling at him. He saw himself showing her how to cock and load the gun, watched her little hand fumble with the slide while trying to hold the thick handle in the other. He saw the look in her eyes when she held it and pointed it towards the mirror in which their reflection shot back at them. There were flames dancing in those orbs of amber perfection. She said, “until death do us part,” and then she winked at him.
She did not pull the trigger but she toyed with it and brushed her finger along its side. He took it from her with his thumb between firing pin and igniter pad, as she was close and did not realize the sensitivity of the trigger. And then her face was gone and the door replaced itself, locking with a loud “clack”.
He stared at the gun. Now in his hands and pointed at the same mirror on the same wall. She was gone. A new bed lay beneath him. He sat alone and the gun seemed to melt into his hands. He dropped the magazine from the handle and pulled the slide back, catching the once chambered round in his free hand. The tears burnt his eyes, then his cheeks, and then they burned as they ran down his neck. He looked at his alarm clock. 4:00P.M. He stood and put the gun away. He slid on khaki pants and a black button up shirt. He sat and pulled his socks on.
He stood and went to the bathroom to wash his face. The water ran cold; he splashed it in his eyes, on his cheeks, and rubbed it in his short, crew-cut hair. The mirror twisted his image in reflection and he cringed when e realized how dark the circles under his eyes had become. Fuck it, he thought, just fuck it.
He squeezed some gel out of the tube and ran it through his hair until the desired spiky, messy look was formed. He opened the cabinet and took two more Valium pills from the bottle. He put them in his portable pill carrier and stuffed it into his pocket. He took a piss and made a loud pleasureful moan as his bladder emptied. He flushed, washed his hands, and went into the living room.
He turned off the DVD player, the television, and the coffee pot. He gathered the joints and placed them in his cigarette pack, took his wool coat from the hanger; put the cigarettes, cell phone, wallet and Zippo lighter in the inside pockets. He checked the side pocket for his keys and they jingled as he searched for them.
He walked to the door and stood for a second, contemplating going out at all. He buttoned his coat and opened the door. He closed it quickly behind him, turned with his head lowered, and locked it. He walked up the stairs looking at the dirty carpet. The stains from another winter spotted and marred the once clean, ocean blue of the floor. He smiled and sashayed sideways through the front door of his building. He giggled and immediately made a stern countenance cover his face.
The sun was bright and shone through the leafless branches of the early spring trees that lined the street to the south. He turned with the sun in front and to the right of him and he walked. The sun lowered itself imperceptibly in the corner of his eye, but gave the impression of not moving at all. His mind moved slower however, and he could see it sliding in inches towards the horizon.
He removed a smoke and lit it with the Zippo; ran his fingers over the surface of the lighter and closed his eyes as he strolled, which became somewhat of a strut as he gained distance from his apartment.
His fingers ran across the surface of the lighter and he felt the angry bulldog on the front and the letter that spelt, “FUCK YOU TOO” beneath the dog’s feet. On the back of the lighter, the inscription was wedged in memory, “To my love. My unrequited love. Death will never separate.” He opened his eyes and managed a smile at her often and early insight into things.
He walked and thought of all the people who told him to move from the apartment. How they prodded him to get out of the area and buy a nice house somewhere. Somewhere he could get reprieve from the memory. He understood why they thought it a good idea, but he told them he needed the motivation, perhaps even the inspiration to not only write but continue living. Of course he also wanted to suffer a little more.
They begged him to get rid of her clothes but he refused. Everything was supposed to be clean again, but it would never be clean without her. The absence of her things would only remind him that she was not coming back. A different home would serve no purpose but to try and wipe away something he did not want to wipe away. So he stayed.
A year had passed now and he knew it had been the right decision to make. His books were selling and most likely his popularity was due, in no small part at least, to the publicity he received from laying a very public beating on the cops and the oil greedy city at large. Each book that he wrote, and in the twelve months he had published two, allowed her beautiful features to pierce through in every character, scene, and motivation. He was told that it was parts of him coming through but he laughed and gently told “them” to go fuck themselves.
They were right of course, parts of him glared through the people, the scenery, the times and the events just as she did. But he wanted her to get all the recognition, wanted for her some form of fame. She lived in his mind and when alive, as though she were a rock star or more appropriately a porn star even though she had no notoriety in life, he would give her what she had always wanted in death.
The critics hated him because he did no readings and took their comments “too seriously”. He laughed at them and did interviews only to belittle their shallow, tiny egos and surface inspections of his work. After his first two novels were published they left him alone because he did not tire of sharing his thoughts on their mothers, fathers, and blood lines in general. He knew they were using him and did not like being used, but he knew that every time he said something unnaturally cruel in a humorous way to the swine, another 50 books would sell. So he played the game in his own way, and mocked his own mockery as he went along.
Her death gave him so many rewards externally that he often wondered how he really felt about it… sometimes. But when she busted in on him in sleep, or wakefulness, he knew how he felt. He knew that she was his muse in death, as she was in her life. He knew why he never went to the shrinkers and talked her away. They belonged together thus, each in their separate worlds. This is how they could be, how he could love her.
His mind snapped back to him, as he remembered where he was going and turned east at the intersecting streets. All were lined with over hanging trees that appeared in late spring, early summer, like those from the movies or old books when the sunshine can barely break through the canopy. At this stage of spring, their branches were bare and their skin was tight and ridged from winter’s freeze. The picture of their fullness was only a mental one, a memory clinging to the edges of his sanity.
He turned on the main avenue and walked south again. The sidewalks were busy with people trying to make it home to someone or something after another day of working in a job that payed the bills and nothing else. Their faces were blank slates expressing the emptiness contained therein. Their stares were hollow and void of either pleasure or pain. Unless he watched the young, they were unbroken, untouched and in some cases even hopeful. They seemed more beautiful than a sunset.
He saw his editor through the window of the Roasterie coffee shop. She was waving and smiling grotesquely at him. He wondered what was wrong with her internally but let the thought go when he remember that she was an extremely sensitive and kind creature; often prone to grandiose gestures when expressing emotion. He laughed under his breath, as she met him at the door. She gave him a hug and a very wet kiss on the mouth. Grotesque he thought given their morning, he laughed again under his breath.
When he talked about the nature of them, she often cried, but she was fond of him and she knew, despite his absence most of the time, he cared for her – so she stayed with him and accepted whatever manner he could provide. Not waiting for something to change. Not waiting for anything really and she had a short memory. He cared enough to tell her the truth and that was more than she ever had.
To her there was something intoxicating about truth, enchanting about being comforted in the often horrible reality of another person’s existence. She knew where she stood and worried for nothing as there is nothing unsaid or left aside out of irrelevance or embarrassment.
The simplistic way in which he kept her safe had kept her in the moment of her initial being saved by his hand. The way he chose her out of all the others, the manner in which he described her and defended her, the way he lived in the pain of his memory and did not utter a word of complaint, made her aware of his unlimited strength and capability as a human being.
She thought thus, as she looked into his eyes and he stared through her. He tried to make her see how wrong she was about him, but the more he professed, the deeper she fell. The more a certain kind of intelligence stood out in him. He could not convince her of his failing days, of his love so strong for one who would never come back to him but who he wanted more than anything in the world, not of the unrelenting guilt he often felt after they made love because his heart belonged to someone else. She heard him, listened to his voice tremble and shake, but she absorbed every word as the truth and simply respected him for it. He wanted to love her for the very nature of her love for him, but thinking thus, he grew cold and more distant.
His vision narrowed and he closed his eyes.
He was walking down a stairway. Circular, lined on the right by tiny, eye – level, slitted windows that gave sight to the purple – hue sunset beyond the foothills; lined on the left by a railing that was painted white, but rubbed down the middle from his hands dragging as he held himself up and moved towards the bottom.
As he reached the base he moved down the hallway. Each side decorated with one picture and one door.
The painting on his right was of a lonely, barren tree in the middle of a highway somewhere on the road to Manitoba from Alberta. The sky behind the tree was grey, no clouds, devoid of the sun, just grey. The left side held a painting of a thunder storm raging behind clouds sending blazing shards of light to the earth when the climax built enough heat to create lightening and a blend of deep purples, blues, yellows and reds.
The doors on either side pounded and shook. Heaved and calmed. He did not stop at them for they death, and directly in front of his position stood two oak doors. He moved to them in perfect stride.
He pushed them open and the room, his room, sat in wait, desperately in want of his company. He sat in the leather chair, on his right a coffee table with a cup of coffee steaming fresh. On his left another table wit an ashtray and burning cigarette. Candles smoldered and lined the room in shadows all around him. In front of him was the statue of his longing; two candelabra lit the chiseled features of the man, sitting with fist curled beneath his chin, elbow resting on one knee and his free hand dangling open, falling towards the earth.
Her loving voice calling out for him from an unseen hiding place…
“Are you alright?” the voice cut harshly through the ceiling of his dream.
He shook his head. Looked at her as though she was not there and tried to focus his eyes. She was looking at him as though she knew him. He smiled, or attempted one, and her face visibly relaxed. Slowly his thoughts calmed and he was back in the coffee shop with her.
“Yes, fine…lost for a moment I guess.”
Sleep came in a half gesture; eyes half closed, rapid eye movement sleep began, but his lids remained slightly open. The fever caught and his mind, no longer his own, played the movie in real time.
******
She paused, letting out the slightest moan. Their bodies flowing like bloody – river water into one ocean. Minds operating on the same basic function; fuck, fuck…all they do is fuck. To make it all go away. Make the Rayn stop. Dry the tears. Hold back the unsaid truths that now claw to replace with lies.
“What lies,” she asked.
“Never mind,” came his abrupt reply.
“Baby… tell me the truth.”
“I’d love to darling, but I haven’t the slightest idea anymore.”
Holding him close, she steadied his head on her bosom, caressed his cheek, lips, and exposed ear with her soft, tiny hand.
He paused, brooding silently while her electric finger tips traced lines that burned his skin like a laser cutting scars. He imagined by morning, to wake and find his face hideous with scars.
“I knew the idea of truth, once, before you and I took shape in real time; perhaps before me and anyone… when the thought of it mattering, occurred to me or shook me to my core…” he paused, drew a deep drag from his cigarette, “before she came and left her unrelenting, growing mark within me. She remains, untouched and very alive from the years fed by my ignorance. I am far too pitiful to love you right, if at all; too wasted in my own decay to set things straight just yet.”
Sobbing, she pulled him tighter as though to pull him beneath her skin. In those moments of truth she could envelope him, as she wanted nothing more than to absorb, steal him from his own misery, and let him fester safely inside of her own; sucking him softly into her long dead yet burning womb.
“To hell with her,” she cried, “to hell with you and truth.”
Dropping tears like enormous rain drops onto his face.
Stuttering now between sobs, looking, eyes burning holes through him, she said, “I’ll take our love, our sickness to our death… or mine.”
Focusing through the barrage of salty tears with one squinting eye; he noticed the perfection of her nipple, the absolute supple beauty of her breast. He could see pictures as a child growing through the stages of any boy, seeing a naked breast for the first time and knew that hers were the ones every boy dreamt of having near them.
The remnants of spoiled – spent desire emanated from the sex between her legs, tickling the hair, as it danced in his nostrils. When she spoke, he failed to catch the weight of the words released. Instead, he was lost in the magic she held for him, the dreams and fantasies from boy to manhood. Total ignorance of her intent, thinking idly of every fight or argument they ever had, knowing sex would come if they could simply stop the slide… he spoke harshly and evenly.
“Love my darling! You do not love me…” he allowed a second or two to pass in order for this to sink in, “No more than I love you. The days will pass and you’ll find another, you always do. I too will rest my weariness elsewhere, lest we die here, strangled in the desperation of our sickness. Being here, we live in an illusion of where we want to be, that it is right here in the simplicity of lust masked as love. We’ll never wish to be here again, once we find ourselves free, instead we’ll wander with heavy hearts and twisted minds through the maze of the lost world outside of our seemingly settled personas.”
His words bore deep into her, as though he had taken the hunting knife she once held on him to keep him there, and he slammed it through her breast plate striking the heart with such an impact as to freeze her instantly in the shock and reality of death. The dream she had clung too; normalcy, belonging, loving, and beauty had been dismantled in a fleeting second with his strong, indifferent voice smashing the eardrums of his desperate lover. He destroyed the very dream, he had helped her cultivate in his moments of awkward kindness. The monstrosity of his actions was not lost on himself. She felt the coldness and it trickled down to him through her touch.
She looked down at him, eyes shining with recognition. Though the rage was rising inside of her, and the pain was near unbearable in her; she could see the tears welling and slithering down his face, which told her all she needed to know about the truth. Allowed her to know without question that his resolve had been set and he would soon be gone.
Slowly the curtains brought shivers of light with the dawning of mourn upon their weariness and lost days. His eyes found an inability to remain open; a burning behind, around, and within them. His head lay resting in her lap. He could not see her face any longer, as his eyes pinned themselves closed as though someone had sewn them shut with needle and a dark thread, his mind raced with the sensation of the thread being woven through his lids… while her eyes burnt with a fire he would never again see.
He woke slowly, eye lids clinging to one another as he attempted to separate and pull the tightened threads apart. His eyes fixated on the ceiling yet could not focus right away. He imagined he was dreaming as the once white stucco ceiling seemed to be covered in blood red splatter. Dreaming, he shook his head to clear the cobwebs from the morphine, weed, and rum. Still the ceiling was splattered in what was clearly blood. He attempted to raise his head from Dawn Rae’s motionless lap and splayed across the wall behind the bed was more dark blood filled with what looked like bone and flesh… his brain began to focus quickly now, as recognition flooded him.
The gun sat clenched between her upper and lower teeth, portions of her upper lip had been caught in the slide when the semi-automatic handgun ejected the spent round onto the bed near our bodies. Most of her head from the ears back was gone. The pieces of flesh and wash of blood were supplemented with clumps of wasted brain matter as he examined the ghastly scene before him for lack of anything tangible to grasp onto - he sat in stillness, staring at her lifeless corpse; soaking in the blood that covered the bed, the room, his body and his mind. The front door crashed in on him, followed by loud and hostile voices…
*****
“Fuck…” he shot up in bed.
Breathing heavy and thick with panic. He lay back down and stared at the ceiling.
She rolled over and touched his shoulder gently.
“What is it baby?”
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he said, his eyes filled with tears.
“Again?”
“…yes…” beneath his eye lids the water welled finally sliding down his cheeks like snakes as he sat back up in bed and looked around the same room.
“Oh baby…”
She moved to him, kissed him softly on the forehead, and stroked his hair. She ran her fingers across his ears, mouth, and face; whispering, “It’s okay. It’s okay,” over and over again.
His body tensed and grew clammy.
“I need you to leave,” his chest heaved, “it’s not ok, and it won’t be ok, not now, not ever…” His breathing began to slow and steady, “I need you to go and now please…”
He was shaking, shivering deep beneath the skin, and his body grew ice cold. Her hands and arms, feeling the change wash through him, released their hold and she moved away.
“I’m…sorry. I need to be alone.”
Her face showed the pain that crashed in on her entire being. Her lips formed a sagging, tight pout, the muscles in her jaw locked, and her forehead burrowed into deep cavernous lines to illustrate the knotting in her stomach he knew was there. Of course, the tears welled and she shook her head; trying to clear away the images she knew were in his mind. Those that now writhed and slithered within her own.
“I’m sorry too,” she whispered, looking down at her naked body, which now appeared gruesome before her eyes. It often did when they were finished, or better said when he was finished with her for that time. She closed her eyes and imagined him being able to get past everything and let her in, but she knew that all she got was all that she would be getting and in the end it was better than what she was used too. The beatings, the yelling, the breaking of a once stoic wall and shell, turned her into an open, raw wound walking on tip toes through the rest of her life.
She felt his helping hand though, through his brutal honesty and genuine kindness when he could show such a thing. It was these moments however, when she wondered if perhaps he would make it another day. How could he live this way she wondered as she unrolled her balled up panties and slid them up her smooth as silk thighs until they were snug and in place around her high waist.
She moved from the bed, as he watched her calmly. She eyed him nervously as she gathered the remainder of her clothes and went into the bathroom. He could hear her sobs from his propped up position in bed. Instinctively, he squeezed and groped his partially stiff cock, but the tears would not stop and nothing resembling sex flooded his body. He rubbed his face and buried it in the pillow. The flow of tears ebbed and stopped with the heavy burning left tormenting his skin. He got up, put sweats, a sweater, and socks on. He made some coffee and lingered anxiously in the living room smoking a cigarette quickly with deep inhalations.
The image of Dawn Rae flashed through his mind once more... then she appeared from the bathroom, hesitated briefly at the doorway; she looked into his eyes, smiled, flung her arms around him and began kissing his soft lips. He held her awkwardly; kissed her as passionately as he could muster, but all that spread was cold empty bloodless history.
“Call me later…”she said. He looked as though he would not answer. “Okay?” She asked as she stroked his face and wiped away the returning tears.
“I’ll try. I’m sorry.”
“I know.”
She laughed, pulled away, and as she closed the door he could hear the cries start towards the top of the stairs. Dawn Rae’s picture settled heavily into the back of his brain. The fever, with threat of returning in force, found reprieve. He locked both doors quickly before either one of them changed their minds and looked back.
He sat down at his computer, waiting for the coffee to finish brewing when he heard a knocking at the door. He looked up with a start, as though he had been in the middle of something, although his hands still rested quietly on his lap. The coffee maker buzzed beneath the knocking. He stared blankly at the half filled white page on the screen in front of him. When came, another knock, louder than the first. He swung around in the swivel chair and glared towards the door. He walked to the coffee maker and stopped the frantic buzzing. The knock repeated several times, heavier with each wall shuddering clack.
Perhaps it was a neighbor, he thought? Perhaps it was the asshole from upstairs, whom walked like an elephant although he was short enough to be considered a dwarf and was also none too fat either! David grimaced loudly. He was in no mood for that little fucker’s bitching about music that never played above a whisper in his small apartment.
He got up from the computer desk, hissing as he walked to the door, looking through the peephole, he saw no one. The asshole was woken up because of the buzzing and then, as it ceased, he decided not to speak to him, deciding it was not worth another fray. He looked again to make sure; there was no one there; so he turned and started to walk away.
The knock thundered, shaking his spine from the root of his lower back to the base of his skull. He closed his eyes and saw her face, gun clenched between teeth and he shuddered, racking his bones so he could hear them rattle together. Blood ran cold; skin tingled, as though on fire – as though he had bathed in acid from the inside out. His stomach locked, twisted, and released a horrid gas into his bowels and out his tightly puckered asshole. He steadied himself on his feet. Propped his hand on the wall for balance and took in deep breaths to fill his lungs, which had stopped taking air for some time.
His stomach settled and the smell of coffee brought him to the kitchen. He poured a cup and sat on the couch, unable to look at the computer screen, which sat mocking him to his left. Instead he chose to stare at the blank television; the large surface reflected his squatting, hairy faced image back at him. Sipped his coffee, he felt her coming again so he sat back on the couch, closed his eyes, and let the terrible tape play all the way through.
There she was; half lying flat, half propped broken against the wall. Still naked with his head atop her lap awkwardly from the impossible contortions that her dead figure had taken. There was blood everywhere, as two officers pulled him moaning away from the bed and corpse.
He was trying to clutch her. Trying to revive her but she was gone. When the police first entered the bedroom, they caught him trying to push the brains and matter back into her head. He gave her mouth to mouth, chest compressions, and more mouth to mouth. He cried for her but they pulled and her blood had become the hue of his skin.
He was naked, covered in blood, and they simply clothed him before putting the handcuffs on. His repeated pleas of innocence and to be cleaned went ignored. They violently hauled him from the apartment. They finally broke him, as they stuffed him heavily into the backseat of the cruiser. They told him he was screwed. He laughed at them. He cried and laughed at the same time. They thought he had gone insane. They told him so. He laughed harder. He told them about their qualifications to diagnose anything beyond the syphilis they had given each other. He laughed and they hit him as hard as they could. Hesitate, and then repeat punch.
At the police station they beat him more. They lied to him. They held him down and promised things they could not deliver. They promised him it would be alright if he told them what he had done. He tried. He told them he did not love her. He told them that it was not what he had done but instead what he could not do.
They laughed at him and they beat him some more because of their inability to understand. Because they thought he was being clever. They thought he had the capacity to be clever in such a time. They thought he was a monster. They kept him awake forty-eight hours thus. They wanted to know about the gun. They wanted to know how he could have slept through it. He told them sarcastically about the need for gun registration in order to have a gun and how they could wipe their ass with his permit. They hit him. He explained the morphine for when he needed sleep beyond consciousness. They beat him for his perfect lies. He wanted death but it deserted him. They watched him constantly and left him sitting isolated in a safe cell dressed in nothing but a paper jump suit. No belt, no ties, nothing in which he could strange himself with should he decide to join his voluptuous dead girlfriend as she had come to be known through the interrogation.
They told him it was suicide. He laughed and told them to fuck themselves. He told them it was a broken heart and nothing else. The gun was simply the tool she chose to end the suffering.
And then the doctors came and went as they observed him. They were worried about what he would do. He did not. He could not do what they imagined he should. He took his time and then he passed their tests. He wrote them off as sideshow attractions for children and gave the answers that all standard psychological tests require for a passing grade. He laughed at their “good intentions” and their high educations. He poked fun at the very existence of such tests when played on the borderline sociopath. He mocked them, and cursed them for trying to manipulate him into submission. He swore that they would pay no matter how they treated him now. He would not forget what they had done.
He was in the newspapers for weeks.
Lawyers wanted money from the city over his mistreatment. He laughed because lawyers are the opposite evil to stupid cops if there is such a thing as evil existing on polar opposites of the same pendulum. It stands to reason however, due to organized religion being one of the first examples of ultimate evil. What! Ask the victims of crusades, oh wait, you can’t not many of those poor fuckers lived. Mind you, the victims of the Jihad experienced much the same thing.
Regardless of his personal opinions and half baked ideas, he decided to turn the useful, lying – blood hounds loose with no restraints. They gave him lots of money and he laughed. He wanted them to hurt like he did, but instead he got paid and they went on not giving a shit. She was in the ground and he was newly rich. Life is not fair. Death is even less fair. For those who are dead anyways.
He blinked his eyes and saw the television sitting in front of him. He sipped from the coffee cup and closed his eyes again. She was gone. The door was locked from the inside - always from the inside. He played with the idea of being able to shut her out, but he knew that she held all the cards.
He sipped coffee and lit another cigarette. He moved to the computer and sat in the chair, setting the coffee cup down on the desk next to the monitor. The ashtray was full and coming over the edges when he pushed the burning butt into it. He blinked, thought of emptying it, but left it sitting on the desk spewing ash and burnt tobacco over its edges.
He stared at the screen. The words were starting to come now, but too fast. They strung themselves together like puzzle pieces only to flutter apart when he closed his eyes to focus on the keys in front of him. He stared at the last sentence that finished page 236. There was a moment when I loved her. One moment in a year of our affair. He read it over and over again. Connect the fucking thought, he thought… but still, the words moved too fast. He grew nauseous by the speed in which they illuminated inside his mind. They swam in circles, danced, broke apart and spewed behind his eyes like lava bursting from a volcano.
He stood up and walked to the medicine cabinet. Satisfied, he opened the cabinet and selected the bottle of Valium. He opened the bottle and took two, one hundred milligram tablets. He ran the water in the tap, put the pills in his mouth, and drank from the faucet with his lips. He stared into the mirror briefly, “fucking stupid druggy,” he thought; then he turned and walked away chuckling, “who cares, it means nothing. You must write you scared bastard, write something down or you will die.”
He retrieved his coffee cup from the desk, refilled it, and sat back at the computer. The page stared at him wile he smoked a cigarette and sipped from his coffee cup. It took a few minutes but the words, like puzzle pieces, finally came together and started to hold long enough to type them one after the other forming what could be construed as coherent sentences. His eyes adjusted to the light and shape of the picture formed. He cracked his knuckles and ran his long and skinny, shaking fingers over the keyboard without looking. He started typing, never looking down. Instead he watched the words string together and a joy, much like one’s first breath after being submersed beneath the water for a long period time, filled his body clearing the smog and cloud of death he felt mere moments before.
The Valium did not hurt I am sure, but he did not care one bit… so why should I? I am just a recorder for him after all is said and done. His fingers were in full glide and he was alive for the first time that day. He loved those moments as though he would never see them again, each was treated like the last he would be given and his focus was beyond intensity. This was how he took the beatings, took the dying, the death, and all the criticism. His focus was on something no one could take away, on something only he and God had any hands on.
He could not stop to look. He could not imagine the words escaping him. He could not live with it. The pressure mounted and the words flowed like a winding river. Turning past rocks disguised as brief disbelief and the shore line that sat as disgust, reached out to dislodge the words he knew to be true. Fast enough to cramp fingers yet slow enough to disregard the mounting pain. The obstacles were unable to thwart the perfection of his fingers. He did not type so much as play the keys like a piano.
There was a moment when I loved her; one brief and fleeting in a year of our affair.
The light shone through the curtains with razor sharp slices, cutting slits across her tanned bare skin. Her short but muscled right leg was crossed over in front of her left as she lay on her side facing the table where I sat writing and often watching. The precise scars that ran down the inside of her left thigh stood out in pale contrast to the rest of her skin, as though she had cut them immediately before going down for a nap. Her right arm was folded under her breasts and her left arm was tucked beneath her head and pillow. Her lips formed a sedated smile. Her eyes fluttered beneath the soft skin of her lids.
The soft breath of her sleeping could be heard within the sound of Beethoven playing throughout my mind.
I had never seen her so beautiful; the tautness of her skin, the lines of her muscles cut so deeply down her side, arms, and legs, the lazy crook of her faint smile, the perfect round ass, and the intoxicating smell emanating from between her legs.
It was as though she posed for me in sleep. As though she knew that I would grow distracted from my writing and steal glances at her with my lustful eyes. Unable to rest again on paper, I would falter in resolve and go to her. I would take her and she would moan in a half awakened state, pulling me deeper instinctively and without words.
I sat watching.
There was no sound but her breathing and the music playing through my ear phones. I took them out of my ears. The air hung motionless in the cabin. The smell of us from hours of over – stimulation and depravation filled the space between her and I. It was sweet like honey and somewhat stale at the same time. Her breathing was shallow and slow. My pace quickened with every inhalation I stole from the air.
I lit another joint and took her in.
I was submerged in her moment of perfection. I imagined for the first and only time that I loved her more then I would ever love another. That in fact I knew what love might be. I imagined that my love for her would carry me for as long as we had together. I wanted that moment to become eternity.
I fought every urge to wake her and let her consume me once more in coitus.
I watched.
I cried as I was reminded that our time would not last. Knowing that she would wake again and all that lingered between us would surface and destroy this image of her. This image of me that lived and loved her. I loathed her waking, despised the need to talk. I envied those who were ignorant of such devices as emotion and the need to respond to their calling. Perhaps the moment of pure love would exist beyond our days together, but the moment, this moment would fail me in my precise inability to live.
I went to her and stripped myself naked. I spooned her from behind, moved her hair from her neck and kissed her softly; my erection pressing on the small of her back woke her with a gentle moan.
She took me in and it was gone. I was no more.
LOVE: a feeling of passionate emotion for another.
He stared at the words finishing the novel and lowered his head. The tears bounced from his glasses and ran onto is shirt. He looked up, moved the mouse to the save data icon, and pressed it. Two hours had gone by since sitting down to write. It was noon and he had nothing really to do but kill time.
He rolled a few joints while watching Taxi Driver. The Valium slowed every movement of his brain and body. Each joint took a life time to roll.
He sipped his coffee and wondered where he would go. He did not know but knew only that he had to get out. With the hostility of memory locked in him, he needed to walk from here to there and mingle silently with the human race at some point or he would suffer from shock when work came around again.
He had slept and screwed away four days and now he needed to move. His torpor was lifting but threatening at the same time to take him fully and leave nothing but the shell he lived in if he remained isolated.
He paced from the living room to the bedroom, into the bathroom, and then the kitchen and back into the living room. Stood and watched the movie for a second and then went into the bathroom for a shower; dropped his clothes on the floor, stepped into the tub, and closed the curtain. The water ran hot immediately. It was hard water. The water burned his skin but he stood beneath it, cleansing the night from him; the remnants of his desire. He toweled off, hung the towel over the curtain rod, and went into the bedroom.
Naked, he stood in front of the tall, thin mirror and traced his hands down his muscular, scarred frame. The scars that sat in a perfect pattern on his chest and stomach seemed new. They seemed as though they were growing ready to release the tiny pellets that had lodged in him so long before. The ones that the doctors missed, but swore they removed. He chuckled and looked further down his body with his eyes and hands. He caught sight of his wrists, where the vertical razor marks served as a reminder, causing a shudder to move through him and he could see his parents crying over him as a boy. His wrists turned instinctively away from his eyes.
His hands moved down to his crotch. He squeezed his cock until it grew erect, just to make sure it was still capable of the action. Satisfied, he let it go and smiled. He imagined himself at eighty and still going strong. He smiled again because he could not imagine making 40 let alone 80.
He turned away from the mirror and opened the middle drawer of his dresser. He moved the shirts to the side, removed the blackened automatic, and the magazine full of ammunition. It scraped the wooden bottom as he lifted it from the drawer. He sat down on the bed and rested the pistol on his lap. The metal was cold. He shivered, picked the gun from his lap, and put the magazine into the handle. He pulled back on the slide and watched the bullet glide into the chamber. He put the gun on the night stand next to the bed and stared at it.
Her face rammed through the door. His body tensed, his eyes narrowed, and his head jarred back from the intrusion.
He saw her smiling at him. He saw himself showing her how to cock and load the gun, watched her little hand fumble with the slide while trying to hold the thick handle in the other. He saw the look in her eyes when she held it and pointed it towards the mirror in which their reflection shot back at them. There were flames dancing in those orbs of amber perfection. She said, “until death do us part,” and then she winked at him.
She did not pull the trigger but she toyed with it and brushed her finger along its side. He took it from her with his thumb between firing pin and igniter pad, as she was close and did not realize the sensitivity of the trigger. And then her face was gone and the door replaced itself, locking with a loud “clack”.
He stared at the gun. Now in his hands and pointed at the same mirror on the same wall. She was gone. A new bed lay beneath him. He sat alone and the gun seemed to melt into his hands. He dropped the magazine from the handle and pulled the slide back, catching the once chambered round in his free hand. The tears burnt his eyes, then his cheeks, and then they burned as they ran down his neck. He looked at his alarm clock. 4:00P.M. He stood and put the gun away. He slid on khaki pants and a black button up shirt. He sat and pulled his socks on.
He stood and went to the bathroom to wash his face. The water ran cold; he splashed it in his eyes, on his cheeks, and rubbed it in his short, crew-cut hair. The mirror twisted his image in reflection and he cringed when e realized how dark the circles under his eyes had become. Fuck it, he thought, just fuck it.
He squeezed some gel out of the tube and ran it through his hair until the desired spiky, messy look was formed. He opened the cabinet and took two more Valium pills from the bottle. He put them in his portable pill carrier and stuffed it into his pocket. He took a piss and made a loud pleasureful moan as his bladder emptied. He flushed, washed his hands, and went into the living room.
He turned off the DVD player, the television, and the coffee pot. He gathered the joints and placed them in his cigarette pack, took his wool coat from the hanger; put the cigarettes, cell phone, wallet and Zippo lighter in the inside pockets. He checked the side pocket for his keys and they jingled as he searched for them.
He walked to the door and stood for a second, contemplating going out at all. He buttoned his coat and opened the door. He closed it quickly behind him, turned with his head lowered, and locked it. He walked up the stairs looking at the dirty carpet. The stains from another winter spotted and marred the once clean, ocean blue of the floor. He smiled and sashayed sideways through the front door of his building. He giggled and immediately made a stern countenance cover his face.
The sun was bright and shone through the leafless branches of the early spring trees that lined the street to the south. He turned with the sun in front and to the right of him and he walked. The sun lowered itself imperceptibly in the corner of his eye, but gave the impression of not moving at all. His mind moved slower however, and he could see it sliding in inches towards the horizon.
He removed a smoke and lit it with the Zippo; ran his fingers over the surface of the lighter and closed his eyes as he strolled, which became somewhat of a strut as he gained distance from his apartment.
His fingers ran across the surface of the lighter and he felt the angry bulldog on the front and the letter that spelt, “FUCK YOU TOO” beneath the dog’s feet. On the back of the lighter, the inscription was wedged in memory, “To my love. My unrequited love. Death will never separate.” He opened his eyes and managed a smile at her often and early insight into things.
He walked and thought of all the people who told him to move from the apartment. How they prodded him to get out of the area and buy a nice house somewhere. Somewhere he could get reprieve from the memory. He understood why they thought it a good idea, but he told them he needed the motivation, perhaps even the inspiration to not only write but continue living. Of course he also wanted to suffer a little more.
They begged him to get rid of her clothes but he refused. Everything was supposed to be clean again, but it would never be clean without her. The absence of her things would only remind him that she was not coming back. A different home would serve no purpose but to try and wipe away something he did not want to wipe away. So he stayed.
A year had passed now and he knew it had been the right decision to make. His books were selling and most likely his popularity was due, in no small part at least, to the publicity he received from laying a very public beating on the cops and the oil greedy city at large. Each book that he wrote, and in the twelve months he had published two, allowed her beautiful features to pierce through in every character, scene, and motivation. He was told that it was parts of him coming through but he laughed and gently told “them” to go fuck themselves.
They were right of course, parts of him glared through the people, the scenery, the times and the events just as she did. But he wanted her to get all the recognition, wanted for her some form of fame. She lived in his mind and when alive, as though she were a rock star or more appropriately a porn star even though she had no notoriety in life, he would give her what she had always wanted in death.
The critics hated him because he did no readings and took their comments “too seriously”. He laughed at them and did interviews only to belittle their shallow, tiny egos and surface inspections of his work. After his first two novels were published they left him alone because he did not tire of sharing his thoughts on their mothers, fathers, and blood lines in general. He knew they were using him and did not like being used, but he knew that every time he said something unnaturally cruel in a humorous way to the swine, another 50 books would sell. So he played the game in his own way, and mocked his own mockery as he went along.
Her death gave him so many rewards externally that he often wondered how he really felt about it… sometimes. But when she busted in on him in sleep, or wakefulness, he knew how he felt. He knew that she was his muse in death, as she was in her life. He knew why he never went to the shrinkers and talked her away. They belonged together thus, each in their separate worlds. This is how they could be, how he could love her.
His mind snapped back to him, as he remembered where he was going and turned east at the intersecting streets. All were lined with over hanging trees that appeared in late spring, early summer, like those from the movies or old books when the sunshine can barely break through the canopy. At this stage of spring, their branches were bare and their skin was tight and ridged from winter’s freeze. The picture of their fullness was only a mental one, a memory clinging to the edges of his sanity.
He turned on the main avenue and walked south again. The sidewalks were busy with people trying to make it home to someone or something after another day of working in a job that payed the bills and nothing else. Their faces were blank slates expressing the emptiness contained therein. Their stares were hollow and void of either pleasure or pain. Unless he watched the young, they were unbroken, untouched and in some cases even hopeful. They seemed more beautiful than a sunset.
He saw his editor through the window of the Roasterie coffee shop. She was waving and smiling grotesquely at him. He wondered what was wrong with her internally but let the thought go when he remember that she was an extremely sensitive and kind creature; often prone to grandiose gestures when expressing emotion. He laughed under his breath, as she met him at the door. She gave him a hug and a very wet kiss on the mouth. Grotesque he thought given their morning, he laughed again under his breath.
When he talked about the nature of them, she often cried, but she was fond of him and she knew, despite his absence most of the time, he cared for her – so she stayed with him and accepted whatever manner he could provide. Not waiting for something to change. Not waiting for anything really and she had a short memory. He cared enough to tell her the truth and that was more than she ever had.
To her there was something intoxicating about truth, enchanting about being comforted in the often horrible reality of another person’s existence. She knew where she stood and worried for nothing as there is nothing unsaid or left aside out of irrelevance or embarrassment.
The simplistic way in which he kept her safe had kept her in the moment of her initial being saved by his hand. The way he chose her out of all the others, the manner in which he described her and defended her, the way he lived in the pain of his memory and did not utter a word of complaint, made her aware of his unlimited strength and capability as a human being.
She thought thus, as she looked into his eyes and he stared through her. He tried to make her see how wrong she was about him, but the more he professed, the deeper she fell. The more a certain kind of intelligence stood out in him. He could not convince her of his failing days, of his love so strong for one who would never come back to him but who he wanted more than anything in the world, not of the unrelenting guilt he often felt after they made love because his heart belonged to someone else. She heard him, listened to his voice tremble and shake, but she absorbed every word as the truth and simply respected him for it. He wanted to love her for the very nature of her love for him, but thinking thus, he grew cold and more distant.
His vision narrowed and he closed his eyes.
He was walking down a stairway. Circular, lined on the right by tiny, eye – level, slitted windows that gave sight to the purple – hue sunset beyond the foothills; lined on the left by a railing that was painted white, but rubbed down the middle from his hands dragging as he held himself up and moved towards the bottom.
As he reached the base he moved down the hallway. Each side decorated with one picture and one door.
The painting on his right was of a lonely, barren tree in the middle of a highway somewhere on the road to Manitoba from Alberta. The sky behind the tree was grey, no clouds, devoid of the sun, just grey. The left side held a painting of a thunder storm raging behind clouds sending blazing shards of light to the earth when the climax built enough heat to create lightening and a blend of deep purples, blues, yellows and reds.
The doors on either side pounded and shook. Heaved and calmed. He did not stop at them for they death, and directly in front of his position stood two oak doors. He moved to them in perfect stride.
He pushed them open and the room, his room, sat in wait, desperately in want of his company. He sat in the leather chair, on his right a coffee table with a cup of coffee steaming fresh. On his left another table wit an ashtray and burning cigarette. Candles smoldered and lined the room in shadows all around him. In front of him was the statue of his longing; two candelabra lit the chiseled features of the man, sitting with fist curled beneath his chin, elbow resting on one knee and his free hand dangling open, falling towards the earth.
Her loving voice calling out for him from an unseen hiding place…
“Are you alright?” the voice cut harshly through the ceiling of his dream.
He shook his head. Looked at her as though she was not there and tried to focus his eyes. She was looking at him as though she knew him. He smiled, or attempted one, and her face visibly relaxed. Slowly his thoughts calmed and he was back in the coffee shop with her.
“Yes, fine…lost for a moment I guess.”