Mordecai
destractivegodofdarkness
Registered: Jan 2001
Location: Denver
Posts: 19781 |
Complete revision:
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I’d been home for a few hours, the bottle of whiskey sat at my right, a glass with melted ice and a pale trace of yellow next to it. The burning cinder of my cigarette reached my fingers and broke my reverie, startling me into movement and cursing. I crushed the cigarette out and then paused in mid-motion, my ears attuned to the sound of crunching gravel. Someone was coming down the road towards the trailer I sat in front of, perched on a small porch of faded and weathered pressure treated boards. I turned my head a slight amount to the right till my peripheral vision met the corner of the trailer so I could see whomever it might be the moment they came into view. I watched, holding my breath, but it was not her. I sighed and hauled myself to my feet grabbing the glass and heading inside.
Inside I dashed the melted remnants into the sink and drew a couple cubes of ice out of the freezer and dropped them into the glass. The water crystals rang as they clattered and spun around the glass. I picked up the glass and twirled it a few times and listened to the sound some more. It’s an unmistakable sound, a sound that signifies loneliness in my mind. I pushed through the screen door and onto the porch, setting the glass on the table made of a cut-off two by twelve and a cinder block. I pulled the cork out of the bottle of whiskey with a twist of my wrist, the cork and whiskey making a squeaking sound. Again the sound of loneliness struck a deep chord somewhere down around my groin and my eyes heated with unshed tears.
Seated once again I grasped the glass and raised it to my lips. The whiskey bit into my tongue and cheeks as I rolled it around my mouth and then swallowed. I raised the glass again and with my tongue plucked out a cube of ice and sucked on it absently as I fished in my pocket for a cheap cigar. In turn I lit the cigar and rolled the smoke around in my mouth and exhaled through my nose, savoring the burn of cheap tobacco on my olfactory nerves. A sneeze tickled the edge of my nose but I suppressed it and shook my head.
Under my chair sat a novel, face down, pages split and waiting for me to pick it up again and bring the characters within to life. I ignored it, hating them for the moment and for all that they were. I wondered if life were like that novel or if I was just one of many, isolated in my mental prison where I knew no one. To be honest I knew that the novel was closer to the real life of most people than mine. I had no one, and even in the most despairing of novels there was always someone, Frankenstein had more love and companionship than I have. That monster at least had a creator it had known, as for myself, I had never known my parents, an orphan, raised in foster homes, a loner on the playground and even now, the odd man out at work, while my co-workers talked of family and friends, I smiled and nodded to their stories and then lied furiously about the friends I had spent my weekend with.
I have never had a friend in my life, until now that is, or so I had thought. I have been haunting a small bar down the street in the evenings, drinking and drinking in the people around me, sucking in their conversations and living vicariously. I needed stories to tell on Monday so that no one would ever know the sucking black hole that I live in. I was sitting there, eyes unfocused, glass half-way to my lips when she sat down next me. I watched her from the corner of my eye as she settled herself in, setting a pack of cigarettes, a lighter and a small wallet on the bar. She wasn’t pretty, not by any standard, her dirty brown hair tightly coiled against her head, wandering eye so very obvious but the way she took control of her surroundings was definite, confident. She marked out her space at the bar as surely as a mutt pissing on a telephone pole. I absorbed her profile and turned back to the bar, casting the nets of my ears wide for stories. A lone bit conversation made its way across the bar to my auditory canal, no context was involved and I snorted at the utter ridiculous of that statement, stranded as it was in the midst of chaos, a fellow orphan.
“What is so amusing?”
I was struck dumb for a half second as I processed the fact that she was speaking to me. I floundered for a moment as a million complex explanations of how the interplay of humanity was a curious and hysterical thing before I settled for shrugging and saying, “People, and the things they say are often a source of comedy that is un-equaled in the world.”
“Aren’t they though? I love watching people, I often go the airport and sit on one of the benches and pretend to read, simply so that I listen to the things people say when they think no one is listening.”
I turned and stared at her, an open expression of shock. Not only was she talking to me, she was speaking my language, a language of a tiny isolated tribe somewhere in the deep jungles of no-where land, lost place of those who wander without human companionship, an urban jungle of hell and rejection. “You really do that?” In my own ears I sounded stupid, like the apes across the bar, staring down the shirt of some plastic breasted barfly. I flushed with shame as hours of internal conversations, imagined scenarios came crashing to naught and I stumbled over my own tongue and my own foolish nature.
My brain recovered in a few seconds and I responded, “Have you ever tried the bus terminal late at night? The conversations are without parallel.”
“I have a few times, but after the fourth or fifth time of being groped by a man smelling of whiskey I gave it up. Airports seem to require a higher standard of behavior and the high security affords me a greater range of freedom.”
I stared down at the glass of cheap whiskey in front of me and felt the flush of red spread across my face. Here the was the only person to speak to me in months and I was batting about zero, whiskey breath, inane responses and a slack-jawed expression I could see in the mirror behind the bar. Feeling like a complete ass was nothing new to me but there was something about this woman that made me more self-conscious than ever and I squirmed, an ant followed by the vicious beam of a magnifying glass wielded by a mischievous ten year old.
She laughed and put her hand on my knee and I nearly jumped out of my seat in surprise. She laughed again.
“Consider it a payback.”
I snorted.
“So are you here just watching, or are you waiting for someone?”
Two days later we were still talking, this time in bed, sticky with sweat. I was mumbling half coherent responses while watching her from half closed eyes. The inborn urge that males have to sleep after sex is a nuisance, ruining many a good post coital discussion. I cursed my own genetics as I struggled to stay conscious.
“You have a lot of secrets hiding in that head of yours.” She spoke as though it were a given fact, something not to be contested but the demand for a response was implicit in the slight tensioning of her tendons and muscles, communicated immediately to me through my skin.
“Secrets? No, not really, not in the ‘not to be told to others’ sense of the word, but rather I simply don’t talk to many people and I share even less of myself with them. It’s not because it necessarily needs hiding, I just don’t ever care to share all that is on my mind.”
“Women must find you very frustrating”
“Women rarely find me at all, which would be a prerequisite to them finding me frustrating.”
“I think they find you un-approachable when they find you.”
“You didn’t have any problems ‘approaching’ me, ‘“ I said, grinning at the memory of the way she’d dragged me into her car and groped me frantically before ordering me into the drivers seat.
“A moment of reckless and drunken abandon, far out of character I assure you.” Her expression was utter innocence and I nipped at her rib cage, that being the part of her closest to my mouth. “Ouch!”
For six weeks we had gone on like this, in between wandering off to our respective occupations we had drifted back and forth between her apartment and my tiny trailer and many, many public places, restaurants, bars, airports, parks. We sat close, books in hand, or pretending to be deep in personal conversation while we snickered and gasped at the people around us. We speculated wildly on the natures of people, created fantastic scenarios to explain the odd things we heard. We gave running commentary heated discussions. In the bars we’d wager on the success of pick up attempts and pool games. I shook the glass again, listening to the music of quiescent water and silica. It had been three days since she suddenly disappeared from my life. Three days since coming home to an empty home and getting a disconnect notice when I called her number. I’d been by her place, and even peered in the windows but there was nothing to see but furniture and darkness. Every day after work I’d called again and listened to the recorded voice. I’ve heard it said that insanity is repeating the same actions over and over again, expecting different results, so I suppose by that criteria I am now insane but I keep hoping. Hoping and drinking.
I’ve always drank, and when she was here, we drank, but it was different then. There was a raucous laughter, silly grins and a heady sense of hilarity. I drank strangely concoctions of fantastic colors that she knew in endless variety. Stumping the bartender was her favorite game. Now it has returned to how it was before, the drink is nothing but the harsh, scouring of cheap whiskey, a liquid firebrand I inflict upon myself. I’m not sure if I’m trying to kill myself or prove that I am alive, but I don’t seem to be accomplishing either.
I took the glass into the bathroom and sat on the edge of the tub. For a long while I sat there, staring at the cheap plastic tub enclosure, not seeing it. A burning arose in the back of my throat and I coughed spastically, spilling my drink into the tub. I turned on the water, washing the whiskey down the drain before inserting the stopper in the drain. I rose to my feet and swayed for a moment as the room swam. I walked back into the kitchen and poured another drink, downed it quickly and filled it again before returning.
The tub was about half full and steaming so I turned on the cold water, swirling my free hand in the water and raising the glass to my lips with the other while I waited for the water to reach a temperature that wouldn’t scald me the moment I stepped into it. After returning to the kitchen for a third refill I shed my clothes before stepping into the tub and slowly seating myself, hissing as the water slowly engulfed me. I stretched out and closed my eyes. I thought of her laugh.
I was in the bar, in the same seat once again, and I wondered whether this was insanity now, doing the same thing and expecting the same results this time, even though I knew it wouldn’t happen. Which is it, sanity or insanity, patterns with or without expectations, same or different? Would she come through the door with that little knit purse she carried everywhere? She didn’t and I drank furiously, ordering shot after shot of whiskey and chasing it with pints of beer. I chain smoked and glared at people, daring them to speak to me, in a murderous rage and ready to kill even though it would likely be myself that was killed in any fight. I ordered another double shot and another beer and poured one after the other down my throat, most of it spilling down the sides of my face into my shirt collar.
I awoke with a start, cold and stiff , just inside the door of my apartment, my head and shoulders inside the coat closet, the door digging into my ribcage and I assumed that was what had awakened me I shifted over and groaned, my head aching. I vaguely wondered what time it was and what day it was. I hoped I didn’t have to work today. I searched through my brain and arrived at the conclusion that it was Saturday and I was safe to lay here and dry heave for a while. I thought about crawling to the bathroom to take a piss but I didn’t feel much of an urge to piss despite memories of drinking heavily. I lay there for a while longer before realizing that most of the coldness I felt centered on my crotch and I slowly became cognizant of the fact that I had pissed myself. I groaned again and crawled to the bathroom. Slowly and painfully I removed my wet and stinking clothing before dragging myself over to the edge of the tub and turning on the water. I dangled my hand in the water and fiddled with the knobs till the stream coming from the faucet was comfortable on the underside of my wrist and I yanked the lever to turn on the shower. Water cascaded down into the pan of the tub with the sound of a hard rain on a car roof. I flopped over the edge of the tub and half-heartedly tugged the shower curtain into place before going limp and luxuriating in the feel of heated water splattering into my skin.
I dressed slowly fumbling with laces. I moved down my tiny porch and grabbed my bicycle. I sat astride it and shook my head to clear the haze. Setting a foot to the pedal I started off down the drive.
The first few blocks were a living hell, and they always are, but after a while the pain of labor fades, and a rhythm sets in, the legs work and your mind clears. I lifted my head and looked into the breeze of my own passage. I looked around for the first time in weeks and saw the world. It still looked flat and unreal but it was there, I’d been ignoring in the hopes that it might go away, but it hadn’t. It never did, an irritating insistence on being there, reality intruding in the way that it always does. I rode for several miles, working my way up through the gears, dodging through traffic with a reckless abandon that bordered on gleeful. I turned off the main road at a small park with a pond in the middle of it. I rode over to the water and lay the bike over on its side. I sat on the slightly damp grass and stared across the pond. The water was brown and yet brilliant with reflected sun. A mixture of ducks and geese paddled about, searching for the best tidbits, insects, and bits of water plants, whatever it was that appealed to them. I’d been watching them for almost ten minutes when I noticed that the pond had a special visitor, down at the far end of the pond, stalking quietly through the cluster of cat-tails that grew there was a great blue heron. I watched it raptly, its odd backwards knee configuration making it somehow other-worldly. It stepped carefully, eyes bright, scanning the water and then suddenly that dagger like beak plunged into the water in flash. The head came back up in a flash and it quickly gulped down the prize it had found. I wondered if it was a frog or a fish that had met its end in that beak. I watched that magnificent thing stalk about for an unknown amount of time, afraid to blink, not wanting to miss a single second of the strange movements and long lines that it presented to me. Finally it took its leave, leaping into the air and spreading massive wings. I watched it until it was out of sight over the western horizon. I found myself staring into a setting sun and I sighed.
I was in the same bar, the same stool once again, but this time the whiskey sat in front of me, untouched. I sat like a mannequin, beer halfway to my lips and lost in thought. I was still in this pose, staring over the heads of the other patrons at some distant point that existed in another world when I felt the touch on my shoulder. I started, shocked back to reality and turned to see who had interrupted. I stared into a pair of eyes I knew, one of them stared back, the other looking at the same spot of infinity I had so recently been lost in.
“Hi,” she said softly, almost inaudible over the waves of sound that always accompany gatherings of inebriated people.
“I was wondering where you were,” I said and smiled.
“So aren’t you going to ask where I’ve been?”
We were lying on my bed, the bedclothes thrown on the floor. I’d been idly tracing her ear with my finger, only half-heartedly trying to stay awake.
“I’d assumed that you would tell me if you wanted me to know.”
“I disappear for three days and it doesn’t bother you?”
“I’ve only known you for a short time, and I certainly don’t own you. You are your own person, free to do as you choose.”
She squirmed out of my arms and sat up on the bed. I could barely see her outline in the darkness but I knew I was treading on dangerous ground.
“You didn’t miss me at all?”
“I missed the sex.”
I had intended to lighten the situation with humor, but I might as well have slapped her across the face, she went rigid for a moment and then leapt off the bed. I could see her searching on the floor for her clothes.
“Hey, wait, I didn’t…”
“Fuck you.” Her voice was rough, full of venom, it didn’t even sound like her.
“I’m sor…”
She screamed, at first a wordless shriek and then she just began repeating, “Shut up! Shut up!” over and over again. I froze in the middle of sliding off the bed. This was dangerous territory, and I didn’t want the police involved, I didn’t even know enough about this woman to gauge whether she might get violent. She rushed from the bedroom and out the front door. I heard the car door slam and then what sounded like more screaming from the car. Then the engine cranked over and the tires spun on the gravel.
“Jesus,” I whispered to myself.
I couldn’t find my wallet, or my keys. I frantically searched my room again, taking a more methodical approach this time, namely taking everything on the floor and tossing on the bed. Somewhere were the pants I’d been wearing the night before. First I tossed the blankets and sheets on the bed, now I could at least see what was on the floor, namely a confusion of discarded clothing. One by one I grabbed jeans and patted them down for hard objects. I found three lighters, a few quarters, no wallet, no keys. I grabbed another pair of pants and held them up. They weren’t mine.
They were hers, the pair she’d been wearing last night. I patted them down and found a wallet. Hers, not mine. Understanding slowly dawned on me. She had put my pants on last night, she had to have put them on, I’d driven her car back, and automatically put the keys in my pocket. She wouldn’t have been able to leave any other way. She had my wallet and my keys.
“I do not fucking believe this.”
I grabbed another pair of pants from basket of clean clothes and a pair of socks. I dressed hurriedly and ran into the kitchen. I slammed a couple of slices of bread into the toaster and ran into the living room. In the lower locked drawer of my file cabinet I found my spare keys and passport.
“Identification and keys, don’t leave home without them.”
I ran back into the kitchen and slapped some peanut butter on the toast, wrapped the slices in a paper towel and ran to my car.
“You’re looking rough this morning Mike,” my boss quipped as I ducked in the door with only a few minutes to spare.
“If I told you, you’d call me a liar.”
“I probably would, you’re about as wild as house-broken dog. Here, take care of this,” he handed me a massive file. I grabbed it and heading for my desk, brushing toast crumbs from my shirt as I went.
I made it through the day by dint of frequent visits to the coffee maker and ignoring my co-workers as best I could. I didn’t want to talk; I didn’t even want to think. Every time my mind strayed from my work I started to panic.
I pulled up in front of my house. Her car was sitting there in my driveway. She was nowhere to be seen, meaning she was inside. Waiting, but for what? I didn’t have a clue, for all I knew she was going to hit me upside the head the second I walked in the door. I parked next to her car, keeping mine far to one side in hopes that she might not hit it if she left in an angry fit again. I walked up to the door as quietly as I could, cursing myself for not fixing the stairs.
“Hi,” she said.
The house was dark, and smelled heavily of garlic and meat. My round coffee table was in the middle of the room, covered with a white cloth, set with my minimal tableware, and a couple of candles. A bottle of wine sat in the middle of the table and pillows sat on either side of the table. She was standing in the opening to the kitchen, fidgeting and nervous.
“Hi.”
“I want to apologize, I’m sorry about last night. Consider this my penance, please. I’ll leave if you want me to.”
“It smells good.”
She smiled tentatively. I couldn’t resist and I strode across the room to her and folded her into my arms. She stood stiff for a moment and then melted against me. I tightened my arms around her and she turned her face into my neck. I stroked her hair. She sobbed softly and tried to speak but I silenced her.
“Hush, let’s eat, enjoy dinner and we can talk later.”
“My father died.”
The sentence crashed out into the darkness and laid there, a fish out of water without even the decency to gasp for life.
We had eaten, mostly in silence, our eyes occasionally making contact shyly. The bottle of wine was drained quickly and I opened another. I selected some quiet, bluesy music and put it on and danced with her in the kitchen. We’d moved about slowly till the candles burned out and then we made our way through sudden black to the bedroom. In the darkness we had made love without sex, simply pulling each other close, smelling, sliding hands over skin, wordless pronouncements of happiness, fingers tangled in hair. I pressed my lips against her neck and ventured to speak.
“I’m sorry.”
Her response was immediate, too fast, “I’m not,” she said, fire burning in that tiny statement. “My father was a small man, hateful and mean. He was always angry that I was not able to replace his dead son and worse yet that I wasn’t even pretty.”
“I’ve never seen anything more beautiful than you smiling at me tonight.”
“You’re good at that, saying the sort of thing that melts a woman’s heart.”
“My third foster mother was an avid reader of very cheap and very explicit romance novels. I read whatever was available to read. My mind is irrevocably warped when it comes to dealing with women.”
“So what do I do next? Swoon?”
“No, at this point you misinterpret my words again and storm out of the house. I spend several weeks in agony thinking of nothing but you, while you do the same. A series of very uncomfortable meetings will take place wherein we will snipe verbally at each other all the while the most depraved sort of lustful thoughts run through our heads.”
She laughed, the first time this evening and the sound fell onto my ears, a sound more beautiful than the wind in the trees.
“You ridiculous ass, you keep that up and I might just fall in love with you.”
“A fitting revenge it would be.”
She tensed, just for a moment but I felt it all along our bodies.
“Did you just declare your love for me?” she asked. Her voice was light, but deliberately so, and I could feel the tension waiting to return to her body, hovering just out of reach.
“I don’t know what love is,” I declared flatly. “Your father may have been less than what you could have wished, but you at least knew him. I have never known anyone but strangers who put up with me for the tax benefits and the slave labor that could be extracted from me. There has not been a single person to ever love me, and I’ve never loved anyone in return. I wouldn’t know where to begin.” My throat felt a bit raw and I coughed.
Her arms were around me, her fingers dug into my back as she pulled me tight against her body, “I lied, I lied to you, I already love you. You are my shame because I swore I would never love a man. I didn’t intend to come back here after my father’s funereal, but the whole time I could think of nothing but your voice. Nothing else, not your eyes, your arms, not even those awesome legs you have, but your voice. Everything I saw, I heard you whispering in my ear, that delightful cynicism and sarcasm you use to keep yourself distant, but even more I heard the real feelings you try so much to hide, the pain you feel at the human condition even though you’ve suffered it more than most.”
The lovemaking began in earnest now, something I could never describe, heaven has nothing, and I pray I never die, not so long as she is here with me. In my moment of climax I cried out in words I had never spoken to another human being.
“I love you!”
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As for my chili, let me know, I'll paint, and cook.
Happy ending and all, even though it's not an ending, I'm gonna run them through a meat grinder before I'm done.
November is coming fast, and I have to be ready for my second, and hopefully less pathetic attempt at NaNoWriMo.
-m
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10-02-2005 09:00 AM
