More or less, in the spirit of Halloween.
In the living room, I struck him with the empty bottle of champagne I had in my hand. There was a flurry of green glass and a mist of blood, as if, for a moment, it was sleeting Christmas colors. They don't tell you the truth about what it is like to kill a man. When they warn you about the consequences, about the guilt and the grief, no one cares to mention how it gets there. It's the strangest thing; how along with all of that blood, a reel of film spools out from the back of the poor bastard's skull, and the sun swings on its axis to project their lives on the back wall for you to watch. The strangest thing. I watched as he skipped stones with his brother, raced him up and down a lake shore. He made love to a pretty girl with bangs in the backseat of his mother's station wagon and after he dropped her off that night cried, inexplicably, with his head on the steering wheel. He tore his knee freshman year of college playing soccer, replaced sports with literature, published a few descent stories over the course of his years. At thirty, he married and this was the first time I met his kids. They looked strong and tan, with their toothy smiles projected against the wall of my study as their father crumpled in slow motion at my feet. I nearly forgot myself, then. Something centrifugal began to turn inside of me. The neck of the champagne bottle, which I had been clutching white-knuckled through all of this, fell from my fingers. Vomit or tears contested for the right to shake through my body. I prepared to pitch myself to the carpet, to clutch at the corpse of this man who was now my friend, and beg to some God for his resurrection. But the film on the wall kept running. And there, pinned up like a calendar girl, amidst all of this man's best days, was the body of my wife. My wife, smiling at him with her head on his chest. My wife making love to him in our backyard, the chrysanthemums I planted for her clear in the background, and shrieking, but not stopping, when the sprinklers came on. My wife mouthing “I love you” over and over as he took her picture with a Polaroid camera. The hot gust of her breath in his ear when she said, “Of course I'll leave him. Of course.” The reel ran black. I looked at the cracked body at my feet and I remembered. I remembered.
Friday, October 29, 2010
Friday, August 13, 2010
Poem--Untitled
It's summer and the sky pushes down its pregnant
stomach until there is no room to breath.
You want to reach up your arms and cut the rain out.
thinking lately about how strange it is
that your neighbors never bother to shut the door
to have an argument
anymore. It's too hot for that,
you understand,
but the stuff of their conversations is fast
becoming the building material of your dreams
and when you wake up hung over,
it's as if you've been another person for four hours.
It's summer and the sun is a cauterizing flame.
They fight about this dog they own together
fight about how it bit the man-- oh it was so long ago-- but
he still can't look at the thing without thinking about the flash
of it moving at him and there's this stupid
phrase that's stuck in his
head about it:
animal enamel.
When you wake up thinking
you're this man, your stomach
hurts because you're so weak--
a weak man who hates a dog
because he's not smart enough to realize
that he actually hates a girl. How could he
hate a girl he's loved since high school?
But then your eyes adjust to the light
and you
remember that you don't give a fuck about dogs
and you
make yourself a cup of coffee
and you
feel better.
It's summer and the line of tombstones
on the freeway inches toward a terrible sun.
Sitting in the shade of the
stairs that lead up to your
place you wonder if it's a problem
specific to your generation
that you feel so much but can't
seem to think straight.
You set out to make lists of things
that could be the cause--
something in the water,
partisan politics,
the absence of authentic American cuisine--but then
you get distracted and it becomes a grocery list
which you lose later on,
emptying your pockets,
looking for your cigarettes.
stomach until there is no room to breath.
You want to reach up your arms and cut the rain out.
thinking lately about how strange it is
that your neighbors never bother to shut the door
to have an argument
anymore. It's too hot for that,
you understand,
but the stuff of their conversations is fast
becoming the building material of your dreams
and when you wake up hung over,
it's as if you've been another person for four hours.
It's summer and the sun is a cauterizing flame.
They fight about this dog they own together
fight about how it bit the man-- oh it was so long ago-- but
he still can't look at the thing without thinking about the flash
of it moving at him and there's this stupid
phrase that's stuck in his
head about it:
animal enamel.
When you wake up thinking
you're this man, your stomach
hurts because you're so weak--
a weak man who hates a dog
because he's not smart enough to realize
that he actually hates a girl. How could he
hate a girl he's loved since high school?
But then your eyes adjust to the light
and you
remember that you don't give a fuck about dogs
and you
make yourself a cup of coffee
and you
feel better.
It's summer and the line of tombstones
on the freeway inches toward a terrible sun.
Sitting in the shade of the
stairs that lead up to your
place you wonder if it's a problem
specific to your generation
that you feel so much but can't
seem to think straight.
You set out to make lists of things
that could be the cause--
something in the water,
partisan politics,
the absence of authentic American cuisine--but then
you get distracted and it becomes a grocery list
which you lose later on,
emptying your pockets,
looking for your cigarettes.
Friday, June 11, 2010
Snippit, sequentially after the post below in larger work
Flat tire before I was even out of the state, can you believe it? I thought I was going to beat that letter to you, but now I have my doubts. Maybe if I just drove straight through: it's only 25 hours from here, and the mechanic said I'll be ready to go first thing in the morning. I could make it, but I'm about as good at fighting sleep as I am a boxer. It probably doesn't matter anyway. Chances are just as good that you shred the letter before reading it.
I called you this morning, before I put the last of the boxes in the car. I tried your parents place, hung up right before the fourth ring. How many times in your life have you been walking away from placing an unanswered phone call, and had the phone ring right back at you? It's like an orgasm, or someone bursting a paper bag right next to your ear. It was bill collectors, the same ones that called two months ago, still trying to sniff out the last tenets of, what has just become, our old place.
I called you this morning, before I put the last of the boxes in the car. I tried your parents place, hung up right before the fourth ring. How many times in your life have you been walking away from placing an unanswered phone call, and had the phone ring right back at you? It's like an orgasm, or someone bursting a paper bag right next to your ear. It was bill collectors, the same ones that called two months ago, still trying to sniff out the last tenets of, what has just become, our old place.
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Work in progress, untitled, rough, part of larger epistolary work
(Excerpt of larger work in progress. No edits yet.)
Cynthia,
I read that book you were always telling me to read. Out of Boston, bound for NYC, I propped my knees on the back of that threadbare Fung-Wah bus seat and I just tore into it. It was the first book I'd read in months, the only Salinger I'd read at all, except for that one story about banana fish, and I guess I liked it all right. Only problem was, I wasn't even halfway through before I started to notice the things that you had pulled from the pages to line your life with. It became obvious to me all at once, like cracking a code, and the epiphany sent me flipping back through read pages, just to make sure I wasn't imagining things. After that, I wasn't reading a novel, I was trying to work off the dust of a mirror that held your reflection.
When I finished the book, I spent the rest of the ride staring at the ceiling, and seeing your face up there. There was a woman next to me, substantial proportions squeezed into a brown glove of a dress, who kept trying to get me to talk about what was wrong, fancied herself my mother, but I wasn't interested in talking. I was talked out. I was everythinged out. I had gone to Boston three days after you left, shacked up with one of my ex's from high school to try and get you off my mind (if you ever read this, I suppose hearing that will make you jealous, you raging hypocrite, you), and decided to come back because, after just a week, she started picking up my vocal mannerisms and, since I've been talking like you for years now, the whole thing just became too much to bear. When I got off the bus, I spent a full minute blinking in the spring sun.
I'm not staying long. Being one of the few people in New York insane enough to own an automobile, and, at that, a full sized van, has the singular advantage of facilitating hasty get aways. I'll be leaving in the morning. Today, I spent hours immersed in the ruminative monotony of packing boxes, making an exit plan and trying to figure out why you lent me the damn book in the first place. Sure, it's been your favorite thing your whole life. It was on your bedside table in the dormitories, when we were still in school, and when we got our own place after graduation it moved to the plastic crates we used as bedside tables 'cause we couldn't afford real ones. You probably bought a new copy to fill up whatever's serving as your beside table now. What I mean to say is, I guess I should have read it a long time ago, but the thing is that you never asked me to once, not in the whole two years we were together.
In fact, I remember a certain blizzard that locked us in our rattrap apartment for three days last year. I was going nuts for something to do, so I picked it up and set down to read it but you took it out of my hands before I even got past the dedication. I remember, you took it and said, “I know this is going to seem unreasonable, but now is not the time for you to read this.” Your reaction took me aback, at first, but I let it go, easy. Joked around, said, "Well, if that's how you feel about it," and then went and smoked a cigarette on our fire escape. It was something to see, the way the snow swallowed that iron ladder only two steps down from the landing I perched on, even though we lived on the second floor.
I didn't understand it then, but now I am far more confounded as to your intentions. Cynthia, darling, you abandon me and run to Texas, but you leave me the book. Why? In hopes that, once I found so many allusions to the text in your life, I would write you off as a charlatan and let you go? That I would suddenly find you disappointing and unoriginal? Darling, if your life is just some movie adaptation of a book, then it's a loose one. A reimagination, to give the accuracy of your interpretation the most credit it deserves. And that's no slight to you. You did a brilliant job with it. It's just that, however much you feel like you're indebted to your influences, your work is still unmistakably original.
Anyway, the point of this is to say I'm coming to Texas. I know that you told me not to, but I'm not listening. Even if it's only one more time, I need to see you. I'll explain why when I arrive. After all, if I could do otherwise, there would be no point in taking the journey to begin with. I'm mailing this letter to your parents' address, which is also the first place I'll come looking for you. I have some confidence that, with economic matters as they are, you haven't been able to find your own digs yet. But who knows: you have friends, you have ingenuity. Regardless, it's a place to start.
I hope I beat this letter to you for my sake. There is some concern that, upon its receipt, you will run from me.
Love, despite everything,
Michael
Cynthia,
I read that book you were always telling me to read. Out of Boston, bound for NYC, I propped my knees on the back of that threadbare Fung-Wah bus seat and I just tore into it. It was the first book I'd read in months, the only Salinger I'd read at all, except for that one story about banana fish, and I guess I liked it all right. Only problem was, I wasn't even halfway through before I started to notice the things that you had pulled from the pages to line your life with. It became obvious to me all at once, like cracking a code, and the epiphany sent me flipping back through read pages, just to make sure I wasn't imagining things. After that, I wasn't reading a novel, I was trying to work off the dust of a mirror that held your reflection.
When I finished the book, I spent the rest of the ride staring at the ceiling, and seeing your face up there. There was a woman next to me, substantial proportions squeezed into a brown glove of a dress, who kept trying to get me to talk about what was wrong, fancied herself my mother, but I wasn't interested in talking. I was talked out. I was everythinged out. I had gone to Boston three days after you left, shacked up with one of my ex's from high school to try and get you off my mind (if you ever read this, I suppose hearing that will make you jealous, you raging hypocrite, you), and decided to come back because, after just a week, she started picking up my vocal mannerisms and, since I've been talking like you for years now, the whole thing just became too much to bear. When I got off the bus, I spent a full minute blinking in the spring sun.
I'm not staying long. Being one of the few people in New York insane enough to own an automobile, and, at that, a full sized van, has the singular advantage of facilitating hasty get aways. I'll be leaving in the morning. Today, I spent hours immersed in the ruminative monotony of packing boxes, making an exit plan and trying to figure out why you lent me the damn book in the first place. Sure, it's been your favorite thing your whole life. It was on your bedside table in the dormitories, when we were still in school, and when we got our own place after graduation it moved to the plastic crates we used as bedside tables 'cause we couldn't afford real ones. You probably bought a new copy to fill up whatever's serving as your beside table now. What I mean to say is, I guess I should have read it a long time ago, but the thing is that you never asked me to once, not in the whole two years we were together.
In fact, I remember a certain blizzard that locked us in our rattrap apartment for three days last year. I was going nuts for something to do, so I picked it up and set down to read it but you took it out of my hands before I even got past the dedication. I remember, you took it and said, “I know this is going to seem unreasonable, but now is not the time for you to read this.” Your reaction took me aback, at first, but I let it go, easy. Joked around, said, "Well, if that's how you feel about it," and then went and smoked a cigarette on our fire escape. It was something to see, the way the snow swallowed that iron ladder only two steps down from the landing I perched on, even though we lived on the second floor.
I didn't understand it then, but now I am far more confounded as to your intentions. Cynthia, darling, you abandon me and run to Texas, but you leave me the book. Why? In hopes that, once I found so many allusions to the text in your life, I would write you off as a charlatan and let you go? That I would suddenly find you disappointing and unoriginal? Darling, if your life is just some movie adaptation of a book, then it's a loose one. A reimagination, to give the accuracy of your interpretation the most credit it deserves. And that's no slight to you. You did a brilliant job with it. It's just that, however much you feel like you're indebted to your influences, your work is still unmistakably original.
Anyway, the point of this is to say I'm coming to Texas. I know that you told me not to, but I'm not listening. Even if it's only one more time, I need to see you. I'll explain why when I arrive. After all, if I could do otherwise, there would be no point in taking the journey to begin with. I'm mailing this letter to your parents' address, which is also the first place I'll come looking for you. I have some confidence that, with economic matters as they are, you haven't been able to find your own digs yet. But who knows: you have friends, you have ingenuity. Regardless, it's a place to start.
I hope I beat this letter to you for my sake. There is some concern that, upon its receipt, you will run from me.
Love, despite everything,
Michael
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Easier
Easier
I.
The boy picked her up from her parents' place. He waited in the car for her to come, listening to music and drumming his fingers on the wheel. The Malibu looked dirty from the outside, coated in summer pollen and the grit from city rain, but on the inside it was spotless. His fingers smelled bitter from coins he had put in the vacuum machine at the service station only a few minutes before. If he thought the girl had loved him, he might have smoked. But the girl did not love him and so he put a stick of gum in his mouth and checked his chin where the razor had slipped. It wasn't the same. Another minute flicked past on the clock, and he cleared his throat, raised the volume of the stereo and drummed his fingers.
The girl left her parents' house precisely five minutes after they were supposed to meet, which was right on time. She came out the side gate and walked past the garden that was all weeds now, wearing a dress that made her skin look like cream. The fabric was blue, a little too dark for the shade of her eyes. Over the dress she wore a men's blazer that did not belong to the boy.
Giving him a weak wave from the lawn, she walked up to the car and around to the passenger door. She tried the handle, and when the door didn't open, the boy undid the locks so she could come inside.
“Hi,” said the girl, as she floated into the passenger's seat.
“It's good to see you. You look great.”
They drove out of town on a dusty ranch road that ran north. Limestone hillsides and patches of trees cleared away for quarries that stayed lit up like amusement parks all night. They were looking for an empty parking lot. The boy wanted it to be someplace he didn't know, where his memories wouldn't win out over experience.
“Do you care where we go?” he asked.
Staring into the window glass, looking at the scenery or maybe her reflection, she said that whatever was fine with her. Her face was mottled by the little moonlight that made its way to the interior of the car. Two weeks earlier, they had met up for the first time in over a year at some asian restaurant where they ate in a large outdoor seating area, overrun with birdbaths and ivy. The first ten minutes they had barely spoken, gawking at each other in contemplation of their changed looks, in wonder of what a year could do.
For the boy, it had been rough. He had come back into town after dropping out of school, after spending months at a state college, sleeping all the time and driving to fuck away weekends with an out of town girlfriend named Elizabeth, who he knew loved him, but also had been breaking his heart for as long as he could remember. He skin had grown stained and weathered, like the stretches of Texas terrain he had traversed on her behalf. The girl though, sitting beside him in the car, had erupted into something miraculous and dangerous since their last meeting. He was acutely aware of it as they drove: how she had been beautiful a year ago, but now she was older and wore it with abandon, almost with anger, as if it was her revenge on everything to look so good. She put her feet up on the dashboard, and played with the fraying ends of a run in her tights.
“Hey,” he said, “Are you alright?”
“Let's not talk about that, okay?”
He looked away from the road at her because he could not stop looking away from the road at her. She ran her finger along the tab for the automatic locks and after a while she said, “Can you believe we used to be so young?”
He said, “Are we old already?”
II.
The roads climbed, running thin and twisting like a black serpent choking the life out of the hillsides and the boy put a hand on the girl's thigh. She chewed on her lower lip while she contemplated the gesture. He probably didn't even know what he meant by it, he was so used to love. The moment hung in the air for a while, until the boy noticed that the girl was looking at him strangely.
“I'm sorry,” he said, stretching out his fingers across the fabric of her dress. “Is this not okay?”
“I don't know,” she said, and ran her hand over his knuckles. His skin was freezing.
Up ahead of them, a set of street lights appeared, washing out the night. Their metal stalks were planted in the parking lot of an abandoned bible school: an outpost for some suburb that had become a ghost town when the housing bubble burst. It was a possible stopping point. The boy didn't believe in sin, so the irony didn't matter to him. He didn't know what the girl believed in.
“Want to check it out?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said.
They pulled into the lot and parked. In front of them, at the end of the lot, the land dropped off and went running for ten miles down to the city they had left. Those lights glimmered like the embers of a dying fire and the boy rolled down the windows and inhaled the cool air. He killed the engine but left the power on because he didn't want the radio to shut off. His ribs distended and fell back into place as he breathed, and he thought of knots untying.
The girl watched this, and she said, “Can you turn the headlights off?”
He looked at her, and smiled. She smiled too, but quickly let her gaze drop down to her ankles. He flicked off the headlights. A moment wore down and then they were kissing. Her mouth was softer than anything, some violet static that washed over him. She ran her fingers down the skin of his neck, and he closed his eyes and she was the only thing he felt in that dark. Then he thought of his own fingers tracing across Elizabeth's neck, four days ago. Of the bruise that he knew was caused by someone else's lips and the open drawers across her dorm room that she always stared into after they fucked. The girl had called him, his phone vibrating deep within the sheets, and when Elizabeth had asked who it was, he had told her that the girl was just an old friend he had run into. Eventually Elizabeth had rolled over to look at him and when she dropped her head onto his chest, he closed her eyes and felt the weight of it and knew had been lied to because the world was anything but limitless.
In the car, his fingers pushed across the fabric of her dress and his mouth was hungry and dry. They were in the back seat now, the windows still rolled down and the stereo still playing. The whole thing was careless because it had to be, because they knew that thought would rip the night in half. She let him take off her dress, lifting her arms over her head. When he had it off, she took the lifeless fabric from his hands and threw it on the floor. He smiled a sheepish smile and she lay back against the cool leather of the car seats. Seeing her like that, he wanted her in his bed on a morning when the sun was out, wanted to feel her skin as it would contrast with cloth and comfort. He watched her for too long, and she stared in his eyes as he watched. Then she sat up and she put her arms around his neck and pulled him toward her and moved her mouth in his
He pushed his fingers underneath her bra and he was reading her like a map when his phone went off in the backseat. All at once context clapped down around them: he saw it come together in her eyes. He watched her face change expression as she remembered what brought them here, the stupid drunken voicemail she had left him, how sad he looked when he picked her up. He brushed her hair away, tried to brush those thoughts away from her. He kissed her on her cheek, and while his lips were tracing down her stomach, she said, “wait,” and at first it just came out as hot breath, so she said it again.
“Wait.”
He looked up at her. The concern on his face was obvious and fatal. He said, “What's the matter?” even though the answer was spelled out in the air. She hesitated and she said, “I really don't want to fuck anything up for you.”
He laughed a sick laugh, like a death rattle or wood splintering, and he said, “You could not possibly fuck anything up that hasn't been broken forever.”
She wanted to be insistent. She said, “Really.”
And he got up right next to her face and he said, “I promise. This is what I want. I wouldn't be here otherwise.”
She shook her head at the boy like he was misunderstanding the world completely, but when he pressed his lips against hers again to prove his point she kissed him back, and when he ran his fingers over the lace of her underwear she lifted her hips so he could take them off. They let the phone ring and ring.
III.
Afterward, they stayed for a while in the cool of the car. There was a feather on her hip, composed of barely straight lines. He ran his finger along the raised ink, and said, “What's this?”
She said, “ I did it myself.”
He asked why, and she said, “Sometimes you just get too drunk and too sad.”
The boy turned the stereo off and took the keys out of the ignition so that the battery wouldn't die and they could stay longer, and asked, “Is that why you're here now?”
Soon, the girl wanted to put her dress back on. The boy got out of the car and walked around to the front and sat on the hood. He put his hand on the pack of cigarettes in his pocket, and hesitated for a while before he lit one. The girl joined him while he finished it. He drove her home. In her driveway, she started to get out and he said, “Hey, wait,” and they shared another long kiss before he let her slip away from him. She tasted like he imagined the winds might taste if they were changing.
VII.
The boy drove back toward his house as rain was starting to fall, thinking about the girl. There were puddles of water already gathered at the shoulders of the road from yesterday's storms and they reflected streetlamps like they were trying to imitate constellations. He wanted everything beautiful to stop, because it was making his head ache. He wanted a drink. He pulled off the road two exits early, and parked in front of a gas station.
The boy got out of the car and smoked another cigarette, staring at the sky, and then at the gasoline pumps. When he was finished, he threw the butt of his cigarette into a puddle, searched his pockets for change and vacuumed the car. The car got clean, and then he didn't know what to do. He walked the lot until, eventually, his cellphone was in his hand and he stared for a long time at the girl's number in his directory, mouthing her name to himself again and again. Then, slowly, he scrolled down another 6 names and dialed.
Elizabeth answered on the fourth ring and he could tell by her voice that she was alone.
He said, “Can I come over?”
I.
The boy picked her up from her parents' place. He waited in the car for her to come, listening to music and drumming his fingers on the wheel. The Malibu looked dirty from the outside, coated in summer pollen and the grit from city rain, but on the inside it was spotless. His fingers smelled bitter from coins he had put in the vacuum machine at the service station only a few minutes before. If he thought the girl had loved him, he might have smoked. But the girl did not love him and so he put a stick of gum in his mouth and checked his chin where the razor had slipped. It wasn't the same. Another minute flicked past on the clock, and he cleared his throat, raised the volume of the stereo and drummed his fingers.
The girl left her parents' house precisely five minutes after they were supposed to meet, which was right on time. She came out the side gate and walked past the garden that was all weeds now, wearing a dress that made her skin look like cream. The fabric was blue, a little too dark for the shade of her eyes. Over the dress she wore a men's blazer that did not belong to the boy.
Giving him a weak wave from the lawn, she walked up to the car and around to the passenger door. She tried the handle, and when the door didn't open, the boy undid the locks so she could come inside.
“Hi,” said the girl, as she floated into the passenger's seat.
“It's good to see you. You look great.”
They drove out of town on a dusty ranch road that ran north. Limestone hillsides and patches of trees cleared away for quarries that stayed lit up like amusement parks all night. They were looking for an empty parking lot. The boy wanted it to be someplace he didn't know, where his memories wouldn't win out over experience.
“Do you care where we go?” he asked.
Staring into the window glass, looking at the scenery or maybe her reflection, she said that whatever was fine with her. Her face was mottled by the little moonlight that made its way to the interior of the car. Two weeks earlier, they had met up for the first time in over a year at some asian restaurant where they ate in a large outdoor seating area, overrun with birdbaths and ivy. The first ten minutes they had barely spoken, gawking at each other in contemplation of their changed looks, in wonder of what a year could do.
For the boy, it had been rough. He had come back into town after dropping out of school, after spending months at a state college, sleeping all the time and driving to fuck away weekends with an out of town girlfriend named Elizabeth, who he knew loved him, but also had been breaking his heart for as long as he could remember. He skin had grown stained and weathered, like the stretches of Texas terrain he had traversed on her behalf. The girl though, sitting beside him in the car, had erupted into something miraculous and dangerous since their last meeting. He was acutely aware of it as they drove: how she had been beautiful a year ago, but now she was older and wore it with abandon, almost with anger, as if it was her revenge on everything to look so good. She put her feet up on the dashboard, and played with the fraying ends of a run in her tights.
“Hey,” he said, “Are you alright?”
“Let's not talk about that, okay?”
He looked away from the road at her because he could not stop looking away from the road at her. She ran her finger along the tab for the automatic locks and after a while she said, “Can you believe we used to be so young?”
He said, “Are we old already?”
II.
The roads climbed, running thin and twisting like a black serpent choking the life out of the hillsides and the boy put a hand on the girl's thigh. She chewed on her lower lip while she contemplated the gesture. He probably didn't even know what he meant by it, he was so used to love. The moment hung in the air for a while, until the boy noticed that the girl was looking at him strangely.
“I'm sorry,” he said, stretching out his fingers across the fabric of her dress. “Is this not okay?”
“I don't know,” she said, and ran her hand over his knuckles. His skin was freezing.
Up ahead of them, a set of street lights appeared, washing out the night. Their metal stalks were planted in the parking lot of an abandoned bible school: an outpost for some suburb that had become a ghost town when the housing bubble burst. It was a possible stopping point. The boy didn't believe in sin, so the irony didn't matter to him. He didn't know what the girl believed in.
“Want to check it out?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said.
They pulled into the lot and parked. In front of them, at the end of the lot, the land dropped off and went running for ten miles down to the city they had left. Those lights glimmered like the embers of a dying fire and the boy rolled down the windows and inhaled the cool air. He killed the engine but left the power on because he didn't want the radio to shut off. His ribs distended and fell back into place as he breathed, and he thought of knots untying.
The girl watched this, and she said, “Can you turn the headlights off?”
He looked at her, and smiled. She smiled too, but quickly let her gaze drop down to her ankles. He flicked off the headlights. A moment wore down and then they were kissing. Her mouth was softer than anything, some violet static that washed over him. She ran her fingers down the skin of his neck, and he closed his eyes and she was the only thing he felt in that dark. Then he thought of his own fingers tracing across Elizabeth's neck, four days ago. Of the bruise that he knew was caused by someone else's lips and the open drawers across her dorm room that she always stared into after they fucked. The girl had called him, his phone vibrating deep within the sheets, and when Elizabeth had asked who it was, he had told her that the girl was just an old friend he had run into. Eventually Elizabeth had rolled over to look at him and when she dropped her head onto his chest, he closed her eyes and felt the weight of it and knew had been lied to because the world was anything but limitless.
In the car, his fingers pushed across the fabric of her dress and his mouth was hungry and dry. They were in the back seat now, the windows still rolled down and the stereo still playing. The whole thing was careless because it had to be, because they knew that thought would rip the night in half. She let him take off her dress, lifting her arms over her head. When he had it off, she took the lifeless fabric from his hands and threw it on the floor. He smiled a sheepish smile and she lay back against the cool leather of the car seats. Seeing her like that, he wanted her in his bed on a morning when the sun was out, wanted to feel her skin as it would contrast with cloth and comfort. He watched her for too long, and she stared in his eyes as he watched. Then she sat up and she put her arms around his neck and pulled him toward her and moved her mouth in his
He pushed his fingers underneath her bra and he was reading her like a map when his phone went off in the backseat. All at once context clapped down around them: he saw it come together in her eyes. He watched her face change expression as she remembered what brought them here, the stupid drunken voicemail she had left him, how sad he looked when he picked her up. He brushed her hair away, tried to brush those thoughts away from her. He kissed her on her cheek, and while his lips were tracing down her stomach, she said, “wait,” and at first it just came out as hot breath, so she said it again.
“Wait.”
He looked up at her. The concern on his face was obvious and fatal. He said, “What's the matter?” even though the answer was spelled out in the air. She hesitated and she said, “I really don't want to fuck anything up for you.”
He laughed a sick laugh, like a death rattle or wood splintering, and he said, “You could not possibly fuck anything up that hasn't been broken forever.”
She wanted to be insistent. She said, “Really.”
And he got up right next to her face and he said, “I promise. This is what I want. I wouldn't be here otherwise.”
She shook her head at the boy like he was misunderstanding the world completely, but when he pressed his lips against hers again to prove his point she kissed him back, and when he ran his fingers over the lace of her underwear she lifted her hips so he could take them off. They let the phone ring and ring.
III.
Afterward, they stayed for a while in the cool of the car. There was a feather on her hip, composed of barely straight lines. He ran his finger along the raised ink, and said, “What's this?”
She said, “ I did it myself.”
He asked why, and she said, “Sometimes you just get too drunk and too sad.”
The boy turned the stereo off and took the keys out of the ignition so that the battery wouldn't die and they could stay longer, and asked, “Is that why you're here now?”
Soon, the girl wanted to put her dress back on. The boy got out of the car and walked around to the front and sat on the hood. He put his hand on the pack of cigarettes in his pocket, and hesitated for a while before he lit one. The girl joined him while he finished it. He drove her home. In her driveway, she started to get out and he said, “Hey, wait,” and they shared another long kiss before he let her slip away from him. She tasted like he imagined the winds might taste if they were changing.
VII.
The boy drove back toward his house as rain was starting to fall, thinking about the girl. There were puddles of water already gathered at the shoulders of the road from yesterday's storms and they reflected streetlamps like they were trying to imitate constellations. He wanted everything beautiful to stop, because it was making his head ache. He wanted a drink. He pulled off the road two exits early, and parked in front of a gas station.
The boy got out of the car and smoked another cigarette, staring at the sky, and then at the gasoline pumps. When he was finished, he threw the butt of his cigarette into a puddle, searched his pockets for change and vacuumed the car. The car got clean, and then he didn't know what to do. He walked the lot until, eventually, his cellphone was in his hand and he stared for a long time at the girl's number in his directory, mouthing her name to himself again and again. Then, slowly, he scrolled down another 6 names and dialed.
Elizabeth answered on the fourth ring and he could tell by her voice that she was alone.
He said, “Can I come over?”
Hardware
Hardware
I.
The day Julian got out of jail the first thing he did was check into a hotel with the fifty bucks he had in his jeans when they took him in. He slept like he had never even been alive. In the morning, he drove to a hardware store where he purchased a shovel with an oak shaft and a steel spade that was painted blue. Julian put the shovel in the back of the truck, and drove west for twenty minutes, out of town.
He went the speed limit and watched the road behind him through the side view, even though the streets were bare and he knew it didn't matter. He kept the radio off because he was afraid of what music might sound like. The shoulder went from gravel to dirt, and he knew where to stop. Everything around him was farm land, and he tried to think about how many minutes closer the city was now. If his memory was good enough, he could figure out how many feet of land went every year, every month, every week. He opened the door of the truck and let his feet sink into the soil.
The air was saturated with the remnants of an afternoon rain, and everything smelled of fertilizer and wet grass. Barbed wire hemmed off a freshly tilled field, and the boy ducked underneath it and set off across the land. He walked almost a quarter of a mile in, before stopping between two furrows and planting his shovel into the soil, confidently. He inhaled the cool air into his lungs until it bit, and then he started to dig. For ten minutes he dug, watching the fresh blue paint fade into the coffee-colored soil. He kept his eyes to his work and allowed himself to be interrupted only once, to watch a constellation of geese track across the sky. The geese had been migrating for weeks now, and it took him a few moments of watching to realize what was different this time. There was no longer chain link in his peripheral vision.
Julian dug up the money, brushed the soil off the duffle bag it was in, and walked back toward his truck.
II.
When Julian stopped at a gas station, the bag was in the spare tire hatch. The spare tire was on the shoulder of the road where he had dug up the bag. He had fifty dollars of it in his pocket, and another hundred in the glove compartment in case of emergencies. He had put a grand in a paper bag in the trunk.
Julian pumped the gas and then went inside the station asked for a pack of cigarettes. The woman working the register was pregnant and smiled at him over a fishing magazine she was reading, before coughing into her sleeve. She looked sick.
“How old are you, sweetheart?”
Julian had to think about it. It was a question no one had asked him in forever, even though there was a time when it was all they asked him.
“Twenty, now,” he said.
“Do you have ID on you?”
He nodded, fished his driver's license out of the back pocket of his jeans, and placed it on the counter over the glass window that displayed lottery tickets. In the picture, his face was still speckled with acne and his smile was close to earnest.
“Anything else?”
He shook his head, and paid for the gas and cigarettes in cash. On the way out, he stopped in the doorway.
“Is there a payphone?”
“Just around the side.”
The sun had warmed up the earth. He turned the wrong direction and circled the whole store before he found the payphone bolted to the corrugated steel wall. He squinted so he could see where to feed the change in. The number was something he still knew by heart, but the ringing sounded ghostly and it made him nauseous. He didn't expect her to answer, but eventually she did.
“April, it's Julian.”
“I know,” she said.
“How are you? I got out last night and I tried to call you but you didn't pick up.”
“When did you call?”
“I called a bunch.”
“I guess I must've been out.
“I guess so,” he said. He brushed his hair behind his ear. It was almost down to his shoulders now. He knew April would hate it. He would get it cut before he saw her.
“Listen,” he said, running his fingers around the metal keypad, “I was hoping I could come by.”
“Julian, I don't think that's a good idea.”
“I've got something to give you.”
“What is it?”
“I don't want to say over the phone”
She laughed a spiteful, cough of a laugh.
“Whatever, Julian. Couldn't you at least have made something up?”
“What? No, I'm not lying. Look, let me just--”
“No, Julian.”
He could picture her how might have looked right then, running her nails along the denim of her jeans and inspecting the cuticles like she did when she needed to say something hard.
“It's been so long” Julian said, finally.
“What?” April said, impatiently. He could hear her moving around the room now, opening cabinets.
“It's been two years, April. That's a fucking long time. And I've never even met her.”
On the other end of the line, the sound of ice falling into a glass, and liquid being poured. He could hear her breath on the receiver as she took a sip of whatever she had mixed and sighed.
“It doesn't matter. It's for the best, Julian. We've talked about this.”
“When did we ever talk about this?”
A car pulled into the parking lot, and Julian turned to look at it. A boxy, beat up station wagon painted a terrible shade of eggplant. A man emerged confidently from the driver's side with sunglasses on and spat into the dirt as he walked up to the station, leaving the car running and the windows down. Julian turned back to the phone as the man walked inside, and leaned against the wall with his fingers outspread, looking down at his shoes. He was standing in crushed, white gravel.
“Not we as in me and you, Julian.”
“What does that mean? Who is 'we' then?”
“Julian, calm down.”
He hung up the phone, and slammed the palm of his hand against the corrugated steel, keeping his eyes on the soil stuck to his shoes. He pressed his head against the wall, and kept banging the steel. His toes shifted to the side and then fell back in focus every time. Soon, the gas station attendant came around.
“What are you doing, honey?”
Julian looked up at her, startled, not understanding why she was there. She looked sad, like she had come from some place where people were much better. Eventually, he shook his head. He straightened up and said, “Nothing. I'm sorry.”
She stared back at him as if she was expecting something else, holding her hands on her pregnant stomach and smiling weakly.
“I guess I'm just going through a rough patch,” he said.
She nodded, and moved her left hand slowly over her belly.
“It's alright,” she said. “But, get moving along now. We don't get many earthquakes around here, and, to be honest, that's the way we like it.”
“I understand, ma'am.”
They parted silently. The boy walked toward his car, and the woman turned back and slipped inside of the building. The station wagon was still there, baking in the heat with its engine idling noisily, as the boy crossed the parking lot. On the dashboard, there was a bouquet of lilies beginning to wilt in the sunlight. Julian stopped walking and looked at the flowers. Watching the petals absorb the sunlight, he felt incredibly old. He walked to his own car, unlocked the passenger's side door, and took twenty dollars out of the glove compartment.
Through the windows, he could see the man in the store chatting with the pregnant attendant and drinking a tallboy. At one point, he touched her hand and she smiled in a way that made Julian wonder who the flowers were really for, if he didn't bring them in. He considered not leaving the money, then, but remembered that he was reformed. He put the bill under the windshield wipers and took the bouquet with him.
III.
An hour later, Julian climbed the concrete steps with one hand on the black, metal railing. He had a thousand dollars in a paper sack, and the flowers in the other. As he numbered off the final few steps, he mused to himself about how it was just a fraction of what he could give to her.
The apartment number was 3C, and he knocked on the door. He heard activity, the sound of a girl giggling. His heart went up like a sodium flare and he burned until a man opened the door. Julian didn't know the man, but the man knew Julian, and Julian could tell that the man knew him by the way he grabbed him by the collar of his shirt. There was an instant in which Julian thought he saw April over the man's shoulder, in some high resolution daydream, grabbing a beautiful little girl wearing a floral print dress and carrying her out of view, but it was over in an instant and replaced with the feeling of his back hitting the concrete landing. He coughed hard, and rolled over onto his side.
“She's my fucking daughter,” he gasped.
The man didn't even kick him in the ribs. Julian wanted him to so badly. He wanted the man to break his bones, and kick his nose into his face, an roll him down the stairs into the street. But he didn't. He didn't need to. Julian knew it as he pressed his face against the cool concrete and tried desperately tried to catch his breath.
“No, she's not,” the man said, his voice surprisingly gentle.
“Of course she is,” Julian spat.
“I'm sorry, man, but not really. Everything in Maggie's life that's mattered happened without you.”
The man who had thrown Julian to the floor had a surprisingly gentle, almost sheepish voice, a barrel chest and huge hands of an auto mechanic. Even with his eyes stinging with tears, from the pain and the glare of the sun, Julian could tell he had an honest face.
Julian's breath evened, and he sprawled his body out on the concrete. He felt as if his spine had dissolved. The man looked at Julian sadly, for a moment, and then turned to go inside.
“Just get out of here,” he said over his shoulder. “You don't want us to call the cops. ”
Julian stared at the bottom of the railing and the texture of the concrete, so close to his eyes.
“Wait, hold on.”
The man stopped and turned around slowly. Julian took a few more deep breaths, and then forced himself up onto his feet. The man watched as Julian gained his balance, but did not move to help him. Julian gripped the black steel railing with a clenched fist and dragged himself to his feet.
“Are you two married now?” he asked, as he moved toward the man.
“Engaged. We'll be married in May.”
Julian nodded. He noticed that the man couldn't help but smile as the words left his lips, even in these circumstances. He bent down, one hand still clutching the railing, and picked up the paper bag from next to the flowers.
“I want to give you some money,” he said. “For Maggie, I mean.I want to give Maggie some money,” he said.
“Is it drug money?”
Julian stopped for a moment.
“It used to be.”
The man shook his head, and said, “I appreciate it, but we talked about it and decided that was a bad idea.”
“You talked about it?”Julian asked.
The man nodded his head. Julian picked up the flowers off the ground, and left.
IV.
Julian drove back to the gas station he had come from. He parked at a pump, and then walked into the station and put the flowers down on the counter, and said, “I think these are for you.”
“What do you mean?” the woman said.
“I mean, I hope these were for you,” Julian said.
The woman said something, but Julian wasn't listening.
“Do you have a pair of scissors?” he asked.
“What?”
“A pair of scissors. Do you sell them? Or have them for opening boxes or cutting tape or something.”
The woman looked at him blankly until Julian grew uncomfortable, and then she weakly gestured toward an aisle. He walked in the direction that she pointed, grabbed a pair of scissors off a shelf of cheap school supplies, went into the bathroom, and locked the door. He took the scissors out of their packaging and left it in the sink. The blades of the scissors were dull and tarnished, but he didn't care. Lock by lock, without paying much attention to what he doing, he cut his hair off. Instead of watching his work, he studied his face and tried to place his features in the blur of a creature he had seen over that man's shoulder. Soon, his hair was short and he was the one who looked like his father. He left the scissors in the sink with their packaging and walked out of the bathroom and then out of the gas station. He took the shovel out of the back of the truck and walked back into the gas station, and said, “I'm sorry,” before he held the spade of the the shovel to the attendant's throat.
“Please relax,” he said to her. “I don't want to her hurt you, or your baby. Will you please just press the silent alarm button, and put some money in a bag.”
She did as she was told. Julian left the store and sat quietly on the curb outside of the station with two hundred dollars in a plastic grocery bag, waiting for the police to come.
I.
The day Julian got out of jail the first thing he did was check into a hotel with the fifty bucks he had in his jeans when they took him in. He slept like he had never even been alive. In the morning, he drove to a hardware store where he purchased a shovel with an oak shaft and a steel spade that was painted blue. Julian put the shovel in the back of the truck, and drove west for twenty minutes, out of town.
He went the speed limit and watched the road behind him through the side view, even though the streets were bare and he knew it didn't matter. He kept the radio off because he was afraid of what music might sound like. The shoulder went from gravel to dirt, and he knew where to stop. Everything around him was farm land, and he tried to think about how many minutes closer the city was now. If his memory was good enough, he could figure out how many feet of land went every year, every month, every week. He opened the door of the truck and let his feet sink into the soil.
The air was saturated with the remnants of an afternoon rain, and everything smelled of fertilizer and wet grass. Barbed wire hemmed off a freshly tilled field, and the boy ducked underneath it and set off across the land. He walked almost a quarter of a mile in, before stopping between two furrows and planting his shovel into the soil, confidently. He inhaled the cool air into his lungs until it bit, and then he started to dig. For ten minutes he dug, watching the fresh blue paint fade into the coffee-colored soil. He kept his eyes to his work and allowed himself to be interrupted only once, to watch a constellation of geese track across the sky. The geese had been migrating for weeks now, and it took him a few moments of watching to realize what was different this time. There was no longer chain link in his peripheral vision.
Julian dug up the money, brushed the soil off the duffle bag it was in, and walked back toward his truck.
II.
When Julian stopped at a gas station, the bag was in the spare tire hatch. The spare tire was on the shoulder of the road where he had dug up the bag. He had fifty dollars of it in his pocket, and another hundred in the glove compartment in case of emergencies. He had put a grand in a paper bag in the trunk.
Julian pumped the gas and then went inside the station asked for a pack of cigarettes. The woman working the register was pregnant and smiled at him over a fishing magazine she was reading, before coughing into her sleeve. She looked sick.
“How old are you, sweetheart?”
Julian had to think about it. It was a question no one had asked him in forever, even though there was a time when it was all they asked him.
“Twenty, now,” he said.
“Do you have ID on you?”
He nodded, fished his driver's license out of the back pocket of his jeans, and placed it on the counter over the glass window that displayed lottery tickets. In the picture, his face was still speckled with acne and his smile was close to earnest.
“Anything else?”
He shook his head, and paid for the gas and cigarettes in cash. On the way out, he stopped in the doorway.
“Is there a payphone?”
“Just around the side.”
The sun had warmed up the earth. He turned the wrong direction and circled the whole store before he found the payphone bolted to the corrugated steel wall. He squinted so he could see where to feed the change in. The number was something he still knew by heart, but the ringing sounded ghostly and it made him nauseous. He didn't expect her to answer, but eventually she did.
“April, it's Julian.”
“I know,” she said.
“How are you? I got out last night and I tried to call you but you didn't pick up.”
“When did you call?”
“I called a bunch.”
“I guess I must've been out.
“I guess so,” he said. He brushed his hair behind his ear. It was almost down to his shoulders now. He knew April would hate it. He would get it cut before he saw her.
“Listen,” he said, running his fingers around the metal keypad, “I was hoping I could come by.”
“Julian, I don't think that's a good idea.”
“I've got something to give you.”
“What is it?”
“I don't want to say over the phone”
She laughed a spiteful, cough of a laugh.
“Whatever, Julian. Couldn't you at least have made something up?”
“What? No, I'm not lying. Look, let me just--”
“No, Julian.”
He could picture her how might have looked right then, running her nails along the denim of her jeans and inspecting the cuticles like she did when she needed to say something hard.
“It's been so long” Julian said, finally.
“What?” April said, impatiently. He could hear her moving around the room now, opening cabinets.
“It's been two years, April. That's a fucking long time. And I've never even met her.”
On the other end of the line, the sound of ice falling into a glass, and liquid being poured. He could hear her breath on the receiver as she took a sip of whatever she had mixed and sighed.
“It doesn't matter. It's for the best, Julian. We've talked about this.”
“When did we ever talk about this?”
A car pulled into the parking lot, and Julian turned to look at it. A boxy, beat up station wagon painted a terrible shade of eggplant. A man emerged confidently from the driver's side with sunglasses on and spat into the dirt as he walked up to the station, leaving the car running and the windows down. Julian turned back to the phone as the man walked inside, and leaned against the wall with his fingers outspread, looking down at his shoes. He was standing in crushed, white gravel.
“Not we as in me and you, Julian.”
“What does that mean? Who is 'we' then?”
“Julian, calm down.”
He hung up the phone, and slammed the palm of his hand against the corrugated steel, keeping his eyes on the soil stuck to his shoes. He pressed his head against the wall, and kept banging the steel. His toes shifted to the side and then fell back in focus every time. Soon, the gas station attendant came around.
“What are you doing, honey?”
Julian looked up at her, startled, not understanding why she was there. She looked sad, like she had come from some place where people were much better. Eventually, he shook his head. He straightened up and said, “Nothing. I'm sorry.”
She stared back at him as if she was expecting something else, holding her hands on her pregnant stomach and smiling weakly.
“I guess I'm just going through a rough patch,” he said.
She nodded, and moved her left hand slowly over her belly.
“It's alright,” she said. “But, get moving along now. We don't get many earthquakes around here, and, to be honest, that's the way we like it.”
“I understand, ma'am.”
They parted silently. The boy walked toward his car, and the woman turned back and slipped inside of the building. The station wagon was still there, baking in the heat with its engine idling noisily, as the boy crossed the parking lot. On the dashboard, there was a bouquet of lilies beginning to wilt in the sunlight. Julian stopped walking and looked at the flowers. Watching the petals absorb the sunlight, he felt incredibly old. He walked to his own car, unlocked the passenger's side door, and took twenty dollars out of the glove compartment.
Through the windows, he could see the man in the store chatting with the pregnant attendant and drinking a tallboy. At one point, he touched her hand and she smiled in a way that made Julian wonder who the flowers were really for, if he didn't bring them in. He considered not leaving the money, then, but remembered that he was reformed. He put the bill under the windshield wipers and took the bouquet with him.
III.
An hour later, Julian climbed the concrete steps with one hand on the black, metal railing. He had a thousand dollars in a paper sack, and the flowers in the other. As he numbered off the final few steps, he mused to himself about how it was just a fraction of what he could give to her.
The apartment number was 3C, and he knocked on the door. He heard activity, the sound of a girl giggling. His heart went up like a sodium flare and he burned until a man opened the door. Julian didn't know the man, but the man knew Julian, and Julian could tell that the man knew him by the way he grabbed him by the collar of his shirt. There was an instant in which Julian thought he saw April over the man's shoulder, in some high resolution daydream, grabbing a beautiful little girl wearing a floral print dress and carrying her out of view, but it was over in an instant and replaced with the feeling of his back hitting the concrete landing. He coughed hard, and rolled over onto his side.
“She's my fucking daughter,” he gasped.
The man didn't even kick him in the ribs. Julian wanted him to so badly. He wanted the man to break his bones, and kick his nose into his face, an roll him down the stairs into the street. But he didn't. He didn't need to. Julian knew it as he pressed his face against the cool concrete and tried desperately tried to catch his breath.
“No, she's not,” the man said, his voice surprisingly gentle.
“Of course she is,” Julian spat.
“I'm sorry, man, but not really. Everything in Maggie's life that's mattered happened without you.”
The man who had thrown Julian to the floor had a surprisingly gentle, almost sheepish voice, a barrel chest and huge hands of an auto mechanic. Even with his eyes stinging with tears, from the pain and the glare of the sun, Julian could tell he had an honest face.
Julian's breath evened, and he sprawled his body out on the concrete. He felt as if his spine had dissolved. The man looked at Julian sadly, for a moment, and then turned to go inside.
“Just get out of here,” he said over his shoulder. “You don't want us to call the cops. ”
Julian stared at the bottom of the railing and the texture of the concrete, so close to his eyes.
“Wait, hold on.”
The man stopped and turned around slowly. Julian took a few more deep breaths, and then forced himself up onto his feet. The man watched as Julian gained his balance, but did not move to help him. Julian gripped the black steel railing with a clenched fist and dragged himself to his feet.
“Are you two married now?” he asked, as he moved toward the man.
“Engaged. We'll be married in May.”
Julian nodded. He noticed that the man couldn't help but smile as the words left his lips, even in these circumstances. He bent down, one hand still clutching the railing, and picked up the paper bag from next to the flowers.
“I want to give you some money,” he said. “For Maggie, I mean.I want to give Maggie some money,” he said.
“Is it drug money?”
Julian stopped for a moment.
“It used to be.”
The man shook his head, and said, “I appreciate it, but we talked about it and decided that was a bad idea.”
“You talked about it?”Julian asked.
The man nodded his head. Julian picked up the flowers off the ground, and left.
IV.
Julian drove back to the gas station he had come from. He parked at a pump, and then walked into the station and put the flowers down on the counter, and said, “I think these are for you.”
“What do you mean?” the woman said.
“I mean, I hope these were for you,” Julian said.
The woman said something, but Julian wasn't listening.
“Do you have a pair of scissors?” he asked.
“What?”
“A pair of scissors. Do you sell them? Or have them for opening boxes or cutting tape or something.”
The woman looked at him blankly until Julian grew uncomfortable, and then she weakly gestured toward an aisle. He walked in the direction that she pointed, grabbed a pair of scissors off a shelf of cheap school supplies, went into the bathroom, and locked the door. He took the scissors out of their packaging and left it in the sink. The blades of the scissors were dull and tarnished, but he didn't care. Lock by lock, without paying much attention to what he doing, he cut his hair off. Instead of watching his work, he studied his face and tried to place his features in the blur of a creature he had seen over that man's shoulder. Soon, his hair was short and he was the one who looked like his father. He left the scissors in the sink with their packaging and walked out of the bathroom and then out of the gas station. He took the shovel out of the back of the truck and walked back into the gas station, and said, “I'm sorry,” before he held the spade of the the shovel to the attendant's throat.
“Please relax,” he said to her. “I don't want to her hurt you, or your baby. Will you please just press the silent alarm button, and put some money in a bag.”
She did as she was told. Julian left the store and sat quietly on the curb outside of the station with two hundred dollars in a plastic grocery bag, waiting for the police to come.
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Please Come Home to Hamngatan
Please Come Home to Hamngatan
I.
When Jenny left him, Ian had one scene left to write in his play. It was his graduate thesis, and she painted her nails in the bathroom before she did it. He could taste the polish, like some overripe fruit in his mouth before she even got into the living room. He was sitting cross legged on the wood floor, making edits to the first act with a blue pen.
Without looking up at her, Ian said, “I'm not sure about the dialogue here, would you mind reading through it with me?” and she said, “I'm leaving.”
II.
The man she left him for was named Robert. He was twenty three and loved records in a measured, delicate way, unlike most boys his age loved anything. He built his own turntables from kits he ordered in the mail and every morning, a half an hour before he needed to be up, he would get out of bed and put an album on. In bed again, he would sleep til the needle sung static to him from the smooth center of the disc.
Before she met him, Robert listened to one side of a record every morning. When she started sleeping over was when he started flipping the records over and playing the other sides so there was something to listen to while he made breakfast and she dozed in bed. It became one of her favorite things: watching, through half opened eyes, as he picked up the record and spun it between his two fingers, before putting it down on the turn table and dropping the needle.
III.
When she left, she didn't take anything. She had hardly anything at his place as it was. Still, Ian spent most of the day considering the things that remained. Her pipe, a few books, a binder full of CDs she never seemed to play anymore. When night came, he set them all outside to be collected with the garbage. Then he tried to drink himself to death. He chose gin, and barely made it through a quarter of the bottle before giving up, and falling asleep on the couch. At first, he dreamt of her, wearing the same clothes as when they first met, feeding some strange animal down by a lake in their home town. Then he dreamt he pulled out his hair, all at once, just by running his hand through it.
In yolky light of morning, he woke hungover, thinking he might have come up with the last scene for the play. He stumbled to his bedroom, wincing against the sound of his own footfalls, in pursuit of his notepad. It was not on his side table. He emptied drawers and tore through binders full of student work, occasionally stumbling under the weight of his nausea and the pain his head and, still, the manuscript was undiscovered. He cancelled the class he was supposed to teach that afternoon and spent the day laying on his hardwood floor surrounded by the contents of his cupboards watching the ceiling fan spin.
IV.
Three days later, he called her up. Their conversation was short, almost nonexistent. He was walking to the liquor store because he had finally finished off all the booze in his house. She answered the phone on the third ring with a hello, her voice lost somewhere crowded that echoed with laughter.
“Jenny?”
“Who is this?” she asked, the cacophony overtaking most of her voice. Ian swallowed hard at the sound and shook his head, looking down at his feet. Hung over for the third day in a row now, the sky pinwheeled and he rubbed his free hand over his puffy eyes.
“You sound lost,” he said.
“Ian? Is that you?”
“Are you coming back?”
“Ian? Ian, why are you calling?”
“Did you take my play?”
“What? No, of course not. Why would I take--”
He hung up, and vomited on the sidewalk.
V.
Cancelled two more classes, spent two days languishing in his house with eyes huge and glassy like fishtanks. Soon, there was a call saying he had to go in to teach or the graduate program would stop funding him. So, on a Thursday, ten minutes late, he showed up and paced the room like he had never seen it before. He blinked silently at the fluorescent lights. A few of the kids had already left and the ones who were still there shrunk away from him, exchanging glances like frightened animals. He studied their faces, trying to remember how he felt three years before, when he was sitting where they were. It was all gone, and he felt disfigured, washed ashore.
Standing there, with all of them watching him, he called her again. His fingers shook as he dialed the numbers, and he thought of all those times in which she had been the one to pump the water out of his lungs. Now, her voicemail picked up after the second ring, and the frightened kids watched as he sat down on his desk and sighed into her voicemail that she needed to fix what she had fucking broken and then when he hung up the phone, he stared at them as if they had sent him to the gallows and dismissed class.
VI.
When Jenny said she was leaving, he wanted to be tortured with the details. They were in the living room still, but now they were sitting on the couch. His hand was clasped in hers, set in her lap, but she wasn't looking at him. Her gaze ran past him into the twitching second hands of a clock on the wall.
He said, “Start from the beginning, I want to know why this is happening.”
She just shook her head.
“It's so complicated.”
“I want to understand,” he said.
“No, you don't. Why would you?”
He just stared at her.
“You just know me too well, Ian,” she continued, and he got up from the couch and walked the room like a tightrope, feeling as if the oxygen was leaving his chest directly from his ribcage. There was a sadness in the way she watched his movements, but it was muted by a more obvious exasperation.
“When did that become a problem?” he asked.
“I don't know,” she said. “It didn't happen all at once.”
“But, isn't that what love is supposed to be? Understanding someone. Loving them in spite of all their bullshit.”
She shook her head, grimacing softly.
“The only people who really love you are the people who completely misunderstand you.”
“That's some kind of contradiction.”
“Maybe,” she said, while he walked over to one of the walls. She watched him spread his fingers over the pattern of the wallpaper and she bit her lower lip before continuing
“I think it will make sense when it happens to you.”
“No, it won't.” he said. “Or, at least I hope it doesn't. That's not wisdom that I want to be a part of.”
“I never called it wisdom, Ian.”
He pressed both of his palms against the wall, as if he needed it to steady himself, and then let his forehead droop down to meet it. After a long time, he spoke, without moving.
“Do you want to know what my play's about?”
“I thought you wanted to wait til it was done.”
“Not much point in that now.”
“No, I guess not.”
“It's about that night we spent in the airport, trying to fly out to my Dad's funeral. That, and the night before, when you took that train back from your conference in Boston just to sit with me and watch TV.”
She flashed him a small smile. Slowly, she said, “that must've been hard to write. You didn't say much of anything that whole time.” She let the joke hang for a second, before returning her gaze to the ground.
“Jenny.”
“I'm sorry, Ian,” she interrupted. “Really,” and then she hesitated a moment before getting up and walking to the kitchen to pour herself a glass of water.
VI.
Two weeks later Josh, a classmate from school, wanted to have a party because he had finished his dissertation. Ian offered up his house. He was tired of quiet, and wanted new footprints to obliterate the traces of Jenny that were still left everywhere. There was more company than expected. By midnight, the house was suffocating with the burgeoning crowd.
A little past one o'clock Josh found him in the kitchen with Stephen in tow. Stephen was fucked up on something: he kept letting his jaw go slack, and whenever he realized he was staring into space he would let out a strange laugh that seemed disconnected from all traditional concepts of sound: two sharp chips, and a long quavering whinny.
Josh was in the middle of a sentence when Stephen interrupted, practically shouting.
“Hey, where's your girl, man?” he said before letting out another ethereal giggle.
Josh winced hard, and pushed Stephen away. He disappeared into the crowd nonchalantly, as if he had never been there.
“I'm sorry about that, dude. He's been barred out all night.”
“Hey don't worry about it,” Ian said, and excused himself to make another drink.
VII.
He did some lines with a pretty girl in the bathroom, and she wanted to fuck after that. She pushed herself up onto the the faux marble counters, placed his hands on her thighs, and smiled the type of smile dental insurance buys. His finger was in his mouth, rubbing the powder around his gums. The bulbs above the mirror were huge, gaudy things and he had to squint just to look at her. Her eyes and hair were this chestnut color, but the rest of her was white as milk straight from the fridge. She took off his clothes and he asked what her name was and she said, “Are you feeling it, yet?”
They had met up in the kitchen because he was leaning against the fridge and she wanted a beer.
“You look out of place,” she said.
“Funny thing is, this is my place.”
Outside, they had shared a cigarette and when she asked him what he did for a living, he said he wrote plays. But in the bathroom, with her nipping at his lips, suddenly all he could think was movies. As she moved against him, he closed his eyes and imagined those panoramic screens crackling in silver light. He thought of taking her to a drive in on some clear night in early autumn. He would need a different car, something where you could take the top down. There was probably great tactile satisfaction to be found in putting the top of a car down. The next thing he knew, the girl had pulled off of him and she was straightening her skirt and putting up her hair in the mirror. He blinked a few times, threw the condom in the toilet and put his jeans back on.
“Do you think you'll write me into one of your plays?” she asked, putting a bobby pin in.
“Sure, maybe,” he said. “But the thing is, it's a comedy.”
“So?”
“So, you seem like a little more of a tragic figure, don't you?
She paused for a moment, looking at him in the glass of the mirror, and bit her lip.
He coughed a little and said, “Hey, sorry. That was a joke, sorry.”
The girl shrugged her shoulders and moved toward the door.
“I'll see you around,” she said, and slipped back into the noise of the party. The door closed and the boy stood looking at it.
He rubbed his nose and said, “Yeah, yeah. We should catch a movie sometime.”
VIII.
He woke up in the morning, with the sun trapped behind clouds so far up that the whole sky looked like the eye of some dead animal, gone milky. At first he didn't know where he was. His cheek was pressed against cement, and he could feel his pulse in his temples like a door being slammed closed repeatedly. It took him several minutes to sit up, and when he did, he looked at his surroundings with dull resignation for several minutes.
He rose like a kid trying to find his footing on roller skates, some sick vertigo welling up in his stomach. When he got his balance, he walked as quietly as he could to the edge of the block. The face on his watch was missing, and he could taste blood on his teeth. He fished his cellphone from his pocket, several of its number keys missing and a hairline crack twisting through the center of the screen.
Josh answered his call on the third ring. From the sound of the call, the party was still going on.
“We thought you were dead.”
“Not quite,” Ian coughed. His voice was gasoline and tinfoil. “Can you come get me? I'm in a scrape.”
“Where are you?”
“Outside of Jenny's.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
“I'll be right there.”
VIII.
As they pulled onto the highway, Josh asked if Ian needed the music down.
“It doesn't feel like a hangover,” he said, “I don't know what it feels like.”
Josh nodded and continued driving, drumming his fingers on the wheel, occasionally looking away from the road to inspect Ian. He was staring at the visor, contemplating lowering it so he could inspect himself. He hardly had the heart. When he did, he surveyed the damage with the stoicism of a saint. A gash above his eye, dried blood all over his mouth and nose, filling up the cracks between his teeth.
“Christ,” Ian breathed.
“Do you know what you took?”
“Just some coke, from this girl. Jesus, it had to be cut bad. Either that or it was laced with something else. I can't remember anything.”
“Nothing?”
He shook his head, and tried to take some of the stains off his teeth with his finger. It was no good.
He said, “It just feels like I spent the whole night staring into a light bulb.”
Josh, nodded as if he understood. The roads were slick and gave off steam in the summer heat, and they passed back from Jenny's neighborhood and into Ian's where there was so much more brick for foliage. Ian stared at the window.
After a long time, Josh asked Ian, “How's your play coming man?”
Ian sighed softly. He reclined his seat and, staring at the roof of the car, said, “There's not a play anymore. Either that, or I'm starting over. I don't know. I just gotta get out of town for a while.” Ian closed his eyes, Josh turned up the music and they folded into the highway.
I.
When Jenny left him, Ian had one scene left to write in his play. It was his graduate thesis, and she painted her nails in the bathroom before she did it. He could taste the polish, like some overripe fruit in his mouth before she even got into the living room. He was sitting cross legged on the wood floor, making edits to the first act with a blue pen.
Without looking up at her, Ian said, “I'm not sure about the dialogue here, would you mind reading through it with me?” and she said, “I'm leaving.”
II.
The man she left him for was named Robert. He was twenty three and loved records in a measured, delicate way, unlike most boys his age loved anything. He built his own turntables from kits he ordered in the mail and every morning, a half an hour before he needed to be up, he would get out of bed and put an album on. In bed again, he would sleep til the needle sung static to him from the smooth center of the disc.
Before she met him, Robert listened to one side of a record every morning. When she started sleeping over was when he started flipping the records over and playing the other sides so there was something to listen to while he made breakfast and she dozed in bed. It became one of her favorite things: watching, through half opened eyes, as he picked up the record and spun it between his two fingers, before putting it down on the turn table and dropping the needle.
III.
When she left, she didn't take anything. She had hardly anything at his place as it was. Still, Ian spent most of the day considering the things that remained. Her pipe, a few books, a binder full of CDs she never seemed to play anymore. When night came, he set them all outside to be collected with the garbage. Then he tried to drink himself to death. He chose gin, and barely made it through a quarter of the bottle before giving up, and falling asleep on the couch. At first, he dreamt of her, wearing the same clothes as when they first met, feeding some strange animal down by a lake in their home town. Then he dreamt he pulled out his hair, all at once, just by running his hand through it.
In yolky light of morning, he woke hungover, thinking he might have come up with the last scene for the play. He stumbled to his bedroom, wincing against the sound of his own footfalls, in pursuit of his notepad. It was not on his side table. He emptied drawers and tore through binders full of student work, occasionally stumbling under the weight of his nausea and the pain his head and, still, the manuscript was undiscovered. He cancelled the class he was supposed to teach that afternoon and spent the day laying on his hardwood floor surrounded by the contents of his cupboards watching the ceiling fan spin.
IV.
Three days later, he called her up. Their conversation was short, almost nonexistent. He was walking to the liquor store because he had finally finished off all the booze in his house. She answered the phone on the third ring with a hello, her voice lost somewhere crowded that echoed with laughter.
“Jenny?”
“Who is this?” she asked, the cacophony overtaking most of her voice. Ian swallowed hard at the sound and shook his head, looking down at his feet. Hung over for the third day in a row now, the sky pinwheeled and he rubbed his free hand over his puffy eyes.
“You sound lost,” he said.
“Ian? Is that you?”
“Are you coming back?”
“Ian? Ian, why are you calling?”
“Did you take my play?”
“What? No, of course not. Why would I take--”
He hung up, and vomited on the sidewalk.
V.
Cancelled two more classes, spent two days languishing in his house with eyes huge and glassy like fishtanks. Soon, there was a call saying he had to go in to teach or the graduate program would stop funding him. So, on a Thursday, ten minutes late, he showed up and paced the room like he had never seen it before. He blinked silently at the fluorescent lights. A few of the kids had already left and the ones who were still there shrunk away from him, exchanging glances like frightened animals. He studied their faces, trying to remember how he felt three years before, when he was sitting where they were. It was all gone, and he felt disfigured, washed ashore.
Standing there, with all of them watching him, he called her again. His fingers shook as he dialed the numbers, and he thought of all those times in which she had been the one to pump the water out of his lungs. Now, her voicemail picked up after the second ring, and the frightened kids watched as he sat down on his desk and sighed into her voicemail that she needed to fix what she had fucking broken and then when he hung up the phone, he stared at them as if they had sent him to the gallows and dismissed class.
VI.
When Jenny said she was leaving, he wanted to be tortured with the details. They were in the living room still, but now they were sitting on the couch. His hand was clasped in hers, set in her lap, but she wasn't looking at him. Her gaze ran past him into the twitching second hands of a clock on the wall.
He said, “Start from the beginning, I want to know why this is happening.”
She just shook her head.
“It's so complicated.”
“I want to understand,” he said.
“No, you don't. Why would you?”
He just stared at her.
“You just know me too well, Ian,” she continued, and he got up from the couch and walked the room like a tightrope, feeling as if the oxygen was leaving his chest directly from his ribcage. There was a sadness in the way she watched his movements, but it was muted by a more obvious exasperation.
“When did that become a problem?” he asked.
“I don't know,” she said. “It didn't happen all at once.”
“But, isn't that what love is supposed to be? Understanding someone. Loving them in spite of all their bullshit.”
She shook her head, grimacing softly.
“The only people who really love you are the people who completely misunderstand you.”
“That's some kind of contradiction.”
“Maybe,” she said, while he walked over to one of the walls. She watched him spread his fingers over the pattern of the wallpaper and she bit her lower lip before continuing
“I think it will make sense when it happens to you.”
“No, it won't.” he said. “Or, at least I hope it doesn't. That's not wisdom that I want to be a part of.”
“I never called it wisdom, Ian.”
He pressed both of his palms against the wall, as if he needed it to steady himself, and then let his forehead droop down to meet it. After a long time, he spoke, without moving.
“Do you want to know what my play's about?”
“I thought you wanted to wait til it was done.”
“Not much point in that now.”
“No, I guess not.”
“It's about that night we spent in the airport, trying to fly out to my Dad's funeral. That, and the night before, when you took that train back from your conference in Boston just to sit with me and watch TV.”
She flashed him a small smile. Slowly, she said, “that must've been hard to write. You didn't say much of anything that whole time.” She let the joke hang for a second, before returning her gaze to the ground.
“Jenny.”
“I'm sorry, Ian,” she interrupted. “Really,” and then she hesitated a moment before getting up and walking to the kitchen to pour herself a glass of water.
VI.
Two weeks later Josh, a classmate from school, wanted to have a party because he had finished his dissertation. Ian offered up his house. He was tired of quiet, and wanted new footprints to obliterate the traces of Jenny that were still left everywhere. There was more company than expected. By midnight, the house was suffocating with the burgeoning crowd.
A little past one o'clock Josh found him in the kitchen with Stephen in tow. Stephen was fucked up on something: he kept letting his jaw go slack, and whenever he realized he was staring into space he would let out a strange laugh that seemed disconnected from all traditional concepts of sound: two sharp chips, and a long quavering whinny.
Josh was in the middle of a sentence when Stephen interrupted, practically shouting.
“Hey, where's your girl, man?” he said before letting out another ethereal giggle.
Josh winced hard, and pushed Stephen away. He disappeared into the crowd nonchalantly, as if he had never been there.
“I'm sorry about that, dude. He's been barred out all night.”
“Hey don't worry about it,” Ian said, and excused himself to make another drink.
VII.
He did some lines with a pretty girl in the bathroom, and she wanted to fuck after that. She pushed herself up onto the the faux marble counters, placed his hands on her thighs, and smiled the type of smile dental insurance buys. His finger was in his mouth, rubbing the powder around his gums. The bulbs above the mirror were huge, gaudy things and he had to squint just to look at her. Her eyes and hair were this chestnut color, but the rest of her was white as milk straight from the fridge. She took off his clothes and he asked what her name was and she said, “Are you feeling it, yet?”
They had met up in the kitchen because he was leaning against the fridge and she wanted a beer.
“You look out of place,” she said.
“Funny thing is, this is my place.”
Outside, they had shared a cigarette and when she asked him what he did for a living, he said he wrote plays. But in the bathroom, with her nipping at his lips, suddenly all he could think was movies. As she moved against him, he closed his eyes and imagined those panoramic screens crackling in silver light. He thought of taking her to a drive in on some clear night in early autumn. He would need a different car, something where you could take the top down. There was probably great tactile satisfaction to be found in putting the top of a car down. The next thing he knew, the girl had pulled off of him and she was straightening her skirt and putting up her hair in the mirror. He blinked a few times, threw the condom in the toilet and put his jeans back on.
“Do you think you'll write me into one of your plays?” she asked, putting a bobby pin in.
“Sure, maybe,” he said. “But the thing is, it's a comedy.”
“So?”
“So, you seem like a little more of a tragic figure, don't you?
She paused for a moment, looking at him in the glass of the mirror, and bit her lip.
He coughed a little and said, “Hey, sorry. That was a joke, sorry.”
The girl shrugged her shoulders and moved toward the door.
“I'll see you around,” she said, and slipped back into the noise of the party. The door closed and the boy stood looking at it.
He rubbed his nose and said, “Yeah, yeah. We should catch a movie sometime.”
VIII.
He woke up in the morning, with the sun trapped behind clouds so far up that the whole sky looked like the eye of some dead animal, gone milky. At first he didn't know where he was. His cheek was pressed against cement, and he could feel his pulse in his temples like a door being slammed closed repeatedly. It took him several minutes to sit up, and when he did, he looked at his surroundings with dull resignation for several minutes.
He rose like a kid trying to find his footing on roller skates, some sick vertigo welling up in his stomach. When he got his balance, he walked as quietly as he could to the edge of the block. The face on his watch was missing, and he could taste blood on his teeth. He fished his cellphone from his pocket, several of its number keys missing and a hairline crack twisting through the center of the screen.
Josh answered his call on the third ring. From the sound of the call, the party was still going on.
“We thought you were dead.”
“Not quite,” Ian coughed. His voice was gasoline and tinfoil. “Can you come get me? I'm in a scrape.”
“Where are you?”
“Outside of Jenny's.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
“I'll be right there.”
VIII.
As they pulled onto the highway, Josh asked if Ian needed the music down.
“It doesn't feel like a hangover,” he said, “I don't know what it feels like.”
Josh nodded and continued driving, drumming his fingers on the wheel, occasionally looking away from the road to inspect Ian. He was staring at the visor, contemplating lowering it so he could inspect himself. He hardly had the heart. When he did, he surveyed the damage with the stoicism of a saint. A gash above his eye, dried blood all over his mouth and nose, filling up the cracks between his teeth.
“Christ,” Ian breathed.
“Do you know what you took?”
“Just some coke, from this girl. Jesus, it had to be cut bad. Either that or it was laced with something else. I can't remember anything.”
“Nothing?”
He shook his head, and tried to take some of the stains off his teeth with his finger. It was no good.
He said, “It just feels like I spent the whole night staring into a light bulb.”
Josh, nodded as if he understood. The roads were slick and gave off steam in the summer heat, and they passed back from Jenny's neighborhood and into Ian's where there was so much more brick for foliage. Ian stared at the window.
After a long time, Josh asked Ian, “How's your play coming man?”
Ian sighed softly. He reclined his seat and, staring at the roof of the car, said, “There's not a play anymore. Either that, or I'm starting over. I don't know. I just gotta get out of town for a while.” Ian closed his eyes, Josh turned up the music and they folded into the highway.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Introductions
Hello, theoretical readership.
My name is Ben Clancy. I'm creating this blog to share creative work that I'll be doing over the summer. I'll be posting completed works and sketchings of short stories, as well as demos of songs that I've recorded on my laptop. I'd love feedback, if you want to provide it in the form of comments or emails, however, the main intention of this blog is just to create a space where anyone who is interested can see what I'm working on as I'm working on it. Also, there is the hope that some sort of public accountability with make me productive.
Hope everyone's doing well. I'll be posting the short stories I've completed during this semester at school very soon.
-Ben
My name is Ben Clancy. I'm creating this blog to share creative work that I'll be doing over the summer. I'll be posting completed works and sketchings of short stories, as well as demos of songs that I've recorded on my laptop. I'd love feedback, if you want to provide it in the form of comments or emails, however, the main intention of this blog is just to create a space where anyone who is interested can see what I'm working on as I'm working on it. Also, there is the hope that some sort of public accountability with make me productive.
Hope everyone's doing well. I'll be posting the short stories I've completed during this semester at school very soon.
-Ben
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