Homecoming Seven

As the night starts over, I can feel Clyde in the distance beyond me.  I know we're racing to meet somewhere in the city, his wings showing more age than mine ever will.  The dry wind gusts hard to tumble me to one side, and I come to in a hotel shower, a slip of soap at eye-level, white and smelling of roses.

I expected Clyde to be expecting me, but I can't tell if he brought us here, or I did.  The water is a temperature that feels translucent to the skin, bathing in something imaginary.  I shut it off, and open the bathroom door to a room mockingly familiar.  The hotel room he abducted Bonnie to, all those years ago.

The light is dimming with the sunset, and the feeling in the room is one of having sent her out for ice.  He's a timeless version of himself, his skin tumbling over the wideness of his arms, black jeans flexing painful as he turns over in the bed sheets.  I wonder if maybe I am her, or if the clothes on the floor are hers, or he's on his way to find her.

Steam escapes behind me and vanishes in the dry air, reflected in the light from the bathroom.  The room smells like his shed clothing, his sweat, the oils of his skin, and something dark beneath it that might be regret, or longing.

"You look like an angel," he offers, watching me tuck the end of my white towel into itself.  It's stiff, and thick, and it smells like disinfectant and cinnamon.

"I would if my roots weren't showing," I tell him, and he turns a final quarter to lay on his back, his arm over his forehead, his body sinking into the sheets, a color not gray or purple or blue, but bruised.

"Mare," he sighs.  "Your roots are always showing."

The slow shift of the light of the city bleeds into our drawling speech, and the heavy heat of Clyde oppresses all of our sentences to break in half, drained of meaning and consistency.

"Are we lovers?" I ask him, and he sits up to light a cigarette, the pack's white and red label seeming generic enough to startle me into the uncertainty of what movie this is.

"Aren't we always?" he asks me.

The resentment on his face that I would ask such a question makes me laugh, and I cast around for something to wear while his frown deepens.

"I just can't tell if these are my clothes."

He looks out the vast windows, ashing his cigarette onto the floor, the back of him in silhouette.

"This isn't our room," he observes.

"It's not?"

"No," he shakes the back of his black head.  "No, I told you about that one.  It's a hole in the wall in Michigan.  I told you, some starlet took her throwaways there."

"Some boy who..."

He pounds the glass with an open palm, the sound startling me.

"LOVES you," he barks, and then laughs.

There's something harsh about the love he has for Marilyn I want to say is something I don't recognize.  I want to distance myself from it with experience and time.  I want to tuck him away somewhere inside and show him that times sure have changed, and he never needed someone like me, anyway.  Whatever ways I didn't have the time for him before, I have for him now.

But then, maybe that was always the joke.

The small palm plant next to the window reaches for the last beams of the light of the sun, and I sneak up behind Clyde holding my breath because... he actually might feel safer around me if I'm dead, and the man of him lapses and relapses into boys and girls and women and dogs in a fast succession.

"Just who the fuck do you think you are?" he asks me, his voice edging on tears.  Anyone else would think he meant to challenge some idea of myself I had.  I know he's really asking for an answer.

"I don't know," I whisper, touching his shoulder.  "You?"

He shakes his head, and the tornado in his black eyes settles into the sands around us, calm again.

"You wanted to bring me home, and we crashed into Cairo," he observes.  "You think you know something about me now."

"Yeah," I admit, and put my arms around him, to touch his damp skin to mine.  "Welcome home."

"Thanks, Fox," he says into my hair, and I disappear before Bonnie comes back.