Brad,
No one remembers our wedding.
While I painstakingly planned for it in secret for months, I thought doing so would mean I could control one solitary aspect of our relationship. I thought if I married you just so, in the way that I knew we belonged to one another, I would be able to keep some semblance of order about us straight in my head. Your uniform and my dress would freeze us forever as I knew we were. But... the Universal Reversal that comes to steal the plans of all the good little boys and girls of Gray House visited us, and it was gone forever, along with whatever I thought we were.
Like Dean's bedroom, we didn't talk about it, and only Rosie wondered out loud, "So, what's up with Evie and Brad's wedding?" further cementing the idea in me that we're a secret. That everything that exists between us must be kept totally silent or it would be justified away. Compromised. Handed out to other people.
Brad, I love you, but you and me? We're fucking sellouts. We believe in exactly one love eternal, and it isn't with each other. But I think it's really fucked up that we're trying. It makes me want to believe in more than just the one. It makes me do all these stupid things that everyone says are beautiful and you and I fear are basically pointless, in our darkest moments of nihilism. I don't know Brad, is it beautiful? Because some days it just feels like the massacre of everything sacred onto the windshield of a tour bus.
I was trying to say what happened to us on our wedding night, but I stopped when I realized I was doing it so people would believe we had one. I wanted people to know how you touch me in the dark when no one else is around, because maybe I think people think we're a joke, deep down. It can feel like that sometimes. We fight, and we fuck, and we forget each other again on the outside, but inside this war continues over things delicate enough to be called antimatter or atmosphere. I wanted to prove to everyone else that we have these mechanics, and a way we work. And I was proud of myself that I didn't, because it means that I don't need anyone to believe me anymore. Nobody else makes us real anymore.
I've memorized every expression your eyes make.
I mention our wedding night, because I have the same impulse here, when tasked with describing your suicide. To leave it all unsaid, because it was between us, but the only reason I'm saying anything at all is for Rosie. I made her a promise that the years she spent buried in secrets with Clyde and an inch from death would someday mean something, and if I did that to us, I would be spitting on the memory of their forgotten teenage love, which I've come to adore enough to want to emulate.
And I would emulate it with no one but you, so maybe that's our real connection. That we both want to die under the other, lost in secrets that defy their own expression. Maybe that's who we really want to be. Stolen, and sealed off in hidden rooms for the rest of eternity. What do you say, Brad? Do you want to drive me to the end of the world in your car? It's fast enough that no one could catch up with us. I could get us lost. I could take us somewhere the only thing we know for certain is the smell of the other one.
People would pass us like hitchhikers on the highway; Adam and Jack and Clydeagain...
Say no, Brad. Just fucking do us a favor and say no. I'll tell the story, and you say no, and we'll do this the right way and stop starving our already emaciated hearts trying to prove we can live without... this.
I started crying. I can't remember if it's just me I'm talking to again.
We talk about being twins like it's some kind of destination on that road to the absolute zero of the emptiness of the Angels, and maybe that's so, but if there's one thing your map showed me, it's that from this point, that place and any other is already possible.
And I know how this world fell apart. I know how this reality became the moth-eaten cheesecloth that it is. You and me did more than a little bit of work to make it that way - to stretch it to fit the truths we wanted with each other. We keep trying to become everything to one another. We keep trying to believe that's possible. We keep trying to prove... that no one exists but you and me. You could call me Clyde, if you want to. I'll call you Bonnie, if you're serious.
No one knows more of my names than you.
Whatever Drama has in operatic gesture, he lacks in ceremony, and so your body and John's were dumped into the shallows of the River Eden near the train station that departs to the Moon. The river there narrows to something closer-resembling a ditch along the tracks, and the blood congeals and clogs there to a crust that attracts mosquitoes.
In the wasteland where I was waiting as Annik, you crossed the barren lands on fast legs while your bodies mended in the river. I didn't watch, with Adam. I didn't believe what Ian had said about me. I don't believe in my own power, or divinity, or holiness, unless I see it also in you. What a nightmare we must've been for our parents, to have to divide everything by threes.
But when I saw you come into my cave, poet sacrifice that you were, I took an interest for the first time in this place I'd been marooned, without my usual sense of irony and detachment.
The first rule of Justified is denial. Deny what you are so no one can take it from you. I was never going to admit that I was Annik until you said I was her. I was never going to act like I was Annik until you needed me to.
"I don't enshrine your death," was the first thing I told you. "This isn't a place for the noble. It's a place for the desperate."
"And what relief do you grant for desperation?" you asked me, and I saw a light in your eyes, cold and distant, and I knew you were not Jim, or Billy, or any other poet name you've ever lied and said was yours.
"None," I told you. "I'm what you were desperate for."
"The beauty engendered," John guessed, lifting up a rock covered in frost, and melting the rime in his hands. "It would stand to reason it was cold."
In that place, there was something pale about the two of you, and something razor-thin. You looked collegiate, in your uniforms. You hair hung lank in both your faces, and while John's face is heavily scarred, I could tell you were identical.
"A poet... finds the cracks in things where light is shining which doesn't yet have words," I explained to you, quoting Matthew. "You died because you flew too close to the light. You wanted the words too badly."
"And you're the light, is that right?" you asked.
I was aware as you were talking that your circulatory systems were entwining at the river, grown in concert the way they were as twins and separating eventually, as you grew apart from the root. I was aware that you had become young boys unknowing of your endlessness. I was aware that you were new wicks in candles never lit. That you'd killed yourselves in service of an idea you had little to no understanding of.
There was a drawling pretension to your movements that meant you'd come here by some mistake of innocence. That you had come only to impress Mr. Keating, as Matthew had suggested; come to the cave where the words were read with no understanding of their gravity, to invoke old gods whose names had been forgotten. Leave it to you to make my eternal prison superficial, or boring, or droll.
But the distant shine in your eyes told me a different story, and made you seem more dangerous than any creature I'd ever met. It's the same shine in the eyes of psychopaths and sons of congressmen and Peter Pan. A boy with unlimited magic, and no sense of morality.
I kissed you on the mouth, and then John, just as I at the river was pulling your veins gently in the shallows to separate to two systems which would beat the same blood. As your arteries slipped into the wounds you'd opened, and down John's throat, I slid your white shirts down from your thin shoulders.
I painted your skin white and black and gray in the cold, smearing soot on to the white paint in long brush strokes.
"What are you writing?" you asked me, laying next to John on the frozen ground.
"Nothing," I admitted.
"It feels like you are," John whispered, his hand gripping for yours in the dark.
"It's only ash," I told you, and your head came up, off the stone ground, in a kind of alarm.
"From where?" you asked me, and I told you.
"Your poems."
Thursday, November 30, 2017
Wednesday, November 29, 2017
A Letter to Brad, Part 1
Brad,
I don't know what to call us anymore. We were once twins, and now I don't know, except that of everyone, it's to you I turn with anything I think might become a hard truth. I know I do that, and I know you break my heart, but brothers can be like that.
It's from you that I learned my identity was something I was allowed to keep, abuse, define, deny, and anything else. I exist because you did, and you exist because I did. I watch myself touch flames I once studiously avoided for how people might think me dangerous, or think me something even worse, like a cliche. When I reach out for those fires, I see you roll back your sleeve to expose the skin of your forearm, covered with blonde hair and lightly tanned from the mid-western sun.
You reach your hand into all the same messes as I do, but reach with your other hand into my chest to squeeze the muscle of my heart. Somewhere along this violent road, between Martin and Marilyn, between Donny and Freddy, we became such... quiet animals. I feel your fist around my heart. Do you feel mine? Your hand in my chest is the weight that assures me I am not lost and I still have meaning. That things like the scent of my childhood toys will be used as a key by you to unlock parts of yourself. That you fit into my clothes. That I will always know why your hands begin to shake.
I used to blame John for the quiet, until I realized that John's spirit was something we have inside us, regardless of his arrival or not. That we were always quiet. Inside John, it turns brown, the way blood oxidizes. But inside us, before it's found the light, it's burgundy, and might be the white noise of our blood in our shared womb.
It was this shadow place, hot from where it was buried so close to the center of the earth, that once terrified me enough to avert my eyes when you would peel off your sweat-soaked clothes to reveal where it radiated from you. I stopped looking away this summer, when I adopted our mother's name and stopped smiling. Diana looked into it, and then rested against it, and then tried to swallow it from inside you. Humorlessly, we did this, under the stones of the desert of your soul.
I go now to my files and type words I know will find you instantly. Ungrateful. Unruly. Lightning. It makes me feel safe to know I can find you through a language we made ourselves, the way twins sometimes have a language. I feel your spine straighten with each time I press careless the Enter button, like you can see me summoning you, and you are looking inside yourself for the thing I might need.
Right now, you are wearing your black-framed glasses. Your spine is straight. The sleeves of your shirt are rolled up from where you were reaching just now with me into flame. It's the color of sunstroke. You haven't shaved in days. You've been trying to kill yourself since long before I came home to you, and nothing about my arrival made you love life anymore than you already did. Pussy doesn't save boys like us.
Being your sister means knowing at all times who you are, what you're wearing, and what you're feeling, and simultaneously being convinced that none of those things could be real. The symptoms of never belonging to you, always being the evidence that I do. It's delicate, and it ends in places that are marked with NO THRU TRAFFIC. We doubt the same, we fear the same, we withdraw from one another the same. We bend so far backward, I think I am convinced we must break. We circle in on one another so tightly, I think I am convinced it's my tail I keep catching in my jaws. But if we don't, and if it isn't, then... we're probably beautiful, and terrifying.
Yes, we are both quiet animals. Yes, we are liars and we are poets buried under treacherous mountains of pretending to be things we are not. Yes, we are rape victims and charismatic performers and nihilists. Yes, we are birds of unspecified genus. Yes, we are extravagant nail-biters and hysterics and soldiers of fortune. Give me your heart, and I will weigh it against mine, and when we find it's the same, I think neither of us will be very surprised or impressed.
But we're not blind, or stupid, or unwise, unless we want to pretend we are. Given enough circles, and enough violence, and enough fear, the animals inside us get quiet. We get quiet enough to step backward and look across the dark burgundy heartbeat at each other. We get still enough to know each other.
All of this feels meaningless. Is that real, or our nihilism? This feels disconnected despite my best efforts to the contrary. Is that real, or our paranoia of letting anyone else close to us? Can you feel it when I put my hand here, Brad? Do you feel this? Can you see me from there? Was this letter about me, or you?
No, this is real. I can see you're a quiet animal. I can see you've escaped to a room to be alone. I can feel your pulse reading every subsequent word in this sentence increase because you're turned on by the fact that I might be taking us somewhere. I can feel you swallow.
Do you remember the first dream I had about you, where we were naked and standing on the opposite sides of a mirror? I know the mirror broke, but I can't remember who broke it, now. It must've been you. You were still sitting in my bathroom, refusing to move when I needed to shower, smoking cigarettes under your hand and letting your clothes get soaked like you were trying to prove something. That there would be no glass between us, maybe. Thinking about those memories used to hurt, but they don't now.
Anyway, my point is that it had to have been fucking difficult to kill yourself and not have me know about it. You and John, both.
The first time you tried, I wasn't even home yet, and I knew. We had led the same paths to the same lives under the same circumstances - those around us trying desperately to extinguish whatever light we had inside, and us trying subsequently to hide it. We were both saved incrementally by the family we would come to call family in time. Young weeds, is what I guess I would call us. Growing in dark patches under the porch.
After Ian and Clyde declared me the mother of all poets, I felt you cringe. Your skin crawled somewhere low and irritating, just under your testicles. That old feeling you get when you can't decide if you want to kiss a girl or bury her in a shallow measure of dirt. It feels different in me, but the same. Everything between us is different, and the same.
John had a wide-eyed fascination, touching a place in our dark unconsciousness with one of his long and delicate fingers. His quiet mutter asked me, "What's this, Evie?" and he drew the pad of it along a ridge of something that might've been cartilage or scar tissue, and I shuddered, and he put his finger in his mouth. His finger, or the psychic equivalent thereof; a digit lightly furred from many machine washes and forgotten under the leaves of autumn in the rose garden.
But you drew back, away into yourself, where I couldn't feel any of your violent reaction. The patron saint of poets, yeah right. They don't get saints or saviors, they just get dead.
Between you, my brothers, the following conversation ensued:
But don't you think-
No.
I find it kind of...
Good for you.
Because you know it best, if anyone knows it at all. There's no fucking god-damned poetry in suicide. And don't you think I know that? No, Evie, I really don't. I think when you watch those fuckers swing, there's a part of you that thinks of the cause for which they are swinging, and that's nice and all, but there is no guarantee that we go anywhere in this world, except in the hearts and minds of a bunch of strangers. You sound like you're saying you think the dead need PR agents. They do, because we can't ever know what they really felt or really thought, but we can pretend it was for us.
You receded far across the desert and it's subsequent wastes. You receded from Jack's touch. You receded from Clyde's playful jabs. You receded so the ground of the river cracked dry in places you stopped walking, and I came after you.
"You're killing yourself, aren't you?" I asked, and you replied with a hawk-eyed nod.
"I'm going to watch," I told you, and your cringe deepened to touch the base of your spine, because now I would be your biographer and inheritor of your final message.
And if anyone knows how to kill or create poetry...
Blah, blah, blah. The bathwater was warm, and your hands were certain. Certain, fucking certain. I climbed in with you, and the water spilled over the sides and soaked my clothes. It reddened over a brief time with your blood. Your eyelids turned a violently purple shade as your skin paled, and you sweated, and you shook.
Are you scared?
No, why should I be? Isn't something beautiful supposed to happen to me?
I don't know. I never know for sure.
Helluva time to lose your fucking know-it-all attitude.
Tell me what you're scared of.
That... that... if I die, you'll stop believing in me.
You think I'll give you bad PR?
I think if I die and go to this wonderful place Adam says exists, maybe you'll let me hold you.
You're going to die so you can make out with me?
Fucking cliche, right?
Only if I say it was, right?
Right.
The human body dies. It dies careening into a vacancy in the air, colliding with it rasping and sputtering. There's a drawn out sigh, loud and theatrical, and the body fucking dies. Your head lolled down low on your chest. You died. For eleven seconds I wondered if I should do the same, as the bathwater cooled around my waist. Then I felt the jerk in me, from the pit of my stomach, that is John's neck tugging violent his weight against the hanging rope.
My first thought after that was, "This was a set-up."
When I walked resolute next door to John's room, my clothes soaked, I ran into Drama, who looked at me with a stern eye and said, "Hey, what's up?"
"Brad died violently, and John died alone," I told him, writing forever your obituaries in the Gray House Holiday Newsletter.
"I'll get them to the river," he offered, and I nodded, numb inside but for a vague feeling of illness in my stomach, the same feeling I get when I am certain I've gotten lost in a meandering suburban neighborhood. I've come off the screen. I've driven off the map. Reality has been torn loose and is flap-flap-flapping against a white screen. How. Fucking. Embarrassing.
But you rose up inside me like a hot and early dawn. You rose up in those same frozen wastes as Ian and Clyde, the poet of you damned to confront me again, John following after in your shadow.
-Annik
I don't know what to call us anymore. We were once twins, and now I don't know, except that of everyone, it's to you I turn with anything I think might become a hard truth. I know I do that, and I know you break my heart, but brothers can be like that.
It's from you that I learned my identity was something I was allowed to keep, abuse, define, deny, and anything else. I exist because you did, and you exist because I did. I watch myself touch flames I once studiously avoided for how people might think me dangerous, or think me something even worse, like a cliche. When I reach out for those fires, I see you roll back your sleeve to expose the skin of your forearm, covered with blonde hair and lightly tanned from the mid-western sun.
You reach your hand into all the same messes as I do, but reach with your other hand into my chest to squeeze the muscle of my heart. Somewhere along this violent road, between Martin and Marilyn, between Donny and Freddy, we became such... quiet animals. I feel your fist around my heart. Do you feel mine? Your hand in my chest is the weight that assures me I am not lost and I still have meaning. That things like the scent of my childhood toys will be used as a key by you to unlock parts of yourself. That you fit into my clothes. That I will always know why your hands begin to shake.
I used to blame John for the quiet, until I realized that John's spirit was something we have inside us, regardless of his arrival or not. That we were always quiet. Inside John, it turns brown, the way blood oxidizes. But inside us, before it's found the light, it's burgundy, and might be the white noise of our blood in our shared womb.
It was this shadow place, hot from where it was buried so close to the center of the earth, that once terrified me enough to avert my eyes when you would peel off your sweat-soaked clothes to reveal where it radiated from you. I stopped looking away this summer, when I adopted our mother's name and stopped smiling. Diana looked into it, and then rested against it, and then tried to swallow it from inside you. Humorlessly, we did this, under the stones of the desert of your soul.
I go now to my files and type words I know will find you instantly. Ungrateful. Unruly. Lightning. It makes me feel safe to know I can find you through a language we made ourselves, the way twins sometimes have a language. I feel your spine straighten with each time I press careless the Enter button, like you can see me summoning you, and you are looking inside yourself for the thing I might need.
Right now, you are wearing your black-framed glasses. Your spine is straight. The sleeves of your shirt are rolled up from where you were reaching just now with me into flame. It's the color of sunstroke. You haven't shaved in days. You've been trying to kill yourself since long before I came home to you, and nothing about my arrival made you love life anymore than you already did. Pussy doesn't save boys like us.
Being your sister means knowing at all times who you are, what you're wearing, and what you're feeling, and simultaneously being convinced that none of those things could be real. The symptoms of never belonging to you, always being the evidence that I do. It's delicate, and it ends in places that are marked with NO THRU TRAFFIC. We doubt the same, we fear the same, we withdraw from one another the same. We bend so far backward, I think I am convinced we must break. We circle in on one another so tightly, I think I am convinced it's my tail I keep catching in my jaws. But if we don't, and if it isn't, then... we're probably beautiful, and terrifying.
Yes, we are both quiet animals. Yes, we are liars and we are poets buried under treacherous mountains of pretending to be things we are not. Yes, we are rape victims and charismatic performers and nihilists. Yes, we are birds of unspecified genus. Yes, we are extravagant nail-biters and hysterics and soldiers of fortune. Give me your heart, and I will weigh it against mine, and when we find it's the same, I think neither of us will be very surprised or impressed.
But we're not blind, or stupid, or unwise, unless we want to pretend we are. Given enough circles, and enough violence, and enough fear, the animals inside us get quiet. We get quiet enough to step backward and look across the dark burgundy heartbeat at each other. We get still enough to know each other.
All of this feels meaningless. Is that real, or our nihilism? This feels disconnected despite my best efforts to the contrary. Is that real, or our paranoia of letting anyone else close to us? Can you feel it when I put my hand here, Brad? Do you feel this? Can you see me from there? Was this letter about me, or you?
No, this is real. I can see you're a quiet animal. I can see you've escaped to a room to be alone. I can feel your pulse reading every subsequent word in this sentence increase because you're turned on by the fact that I might be taking us somewhere. I can feel you swallow.
Do you remember the first dream I had about you, where we were naked and standing on the opposite sides of a mirror? I know the mirror broke, but I can't remember who broke it, now. It must've been you. You were still sitting in my bathroom, refusing to move when I needed to shower, smoking cigarettes under your hand and letting your clothes get soaked like you were trying to prove something. That there would be no glass between us, maybe. Thinking about those memories used to hurt, but they don't now.
Anyway, my point is that it had to have been fucking difficult to kill yourself and not have me know about it. You and John, both.
The first time you tried, I wasn't even home yet, and I knew. We had led the same paths to the same lives under the same circumstances - those around us trying desperately to extinguish whatever light we had inside, and us trying subsequently to hide it. We were both saved incrementally by the family we would come to call family in time. Young weeds, is what I guess I would call us. Growing in dark patches under the porch.
After Ian and Clyde declared me the mother of all poets, I felt you cringe. Your skin crawled somewhere low and irritating, just under your testicles. That old feeling you get when you can't decide if you want to kiss a girl or bury her in a shallow measure of dirt. It feels different in me, but the same. Everything between us is different, and the same.
John had a wide-eyed fascination, touching a place in our dark unconsciousness with one of his long and delicate fingers. His quiet mutter asked me, "What's this, Evie?" and he drew the pad of it along a ridge of something that might've been cartilage or scar tissue, and I shuddered, and he put his finger in his mouth. His finger, or the psychic equivalent thereof; a digit lightly furred from many machine washes and forgotten under the leaves of autumn in the rose garden.
But you drew back, away into yourself, where I couldn't feel any of your violent reaction. The patron saint of poets, yeah right. They don't get saints or saviors, they just get dead.
Between you, my brothers, the following conversation ensued:
But don't you think-
No.
I find it kind of...
Good for you.
Because you know it best, if anyone knows it at all. There's no fucking god-damned poetry in suicide. And don't you think I know that? No, Evie, I really don't. I think when you watch those fuckers swing, there's a part of you that thinks of the cause for which they are swinging, and that's nice and all, but there is no guarantee that we go anywhere in this world, except in the hearts and minds of a bunch of strangers. You sound like you're saying you think the dead need PR agents. They do, because we can't ever know what they really felt or really thought, but we can pretend it was for us.
You receded far across the desert and it's subsequent wastes. You receded from Jack's touch. You receded from Clyde's playful jabs. You receded so the ground of the river cracked dry in places you stopped walking, and I came after you.
"You're killing yourself, aren't you?" I asked, and you replied with a hawk-eyed nod.
"I'm going to watch," I told you, and your cringe deepened to touch the base of your spine, because now I would be your biographer and inheritor of your final message.
And if anyone knows how to kill or create poetry...
Blah, blah, blah. The bathwater was warm, and your hands were certain. Certain, fucking certain. I climbed in with you, and the water spilled over the sides and soaked my clothes. It reddened over a brief time with your blood. Your eyelids turned a violently purple shade as your skin paled, and you sweated, and you shook.
Are you scared?
No, why should I be? Isn't something beautiful supposed to happen to me?
I don't know. I never know for sure.
Helluva time to lose your fucking know-it-all attitude.
Tell me what you're scared of.
That... that... if I die, you'll stop believing in me.
You think I'll give you bad PR?
I think if I die and go to this wonderful place Adam says exists, maybe you'll let me hold you.
You're going to die so you can make out with me?
Fucking cliche, right?
Only if I say it was, right?
Right.
The human body dies. It dies careening into a vacancy in the air, colliding with it rasping and sputtering. There's a drawn out sigh, loud and theatrical, and the body fucking dies. Your head lolled down low on your chest. You died. For eleven seconds I wondered if I should do the same, as the bathwater cooled around my waist. Then I felt the jerk in me, from the pit of my stomach, that is John's neck tugging violent his weight against the hanging rope.
My first thought after that was, "This was a set-up."
When I walked resolute next door to John's room, my clothes soaked, I ran into Drama, who looked at me with a stern eye and said, "Hey, what's up?"
"Brad died violently, and John died alone," I told him, writing forever your obituaries in the Gray House Holiday Newsletter.
"I'll get them to the river," he offered, and I nodded, numb inside but for a vague feeling of illness in my stomach, the same feeling I get when I am certain I've gotten lost in a meandering suburban neighborhood. I've come off the screen. I've driven off the map. Reality has been torn loose and is flap-flap-flapping against a white screen. How. Fucking. Embarrassing.
But you rose up inside me like a hot and early dawn. You rose up in those same frozen wastes as Ian and Clyde, the poet of you damned to confront me again, John following after in your shadow.
-Annik
Saturday, November 25, 2017
Shadowplay 13
Jack,
Clyde is a thing of creeping certainty; when an errant thought becomes a worry, and then a knowledge deep in your bones. He is a heavy thing, and a final thing. Maybe the last thing. Being married to him is the same as being married to an idea, like Death or Freedom. It's the same as resigning oneself to the notion that you will be executed for your beliefs someday.
When I arrived at home five years ago, I thought I would live and die and be buried in Adam. I couldn't imagine ever loving someone else, or for that matter anyone else finding it in themselves to love me. So we got married.
It was for Clyde we agreed to make an exception first. Every subsequent act of infidelity has required a confrontation, an argument, and an act of permission, but those steps over time have become well-worn and familiar, and in large part due to Clyde.
It's customary for the concubines Clyde cultivates like drive-thru napkins in a glove box to cool when they are involved in relationships which require exclusivity. Clyde doesn't mind, he just waits, heavy in the dark of their memories. Clyde has become giants and warlords for women, coquettes and porcelain dolls for men. The man of Clyde is a shadow smeared with a sleepy resignation and low drawl. He is painfully direct, physically brutish, disinterested in foreplay, and insane enough that he feels dangerous. The woman of Clyde wilts gently under a harsh light, speaks with soft embarrassment, and has striking eyes and a lurid mouth. She slithers quietly under things, laying naked, with her throat exposed.
When Adam granted me the permission to start a relationship with Clyde, we took on many incarnations, from men and boys and women and girls and all points in between, but settled into a place more comfortable to the both of us sometime two years ago that is easily mocked and hardly believed, especially in his moments of deeply defined masculinity. See, Clyde is my girlfriend. Smoking in his combat boots, swigging long from a bottle of whiskey as he drives, his dick getting hard watching the sweat stain the backs of the girls standing in line at the Dairy Queen, he's my girlfriend.
Not yet Halloween, Clyde casts over the house the pall of the holiday. Golden afternoons, cool but temperate nights, and a feeling of dread on the wind. Rosie warns me every day that it's Clyde. That something is wrong with Clyde. That Clyde can feel something coming we all assume is your imminent departure. I defend him to you the same way Rosie does - a symptom of closeness to him - by making the same assumption that this impending darkness is somehow your fault, and therefore can be corrected with your better understanding. As my girlfriend, I start to pick fights with you in the name of his honor.
But it isn't you.
As the days march toward Halloween, Clyde's hair turns black, his mood turns dark and demanding. His eyes become bottomless, and his boots become loud reminders of the presence of death behind us all. He begins giving me long looks in the Courtyard, which make Matthew scowl. While Adam has agreed to my affairs, Matthew merely tolerates what he sees as diversions from time spent with him, surely the only man I've ever loved.
But Clyde comes to the frozen light of my bonescape, boots padding soft as the wolf he is.
I know he uses my name, but what name he uses vanishes when it exits his mouth into the cold, and becomes wild. The bottomless pit of his right eye shines yellow in the light. The other remains black, and almost closed when he turns a certain way. The leaves of the aspen trees at the River of Eden have yellowed, and at the end of their grove, he waits the way he does every year, but this time I wasn't there to see the autumn come. I was stuck in this snow globe with Ian, and so I had missed my death coming for me.
"Red," he calls me, and I answer him.
"Bitter."
The black of his fur around his face shows a dusting of gray - ash or age. For time out of memory when this has come for me; this fairy tale coming to find me in my red hood; Bitter has always looked variously amused, haunted, or ravenous. Now I see love in his remaining eye. Something that might even be peace. His ears twitch soft against the black snow and cold wind. There are closed doors against the winter between us, loss and blame of a thousand vows betrayed to Adam and anyone else stupid enough to try and love us through a season. Christmas cards unsent, children aborted, lives ruined.
"Bt ths thyyym," he wonders, hearing my thoughts.
"I was supposed... to be safe from you here. On the moon," I tell him, choking a hopeless sob. "Adam... you can't tell him. He can't ever know this."
Clyde's snout lowers to the ground, to smell something that's fallen in front of him. We are 30 feet apart. I belong to him the way all of the girls always belonged to Charlie, the way a soldier follows the orders of only one directive, and the way we can wish impossible things and know at the same time they will never, ever change. Without speaking, he tells me what I've always understood but never verbalized: that the Woodsman will always try to stop Death because it's his quest for immortality as a Man that matters. And I will always die because if I don't, he wouldn't care.
"N b'sides, ehvrywon dize, Red."
Adam had once thought if I could be saved from mortality anywhere, it would be in a timeless dimension like the moon. It was the one thing that kept him sane, really; thinking he'd find a way to send me there eventually, despite Matthew's disappearance. But like all things, Clyde found it, and like all things thought sacred, I know he's about to swallow it. He's about to tell me that no matter where I go, and no matter what name someone calls me, there's a thing I am, and it's his to chew up.
Bitter licks his lips.
"You don't," I remind him, and he looks away, at a sound in the dry weeds.
"Eye w'll," he concedes. "N tym."
"But this time," I echo him, and he looks almost gently at me, his hackles raised in a kind of smile.
"Ien sez stahr gun fahl hit th trane."
"Yeah," I agree with him, remarking on Ian's letters. "Yes, he does."
"Mayk ahl the po-ets awf thmslves."
"So what?" I ask him, crossing my arms. His tail flicks happily, impatient.
"I downt die, Red. Nawt fer yew. But ey'll tayk yew tew th tranes t sea it unhinj."
"You... are taking me on a date?" I ask him, and he straightens the lapels of his jacket.
"I ate the whole world fer yew."
I stare at him in the aftermath of his words. There is nothing about Clyde that is metaphor. He wouldn't say anything to me unless he were completely serious, and I struggle to fathom in what capacity he might mean what he says. Yes, the Wolf has come for most of the world. Most of the world is not living, and the seasons die, and so must I follow it as the Spring itself, but he didn't say MOST, he said WHOLE.
"You did?" I ask him, whispering now although he's too far away to hear me properly. But it doesn't matter, because I am whispering from inside him, behind his ear.
"Yeah. Do you think that's a poem? I'm th onlee po-et in heer, Red."
He stands and crosses 10 feet of terrain to me with careful steps. Bitter is sly, and his eyes are careful. There's a story, I remember from somewhere, of the wolf that swallows the world, and I know this is the one I'm looking at. I can feel how big he is as he approaches. How big he is, really, or will be, when the train derails him from his skin.
"Now we kin dew whatevr we lyk."
If Clyde really swallowed the world, we could be remade in the warmth of his belly, in whatever form we see fit. I understand he's telling me that things are different now for us, in a way I can probably barely fathom. That he has consumed all of our fates, slicked them down with his saliva, and broken them down to particles easier for digestion. That we can shed those fates, or wash ourselves in them if we choose. He crosses another 10 feet. I can now smell the blood on his breath.
"No one will notice," he assures me. And they wouldn't, would they? Because there's no fire and brimstone in the creation or destruction of something the size of a world. There is only the seam in reality, and the stitches Clyde carefully uses to close it again, after removing the words he wants.
I realize whatever death I thought be might be bringing today, or this winter, has already come and gone. That while I was Annik, and hiding on the moon, what that had afforded me was simply a better view. The muse of me had inspired him to this grand gesture, and so had watched him do it, while waiting here among the icicles. I reach out my hand to him, and he licks his lips again.
"Come with me tewnite," he growls, moving fast and easy through the giant version of himself, to the poet wolf who eats girls and seasons and worlds alike, to my teenage werewolf boyfriend in his leathers.
"Will we see the train?" I ask him, and he nods.
I don't know where in the kaleidoscope he'd been before that, but it brought him here to me where he says he's swallowed the old world and now we can start it over. However you want the world, Jack, you might want to let Clyde know. He makes up the sky and all those stars you've been wishing on.
Clyde is a thing of creeping certainty; when an errant thought becomes a worry, and then a knowledge deep in your bones. He is a heavy thing, and a final thing. Maybe the last thing. Being married to him is the same as being married to an idea, like Death or Freedom. It's the same as resigning oneself to the notion that you will be executed for your beliefs someday.
When I arrived at home five years ago, I thought I would live and die and be buried in Adam. I couldn't imagine ever loving someone else, or for that matter anyone else finding it in themselves to love me. So we got married.
It was for Clyde we agreed to make an exception first. Every subsequent act of infidelity has required a confrontation, an argument, and an act of permission, but those steps over time have become well-worn and familiar, and in large part due to Clyde.
It's customary for the concubines Clyde cultivates like drive-thru napkins in a glove box to cool when they are involved in relationships which require exclusivity. Clyde doesn't mind, he just waits, heavy in the dark of their memories. Clyde has become giants and warlords for women, coquettes and porcelain dolls for men. The man of Clyde is a shadow smeared with a sleepy resignation and low drawl. He is painfully direct, physically brutish, disinterested in foreplay, and insane enough that he feels dangerous. The woman of Clyde wilts gently under a harsh light, speaks with soft embarrassment, and has striking eyes and a lurid mouth. She slithers quietly under things, laying naked, with her throat exposed.
When Adam granted me the permission to start a relationship with Clyde, we took on many incarnations, from men and boys and women and girls and all points in between, but settled into a place more comfortable to the both of us sometime two years ago that is easily mocked and hardly believed, especially in his moments of deeply defined masculinity. See, Clyde is my girlfriend. Smoking in his combat boots, swigging long from a bottle of whiskey as he drives, his dick getting hard watching the sweat stain the backs of the girls standing in line at the Dairy Queen, he's my girlfriend.
Not yet Halloween, Clyde casts over the house the pall of the holiday. Golden afternoons, cool but temperate nights, and a feeling of dread on the wind. Rosie warns me every day that it's Clyde. That something is wrong with Clyde. That Clyde can feel something coming we all assume is your imminent departure. I defend him to you the same way Rosie does - a symptom of closeness to him - by making the same assumption that this impending darkness is somehow your fault, and therefore can be corrected with your better understanding. As my girlfriend, I start to pick fights with you in the name of his honor.
But it isn't you.
As the days march toward Halloween, Clyde's hair turns black, his mood turns dark and demanding. His eyes become bottomless, and his boots become loud reminders of the presence of death behind us all. He begins giving me long looks in the Courtyard, which make Matthew scowl. While Adam has agreed to my affairs, Matthew merely tolerates what he sees as diversions from time spent with him, surely the only man I've ever loved.
But Clyde comes to the frozen light of my bonescape, boots padding soft as the wolf he is.
I know he uses my name, but what name he uses vanishes when it exits his mouth into the cold, and becomes wild. The bottomless pit of his right eye shines yellow in the light. The other remains black, and almost closed when he turns a certain way. The leaves of the aspen trees at the River of Eden have yellowed, and at the end of their grove, he waits the way he does every year, but this time I wasn't there to see the autumn come. I was stuck in this snow globe with Ian, and so I had missed my death coming for me.
"Red," he calls me, and I answer him.
"Bitter."
The black of his fur around his face shows a dusting of gray - ash or age. For time out of memory when this has come for me; this fairy tale coming to find me in my red hood; Bitter has always looked variously amused, haunted, or ravenous. Now I see love in his remaining eye. Something that might even be peace. His ears twitch soft against the black snow and cold wind. There are closed doors against the winter between us, loss and blame of a thousand vows betrayed to Adam and anyone else stupid enough to try and love us through a season. Christmas cards unsent, children aborted, lives ruined.
"Bt ths thyyym," he wonders, hearing my thoughts.
"I was supposed... to be safe from you here. On the moon," I tell him, choking a hopeless sob. "Adam... you can't tell him. He can't ever know this."
Clyde's snout lowers to the ground, to smell something that's fallen in front of him. We are 30 feet apart. I belong to him the way all of the girls always belonged to Charlie, the way a soldier follows the orders of only one directive, and the way we can wish impossible things and know at the same time they will never, ever change. Without speaking, he tells me what I've always understood but never verbalized: that the Woodsman will always try to stop Death because it's his quest for immortality as a Man that matters. And I will always die because if I don't, he wouldn't care.
"N b'sides, ehvrywon dize, Red."
Adam had once thought if I could be saved from mortality anywhere, it would be in a timeless dimension like the moon. It was the one thing that kept him sane, really; thinking he'd find a way to send me there eventually, despite Matthew's disappearance. But like all things, Clyde found it, and like all things thought sacred, I know he's about to swallow it. He's about to tell me that no matter where I go, and no matter what name someone calls me, there's a thing I am, and it's his to chew up.
Bitter licks his lips.
"You don't," I remind him, and he looks away, at a sound in the dry weeds.
"Eye w'll," he concedes. "N tym."
"But this time," I echo him, and he looks almost gently at me, his hackles raised in a kind of smile.
"Ien sez stahr gun fahl hit th trane."
"Yeah," I agree with him, remarking on Ian's letters. "Yes, he does."
"Mayk ahl the po-ets awf thmslves."
"So what?" I ask him, crossing my arms. His tail flicks happily, impatient.
"I downt die, Red. Nawt fer yew. But ey'll tayk yew tew th tranes t sea it unhinj."
"You... are taking me on a date?" I ask him, and he straightens the lapels of his jacket.
"I ate the whole world fer yew."
I stare at him in the aftermath of his words. There is nothing about Clyde that is metaphor. He wouldn't say anything to me unless he were completely serious, and I struggle to fathom in what capacity he might mean what he says. Yes, the Wolf has come for most of the world. Most of the world is not living, and the seasons die, and so must I follow it as the Spring itself, but he didn't say MOST, he said WHOLE.
"You did?" I ask him, whispering now although he's too far away to hear me properly. But it doesn't matter, because I am whispering from inside him, behind his ear.
"Yeah. Do you think that's a poem? I'm th onlee po-et in heer, Red."
He stands and crosses 10 feet of terrain to me with careful steps. Bitter is sly, and his eyes are careful. There's a story, I remember from somewhere, of the wolf that swallows the world, and I know this is the one I'm looking at. I can feel how big he is as he approaches. How big he is, really, or will be, when the train derails him from his skin.
"Now we kin dew whatevr we lyk."
If Clyde really swallowed the world, we could be remade in the warmth of his belly, in whatever form we see fit. I understand he's telling me that things are different now for us, in a way I can probably barely fathom. That he has consumed all of our fates, slicked them down with his saliva, and broken them down to particles easier for digestion. That we can shed those fates, or wash ourselves in them if we choose. He crosses another 10 feet. I can now smell the blood on his breath.
"No one will notice," he assures me. And they wouldn't, would they? Because there's no fire and brimstone in the creation or destruction of something the size of a world. There is only the seam in reality, and the stitches Clyde carefully uses to close it again, after removing the words he wants.
I realize whatever death I thought be might be bringing today, or this winter, has already come and gone. That while I was Annik, and hiding on the moon, what that had afforded me was simply a better view. The muse of me had inspired him to this grand gesture, and so had watched him do it, while waiting here among the icicles. I reach out my hand to him, and he licks his lips again.
"Come with me tewnite," he growls, moving fast and easy through the giant version of himself, to the poet wolf who eats girls and seasons and worlds alike, to my teenage werewolf boyfriend in his leathers.
"Will we see the train?" I ask him, and he nods.
I don't know where in the kaleidoscope he'd been before that, but it brought him here to me where he says he's swallowed the old world and now we can start it over. However you want the world, Jack, you might want to let Clyde know. He makes up the sky and all those stars you've been wishing on.
Friday, November 24, 2017
Shadowplay 12
Jack,
September brings a second summer, but we pray always for rain; a storm which might wash the summer clean and awaken parts of us which we can feel but not quite stir. Restless, Ian locks himself in my bedroom and foxes for things my current life has forgotten, and Ian's life remembers. He tears the fabric of my couch apart, and emerges triumphant with what he says is my journal. Annik's journal.
Of course, the couch is one I summoned from memory and so it must've...
Rapidly, I dress Annik's flat in my mind. The small space is occupied by a bed, a couch, and the regulation kitchen appliances of an apartment, but miniaturized. There is a single window which looks into an alleyway. A lamp with an elephant-print shade, dark blue paint, the anonymous brown floral sofa - I feel Nicholas under it all, like a dark blue ribbon, typing words onto a narrative of my past that I remember the way we all remember while reading the books from our childhood - innocent and dreamlike.
The couch was moved to Rosie's living room just after that. It belonged after that to John, who tossed it into the storage unit from which I stole it again in 2013. Maybe it even belonged once to you, Jack. You know it by sight, or told me once you did. The brown floral velvet, with the wood accents. The roses are orange. Sewn into the back of it, beneath the cushion, there is a seam where Matthew inserts my switchblade.
The journal itself is a fire-blistered violet color, marked with runes for water and protection, burned into the cover. Adam "confiscates" it almost immediately to the lab, where he reasons he has to determine if it's really mine, and if there are traps or hexes which will befall those who attempt to open it. He bravely volunteers himself, but I know it's only to be the first to see it's content. If I was mad, he would volunteer to be my therapist. If I only spoke a fictional language, he would be the first to learn it. If I was a carnivorous plant, he would offer himself only to be the first to know how I masticate.
I realize there is a perception among the Grays that I am the same poison as Matthew. The way the ivy creeps... the way a flame crawls... there are sides of me which are the same weapon of mass destruction as him. That if this delicate construct of the experiment of Gray House were ever able to be destroyed, it would be by one of us, or both. And it's Annik they have elected to be this noxious plant, for all the ivy I have grown over the walls, and all the ghost-ferns I have planted on the surface of the moon.
Adam expects my journal to be coated in the same hallucinogenic botanical oil he assumes seeps from Annik's skin, and when I look for explanations as to why, he ducks his head, nearly embarrassed.
"She has green eyes," he admits, and might as well be saying I am part of the same watery branch of the Gray family tree to which Rosie and Dean belong; the sirens who kill with impunity. Adam has long thought of me as the infection he must endure, but suddenly I am coated with a patina of Matthew's phlgemy evil. Annik is a creature. I long suspected it, but they have become wary of me the same way they are wary of Rosie. Annik is an unknown creature.
Adam closes the door of the lab and we watch over the waves of our connected mental eye. He confirms the meaning of the runes. Water, and protection, burned into it's surface. The color is dark purple. Evelyn, does that mean anything to you?
He asks politely, although he knows it does mean something to me. I lay in my bed, in Ian's arms, and cry over the struggle of a young girl who could never decide on what an Evelyn might've been. Matthew holds tight to my shoulders, because he was there for the struggle, and remembers what every burn mark on the journal means.
Jack, do you think we wed ourselves too early to some element, and let it tell us too much who we are? Do you suppose as children, we might've all chosen fire, and regretted it somehow for it's implications of things which we failed to live down? Do you suppose what an element really is, really at it's soul, is not what those fucking horoscopes would've had you believe?
Apparently Annik had the same struggle, or was born of it, or I had not quite finished it until this world came to swallow me.
"Burn it," I tell Adam, and Ian's arms tighten around me. "That's my guess."
Adam puts the book on the counter in the lab.
"Are you certain?" he asks me, through the floorboards of our telepathy.
"No."
But I should be. Shouldn't I be?
Against my window, the rain begins. I realize I have a single window in this single room, stuffed with a bed and couch, and an elephant-print lamp. I realize I have recreated Annik's flat here, in the Clock, but washed it with pink and ivy enough to make Matthew declare me Venus herself.
Downstairs, we all watch Adam put the book over a Bunsen flame. It burns with purple flame, and he murmurs that it smells of lavender and rotting flesh. The book remains unconsumed by flames, and he sets it in a metal pan to cool. The lock on it's edge remains intact.
"Dump water on it," Ian suggests, and Adam obliges. Lavender steam rises from it, and Adam tumbles to the floor of the lab. The power flickers in the house, and the elephant lamp browns, and hums.
"He got sent to the river," Clyde interrupts our thoughts. "By inhaling the stuff."
A clap of thunder shakes the house.
Rosie and Clyde take up the task of opening the journal, an extra douse of water, and a magical kiss. Neither work, and the journal's cover scars with the words, "You now have three failed password attempts. Your account is suspended until the owner of his journal resets the password."
Eavesdroppers howl with cackles, and Ian's fist grips the fabric of my shirt in anger.
"This is not anyone's business but yours," he hisses in my ear. "They do not respect you or your privacy, and they do not care if your feelings are hurt."
Ian turns to Matthew again on a dime's edge. The world becomes us and them, the House and our room, and how the diseases we become are not safe from the sterilization process of everyone we come in contact with.
"Get the journal back," he insists to me, his tone suggesting we will be allowed to infect one another. "I will show you how it opens. I remember."
I bring it back to my room, the crocodile skin of it cool and smooth and wet from where Clyde covered it with rain. Matthew sits on the floor of my room, his thin legs crossed in his black jeans. His shirt removed, he is starkly illustrated with his 306 tattoos (by Nick's precise account). He is picking his nails with Valentine, my switchblade. He gestures for me to sit beside him, and I put the book on the floor between us.
He says to me, "Fire and water," summarizing the last 16 years in concise practicality. He cuts open my palm, and presses it to the journal, and the locks click open.
The original pages we can see have all been burnt out. It has pages from various places stuffed into the now empty binding, different sizes and textures. Most that I flip through begin with, "Dear Ian." They all smell like campfire smoke and violets.
I read the first letter anxiously, but in the tradition of Gray House, a glass shatters, a scream carries up the stairs. Clyde vomits, Ian seizes, you overdose. The journal is shoved into a corner, and forgotten when Clyde forces his way into our world.
September brings a second summer, but we pray always for rain; a storm which might wash the summer clean and awaken parts of us which we can feel but not quite stir. Restless, Ian locks himself in my bedroom and foxes for things my current life has forgotten, and Ian's life remembers. He tears the fabric of my couch apart, and emerges triumphant with what he says is my journal. Annik's journal.
Of course, the couch is one I summoned from memory and so it must've...
Rapidly, I dress Annik's flat in my mind. The small space is occupied by a bed, a couch, and the regulation kitchen appliances of an apartment, but miniaturized. There is a single window which looks into an alleyway. A lamp with an elephant-print shade, dark blue paint, the anonymous brown floral sofa - I feel Nicholas under it all, like a dark blue ribbon, typing words onto a narrative of my past that I remember the way we all remember while reading the books from our childhood - innocent and dreamlike.
The couch was moved to Rosie's living room just after that. It belonged after that to John, who tossed it into the storage unit from which I stole it again in 2013. Maybe it even belonged once to you, Jack. You know it by sight, or told me once you did. The brown floral velvet, with the wood accents. The roses are orange. Sewn into the back of it, beneath the cushion, there is a seam where Matthew inserts my switchblade.
The journal itself is a fire-blistered violet color, marked with runes for water and protection, burned into the cover. Adam "confiscates" it almost immediately to the lab, where he reasons he has to determine if it's really mine, and if there are traps or hexes which will befall those who attempt to open it. He bravely volunteers himself, but I know it's only to be the first to see it's content. If I was mad, he would volunteer to be my therapist. If I only spoke a fictional language, he would be the first to learn it. If I was a carnivorous plant, he would offer himself only to be the first to know how I masticate.
I realize there is a perception among the Grays that I am the same poison as Matthew. The way the ivy creeps... the way a flame crawls... there are sides of me which are the same weapon of mass destruction as him. That if this delicate construct of the experiment of Gray House were ever able to be destroyed, it would be by one of us, or both. And it's Annik they have elected to be this noxious plant, for all the ivy I have grown over the walls, and all the ghost-ferns I have planted on the surface of the moon.
Adam expects my journal to be coated in the same hallucinogenic botanical oil he assumes seeps from Annik's skin, and when I look for explanations as to why, he ducks his head, nearly embarrassed.
"She has green eyes," he admits, and might as well be saying I am part of the same watery branch of the Gray family tree to which Rosie and Dean belong; the sirens who kill with impunity. Adam has long thought of me as the infection he must endure, but suddenly I am coated with a patina of Matthew's phlgemy evil. Annik is a creature. I long suspected it, but they have become wary of me the same way they are wary of Rosie. Annik is an unknown creature.
Adam closes the door of the lab and we watch over the waves of our connected mental eye. He confirms the meaning of the runes. Water, and protection, burned into it's surface. The color is dark purple. Evelyn, does that mean anything to you?
He asks politely, although he knows it does mean something to me. I lay in my bed, in Ian's arms, and cry over the struggle of a young girl who could never decide on what an Evelyn might've been. Matthew holds tight to my shoulders, because he was there for the struggle, and remembers what every burn mark on the journal means.
Jack, do you think we wed ourselves too early to some element, and let it tell us too much who we are? Do you suppose as children, we might've all chosen fire, and regretted it somehow for it's implications of things which we failed to live down? Do you suppose what an element really is, really at it's soul, is not what those fucking horoscopes would've had you believe?
Apparently Annik had the same struggle, or was born of it, or I had not quite finished it until this world came to swallow me.
"Burn it," I tell Adam, and Ian's arms tighten around me. "That's my guess."
Adam puts the book on the counter in the lab.
"Are you certain?" he asks me, through the floorboards of our telepathy.
"No."
But I should be. Shouldn't I be?
Against my window, the rain begins. I realize I have a single window in this single room, stuffed with a bed and couch, and an elephant-print lamp. I realize I have recreated Annik's flat here, in the Clock, but washed it with pink and ivy enough to make Matthew declare me Venus herself.
Downstairs, we all watch Adam put the book over a Bunsen flame. It burns with purple flame, and he murmurs that it smells of lavender and rotting flesh. The book remains unconsumed by flames, and he sets it in a metal pan to cool. The lock on it's edge remains intact.
"Dump water on it," Ian suggests, and Adam obliges. Lavender steam rises from it, and Adam tumbles to the floor of the lab. The power flickers in the house, and the elephant lamp browns, and hums.
"He got sent to the river," Clyde interrupts our thoughts. "By inhaling the stuff."
A clap of thunder shakes the house.
Rosie and Clyde take up the task of opening the journal, an extra douse of water, and a magical kiss. Neither work, and the journal's cover scars with the words, "You now have three failed password attempts. Your account is suspended until the owner of his journal resets the password."
Eavesdroppers howl with cackles, and Ian's fist grips the fabric of my shirt in anger.
"This is not anyone's business but yours," he hisses in my ear. "They do not respect you or your privacy, and they do not care if your feelings are hurt."
Ian turns to Matthew again on a dime's edge. The world becomes us and them, the House and our room, and how the diseases we become are not safe from the sterilization process of everyone we come in contact with.
"Get the journal back," he insists to me, his tone suggesting we will be allowed to infect one another. "I will show you how it opens. I remember."
I bring it back to my room, the crocodile skin of it cool and smooth and wet from where Clyde covered it with rain. Matthew sits on the floor of my room, his thin legs crossed in his black jeans. His shirt removed, he is starkly illustrated with his 306 tattoos (by Nick's precise account). He is picking his nails with Valentine, my switchblade. He gestures for me to sit beside him, and I put the book on the floor between us.
He says to me, "Fire and water," summarizing the last 16 years in concise practicality. He cuts open my palm, and presses it to the journal, and the locks click open.
The original pages we can see have all been burnt out. It has pages from various places stuffed into the now empty binding, different sizes and textures. Most that I flip through begin with, "Dear Ian." They all smell like campfire smoke and violets.
I read the first letter anxiously, but in the tradition of Gray House, a glass shatters, a scream carries up the stairs. Clyde vomits, Ian seizes, you overdose. The journal is shoved into a corner, and forgotten when Clyde forces his way into our world.
Monday, November 20, 2017
Shadowplay 11
Jack,
Yes, I could probably do this forever. I told you that. Next we could slide into that old world, and that old life if we wanted to, like sliding into a certain mood when the light changes in a room. We could slide into the night when, despite all that, we almost had sex. I cried about the dread wolf, and you pocketed the lavender mesh panties I had on and never gave them back. I might be convinced that specific time has some kind of significance to this one, but Nick told me once to keep moving forward, when considering our old lives, and so I have. You don't need to explain. I left you, certain you would kill yourself the slowest way you know how, and never looked back. Shit happens. Maybe we owed each other once, but we don't anymore.
After Adam's suicide and subsequent return, Matthew's seizures got worse. He said he was simply remembering his life as Ian, and with each seizure, he returned with more of the light on the moon in his eyes, and more unwinding babble about an impending collision. With each letter he slipped under the door he became more and more insistently virile, catching me at odd hours of the day and night, to spill feverish his visions in my ear, and his cum in my mouth. He began to embody Ian's same hollow desperation - that no one but me could see what he saw, or know what he knew. That he was disbelieved by everyone, except in the poetic sense that all people pretend to understand lyricism. Only I could know he was serious, literal, terrified, and shoved routinely between the pages of this reality to find himself inside of Ian's fits, and torn back out again.
I began to understand that I am the vessel for his madness, even if I could never be his interpreter. Before his death, he would tell me all of it, and I would be left alone to puzzle over it's misshapen pieces and bits of song forever. I grew cold, and quiet, and very still within, to accept with the best of my ability his frantic encounters. In the cold landscape of the winter in which I'd been frozen, he touched me like he touches the fragile and the already broken. Which is to say, he smashed me onto the surfaces of his flesh with all the strength in his body, and poured the crushed fragments down his throat.
It's boyish, his actions, and how a boy treats the girl of his affections. While my gender before this all happened was ambiguous at best, he forced me into the form of a girl, where he shaped a burrow for his body to be cradled against the cold like a digging animal.
He finds me in dark corners of my thoughts, this lean and intellectual beast, to marry his visions he has while seizing to the memories I want least touched by the world.
"Today, I had tried to go to the market," he tells me, his voice soft. "A man got to close to me and I had tried to withdraw, but it started again. I smelled his cigar and tasted his semen at simultaneous moments before I could trace the constellations from which the meteor will come."
"Are you alright?" I ask him, poising myself in the caves of the moon, my body crouched and smeared in black and white paint.
"Yes. Nick had come with me and after brought me home."
"That's good. What do you think it means?"
"That you are the grace which all poets strive to capture and fail. It is for you they die, and when the meteor comes, it will kill us to prove it."
I crouch lower, among the rocks, my hands flat on the cold ground.
"I don't want that."
"But we will die together," he reminds me, materializing from the darkness in his plain shirt and pants.
"It is not my aspiration to die, Ian. I don't know why it's yours."
His smile is gracious and genuine, showing the gap in his front teeth. His green eyes warm, and I believe for one second that he is a boy who is capable of kindness before remembering that he is not, absolutely.
"It isn't mine, either. You will make me die. You will kill me to tell all the world who you are. I am your martyr."
I stand again, prim in my navy sweater, my skirt patterned with elephants, a girl again.
"You are not a martyr for anyone. You come and go as you please. So you must belong here, with me. This is your world as much as it is mine."
He shakes his head, his black hair catching lovely the low light in the caves.
"No, Nik, this is where we all come to hold you. To get here, we have to die."
"You're not dead," I sulk at him, and he sits on a rock to consider me. Water drips in the silence. I have drawn his portrait, over and over, and the paper litters the ground like autumn leaves in black and white. I am not an artist, but I have gotten better.
"That is only because I know death best," he reminds me, and the boy vanishes behind the cold prince. The devil I know.
"What?" I ask him, and he stares.
"It seems as I should have no worries when we aren't fucking and I should feel something more romantic than relief when we are fucking," he confesses, and so I confess back, sitting beside him.
"Sometimes I cry when we aren't."
"Since we are a lock and key," he says, and I nod. He puts his hand missing his finger on my leg, gently tented like a calm spider.
"If we are a lock and key, what do we protect?"
"I'm not sure."
"I did not care very much what it was but then I thought it would be our child."
"It might be," I admit, and his mood changes rapidly.
"If enough of my cum goes inside you, it will go in your bloodstream and you will hear all my thoughts," he says, squeezing my leg with his hand.
I think to tell him we're already well on the way to that, but instead I take his clothes off and we fuck on the ground of the cave, soot caking the back of my hair where I sweat. Of course, we are both virgins, and it hurts like it does every time.
Yes, I could probably do this forever. I told you that. Next we could slide into that old world, and that old life if we wanted to, like sliding into a certain mood when the light changes in a room. We could slide into the night when, despite all that, we almost had sex. I cried about the dread wolf, and you pocketed the lavender mesh panties I had on and never gave them back. I might be convinced that specific time has some kind of significance to this one, but Nick told me once to keep moving forward, when considering our old lives, and so I have. You don't need to explain. I left you, certain you would kill yourself the slowest way you know how, and never looked back. Shit happens. Maybe we owed each other once, but we don't anymore.
After Adam's suicide and subsequent return, Matthew's seizures got worse. He said he was simply remembering his life as Ian, and with each seizure, he returned with more of the light on the moon in his eyes, and more unwinding babble about an impending collision. With each letter he slipped under the door he became more and more insistently virile, catching me at odd hours of the day and night, to spill feverish his visions in my ear, and his cum in my mouth. He began to embody Ian's same hollow desperation - that no one but me could see what he saw, or know what he knew. That he was disbelieved by everyone, except in the poetic sense that all people pretend to understand lyricism. Only I could know he was serious, literal, terrified, and shoved routinely between the pages of this reality to find himself inside of Ian's fits, and torn back out again.
I began to understand that I am the vessel for his madness, even if I could never be his interpreter. Before his death, he would tell me all of it, and I would be left alone to puzzle over it's misshapen pieces and bits of song forever. I grew cold, and quiet, and very still within, to accept with the best of my ability his frantic encounters. In the cold landscape of the winter in which I'd been frozen, he touched me like he touches the fragile and the already broken. Which is to say, he smashed me onto the surfaces of his flesh with all the strength in his body, and poured the crushed fragments down his throat.
It's boyish, his actions, and how a boy treats the girl of his affections. While my gender before this all happened was ambiguous at best, he forced me into the form of a girl, where he shaped a burrow for his body to be cradled against the cold like a digging animal.
He finds me in dark corners of my thoughts, this lean and intellectual beast, to marry his visions he has while seizing to the memories I want least touched by the world.
"Today, I had tried to go to the market," he tells me, his voice soft. "A man got to close to me and I had tried to withdraw, but it started again. I smelled his cigar and tasted his semen at simultaneous moments before I could trace the constellations from which the meteor will come."
"Are you alright?" I ask him, poising myself in the caves of the moon, my body crouched and smeared in black and white paint.
"Yes. Nick had come with me and after brought me home."
"That's good. What do you think it means?"
"That you are the grace which all poets strive to capture and fail. It is for you they die, and when the meteor comes, it will kill us to prove it."
I crouch lower, among the rocks, my hands flat on the cold ground.
"I don't want that."
"But we will die together," he reminds me, materializing from the darkness in his plain shirt and pants.
"It is not my aspiration to die, Ian. I don't know why it's yours."
His smile is gracious and genuine, showing the gap in his front teeth. His green eyes warm, and I believe for one second that he is a boy who is capable of kindness before remembering that he is not, absolutely.
"It isn't mine, either. You will make me die. You will kill me to tell all the world who you are. I am your martyr."
I stand again, prim in my navy sweater, my skirt patterned with elephants, a girl again.
"You are not a martyr for anyone. You come and go as you please. So you must belong here, with me. This is your world as much as it is mine."
He shakes his head, his black hair catching lovely the low light in the caves.
"No, Nik, this is where we all come to hold you. To get here, we have to die."
"You're not dead," I sulk at him, and he sits on a rock to consider me. Water drips in the silence. I have drawn his portrait, over and over, and the paper litters the ground like autumn leaves in black and white. I am not an artist, but I have gotten better.
"That is only because I know death best," he reminds me, and the boy vanishes behind the cold prince. The devil I know.
"What?" I ask him, and he stares.
"It seems as I should have no worries when we aren't fucking and I should feel something more romantic than relief when we are fucking," he confesses, and so I confess back, sitting beside him.
"Sometimes I cry when we aren't."
"Since we are a lock and key," he says, and I nod. He puts his hand missing his finger on my leg, gently tented like a calm spider.
"If we are a lock and key, what do we protect?"
"I'm not sure."
"I did not care very much what it was but then I thought it would be our child."
"It might be," I admit, and his mood changes rapidly.
"If enough of my cum goes inside you, it will go in your bloodstream and you will hear all my thoughts," he says, squeezing my leg with his hand.
I think to tell him we're already well on the way to that, but instead I take his clothes off and we fuck on the ground of the cave, soot caking the back of my hair where I sweat. Of course, we are both virgins, and it hurts like it does every time.
Shadowplay 10
Jack,
The same man taught both Adam and me to build a fire. We both learned as children, and paid attention to the lessons for our own reasons. When I forgot what to do in my teens, Adam showed me again in the wood-burning stove in my living room during the winter we were snowed in together and I wanted nothing more than to learn to survive again.
In the grate, we watched the wood burn in layers, a little at a time, scaling into squares and charring black. It's this memory that returns to me when I spread lighter fluid over the sheets of Adam's bed.
It was once our bed, and now his by the designation of the Clock. It's heavy and dark, carved with the heads of lions on the headboard. I don't know the kind of wood it is, but I know from the weight of the damn thing the frame will burn last. I toss matches over other objects in his room; things he saw great artistry in that I burn now in his death.
The only thing that gives me pause is his writing desk, strewn with half-filled pages.
It was the winter we were snowed in that Adam started writing me letters. Who knows what unfinished and irretrievable thoughts I'm destroying? Who knows what poetry is now going to vanish when I...
But I do it anyway, because maybe that's how a poet really dies, in an Oscar Wilde sense. I watch my name curl and vanish into brown leaves of spent paper, and I pray silently that Adam knows, when he wakes up, that I at least thought it over before burning his letters. I hope he knows this was the same as burning a church for me, or setting a cross down on the lawn of a black preacher's family. Something insidious and possibly evil, to burn Adam's words - those into which I have escaped for over half of my life.
Like I said before, I don't know how to kill myself. It's Adam who does, and always for love. Brad does, too, but only for revenge. Is there something wrong with me, that I can't? Do I lack some... romance or conviction, do you think? I value my life more than anything else, and so I would only end it if it had been ended already, in all but title.
As I watch Adam's slides pressed with samples of my blood heat and shatter, I think of the time I told you I wanted to die, and how, because of our lives as professional liars and killers, you could not believe me. It's a life far away from this one, and from the one I am living right now, as Annik. A secret life, where all this needless bloodshed between us began.
"You think you have problems?" you demanded of me through the phone, your voice cracking on the O. "Like your life was so hard."
"I need to get out of here, Jack."
"You do what you have to, but I don't run from my problems."
"You don't know what it's been like."
I did not have at the time the will or energy to argue your logical fallacies with you. That in fact running from your problems is your fucking religion, and I had all the letters to prove it. I was too tired to tell you the truth, or even think about what the truth really was.
"You run but it'll catch up, Laura. They always catch up with you. You're gonna die haunted by all of us," you had said.
And it impressed me for the first time how much you could know me, without knowing me at all.
"I need you here. I need you to take care of the things you fucked up. You fucked up MY life, do you get that? I lost everything because of you, and what do you want to do about that? The way I see it, you owe me," you had said.
"I owe you shit."
I don't know if I ever really understood the chaos in your heart which forced you to make it my responsibility, but by appealing to my sense of justice, you convinced me to stay with you for 3 years. By appealing to the fact I loved you, you excused your self-destruction by blaming me as the starting point, and I don't know, Jack, maybe I was. If I was, I'm sorry.
While Adam's room burns, I touch the place on the pad of my left thumb where I unknowingly burned off the print on the glass bowl of your pipe. In the 13 years since it happened, the scar has disappeared as surely as you have, so I have no evidence of our history together at all.
"Just hold me, Laura," you'd begged me, and so I did, but it was at the expense of swallowing the swords of this, to stay silent for you.
When I filled myself with secrets you'd never get to learn, and I discovered the locked sections of my chivalrous heart, and when I became a poet myself, it was over you.
The same man taught both Adam and me to build a fire. We both learned as children, and paid attention to the lessons for our own reasons. When I forgot what to do in my teens, Adam showed me again in the wood-burning stove in my living room during the winter we were snowed in together and I wanted nothing more than to learn to survive again.
In the grate, we watched the wood burn in layers, a little at a time, scaling into squares and charring black. It's this memory that returns to me when I spread lighter fluid over the sheets of Adam's bed.
It was once our bed, and now his by the designation of the Clock. It's heavy and dark, carved with the heads of lions on the headboard. I don't know the kind of wood it is, but I know from the weight of the damn thing the frame will burn last. I toss matches over other objects in his room; things he saw great artistry in that I burn now in his death.
The only thing that gives me pause is his writing desk, strewn with half-filled pages.
It was the winter we were snowed in that Adam started writing me letters. Who knows what unfinished and irretrievable thoughts I'm destroying? Who knows what poetry is now going to vanish when I...
But I do it anyway, because maybe that's how a poet really dies, in an Oscar Wilde sense. I watch my name curl and vanish into brown leaves of spent paper, and I pray silently that Adam knows, when he wakes up, that I at least thought it over before burning his letters. I hope he knows this was the same as burning a church for me, or setting a cross down on the lawn of a black preacher's family. Something insidious and possibly evil, to burn Adam's words - those into which I have escaped for over half of my life.
Like I said before, I don't know how to kill myself. It's Adam who does, and always for love. Brad does, too, but only for revenge. Is there something wrong with me, that I can't? Do I lack some... romance or conviction, do you think? I value my life more than anything else, and so I would only end it if it had been ended already, in all but title.
As I watch Adam's slides pressed with samples of my blood heat and shatter, I think of the time I told you I wanted to die, and how, because of our lives as professional liars and killers, you could not believe me. It's a life far away from this one, and from the one I am living right now, as Annik. A secret life, where all this needless bloodshed between us began.
"You think you have problems?" you demanded of me through the phone, your voice cracking on the O. "Like your life was so hard."
"I need to get out of here, Jack."
"You do what you have to, but I don't run from my problems."
"You don't know what it's been like."
I did not have at the time the will or energy to argue your logical fallacies with you. That in fact running from your problems is your fucking religion, and I had all the letters to prove it. I was too tired to tell you the truth, or even think about what the truth really was.
"You run but it'll catch up, Laura. They always catch up with you. You're gonna die haunted by all of us," you had said.
And it impressed me for the first time how much you could know me, without knowing me at all.
"I need you here. I need you to take care of the things you fucked up. You fucked up MY life, do you get that? I lost everything because of you, and what do you want to do about that? The way I see it, you owe me," you had said.
"I owe you shit."
I don't know if I ever really understood the chaos in your heart which forced you to make it my responsibility, but by appealing to my sense of justice, you convinced me to stay with you for 3 years. By appealing to the fact I loved you, you excused your self-destruction by blaming me as the starting point, and I don't know, Jack, maybe I was. If I was, I'm sorry.
While Adam's room burns, I touch the place on the pad of my left thumb where I unknowingly burned off the print on the glass bowl of your pipe. In the 13 years since it happened, the scar has disappeared as surely as you have, so I have no evidence of our history together at all.
"Just hold me, Laura," you'd begged me, and so I did, but it was at the expense of swallowing the swords of this, to stay silent for you.
When I filled myself with secrets you'd never get to learn, and I discovered the locked sections of my chivalrous heart, and when I became a poet myself, it was over you.
Saturday, November 18, 2017
Shadowplay 9
Jack,
The impatient laugh of a .38 revolver is the most arrogant sound on earth. When it barks out over the quiet of the courtyard, I feel a rush of annoyance at all the boys who laughed that way I've ever met. I want to scream at the universe, "No one thinks you're very funny."
But of course, I've only ever met one boy who laughs that way.
My symbiotic otherhalf, Adam would muster his arrogance from the shelf directly above where I house my biting and jealous inferiority, and while Adam's arrogant laugh belies his hidden fear that he'll never be good enough, my sarcastic submission is surely proof I think so fucking highly of myself. In the library of ourselves, my name is written inside all of the books about Adam, checked out for decades, lost, and returned again when I'd memorized every passage.
The second Rosie tells me he's going to shoot himself, I know the gunshot will follow closely enough behind that no one can stop it. Why? Because fast and without language, I feel the settling dimes and car keys and contents of his slacks which collect in the configuration to make his suicide possible in the first place: an innocent studiousness, a teenage hopelessness, an ignorance to that which had unfolded around him, and a need to prove the magic sleeping in his veins is real.
When I run to his dorm room, I see Brad take a step inside, pale, and turn to me, catching the force of my body against his chest.
"No, no, don't," he shoves me hard, backward into the courtyard. "No, Evie, don't look."
I struggle to get past him, but he has always been bigger and stronger than me, my older brother by nine minutes. He looks down at me from a stern and blue-eyed height, my shoulders pushed into the wall between Joshua and Grady's rooms.
"I just need to know if he's okay," I tell Brad, trying to show him I'm calm, that I'm not hysterical. You exit your bedroom to tell Brad your conversation isn't done yet, the fight you were having unraveling with the sudden rush of events.
"Not now, Jack," Brad shouts, and you recede to the shadows, as if you have been told once again you aren't allowed.
"I just need to know if he's okay," I tell him, my voice quiet. He yells into the bustle around us.
"Joshua, you need to get him to the River!" Brad yells. "Nick! Someone get him out of here!"
Rosie is sitting calm on the edge of the fountain watching me. I begin to speak to her instead of my handler.
"I just need to know it's going to be okay," I explain to her, and she nods, her eyes innocent.
"I just knew," she says, her voice barely more than a whisper. "I just knew he was going to. I saw him pick up the gun, just like... well, he did it for Mr. Keating."
"Rosie, I swear to God," Brad threatens her.
Joshua pushes through the crowd of us gathering at the doorway, but I miss what happens as Brad steers me into my room before they carry him out.
Hello, Jack, nice to meet you, I am Eve of the Undying Spring. Except that spring is always ending and dying and starting over. I am the resurrection and the life, as the expression goes, connected forever to the Blood which created Man. Adam's blood. Our blood.
The River in Eden is red with it, and submerging oneself in it will result in the healing of all wounds. A painful regenerative process takes place, where tissues are slowly grown, reconnected to nerves, sealed with skin, and returned to their original state again. Joshua hefts Adam's body over his shoulder and brings him to Eden, where he lays his body in the River, the crater in his skull bubbling in the blood of our Legacy.
I watch over him while his body changes, thinking about the act of suicide itself. I know somewhere he is wandering the blank and colorless landscape of the snow globe within the Moon; the place Ian told me poets go; but I don't go there. I don't look, and I don't care. Because this is different. It's Adam, and I cannot be made to stop the vigil I'm holding until his body comes back to life.
"He does this for me," I remind Joshua, who is sitting beside me, his calm teddy bear eyes lacking judgment and blank as buttons. Yearly, Adam makes it his priority to hold the vigil of the season until I can come back to myself, from somewhere distant that I might say is the same as dying.
"Yeah," Joshua says.
Adam kills himself because, according to the symbiosis of us, I do not. I can't reach the place inside myself where I am lost without the certainty of death. I'm the dawn and evening. I'm the spring risen from death. I don't know how to die, really, unless it's forced on me by the jaws of Death himself. All I know to do is theatrically give up, compromise, or pretend.
I'm a violent, disbelieving thing. I don't need to have faith in anything because I wait for it to be provided to me and immolate it again when it loses meaning. I'm made of the confusion of beginnings. But Adam is not.
Adam is the only thing through which I might be made to endure.
"He might be the life I live," I tell Joshua, who pats his knee to let me sit in his lap. I crawl to the center of him, and lay on his chest. He's soft and quiet.
Adam knows what it means to be pathetic, and without direction or moral conviction. The only reason I know it is through him. Adam's taught me what it means to lose faith. I touch his ankle in the shallow water, his sock soaked with blood, the shine of his black leather dress shoe polished to a vicious mirror in which he surely must've seen himself, and his futility, and his superfluity, and his skepticism of God's plan. I pull them off, one and then the other, and they float away in the gentle current.
After a time, Joshua leaves me alone. It's hours before his head is knit back together, and the usually sunless River dims from twilight to a moonless night in which the Aurora drifts, lazy and beautiful and mute. When I know he is well, but simply still unconscious, I leave his body in the shallows and go to my room, to be alone. Adam would not like it if I was there when he awoke.
"I'm going to go," Rosie assures me. "I'll go and speak poetry to him. That's what Clyde said to do."
In my bedroom, Clyde is waiting on my pink blankets, his black shirt hiked up during his nap to expose his stomach. The shirt is too small and printed with the KISS logo. His shoes are muddy and propped up on my pillow. His eyes are sleepy.
"Heya," he greets me, his voice quiet, and I don't answer him, but move his shoes roughly off the bed.
"You're messing up my sheets," I tell him, and he lets his legs fall heavy to the whitewashed floor.
"Did a little," he admits, his voice sly.
His hair spreads over his forehead and obscures something he uses to pass for a smile, and I curl into the smell of him, my arms seeking his warmth even though he's the last person I want to see. He smells like the wilt of flowers and the sweat of a lawn mower.
"Why is this happening?" I demand. I demand because I know he will tell me. As soon as he tells me, I regret demanding.
"Yer the reason a poet kills hisself," he drawls, his body still, his breath in my hair. "Doncha know that by now, Ninemuse?"
I cry onto his KISS shirt until my sobs turn angry, and I hit his chest. He lets me until he can tell I'm only doing it to get him to react to me, and then he nips hard toward my face.
"Stop," he snarls. "Hurts."
I stop. He breathes slow and deep, pressing his body against mine until I have to match him, or die struggling.
"Burn it," he murmurs at length, and I stir to see the side of his face in the gathering dark.
"What?" I ask him.
"His room. Burn it, and eat the ashes. Ashes of the poet are good luck."
So I did.
The impatient laugh of a .38 revolver is the most arrogant sound on earth. When it barks out over the quiet of the courtyard, I feel a rush of annoyance at all the boys who laughed that way I've ever met. I want to scream at the universe, "No one thinks you're very funny."
But of course, I've only ever met one boy who laughs that way.
My symbiotic otherhalf, Adam would muster his arrogance from the shelf directly above where I house my biting and jealous inferiority, and while Adam's arrogant laugh belies his hidden fear that he'll never be good enough, my sarcastic submission is surely proof I think so fucking highly of myself. In the library of ourselves, my name is written inside all of the books about Adam, checked out for decades, lost, and returned again when I'd memorized every passage.
The second Rosie tells me he's going to shoot himself, I know the gunshot will follow closely enough behind that no one can stop it. Why? Because fast and without language, I feel the settling dimes and car keys and contents of his slacks which collect in the configuration to make his suicide possible in the first place: an innocent studiousness, a teenage hopelessness, an ignorance to that which had unfolded around him, and a need to prove the magic sleeping in his veins is real.
When I run to his dorm room, I see Brad take a step inside, pale, and turn to me, catching the force of my body against his chest.
"No, no, don't," he shoves me hard, backward into the courtyard. "No, Evie, don't look."
I struggle to get past him, but he has always been bigger and stronger than me, my older brother by nine minutes. He looks down at me from a stern and blue-eyed height, my shoulders pushed into the wall between Joshua and Grady's rooms.
"I just need to know if he's okay," I tell Brad, trying to show him I'm calm, that I'm not hysterical. You exit your bedroom to tell Brad your conversation isn't done yet, the fight you were having unraveling with the sudden rush of events.
"Not now, Jack," Brad shouts, and you recede to the shadows, as if you have been told once again you aren't allowed.
"I just need to know if he's okay," I tell him, my voice quiet. He yells into the bustle around us.
"Joshua, you need to get him to the River!" Brad yells. "Nick! Someone get him out of here!"
Rosie is sitting calm on the edge of the fountain watching me. I begin to speak to her instead of my handler.
"I just need to know it's going to be okay," I explain to her, and she nods, her eyes innocent.
"I just knew," she says, her voice barely more than a whisper. "I just knew he was going to. I saw him pick up the gun, just like... well, he did it for Mr. Keating."
"Rosie, I swear to God," Brad threatens her.
Joshua pushes through the crowd of us gathering at the doorway, but I miss what happens as Brad steers me into my room before they carry him out.
Hello, Jack, nice to meet you, I am Eve of the Undying Spring. Except that spring is always ending and dying and starting over. I am the resurrection and the life, as the expression goes, connected forever to the Blood which created Man. Adam's blood. Our blood.
The River in Eden is red with it, and submerging oneself in it will result in the healing of all wounds. A painful regenerative process takes place, where tissues are slowly grown, reconnected to nerves, sealed with skin, and returned to their original state again. Joshua hefts Adam's body over his shoulder and brings him to Eden, where he lays his body in the River, the crater in his skull bubbling in the blood of our Legacy.
I watch over him while his body changes, thinking about the act of suicide itself. I know somewhere he is wandering the blank and colorless landscape of the snow globe within the Moon; the place Ian told me poets go; but I don't go there. I don't look, and I don't care. Because this is different. It's Adam, and I cannot be made to stop the vigil I'm holding until his body comes back to life.
"He does this for me," I remind Joshua, who is sitting beside me, his calm teddy bear eyes lacking judgment and blank as buttons. Yearly, Adam makes it his priority to hold the vigil of the season until I can come back to myself, from somewhere distant that I might say is the same as dying.
"Yeah," Joshua says.
Adam kills himself because, according to the symbiosis of us, I do not. I can't reach the place inside myself where I am lost without the certainty of death. I'm the dawn and evening. I'm the spring risen from death. I don't know how to die, really, unless it's forced on me by the jaws of Death himself. All I know to do is theatrically give up, compromise, or pretend.
I'm a violent, disbelieving thing. I don't need to have faith in anything because I wait for it to be provided to me and immolate it again when it loses meaning. I'm made of the confusion of beginnings. But Adam is not.
Adam is the only thing through which I might be made to endure.
"He might be the life I live," I tell Joshua, who pats his knee to let me sit in his lap. I crawl to the center of him, and lay on his chest. He's soft and quiet.
Adam knows what it means to be pathetic, and without direction or moral conviction. The only reason I know it is through him. Adam's taught me what it means to lose faith. I touch his ankle in the shallow water, his sock soaked with blood, the shine of his black leather dress shoe polished to a vicious mirror in which he surely must've seen himself, and his futility, and his superfluity, and his skepticism of God's plan. I pull them off, one and then the other, and they float away in the gentle current.
After a time, Joshua leaves me alone. It's hours before his head is knit back together, and the usually sunless River dims from twilight to a moonless night in which the Aurora drifts, lazy and beautiful and mute. When I know he is well, but simply still unconscious, I leave his body in the shallows and go to my room, to be alone. Adam would not like it if I was there when he awoke.
"I'm going to go," Rosie assures me. "I'll go and speak poetry to him. That's what Clyde said to do."
In my bedroom, Clyde is waiting on my pink blankets, his black shirt hiked up during his nap to expose his stomach. The shirt is too small and printed with the KISS logo. His shoes are muddy and propped up on my pillow. His eyes are sleepy.
"Heya," he greets me, his voice quiet, and I don't answer him, but move his shoes roughly off the bed.
"You're messing up my sheets," I tell him, and he lets his legs fall heavy to the whitewashed floor.
"Did a little," he admits, his voice sly.
His hair spreads over his forehead and obscures something he uses to pass for a smile, and I curl into the smell of him, my arms seeking his warmth even though he's the last person I want to see. He smells like the wilt of flowers and the sweat of a lawn mower.
"Why is this happening?" I demand. I demand because I know he will tell me. As soon as he tells me, I regret demanding.
"Yer the reason a poet kills hisself," he drawls, his body still, his breath in my hair. "Doncha know that by now, Ninemuse?"
I cry onto his KISS shirt until my sobs turn angry, and I hit his chest. He lets me until he can tell I'm only doing it to get him to react to me, and then he nips hard toward my face.
"Stop," he snarls. "Hurts."
I stop. He breathes slow and deep, pressing his body against mine until I have to match him, or die struggling.
"Burn it," he murmurs at length, and I stir to see the side of his face in the gathering dark.
"What?" I ask him.
"His room. Burn it, and eat the ashes. Ashes of the poet are good luck."
So I did.
Friday, November 17, 2017
Shadowplay 8
Jack,
The nearly quarter-moon had already set in the small hours of May 18th, so I imagine (or perhaps remember) that the sky seemed dark, and unnaturally lit by the glow of the stars. By two in the morning, there was only light traffic on South Park Road. The wind blew soft through the trees to the south. Ian knelt in his kitchen, stubborn and unrelenting, to pray for the life to be choked from his body.
I neither celebrate nor lament the gentle offerings of poets made in prayer, at night, in kitchens. I don't read their notes. I don't suffer the loss of them from this world. I know that the water comes, low at first, and dark. It swarms with the Word, and a man like Ian believes he can save himself if he drinks fast enough, but eventually the volume of the water becomes violent, the Word lost to the rushing certainty of God, and he runs, or he drowns.
To open yourself to the Words means in time you'll be consumed by them. As a poet, I believe Ian understood that. But when the Words came for him, to take him that night, I didn't expect him to pull me through after him.
Did you know the world is made of buttonholes? Nothing any more or less complicated than that; buttonholes, like doorways into the other rooms of this great House. Ian prayed for the water to take him, and found the buttonhole through which he needed to slip to reach the world just beyond this one.
And like breaking glass, I followed him. Like the city which has lost power. Like the girl who learns she was born a god, I was pulled to the deadland of the moon, the snow falling black from a violet sky. Where it landed, it froze in crystal patterns which lightened gray, and white again in the deepest folds of the caves on the mountains.
In these wastes, we become little more than bone, sustained by the Word. Ian's medications, and his pathology, and the smell of his neck when he woke, choked with a sour sweat, all vanish. His fear of pity vanishes, or is blown away in this hailstorm. Did I remember myself then, or is it only that I remember myself now?
Ian prayed for rain, and the rain came. It carried away all of him that was not an Instrument to speak the truth - a Virgin. The unbroken and endless part of his soul, remaining forever at the bottom of drains and urinals and the dark spaces under hedges. The rain carried him here, to where that soul could be bleached clean again as a jawbone battered by the desert sand.
So here I am. The bone of me sheared clean of my excess, my blue sweater, my pin shaped like a fly. You’ve held a lot of people in your arms, Jack, and touched their flesh with the soft plain of your palm, but what about their bones? I’m a dry and unchangeable thing. A slip of ribbon blanched to a nameless color meandering across a tuneless waste. In the salt crystals of frozen snow, Ian oxidizes black as his glower.
"You are here because you are Inspiration," he reminds me, the dark pools of shadows moving across the matte black of his skin. Reminding me that somewhere close to this place, we all serve a purpose the way Improvisation and Drama do. "You must always be here when a poet dies."
"Annik... is a muse," I suppose at him, drawing the Word in the snow with my finger. We might invent the word muse together, in this place. I crouch on the ground, quiet as the stars, and heavy as the expanse of the sky. The gap in each of his teeth betray he is, at his core, a key used to bury a great secret, or reveal one.
"I dreamed I was here before," I tell him. "The night you... we were in a school."
The word school crosses slow and foreign the space between us, causing his head to turn, as if he can hear a voice on the wind.
"School?" he asks me, and we look together at the rising earth, distant over the horizon.
It's a strange idea, that binds us back to the earth of our memories, and anchors us back in a place we can remember time. Bells. Homework. Prom.
That world in the house above us is still uncoiling in the kaleidoscope, and if we move slightly, we both become a part of it again; the glass of this world ethereal and inconstant. Annik's sweater comes back, Ian's tear-stains. The smell in the air says he's spilled turpentine on the floor, and it's been decades since the police sealed off Barton Street. Like anything else in Gray House, it comes tinged with the bitter sense of forgery: we might be gods but we are young gods, who know nothing and will never learn.
"Eve?" Matthew asks me, his eyes the same terrified roundness I've seen looking out from under Ian's straight fringe.
Rosie enters the studio where Matthew paints, and takes no notice of the soot in the air, or the paint thinner on the floor. She whispers at us a half-second before we hear the gunshot from the next room.
"Adam has a gun. He's going to kill hi-"
The nearly quarter-moon had already set in the small hours of May 18th, so I imagine (or perhaps remember) that the sky seemed dark, and unnaturally lit by the glow of the stars. By two in the morning, there was only light traffic on South Park Road. The wind blew soft through the trees to the south. Ian knelt in his kitchen, stubborn and unrelenting, to pray for the life to be choked from his body.
I neither celebrate nor lament the gentle offerings of poets made in prayer, at night, in kitchens. I don't read their notes. I don't suffer the loss of them from this world. I know that the water comes, low at first, and dark. It swarms with the Word, and a man like Ian believes he can save himself if he drinks fast enough, but eventually the volume of the water becomes violent, the Word lost to the rushing certainty of God, and he runs, or he drowns.
To open yourself to the Words means in time you'll be consumed by them. As a poet, I believe Ian understood that. But when the Words came for him, to take him that night, I didn't expect him to pull me through after him.
Did you know the world is made of buttonholes? Nothing any more or less complicated than that; buttonholes, like doorways into the other rooms of this great House. Ian prayed for the water to take him, and found the buttonhole through which he needed to slip to reach the world just beyond this one.
And like breaking glass, I followed him. Like the city which has lost power. Like the girl who learns she was born a god, I was pulled to the deadland of the moon, the snow falling black from a violet sky. Where it landed, it froze in crystal patterns which lightened gray, and white again in the deepest folds of the caves on the mountains.
In these wastes, we become little more than bone, sustained by the Word. Ian's medications, and his pathology, and the smell of his neck when he woke, choked with a sour sweat, all vanish. His fear of pity vanishes, or is blown away in this hailstorm. Did I remember myself then, or is it only that I remember myself now?
Ian prayed for rain, and the rain came. It carried away all of him that was not an Instrument to speak the truth - a Virgin. The unbroken and endless part of his soul, remaining forever at the bottom of drains and urinals and the dark spaces under hedges. The rain carried him here, to where that soul could be bleached clean again as a jawbone battered by the desert sand.
So here I am. The bone of me sheared clean of my excess, my blue sweater, my pin shaped like a fly. You’ve held a lot of people in your arms, Jack, and touched their flesh with the soft plain of your palm, but what about their bones? I’m a dry and unchangeable thing. A slip of ribbon blanched to a nameless color meandering across a tuneless waste. In the salt crystals of frozen snow, Ian oxidizes black as his glower.
"You are here because you are Inspiration," he reminds me, the dark pools of shadows moving across the matte black of his skin. Reminding me that somewhere close to this place, we all serve a purpose the way Improvisation and Drama do. "You must always be here when a poet dies."
"Annik... is a muse," I suppose at him, drawing the Word in the snow with my finger. We might invent the word muse together, in this place. I crouch on the ground, quiet as the stars, and heavy as the expanse of the sky. The gap in each of his teeth betray he is, at his core, a key used to bury a great secret, or reveal one.
"I dreamed I was here before," I tell him. "The night you... we were in a school."
The word school crosses slow and foreign the space between us, causing his head to turn, as if he can hear a voice on the wind.
"School?" he asks me, and we look together at the rising earth, distant over the horizon.
It's a strange idea, that binds us back to the earth of our memories, and anchors us back in a place we can remember time. Bells. Homework. Prom.
That world in the house above us is still uncoiling in the kaleidoscope, and if we move slightly, we both become a part of it again; the glass of this world ethereal and inconstant. Annik's sweater comes back, Ian's tear-stains. The smell in the air says he's spilled turpentine on the floor, and it's been decades since the police sealed off Barton Street. Like anything else in Gray House, it comes tinged with the bitter sense of forgery: we might be gods but we are young gods, who know nothing and will never learn.
"Eve?" Matthew asks me, his eyes the same terrified roundness I've seen looking out from under Ian's straight fringe.
Rosie enters the studio where Matthew paints, and takes no notice of the soot in the air, or the paint thinner on the floor. She whispers at us a half-second before we hear the gunshot from the next room.
"Adam has a gun. He's going to kill hi-"
Wednesday, November 15, 2017
Shadowplay 7
Jack,
The surface of the moon was once covered in strange and lush plant-life, blooming in colors reflective of the meager light of the sun, watered by a greasy substance that has the consistency of oil and is a bright and phosphorescent green. The atmosphere this created was a violet one, the stars distant above the lavender fog. The hollow core of the planet was filled with all the mechanics of a roving ship, and while it settled distant from the earth to become it's satellite, and the facets of Matthew swarmed it's inner workings to shine disc-like onto the surface of it a spotlight, men and wolves called to it, as if it could hear.
But that was long enough ago that no one remembers, even Matthew. All that life was choked to death and turned to ash as Matthew tried to force himself into, or out of, your unforgiving cunt. It was love that killed him - love that tore you apart.
I took it upon myself to bring the life back to the moon. I planted myself the strange ghost flowers, clear and flowing with a resin the color of blood. I made Clyde fill one sea with his tears. And I wandered the basement of the planet, among gears the size of cities that I'd seen in my dreams, following the red pipes that collected over this vast and networked chasm to a room which read in black stencil HYDRAULICS.
Inside is the spartan cement box of Ian's rehearsals, where I would descend, beneath the hedges of my dreams, to lose my virginity to him when I was fourteen years old. One fox and another, we met in the gray darkness, the cold room far below the ash of a ruined planet. I had run there.
What I was running from (a wolf), and why (I am the reborn spring which is extinguished by the winter), doesn't matter here. Because where we are in Gray House, by and large, establishes who we are, and what we're doing there.
Every room you've ever wandered into is inside of Gray House. The Hydraulics room is a part of the vast network of sub-basements where Clyde disappears to often, to see the past. There are floors as of yet unexplored where he might go to see the future. In this cement room, I got pregnant with my oldest son, when Matthew and I were...
My body too, Jack, is a room in Gray House. A room inside which I am always forgetting the people in the photographs with me, and remembering again when I look inside the music boxes at the pieces I collected of broken jewelry. Your life, your memories, your future, will all become a room in this house, connected however fitfully to all the others. I wander the room of myself unsure of what the time is, where I am, what I remember, and what I've discovered since I was home. I thought he was Adam's, my son, until I heard the rickety bass line of Shadowplay and remembered how I lost my virginity.
Matthew and I were 14, and we were also 20, and it was 1999, and it was 1978, and it was London, and it was the Sea of Showers. But what was the same were the echoes of this room, the clothes we wore, and the peril in the air. The kaleidoscope shifts, but that much remains the same. And if you find this room ever again, maybe all that's within it is the rustle of teenagers fucking on Ian's bare mattress, next to his discarded and annotated copy of The Idiot.
"Why did you want to meet me here?" he demands into the darkness, angry still from our earlier argument. The light switch flicks ineffective, and he calls out for me to answer him.
"Annik."
"Je suis ici."
I hear him move through the darkness, until the white of his face is a blur across the gray brick. He is wearing black and his hands vanish into his clothing.
"Are you alright?" he asks me, and I do not know how to explain to him what it is I've seen. What it is I know, that the wolf has tried to show me. I choke on a sob, and he crouches to hold me, awkward.
"You've been sleeping here," I realize, and I feel his breath on my hair.
"Yes," he sighs. "I have left Deborah, and after our last row, I am not allowed to stay with Pete."
"I feel like someone is following me," is the feeble explanation I manage, before disappearing under the weight of his mouth.
And behind his teeth...
The room inside of Ian is...
Well, just listen to it, Jack. You can hear where we went. You can hear what we became.
Listen to where he took us.
Under the snow, behind the glass.
Inside is the spartan cement box of Ian's rehearsals, where I would descend, beneath the hedges of my dreams, to lose my virginity to him when I was fourteen years old. One fox and another, we met in the gray darkness, the cold room far below the ash of a ruined planet. I had run there.
What I was running from (a wolf), and why (I am the reborn spring which is extinguished by the winter), doesn't matter here. Because where we are in Gray House, by and large, establishes who we are, and what we're doing there.
Every room you've ever wandered into is inside of Gray House. The Hydraulics room is a part of the vast network of sub-basements where Clyde disappears to often, to see the past. There are floors as of yet unexplored where he might go to see the future. In this cement room, I got pregnant with my oldest son, when Matthew and I were...
My body too, Jack, is a room in Gray House. A room inside which I am always forgetting the people in the photographs with me, and remembering again when I look inside the music boxes at the pieces I collected of broken jewelry. Your life, your memories, your future, will all become a room in this house, connected however fitfully to all the others. I wander the room of myself unsure of what the time is, where I am, what I remember, and what I've discovered since I was home. I thought he was Adam's, my son, until I heard the rickety bass line of Shadowplay and remembered how I lost my virginity.
Matthew and I were 14, and we were also 20, and it was 1999, and it was 1978, and it was London, and it was the Sea of Showers. But what was the same were the echoes of this room, the clothes we wore, and the peril in the air. The kaleidoscope shifts, but that much remains the same. And if you find this room ever again, maybe all that's within it is the rustle of teenagers fucking on Ian's bare mattress, next to his discarded and annotated copy of The Idiot.
"Why did you want to meet me here?" he demands into the darkness, angry still from our earlier argument. The light switch flicks ineffective, and he calls out for me to answer him.
"Annik."
"Je suis ici."
I hear him move through the darkness, until the white of his face is a blur across the gray brick. He is wearing black and his hands vanish into his clothing.
"Are you alright?" he asks me, and I do not know how to explain to him what it is I've seen. What it is I know, that the wolf has tried to show me. I choke on a sob, and he crouches to hold me, awkward.
"You've been sleeping here," I realize, and I feel his breath on my hair.
"Yes," he sighs. "I have left Deborah, and after our last row, I am not allowed to stay with Pete."
"I feel like someone is following me," is the feeble explanation I manage, before disappearing under the weight of his mouth.
And behind his teeth...
The room inside of Ian is...
Well, just listen to it, Jack. You can hear where we went. You can hear what we became.
Listen to where he took us.
Under the snow, behind the glass.
Wednesday, November 8, 2017
Shadowplay 6
Jack,
In the dorm rooms of Gray House, Ian lays on his bed.
Nik,
Nothing is right. You are going to say I’m superstitious for it again but it’s all wrong because I keep forgetting to pay the light charges. On the days when I have to spend half the morning calling in to the electric people to get the lights back on, I always fight with Pete and if I fight with Pete I never remember to call them back and when the power’s not back on by nightfall, I get into a fight with Deb. She’s working too late anyhow, she should be in bed by then. Do you recall the last time we came in after midnight and just before I was almost struck by that car? I know you believe in the superstitions since I see you cross yourself at cemeteries though you never tell me such things. You’re waiting, I think. You don’t trust me. Well I’m going to make you trust me. Wait and see.
I
Nik,
The trains coming in from Cheshire were damaged by the meteors. It’s planned to happen again in November and I want you to come with me to see them. I am sorry for calling so late but I knew you would be awake. I don’t remember having told you before about the night I was locked in the schoolhouse. I was running away from home and stole jellies my mother made. I brought a sack and broke into the school. The lock jammed on me. I was terrified.Are you laughing? Then, I wasn’t found till morning when the maintenance team came. I’d hid all night under the watering I don’t know what you’d call them. I’m sorry I fell asleep while you were still on the phone. I can’t stand it here. I want the heavens to rain with fiery cannons down at me. I want to be bashed into something new. I know you will understand.
I
Nik,
I rented out Steph’s cellar, but you’ve got to let me clean it before we can use it. These are the bending bottle days but I don’t drink any longer. I swallowed the shards of God’s considerable debris. The two of us. If we will go to hell for this raconteuring, the restless apathets will have stopped listening, I know. I was wanting to ask if you remember how it was the trains vibrated everything on the iron-walled side of the isle of dogs?
We drove the captain’s plagues and rafted the sickest
to the banks, where the holier man waits to give his life for the cure
But the leeches starved and the barred doors told weak prayers
The words they threw at you, the words, you knew them too
I
Nik,
I must go and get shoe polish and ribbons.
I
Nik,
I wrote you a song. I’m outraged by your parent’s reaction to finding us out last Sunday. I'll take up your auto charges now, don't worry yourself. There were no directions out of the fire plains. Our marching never moved us anyway but through misheard orders and the embers. Do you remember? It didn't stop us any. Very glad now that I had the intuition to get a telephone connected in your flat. Now just please answer when I give you a call.
I
Nik,
The vast constituency has come to the North corner of the city. I offered to pay for him room and board, but he says where he stays doesn’t cost him. I don’t remember when last I could say for certain he slept. He sit behind sunglasses that seem to darken the long I look at them. He says the airports he’s seeking to build have been approved. It’ll make transport easy, God leave the trains for greater disasters.
Woke up sick again, urine oaking my shirt all the way to my chin this time. I know it’s crass to say but the smell is beginning to make me miss you. Please don’t repeat that. I love you, nikka. I want to be with you now but the train is late as always. These transgression will keep me late, the train arriving or no.
I
Nik,
Je veux me tuer. Vous êtes parti depuis trois jours dans les montagnes avec votre famille. J'ai menti lorsque j'ai dit que j'allais bien. Je ne veux rien d'autre que toi. J'ai eu plusieurs saisies et je ne peux pas dormir parce que quand je fais, j'ai de terribles cauchemars d'araignées sur les voies ferrées. Ils crient de l'aide, mais je ne peux pas les aider.
J'ai promis de lire les versets bibliques que vous m'avez donnés, mais j'ai également compris cela. J'aurais aimé savoir que vous pensiez à vous raser la tête. Je l'aurais fait avant de partir pour la nature sauvage. Je désire désespérément que j'ai eu quelques-unes de tes cheveux ici avec moi dans le noir. C'est plus sombre que jamais. Je me sens tellement idiot de ne pas demander le numéro de téléphone de l'auberge que vous allez rester. J'ai eu le courage de tout cela avant de décider de me marier Deb et maintenant je ne le fais pas. Ce qui m'importe est de changer très rapidement maintenant que je ne pense pas pouvoir continuer. N'ayez pas peur pour moi. Je vais lire vos versets à nouveau et comprendre pourquoi vous avez dit qu'il s'agissait d'une carte hors de ce lieu. I love you, Nikka. Do you love me? Please give us a call and say you do.
I
Nik,
When I'd run away from home the second the time after the time I had told you of, I brought a bomb with me. It was a pipe bomb made by my mate older than me which I stole. The medicines would do nothing to destroy my cock considérant the strength of the blast put into it. I am dreaming of exploding a train station bathroom. It'd give us time enough that I could make love to you. I've come to the library to check a book on it. That's where I'm writing this letter.
I tried to make a large payment for your auto charge but I was rebuffed when I told them I was not your family. I'm sending Steph there to try again and he will tell them he is your brother. Thank you for ringing me, I would never have known my vouchers weren't accepted.
I
Nik,
The dead are talking to me again. The tracks were built of their bones and they don’t find it pleasing to be run over by a
I had another seizure and another vision too with it. Deb’s dreams are telling her what I knew all along. She and I are the same this way, tho she won’t tell anyone about her own seizures. She dreamed the bullets of agamemnon were put on the tracks. There were prefabricated homes there, all along the lanes. In November the world is going to end. I know I’ll find myself lost if I’m separated from you. I’ve decided to divorce Deb if she won’t come with us. She remembers more than she can admit, but it changes nothing.
I
Nik,
The pills are a consolation to the noises that have been dusted over. I can't hear down up here the way I did down there. The people cross over the Moore, recognizing their last moments how I never will. I want to stop it but I know there are no right answers, only wrong tunnels corroded with lies.
The way through is happening to me/The way through is happening to you/The way this was always wrong/I'm not going away from you
I've been writing you another song. It has an elephant in it like I promised last time. Do you have enough food? Come around for me and I'll take you to the shops.
I
Nik,
You vibrate my body with the sound you make having an orgasm. It's the same sound of the trains coming to a halt in the station. I've reconciled with Steph now won't you let me go on over to your flat? I miss you. I know that I made an arse of myself, but he's forgiven me and so now should you? Will you? I thought to package my sperm in an envelope for you but that was prior to the brawl and had sense bopped into me. I love you.
I
All of these are sealed into thin envelopes through which Ian's slipshod rapid print can be seen plainly, on his unlined journal paper. He slips them under my door, the envelopes, sealed and blank but for a warning scrawled along the seal: DO NOT REPLY.
In the dorm rooms of Gray House, Ian lays on his bed.
Nik,
Nothing is right. You are going to say I’m superstitious for it again but it’s all wrong because I keep forgetting to pay the light charges. On the days when I have to spend half the morning calling in to the electric people to get the lights back on, I always fight with Pete and if I fight with Pete I never remember to call them back and when the power’s not back on by nightfall, I get into a fight with Deb. She’s working too late anyhow, she should be in bed by then. Do you recall the last time we came in after midnight and just before I was almost struck by that car? I know you believe in the superstitions since I see you cross yourself at cemeteries though you never tell me such things. You’re waiting, I think. You don’t trust me. Well I’m going to make you trust me. Wait and see.
I
Nik,
The trains coming in from Cheshire were damaged by the meteors. It’s planned to happen again in November and I want you to come with me to see them. I am sorry for calling so late but I knew you would be awake. I don’t remember having told you before about the night I was locked in the schoolhouse. I was running away from home and stole jellies my mother made. I brought a sack and broke into the school. The lock jammed on me. I was terrified.Are you laughing? Then, I wasn’t found till morning when the maintenance team came. I’d hid all night under the watering I don’t know what you’d call them. I’m sorry I fell asleep while you were still on the phone. I can’t stand it here. I want the heavens to rain with fiery cannons down at me. I want to be bashed into something new. I know you will understand.
I
Nik,
I rented out Steph’s cellar, but you’ve got to let me clean it before we can use it. These are the bending bottle days but I don’t drink any longer. I swallowed the shards of God’s considerable debris. The two of us. If we will go to hell for this raconteuring, the restless apathets will have stopped listening, I know. I was wanting to ask if you remember how it was the trains vibrated everything on the iron-walled side of the isle of dogs?
We drove the captain’s plagues and rafted the sickest
to the banks, where the holier man waits to give his life for the cure
But the leeches starved and the barred doors told weak prayers
The words they threw at you, the words, you knew them too
I
Nik,
I must go and get shoe polish and ribbons.
I
Nik,
I wrote you a song. I’m outraged by your parent’s reaction to finding us out last Sunday. I'll take up your auto charges now, don't worry yourself. There were no directions out of the fire plains. Our marching never moved us anyway but through misheard orders and the embers. Do you remember? It didn't stop us any. Very glad now that I had the intuition to get a telephone connected in your flat. Now just please answer when I give you a call.
I
Nik,
The vast constituency has come to the North corner of the city. I offered to pay for him room and board, but he says where he stays doesn’t cost him. I don’t remember when last I could say for certain he slept. He sit behind sunglasses that seem to darken the long I look at them. He says the airports he’s seeking to build have been approved. It’ll make transport easy, God leave the trains for greater disasters.
Woke up sick again, urine oaking my shirt all the way to my chin this time. I know it’s crass to say but the smell is beginning to make me miss you. Please don’t repeat that. I love you, nikka. I want to be with you now but the train is late as always. These transgression will keep me late, the train arriving or no.
I
Nik,
Je veux me tuer. Vous êtes parti depuis trois jours dans les montagnes avec votre famille. J'ai menti lorsque j'ai dit que j'allais bien. Je ne veux rien d'autre que toi. J'ai eu plusieurs saisies et je ne peux pas dormir parce que quand je fais, j'ai de terribles cauchemars d'araignées sur les voies ferrées. Ils crient de l'aide, mais je ne peux pas les aider.
J'ai promis de lire les versets bibliques que vous m'avez donnés, mais j'ai également compris cela. J'aurais aimé savoir que vous pensiez à vous raser la tête. Je l'aurais fait avant de partir pour la nature sauvage. Je désire désespérément que j'ai eu quelques-unes de tes cheveux ici avec moi dans le noir. C'est plus sombre que jamais. Je me sens tellement idiot de ne pas demander le numéro de téléphone de l'auberge que vous allez rester. J'ai eu le courage de tout cela avant de décider de me marier Deb et maintenant je ne le fais pas. Ce qui m'importe est de changer très rapidement maintenant que je ne pense pas pouvoir continuer. N'ayez pas peur pour moi. Je vais lire vos versets à nouveau et comprendre pourquoi vous avez dit qu'il s'agissait d'une carte hors de ce lieu. I love you, Nikka. Do you love me? Please give us a call and say you do.
I
Nik,
When I'd run away from home the second the time after the time I had told you of, I brought a bomb with me. It was a pipe bomb made by my mate older than me which I stole. The medicines would do nothing to destroy my cock considérant the strength of the blast put into it. I am dreaming of exploding a train station bathroom. It'd give us time enough that I could make love to you. I've come to the library to check a book on it. That's where I'm writing this letter.
I tried to make a large payment for your auto charge but I was rebuffed when I told them I was not your family. I'm sending Steph there to try again and he will tell them he is your brother. Thank you for ringing me, I would never have known my vouchers weren't accepted.
I
Nik,
The dead are talking to me again. The tracks were built of their bones and they don’t find it pleasing to be run over by a
I had another seizure and another vision too with it. Deb’s dreams are telling her what I knew all along. She and I are the same this way, tho she won’t tell anyone about her own seizures. She dreamed the bullets of agamemnon were put on the tracks. There were prefabricated homes there, all along the lanes. In November the world is going to end. I know I’ll find myself lost if I’m separated from you. I’ve decided to divorce Deb if she won’t come with us. She remembers more than she can admit, but it changes nothing.
I
Nik,
The pills are a consolation to the noises that have been dusted over. I can't hear down up here the way I did down there. The people cross over the Moore, recognizing their last moments how I never will. I want to stop it but I know there are no right answers, only wrong tunnels corroded with lies.
The way through is happening to me/The way through is happening to you/The way this was always wrong/I'm not going away from you
I've been writing you another song. It has an elephant in it like I promised last time. Do you have enough food? Come around for me and I'll take you to the shops.
I
Nik,
You vibrate my body with the sound you make having an orgasm. It's the same sound of the trains coming to a halt in the station. I've reconciled with Steph now won't you let me go on over to your flat? I miss you. I know that I made an arse of myself, but he's forgiven me and so now should you? Will you? I thought to package my sperm in an envelope for you but that was prior to the brawl and had sense bopped into me. I love you.
I
All of these are sealed into thin envelopes through which Ian's slipshod rapid print can be seen plainly, on his unlined journal paper. He slips them under my door, the envelopes, sealed and blank but for a warning scrawled along the seal: DO NOT REPLY.
Tuesday, November 7, 2017
Shadowplay
5/16/15
Adam,
The only song I've ever heard about losing my virginity is Shadowplay by Joy Division. I'm listening to it on repeat and feeling the slow throb of pain in my pussy you left behind when you took it, that radiates into my abdomen where your children grow inside me. Last night, I talked to Bonnie about wanting to kill you. One day, Adam, we might experience everything two people can together, all at once, with your cum spilling into me at the same time.
No, you can't fuck ghosts. But a shadow, Adam? Can you fuck those?
Ian is a girl tonight, with me, and he is staring up at the dark ceiling next to me, and we both know your name. The first thing he tells me, is how the loss of virginity, the surrender, is a violation made due to ignorance.
He's smoking a cigarette and he's got the sleeves of his shirt rolled back. It's a gunmetal gray that toys with blue and his hair is flat, slicked to his forehead. His voice is soft and low and his eyes are brimming with tears.
Adam? There's no way I could know, when I tell you I want you inside me. I don't know what it will do, or what I will feel, or how I might love you after. I don't know the impact, I CAN'T know the...the impact. God. I'm never going to be the same after this. You're going to unlock some darkness inside me, and I'll be left thinking of you as...some....
Ian puffs smoke and supplies me with the word I'm reaching for.
"He's going to be your destination."
"All of them."
"Yes," he nods, slow. "All of them."
In the dark, I take his hand because I'm afraid, but girls alone together don't admit fear. That's something only the boy of their devotion can ever be told.
How close getting fucked feels like being murdered is a secret I think me and Ian keep between us. A man comes and puts something inside your body. In the library, I was quiet because someone might hear me, and you covered my mouth against a moan. It meant dying under you, in a dim place. Adam slips hard and hot into Evelyn, and she becomes an object of desperation in the hands of a dangerous man.
I roll onto my stomach and I look at Ian's wide eyes, round as moons, and he looks back, and doesn't blink.
"I wanted him to do whatever he wanted," I tell him. "I almost begged him to. He could have strangled me to death and I would've loved it so much. I can't..."
Ian squeezes my hand.
"Be his."
"Yeah. I can't be his unless he wants all of me."
We get quiet, me and Ian. He lays in the bed, and I pull a blanket over us, in our clothes. The songs ends and I switch it off. In the quiet, Ian says something I don't understand.
"There's a place inside you, where you're always a small thing."
He chokes on a sob.
"That's all it is. Climbing down into the sewers to the very smallest place. Being a virgin lives there. Everyone is a virgin when they're small enough."
"How do you lose it?" I ask him. "How do you give it away?"
He looks terrified and confused. He wipes his eyes.
"I don't know. Maybe just put that in someone's hands and say....you can hurt me....if.....if you want to."
Love always,
Evelyn and Ian
10/18/15
2/26/16
Matthew,
I might believe that being soul mates implies a certain responsibility for the other's virginity. Maybe you created mine. Maybe I created yours. Maybe, in the quiet depth below all things, we made little assignations of ourselves, to one another, like kisses, pressed to one another like medals of war.
You're innocent of any crime, because it was your innocence which drove you to commit them. Maybe I'll never be bothered by anything you've ever done, because I have this piece of you, which is inconsequential to those things. Inconsequential, because it exists below your actions or motivations, and it's comprised of a pure expression of you. Crime happens within the parameters dragons make for one another, and this is what evades those edges every time, and makes you a fox.
There's a place beneath the hedges where our creeping fingers met and I would have thought us both a weed or a vine, knowledge thick between us that twining is an act of desperation, slow and single-minded, reaching for that which with intent will be met and strengthened. Your fingers crept into mine, your fingers, they crept into mine, and we knotted together into a hedge, a dark place to recede to, a wall, an act of family, a creation of a secret, an acknowledgment of something safe.
I wanted down there. I wanted down there my whole life, I wanted to be down there, my eyes burning hot and bright in endless sun. I wanted down there, and I was not brave enough or could not have gone alone. I wanted down there, Matthew, I wanted down there into silence and strange ritual of raking dirt through my fingers and finding the importance of all I'd lost or misplaced. It was my first love, that place I wanted, the secret of it, the lost world, the place I always knew to go, my expression wide and starved.
There's something innocent about you and me. I'll stay right here, until you understand. The world is made of doors to other worlds. Some of them are dark and simple. The hedges of neat suburban homes, trimmed in the sapling spring, junipers soft and fur-like, their thorns supple, littering yellow and hard the ground beneath, breaking fast as bird bones. The dirt black, the air cold, the light dim and blue. There are doors to other worlds, where under hedges, there are windows, into basements, which push inward like your intruding hands.
The glass of each window is hazed with dirt and the water of past rain. They are webbed delicate with the work of spiders. They are rusted shut. They are levered open, they are cracked in a gentle arc.
The basements are unfinished. The floors are leaked onto from the sagging floor above. The tiles are stacked into corners, the dust is from something demolished, your jacket is torn, the door is locked. Your breath is loud and mine is quiet, but my lungs burn with the effort to control my heart and slow it down because I won't admit I'm out of breath in front of almost anyone. Your eyes are low. Mine are sly.
You reach blindly into unpainted sheetrock, dented and crumbling, and remove a small glass marijuana pipe, speckled blue, and laugh before tossing it against the cinder brick, where it smashes into bigger pieces than I would have liked.
We wouldn't have to say anything here. The butterfly wings of my spreading thighs will be the same color as the paper used to hold the drywall into place, an unpainted pale tinting flesh-toned in the damp. If we did speak, it would sound something like...
"Have you always been afraid of spiders?"
"No."
I wanted down there, I wanted down there for years after... and did I lose you? Fiercely, hopelessly, sexually, I wanted down there. I wanted you. I want you.
Thinking about this makes me feel how the angels must, about dancing. That I could never tell anyone, not out loud, what it does to me inside, to think about going out, much less going out with you. How it makes me want to touch myself, aimlessly, slowly, drawing out the sense of anticipation as long as possible, the way it feels to circle a seemingly empty room with you.
It will happen when it happens, when you reach so assuredly into a dark place, and remove a broken pair of glasses, bent out of shape and shining gold. I pet my swollen pussy with a soft finger, my knees up, mimicking the pace of my heart beat, going nowhere. My lowest secrets are always yours.
Love,
Evelyn
In the murder of my heart by an instrument of artistry,
Adam,
The only song I've ever heard about losing my virginity is Shadowplay by Joy Division. I'm listening to it on repeat and feeling the slow throb of pain in my pussy you left behind when you took it, that radiates into my abdomen where your children grow inside me. Last night, I talked to Bonnie about wanting to kill you. One day, Adam, we might experience everything two people can together, all at once, with your cum spilling into me at the same time.
No, you can't fuck ghosts. But a shadow, Adam? Can you fuck those?
Ian is a girl tonight, with me, and he is staring up at the dark ceiling next to me, and we both know your name. The first thing he tells me, is how the loss of virginity, the surrender, is a violation made due to ignorance.
He's smoking a cigarette and he's got the sleeves of his shirt rolled back. It's a gunmetal gray that toys with blue and his hair is flat, slicked to his forehead. His voice is soft and low and his eyes are brimming with tears.
Adam? There's no way I could know, when I tell you I want you inside me. I don't know what it will do, or what I will feel, or how I might love you after. I don't know the impact, I CAN'T know the...the impact. God. I'm never going to be the same after this. You're going to unlock some darkness inside me, and I'll be left thinking of you as...some....
Ian puffs smoke and supplies me with the word I'm reaching for.
"He's going to be your destination."
"All of them."
"Yes," he nods, slow. "All of them."
In the dark, I take his hand because I'm afraid, but girls alone together don't admit fear. That's something only the boy of their devotion can ever be told.
How close getting fucked feels like being murdered is a secret I think me and Ian keep between us. A man comes and puts something inside your body. In the library, I was quiet because someone might hear me, and you covered my mouth against a moan. It meant dying under you, in a dim place. Adam slips hard and hot into Evelyn, and she becomes an object of desperation in the hands of a dangerous man.
I roll onto my stomach and I look at Ian's wide eyes, round as moons, and he looks back, and doesn't blink.
"I wanted him to do whatever he wanted," I tell him. "I almost begged him to. He could have strangled me to death and I would've loved it so much. I can't..."
Ian squeezes my hand.
"Be his."
"Yeah. I can't be his unless he wants all of me."
We get quiet, me and Ian. He lays in the bed, and I pull a blanket over us, in our clothes. The songs ends and I switch it off. In the quiet, Ian says something I don't understand.
"There's a place inside you, where you're always a small thing."
He chokes on a sob.
"That's all it is. Climbing down into the sewers to the very smallest place. Being a virgin lives there. Everyone is a virgin when they're small enough."
"How do you lose it?" I ask him. "How do you give it away?"
He looks terrified and confused. He wipes his eyes.
"I don't know. Maybe just put that in someone's hands and say....you can hurt me....if.....if you want to."
Love always,
Evelyn and Ian
10/18/15
Eve,
I'm assuming I've read your letters in the form of my dreams. From what Adam tells me, that's how that would work.
These lights are brightly burning nightmares of an experiment they'd do on the GIs destitute enough to suck lysergic acid off a common block in rooms like this one. I wasn't given a gown, not a regulation one, and I did not fall in love. I do not fall in love with the impassioned sinkholes of vaginas tight enough to be assholes. I fell in love with her for her humor. I fell in love with her and just as I'd expected, the hallucinations started again.
I shouldn't be telling you this, but I find it more comfortable than what Adam says would happen if I didn't.
I have, wearing a black sequined evening gown, swept wishes to a fountain for the breath of spring. My desire is for the frowns so they be kept and swept away from lips so innocent. My dress and my frown and my boisterous crowd of geese ride the wave of my thigh awaiting a pluck of mine, hairs left, swaths of a mannish curse. And the lightening winks in the pendulous distance.
Corpses is what Adam titles our grind brushed in the cribbage holding patterns of the land where I called him from a pay phone. We are corpses. We are the corpses. We are the dead fucking meat, corpses, we all. If you're in luck, you're enslaved, you're in St. Paul, you're held to some Swedish jock hipster's highest standards. Do you remember what you were doing before you began this pointless exercise? Well, do you?
Hello, my name is Matthew Kettering. I know who you are. I remember you and you remember me. I noticed you did not give your last name.
I dreamed of a world of broken mirrors just as hard as when I cracked my head on the coffee table, learning to walk. I'm allowed my clenching fists pouring blood from my nails that pools at my shoes and so invisible to him, spinning angry thoughts I won't give up to him. What makes me so angry is the way he allows it. I can't make him go away.
He may not but I do. He may not but I do. He may not but I do. He may not but I do. He may not but I do. He may not but I do. He may not but I do. He may not but I do. He may not but I do.
Sincerely, I came to see you knowing you're the only one who wouldn't talk me out of what I wanted. The romantic writhing blob, they mean well but I needed release. I splintered my time and name to nothing in increments and bided it and fought it. I fought it, all that I could fight. Some I started myself and some I finished but I fought all that could be fought.
She had one picture of me and in it I was shaving. I stepped onto a platform under a bathroom sink to be tall enough to see the mirror. I shaved for the first time. This memory plays back in my mind while I shave for the first time since the last time she watched me do it. She watched me shave. She watched me shave my face. I could be an emperor. I could be a mouse. I could make a beautiful Brie with marmalade or I could be a waste. When I hear the metal on metal, I whisper I love you and it she doesn't hear it. I shaved my fucking face while she fucking watched.
Eve? Eve? Eve? Eve...
You understand I just came home from a war. I'm hungry. I'm pulling your warmth down and taking it close to me. Inside you, I breathed with lungs that can't be mine or the old ones can't, for I was changed or unchanged. Were we born without sin or was our salvation was too quick to be trusted? Whichever, I fucking don't care, because the clocks stopped when I read my name in your hand. You're a dew and spider silk adorned flower, you're the mood of a room, you're making me want to write you a poem.
Who is Livid?
I want to move my hands around your skin, not at all touching, but seeing what it does or doesn't do to you.
Love,
MBK
I'm assuming I've read your letters in the form of my dreams. From what Adam tells me, that's how that would work.
These lights are brightly burning nightmares of an experiment they'd do on the GIs destitute enough to suck lysergic acid off a common block in rooms like this one. I wasn't given a gown, not a regulation one, and I did not fall in love. I do not fall in love with the impassioned sinkholes of vaginas tight enough to be assholes. I fell in love with her for her humor. I fell in love with her and just as I'd expected, the hallucinations started again.
I shouldn't be telling you this, but I find it more comfortable than what Adam says would happen if I didn't.
I have, wearing a black sequined evening gown, swept wishes to a fountain for the breath of spring. My desire is for the frowns so they be kept and swept away from lips so innocent. My dress and my frown and my boisterous crowd of geese ride the wave of my thigh awaiting a pluck of mine, hairs left, swaths of a mannish curse. And the lightening winks in the pendulous distance.
Corpses is what Adam titles our grind brushed in the cribbage holding patterns of the land where I called him from a pay phone. We are corpses. We are the corpses. We are the dead fucking meat, corpses, we all. If you're in luck, you're enslaved, you're in St. Paul, you're held to some Swedish jock hipster's highest standards. Do you remember what you were doing before you began this pointless exercise? Well, do you?
Hello, my name is Matthew Kettering. I know who you are. I remember you and you remember me. I noticed you did not give your last name.
I dreamed of a world of broken mirrors just as hard as when I cracked my head on the coffee table, learning to walk. I'm allowed my clenching fists pouring blood from my nails that pools at my shoes and so invisible to him, spinning angry thoughts I won't give up to him. What makes me so angry is the way he allows it. I can't make him go away.
He may not but I do. He may not but I do. He may not but I do. He may not but I do. He may not but I do. He may not but I do. He may not but I do. He may not but I do. He may not but I do.
Sincerely, I came to see you knowing you're the only one who wouldn't talk me out of what I wanted. The romantic writhing blob, they mean well but I needed release. I splintered my time and name to nothing in increments and bided it and fought it. I fought it, all that I could fight. Some I started myself and some I finished but I fought all that could be fought.
She had one picture of me and in it I was shaving. I stepped onto a platform under a bathroom sink to be tall enough to see the mirror. I shaved for the first time. This memory plays back in my mind while I shave for the first time since the last time she watched me do it. She watched me shave. She watched me shave my face. I could be an emperor. I could be a mouse. I could make a beautiful Brie with marmalade or I could be a waste. When I hear the metal on metal, I whisper I love you and it she doesn't hear it. I shaved my fucking face while she fucking watched.
Eve? Eve? Eve? Eve...
You understand I just came home from a war. I'm hungry. I'm pulling your warmth down and taking it close to me. Inside you, I breathed with lungs that can't be mine or the old ones can't, for I was changed or unchanged. Were we born without sin or was our salvation was too quick to be trusted? Whichever, I fucking don't care, because the clocks stopped when I read my name in your hand. You're a dew and spider silk adorned flower, you're the mood of a room, you're making me want to write you a poem.
Who is Livid?
I want to move my hands around your skin, not at all touching, but seeing what it does or doesn't do to you.
Love,
MBK
2/26/16
Matthew,
I might believe that being soul mates implies a certain responsibility for the other's virginity. Maybe you created mine. Maybe I created yours. Maybe, in the quiet depth below all things, we made little assignations of ourselves, to one another, like kisses, pressed to one another like medals of war.
You're innocent of any crime, because it was your innocence which drove you to commit them. Maybe I'll never be bothered by anything you've ever done, because I have this piece of you, which is inconsequential to those things. Inconsequential, because it exists below your actions or motivations, and it's comprised of a pure expression of you. Crime happens within the parameters dragons make for one another, and this is what evades those edges every time, and makes you a fox.
There's a place beneath the hedges where our creeping fingers met and I would have thought us both a weed or a vine, knowledge thick between us that twining is an act of desperation, slow and single-minded, reaching for that which with intent will be met and strengthened. Your fingers crept into mine, your fingers, they crept into mine, and we knotted together into a hedge, a dark place to recede to, a wall, an act of family, a creation of a secret, an acknowledgment of something safe.
I wanted down there. I wanted down there my whole life, I wanted to be down there, my eyes burning hot and bright in endless sun. I wanted down there, and I was not brave enough or could not have gone alone. I wanted down there, Matthew, I wanted down there into silence and strange ritual of raking dirt through my fingers and finding the importance of all I'd lost or misplaced. It was my first love, that place I wanted, the secret of it, the lost world, the place I always knew to go, my expression wide and starved.
There's something innocent about you and me. I'll stay right here, until you understand. The world is made of doors to other worlds. Some of them are dark and simple. The hedges of neat suburban homes, trimmed in the sapling spring, junipers soft and fur-like, their thorns supple, littering yellow and hard the ground beneath, breaking fast as bird bones. The dirt black, the air cold, the light dim and blue. There are doors to other worlds, where under hedges, there are windows, into basements, which push inward like your intruding hands.
The glass of each window is hazed with dirt and the water of past rain. They are webbed delicate with the work of spiders. They are rusted shut. They are levered open, they are cracked in a gentle arc.
The basements are unfinished. The floors are leaked onto from the sagging floor above. The tiles are stacked into corners, the dust is from something demolished, your jacket is torn, the door is locked. Your breath is loud and mine is quiet, but my lungs burn with the effort to control my heart and slow it down because I won't admit I'm out of breath in front of almost anyone. Your eyes are low. Mine are sly.
You reach blindly into unpainted sheetrock, dented and crumbling, and remove a small glass marijuana pipe, speckled blue, and laugh before tossing it against the cinder brick, where it smashes into bigger pieces than I would have liked.
We wouldn't have to say anything here. The butterfly wings of my spreading thighs will be the same color as the paper used to hold the drywall into place, an unpainted pale tinting flesh-toned in the damp. If we did speak, it would sound something like...
"Have you always been afraid of spiders?"
"No."
I wanted down there, I wanted down there for years after... and did I lose you? Fiercely, hopelessly, sexually, I wanted down there. I wanted you. I want you.
Thinking about this makes me feel how the angels must, about dancing. That I could never tell anyone, not out loud, what it does to me inside, to think about going out, much less going out with you. How it makes me want to touch myself, aimlessly, slowly, drawing out the sense of anticipation as long as possible, the way it feels to circle a seemingly empty room with you.
It will happen when it happens, when you reach so assuredly into a dark place, and remove a broken pair of glasses, bent out of shape and shining gold. I pet my swollen pussy with a soft finger, my knees up, mimicking the pace of my heart beat, going nowhere. My lowest secrets are always yours.
Love,
Evelyn
Matthew,
In the murder of my heart by an instrument of artistry,
I bend and suck clean from our knees
Embers burning and the land follows.
Find me and follow me.
Find me and follow me.
Baiting these machines to savvy
These war machines to a black silence
Enthralled, my heart a pinlock
Winnowed thin.
Did you hear them call surrender,
When we fumbled at last to our knees?
I felt the ash,
Deep under the snow.
Jack,
Nightly, I scream your name into black spaces and receive back the echo of your broken promises.
You must understand, we've always been at war. At war for our souls, against that which would ignore them, convinced of their nonexistence. You are being made to not exist, Jack, and you see it in the eyes of those you pass every day. It's a silent war, and a paranoid one. There are no words to it, but there is a quiet and distant tune. If you're still some mornings, you can hear the drums.
Hello, Jack, my name is Annik. I know your name is not really Jack, and I know you are at war, and I know you have no hope at all of knowing on which side you are really fighting. Hello, Jack. I am the voice on the radio which has never broadcast before. I am calling to you from a far-off place, behind a pane of glass small enough that I can touch it and feel it's gentle curvature. My words that continually get lost in the rushing wind of this vortex are: We can't stop this unless we choose love. Consideration. Compassion. Confrontation. Jack, do you understand we're at war? Do you understand it's over our souls?
You were right, Jack, about him.
You were right, Jack, about her.
The war kills poets, Jack. It's a meat-grinder for beauty. The guitar players of Central Park wake up early in the cold mornings to fight. The drag queens stay out late and stand guard over the sleeping world, crossing broad arms over sequined corsets and standing in murderous shoes to stomp out the paranoia that they were laughing at you; paranoia which creeps like corporeal shadows under doors and down your snoring throat.
There's an army of us, waiting under the hedges. We hear you. We are listening to your voice. They can fuck you all they want, but don't forget you're a virgin.
All my love,
Annik
Saturday, November 4, 2017
Shadowplay 4
Jack,
What we know, we do not question. Even when all the senses reject the knowledge, like religion, we persist. So it also happens in Gray House, when no one questions why Adam said Ian and not Matthew, or how we knew that Matthew and Ian Curtis were always the same man, like a hand inside a glove. We just do. Because we do.
Hello, Jack. My name is Eve. Eve was not my first name, or my only name. But it might be my favorite name, given to me three summers ago by Adam, which was the same as ten thousand years ago, and the same as January 12th, 2013, and the same as November 11th, 2001, for all we know or care. I call myself Eve because I like it. I know you think it makes me a cliche.
But so are you, Jack, being both nimble and quick.
How was I Eve when I've never believed in God? I just am. I could show you, but you won't ask. There's a story there, like anything else, and we could walk there through the grinding of the beads inside this wooden mechanism to throw pink colors on our faces. I could take you to my room, to 1978, to the last years of the war, to the garden itself. But you won't ask. So I just am, and we just know all the cliches we wear proudly across our chests.
I am a guilty princess of Earth, and you are the nimble and quick guardian of the wall that separates that earth from this House and all who live in it. God (if he could be said to exist) sends you out as a sheep in the midst of wolves, to keep that wall strong and take on the twelves of us with each test of this magic, to bring back this knowledge of the way things are without evidence. You stand on the wall and tell the world below what you see to make their religion, and so Jack, be wise as serpents, and innocent as doves.
Innocence. Yes. That's what I'm trying to talk about.
We are the Innocents, the Children of Eden, the Lost Boys, and naturally the last surviving attendants of Badham Preschool. The Innocent Ones, for whom innocence is bought over and over, at a sometimes terrible price (see Genesis 3:6). While all of that sounds grand and non-specific, the price of Matthew's innocence is an affliction he calls his "spells; a hallucinatory episode in which he is thrust against the person he is in closest proximity to, in order to experience the sensory illusion of the loss of that virginity, over and over, in occasionally non-consenting or violent methods.
His history is pocked with long periods of isolation from strangers, avoiding this very eventuality. He finds it difficult to live through a delusion of rape around those he knows very well, much less strangers. They've mimicked seizures in the past, but this is the first that...
Matthew's mouth, wide and French with generous lips and a vulgar sneer, pinches now in the shadows of his room to something small and birdlike as he wakes. His shoulders shift and set askew. The thin and waifish boy of him who normally can only command respect with his heavy and sadistic glower melts to something not softer... but plainer. Missing his exotic gypsy tattoos and his low-slung designer jeans, his skin is white and blank, and his eyes open confused to the ceiling.
"What happened?" he asks, and Clyde pets his hair back, his wide fingers attempting a light touch and failing.
"Virgin," Clyde accuses him, and Ian sighs.
"Ah, alright," he agrees, his accent presenting itself now.
"You alright, mate?" Steph asks him, and Ian sits up, touching the gash over his eye from where he hit the cold concrete. Pete moves the amp he likely tripped over, and the cords spilling from it.
"Yeah, I think I was just..." Ian explains but trails off, his eyes unfocused in the cold cement afternoon. The light is gray and thin, and I tighten my navy sweater around my shoulders.
"I'll get some water," I offer, and Ian looks up, and quickly down again, remembering I'm standing here.
"No, I'll be alright."
I bandage him in the unfinished bathroom of the building, sitting on the toilet while he crouches on the floor by my knees. He looks apologetic, like he's sorry this happened, sending the boys home so early.
"J'ai entendu la chanson," I remind him. "I liked it very much."
He touches the brooch on my sweater, silver and shaped like a fly.
"Where did you get this?" he asks me, his fingers cautious and his eyes curious and distant.
"My father, when I left home."
He touches the ends of my hair, freshly cut.
"You ought to do it purple," he says, his tone softening as I dab at the wound on his face with icy water from the new pipes. I laugh short, and he laughs, also, like a child although I haven't told him the joke. "What?" he asks.
"Purple like an old woman?" I ask him, and he shakes his head.
"No, like it was that night. In July."
The single window in the corner of the room is open to the cold weather, unseasonable for October, but made worse by the naked cinder blocks he requires for rehearsal.
"Ian," I begin, touching his hand, and he interrupts me.
"We haven't made love in nine days. I came to your flat yesterday and you were out. Tell me, have I done something?"
"No," I insist, and Brad's head turns to look at me.
"Huh?" he asks me, and I'm standing in the courtyard, the dormitory returned, Brad's boxers hanging from his hips loose and rumpled.
"Um. I. Sorry," I tell him.
Matthew's been returned to his bed, and the crowd of boys dispersed. He sits up when he hears me talk, and calls out into the center of the house.
"Nikka, please answer me!"
Eyebrows raise, heads turn, and mouths open, and close again. All around me, the Grays react to what's happening by averting their eyes, closing their doors, and smirking as they walk away. As if they all knew and I was only one who didn't. And they might've. Because what they know, they do not question.
What we know, we do not question. Even when all the senses reject the knowledge, like religion, we persist. So it also happens in Gray House, when no one questions why Adam said Ian and not Matthew, or how we knew that Matthew and Ian Curtis were always the same man, like a hand inside a glove. We just do. Because we do.
Hello, Jack. My name is Eve. Eve was not my first name, or my only name. But it might be my favorite name, given to me three summers ago by Adam, which was the same as ten thousand years ago, and the same as January 12th, 2013, and the same as November 11th, 2001, for all we know or care. I call myself Eve because I like it. I know you think it makes me a cliche.
But so are you, Jack, being both nimble and quick.
How was I Eve when I've never believed in God? I just am. I could show you, but you won't ask. There's a story there, like anything else, and we could walk there through the grinding of the beads inside this wooden mechanism to throw pink colors on our faces. I could take you to my room, to 1978, to the last years of the war, to the garden itself. But you won't ask. So I just am, and we just know all the cliches we wear proudly across our chests.
I am a guilty princess of Earth, and you are the nimble and quick guardian of the wall that separates that earth from this House and all who live in it. God (if he could be said to exist) sends you out as a sheep in the midst of wolves, to keep that wall strong and take on the twelves of us with each test of this magic, to bring back this knowledge of the way things are without evidence. You stand on the wall and tell the world below what you see to make their religion, and so Jack, be wise as serpents, and innocent as doves.
Innocence. Yes. That's what I'm trying to talk about.
We are the Innocents, the Children of Eden, the Lost Boys, and naturally the last surviving attendants of Badham Preschool. The Innocent Ones, for whom innocence is bought over and over, at a sometimes terrible price (see Genesis 3:6). While all of that sounds grand and non-specific, the price of Matthew's innocence is an affliction he calls his "spells; a hallucinatory episode in which he is thrust against the person he is in closest proximity to, in order to experience the sensory illusion of the loss of that virginity, over and over, in occasionally non-consenting or violent methods.
His history is pocked with long periods of isolation from strangers, avoiding this very eventuality. He finds it difficult to live through a delusion of rape around those he knows very well, much less strangers. They've mimicked seizures in the past, but this is the first that...
Matthew's mouth, wide and French with generous lips and a vulgar sneer, pinches now in the shadows of his room to something small and birdlike as he wakes. His shoulders shift and set askew. The thin and waifish boy of him who normally can only command respect with his heavy and sadistic glower melts to something not softer... but plainer. Missing his exotic gypsy tattoos and his low-slung designer jeans, his skin is white and blank, and his eyes open confused to the ceiling.
"What happened?" he asks, and Clyde pets his hair back, his wide fingers attempting a light touch and failing.
"Virgin," Clyde accuses him, and Ian sighs.
"Ah, alright," he agrees, his accent presenting itself now.
"You alright, mate?" Steph asks him, and Ian sits up, touching the gash over his eye from where he hit the cold concrete. Pete moves the amp he likely tripped over, and the cords spilling from it.
"Yeah, I think I was just..." Ian explains but trails off, his eyes unfocused in the cold cement afternoon. The light is gray and thin, and I tighten my navy sweater around my shoulders.
"I'll get some water," I offer, and Ian looks up, and quickly down again, remembering I'm standing here.
"No, I'll be alright."
I bandage him in the unfinished bathroom of the building, sitting on the toilet while he crouches on the floor by my knees. He looks apologetic, like he's sorry this happened, sending the boys home so early.
"J'ai entendu la chanson," I remind him. "I liked it very much."
He touches the brooch on my sweater, silver and shaped like a fly.
"Where did you get this?" he asks me, his fingers cautious and his eyes curious and distant.
"My father, when I left home."
He touches the ends of my hair, freshly cut.
"You ought to do it purple," he says, his tone softening as I dab at the wound on his face with icy water from the new pipes. I laugh short, and he laughs, also, like a child although I haven't told him the joke. "What?" he asks.
"Purple like an old woman?" I ask him, and he shakes his head.
"No, like it was that night. In July."
The single window in the corner of the room is open to the cold weather, unseasonable for October, but made worse by the naked cinder blocks he requires for rehearsal.
"Ian," I begin, touching his hand, and he interrupts me.
"We haven't made love in nine days. I came to your flat yesterday and you were out. Tell me, have I done something?"
"No," I insist, and Brad's head turns to look at me.
"Huh?" he asks me, and I'm standing in the courtyard, the dormitory returned, Brad's boxers hanging from his hips loose and rumpled.
"Um. I. Sorry," I tell him.
Matthew's been returned to his bed, and the crowd of boys dispersed. He sits up when he hears me talk, and calls out into the center of the house.
"Nikka, please answer me!"
Eyebrows raise, heads turn, and mouths open, and close again. All around me, the Grays react to what's happening by averting their eyes, closing their doors, and smirking as they walk away. As if they all knew and I was only one who didn't. And they might've. Because what they know, they do not question.
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