See, I had it all planned.
If I married Brad there, in the ruined house, just after the bomb had exploded, then we'd have to say it was over, and now we were picking up the pieces.
In the desert, the light glinted off of mica and pyrite on the ground, the sun high and white. It was late, but it felt like morning. My dress I made from the burned remnants of the curtains - white lace scorched along the edges - so everyone would know, and through some magic, we would trap ourselves here, in the bright light of the Aftermath.
We could start over, there. No more tragic stories of our separation, no more talking about our fathers and what sickness was dormant in our bloodlines, no more holding hands in the dark to hide from our rapists, no more writing songs about the people who wouldn't love us but each other, no more nightmares about John being real or not real or dead.
Nightmares. Right, that's what it was about. In the light of day, there are no more nightmares, and so if I married him then, we'd be stuck here forever in a place those horrors would never find us again. Things could be
"Clean."
I looked from the window showing me the expanse of bright desert and a dozen white chairs, to Brad standing in the empty living room of Denton, his eyes almost desperate. He was wearing his uniform for our wedding, less than an hour away.
"Maybe we could get away," I tell him, hoping he understands what I mean.
Wednesday, January 31, 2018
Friday, January 26, 2018
Denton, 1947
It takes 100 miles for the land to become strange, and for us both to forget.
The dust chokes the smoking engine where he lifts the hood
He lifts the hood and what ritual is
Sifted black in our pockets is
Made of what will make it rain,
And not of what will return us
To That World.
To That World 100 miles ago, which we both forgot and
He trembles his hand over the valley
Coughing deep plegmatic
Loosing cotton and packets of salt,
Which are sweating in his pockets.
I shed my coin, my folded napkin,
Lighter now and still closer to the rain.
"Now the rain will come and darken the land like
Slipping consciousness."
We always had the car, until we didn't have it anymore.
The sunset is a dirty reddish-brown from the way men have painted it
And will always paint it.
There are few things but the ground and sun,
Plants rough and pale,
Hiding the bones of nothing.
His shoes crunch gravel like glass,
His shirt soaked in close sweat,
His smell like hostel or whorehouse.
His name is tattooed onto the inside of my throat,
That which carves the timbre of a laugh.
Water dries to blood.
Sun coalesces to lightning.
The storm approaches,
Moving slow across the waste.
"Great lizards once walked this country.
They sang to one another, and built forest temples
Inside which they discovered the light of humanity,
And they used their ancient magic to
Transform themselves into the image of their God.
No temples have survived, but the ground resonates where they once stood."
His hand presses flat the hot blacktop of the road we skirt
To be reminded of the shape of things,
The First Blood and the Last Massacre,
How to force this mass into the heart of
These things which so definitely refuse them.
The sunset fails,
And it fails
To hold tight the maroon road
As the rain begins.
He holds his hand out to catch the rain,
And he catches the rain,
Where he is dancing in the temples
Of long-dead lizard warriors,
And across the highway,
Soldiers have emptied themselves
Into the woolen martyrdom
Of dead native girls.
Their hair is sprawling lush,
Tumbling reckless black water and the veiny pink
Cracked insignia of this collision,
Seven brittle marvels hollowed to hold tight
To the maroon road, spraying
Spare arm and leg brown and useless.
"The wagons have come."
He tells me.
The blue-suited soldiers carry their own kind,
Borne heavy on cotton stretchers,
To the cloud-wagons black and murky,
Vanishing soft in the rain,
Which turns to blood
While the native girls wait
In silent pieces for their gods.
The dust chokes the smoking engine where he lifts the hood
He lifts the hood and what ritual is
Sifted black in our pockets is
Made of what will make it rain,
And not of what will return us
To That World.
To That World 100 miles ago, which we both forgot and
He trembles his hand over the valley
Coughing deep plegmatic
Loosing cotton and packets of salt,
Which are sweating in his pockets.
I shed my coin, my folded napkin,
Lighter now and still closer to the rain.
"Now the rain will come and darken the land like
Slipping consciousness."
We always had the car, until we didn't have it anymore.
The sunset is a dirty reddish-brown from the way men have painted it
And will always paint it.
There are few things but the ground and sun,
Plants rough and pale,
Hiding the bones of nothing.
His shoes crunch gravel like glass,
His shirt soaked in close sweat,
His smell like hostel or whorehouse.
His name is tattooed onto the inside of my throat,
That which carves the timbre of a laugh.
Water dries to blood.
Sun coalesces to lightning.
The storm approaches,
Moving slow across the waste.
"Great lizards once walked this country.
They sang to one another, and built forest temples
Inside which they discovered the light of humanity,
And they used their ancient magic to
Transform themselves into the image of their God.
No temples have survived, but the ground resonates where they once stood."
His hand presses flat the hot blacktop of the road we skirt
To be reminded of the shape of things,
The First Blood and the Last Massacre,
How to force this mass into the heart of
These things which so definitely refuse them.
The sunset fails,
And it fails
To hold tight the maroon road
As the rain begins.
He holds his hand out to catch the rain,
And he catches the rain,
Where he is dancing in the temples
Of long-dead lizard warriors,
And across the highway,
Soldiers have emptied themselves
Into the woolen martyrdom
Of dead native girls.
Their hair is sprawling lush,
Tumbling reckless black water and the veiny pink
Cracked insignia of this collision,
Seven brittle marvels hollowed to hold tight
To the maroon road, spraying
Spare arm and leg brown and useless.
"The wagons have come."
He tells me.
The blue-suited soldiers carry their own kind,
Borne heavy on cotton stretchers,
To the cloud-wagons black and murky,
Vanishing soft in the rain,
Which turns to blood
While the native girls wait
In silent pieces for their gods.
Wednesday, January 24, 2018
Denton, 1997
Brad rolls down the window of the blue Chevy my father drove and his never owned, and our father, who is neither man, rolls his eyes. Brad is thin and young, his eyes gleaming blue, and I am folded into a space behind the bench seat that exists in Brad’s father’s truck but not the Chevy. I tangle my feet around jumper cables and a yellow and black rope. The cushion on the seat is blue Campbell tartan and itchy and cigarette-burned. The song plays faint on the radio, something Brad’s father would have liked and mine would have disdained.
The moment is tense when the window comes down, and my father, or his, or neither, grips the steering wheel of this truck which is the meeting point between the two men. The radio crackles with Brad’s touch of the dial. His wrist is slim and laden with dirty wristbands. He finds a tune fast, too fast for the desert, and a half-smile touches his mouth.
The fingers of our father’s right hand tighten, relax, tighten again, and he reaches fast into the void of space between them, where I wait, somehow removed. His hand, dark hair on his low knuckles, slaps Brad’s hand away with a vicious adder’s strike, and Brad’s smile fades in the air like an unfinished song while the snake hand of our father reaches, lightning-quick, to land the same blow on Brad’s left cheek.
Injustice tightens my chest and raises the blood of me to make me shake and feel like I can’t be fast enough. Never fucking fast enough to stop it when I see the moment blooming in front of me. His hands tensed, and I should have, now I could, Brad’s eyes tear, but if I knew his hand would, but here I am again where.
Brad looks down, his face red. Our father who is not our father drives silent, through the desert, and the fine tuning of the dream thins to nothing in the early morning.
I wake at 4 am. He’s hard edges and sweat against me, his hair stuck to his face, nearly steaming in the February morning. His eyelids move to belie the racing of his eyes. His lashes are heavy, and they open and focus from nothing, onto me, pupils relating to my proximity, the softly wrinkling bed of them showing he recognizes me.
“Evie,” he chokes. I pet his hair, and the smell of him covers us while my hatred and injustice settles low in my stomach and makes it ache. He smells like sweat and dirty laundry and the bergamot scent of boy. The white of his undershirt is a pale imitation of his skin, soaked close to him and clung tight as my arms in a nest of us. Where are we? I look around. Pressed into the bottom bunk of a bed in the house he built inside me.
“It’s okay,” I tell him, breaking the statement into two pieces, my voice weak. I’m wearing my Chicago 17 jersey with red sleeves and it’s choking me. I pull it off, and wriggle him out of his clothes and the covers. We lay in the cold air of Eden in winter, our skin close. There are no sheets on the bed, and the carpeting is lifting in the corner, gravel-laden and mildewing from a flood. I think, over and over, the phrase, “His body full of nightmares.”
“You want water?” I ask him. Fear crosses his eyes to focus them distant from me, lit with the yellow glow of the light in the hall.
“No,” he says. “I...I don’t want anything. I w. I.”
His tears come fast from under his tongue. He buries his face by turning away. A grown man doesn’t cry over nightmares of his father. I see his ear redden to the same slapped shade I was witness to a moment before, and I tug him back to me.
“It’s gone,” I repeat to him three times, his sobs pushing his face into my collar. I feel his tears run over my skin, pinned to the mess of Brad, while he cries.
Sometimes, I think this nightmare might kill him, and sometimes it's this nightmare which I see light his eyes cold and vengeful.
“Fuck yes, we come from the same place. The SAME PLACE, Evie. Our father is a killer. We come from that. We’re born from that. We have that inside.”
Brad’s father and my father. The men who put our blood in us.
Some nights, Brad rolls down the window of his red car and the radio is lost to static. We stay on the road and beyond us in the dust, the night beasts roll by, swift on their feet, thrumming heartbeats through the ground. We drive, me tucked under his arm, the yellowing and dusty plastic cover of the radio glowing the stations at me, telling me the name of a girl I love.
He lights a cigarette around me, his arm wrapping close to me. He places it between the fingers of his left hand. His right, between shifting, buries itself between the soft denim of my thighs in borrowed jeans. He’s a grown up the way all boys in high school were more grown up than me; he knows more about sex and how to fix cars and he has a job and he can talk to the world and not feel ignorant to it. When we’re threatened, Brad knows to step in front of me and speak in an even tone. I only speak for us when we’re angry with the tight fists of children to our older brothers.
“Watcha thinkin about, Caroline?” he asks me, his voice low and soft. Brad’s voice is deeply boyish and cracking, but soft when he whispers or is talking to his terrified sister. He invokes now a different name between us; one that is teasingly sung and coyly used.
“Clyde,” I say into my lap. His hand squeezes my thigh at the mention of the name of his first love. Convulsive, reflexive. I hear him swallow, too, and he glances at the flats in the desert beyond the scope of his headlights as if the wolf of his brother might hear the summoning of his name in nightmares. Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice. He glances back and sees the daring in my eyes before he squeezes harder a second time. Don’t, Evie.
I don’t.
We pass in the dark the monument in the desert of his heart that marks the entrance underground to the city of him; a statue of a man’s face that he says is our father’s. Under the worn visage of it, he kissed me for the first time, his mouth hot and open, his tongue spelling a name I’d forgotten into the dark parts of my mouth. He’d been sly there, wanting a sacrilege or desecration under the stone gaze of a disapproving father, to demonstrate to some force within him that we were stronger than anything we might fear.
In a dream. He kissed me for the first time in dreams.
We drive until the light breaks red in him, low at dawn. The beasts are silent and the desert is as still and cold as the gaze of his knife. He pulls the car over and lights another cigarette. He takes gasoline from the trunk, dowses the car, and torches it. We watch it burn to something caked and animal, a charred beetle-shelled thing in the pale sand of morning. He’s silent.
Maybe every nightmare is inherited from our fathers. We walk always through long deserts looking for the sites where we can bury them and leave them forever behind, but the terror fathers inspire in us stays in the sand for generations, for children to unearth by accident or intention. The curious, the haphazard, the innocent wander by and touch the monsters of our humanity disfigured. Sin has no origin, but perpetuates.
The moment is tense when the window comes down, and my father, or his, or neither, grips the steering wheel of this truck which is the meeting point between the two men. The radio crackles with Brad’s touch of the dial. His wrist is slim and laden with dirty wristbands. He finds a tune fast, too fast for the desert, and a half-smile touches his mouth.
The fingers of our father’s right hand tighten, relax, tighten again, and he reaches fast into the void of space between them, where I wait, somehow removed. His hand, dark hair on his low knuckles, slaps Brad’s hand away with a vicious adder’s strike, and Brad’s smile fades in the air like an unfinished song while the snake hand of our father reaches, lightning-quick, to land the same blow on Brad’s left cheek.
Injustice tightens my chest and raises the blood of me to make me shake and feel like I can’t be fast enough. Never fucking fast enough to stop it when I see the moment blooming in front of me. His hands tensed, and I should have, now I could, Brad’s eyes tear, but if I knew his hand would, but here I am again where.
Brad looks down, his face red. Our father who is not our father drives silent, through the desert, and the fine tuning of the dream thins to nothing in the early morning.
I wake at 4 am. He’s hard edges and sweat against me, his hair stuck to his face, nearly steaming in the February morning. His eyelids move to belie the racing of his eyes. His lashes are heavy, and they open and focus from nothing, onto me, pupils relating to my proximity, the softly wrinkling bed of them showing he recognizes me.
“Evie,” he chokes. I pet his hair, and the smell of him covers us while my hatred and injustice settles low in my stomach and makes it ache. He smells like sweat and dirty laundry and the bergamot scent of boy. The white of his undershirt is a pale imitation of his skin, soaked close to him and clung tight as my arms in a nest of us. Where are we? I look around. Pressed into the bottom bunk of a bed in the house he built inside me.
“It’s okay,” I tell him, breaking the statement into two pieces, my voice weak. I’m wearing my Chicago 17 jersey with red sleeves and it’s choking me. I pull it off, and wriggle him out of his clothes and the covers. We lay in the cold air of Eden in winter, our skin close. There are no sheets on the bed, and the carpeting is lifting in the corner, gravel-laden and mildewing from a flood. I think, over and over, the phrase, “His body full of nightmares.”
“You want water?” I ask him. Fear crosses his eyes to focus them distant from me, lit with the yellow glow of the light in the hall.
“No,” he says. “I...I don’t want anything. I w. I.”
His tears come fast from under his tongue. He buries his face by turning away. A grown man doesn’t cry over nightmares of his father. I see his ear redden to the same slapped shade I was witness to a moment before, and I tug him back to me.
“It’s gone,” I repeat to him three times, his sobs pushing his face into my collar. I feel his tears run over my skin, pinned to the mess of Brad, while he cries.
Sometimes, I think this nightmare might kill him, and sometimes it's this nightmare which I see light his eyes cold and vengeful.
“Fuck yes, we come from the same place. The SAME PLACE, Evie. Our father is a killer. We come from that. We’re born from that. We have that inside.”
Brad’s father and my father. The men who put our blood in us.
Some nights, Brad rolls down the window of his red car and the radio is lost to static. We stay on the road and beyond us in the dust, the night beasts roll by, swift on their feet, thrumming heartbeats through the ground. We drive, me tucked under his arm, the yellowing and dusty plastic cover of the radio glowing the stations at me, telling me the name of a girl I love.
He lights a cigarette around me, his arm wrapping close to me. He places it between the fingers of his left hand. His right, between shifting, buries itself between the soft denim of my thighs in borrowed jeans. He’s a grown up the way all boys in high school were more grown up than me; he knows more about sex and how to fix cars and he has a job and he can talk to the world and not feel ignorant to it. When we’re threatened, Brad knows to step in front of me and speak in an even tone. I only speak for us when we’re angry with the tight fists of children to our older brothers.
“Watcha thinkin about, Caroline?” he asks me, his voice low and soft. Brad’s voice is deeply boyish and cracking, but soft when he whispers or is talking to his terrified sister. He invokes now a different name between us; one that is teasingly sung and coyly used.
“Clyde,” I say into my lap. His hand squeezes my thigh at the mention of the name of his first love. Convulsive, reflexive. I hear him swallow, too, and he glances at the flats in the desert beyond the scope of his headlights as if the wolf of his brother might hear the summoning of his name in nightmares. Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice. He glances back and sees the daring in my eyes before he squeezes harder a second time. Don’t, Evie.
I don’t.
We pass in the dark the monument in the desert of his heart that marks the entrance underground to the city of him; a statue of a man’s face that he says is our father’s. Under the worn visage of it, he kissed me for the first time, his mouth hot and open, his tongue spelling a name I’d forgotten into the dark parts of my mouth. He’d been sly there, wanting a sacrilege or desecration under the stone gaze of a disapproving father, to demonstrate to some force within him that we were stronger than anything we might fear.
In a dream. He kissed me for the first time in dreams.
We drive until the light breaks red in him, low at dawn. The beasts are silent and the desert is as still and cold as the gaze of his knife. He pulls the car over and lights another cigarette. He takes gasoline from the trunk, dowses the car, and torches it. We watch it burn to something caked and animal, a charred beetle-shelled thing in the pale sand of morning. He’s silent.
Maybe every nightmare is inherited from our fathers. We walk always through long deserts looking for the sites where we can bury them and leave them forever behind, but the terror fathers inspire in us stays in the sand for generations, for children to unearth by accident or intention. The curious, the haphazard, the innocent wander by and touch the monsters of our humanity disfigured. Sin has no origin, but perpetuates.
Tuesday, January 23, 2018
Denton, 1773
Brad's heart may as well never beat, for all the compassion he's ever really felt. Not that the measure of life is a man's compassion, thank goodness for most of us.
We got ready for the ball together, the second time he's buttoned me into a white dress. We were silent in the bedroom of Denton, made to look like Eden. Of course, someone made a fucking Eden room here. I don't mind never being able to escape that certain fate, but I do mind the way I'm looked at like such a cliche when it confronts me.
Brad's eyes were distant and cruel. When he moves to the austere and storm-watching part of himself, I use his formal name, and he uses mine, as if we were strangers come to this strange time in which neither of us belong.
"Joel?" I ask him, and he dips his hands into the basin on the dresser and slicks his hair back with a handful of water. It's a burnished gold, almost dull when it's wet. It drips from the ends onto the shoulders of his white shirt.
"What?"
He answered me terse, and professional. The heartless boy he becomes, when he knows they're all watching us.
"Are you alright?"
He busies himself with the cuffs around his wrists, his reflection in the mirror wearing a critical sneer.
"Yes."
Brad's ability to turn into a creature as mystical as Clyde has developed along with the darkening of his hair. When we were young, he was blonde, vapid, fast-moving, stupid, beautiful, using his magical talent to slip through time and fuck both this girl, and that one. To become invisible in order to sneak his mother's Quaaludes from the medicine cabinet in her bathroom. To avoid police detection when he took the Ferrari off the lot in the midday sun.
Was it his seventeenth heartbreak, or his eighteenth? Was it Rosie? Was it me? Was it the realization in 2015 he'd had that he'd lived his whole life as some pathetic masquerade of himself? Was it the letter he wrote me? Was it when Lou died?
I can't say for certain what changed in him, but it also changed in his eyes. Something transformed, from adolescent arrogance to a cold detachment, and a far-reaching gaze to worlds beyond this one.
It was his eyes that I fell in love with first, and their expressions which I knew by second nature. For all he'd seen, and all he couldn't say.
We got ready for the ball together, the second time he's buttoned me into a white dress. We were silent in the bedroom of Denton, made to look like Eden. Of course, someone made a fucking Eden room here. I don't mind never being able to escape that certain fate, but I do mind the way I'm looked at like such a cliche when it confronts me.
Brad's eyes were distant and cruel. When he moves to the austere and storm-watching part of himself, I use his formal name, and he uses mine, as if we were strangers come to this strange time in which neither of us belong.
"Joel?" I ask him, and he dips his hands into the basin on the dresser and slicks his hair back with a handful of water. It's a burnished gold, almost dull when it's wet. It drips from the ends onto the shoulders of his white shirt.
"What?"
He answered me terse, and professional. The heartless boy he becomes, when he knows they're all watching us.
"Are you alright?"
He busies himself with the cuffs around his wrists, his reflection in the mirror wearing a critical sneer.
"Yes."
Brad's ability to turn into a creature as mystical as Clyde has developed along with the darkening of his hair. When we were young, he was blonde, vapid, fast-moving, stupid, beautiful, using his magical talent to slip through time and fuck both this girl, and that one. To become invisible in order to sneak his mother's Quaaludes from the medicine cabinet in her bathroom. To avoid police detection when he took the Ferrari off the lot in the midday sun.
Was it his seventeenth heartbreak, or his eighteenth? Was it Rosie? Was it me? Was it the realization in 2015 he'd had that he'd lived his whole life as some pathetic masquerade of himself? Was it the letter he wrote me? Was it when Lou died?
I can't say for certain what changed in him, but it also changed in his eyes. Something transformed, from adolescent arrogance to a cold detachment, and a far-reaching gaze to worlds beyond this one.
In Gray House, every joke has the potential to stop being funny at the behest of it's truth. We threw a ball - a Halloween ball - for the second time in five years. The first having gone so disastrously, why wouldn't we throw a second, and why wouldn't we don costumes which betrayed what we wished no one to know about us?
Get it?
Brad asked me to go, and had in mind what we would go as, together. The Cruel Prince, and the Cruel Princess; white ghosts in formal attire, hearts missing from our chests. Military dedication to a magic-laden surgical procedure accomplished the effects, but the vacancy we had in both our expressions was authentic. Here is what we had become, given enough time, distance from one another, and hatred of all others. Whether he knew it consciously or not, he'd asked me to show everyone who we'd become; this tragedy of our ruin of a relationship. Hey, Evie, go to prom with me, but make sure you wear a sign that says we already broke up.
"You once told me to never be cruel, because it wasn't who I am," I reminded him, fastening my necklace in the mirror. "Do you remember?"
The room was hot and green, and he moved through it almost mechanically, or moth-like in his white clothes, fastening buttons as he walked on fast legs. The sound of his shoes was obscene on the barren floor.
"Yes, Eve, I remember."
I can count on one hand the times Brad has ever called me Eve, settling almost without exception on it's diminutive. It was one of maybe five things he tried to put in place between us. Let me be the older twin. Let me be the one who is cruel. Let me be the killer of the two of us. Let me be your first love. Let me live inside you. Hey, I don't want much, Evie, is that so hard?
But here I was, the Cruel Princess, not cruel how he was, but unintentionally, and as a result of all my failings to love myself and therefore anyone else. Cold inside, the way Jack's always insisted I am. Heartless, because I can't fall in love.
And Brad is cruel because he chose to be. Not that it will ever matter to anyone to know, but Brad is cruel because he chose to look down the barrel of every gun pointed at another human being, in order to understand the unwavering will of a killer. Brad chose knowledge over compassion, and the way back to kindness and decency was a long and arduous road to travel. Why bother, when you know what he knows? When no one is truly innocent, or righteous, or valorous?
It was his eyes that I fell in love with first, and their expressions which I knew by second nature. For all he'd seen, and all he couldn't say.
The sound of my skirts rustled while I crossed the room to him, to stand next to his knowledge, and to his cruelty. There are ways only we could ever love one another, the way orphans can, or those forgotten to fates and circumstances more than the heart can bear. It's this way that I can stand next to him and feel the isolation of our tragedy which brought me to this point where nothing else is possible. We had a kingdom, once, but we lost it when the King was executed, and now, no one knows what we know.
The tips of his hair still wet, his jaw still tense, his eyes still watching the slow storm pass over the desert beyond the windows, he was hard to the touch. I touched the bones of his shoulders, and his arms crossed against me, so the bones moved under his skin which is always five degrees hotter than mine.
Brad and I are not the same size. The sameness we have physically comes from an internal symmetry instead of an external one. I rested my head against his back, his height sprouting seven inches over me.
"What is it?" he asked me. "You're not frightened, are you?"
His back and his shoulders tensed as if to threaten whatever I was feeling into nonexistence by his reason or his presence.
"No," I told him.
"It'll be quick," he promised me, about the idea that he was minutes from removing my heart from my chest.
But it wasn't the fact I'm heartless, or would soon be, which bothered me. It was the idea that the circuit to become so would now be made by us, and that this somehow implied that we'd created the other's cruelty simply by existing. Did Brad look into the heart of every evil only to prepare himself as my protector? Did I stop short of love with so many others because they just weren't him? Had we done too much to make room for each other in our souls that now they would cease to function independently?
He turned to hold me while I started to cry, thinking only that if that were true, there was no way back from that place anymore. Brad would take us there, and further, on the point of his knife.
The tips of his hair still wet, his jaw still tense, his eyes still watching the slow storm pass over the desert beyond the windows, he was hard to the touch. I touched the bones of his shoulders, and his arms crossed against me, so the bones moved under his skin which is always five degrees hotter than mine.
Brad and I are not the same size. The sameness we have physically comes from an internal symmetry instead of an external one. I rested my head against his back, his height sprouting seven inches over me.
"What is it?" he asked me. "You're not frightened, are you?"
His back and his shoulders tensed as if to threaten whatever I was feeling into nonexistence by his reason or his presence.
"No," I told him.
"It'll be quick," he promised me, about the idea that he was minutes from removing my heart from my chest.
But it wasn't the fact I'm heartless, or would soon be, which bothered me. It was the idea that the circuit to become so would now be made by us, and that this somehow implied that we'd created the other's cruelty simply by existing. Did Brad look into the heart of every evil only to prepare himself as my protector? Did I stop short of love with so many others because they just weren't him? Had we done too much to make room for each other in our souls that now they would cease to function independently?
He turned to hold me while I started to cry, thinking only that if that were true, there was no way back from that place anymore. Brad would take us there, and further, on the point of his knife.
Friday, January 19, 2018
Denton, 1936
Brad,
What we know, that no one else knows, is the romance of the world of a killer. People say chivalry is dead, but I know it only wears a face they no longer care to look at; the face of the lowly, the unholy, and the bitterly forgotten.
Running like smoke through the ringing and newly-electrified Delta blues singers is the murderous loyalty that warms every Southern summer night to sweating, lynches little girls in the cool nightwoods, makes a good man forget himself, and drives him... pretty crazy.
There's no greater romance than that which is found in the twisted heart of an unrequited dockworker, drinking from a flask in the water-reflected light of the passing showboat he'll never be allowed on. See, she's in there.
She's in there, with her skirt around her ears, working for the living a man like you couldn't provide her. It makes you believe in fate in the worst way; a cruel fate which will come to crush you someday, rabid dog to rabid dog. It makes you believe in the devil enough to attempt the sale of your diseased soul to him, the mossy bayou sticking your stinking shirt to your heaving chest.
When she dies, a man like you believes a passage to the underworld to retrieve her is not only possible, but the cross on which he will be nailed should he not attempt it. Do you believe in voodoo because you kill, or do you kill because you believe in voodoo?
Lightnin' would have you believe that love is all biology and blood. The smell of her rank and descending down the shaft of your cock, unwashed in the hellhole your father beat you in, her eyes closed in the afternoon, the long strings of her menstruation dripping hot slick across your thighs and rolling slow the distance of your ass, softens somehow the texture of her skin in your mouth. A killer is just a man who is prepared to do what all men talk of and can't find within themselves.
An acceptance that you'll never be enough, but you can show her how far you'd go to find that out.
This bayou is crawling with knights errant, all skinny white boys in their stained jeans and trucker caps, and you're their king and you will set the tree you tied her to on fire to resurrect the ghost of her perfume.
You're such a poet, Brad. And you're right. Love is all blood and guts.
A killer doesn't understand what's so hard about all this. You're my girl, and if you stop being my girl, I'll spread the viscera of you across the wilderness and live forever tortured by the loss of you. But that blood is mine, and won't cover the skin of another man. IS THAT SO FUCKING HARD?
Because it's all done in service of an idea that there is a perfection. There is a name that goes unsaid in your heart. There is a grave you will slit your wrists on. There is a woman, somewhere, in this horror, who is pure... of fucking... heart.
You laid next to me today and you asked me what I felt between us, and that's my answer.
When we were younger, we stood beside one another and talked about the dream of romance, you and John and I. And holding your hand these last few days, I can feel your pulse in your wrist, and the blood in your palms seeping around the pressure of my nails. I can see something like... where once I shared a passion with you, back to back, with blindfolds on, now I can look at you and see you as the subject of it.
The secret of this romance gets thick between us, all the blood and guts that Lightnin' promised it would be. You always had my blood and my bones, but now I feel it coursing into the body of a love we're making. I etched your name in my skin. I named my knife after you. I'll kill you if you leave me. If you lock the door, I'll shoot the lock off with a stolen shotgun from Clyde.
I saw you get drunk over me. I saw you crash your car. I saw you kill a girl when I made you angry. I saw you spray my perfume on your wife. I want to show you what I think poetry is.
If you stay, we could just sleep. But if you sleep somewhere else, you know what I'll do.
I love you.
What we know, that no one else knows, is the romance of the world of a killer. People say chivalry is dead, but I know it only wears a face they no longer care to look at; the face of the lowly, the unholy, and the bitterly forgotten.
Running like smoke through the ringing and newly-electrified Delta blues singers is the murderous loyalty that warms every Southern summer night to sweating, lynches little girls in the cool nightwoods, makes a good man forget himself, and drives him... pretty crazy.
There's no greater romance than that which is found in the twisted heart of an unrequited dockworker, drinking from a flask in the water-reflected light of the passing showboat he'll never be allowed on. See, she's in there.
She's in there, with her skirt around her ears, working for the living a man like you couldn't provide her. It makes you believe in fate in the worst way; a cruel fate which will come to crush you someday, rabid dog to rabid dog. It makes you believe in the devil enough to attempt the sale of your diseased soul to him, the mossy bayou sticking your stinking shirt to your heaving chest.
When she dies, a man like you believes a passage to the underworld to retrieve her is not only possible, but the cross on which he will be nailed should he not attempt it. Do you believe in voodoo because you kill, or do you kill because you believe in voodoo?
Lightnin' would have you believe that love is all biology and blood. The smell of her rank and descending down the shaft of your cock, unwashed in the hellhole your father beat you in, her eyes closed in the afternoon, the long strings of her menstruation dripping hot slick across your thighs and rolling slow the distance of your ass, softens somehow the texture of her skin in your mouth. A killer is just a man who is prepared to do what all men talk of and can't find within themselves.
An acceptance that you'll never be enough, but you can show her how far you'd go to find that out.
This bayou is crawling with knights errant, all skinny white boys in their stained jeans and trucker caps, and you're their king and you will set the tree you tied her to on fire to resurrect the ghost of her perfume.
You're such a poet, Brad. And you're right. Love is all blood and guts.
A killer doesn't understand what's so hard about all this. You're my girl, and if you stop being my girl, I'll spread the viscera of you across the wilderness and live forever tortured by the loss of you. But that blood is mine, and won't cover the skin of another man. IS THAT SO FUCKING HARD?
Because it's all done in service of an idea that there is a perfection. There is a name that goes unsaid in your heart. There is a grave you will slit your wrists on. There is a woman, somewhere, in this horror, who is pure... of fucking... heart.
You laid next to me today and you asked me what I felt between us, and that's my answer.
When we were younger, we stood beside one another and talked about the dream of romance, you and John and I. And holding your hand these last few days, I can feel your pulse in your wrist, and the blood in your palms seeping around the pressure of my nails. I can see something like... where once I shared a passion with you, back to back, with blindfolds on, now I can look at you and see you as the subject of it.
The secret of this romance gets thick between us, all the blood and guts that Lightnin' promised it would be. You always had my blood and my bones, but now I feel it coursing into the body of a love we're making. I etched your name in my skin. I named my knife after you. I'll kill you if you leave me. If you lock the door, I'll shoot the lock off with a stolen shotgun from Clyde.
I saw you get drunk over me. I saw you crash your car. I saw you kill a girl when I made you angry. I saw you spray my perfume on your wife. I want to show you what I think poetry is.
If you stay, we could just sleep. But if you sleep somewhere else, you know what I'll do.
I love you.
Thursday, January 18, 2018
Denton, 2013
It all started so innocuously, with a song.
Several, actually, in a chain, like a conversation.
Newly approaching the House, everything unknown, a conversation took place between Brad and I that recalled things personal and hidden. Through the water and distortion of secrets buried inside, I held my hand up to a window, and so did he, and what we found in one another were animals of the same name locked in our hearts.
What people don't know about Brad is how volatile, and how shy. He might, over time, come to eat from your hand, but he will run away again once he has. What gets seen are the parts he offers for consumption just the same; the parts he is certain will mean you will eat from his hand. When he sent me Orestes, it was a wolf who did it, disguised as a dog. A boy I might one day name the Cruel Prince; the last avenger of his family.
It was with this song he told me who he was, and with the next I replied with my own identity. We were both anchored deep in a history of blood and violent unrepentance; chained to the walls of our legacy.
The expression in our eyes when we first touched was confused, and suspicious. No one can share the same experiences, no matter how congruous the events. Someone else always sees something different, has a different vantage point, is older, is a boy, is not emotionally connected to the same sinew. And so how could we feel this symmetry between us, and was it even real?
I asked him this question in the next song, full of the trepidation of memory.
And if we were, what would it matter?
And if we weren't, what would we lose?
Every wall of Gray House had become a dark womb of a single purpose, reaching in the dark warmth for something I thought might be my own reflection, and something I would never believe could be mine. The air was heavy with the unexplained magic between Brad and I, staring long at one another over a candlelit dinner we'd never had. I've never felt anything like it again. There was something pouring out of me at all times that felt like a tangible kinship, but what I couldn't anticipate or prepare for was the anger, the egotism, and the shame. Like we'd eaten every bite of the dinner laid out on the table, long before anyone else arrived. A decadence, maybe, or an indulgence; the way dogs fight over food thrown by noblemen.
The verses in Runner sealed our fate forever. When he told me he wanted to build a house inside me, we did just that, in the literal way that all things in Gray House are made.
And then we were twins.
He found a house in the garden inside me, and I found a house in the desert of his heart. It was a dangerous pagan ritual, I'm sure. It bound us together, I'm sure, so now I can't suffer a heartbreak without Brad feeling it and he can't scrape his knee without scarring me. We didn't think of the outcome or the consequences, and in a way, I'm sure that was what we were always meant to be doing. Never thinking about how we could hurt each other, or fall out of love. Just create with words and wishes that which had never before existed.
I could feel him in my heart, and he could feel me in his. Things don't begin with bombs exploding, or the complications of locked doors. Things begin simply, and as far as I know, they never end. But I can feel how far we've drifted since that winter, when I went home to Brad for the first time.
"I'm going to call it Denton," I told him, and he laughed.
"The home of happiness?" he asked, and I remembered the joke from Rocky Horror, the film from which Brad took his name.
"Oh," I laughed. "Yeah, I guess it is. I didn't remember that, I was making a joke about dens."
In the wastes of the desert, my house stood, a burnt shell of a house with open windows and missing doors. The inside was mostly bare, and covered in dust from the wind. The upstairs had a bare mattress and a view of the plains across which moved storms, flickering lightning late into the darkness. Animals lived in the chimney of the ruined fireplace.
"Don't you wanna like fix it up or something?" he asked me, and I shook my head, taken with the romance of abandonment.
Was it that? Was it always just that, the one simple thing, the tiny detail I'd overlooked? Did I think it was romantic, to live in a ruined castle? Did I think it made us romantic, to be a part of a lost people, or a forgotten culture, or speak a dead language? Did I torture us all the way to the conclusion of that fantasy?
Because at the end of that fantasy, there's loneliness, and alienation, and acculturation to some other strange thing which can sustain us. Or we die.
I slept on the bare mattress, and in time visited only when my heart was the same barren state, and maybe I tried to turn Brad into my savior, or my conscience.
Brad's house inside me was his childhood home, which did it's own reckoning in his heart. Was I supposed to do something no one ever did? Change something no one could? Was I supposed to sweep up the fragments of something broken there, or always... see him as a boy?
It's funny most of these questions never got answered, because back then, we just didn't know to ask them, and it never felt like it mattered, until it did.
In 2015, I burned down the house he built, to remake us from the ashes.
Actually, I don't know why I did it, other than to take back all I'd promised him when we built it. As Cruel Royalty, maybe the sacrifice had become necessary between us. Nowhere to go but here, right?
3/7/15
Brad,
Today, I might hate all the people you've ever loved. I just might. I just might.
I might be thinking of choking on that hate so hard it hurts to swallow my way past. Hurts once I do, like a fire in my stomach that sets my teeth on the edge of themselves, bared like an animal.
I fucking hate them, Brad.
Brad, I burned your house down. It's now in cinders. If you know me, if you know that already, if you knew me ever, if you don't know me by now. The pile of boards and planks that once held your house has been decimated to a smolder. I hated it. Brad, I hated it. Brad, please help me, I'm going to die.
Just your house, and not you, Brad. Just your house, and everything I owned inside it. It felt good, because being feeling good and I don't care about thinks like keeping letters like Jack does. I'm in love with you, so I keep burning us down because I don't know how to be in the same room. I don't give a fuck about the things I've given you. I don't.
My letters are worthless. Burn them. Burn this one, I don't care. My shirt, your shirt. The places we've always felt safe. I slept in a crypt, so what does that tell you? We don't need it. It's worthless. It's all fucking garbage. You loaned me your scarf and I burned it, too. I'm sorry, I just don't care. It doesn't fucking matter to me.
Because you're never in them. In those things I grip and hold close and tell myself are you. They aren't you. You're not there, and it doesn't tell me shit about dick, so. All your fucking plaids, Leslie Modern, Edgar Red. Fuck you, Brad Majors. Fuck you. You've never been where I was promised you would hide.
It's enough to make any knife a friend of mine, a really good one.
I kept your lipstick. I don't know my name, but that. I don't want to die, Brad. I wrote it on your mirror.
-Evelyn
Several, actually, in a chain, like a conversation.
Newly approaching the House, everything unknown, a conversation took place between Brad and I that recalled things personal and hidden. Through the water and distortion of secrets buried inside, I held my hand up to a window, and so did he, and what we found in one another were animals of the same name locked in our hearts.
What people don't know about Brad is how volatile, and how shy. He might, over time, come to eat from your hand, but he will run away again once he has. What gets seen are the parts he offers for consumption just the same; the parts he is certain will mean you will eat from his hand. When he sent me Orestes, it was a wolf who did it, disguised as a dog. A boy I might one day name the Cruel Prince; the last avenger of his family.
It was with this song he told me who he was, and with the next I replied with my own identity. We were both anchored deep in a history of blood and violent unrepentance; chained to the walls of our legacy.
The expression in our eyes when we first touched was confused, and suspicious. No one can share the same experiences, no matter how congruous the events. Someone else always sees something different, has a different vantage point, is older, is a boy, is not emotionally connected to the same sinew. And so how could we feel this symmetry between us, and was it even real?
I asked him this question in the next song, full of the trepidation of memory.
And if we were, what would it matter?
And if we weren't, what would we lose?
Every wall of Gray House had become a dark womb of a single purpose, reaching in the dark warmth for something I thought might be my own reflection, and something I would never believe could be mine. The air was heavy with the unexplained magic between Brad and I, staring long at one another over a candlelit dinner we'd never had. I've never felt anything like it again. There was something pouring out of me at all times that felt like a tangible kinship, but what I couldn't anticipate or prepare for was the anger, the egotism, and the shame. Like we'd eaten every bite of the dinner laid out on the table, long before anyone else arrived. A decadence, maybe, or an indulgence; the way dogs fight over food thrown by noblemen.
The verses in Runner sealed our fate forever. When he told me he wanted to build a house inside me, we did just that, in the literal way that all things in Gray House are made.
And then we were twins.
He found a house in the garden inside me, and I found a house in the desert of his heart. It was a dangerous pagan ritual, I'm sure. It bound us together, I'm sure, so now I can't suffer a heartbreak without Brad feeling it and he can't scrape his knee without scarring me. We didn't think of the outcome or the consequences, and in a way, I'm sure that was what we were always meant to be doing. Never thinking about how we could hurt each other, or fall out of love. Just create with words and wishes that which had never before existed.
I could feel him in my heart, and he could feel me in his. Things don't begin with bombs exploding, or the complications of locked doors. Things begin simply, and as far as I know, they never end. But I can feel how far we've drifted since that winter, when I went home to Brad for the first time.
"I'm going to call it Denton," I told him, and he laughed.
"The home of happiness?" he asked, and I remembered the joke from Rocky Horror, the film from which Brad took his name.
"Oh," I laughed. "Yeah, I guess it is. I didn't remember that, I was making a joke about dens."
In the wastes of the desert, my house stood, a burnt shell of a house with open windows and missing doors. The inside was mostly bare, and covered in dust from the wind. The upstairs had a bare mattress and a view of the plains across which moved storms, flickering lightning late into the darkness. Animals lived in the chimney of the ruined fireplace.
"Don't you wanna like fix it up or something?" he asked me, and I shook my head, taken with the romance of abandonment.
Was it that? Was it always just that, the one simple thing, the tiny detail I'd overlooked? Did I think it was romantic, to live in a ruined castle? Did I think it made us romantic, to be a part of a lost people, or a forgotten culture, or speak a dead language? Did I torture us all the way to the conclusion of that fantasy?
Because at the end of that fantasy, there's loneliness, and alienation, and acculturation to some other strange thing which can sustain us. Or we die.
I slept on the bare mattress, and in time visited only when my heart was the same barren state, and maybe I tried to turn Brad into my savior, or my conscience.
Brad's house inside me was his childhood home, which did it's own reckoning in his heart. Was I supposed to do something no one ever did? Change something no one could? Was I supposed to sweep up the fragments of something broken there, or always... see him as a boy?
It's funny most of these questions never got answered, because back then, we just didn't know to ask them, and it never felt like it mattered, until it did.
In 2015, I burned down the house he built, to remake us from the ashes.
Actually, I don't know why I did it, other than to take back all I'd promised him when we built it. As Cruel Royalty, maybe the sacrifice had become necessary between us. Nowhere to go but here, right?
3/7/15
Brad,
Today, I might hate all the people you've ever loved. I just might. I just might.
I might be thinking of choking on that hate so hard it hurts to swallow my way past. Hurts once I do, like a fire in my stomach that sets my teeth on the edge of themselves, bared like an animal.
I fucking hate them, Brad.
Brad, I burned your house down. It's now in cinders. If you know me, if you know that already, if you knew me ever, if you don't know me by now. The pile of boards and planks that once held your house has been decimated to a smolder. I hated it. Brad, I hated it. Brad, please help me, I'm going to die.
Just your house, and not you, Brad. Just your house, and everything I owned inside it. It felt good, because being feeling good and I don't care about thinks like keeping letters like Jack does. I'm in love with you, so I keep burning us down because I don't know how to be in the same room. I don't give a fuck about the things I've given you. I don't.
My letters are worthless. Burn them. Burn this one, I don't care. My shirt, your shirt. The places we've always felt safe. I slept in a crypt, so what does that tell you? We don't need it. It's worthless. It's all fucking garbage. You loaned me your scarf and I burned it, too. I'm sorry, I just don't care. It doesn't fucking matter to me.
Because you're never in them. In those things I grip and hold close and tell myself are you. They aren't you. You're not there, and it doesn't tell me shit about dick, so. All your fucking plaids, Leslie Modern, Edgar Red. Fuck you, Brad Majors. Fuck you. You've never been where I was promised you would hide.
It's enough to make any knife a friend of mine, a really good one.
I kept your lipstick. I don't know my name, but that. I don't want to die, Brad. I wrote it on your mirror.
-Evelyn
Monday, January 15, 2018
Denton, 1955
The white light carries us away.
The house, the afternoon, the album playing endless, the slow curl of Brad's mouth as we kiss.
It's blown away in the white light, which is a silent flash, followed by the noise of acceleration, and then nothingness.
In the way a Dragon can see nothing but the succession of moments to something greater than those which preceded it, I feel myself get hot and stiff in Brad's arms. Hot and stiff and anxious for change. In the way we are a hallway consisting of no doorways, or a tunnel with no end, I feel my fists ball up, and Brad's skin gets flushed and begins to peel away in my hands.
Nowhere to go but here. Nowhere to go but here. Nowhere to go but here.
His body changes to the light itself, impossible to hold onto. I don't make a sound anymore. I think once, I used to scream, but I don't anymore. I haven't screamed since the last time this happened, since
The house, the afternoon, the album playing endless, the slow curl of Brad's mouth as we kiss.
It's blown away in the white light, which is a silent flash, followed by the noise of acceleration, and then nothingness.
In the way a Dragon can see nothing but the succession of moments to something greater than those which preceded it, I feel myself get hot and stiff in Brad's arms. Hot and stiff and anxious for change. In the way we are a hallway consisting of no doorways, or a tunnel with no end, I feel my fists ball up, and Brad's skin gets flushed and begins to peel away in my hands.
Nowhere to go but here. Nowhere to go but here. Nowhere to go but here.
His body changes to the light itself, impossible to hold onto. I don't make a sound anymore. I think once, I used to scream, but I don't anymore. I haven't screamed since the last time this happened, since
I wake up in the hospital, and it’s bright outside, and there are magazines on the tables. Brad’s eyes are clear and cruel.
“It’s time to go,” he tells me, and I snuggle against my purple sweater.
“Okay,” I tell him. “Are you sure?”
He takes my hand, and squeezes it.
“Evie, look around. There’s nothing left here. This place has been closed for years.”
I look around the waiting room. It’s bright white, the furniture covered in sheets, and a layer of white dust that floats in the air like snow. We’re alone, and the sky is searing and gray-white like the ocean when the sun hits it.
The acceleration stops, and we are surrounded by ruin. The house is destroyed, the brick fireplace a pile on the floor, the carpets burned away, the furniture rotted and covered in a film of sand. Outside, the light is red, or yellow, or any other color of a town burning down. Brad vanishes from under me, and is replaced by the feeling he leaves in a room when he's gone.
I could talk about our destruction for ever and ever, but it wouldn't be worth it. The house is a ruin. The house is a ruin and I don't want to look at it anymore.
Upstairs, I hear Brad's footsteps on the floor above. I run to chase him, and find a shadow of him burned into the wall. I touch it, waiting for it to come to life like Peter's shadow, but it doesn't. The soot of his imprint on the wall is slightly resinous and reminds me of mildew, except we're in the middle of the Nevada desert where almost nothing stays damp that long.
I run down this long corridor without doors, looking for the end, and finding only the confusion of a girl lost in time, and no comprehension of an ending or a beginning. Those things ,after all, are marked in distance, and not...
Wait, Brad, I want to explain.
I got nothing but time, Evie.
I mistook this heartbreak for all the things which came before it, or maybe after.
I don't know what the fuck that means.
Time is all screwed up. Time, distance, and proportion.
You're doing this by the books, now?
I dropped a stone into a well, and physics dictates I should've heard the splash of the stone lost to the depths. But Brad, we echoed first the sound of the splash of the stone, and then realized there was no stone to drop, and then we stood around the well, and cried.
But where did the stone go?
I mistook it for a tragedy, that we never had one. I thought if we wished for it hard enough...
Someone would pick it up in the second act.
Brad explodes, and while exploding becomes the most lurid poet in his heart.
The wreckage of us is all that's left when we've strangled ourselves to nothingness, burned ourselves meaningless and permanent in to the walls, and we have sucked off the bones of one another anything left that might've once been magic. I remember standing in the rubble with him, pawing through the fragments of some life we'd never shared. Our houses had begun life as ruins, long after the aftermath of this moment. It took the poison of how I tried to love him to draw us backward to the time it had all fallen apart; when he'd told me who he really was. The man I never bothered to learn existed.
In the desert inside Brad, we had walked through the char of the neighborhood he once tried to convince me we'd shared, and we didn't speak. He asked me if I could hear anything, even birds singing, and I couldn't. I told him, "It was the sound of the explosion." As if that was meant to explain the 3 years I hadn't listened to him up until now.
Wait, wait, I want to explain. I can explain. I was asleep, and then I woke up in the hospital, and Brad was there. Everyone else I loved had died, but Brad had waited for me like a ghost.
No one knows what that feels like but me.
In the silence after I woke up, I realized it was long after the explosion, and I noticed that nothing was different about the two of us. The great explosion had occurred, and everything was the same inside. I fell asleep in the hospital, and he stayed with me, and became a ghost, because I would've done the same for him, or did.
No one
No one knows what that was like, but me and him. No one will ever know what it meant to wake up that way and see how...
How in the lurches of the endings of a war we'd been waging, nothing at all had changed. No ground had been won, no order restored, no point proven. It was all the same, and bleached white to bone, and so fucking meaningless I understood for the first time the nature of his nihilism. He waited simply for me to wake up, when no one else on Earth existed and I wouldn't wake up, like a princess in a story.
If we behaved as if our words could level cities, I think we'd all wonder more closely what we were really trying to prove. When I woke up, I realized I had been trying to prove that we not only were born to live in the aftermath of the destruction of a beautiful thing, but that we were the beautiful thing which was destroyed, and somehow, I'd... succeeded, God forbid.
The white light carries us away out of habit, and he marks the stones of the upper floors of my house in Denton as a routine. I wanted us to be aftermath, and so we are. We have been, anyway, until last week.
The acceleration stops, and we are surrounded by ruin. The house is destroyed, the brick fireplace a pile on the floor, the carpets burned away, the furniture rotted and covered in a film of sand. Outside, the light is red, or yellow, or any other color of a town burning down. Brad vanishes from under me, and is replaced by the feeling he leaves in a room when he's gone.
I could talk about our destruction for ever and ever, but it wouldn't be worth it. The house is a ruin. The house is a ruin and I don't want to look at it anymore.
Upstairs, I hear Brad's footsteps on the floor above. I run to chase him, and find a shadow of him burned into the wall. I touch it, waiting for it to come to life like Peter's shadow, but it doesn't. The soot of his imprint on the wall is slightly resinous and reminds me of mildew, except we're in the middle of the Nevada desert where almost nothing stays damp that long.
I run down this long corridor without doors, looking for the end, and finding only the confusion of a girl lost in time, and no comprehension of an ending or a beginning. Those things ,after all, are marked in distance, and not...
Wait, Brad, I want to explain.
I got nothing but time, Evie.
I mistook this heartbreak for all the things which came before it, or maybe after.
I don't know what the fuck that means.
Time is all screwed up. Time, distance, and proportion.
You're doing this by the books, now?
I dropped a stone into a well, and physics dictates I should've heard the splash of the stone lost to the depths. But Brad, we echoed first the sound of the splash of the stone, and then realized there was no stone to drop, and then we stood around the well, and cried.
But where did the stone go?
I mistook it for a tragedy, that we never had one. I thought if we wished for it hard enough...
Someone would pick it up in the second act.
Brad explodes, and while exploding becomes the most lurid poet in his heart.
The wreckage of us is all that's left when we've strangled ourselves to nothingness, burned ourselves meaningless and permanent in to the walls, and we have sucked off the bones of one another anything left that might've once been magic. I remember standing in the rubble with him, pawing through the fragments of some life we'd never shared. Our houses had begun life as ruins, long after the aftermath of this moment. It took the poison of how I tried to love him to draw us backward to the time it had all fallen apart; when he'd told me who he really was. The man I never bothered to learn existed.
In the desert inside Brad, we had walked through the char of the neighborhood he once tried to convince me we'd shared, and we didn't speak. He asked me if I could hear anything, even birds singing, and I couldn't. I told him, "It was the sound of the explosion." As if that was meant to explain the 3 years I hadn't listened to him up until now.
Wait, wait, I want to explain. I can explain. I was asleep, and then I woke up in the hospital, and Brad was there. Everyone else I loved had died, but Brad had waited for me like a ghost.
No one knows what that feels like but me.
In the silence after I woke up, I realized it was long after the explosion, and I noticed that nothing was different about the two of us. The great explosion had occurred, and everything was the same inside. I fell asleep in the hospital, and he stayed with me, and became a ghost, because I would've done the same for him, or did.
No one
No one knows what that was like, but me and him. No one will ever know what it meant to wake up that way and see how...
How in the lurches of the endings of a war we'd been waging, nothing at all had changed. No ground had been won, no order restored, no point proven. It was all the same, and bleached white to bone, and so fucking meaningless I understood for the first time the nature of his nihilism. He waited simply for me to wake up, when no one else on Earth existed and I wouldn't wake up, like a princess in a story.
If we behaved as if our words could level cities, I think we'd all wonder more closely what we were really trying to prove. When I woke up, I realized I had been trying to prove that we not only were born to live in the aftermath of the destruction of a beautiful thing, but that we were the beautiful thing which was destroyed, and somehow, I'd... succeeded, God forbid.
The white light carries us away out of habit, and he marks the stones of the upper floors of my house in Denton as a routine. I wanted us to be aftermath, and so we are. We have been, anyway, until last week.
Denton, 2018
Brad sucks hard on the straw of his drink, decorated with a row of red palm trees, resting it on his chest as he lounges on the couch, his ankles crossed at his designer shoes. He sighs like he's had a long day, but we both know he woke up at noon and chased his craving for In-N-Out Burger, and has done little else. I sit down next to him, sighing out my own exhaustion from the day.
"Adam says he wants to get married."
When I tell him my news, he looks up in sudden alarm, and puts his feet down on the floor, tossing back his hair the same length as mine.
"Don't."
The afternoon light cuts in across the living room from the west, creating tangible shafts of light in the dust motes floating by. The light glances off Brad's shoulder and pools near the coffee table. He sets down his drink, the ice within it sloshing around, and we avoid eye contact for the next few seconds.
I see his jaw clench back words he's not saying in profile, the crow's feet around his eyes creasing and uncreasing with an expression between thoughtfulness and hatred. He stares through the room and toward the front door of the house, looking through every layer of reality between us on the couch and where he sees us going someday, together. Like a mirage in the desert, I imagine it gets a little further every day that passes where we don't talk, or we do talk and fight.
This fight has lasted a week, and has been punctuated sporadically with breaks during which we spend the night together.
"You're a little late," I tease him, half to force him to say why he'd insist I don't, and half to tell him that it's no big deal, whatever he wants, and it's not like I love Adam or anything, he's just this guy who thinks he can be as close as we are, Brad, okay? But I know full well at least a third of it stands to make him defensive, for one reason or another. I wait for him to laugh his breathy laugh that says I'm full of shit, but he stays quiet, and his jaw clenches faster.
I want to stand up, throw something across the room, and scream at him, "What do you want me to do, Brad?" I want to break something, or I want to break myself into the girl he's always wishing I am. I want to seamlessly become whoever she is, which will walk us, step-by-step, to the place he's always looking when we talk.
I stay still on the couch and do nothing, and say nothing, because I'm trapped, and so is he. Because I know he's wishing for the same thing. We're always wishing for the same things.
A week ago, the distant look drained from his eyes and he started looking at me for the first time, which I would've been thankful for, if it didn't mean we had been defeated somehow. I tried to tell him everything we were looking at once was still possible, but like couples who stop trying to conceive to spare themselves the inevitable heartbreak, I had to let it go. Doors closed between us, enough to sound like rain falling on a roof. He told me to look at him, right now, so I wandered into the living room where he was finishing his cheeseburger, and he suffered a momentary relapse of purpose by telling me not to marry Adam.
We sit for a moment and try to regain our focus, both of us trying to be together without looking past this moment to the one which might follow it, where we're different than what we are. I told him the other day it feels like we were once engaged and then broke up, only to reconcile years later. It all feels like small tests of limit with Brad. Are we back to where we were supposed to be yet? Are we back there now? How about now?
But the thing is, we were never there, so how could we be back?
In the silence following my joke, I begin to formulate two theories of existence while Brad fishes Nicorette from the pocket of his jeans. Having flirted with quitting, cutting down, and quitting again in the last year, he's now settled on smoking only on the rare occasions he wishes to make a particularly strong statement about how upset he is.
My first theory of reality is that there is a world where Brad and I are happy that we've never been able to find but once. My second is that we are fated to live a normal relationship in reverse, beginning in a place I would describe as platonic volatility, and moving backward through disappointment, betrayal, passion, love, and ending at attraction.
"Why not?" I ask him, knowing full well he's fighting with how to answer that inevitable question.
"Cause you're gonna marry me," he blurts, tucking the gum into his jaw. "You keep saying shit like it doesn't feel like we are, so I said well fuck it then. I'm just gonna marry your ass again and again 'til it sticks."
Until it sticks. Until we can find which theory is real, or penetrate the near-impenetrable universe of togetherness we strive for. Until we are looking at each other. Until I can believe we're married, and he can see we are.
At this point I should say that my struggle to bring this moment to life with words is three times as hard as writing about Adam ever is, and to me it means there's a way Brad and I have never really been in the same room. At this point, I feel like I need to say that there's something...
God, there's just something missing from all this. My sense of purpose, or my sense of beauty. The way I have always chosen to bring Brad to life, or maybe with the way Brad has always been alive for me. Why is this going so wrong? I can't ever say how this feels, to be within arm's reach of him and no closer.
All I can figure is that I am as afraid to write about him, as I am to love him. I'm afraid to travel down the slick umbilicals of us to the warm knot where we reside and try to untie it out loud for all it's denseness and it's sharp corners of nevermind and it's deep needs for each other. Maybe I'm afraid it's too bloody or too sick or too hard.
The truth is anywhere I could find space for Brad to carve out something to keep for ourselves, I did. I hooked barbs into his heart, connected with heavy ropes which I attached to my own, looping them around things we hated or loved, strangling things which were supposed to grow. Because he's mine. He's something I understand, and a way I understood myself. And I don't want to let him go, but I'm running out of ways I can see it's possible to keep him. I did all this at the expense of our ability to breathe.
"Evie?" Brad asks me, when he sees I've started to cry. His eyes usually sharp and bird-like are cautious, and almost gentle. He is reaching out to me across the pool of afternoon light, acting like a spotlight on a stage for us, and I can see all the blonde hairs on the ridge of his hand, and the thick of his forearm . I can feel within him all the low animals which forced his hand across that divide; every wolf mistaken for a dog, every prince-turned-coke-dealer.
I take his hand and he pulls me across the couch. The distance I cross from where he's a boy who could never mean what he says to someone with the will to end a human life seems much shorter in practice than it does in my mind. Our fights travel that same distance - we begin with a mess of our words and they give way, in the end, to this place.
Do you remember when you thought the best album you'd ever heard was over, but they granted you just one more song? Do you remember it coming on softly enough to convince you it was your ears playing tricks on you?
Yeah, Evie, I remember.
We must've been together.
And it must've been like this, after school, and almost time for mom and dad to get home.
But the house is unfamiliar, the way a memory stolen is unfamiliar, and never sounds like something I would do.
I never would've...
See, I never would've just been in love with Brad, without trying also to test that love by destroying it. I couldn't just have him, not like this. It couldn't be this simple, it couldn't feel...
"I love you," he says to me, his mouth an inch from mine, his kiss slow and almost afraid. And hey, maybe it's something I could be proud of; being the girl so dead set on self-destruction that even Brad is terrified of me. So the last song on the album starts, quiet after the long pause of our silence.
The doors of our possible lives open on quiet hinges while I'm sitting in his lap. If we can stay here, and we can fuck forever and keep at bay the guilt that I didn't let us stay here to begin with, we'll be okay. If we can stay here without any problems being used for evidence against ever belonging in this place, we'll be okay. We'll be okay if the album doesn't end. We'll be okay if the sun never sets. If I ignore this knot inside me which makes us impossible to survive.
I know how to survive, Evie. I taught you how, remember?
Yeah, Brad, I remember.
Don't marry Adam. Just stay here with me.
"Do you feel that?" I ask him, and I open my eyes to see his, wide and blue.
"Yeah," he breathes.
"Adam says he wants to get married."
When I tell him my news, he looks up in sudden alarm, and puts his feet down on the floor, tossing back his hair the same length as mine.
"Don't."
The afternoon light cuts in across the living room from the west, creating tangible shafts of light in the dust motes floating by. The light glances off Brad's shoulder and pools near the coffee table. He sets down his drink, the ice within it sloshing around, and we avoid eye contact for the next few seconds.
I see his jaw clench back words he's not saying in profile, the crow's feet around his eyes creasing and uncreasing with an expression between thoughtfulness and hatred. He stares through the room and toward the front door of the house, looking through every layer of reality between us on the couch and where he sees us going someday, together. Like a mirage in the desert, I imagine it gets a little further every day that passes where we don't talk, or we do talk and fight.
This fight has lasted a week, and has been punctuated sporadically with breaks during which we spend the night together.
"You're a little late," I tease him, half to force him to say why he'd insist I don't, and half to tell him that it's no big deal, whatever he wants, and it's not like I love Adam or anything, he's just this guy who thinks he can be as close as we are, Brad, okay? But I know full well at least a third of it stands to make him defensive, for one reason or another. I wait for him to laugh his breathy laugh that says I'm full of shit, but he stays quiet, and his jaw clenches faster.
I want to stand up, throw something across the room, and scream at him, "What do you want me to do, Brad?" I want to break something, or I want to break myself into the girl he's always wishing I am. I want to seamlessly become whoever she is, which will walk us, step-by-step, to the place he's always looking when we talk.
I stay still on the couch and do nothing, and say nothing, because I'm trapped, and so is he. Because I know he's wishing for the same thing. We're always wishing for the same things.
A week ago, the distant look drained from his eyes and he started looking at me for the first time, which I would've been thankful for, if it didn't mean we had been defeated somehow. I tried to tell him everything we were looking at once was still possible, but like couples who stop trying to conceive to spare themselves the inevitable heartbreak, I had to let it go. Doors closed between us, enough to sound like rain falling on a roof. He told me to look at him, right now, so I wandered into the living room where he was finishing his cheeseburger, and he suffered a momentary relapse of purpose by telling me not to marry Adam.
We sit for a moment and try to regain our focus, both of us trying to be together without looking past this moment to the one which might follow it, where we're different than what we are. I told him the other day it feels like we were once engaged and then broke up, only to reconcile years later. It all feels like small tests of limit with Brad. Are we back to where we were supposed to be yet? Are we back there now? How about now?
But the thing is, we were never there, so how could we be back?
In the silence following my joke, I begin to formulate two theories of existence while Brad fishes Nicorette from the pocket of his jeans. Having flirted with quitting, cutting down, and quitting again in the last year, he's now settled on smoking only on the rare occasions he wishes to make a particularly strong statement about how upset he is.
My first theory of reality is that there is a world where Brad and I are happy that we've never been able to find but once. My second is that we are fated to live a normal relationship in reverse, beginning in a place I would describe as platonic volatility, and moving backward through disappointment, betrayal, passion, love, and ending at attraction.
"Why not?" I ask him, knowing full well he's fighting with how to answer that inevitable question.
"Cause you're gonna marry me," he blurts, tucking the gum into his jaw. "You keep saying shit like it doesn't feel like we are, so I said well fuck it then. I'm just gonna marry your ass again and again 'til it sticks."
Until it sticks. Until we can find which theory is real, or penetrate the near-impenetrable universe of togetherness we strive for. Until we are looking at each other. Until I can believe we're married, and he can see we are.
At this point I should say that my struggle to bring this moment to life with words is three times as hard as writing about Adam ever is, and to me it means there's a way Brad and I have never really been in the same room. At this point, I feel like I need to say that there's something...
God, there's just something missing from all this. My sense of purpose, or my sense of beauty. The way I have always chosen to bring Brad to life, or maybe with the way Brad has always been alive for me. Why is this going so wrong? I can't ever say how this feels, to be within arm's reach of him and no closer.
All I can figure is that I am as afraid to write about him, as I am to love him. I'm afraid to travel down the slick umbilicals of us to the warm knot where we reside and try to untie it out loud for all it's denseness and it's sharp corners of nevermind and it's deep needs for each other. Maybe I'm afraid it's too bloody or too sick or too hard.
The truth is anywhere I could find space for Brad to carve out something to keep for ourselves, I did. I hooked barbs into his heart, connected with heavy ropes which I attached to my own, looping them around things we hated or loved, strangling things which were supposed to grow. Because he's mine. He's something I understand, and a way I understood myself. And I don't want to let him go, but I'm running out of ways I can see it's possible to keep him. I did all this at the expense of our ability to breathe.
"Evie?" Brad asks me, when he sees I've started to cry. His eyes usually sharp and bird-like are cautious, and almost gentle. He is reaching out to me across the pool of afternoon light, acting like a spotlight on a stage for us, and I can see all the blonde hairs on the ridge of his hand, and the thick of his forearm . I can feel within him all the low animals which forced his hand across that divide; every wolf mistaken for a dog, every prince-turned-coke-dealer.
I take his hand and he pulls me across the couch. The distance I cross from where he's a boy who could never mean what he says to someone with the will to end a human life seems much shorter in practice than it does in my mind. Our fights travel that same distance - we begin with a mess of our words and they give way, in the end, to this place.
Do you remember when you thought the best album you'd ever heard was over, but they granted you just one more song? Do you remember it coming on softly enough to convince you it was your ears playing tricks on you?
Yeah, Evie, I remember.
We must've been together.
And it must've been like this, after school, and almost time for mom and dad to get home.
But the house is unfamiliar, the way a memory stolen is unfamiliar, and never sounds like something I would do.
I never would've...
See, I never would've just been in love with Brad, without trying also to test that love by destroying it. I couldn't just have him, not like this. It couldn't be this simple, it couldn't feel...
"I love you," he says to me, his mouth an inch from mine, his kiss slow and almost afraid. And hey, maybe it's something I could be proud of; being the girl so dead set on self-destruction that even Brad is terrified of me. So the last song on the album starts, quiet after the long pause of our silence.
The doors of our possible lives open on quiet hinges while I'm sitting in his lap. If we can stay here, and we can fuck forever and keep at bay the guilt that I didn't let us stay here to begin with, we'll be okay. If we can stay here without any problems being used for evidence against ever belonging in this place, we'll be okay. We'll be okay if the album doesn't end. We'll be okay if the sun never sets. If I ignore this knot inside me which makes us impossible to survive.
I know how to survive, Evie. I taught you how, remember?
Yeah, Brad, I remember.
Don't marry Adam. Just stay here with me.
"Do you feel that?" I ask him, and I open my eyes to see his, wide and blue.
"Yeah," he breathes.
Saturday, January 13, 2018
Blue Suit 1: Christmas Eve
Christmas Eve, 2017
I put Adam's face in my hands, resting his jaw against the heel of my palms, and feel his five o'clock shadow rough since he has skipped shaving for two days. The smile on his face is a lazy one, because he is exhausted and full of mischief.
"I got you something else, Doll," he confesses, out here on the fire escape.
My gift from the Gray Family this year was a fire escape, nailed outside my window, and leading down into the bayou on an iron staircase painted flat and rusty black. It creeps up to the third floor, doubling back on itself, and I am standing over the third stair where Adam is lounging, the creases in his slacks finally giving out in the last hours of the night.
His tie is loose, the starch of his shirt wilted, and I've had my hands in his hair too much for it to have kept the shape he's tortured it into with his black comb. Inside, the Victrola is playing Sam Cook in the unseasonable heat, and Adam is wearing a blue suit for what I know is the first of three times this winter.
"You did not," I argue, and he rises to his slow feet, holding his glass in his hand. While we sway, the grating of the fire escape creaks with our weight. The gold light from my room spills out over the darkness of the backyard, lighting him in a glowing square and half a ghostly moon.
"You calling me a liar?" he all but drawls, the ice clinking in his glass while he tries to make me dance.
"Yes," I push him backward, and he laughs as I climb back through the window into my bedroom.
I cross the floor passing all my furniture but feeling like a guest there the way I always do in my bedroom. Gray House is changeable enough that one could never really know every inch of a room the way we begin to know the houses of our childhood, but there's something comforting about that which reminds me more solidly of home than anything else ever has; I was always convinced when I was young that my house could open with gaping wide trap doors and hidden alcoves at any moment.
It means the magic I had hoped for there, is real here.
The threadbare rugs barely mask the official sound of Adam's shoes as he follows me to the velvet and cane barrel chairs on either side of my salon table where in the warm light I pour another drink.
I'm barefoot, wearing old yoga pants and a t-shirt for pajamas, and freshly showered. The day's panties and bra are laying next to the bed, in a pile of laundry I know Dean won't collect until the 26th.
Adam sits in the chair opposite me, and it creaks slightly like the fire escape. It's the arms that creak. I know the names of everything in here, like salon table and cane barrel chair and wood accent sofa because I knew someday I'd have to write it all down. Adam leans his wilting suit against the stained velvet back of the chair the color of cheap wine, and sighs at the ceiling. He never thinks about naming anything any name besides Evelyn. Everything else is my job.
"Well... Eve..." he ponders, kicking his shoes off of with two soft thunks. "How was your day?"
The Christmas Eve before I came home, Adam spent alone in an empty house smoking cigarettes and thinking about his future. He told me about it once, but I can't remember what conclusions he might've drawn. As I watch him now, I can imagine he knew I was coming home in one week, and therefore all his secrets were about to be unraveled. I can imagine his combination of fear and arousal at the idea our clothes would suddenly be allowed to smell like the other, that people would listen to us making love (with any luck), and that he would very shortly look incredibly stupid for an indeterminate amount of time.
The Christmas Eve before I came home, I also spent alone, and writing. I wrote about my solitude the same way I wrote about my feelings the year after, and the year after. Every Christmas since, Adam has tried to the best of his ability to preserve something for us, but that's in his nature. Because in many ways we're still newlyweds, he's always taken each moment between us as seriously as a virgin bride, shadowboxing each thing we share, writing carefully it's date beneath it, smashing it onto glass for later study and revelation. He's been giddy in his new life, since I came home, and careful; every day his actions underlined with the stark punctuation of, "EVELYN!"
Until tonight, when he is sagging drunk and comfortable in my cane barrel chair, in his socks.
"It was wonderful, Adam," I tell him softly. "How was yours?"
Staring at the ceiling, I see a tear escape from the corner of his eye, which he brushes fast away, and clears his throat gruffly. Maybe he's thinking what I'm thinking: that there's a sense between us tonight of having been home... for who knows how long now?
"Well, it's been five years, Evie," he answers for me. "I think I'm finally ready to tell you what I want for Christmas."
I sip the alcohol.
"A divorce?"
He laughs ragged, and lights a cigarette.
Of course it's not fair, that he's in my room. The same way his room transforms me into something which belongs to him, my room does the same. He is now a maudlin version of himself, struggling under the weight of an oppressive sensory overload. Here in my room, the nest of all his obsessions, he doesn't know whether to behave normally, or begin stuffing things into his pockets for later. Instead, he pulls me to the fire escape to dance, gets drunk, and stares at the ceiling while he cries.
My phone on the salon table flashes an alert that I have an incoming message from Jack. For 30 minutes, he's been condescending for no reason, inane and meandering enough I'm sure he's drunk, and insulting to the point I've constricted bile in my throat.
"What does he want?" Adam asks, scooping up my phone with little ceremony. He enters the code to unlock my phone and reads quickly, a grin blooming over his face.
"Oh, you must show this to Improvisation," he gushes to me, and cackles rough in his throat. "I'm an experiment to be ended, is that right, Evelyn? The travails of an author, oh woe."
He jibes at Jack for a few more minutes, explaining his lack of understanding as a fundamental defect of character.
"I think there are men who strive toward knowledge and others whom are threatened by it."
By the way he says "threatened" I can tell he means sexually. I can tell he's talking from his experience as all men, that there are some inside him who don't wish to know anything, actually, but rather destroy that which is unknown in even the most delicate sense, in order to master it according to their own ideals.
"To hammer all nails into the leather of the world and nevermind the holes," he goes on.
There is a part of Adam who is maybe solely the organ of his sex. Not an animal thing, but a creature of terrible pragmatism - a logician who organizes the world into the complementary puzzle pieces of copulation. Sword and wound. Victory and acceptance. Supremacy and submission. Pen and lid. Bucket and well. Key and lock. Some damned electrician looking always for the positive and negative charge. And maybe that exists in all men, this strange monster of single purpose, inelegant and violent. But as always, that monster is one I can reverse and counter in Adam, and not in Jack. In Jack, he's just...
"Despicable," Adam finishes, and I have not heard most of his speech, but it was one I knew already anyway.
"He's boring," I tell him, nodding to my phone as if Jack lived inside it. "I'll bet you he never replies to me."
Adam slouches further into the chair, smug and self-satisfied, and drags hard on his cigarette.
"Evelyn, I can assure you that no matter what Jack has ever said to you, he has never replied," he muses, pressing his fingers to his temple as if the statement were rote. The patterns in the waves of his hair match the unfolding flowers on the wallpaper just beyond him, shadowed by ivy.
The ivy grows in my room of it's own accord, or possibly of my accord, if there's a difference. It's grown wild enough inside that I have lost things beneath it like my trunk of blankets, and my box of records I consider second-string. Nestled into the darkness of the ivy are small jars lit from beneath, and the glow they radiate is a cool purplish-red. Like somewhere between flowers or lanterns, they cast the edges of Adam's frame into soft focus, as if we're sitting in a garden with lights along the path. It's a pleasant enough glow that people often fail to remark on the jars containing human hearts, fished from the cool murk of the Edisto River.
Everything else in my room are baubles a hundred shades of pink champagne; a color I adopted as my own because Adam forced me there with his graphite suits and sheets of antique paper. Beneath the pink floral myriad are the army-green resignations of my true nature, and boy's sneakers, and journals full of my thoughts that all capitulated to this soft place of memory. I was once a boy with him, in a Garden of storied antiquity, until Adam forced me to violent girlhood by saying
"I would like us to be married, actually."
I realize he's asking me for this, for Christmas. I look up at his face, and I see him avoiding mine. He studies his drink, his heavy brow furrowed dark against his skin, the tone of which has always evaded my description. He wilts in his suit, and pretends to study his bourbon, while I gather his meaning from what he has not said.
"We are," I remind him, my voice flat, and he nods toward the rug at his feet.
"Mm. Yes. We did marry, five years ago."
"Four years ago," I remind him, pressing him not to round up. "Four years and eleven months."
"Four years, ten months, and ten days," he counters, raising one single eyebrow in my direction. "And seventeen hours, but you have clearly not been counting."
"I was not," I snap.
"At that time, we were married," he continues, ignoring me. "We were married by Clyde, in the Garden. I would like you to be seen by a priest, or perhaps a Justice of the Peace. I would like it on paper."
I stare at him long enough he looks up, sheepish, the tips of his ears reddening under his hair. His left eye is squinted at me with the look of his stern consideration, but his mouth is raised in a thin and hopeful smile.
The line he's traversing with this reckless and bourbon-soaked frankness is an unspoken divide between us into which all other relationships are destined to fall. Being Adam of Eden means having a strange and sexual fixation with that wholly human institution: Marriage. The dedication of someone to another, under the eyes of their creator, belonging to one another in soul and flesh. He's breathed hot into my ear enough times that couples all over the world were donning our clothes, saying our vows, and undressing each other in celebration of our wedding night.
Of course, I'm just as guilty. Being made for Adam means I've always wanted something to show for it, and it was that which I've always had: Marriage. A rite of our symbiosis, detailed and mimicked the world over. Marrying him is embracing the hope that love has meaning to the continuance of life. So I tell him to slow down, and say it to me again.
Frozen like that, the look between us continues while I cycle through what I'm sure looks like horror, then shock, before settling on suspicion.
We'd had the rite, in the proper place for us, and with the proper deities in attendance: Presided over by Death, witnessed by Dreams and Innocence, celebrated in the place of our birth. But now, he's saying...
"You want to do it like everyone else," I test him, my voice now low and cautious, and he reaches for the bottle to refill our glasses as we speak our blasphemy.
"Yes," he agrees.
Yes, Dionysus is leaving the concubines of Olympus to drive to Topeka and fuck in the cold and stale interior of a Tercel parked outside a Denny's. Yes, the mortician is asking to be embalmed although he's still alive. Yes, Adam is asking me to elope to a chapel where Elvis will have us exchange rings. And he wants to because he's Adam, yes, but before that, he's a man.
"Nothing too fancy," he assures me. "I'll handle everything. You'll just need to find a dress."
Find a dress, sure. I'd only have to look as far as the Modern Bride magazine he has stuffed guilty under his mattress, the pages shellacked in his semen with twice the fervor he's ever shown a Hustler. After all, we were made to do this; made to get married, made to fuck, made to make babies, and made to need the other to do it. It makes sense, on a biological level, and before I can really think about it, I tell him yes.
I put Adam's face in my hands, resting his jaw against the heel of my palms, and feel his five o'clock shadow rough since he has skipped shaving for two days. The smile on his face is a lazy one, because he is exhausted and full of mischief.
"I got you something else, Doll," he confesses, out here on the fire escape.
My gift from the Gray Family this year was a fire escape, nailed outside my window, and leading down into the bayou on an iron staircase painted flat and rusty black. It creeps up to the third floor, doubling back on itself, and I am standing over the third stair where Adam is lounging, the creases in his slacks finally giving out in the last hours of the night.
His tie is loose, the starch of his shirt wilted, and I've had my hands in his hair too much for it to have kept the shape he's tortured it into with his black comb. Inside, the Victrola is playing Sam Cook in the unseasonable heat, and Adam is wearing a blue suit for what I know is the first of three times this winter.
"You did not," I argue, and he rises to his slow feet, holding his glass in his hand. While we sway, the grating of the fire escape creaks with our weight. The gold light from my room spills out over the darkness of the backyard, lighting him in a glowing square and half a ghostly moon.
"You calling me a liar?" he all but drawls, the ice clinking in his glass while he tries to make me dance.
"Yes," I push him backward, and he laughs as I climb back through the window into my bedroom.
I cross the floor passing all my furniture but feeling like a guest there the way I always do in my bedroom. Gray House is changeable enough that one could never really know every inch of a room the way we begin to know the houses of our childhood, but there's something comforting about that which reminds me more solidly of home than anything else ever has; I was always convinced when I was young that my house could open with gaping wide trap doors and hidden alcoves at any moment.
It means the magic I had hoped for there, is real here.
The threadbare rugs barely mask the official sound of Adam's shoes as he follows me to the velvet and cane barrel chairs on either side of my salon table where in the warm light I pour another drink.
I'm barefoot, wearing old yoga pants and a t-shirt for pajamas, and freshly showered. The day's panties and bra are laying next to the bed, in a pile of laundry I know Dean won't collect until the 26th.
Adam sits in the chair opposite me, and it creaks slightly like the fire escape. It's the arms that creak. I know the names of everything in here, like salon table and cane barrel chair and wood accent sofa because I knew someday I'd have to write it all down. Adam leans his wilting suit against the stained velvet back of the chair the color of cheap wine, and sighs at the ceiling. He never thinks about naming anything any name besides Evelyn. Everything else is my job.
"Well... Eve..." he ponders, kicking his shoes off of with two soft thunks. "How was your day?"
The Christmas Eve before I came home, Adam spent alone in an empty house smoking cigarettes and thinking about his future. He told me about it once, but I can't remember what conclusions he might've drawn. As I watch him now, I can imagine he knew I was coming home in one week, and therefore all his secrets were about to be unraveled. I can imagine his combination of fear and arousal at the idea our clothes would suddenly be allowed to smell like the other, that people would listen to us making love (with any luck), and that he would very shortly look incredibly stupid for an indeterminate amount of time.
The Christmas Eve before I came home, I also spent alone, and writing. I wrote about my solitude the same way I wrote about my feelings the year after, and the year after. Every Christmas since, Adam has tried to the best of his ability to preserve something for us, but that's in his nature. Because in many ways we're still newlyweds, he's always taken each moment between us as seriously as a virgin bride, shadowboxing each thing we share, writing carefully it's date beneath it, smashing it onto glass for later study and revelation. He's been giddy in his new life, since I came home, and careful; every day his actions underlined with the stark punctuation of, "EVELYN!"
Until tonight, when he is sagging drunk and comfortable in my cane barrel chair, in his socks.
"It was wonderful, Adam," I tell him softly. "How was yours?"
Staring at the ceiling, I see a tear escape from the corner of his eye, which he brushes fast away, and clears his throat gruffly. Maybe he's thinking what I'm thinking: that there's a sense between us tonight of having been home... for who knows how long now?
"Well, it's been five years, Evie," he answers for me. "I think I'm finally ready to tell you what I want for Christmas."
I sip the alcohol.
"A divorce?"
He laughs ragged, and lights a cigarette.
Of course it's not fair, that he's in my room. The same way his room transforms me into something which belongs to him, my room does the same. He is now a maudlin version of himself, struggling under the weight of an oppressive sensory overload. Here in my room, the nest of all his obsessions, he doesn't know whether to behave normally, or begin stuffing things into his pockets for later. Instead, he pulls me to the fire escape to dance, gets drunk, and stares at the ceiling while he cries.
My phone on the salon table flashes an alert that I have an incoming message from Jack. For 30 minutes, he's been condescending for no reason, inane and meandering enough I'm sure he's drunk, and insulting to the point I've constricted bile in my throat.
"What does he want?" Adam asks, scooping up my phone with little ceremony. He enters the code to unlock my phone and reads quickly, a grin blooming over his face.
"Oh, you must show this to Improvisation," he gushes to me, and cackles rough in his throat. "I'm an experiment to be ended, is that right, Evelyn? The travails of an author, oh woe."
He jibes at Jack for a few more minutes, explaining his lack of understanding as a fundamental defect of character.
"I think there are men who strive toward knowledge and others whom are threatened by it."
By the way he says "threatened" I can tell he means sexually. I can tell he's talking from his experience as all men, that there are some inside him who don't wish to know anything, actually, but rather destroy that which is unknown in even the most delicate sense, in order to master it according to their own ideals.
"To hammer all nails into the leather of the world and nevermind the holes," he goes on.
There is a part of Adam who is maybe solely the organ of his sex. Not an animal thing, but a creature of terrible pragmatism - a logician who organizes the world into the complementary puzzle pieces of copulation. Sword and wound. Victory and acceptance. Supremacy and submission. Pen and lid. Bucket and well. Key and lock. Some damned electrician looking always for the positive and negative charge. And maybe that exists in all men, this strange monster of single purpose, inelegant and violent. But as always, that monster is one I can reverse and counter in Adam, and not in Jack. In Jack, he's just...
"Despicable," Adam finishes, and I have not heard most of his speech, but it was one I knew already anyway.
"He's boring," I tell him, nodding to my phone as if Jack lived inside it. "I'll bet you he never replies to me."
Adam slouches further into the chair, smug and self-satisfied, and drags hard on his cigarette.
"Evelyn, I can assure you that no matter what Jack has ever said to you, he has never replied," he muses, pressing his fingers to his temple as if the statement were rote. The patterns in the waves of his hair match the unfolding flowers on the wallpaper just beyond him, shadowed by ivy.
The ivy grows in my room of it's own accord, or possibly of my accord, if there's a difference. It's grown wild enough inside that I have lost things beneath it like my trunk of blankets, and my box of records I consider second-string. Nestled into the darkness of the ivy are small jars lit from beneath, and the glow they radiate is a cool purplish-red. Like somewhere between flowers or lanterns, they cast the edges of Adam's frame into soft focus, as if we're sitting in a garden with lights along the path. It's a pleasant enough glow that people often fail to remark on the jars containing human hearts, fished from the cool murk of the Edisto River.
Everything else in my room are baubles a hundred shades of pink champagne; a color I adopted as my own because Adam forced me there with his graphite suits and sheets of antique paper. Beneath the pink floral myriad are the army-green resignations of my true nature, and boy's sneakers, and journals full of my thoughts that all capitulated to this soft place of memory. I was once a boy with him, in a Garden of storied antiquity, until Adam forced me to violent girlhood by saying
"I would like us to be married, actually."
I realize he's asking me for this, for Christmas. I look up at his face, and I see him avoiding mine. He studies his drink, his heavy brow furrowed dark against his skin, the tone of which has always evaded my description. He wilts in his suit, and pretends to study his bourbon, while I gather his meaning from what he has not said.
"We are," I remind him, my voice flat, and he nods toward the rug at his feet.
"Mm. Yes. We did marry, five years ago."
"Four years ago," I remind him, pressing him not to round up. "Four years and eleven months."
"Four years, ten months, and ten days," he counters, raising one single eyebrow in my direction. "And seventeen hours, but you have clearly not been counting."
"I was not," I snap.
"At that time, we were married," he continues, ignoring me. "We were married by Clyde, in the Garden. I would like you to be seen by a priest, or perhaps a Justice of the Peace. I would like it on paper."
I stare at him long enough he looks up, sheepish, the tips of his ears reddening under his hair. His left eye is squinted at me with the look of his stern consideration, but his mouth is raised in a thin and hopeful smile.
The line he's traversing with this reckless and bourbon-soaked frankness is an unspoken divide between us into which all other relationships are destined to fall. Being Adam of Eden means having a strange and sexual fixation with that wholly human institution: Marriage. The dedication of someone to another, under the eyes of their creator, belonging to one another in soul and flesh. He's breathed hot into my ear enough times that couples all over the world were donning our clothes, saying our vows, and undressing each other in celebration of our wedding night.
Of course, I'm just as guilty. Being made for Adam means I've always wanted something to show for it, and it was that which I've always had: Marriage. A rite of our symbiosis, detailed and mimicked the world over. Marrying him is embracing the hope that love has meaning to the continuance of life. So I tell him to slow down, and say it to me again.
Frozen like that, the look between us continues while I cycle through what I'm sure looks like horror, then shock, before settling on suspicion.
We'd had the rite, in the proper place for us, and with the proper deities in attendance: Presided over by Death, witnessed by Dreams and Innocence, celebrated in the place of our birth. But now, he's saying...
"You want to do it like everyone else," I test him, my voice now low and cautious, and he reaches for the bottle to refill our glasses as we speak our blasphemy.
"Yes," he agrees.
Yes, Dionysus is leaving the concubines of Olympus to drive to Topeka and fuck in the cold and stale interior of a Tercel parked outside a Denny's. Yes, the mortician is asking to be embalmed although he's still alive. Yes, Adam is asking me to elope to a chapel where Elvis will have us exchange rings. And he wants to because he's Adam, yes, but before that, he's a man.
"Nothing too fancy," he assures me. "I'll handle everything. You'll just need to find a dress."
Find a dress, sure. I'd only have to look as far as the Modern Bride magazine he has stuffed guilty under his mattress, the pages shellacked in his semen with twice the fervor he's ever shown a Hustler. After all, we were made to do this; made to get married, made to fuck, made to make babies, and made to need the other to do it. It makes sense, on a biological level, and before I can really think about it, I tell him yes.
Monday, January 1, 2018
Christmas Flood
The morning of Christmas dawns late, the blue light seeping cold through the smoke drifting from wet buildings quenched by winter all over the realities Gray House touches. What isn't quiet by natures has been quieted to ruin, the great factory of us silent for this one day when nothing moves.
Most of the rooms on the clock are empty, all of us scattered to the four corners of creation to find what little dignity we have left after Yule, and all the things we've done in the last week to touch God or each other; to feel alive or more dead than possible given our states of being.
There's discarded panties floating in the courtyard fountain, a sad relic of a time designated by propriety. Nick wanders from room to room, bumming cigarettes. Dean collects water-damaged playing cards and sodden papers that were once stacked on Adam's desk. The new year is demanding us to reconcile what we are to some new definition. The new year is damning us with it's impeding deadline to find something more, pushing us ever onward.
Nick walks as if he knows it's a war-zone, and Dean walks as if he does not.
The contents of my room, once peeling off of itself in dreary exhaustion, is now shellacked with powder blue house paint, sticking the leaves of the ivy that creeps the walls to flush with the plaster. My clothes are mostly ruined, in places where it's pooled in thick and hardened shells of cooling lava. What wasn't ruined by paint has been ruined by a flood which swept most of the delicate ambiance of the second floor away: the dust and dry shuffles of noise, the sheaves of paper, the ephemera of living, the laundry and dried leaves.
Rosie looks at me, her expression hopefully sheepish, bordering on the mischief of a child.
"This is my fault," she admits, the floodwaters she called forth now subsided.
Now the mud-filled house has been touched with the murky waters of God in which she's been lost, but I have a moment to wish that as much as God gives, he also takes away. Maybe this has made a mess, but maybe it's also cleared away the muck which held us tied fast to this world like a damsel tied to the tracks before an oncoming train.
Maybe she washed it away, or the fires burned it out, or the cities we built our hearts on will all fall, one by one, now that there is nothing stopping us. And I'm bitter, because I was only just starting to make sense of things, but Rosie and her cloying nonsense seem to always sense when I'm placing rubber bands around the house, to get it to line up just so. When she sees me with my level out, measuring bookshelves, she comes with a flood and makes me start from nothing, and nowhere.
Yule was a beautiful ruin. Instead of fumbling clothes off in a crowded room with candlelight and averted glances, we lit the city on fire, and chased each other down the dark streets, feelings in our hearts without name. In mine was a gentle bitterness, touched with a resignation and excitement that the resignation could exist. Resignations of this kind are good; they mean there's such a thing as "forever."
Near the National Library in Cairo, I cried in a stolen car as flames crept along the curves of the roof like a hand caressing the stone. Yes, Evelyn, there is such a thing as Forever. Yes, Virginia.
My hair has been violet-tinted black since October, and on Yule, the ends were a washed-out pink, as if some revolution had occurred. As if there are some parts of our nature inherent which we cannot escape. As if I'm not capable of carrying the stone of Annik in my heart forever, and must in time become this... graceless animal. It's been a year since I last shaved my head, but on Yule it felt like my body remembered. Annik is a place the punk boys of me ran to be accepted in something soft and heavy and feminine.
I watched Matthew run into the street from the library, his black hair greasy and hanging in his face. He carried a backpack with him from which he withdrew bottles of alcohol he stuffed with rags and threw onto cars along the street. The flames spread liquid over their hoods. His denim vest hung loose from his ribs, and it caught the firelight through the arm hole when he froze, seeing me sitting in the car that was to be his next target. He hesitated mid-throw, and I saw him mouth my name from where he stood in the street.
He ran to the car and climbed into the passenger seat.
"I have not seen anyone else," he told me, his breath heavy and shallow in his chest. "You are first."
"I don't know where the flag is," I told him immediately, reminding him that whatever game he and these Lost Boys have been playing, I have not been told the rules and therefore can't help him.
"You are not on my team," he grinned at me, and tucked his backpack between his knees.
The normal light pollution of the Cairo metropolitan area was corrected by the rolling blackouts created by damage to the power lines, and worsened again by the orange glow in the sky at the horizon from the fires. I drove with the simple objective of finding a building not burning to stay in, and drove past dozens of hotels now rotted and hollowed like pumpkins charred and black.
"I hit these this afternoon," Matthew explained the dark shells of hotels.
"Is there anywhere left?" I asked, and he shrugged and laughed wide enough for me to see the gap in his teeth.
Maybe there's nowhere left. Maybe the last place we have to plunge is the abyss of unformed thought and possible places we know the moat carried inside it. Maybe it was useless to try and find one pristine place in the city Matthew had essentially destroyed with 5 hours and a few bottles of alcohol. Maybe that's all it takes is 5 hours alone with the devil to stop existing, or find out you never have.
We fucked, but that hardly matters now.
We found each other on Yule, and then on Christmas Eve, Adam promised to marry me, and the squealing brakes engaged on the tracks and rained sparks into the underbrush and....
I don't know, I guess things got quiet, and then they never got loud again. And I got tired of everything falling apart.
Most of the rooms on the clock are empty, all of us scattered to the four corners of creation to find what little dignity we have left after Yule, and all the things we've done in the last week to touch God or each other; to feel alive or more dead than possible given our states of being.
There's discarded panties floating in the courtyard fountain, a sad relic of a time designated by propriety. Nick wanders from room to room, bumming cigarettes. Dean collects water-damaged playing cards and sodden papers that were once stacked on Adam's desk. The new year is demanding us to reconcile what we are to some new definition. The new year is damning us with it's impeding deadline to find something more, pushing us ever onward.
Nick walks as if he knows it's a war-zone, and Dean walks as if he does not.
The contents of my room, once peeling off of itself in dreary exhaustion, is now shellacked with powder blue house paint, sticking the leaves of the ivy that creeps the walls to flush with the plaster. My clothes are mostly ruined, in places where it's pooled in thick and hardened shells of cooling lava. What wasn't ruined by paint has been ruined by a flood which swept most of the delicate ambiance of the second floor away: the dust and dry shuffles of noise, the sheaves of paper, the ephemera of living, the laundry and dried leaves.
Rosie looks at me, her expression hopefully sheepish, bordering on the mischief of a child.
"This is my fault," she admits, the floodwaters she called forth now subsided.
Now the mud-filled house has been touched with the murky waters of God in which she's been lost, but I have a moment to wish that as much as God gives, he also takes away. Maybe this has made a mess, but maybe it's also cleared away the muck which held us tied fast to this world like a damsel tied to the tracks before an oncoming train.
Maybe she washed it away, or the fires burned it out, or the cities we built our hearts on will all fall, one by one, now that there is nothing stopping us. And I'm bitter, because I was only just starting to make sense of things, but Rosie and her cloying nonsense seem to always sense when I'm placing rubber bands around the house, to get it to line up just so. When she sees me with my level out, measuring bookshelves, she comes with a flood and makes me start from nothing, and nowhere.
Yule was a beautiful ruin. Instead of fumbling clothes off in a crowded room with candlelight and averted glances, we lit the city on fire, and chased each other down the dark streets, feelings in our hearts without name. In mine was a gentle bitterness, touched with a resignation and excitement that the resignation could exist. Resignations of this kind are good; they mean there's such a thing as "forever."
Near the National Library in Cairo, I cried in a stolen car as flames crept along the curves of the roof like a hand caressing the stone. Yes, Evelyn, there is such a thing as Forever. Yes, Virginia.
My hair has been violet-tinted black since October, and on Yule, the ends were a washed-out pink, as if some revolution had occurred. As if there are some parts of our nature inherent which we cannot escape. As if I'm not capable of carrying the stone of Annik in my heart forever, and must in time become this... graceless animal. It's been a year since I last shaved my head, but on Yule it felt like my body remembered. Annik is a place the punk boys of me ran to be accepted in something soft and heavy and feminine.
I watched Matthew run into the street from the library, his black hair greasy and hanging in his face. He carried a backpack with him from which he withdrew bottles of alcohol he stuffed with rags and threw onto cars along the street. The flames spread liquid over their hoods. His denim vest hung loose from his ribs, and it caught the firelight through the arm hole when he froze, seeing me sitting in the car that was to be his next target. He hesitated mid-throw, and I saw him mouth my name from where he stood in the street.
He ran to the car and climbed into the passenger seat.
"I have not seen anyone else," he told me, his breath heavy and shallow in his chest. "You are first."
"I don't know where the flag is," I told him immediately, reminding him that whatever game he and these Lost Boys have been playing, I have not been told the rules and therefore can't help him.
"You are not on my team," he grinned at me, and tucked his backpack between his knees.
The normal light pollution of the Cairo metropolitan area was corrected by the rolling blackouts created by damage to the power lines, and worsened again by the orange glow in the sky at the horizon from the fires. I drove with the simple objective of finding a building not burning to stay in, and drove past dozens of hotels now rotted and hollowed like pumpkins charred and black.
"I hit these this afternoon," Matthew explained the dark shells of hotels.
"Is there anywhere left?" I asked, and he shrugged and laughed wide enough for me to see the gap in his teeth.
Maybe there's nowhere left. Maybe the last place we have to plunge is the abyss of unformed thought and possible places we know the moat carried inside it. Maybe it was useless to try and find one pristine place in the city Matthew had essentially destroyed with 5 hours and a few bottles of alcohol. Maybe that's all it takes is 5 hours alone with the devil to stop existing, or find out you never have.
We fucked, but that hardly matters now.
We found each other on Yule, and then on Christmas Eve, Adam promised to marry me, and the squealing brakes engaged on the tracks and rained sparks into the underbrush and....
I don't know, I guess things got quiet, and then they never got loud again. And I got tired of everything falling apart.
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