There are some things we can't know until the universe or God or Fate puts us in a position to see it for ourselves. Rosie calls those moments the Truth, and she talks about it like it's coming for us all, looming huge and inevitable on the horizon. If I don't believe in something - and I usually don't - she'll just shrug it off and tell me the Truth will come out someday. So I don't think Brad loves me? I will eventually, because at some point in my future, the columns of my life will collapse one by one to reveal the single moment when I'm stranded with that love and the certainty of it's endurance.
She tells me all the time that's the reason she's not worried when Jack lies. Those lies will either come true or they won't. It's not for us to say, and it's between God and Jack.
Living in Gray House, those moments come for me all the time, usually in a sudden realization of what someone has been talking about all along. My cursory understanding and ability to empathize can take me all the way to the front door of some idea, but it's something supernatural which shoves me inside. For me, it's far less likely that I would be bathed in the wondrous blah blah blah of Brad's love, and more likely that I would feel it from the inside out; the twisting rattlesnakes of his affections for me with all their strikes and dangerous rattles, infecting every other woman he meets with a specific poison.
I explain all this to Adam as we drive Bev to the house in Denton. He's reapplied his layer of suit over bare skin, donning only the essential pants and shirt and jacket, leaving the underwear and tie in his bedroom. He rolls a coin between his fingers as I drive, his arm lazing out of the window. Rosie and I quit smoking over a year ago, and the chain-smoking Gray Boys had done their best to cut back to a more respectable amount. Adam's crutch had become fidgeting with a silver dollar he'd been given by his uncle Jim when he was fourteen or so, who swore under drunken oath it had been forcibly projected from the pussy of a showgirl, thereby making it good luck.
Adam refers me back to the summer before last, when I had learned to be a boy by becoming one, and he had been a voice in my head telling me all it meant to be a man. The secrets of masculinity had been passed on to me by the First Man himself, then.
"Yeah," I agree with him, turning down the long drive to Denton. "I understood it intellectually until it was time to live it."
He stays quiet until I pull up to the front of the house. The dust of the road settles down around Beverly, and I turn off the engine and the headlights die against the front door. We sit in the close silence of the car for a moment.
"So, what will I be living inside here?" he asks me. "Or rather, what will you?"
I think for a moment before answering.
"The fear of an amnesiac," I tell him, and he scratches his eyebrow with his thumb.
"A difficult, but stunning, album," he considers. He rolls up the window and the smell of his cologne takes over the scent of Beverly's new leather seats Clyde installed for me last Christmas. Adam smells, on most days, like the pine woods men have spent their whole evolution trying to escape. He's quiet, and I know he's thinking about whatever secret he has about Amnesiac that no one will talk about. Some haunting of 2001 that he and Rosie and Brad refuse to acknowledge.
The exterior of the Denton house is brick and siding, angular designs in the garage door which betray the decade it was built. The windows in the front are large, but covered with drapes.
"It's scary when you remember something you forgot," I tell him, and the coin vanishes in favor of a second cigarette.
"Sometimes," he agrees with me.
"Half-remembering is even worse," I tell him, staring at the aluminum screen door covering the red front door. "It's like... if you went back to a summer house. If you hadn't seen it for years."
Adam picks tobacco off of his tongue and nods slowly.
"Yes. As if it had been abandoned, by you, although you've since forgotten."
"Yeah."
We stare for a minute more in silence. I look for the sign of movement in the windows, and see none.
"The house in Black Diamond felt like that," he reminds me. "To most of us."
A different house, and a distant memory. A time before me, or maybe it wasn't. No one can remember what they remember anymore, and so maybe everywhere we go will begin to feel like this; like we were run out of this castle so young, we can't remember anything but the way light falls onto a river. I remove the keys from the ignition, and we get out of the car. Bev's driver side door creaks a little when I push it open. It's a sound I like. It means she's old enough to know better.
On the front stoop, I reach under the old black rubber welcome mat and extract a key. The screen has an aluminum knob on it, and it rattles when it opens. When I push the front door open, the dark of the house yawns back, and a smell comes with it which makes Adam clear his throat.
"Ahem, yes," he says. "I uh. I believe I've been here, before."
I reach inside, to the light switch on the wall. It illuminates a single hanging lamp in the corner, brown glass suspended over an easy chair. The remnants of Brad and I litter the room, from when we were here before.
When we were here before...
The sleeping bag Brad found in the closet is still tossed on the carpet of the living room. A coloring book is half-colored, a puzzle is half-done on the coffee table. This room is a time capsule of some life I don't remember.
The kitchen chairs are brown and spindly-legged. The linoleum is yellowing in the corners. If I tore it up, I think I would find my name written underneath.
Adam stands in the center of the open living room and dining room, looking around with his critical eyes. I sit in the dim light on a green couch. I wait for him to say the words I know he's going to say.
"Evelyn," he mutters, his cigarette shortening in his teeth. "This is... well."
I know he's cycling through names to call it. The Dragon's house, my house, the house I grew up in, the house Brad had installed here once and I'd torn it down immediately because I didn't want to live in it anymore. The place we started when I'd come home in the first place. He slips his hands back into his pockets to consider the wood paneling on the walls.
"And the piano," he gestures, and I nod. Adam had played that piano the winter we'd been snowed in together, in 2000.
"But it's changed some," he observes.
"Yeah, I'm not sure why," I tell him.
The world is so depressingly short on places I recognize. The things I grew to see as familiar have all been torn down and replaced with things maybe my children will grow up feeling comforted by. But sometimes it's made me feel like my life could be entirely erased because there's no evidence of my experiences anymore. Every surface I touched has been painted over or torn down, and it has always made me feel lost in a certain way. In this way. In the way that made Brad build it and me destroy it again.
But here it is, and maybe that means we can also endure long past the fear we won't. I wanted to wear a hole in the world, in the places I walked over it enough times to disintegrate carpets to ruin, but when I couldn't, I think I got scared, and pushed every familiar thing away. The Dragon, and the house I grew up in, and even Brad.
Adam picks his way through the living room and remembers how we moved the couch in front of the fireplace. Another time, and another place, but connecting now. He asks me questions about where and when we might be, based on history I know.
"Is this the Cartwright home? he asks me, referring to a world where Brad and John and I are triplets and live across the street from Rosie and Drama.
"No."
"And... well, no, this couldn't be the Garage."
"No."
"It smells of you," he admits to me, putting his cigarette out in the amber ashtray on the table. "Things only I would recognize."
At first I think he's telling me this to brag, but I can see his expression as he glances around, and I know it's because it also smells like Brad and how we're a common denominator in his life.
And yes, it smells like me, but it also smells like Brad and it also smells like the dust left over all our things we forgot...
Just the way the air in Eden was thick with possibility, so the air of Gray House has become similarly thick and full of the passing of moments out of the order and thought of time. Ever since Drama came home, it's been like this, and so it begs the question, did Drama take us back to Eden?
Or maybe we never left, and like everything else in life, losing it is a simple act of believing yourself to no longer have it. Could the world really change so drastically by just believing it was different one morning?
Adam removes his jacket, and rolls the sleeves of his shirt deliberately to the elbow.
That's what had happened with us, wasn't it? I'd gone to sleep one night with Adam and woken up to a different world. The night everything changed. I remember I'd even tried to go back to my old life after that - to resume the every day as if it was all the same as before - and I'd been unable to. So I have evidence that it is that simple, and it's wholly dependent on who or what you happen to be falling in love with.
It shocks me as I'm considering our history to see Adam's tall and brusque outline doesn't fit in this room. He looks out-of-place here, like a lost traveling salesman. I see he's taken off his jacket in reaction to this intrusion, in an effort to be what he would call "more comfortable."
It's a small and maybe petty thing, that I notice Brad belongs here and Adam doesn't. But this might be the only place it's true, and so I feel like protecting it. I feel like holding still and waiting for him to pass me by, as if he were a prison guard of this reality, and I have to make sure he doesn't see the hole I've dug to the beach. I curl up on the couch, hugging my own knees and Adam gestures to the sleeping bag on the floor.
"You made love," he observes, his voice quiet. He can feel my tension rising, and I can tell he's trying to make himself soft-voiced and slow-moving. He summons all the tricks of men to get animals to eat from their hands.
"Yeah."
"What was it like?" he asks, trying to keep his tone casual, light. Flowers bloom in my chest and wilt and bloom again in a fast procession, tickling adrenaline and closing up my throat. I don't answer him, but he can see me blush.
He kneels carefully and puts his hand on the now cold fabric of the sleeping bag. Yes, we made love, but it could've been decades ago. It could have been just a dream. It could've meant everything or nothing. I could be Evelyn, or the span of the planet she came from. It's up to me to tell him what I believe.
"This is where I came from," I tell him. "Me and Brad found it together."
Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Tuesday, February 20, 2018
Blue Suit 2: January 12th
Adam scoffs at my late arrival to his room.
"Oh," he chuffs, rising from his brown leather reading chair and setting down his drink. "Oh, I see. Are we taking numbers? Am I next?"
Gray laces his hair like frost settling over an otherwise brown lawn. His heavy brow is raised in mock concern for me in the slow light of his room; a treasure trove of all that which might make a man into a man.
His expectant face makes him look like Gary Oldman, but Adam tends to, whether he's just standing here, or melting into deaf musicians, fat prime ministers, Carpathian princes, crude pimps, or violent lovers. His suit is pale and steely blue, and there's a sheen to the fabric tonight. He's starched and ironed himself into right angles and sarcastic amusement.
I wilt at his line, which he intended me to do.
"I..."
I hesitate in the doorway. Adam's room is a foreign place full of pools of delicate gold light, strange artifacts, broken machines, and the quiet whispers of his cruelty and his rage. He's grown all these sharp edges and hard thorns for me to soften, now, and he's done it just so. Just because. Just in case.
He moves his jaw to explore his teeth with his tongue, and I by the way the shadows fall, I can see he's skipped a day of shaving. So he's meant to burn me, as well.
Adam's bed is dark and imposing, tall and impossible to climb into without standing on one of the dozens of stacks of books he keeps around it. The items within are crammed into cabinets, and the cabinets make the room feel cave-like. Currently, the bed is tossed with a blanket made of tawny red fur I gifted him once - fox fur.
"Evelyn," he recites my name to me, sliding his hands into his pockets. "Just who the fuck do you take me for?"
"Adam," I tell him, shutting the door quietly behind me, shrugging my way around it with guilty shoulders. "You're mad at me."
"I am, that, Doll," he snorts. "I am, that, indeed."
His tie is navy. The suit is slim-cut, notch lapels, single breasted, two button. The cuffs of his shirt beneath are two button mitered cuffs. I learned the names of everything for him, and he spits out his favorite word at me now in total disdain.
"Evelyn."
"Adam."
"This is our night."
"I know."
I look up at him, my expression blank. Adam's moods are better weathered before response, because he so often talks himself out of his rages. Glasses have shattered in the fireplace and holes have been smashed into the drywall before he looks up sheepish and admits his own fears, and so I say nothing, and I do nothing, while he clips his words short and terse to me in irritation of my blasphemy.
"You see, I had thought," he steps toward me, trying to get a read on my emotions, and I interrupt him.
"I know."
He presses me against the door.
"You know everything, is that right? You know what this all means to me? I see, so there's no need to discuss it further."
"Adam-"
"Evelyn."
"I just-"
"He took you home," he fumes at me, and turns his back on me.
"What?" I ask him, suddenly nervous. "What do you mean?"
Adam stands with his back to me, and I watch his shoulders move and adjust as he unfastens the buttons at his wrist, and on his coat. He shrugs the jacket off without looking at me, and it occurs to me what's happening.
He deposits the jacket on the back of his reading chair and begins to loosen his tie, and I feel panic setting in.
Since I came home to Gray House, there were two things treated as ritual: that Adam and I were Home to one another, and when that was compromised by disagreement, we fought naked. I think subconsciously or even consciously, Adam thought that being naked meant we would be more respectful to our true natures. I can see now that because I hadn't respected the first ritual, I am going to be made to choke on the second.
Of course, I hadn't thought that talking to Brad about Denton, or listening to the mix, or even going there would constitute this level of infidelity he was acting like I'd committed. Sure, I had drawn Brad from some other time and place to sit inside the house we built within each other in order to see how we'd always been together, but that's, like, not a crime. It didn't make that place home any more than it had been when I'd come to Gray House, which was not at all. I mean. Right?
The edges of my nonchalance begin to rankle.
It had been different, and it had meant something this time which it hadn't meant before. Downplaying it now to keep Adam's feelings safe meant undercutting in some way what had happened between Brad and I, and maybe that's how things got this way. Maybe, since I first set foot in Gray House, I've been so scared of losing something I've never really had anything. I take a deep breath and kick off my ballet shoes.
Adam's slacks hit the hardwood floor with the jangle of his belt-buckle. His wristwatch and our wedding ring clink onto his nightstand. He peels off his undershirt and his underwear and adjusts his weight to one foot, crossing his arms over his now bare chest.
I slink my way guilty from my white sundress, and I let it fall to the floor. Adam doesn't bat an eye at my red bra and panties. I add them to the puddle of my dress at my feet. He waits for me to take off my jewelry, also, and I hesitate before depositing my necklace and ring onto the bookcase next to me.
The psychological impulse to crawl into his bed and cover up with the blankets is so strong, I start to move toward the bed surreptitiously, avoiding his eye-contact.
"I've been telling myself there must be some explanation. Some need for this," Adam muses, looking at me like I've stolen his Corvette when he told me explicity not to drive it. I circle my arms and lace my fingers together just under my belly. I touch the relatively new scar on the right side of my stomach.
"There is," I tell him, and his expression shifts from disbelieving back to expectant. Underneath, I can see his concern and fear. "I'm not sure I can explain it," I add.
"This isn't a god-damned obligation, Evelyn, and I won't have it treated as such," he cautions me.
"No, I know, I wanted to come."
He relents to letting me climb into the bed, and the air shifts to one of his need to understand. The fox fur is rough under my legs and I look out over the strange vistas of Adam's bedroom. He has a watch taken to pieces on his writing desk, and a row of vials beside it filled with greenish liquids.
I came to Gray House for Brad, and Brad alone. It was an innocent encounter between two like animals that had drawn me Home, and Adam and I had so catastrophically interfered with everything. Like a car crash, Adam had just happened to me, and we crashed into one another and we kept crashing, loud and heavy enough to drown out the sound of all other things.
In the cramped kitchen of the Old House, we'd collided that night in January, when we were finally alone, and everything Brad and I had been building together, inside, was razed and replaced with a single white tree onto which I had carved the name "Adam." We had tried to pick our way through the landmines of human interaction that is Gray House, but it hadn't really worked, and the River came crashing down the sides of the granite mountains west of Eden, and carried everything else away; even Brad, even Clyde.
"Did you want it that way?" I ask him, and he climbs into the bed beside me. We'd shared this same bed for almost two years, and this bed nearly exclusively. He looks straight ahead, at the wall.
"Well, yes, of course," he admits. "I told you as much, the day I gave you permission to sleep with Clyde. I have no more intentions of being gentlemanly."
"You also told me that you'd never do anything to interfere in my relationship with Brad."
"I lied," he answers me quickly. "And it was an innocent lie, but it was a lie. Any interfering I did, I did in a playful kind of rivalry. I've never done anything to harm you, or him."
He examines his fingernails, neatly scrubbed of engine grease and trimmed to thin white crescents at the ends of his fingers.
"Yet," he adds, his voice light and airy.
It's true he might, someday, abdicating any promise he's made me so far. Adam is by nature treacherous and disloyal, even to me, because he feels infected by me as much as he feels obsessive of me. We both know, sitting in the gold silence, that he might interfere in any one of my other relationships in the future, but that I would also remain chained to this dreadful and politic faithfulness, no matter what he did.
We put first who we put first. The reason we do it probably doesn't matter, because it would dissect the love we have for everyone else, and measure it, and compare it in depth and passion and constancy, and what a fucking distasteful thing to do.
But maybe that's what Adam wants, really, and maybe he wants to be naked when I do. I cringe, and pull the fur over my legs. Whatever slight Adam feels tonight is one tenth of the poison I know is in Matthew's heart, waiting for me far beneath Gray House, in the warmer parts of Hell. Adam has the capacity to play this game, and to walk steady along this high-wire. Matthew does not. Being a ghost, for Adam, meant learning to experience the love between others, in order to possess it for himself. Being one for Matthew meant disappearing from love forever.
Adam rips off the skin of his cuticle with a toothy sneer, and it begins to bleed.
"I can't abide you keeping things from me," he mutters into his lap. Of course, Adam wouldn't have cared if I never came to him tonight, if I'd let him watch me from a dark corner somewhere. If I'd let him possess the actions I'd taken with Brad for himself, to study and interpret. I glance over at him, knowing this is the moment his rage turns to the aforementioned self-pity.
"We're very good together," I remark at him, taking his torn finger and stuffing it into my mouth. He squints his dark eyes at me in disgust, as if I've purposely given him a disease, and maybe I have. I suck the blood from the tear, copper and salt.
"Hardly," he cuts. "You're a... a menace," he argues, taking his hand back.
"I didn't think," I tell him. "I should've told you, I'm sorry. I was with Brad, and I wanted him to... I wanted to show him..."
I hesitate and struggle for words before I begin to cry. It happens to me usually so fast someone not looking directly at me would think I'd begun to laugh. Adam, knowing better, just pushes the fur over me and moves closer to me in the bed.
"You two have always struggled," he sighs. "Living proof, of course, that you don't really love yourself. You're so much better off with someone... well, much less like you, Evelyn. And so is he."
"Maybe we don't really work, but we love each other," I plead to him, like he hasn't been listening to me.
"Well, yes, naturally," he relents as he pulls me to his chest. "Such is it with Nicholas, and I."
Invoking his own twin brother quiets me enough to begin to think about them. Adam and Nick have always had a deep and unrelenting hatred which runs almost as deep as their deep and unrelenting love. You can't know someone, maybe, how we end up knowing each other and not hating them as much as you love them. Or loving them for the truth of who they are, which might actually be the same thing. Maybe we never worked as a couple because I'd spent so much time and energy trying to make us into one, and we just aren't.
In the breadth of human history, we've only ever found three or four relationships to have with someone. Beyond those parameters, only few have dared to tread, and usually have done so famously and disastrously. It leads me to think there are certain inevitable ways a heart breaks, which we can count on. But here Brad broke my heart by removing himself from it, slowly over years, like removing a railroad spike and giving me time to heal.
"When I came to Gray House, Brad and I were already breaking up," I tell Adam. "We broke up and found out we could never ever ever get back together. And then we moved backwards."
"Mm," Adam murmurs, and I feel the sound vibrate in his chest.
"We went backwards, and after we broke up, we were in a relationship with a lot of problems. We had lost our house, but then it grew back. And then we were in a relationship that was kind of good, but we could tell it was going to end. And then we were in a new relationship."
"So. Now. Having gotten to that place, what happens next?" he asks me.
"I don't know," I admit to him. "I've never felt like this about anyone else. I've never gone back in time before. Or even through it all mixed up, like it has been."
"But you took him to the house," Adam protests. "The house which now stands, untouched by your destructions. Isn't that right?"
I nod. Adam lights one of his cigarettes from the case on his nightstand.
"Well, I'd very much like you to show it to me," he decides.
"Oh," he chuffs, rising from his brown leather reading chair and setting down his drink. "Oh, I see. Are we taking numbers? Am I next?"
Gray laces his hair like frost settling over an otherwise brown lawn. His heavy brow is raised in mock concern for me in the slow light of his room; a treasure trove of all that which might make a man into a man.
His expectant face makes him look like Gary Oldman, but Adam tends to, whether he's just standing here, or melting into deaf musicians, fat prime ministers, Carpathian princes, crude pimps, or violent lovers. His suit is pale and steely blue, and there's a sheen to the fabric tonight. He's starched and ironed himself into right angles and sarcastic amusement.
I wilt at his line, which he intended me to do.
"I..."
I hesitate in the doorway. Adam's room is a foreign place full of pools of delicate gold light, strange artifacts, broken machines, and the quiet whispers of his cruelty and his rage. He's grown all these sharp edges and hard thorns for me to soften, now, and he's done it just so. Just because. Just in case.
He moves his jaw to explore his teeth with his tongue, and I by the way the shadows fall, I can see he's skipped a day of shaving. So he's meant to burn me, as well.
Adam's bed is dark and imposing, tall and impossible to climb into without standing on one of the dozens of stacks of books he keeps around it. The items within are crammed into cabinets, and the cabinets make the room feel cave-like. Currently, the bed is tossed with a blanket made of tawny red fur I gifted him once - fox fur.
"Evelyn," he recites my name to me, sliding his hands into his pockets. "Just who the fuck do you take me for?"
"Adam," I tell him, shutting the door quietly behind me, shrugging my way around it with guilty shoulders. "You're mad at me."
"I am, that, Doll," he snorts. "I am, that, indeed."
His tie is navy. The suit is slim-cut, notch lapels, single breasted, two button. The cuffs of his shirt beneath are two button mitered cuffs. I learned the names of everything for him, and he spits out his favorite word at me now in total disdain.
"Evelyn."
"Adam."
"This is our night."
"I know."
I look up at him, my expression blank. Adam's moods are better weathered before response, because he so often talks himself out of his rages. Glasses have shattered in the fireplace and holes have been smashed into the drywall before he looks up sheepish and admits his own fears, and so I say nothing, and I do nothing, while he clips his words short and terse to me in irritation of my blasphemy.
"You see, I had thought," he steps toward me, trying to get a read on my emotions, and I interrupt him.
"I know."
He presses me against the door.
"You know everything, is that right? You know what this all means to me? I see, so there's no need to discuss it further."
"Adam-"
"Evelyn."
"I just-"
"He took you home," he fumes at me, and turns his back on me.
"What?" I ask him, suddenly nervous. "What do you mean?"
Adam stands with his back to me, and I watch his shoulders move and adjust as he unfastens the buttons at his wrist, and on his coat. He shrugs the jacket off without looking at me, and it occurs to me what's happening.
He deposits the jacket on the back of his reading chair and begins to loosen his tie, and I feel panic setting in.
Since I came home to Gray House, there were two things treated as ritual: that Adam and I were Home to one another, and when that was compromised by disagreement, we fought naked. I think subconsciously or even consciously, Adam thought that being naked meant we would be more respectful to our true natures. I can see now that because I hadn't respected the first ritual, I am going to be made to choke on the second.
Of course, I hadn't thought that talking to Brad about Denton, or listening to the mix, or even going there would constitute this level of infidelity he was acting like I'd committed. Sure, I had drawn Brad from some other time and place to sit inside the house we built within each other in order to see how we'd always been together, but that's, like, not a crime. It didn't make that place home any more than it had been when I'd come to Gray House, which was not at all. I mean. Right?
The edges of my nonchalance begin to rankle.
It had been different, and it had meant something this time which it hadn't meant before. Downplaying it now to keep Adam's feelings safe meant undercutting in some way what had happened between Brad and I, and maybe that's how things got this way. Maybe, since I first set foot in Gray House, I've been so scared of losing something I've never really had anything. I take a deep breath and kick off my ballet shoes.
Adam's slacks hit the hardwood floor with the jangle of his belt-buckle. His wristwatch and our wedding ring clink onto his nightstand. He peels off his undershirt and his underwear and adjusts his weight to one foot, crossing his arms over his now bare chest.
I slink my way guilty from my white sundress, and I let it fall to the floor. Adam doesn't bat an eye at my red bra and panties. I add them to the puddle of my dress at my feet. He waits for me to take off my jewelry, also, and I hesitate before depositing my necklace and ring onto the bookcase next to me.
The psychological impulse to crawl into his bed and cover up with the blankets is so strong, I start to move toward the bed surreptitiously, avoiding his eye-contact.
"I've been telling myself there must be some explanation. Some need for this," Adam muses, looking at me like I've stolen his Corvette when he told me explicity not to drive it. I circle my arms and lace my fingers together just under my belly. I touch the relatively new scar on the right side of my stomach.
"There is," I tell him, and his expression shifts from disbelieving back to expectant. Underneath, I can see his concern and fear. "I'm not sure I can explain it," I add.
"This isn't a god-damned obligation, Evelyn, and I won't have it treated as such," he cautions me.
"No, I know, I wanted to come."
He relents to letting me climb into the bed, and the air shifts to one of his need to understand. The fox fur is rough under my legs and I look out over the strange vistas of Adam's bedroom. He has a watch taken to pieces on his writing desk, and a row of vials beside it filled with greenish liquids.
I came to Gray House for Brad, and Brad alone. It was an innocent encounter between two like animals that had drawn me Home, and Adam and I had so catastrophically interfered with everything. Like a car crash, Adam had just happened to me, and we crashed into one another and we kept crashing, loud and heavy enough to drown out the sound of all other things.
In the cramped kitchen of the Old House, we'd collided that night in January, when we were finally alone, and everything Brad and I had been building together, inside, was razed and replaced with a single white tree onto which I had carved the name "Adam." We had tried to pick our way through the landmines of human interaction that is Gray House, but it hadn't really worked, and the River came crashing down the sides of the granite mountains west of Eden, and carried everything else away; even Brad, even Clyde.
"Did you want it that way?" I ask him, and he climbs into the bed beside me. We'd shared this same bed for almost two years, and this bed nearly exclusively. He looks straight ahead, at the wall.
"Well, yes, of course," he admits. "I told you as much, the day I gave you permission to sleep with Clyde. I have no more intentions of being gentlemanly."
"You also told me that you'd never do anything to interfere in my relationship with Brad."
"I lied," he answers me quickly. "And it was an innocent lie, but it was a lie. Any interfering I did, I did in a playful kind of rivalry. I've never done anything to harm you, or him."
He examines his fingernails, neatly scrubbed of engine grease and trimmed to thin white crescents at the ends of his fingers.
"Yet," he adds, his voice light and airy.
It's true he might, someday, abdicating any promise he's made me so far. Adam is by nature treacherous and disloyal, even to me, because he feels infected by me as much as he feels obsessive of me. We both know, sitting in the gold silence, that he might interfere in any one of my other relationships in the future, but that I would also remain chained to this dreadful and politic faithfulness, no matter what he did.
We put first who we put first. The reason we do it probably doesn't matter, because it would dissect the love we have for everyone else, and measure it, and compare it in depth and passion and constancy, and what a fucking distasteful thing to do.
But maybe that's what Adam wants, really, and maybe he wants to be naked when I do. I cringe, and pull the fur over my legs. Whatever slight Adam feels tonight is one tenth of the poison I know is in Matthew's heart, waiting for me far beneath Gray House, in the warmer parts of Hell. Adam has the capacity to play this game, and to walk steady along this high-wire. Matthew does not. Being a ghost, for Adam, meant learning to experience the love between others, in order to possess it for himself. Being one for Matthew meant disappearing from love forever.
Adam rips off the skin of his cuticle with a toothy sneer, and it begins to bleed.
"I can't abide you keeping things from me," he mutters into his lap. Of course, Adam wouldn't have cared if I never came to him tonight, if I'd let him watch me from a dark corner somewhere. If I'd let him possess the actions I'd taken with Brad for himself, to study and interpret. I glance over at him, knowing this is the moment his rage turns to the aforementioned self-pity.
"We're very good together," I remark at him, taking his torn finger and stuffing it into my mouth. He squints his dark eyes at me in disgust, as if I've purposely given him a disease, and maybe I have. I suck the blood from the tear, copper and salt.
"Hardly," he cuts. "You're a... a menace," he argues, taking his hand back.
"I didn't think," I tell him. "I should've told you, I'm sorry. I was with Brad, and I wanted him to... I wanted to show him..."
I hesitate and struggle for words before I begin to cry. It happens to me usually so fast someone not looking directly at me would think I'd begun to laugh. Adam, knowing better, just pushes the fur over me and moves closer to me in the bed.
"You two have always struggled," he sighs. "Living proof, of course, that you don't really love yourself. You're so much better off with someone... well, much less like you, Evelyn. And so is he."
"Maybe we don't really work, but we love each other," I plead to him, like he hasn't been listening to me.
"Well, yes, naturally," he relents as he pulls me to his chest. "Such is it with Nicholas, and I."
Invoking his own twin brother quiets me enough to begin to think about them. Adam and Nick have always had a deep and unrelenting hatred which runs almost as deep as their deep and unrelenting love. You can't know someone, maybe, how we end up knowing each other and not hating them as much as you love them. Or loving them for the truth of who they are, which might actually be the same thing. Maybe we never worked as a couple because I'd spent so much time and energy trying to make us into one, and we just aren't.
In the breadth of human history, we've only ever found three or four relationships to have with someone. Beyond those parameters, only few have dared to tread, and usually have done so famously and disastrously. It leads me to think there are certain inevitable ways a heart breaks, which we can count on. But here Brad broke my heart by removing himself from it, slowly over years, like removing a railroad spike and giving me time to heal.
"When I came to Gray House, Brad and I were already breaking up," I tell Adam. "We broke up and found out we could never ever ever get back together. And then we moved backwards."
"Mm," Adam murmurs, and I feel the sound vibrate in his chest.
"We went backwards, and after we broke up, we were in a relationship with a lot of problems. We had lost our house, but then it grew back. And then we were in a relationship that was kind of good, but we could tell it was going to end. And then we were in a new relationship."
"So. Now. Having gotten to that place, what happens next?" he asks me.
"I don't know," I admit to him. "I've never felt like this about anyone else. I've never gone back in time before. Or even through it all mixed up, like it has been."
"But you took him to the house," Adam protests. "The house which now stands, untouched by your destructions. Isn't that right?"
I nod. Adam lights one of his cigarettes from the case on his nightstand.
"Well, I'd very much like you to show it to me," he decides.
Friday, February 16, 2018
Denton, 10000 BC
Evelyn to Brad - Denton
We wake when the Dragon wakes, warm under the pale wallow of his belly. The three of us stretch in the morning sun of spring and slither out into the Garden, to run to the River in our sneakers.
Eden is the gestation of the Earth; things like Time and Space and Dreams are crowded together into this womb to wait to be born. Running to the River might take an hour, but we travel through the heavy air to get there, thick with ideas and fate.
Of course, we don't know that, John and Joel and I. We won't know that until the Storm comes, and Time spills out of the gate of Eden like afterbirth, spreading out flat and useless and thin. For now, we tear off our thin t-shirts, my own a pale yellow, and we wade into the cold water, sucking our breath in hard and laughing. The Dragon stretches, and the trees groan distant as he presses them with his wings. He blots out the coming daylight with a single unfurl before launching himself into the pearl sky, turning high to show us his gray back ridged with hard scales.
The current of the River is clear and untouched, is polluted by a paper mill, is reddened with blood from a battle, is low and then high again with the rains that haven't come.
"I want a Slurpee," Joel confesses, and we agree, tasting the cherry flavor melting over the morning that is the way the invention of the Slurpee tastes, and the medicinal soda-fountain history of it's origin. It tastes good, and it feels like freedom and industry, and so we agree.
John shakes the water from his brassy hair, and it slaps the sides of his pale cheeks, and sticks there. There's no way to get clean in the River because the River is made of all things, and in all things one gets only... wet. Leaves stick to his white chest, skinny and only beginning to form the muscles he'll need to one day lift Joel from the same water and save his life, which we can feel rush by us in the current, making us all shiver.
I remain quiet because I don't know what life is anymore than I know what death is, and it makes me certain of things like taxes and suitcases and the car I know Joel will one day buy when he calls himself Bradley.
"What's the matter, Zech?" he asks me, and I throw a rock into the water, and watch it sink.
On the shore, John is putting his shirt back on, which is red and says Coca-Cola, but I can't read yet. The cotton knocks the leaves from his body, and they fall to the mud.
Joel crosses his arms over his stomach. He looks at me, and the air around me, which I might be turning back into night with my thoughts.
The River changes around us to a flat black street, the sun setting instead of rising, Joel and I glaring at one another with 20 more years shared between us. He's wearing a red leather jacket, and I've finally gotten taller than him.
"To a small man, every inch counts, Zechariah," he smirks at me, and I think about pulling my knife on him, and the invention of knives, and the evolution of murder, and I stop feeling good in my stomach, so I get out of the river.
Beside me on the riverbank, Joel plops his wet jeans with a thunk into the mud.
"Aw, I was just kidding," he apologizes, wearing the same smirk he wore moments before. The place he cut off his jeans is frayed, and I pick at the strings that hang along the bone of his kneecap.
The air smells like frankincense and rose oil. There are elephants in the woods behind us, bowing low to one another, and I can feel their feet strike the ground when they rise again. I push my hair back behind my ears, and it lengthens as I do, and turns white-blonde. Joel puts his shirt back on - forest green and bearing a logo - and it sticks to his wet skin.
"I don't feel good," I whisper to him, and I trace on his arm the map I see of the two of us unwinding forever, through the tall grass browned by a tired world ready to give in. He feels the same thing I do when I trace it; the fear of failing to reach an important destination.
Like matryoshka dolls, we wait inside ourselves, the same people we become today, and the day before. The same nihilistic punk boys and ostracized royalty which feels the oppressive sense of our utter failure creep through the ribs of he and I as children on the banks of the Mnemosyne.
"We could get married," he suggests, and I think about what that really means at all.
Behind us, I can hear Denton being built, with the hammers and nails of the army men intent on destroying it, and I'm one of them, and so is Joel. I can feel the cool cast of it's shadow over me that means people are going to take this very simple idea of marriage and make it into an institution of control and justification of power. I can feel the cold parts of the River which mean some will be happy and some will be unhappy.
"I don't want to get married," I tell him, afraid of the cold history getting born around us, and the army men we someday become detonate the bomb that destroys Dummy Town, and levels our home.
Joel pulls a bug off my shoulder and lets it loose on the muddy bank.
"Well," he thinks, and I watch him cast around for the right time, and the right feeling, his ears still too big for his head at eleven or however old we are.
Behind us, the elephants have gone. Now, the woods are dark and warm with a change of the season. The light is gold coming through the trees, and Joel has started to call himself Bradley. His eyes turn from warm blue to cold blue, and I feel the terror grow inside him from the inside which makes him cold. He is suddenly 16, suddenly a trapped animal, suddenly full of a scream inside his heart. The sweat collects at his temples when he asks me.
"Hey, why don't you be my Valentine?"
We wake when the Dragon wakes, warm under the pale wallow of his belly. The three of us stretch in the morning sun of spring and slither out into the Garden, to run to the River in our sneakers.
Eden is the gestation of the Earth; things like Time and Space and Dreams are crowded together into this womb to wait to be born. Running to the River might take an hour, but we travel through the heavy air to get there, thick with ideas and fate.
Of course, we don't know that, John and Joel and I. We won't know that until the Storm comes, and Time spills out of the gate of Eden like afterbirth, spreading out flat and useless and thin. For now, we tear off our thin t-shirts, my own a pale yellow, and we wade into the cold water, sucking our breath in hard and laughing. The Dragon stretches, and the trees groan distant as he presses them with his wings. He blots out the coming daylight with a single unfurl before launching himself into the pearl sky, turning high to show us his gray back ridged with hard scales.
The current of the River is clear and untouched, is polluted by a paper mill, is reddened with blood from a battle, is low and then high again with the rains that haven't come.
"I want a Slurpee," Joel confesses, and we agree, tasting the cherry flavor melting over the morning that is the way the invention of the Slurpee tastes, and the medicinal soda-fountain history of it's origin. It tastes good, and it feels like freedom and industry, and so we agree.
John shakes the water from his brassy hair, and it slaps the sides of his pale cheeks, and sticks there. There's no way to get clean in the River because the River is made of all things, and in all things one gets only... wet. Leaves stick to his white chest, skinny and only beginning to form the muscles he'll need to one day lift Joel from the same water and save his life, which we can feel rush by us in the current, making us all shiver.
I remain quiet because I don't know what life is anymore than I know what death is, and it makes me certain of things like taxes and suitcases and the car I know Joel will one day buy when he calls himself Bradley.
"What's the matter, Zech?" he asks me, and I throw a rock into the water, and watch it sink.
On the shore, John is putting his shirt back on, which is red and says Coca-Cola, but I can't read yet. The cotton knocks the leaves from his body, and they fall to the mud.
Joel crosses his arms over his stomach. He looks at me, and the air around me, which I might be turning back into night with my thoughts.
The River changes around us to a flat black street, the sun setting instead of rising, Joel and I glaring at one another with 20 more years shared between us. He's wearing a red leather jacket, and I've finally gotten taller than him.
"To a small man, every inch counts, Zechariah," he smirks at me, and I think about pulling my knife on him, and the invention of knives, and the evolution of murder, and I stop feeling good in my stomach, so I get out of the river.
Beside me on the riverbank, Joel plops his wet jeans with a thunk into the mud.
"Aw, I was just kidding," he apologizes, wearing the same smirk he wore moments before. The place he cut off his jeans is frayed, and I pick at the strings that hang along the bone of his kneecap.
The air smells like frankincense and rose oil. There are elephants in the woods behind us, bowing low to one another, and I can feel their feet strike the ground when they rise again. I push my hair back behind my ears, and it lengthens as I do, and turns white-blonde. Joel puts his shirt back on - forest green and bearing a logo - and it sticks to his wet skin.
"I don't feel good," I whisper to him, and I trace on his arm the map I see of the two of us unwinding forever, through the tall grass browned by a tired world ready to give in. He feels the same thing I do when I trace it; the fear of failing to reach an important destination.
Like matryoshka dolls, we wait inside ourselves, the same people we become today, and the day before. The same nihilistic punk boys and ostracized royalty which feels the oppressive sense of our utter failure creep through the ribs of he and I as children on the banks of the Mnemosyne.
"We could get married," he suggests, and I think about what that really means at all.
Behind us, I can hear Denton being built, with the hammers and nails of the army men intent on destroying it, and I'm one of them, and so is Joel. I can feel the cool cast of it's shadow over me that means people are going to take this very simple idea of marriage and make it into an institution of control and justification of power. I can feel the cold parts of the River which mean some will be happy and some will be unhappy.
"I don't want to get married," I tell him, afraid of the cold history getting born around us, and the army men we someday become detonate the bomb that destroys Dummy Town, and levels our home.
Joel pulls a bug off my shoulder and lets it loose on the muddy bank.
"Well," he thinks, and I watch him cast around for the right time, and the right feeling, his ears still too big for his head at eleven or however old we are.
Behind us, the elephants have gone. Now, the woods are dark and warm with a change of the season. The light is gold coming through the trees, and Joel has started to call himself Bradley. His eyes turn from warm blue to cold blue, and I feel the terror grow inside him from the inside which makes him cold. He is suddenly 16, suddenly a trapped animal, suddenly full of a scream inside his heart. The sweat collects at his temples when he asks me.
"Hey, why don't you be my Valentine?"
Thursday, February 15, 2018
My lockets have room for 3 people.
6, really.
Well, what 6?
I imagine any six will do.
I'm not sure what to do.
Can't help you.
You're only a prophet when it suits you.
I got as close to this day as I care to.
I was thinking of doing the night twice.
Well, you'll be up a lot later than me. That's past my bed time.
6, really.
Well, what 6?
I imagine any six will do.
I'm not sure what to do.
Can't help you.
You're only a prophet when it suits you.
I got as close to this day as I care to.
I was thinking of doing the night twice.
Well, you'll be up a lot later than me. That's past my bed time.
Wednesday, February 14, 2018
From The Sherwood Motel
There are times I don't feel connected at all to this life, or this body. Other times, it's the only thing that really matters. This life, this existence. I find myself trying to hold onto it, and keep myself here instead of drifting off into what I know is out there - the darkness, and all the unanswered questions.
Tuesday, February 13, 2018
Denton, Intermission
For five years, the family has left the sanctuary of Gray House every impending winter on what we call vacation, and for five years, Adam has brought me home again after the holidays to commemorate our anniversary - the night we had sex the first time.
I think I've written about that night so many times, I could recite the prose from memory. I could also recite things Adam has written about it, in his journals, with more romance and greater dexterity than I ever could muster. Was it the most romantic, most pivotal, most important event of my life? It's possible it was, because after that night, everything changed.
It was the dead of winter, and the first time I approached Gray House. The Old House as we call it now was a fraction as grand, decimated by the damp, and missing more than two thirds of the rooms we now possess. Some of us like to admit, and some of us don't, that there was life before we found Gray House, when we lived in a small farmhouse inherited from our parents. Adam and I had exchanged four letters and two telephone calls, but hadn't yet met face-to-face. I had come to see him on a night I knew he was alone in the house, the then-meager numbers of us off elsewhere for the night.
Our such meager beginnings. The Genesis of Gray House.
It was the house Adam had grown up in, and I came in through the back door, into the kitchen, which was dark and nicotine-stained. What struck me first was the gold resin that clings to everything in a kitchen where too much frying goes on. What struck me second is how certain I was that he had grown up here; how well this place helped to define him as a man and a human being. The smell of cooking oil hung in the air and most of the lights were off, but for the hood light on the stove, and Adam was listening to the radio softly, his back to me where he sat. The surface of the table was worn smooth at the edges, and browned with the gum of human touch. The chair creaked as he adjusted, and the amber ashtray into which he flicked his cigarettes was overflowing with butts of other brands. The cups on the counter were all mismatched, aluminium foil showing plainly he had eaten re-heated leftovers for his dinner. I felt grit under my feet as I walked into the room, the screen door closing loud behind me with a squeal, and then a bang.
And Adam had stood up, and turned around, and said, "Hello."
In the half-light of the kitchen he was cautious, he was overdressed in a gray suit, he was nervous that I'd come, he had tried hastily to clean, he was sweet, and he was hopeless.
"Hello," is what I had said back.
We had sex in the kitchen, as if the rest of the world beyond the room had long ago gone to sleep, and we were awake and frozen like moths in the light over the stove. I had kissed him because we were already pinned under the thumb of the fate of us, and because I knew he wouldn't.
Every year since, when the time returns, we turn to one another and say, "Do you remember?" in reference to this moment when everything changed. And every year, he tells me he can bring me home again, by returning to the now-abandoned kitchen of the Old House, to wait for me to arrive, wearing white.
It's beautiful, I think, and tragic to the point of heartbreak. And it's something that has the power to draw me from anywhere else in the Universe, to feel at home. To feel Home, there with Adam, in the chaos of all things.
But I was busy this year, so.
"I made you a mix," I told Brad, and I had seen him get anxious and suspicious.
"Isn't it your anniversary?" was his first question, and I could tell by his expression changing from confusion to regret that he didn't really want me to say what I did.
"Yeah, it is."
But then he had to respond, and something fragile between us was forced to become steel, or die trying.
"Aren't you going home with Adam tonight?"
But maybe that's where Brad lives, at the intersection where things become steel or die. If he had been more polite or delicate, I wouldn't have been made to choose between them this way, or vocalize my attempt to be diplomatic and see both, or explain why that was okay and not inherently disingenuous in my heart, but Brad is neither delicate nor polite.
I could see in that moment how his bluntness often mistaken for emotional stupidity was really a manipulation styled as ignorance, to get people to explain things to him in the black-and-white of their truest and most despicable motivations. See, well, Brad, I was thinking we could hang and then when it got late, I would hit up Adam and maybe we could just keep it between us...
I immediately opted for a reversal of the burden of explanation.
"So?"
So, what could possibly be wrong with that, Brad, do tell.
His skin was blotchy and dark, how it gets when he's upset, especially low on his cheeks, by the jaw. He stared at me long and cold, and then out into the distance.
"So, are you still gonna see him?"
I shrugged, and refused to answer.
"I don't know."
The blotches got darker as he chewed on the insides of his mouth and thought. But of course the question betrayed that he wanted me to choose; to choose him over Adam, because of all that it might mean. He wasn't asking me if I was still going to see Adam, he was asking me if this was on purpose, this timing of this mix on this night. Could he mean that much to me? And he wanted me to say yes.
"What's the mix about?" he asked, and I could feel myself blushing in the same place, along my jawbone, as my heartbeat picked up.
"Well. Denton. It's about our house."
"You made me a mix about our house," he repeated, his eyes flat and erased of all emotion as carefully as he'd erased his voice.
"Yeah."
"You want to listen to it tonight," he repeated, his tone still cold.
"Yeah."
When I'm confronted with the same situation between me and anyone else, I'm usually in Brad's role, thinking through their words and underlying motivations. My repetition is the same, my consideration the same. I see how we're alike in this moment, but where I understand what he's asking me to do, and why he is asking me with a valueless blank chill, others mistake it in me for derision. Mhm, okay sure, we can do that. Idiot.
He clenched his jaw and unclenched it for almost ten seconds, and I could see the two dark freckles on his cheek moving as he did. He hadn't gotten me to say anything either way, hadn't been able to push me anywhere but the suggestion of what I wanted.
Finally, he tugged with both hands on the ends of the scarf he was wearing, and agreed.
"Alright."
Is it the choosing which is wrong, or the not choosing? Is it a lie by omission, or have I told the truth?
Would I sell Adam for Brad, if given half the chance, and would I ever really be given that choice?
To me, the answer is obvious. Because of Adam, I'm a waste. I will always and forever owe the rest of the world half my soul because it's tied up in Adam, physically, and I can never get it back. The choice is a luxury Adam and I are only pretending exists in the first place; to put anyone before him.
And if it's only symbolic, and we know it is, the color drains away from the action itself. Why do anything that is only symbolic? Why would I choose at all? Why have I done all these things, mouthed apologies to my brothers, stood and put my hand over my heart to pledge allegiance? The world is full of symbols kept alive by the CPR of their repetition, insisting there's something they all mean.
Making the choice would mean I wish it were true. Not making it means that I know it's not even possible, but moot.
As long as Adam exists, maybe I'm just a lie to everyone else we pretend is real. Maybe I'm the shadow of Evelyn and we all carry on pretending that I'm actually real and actually married to them and actually have a life and a love and reason to keep moving forward. Maybe it's me that's the symbol, repeated over and over again by all the other men who love me, performing some ritual of CPR on the cardboard cut-out of myself I trot out to say, "I choose you first, before Adam. I hate Adam, I fucking want away from him, God please help me."
But what could they do, anyway? Who would I be if I wasn't Eve?
Maybe this whole thing is just for nothing.
I think I've written about that night so many times, I could recite the prose from memory. I could also recite things Adam has written about it, in his journals, with more romance and greater dexterity than I ever could muster. Was it the most romantic, most pivotal, most important event of my life? It's possible it was, because after that night, everything changed.
It was the dead of winter, and the first time I approached Gray House. The Old House as we call it now was a fraction as grand, decimated by the damp, and missing more than two thirds of the rooms we now possess. Some of us like to admit, and some of us don't, that there was life before we found Gray House, when we lived in a small farmhouse inherited from our parents. Adam and I had exchanged four letters and two telephone calls, but hadn't yet met face-to-face. I had come to see him on a night I knew he was alone in the house, the then-meager numbers of us off elsewhere for the night.
Our such meager beginnings. The Genesis of Gray House.
It was the house Adam had grown up in, and I came in through the back door, into the kitchen, which was dark and nicotine-stained. What struck me first was the gold resin that clings to everything in a kitchen where too much frying goes on. What struck me second is how certain I was that he had grown up here; how well this place helped to define him as a man and a human being. The smell of cooking oil hung in the air and most of the lights were off, but for the hood light on the stove, and Adam was listening to the radio softly, his back to me where he sat. The surface of the table was worn smooth at the edges, and browned with the gum of human touch. The chair creaked as he adjusted, and the amber ashtray into which he flicked his cigarettes was overflowing with butts of other brands. The cups on the counter were all mismatched, aluminium foil showing plainly he had eaten re-heated leftovers for his dinner. I felt grit under my feet as I walked into the room, the screen door closing loud behind me with a squeal, and then a bang.
And Adam had stood up, and turned around, and said, "Hello."
In the half-light of the kitchen he was cautious, he was overdressed in a gray suit, he was nervous that I'd come, he had tried hastily to clean, he was sweet, and he was hopeless.
"Hello," is what I had said back.
We had sex in the kitchen, as if the rest of the world beyond the room had long ago gone to sleep, and we were awake and frozen like moths in the light over the stove. I had kissed him because we were already pinned under the thumb of the fate of us, and because I knew he wouldn't.
Every year since, when the time returns, we turn to one another and say, "Do you remember?" in reference to this moment when everything changed. And every year, he tells me he can bring me home again, by returning to the now-abandoned kitchen of the Old House, to wait for me to arrive, wearing white.
It's beautiful, I think, and tragic to the point of heartbreak. And it's something that has the power to draw me from anywhere else in the Universe, to feel at home. To feel Home, there with Adam, in the chaos of all things.
But I was busy this year, so.
"I made you a mix," I told Brad, and I had seen him get anxious and suspicious.
"Isn't it your anniversary?" was his first question, and I could tell by his expression changing from confusion to regret that he didn't really want me to say what I did.
"Yeah, it is."
But then he had to respond, and something fragile between us was forced to become steel, or die trying.
"Aren't you going home with Adam tonight?"
But maybe that's where Brad lives, at the intersection where things become steel or die. If he had been more polite or delicate, I wouldn't have been made to choose between them this way, or vocalize my attempt to be diplomatic and see both, or explain why that was okay and not inherently disingenuous in my heart, but Brad is neither delicate nor polite.
I could see in that moment how his bluntness often mistaken for emotional stupidity was really a manipulation styled as ignorance, to get people to explain things to him in the black-and-white of their truest and most despicable motivations. See, well, Brad, I was thinking we could hang and then when it got late, I would hit up Adam and maybe we could just keep it between us...
I immediately opted for a reversal of the burden of explanation.
"So?"
So, what could possibly be wrong with that, Brad, do tell.
His skin was blotchy and dark, how it gets when he's upset, especially low on his cheeks, by the jaw. He stared at me long and cold, and then out into the distance.
"So, are you still gonna see him?"
I shrugged, and refused to answer.
"I don't know."
The blotches got darker as he chewed on the insides of his mouth and thought. But of course the question betrayed that he wanted me to choose; to choose him over Adam, because of all that it might mean. He wasn't asking me if I was still going to see Adam, he was asking me if this was on purpose, this timing of this mix on this night. Could he mean that much to me? And he wanted me to say yes.
"What's the mix about?" he asked, and I could feel myself blushing in the same place, along my jawbone, as my heartbeat picked up.
"Well. Denton. It's about our house."
"You made me a mix about our house," he repeated, his eyes flat and erased of all emotion as carefully as he'd erased his voice.
"Yeah."
"You want to listen to it tonight," he repeated, his tone still cold.
"Yeah."
When I'm confronted with the same situation between me and anyone else, I'm usually in Brad's role, thinking through their words and underlying motivations. My repetition is the same, my consideration the same. I see how we're alike in this moment, but where I understand what he's asking me to do, and why he is asking me with a valueless blank chill, others mistake it in me for derision. Mhm, okay sure, we can do that. Idiot.
He clenched his jaw and unclenched it for almost ten seconds, and I could see the two dark freckles on his cheek moving as he did. He hadn't gotten me to say anything either way, hadn't been able to push me anywhere but the suggestion of what I wanted.
Finally, he tugged with both hands on the ends of the scarf he was wearing, and agreed.
"Alright."
Is it the choosing which is wrong, or the not choosing? Is it a lie by omission, or have I told the truth?
Would I sell Adam for Brad, if given half the chance, and would I ever really be given that choice?
To me, the answer is obvious. Because of Adam, I'm a waste. I will always and forever owe the rest of the world half my soul because it's tied up in Adam, physically, and I can never get it back. The choice is a luxury Adam and I are only pretending exists in the first place; to put anyone before him.
And if it's only symbolic, and we know it is, the color drains away from the action itself. Why do anything that is only symbolic? Why would I choose at all? Why have I done all these things, mouthed apologies to my brothers, stood and put my hand over my heart to pledge allegiance? The world is full of symbols kept alive by the CPR of their repetition, insisting there's something they all mean.
Making the choice would mean I wish it were true. Not making it means that I know it's not even possible, but moot.
As long as Adam exists, maybe I'm just a lie to everyone else we pretend is real. Maybe I'm the shadow of Evelyn and we all carry on pretending that I'm actually real and actually married to them and actually have a life and a love and reason to keep moving forward. Maybe it's me that's the symbol, repeated over and over again by all the other men who love me, performing some ritual of CPR on the cardboard cut-out of myself I trot out to say, "I choose you first, before Adam. I hate Adam, I fucking want away from him, God please help me."
But what could they do, anyway? Who would I be if I wasn't Eve?
Maybe this whole thing is just for nothing.
Monday, February 12, 2018
Denton, 2020
I’m looking for some advice from Rosie today. It gets to feeling like she has so much shit figured out that I don’t. Clyde said she was becoming a man and that just figures right cuz I was born with a dick but no matter where I put it I end up feeling like being a man is like reaching the pedals to drive. You’re too short until you’re just not anymore so whatever Rosie’s secret is I want to know it so I go to her house but I guess it’s the wrong year cuz nobody’s home and I end up eating my lunch staring at the dust on the tv in her living room. The room is quiet anyway but quieter than quiet how it gets when Rosie isn’t in a room. I don’t even hear it when Evie comes in but she’s moving slow and her arms are crossed like she’s working up to telling me real gentle that she’s divorcing me and I have to move out.
You know…………...I hate to do this. I fuckin hate the catwalk and i hate the look on evies face when she sees me climb up there with a burger and a coke and a blanket like I’m never gonna leave. She looks up at me like right NOW Brad? you’re gonna make fun of my dress NOW when i just triedd on six of them for you and you said they were all just OK but sitting there in the old twenty twenty isn’t like my idea of fun you know. Just know I hate this. I didn’t get stuck two years ahead of this moment for kicks alright?
The metal up here is broken in pretty good by me, it clangs in all the right places making me feel as heavy as my thoughts and when i sit down, she scoffs at me hard. I can’t fuckin help it so evie looks like she’s over my shit and shakes her head and goes back to the scene she’s got going on with the REAL me in the REAL world but guess what? she can’t get her mind off of me sitting up all the way up there and maybe it’s cuz I’m droppin lettuce from my double double or maybe it’s cuz she likes me better than that joke down there who doesn’t have anything to say she doesn’t already know.
yeah ok so she wants to get married to adam so what? So I’ll tell you what. That numbnuts down there with my name and MY wife is gonna tell her that’s cool what does that mean you guys are already married so what’s his sick shit about anyways? Can I be a fuckin groomsman evie wow you’d look great in one of those flapper style thing you thought about that one time JESUS CHRIST MAN, DON’T DO IT. yeah, i’m her brother, I’m her best friend, I’ve been her fuckin mom before but this is a joke.
It’ss real dark up on the catwalk and bright down there on the stage where I’m sitting on the couch that looks like Al Bundy’s. i don’t blink and I start thinking there’s a reason for why it’s like that, bright on the stage and dark up here. You know, a different reason than the obvious. What do I know just cuz I’m up here where there’s more information? Knowing something like the real solid gold fucking wisdom about some shit is not the same as only having the information about it. Yeah I know what’s gonna happen but I’m still in the dark unlike that me down there that’s all lit up in the afternoon that’s the same in twenty different subsequent years. THAT guy UNDERSTANDS why knowing what THIS GUY knows doesn’t matter. I could tell her we’re gonna be married but it’s not gonna make us be married.
I hate Back to the Future, but I know I’m Marty McFuckingFly now because I get it now. I get how it makes sense that you have to go save your grandpa so you save your own life to save your grandpa and so on. That’s real, that’s what it’s like and you can blame Escher and say it’s nonsense if you wanted to but wait until you yourself step in some dog shit just like it and see what you really believe. I don’t believe in God or anything like that but you can bet I believe what Doc Brown says, absolutely. I absolutely do.
So yeah, so I tell her don’t and I tell her that cuz what if I don’t want her to? I already know she’s gonna tell me it doesn’t hurt my chances or have shit to do with us in an invasive or even substantive ripple effect kinda way. I already know but she tells me I’m late anyways so I know she just wants to DISCUSS the alternate universe where she’s not already married to Adam but she doesn’t wanna GO there and I know cuz she tells me I’m a little late when I tell her don’t. I tell her and she says I’m a little late like gee Brad, why are you hanging out over there when we both know that’s not real. Well gee Evie you said Adam wanted to marry you how the fuck should I know you meant he wants to marry you again. a word like again means the difference between so much shit it crushes my chest in and I can’t breathe thinking it’s the ten pound mallet of words and I got one you know, hanging up nestled in the curtain ropes up here I could do a lot of damage raining some AGAIN down on us right now what do you think?
there’s plenty of ways I could save myself from caring about who she marries or if it’s ever gonna be me. her hair color means she belongs to matthew so fuck her. She wants to play the butterfly in a net game where anything i say can and will be used against the girl she is that she has to protect from mean old Bradley who could sew up her pussy and spit in her face with a few halfassedly chosen words. I don’t have to care whether she wants to marry me or not if I remember she walked down the goddamn aisle to me once and I never forgot that and once is enough. There’s more, there’s a ton more, I’ve filled up a hundred composition notebooks with the thousand and one ways I can stop caring if I want to. but i guess hey I didn’t really want to.
I don’t want to cuz see, she’s got her own Back to the Future shit going on. Hell of a time to quit smoking. and at least in 2018 she’s looking at 2018 me with some compassion she doesn’t have for 2020 me. she reminds me i can trust her. at least where the couch smells like we grew up therre she doesn’t think i’m just refusing to change something i couldn’t change if i wanted to. She knows the names for all the moving parts between us and how the years cut in and out. She knows she has to unravell things in the right order inside her own heart to save mine so i can save hers so she can save mine so i can save hers. i wanna tell her that i want it to end, you know? I wanna tell her her that once i save her the loops just ends right? but it doesn’t. And the endless fucking fighting we do and the shadow boxing and the games and the dancing and not knowing where we go or where this ends or where we’ve found ourselves is something i gotta admit i’m not too anxious to be done with. Ok, I like it. I like it a lot, I even did some shit I’m not proud of to protect it and still do. But I’m not talking about me I’m talking about her eyes in the afternoon and how she doesn’t get what it’s like to look at her in the afternoon at her eyes like diamonds caught in spider webs and not see love ther e just these questions about how did we get here and how do we get out. I’m talking about the slipstream of us that gets our heads underwater and I don’t know how we’re supposed to share our breath or if we shouldn’t let each other drown and this is the thing: I don’t fucking care.
Which probably shows cuz I masticaste this moment by saying nothing or all the wrong shit and my stomach starts hurting like I ate too fast but see I got this goal in mind and it’s a lot like………………………..it’s a lot like my dick, actually. I have this thing I wanna put inside her and I’ve done it a lot already and it does different shit every time I try and I like that. I got these ways I feel and this shit I can see from the catwalk and how that gets translated down there on the stage good bad or indifferent from the rise of the stillight to the drawing of the curtain you know, I’M still UP here when the fucking scene ends.
I love her. Isn’t that all that fucking matters? I love her so much and she should be able to see that and it should make her feel like the fuckin queen of my heart and never like I’m just tolerating her but I fucking know I don’t do it right. I don’t say the right thing or show her the right side of me, I can’t even do John’s stupid self-deprecation shit good enough to endear her to me even just a little bit. Yeah alright so I’m not endearing and I go through life sticking my dick in everything and hoping it goes ok and that gets me off. I can’t stop thinking about if there’s a huge stack of old puzzles in the closet I could mix together and light on fire and feed her the ashes. I’m into some sick shit, I know this. but either all this shit will just become enough for her one day or she’ll leave me, there’ss nothing else for me to do.
But I’m a manipulative bastard too cuz when I’m thinking all this boohoo shit, I try to make sure she can hear me cuz it gets her off a little even if she hates it too or she won’t play with my Justiified. but tThe edge of my nihilism is this thing that makes her feel endless weirdly. I can tell when she gets in my lap and slides her pussy around my fingers. Like my iniquity is no roadblock, it’s my fucking will to live and it is. When I fuck her, I wanna leave my cum inside her as much as my real detailed explanation of why this is it. We’re not going anywhere, Evie, this is it. Sometimes I feel sorry about her bad luck but there is no destination and so we’re gonna get married as many times as I feel like it and maybe she never feels any different so what? So she gives up one day? I have no problem dragging her\ corpse around to fight and fuck it and make it watch me crash planets together for her if she does. I made up my mind already we’re never gonna be apart so w/e.
You know…………...I hate to do this. I fuckin hate the catwalk and i hate the look on evies face when she sees me climb up there with a burger and a coke and a blanket like I’m never gonna leave. She looks up at me like right NOW Brad? you’re gonna make fun of my dress NOW when i just triedd on six of them for you and you said they were all just OK but sitting there in the old twenty twenty isn’t like my idea of fun you know. Just know I hate this. I didn’t get stuck two years ahead of this moment for kicks alright?
The metal up here is broken in pretty good by me, it clangs in all the right places making me feel as heavy as my thoughts and when i sit down, she scoffs at me hard. I can’t fuckin help it so evie looks like she’s over my shit and shakes her head and goes back to the scene she’s got going on with the REAL me in the REAL world but guess what? she can’t get her mind off of me sitting up all the way up there and maybe it’s cuz I’m droppin lettuce from my double double or maybe it’s cuz she likes me better than that joke down there who doesn’t have anything to say she doesn’t already know.
yeah ok so she wants to get married to adam so what? So I’ll tell you what. That numbnuts down there with my name and MY wife is gonna tell her that’s cool what does that mean you guys are already married so what’s his sick shit about anyways? Can I be a fuckin groomsman evie wow you’d look great in one of those flapper style thing you thought about that one time JESUS CHRIST MAN, DON’T DO IT. yeah, i’m her brother, I’m her best friend, I’ve been her fuckin mom before but this is a joke.
It’ss real dark up on the catwalk and bright down there on the stage where I’m sitting on the couch that looks like Al Bundy’s. i don’t blink and I start thinking there’s a reason for why it’s like that, bright on the stage and dark up here. You know, a different reason than the obvious. What do I know just cuz I’m up here where there’s more information? Knowing something like the real solid gold fucking wisdom about some shit is not the same as only having the information about it. Yeah I know what’s gonna happen but I’m still in the dark unlike that me down there that’s all lit up in the afternoon that’s the same in twenty different subsequent years. THAT guy UNDERSTANDS why knowing what THIS GUY knows doesn’t matter. I could tell her we’re gonna be married but it’s not gonna make us be married.
I hate Back to the Future, but I know I’m Marty McFuckingFly now because I get it now. I get how it makes sense that you have to go save your grandpa so you save your own life to save your grandpa and so on. That’s real, that’s what it’s like and you can blame Escher and say it’s nonsense if you wanted to but wait until you yourself step in some dog shit just like it and see what you really believe. I don’t believe in God or anything like that but you can bet I believe what Doc Brown says, absolutely. I absolutely do.
So yeah, so I tell her don’t and I tell her that cuz what if I don’t want her to? I already know she’s gonna tell me it doesn’t hurt my chances or have shit to do with us in an invasive or even substantive ripple effect kinda way. I already know but she tells me I’m late anyways so I know she just wants to DISCUSS the alternate universe where she’s not already married to Adam but she doesn’t wanna GO there and I know cuz she tells me I’m a little late when I tell her don’t. I tell her and she says I’m a little late like gee Brad, why are you hanging out over there when we both know that’s not real. Well gee Evie you said Adam wanted to marry you how the fuck should I know you meant he wants to marry you again. a word like again means the difference between so much shit it crushes my chest in and I can’t breathe thinking it’s the ten pound mallet of words and I got one you know, hanging up nestled in the curtain ropes up here I could do a lot of damage raining some AGAIN down on us right now what do you think?
there’s plenty of ways I could save myself from caring about who she marries or if it’s ever gonna be me. her hair color means she belongs to matthew so fuck her. She wants to play the butterfly in a net game where anything i say can and will be used against the girl she is that she has to protect from mean old Bradley who could sew up her pussy and spit in her face with a few halfassedly chosen words. I don’t have to care whether she wants to marry me or not if I remember she walked down the goddamn aisle to me once and I never forgot that and once is enough. There’s more, there’s a ton more, I’ve filled up a hundred composition notebooks with the thousand and one ways I can stop caring if I want to. but i guess hey I didn’t really want to.
I don’t want to cuz see, she’s got her own Back to the Future shit going on. Hell of a time to quit smoking. and at least in 2018 she’s looking at 2018 me with some compassion she doesn’t have for 2020 me. she reminds me i can trust her. at least where the couch smells like we grew up therre she doesn’t think i’m just refusing to change something i couldn’t change if i wanted to. She knows the names for all the moving parts between us and how the years cut in and out. She knows she has to unravell things in the right order inside her own heart to save mine so i can save hers so she can save mine so i can save hers. i wanna tell her that i want it to end, you know? I wanna tell her her that once i save her the loops just ends right? but it doesn’t. And the endless fucking fighting we do and the shadow boxing and the games and the dancing and not knowing where we go or where this ends or where we’ve found ourselves is something i gotta admit i’m not too anxious to be done with. Ok, I like it. I like it a lot, I even did some shit I’m not proud of to protect it and still do. But I’m not talking about me I’m talking about her eyes in the afternoon and how she doesn’t get what it’s like to look at her in the afternoon at her eyes like diamonds caught in spider webs and not see love ther e just these questions about how did we get here and how do we get out. I’m talking about the slipstream of us that gets our heads underwater and I don’t know how we’re supposed to share our breath or if we shouldn’t let each other drown and this is the thing: I don’t fucking care.
Which probably shows cuz I masticaste this moment by saying nothing or all the wrong shit and my stomach starts hurting like I ate too fast but see I got this goal in mind and it’s a lot like………………………..it’s a lot like my dick, actually. I have this thing I wanna put inside her and I’ve done it a lot already and it does different shit every time I try and I like that. I got these ways I feel and this shit I can see from the catwalk and how that gets translated down there on the stage good bad or indifferent from the rise of the stillight to the drawing of the curtain you know, I’M still UP here when the fucking scene ends.
I love her. Isn’t that all that fucking matters? I love her so much and she should be able to see that and it should make her feel like the fuckin queen of my heart and never like I’m just tolerating her but I fucking know I don’t do it right. I don’t say the right thing or show her the right side of me, I can’t even do John’s stupid self-deprecation shit good enough to endear her to me even just a little bit. Yeah alright so I’m not endearing and I go through life sticking my dick in everything and hoping it goes ok and that gets me off. I can’t stop thinking about if there’s a huge stack of old puzzles in the closet I could mix together and light on fire and feed her the ashes. I’m into some sick shit, I know this. but either all this shit will just become enough for her one day or she’ll leave me, there’ss nothing else for me to do.
But I’m a manipulative bastard too cuz when I’m thinking all this boohoo shit, I try to make sure she can hear me cuz it gets her off a little even if she hates it too or she won’t play with my Justiified. but tThe edge of my nihilism is this thing that makes her feel endless weirdly. I can tell when she gets in my lap and slides her pussy around my fingers. Like my iniquity is no roadblock, it’s my fucking will to live and it is. When I fuck her, I wanna leave my cum inside her as much as my real detailed explanation of why this is it. We’re not going anywhere, Evie, this is it. Sometimes I feel sorry about her bad luck but there is no destination and so we’re gonna get married as many times as I feel like it and maybe she never feels any different so what? So she gives up one day? I have no problem dragging her\ corpse around to fight and fuck it and make it watch me crash planets together for her if she does. I made up my mind already we’re never gonna be apart so w/e.
Saturday, February 10, 2018
Denton, 2001
Brad wakes up at 7:30, fifteen minutes before we have to be at school on Monday morning. He is skeletal in his undershirt, and he lights a cigarette before he even gets out of bed.
His room is messy and marred with evidence of his fury. There is a careful slit in the mattress, a haphazard hole in the wall behind the door, empty soda cans on the ground among the laundry. His diary is a spiral notebook, open to a page onto which he's written MELT with his own blood. The walls are gray and the sheets are red. The posters he has on the walls are of Playboy models.
He pulls on his jeans and black designer shoes. His hair is slick enough from being unwashed that he doesn't need to wet it or comb it. It hangs in loose tendrils around his face. In teenage hangover, he dons sunglasses and a black sport coat. He blows a smoke ring at his own reflection before noticing me in his doorway.
"I'm not going."
He turns to me and smiles under his blackout glasses.
"Oh, yes you are."
He marches me to my bedroom, through the wide expanse of our parents' hallway, painted a painful taupe. It's bare and cold over the dark hardwood floor, and it's supposed to be elegant but falls just short, because there's no artwork. Only family photos, lined up in ascending age.
My room is yellow, and has pressed flowers on the walls in white frames.
"Now," he says, throwing open the white door of my closet, and pawing at clothes. "Wear these."
He tosses me a red dress and white sweater I wore to a Valentine's Day dance the year before, and I understand what it is he's doing. I hold the slick material in my fingers for a long moment during which he raises his glasses and we stare into one another's eyes and his cigarette burns down in his fingers. He isn't allowed to smoke in the house.
"Okay," I tell him, and change my clothes.
The downstairs of our parents' house is dark and silent. Behind the closed bedroom door, I listen for a moment and hear the sound of our mother softly crying. Her sobs are listless whimpers now that she is on the far side of her sedatives.
Normally the bright kitchen would be bustling with the sounds of her making coffee and the chatter of her and my father exchanging stories about the news. I walk through the entire downstairs, as if the sound of a normal morning is hiding somewhere in another room. The living room is strewn with tissues and the television is still on, but muted. There's a chair pushed over on it's side on the floor of the dining room, and the rest ignore it like a dying member of their herd.
Brad watches me in the dining room through the doorway which leads to the kitchen. He leans against the counter with his arms crossed until the clock next to the long polished table begins to chime the quarter hour.
"We're taking Dad's car," he informs me, and grabs the keys from the hooks hanging in a neat row on the wall of the kitchen. He stands at the door to the garage and waits for me.
"They're going to stare at us," I tell him, looking down at the fallen chair like there's no way for me to right this at all.
"Yes," he says, his voice biting, and throws his cigarette into the sink holding soaking dishes. It makes a hissing sound, and he swings the keys around his index finger.
"Come on, Evie. Get in the car."
Our father's painstakingly restored Jaguar E-type series 3 Roadster crouches in the garage, and Brad vaults himself over the door and into the driver's seat with a kind of merciless and intentional glee. The interior is clean and black, the steering wheel a gold wood grain outlining the polished steel. The front panel of the dashboard is lined with toggle switches controlling things I was never allowed to touch, but Brad starts the engine like he's practiced a hundred times.
The car comes to life and the sound is threatening in the dark garage. Brad revs the engine and glances over at me as I open the door and sit beside him.
"I could just leave it running in here," he jokes, and revs the engine again. "No more rumors. No more staring. No more finals..."
I press the opener, and he laughs as light from the morning fills the garage.
"I just want to get it over with," I tell him, and he clutches my hand with his, warm and dry.
"I'll be with you all day," he assures me.
We back out into the street and he speeds to school. We arrive just before the first bell and he squeals into the parking lot while the student body on the lawn turn to watch us.
"How does it feel to be the daughter of the worst serial murderer in our town's history?" Brad asks me, lifting his glasses up from the back like this is all a big joke.
"How does it feel to be his son?" I snap at him, and he smiles at me, and pulls on one of the pearl buttons of my sweater.
When he gets out of the car, he throws his arm around me so we can walk in together.
His room is messy and marred with evidence of his fury. There is a careful slit in the mattress, a haphazard hole in the wall behind the door, empty soda cans on the ground among the laundry. His diary is a spiral notebook, open to a page onto which he's written MELT with his own blood. The walls are gray and the sheets are red. The posters he has on the walls are of Playboy models.
He pulls on his jeans and black designer shoes. His hair is slick enough from being unwashed that he doesn't need to wet it or comb it. It hangs in loose tendrils around his face. In teenage hangover, he dons sunglasses and a black sport coat. He blows a smoke ring at his own reflection before noticing me in his doorway.
"I'm not going."
He turns to me and smiles under his blackout glasses.
"Oh, yes you are."
He marches me to my bedroom, through the wide expanse of our parents' hallway, painted a painful taupe. It's bare and cold over the dark hardwood floor, and it's supposed to be elegant but falls just short, because there's no artwork. Only family photos, lined up in ascending age.
My room is yellow, and has pressed flowers on the walls in white frames.
"Now," he says, throwing open the white door of my closet, and pawing at clothes. "Wear these."
He tosses me a red dress and white sweater I wore to a Valentine's Day dance the year before, and I understand what it is he's doing. I hold the slick material in my fingers for a long moment during which he raises his glasses and we stare into one another's eyes and his cigarette burns down in his fingers. He isn't allowed to smoke in the house.
"Okay," I tell him, and change my clothes.
The downstairs of our parents' house is dark and silent. Behind the closed bedroom door, I listen for a moment and hear the sound of our mother softly crying. Her sobs are listless whimpers now that she is on the far side of her sedatives.
Normally the bright kitchen would be bustling with the sounds of her making coffee and the chatter of her and my father exchanging stories about the news. I walk through the entire downstairs, as if the sound of a normal morning is hiding somewhere in another room. The living room is strewn with tissues and the television is still on, but muted. There's a chair pushed over on it's side on the floor of the dining room, and the rest ignore it like a dying member of their herd.
Brad watches me in the dining room through the doorway which leads to the kitchen. He leans against the counter with his arms crossed until the clock next to the long polished table begins to chime the quarter hour.
"We're taking Dad's car," he informs me, and grabs the keys from the hooks hanging in a neat row on the wall of the kitchen. He stands at the door to the garage and waits for me.
"They're going to stare at us," I tell him, looking down at the fallen chair like there's no way for me to right this at all.
"Yes," he says, his voice biting, and throws his cigarette into the sink holding soaking dishes. It makes a hissing sound, and he swings the keys around his index finger.
"Come on, Evie. Get in the car."
Our father's painstakingly restored Jaguar E-type series 3 Roadster crouches in the garage, and Brad vaults himself over the door and into the driver's seat with a kind of merciless and intentional glee. The interior is clean and black, the steering wheel a gold wood grain outlining the polished steel. The front panel of the dashboard is lined with toggle switches controlling things I was never allowed to touch, but Brad starts the engine like he's practiced a hundred times.
The car comes to life and the sound is threatening in the dark garage. Brad revs the engine and glances over at me as I open the door and sit beside him.
"I could just leave it running in here," he jokes, and revs the engine again. "No more rumors. No more staring. No more finals..."
I press the opener, and he laughs as light from the morning fills the garage.
"I just want to get it over with," I tell him, and he clutches my hand with his, warm and dry.
"I'll be with you all day," he assures me.
We back out into the street and he speeds to school. We arrive just before the first bell and he squeals into the parking lot while the student body on the lawn turn to watch us.
"How does it feel to be the daughter of the worst serial murderer in our town's history?" Brad asks me, lifting his glasses up from the back like this is all a big joke.
"How does it feel to be his son?" I snap at him, and he smiles at me, and pulls on one of the pearl buttons of my sweater.
When he gets out of the car, he throws his arm around me so we can walk in together.
Thursday, February 8, 2018
Denton, 1978
There are some parts of the universe my name becomes Girl Soldier. In response, or perhaps by necessity, Brad's becomes Boy Soldier. We live in a Wasteland, and we wear the same shoe size. Dust on my skin, I walked through the Aftermath toward Brad at the end of the aisle. I remember the white chairs were full of the Gray Family, and no one turned to look at me.
There's love that's based on admiration, but there's another kind of love that has to do with seeing yourself in someone else, and therefore finding some kind of permission to exist. I wouldn't know half of the things I now know about myself without Brad, whether it was because he was the same or because he was different. Maybe I just lacked personal imagination, but there were errant punk teenagers, wild unknown species, shy and vindictive nihilists, and trees stunted and persistent in growth I found flowering in the dark shadows we cast on one another. Things I never would have seen before unless I saw it demonstrated in the lash of his tongue and the distance in his eyes.
Maybe there's no way to really know yourself until you watch yourself brought to life in front of you. At the end of the aisle, Brad has his arms at his sides, his hands balled into fists, and I could tell that every violent act of man was collapsing in on itself in his heart, and I was remembering one of our hundred mottos: He fights as you sing prick-song, keeps time, distance, and proportion.
Someday I'll write a whole book just on those three words and all the life they breathe into the heart of magic. It will be about how Brad taught magic to me, in the low river underbrush of Eden; dirt on our sneakers and shirts stuck hot to our backs.
For now I simply repeated it, trying to get to the end of the aisle, no matter where or when the end of it was. It's a motto of perseverance and the exactness of warfare. How Brad is an artist, a measured response, and a chemical reaction.
I remember the wind dying, and the sound of him breathing, close and present in the midday when I reached him. Then it was over.
I woke up in the woods, in the early morning, dew hanging on the tips of the pine needles on the trees around me. It was cold, still November, and just after a rain, judging by the smell. Beneath the rain was the copper scent of the river. The wedding was gone, or had ended, and I was alone with myself again, an event stolen or erased or lost under the weight of this existence we've chosen.
"Brad?" I called into the trees.
In open spaces, the human voice refuses to be carried for long. My yell filled my own ears and died around me, snapping small twigs in the clearing I had woken up in. I saw a brown rabbit raise it's head high enough to show me it's proud ears before disappearing into the brush.
Had we gotten married? Was I still myself? Had years gone by where I'd been lost and alone here? Had he forgotten me? Was I in another world altogether? Had I slipped through the virginal hymen that separated universes again?
My wedding dress gone, I could feel jeans underneath the blanket that had been laid over me - a yellow and brown plaid of wide bricks and lines, the fringe stuck with brown leaves. I wrapped it around my shoulders and blew a pale-colored spider from my leg before standing to look around.
The sun was burning mist off of the valley where the woods were thickest. I yelled for him again, expecting no response. Expecting the worst answers to all my questions.
"Brad?"
"Evie!" was his bark of a reply, and I turned in all directions, tricked by his voice to believe he was down every path I could find through the underbrush.
"Where are you?" I asked the blank faces of trees.
"Come up the hill!" he yelled.
I hurried to him, afraid in the forest. I hadn't been to the woods in maybe years, and while I had once counted it as my home, I had withdrawn from it so far, it made me feel exposed and endangered more than anything else. I didn't feel the sense of playfulness at the antics of this place anymore. Just the cold strangeness of a foreign land.
My boots slid over a rock and I stumbled on the way up to meet him, but I found him where the hill leveled at it's apex, standing in front of an old house that I could tell had once been painted yellow. Now it had faded to bone white, with the persistence of time and exposure. There's a pallet to the woods; I remembered that much. A range of shades all things in time are reduced to. Bone white, soil brown, poppy red, lichen green.
Some of the siding had been pulled away to reveal the ribs of the house - a battle scar on it's smeared face revealing the brown frame beneath. Rust crept over the white paint of the screen door. The windows were opaque with rain and dust. The thing which always bothered me about the woods was the way it makes death so inevitable this way. The woods come to claim all things in time, even this house, whoever lived here once, and any happiness they might've shared. If it's not moss, it's mildew, and it's rain, and it's the choking kudzu, and it's Robert Frost in all his smug brevity.
"Look at this," Brad said, tightening a brown leather jacket over his shoulders. He was unshaven, the sides of his face flushing in the cold, his hair tucked into a hat and almost as dark as Clyde's in this green and brown wilderness.
He had an intrigued smile that meant he wasn't afraid like I was. He put his arm around me, and we stood looking at the house. Four steps up to the small porch, the bottom step sinking into the mud.
"I was looking for firewood," he said to me. "I didn't get any closer, thinking maybe there's a witch in there."
I touched a rope hanging from a tree next to me in the yard, knotted at the end to hold up a swing of splintering wood.
"We should go in," I suggested, the suggestion itself clung with the steam that puffed out of our lungs and weighed down the layers of dead leaves underfoot. The woods hold witches, sure, but not any that I can't reason with. Nightmares, absolutely, but none Brad can't make even more vile with the blowing of a casual kiss.
"Yeah, okay," he agreed.
The door creaked when it gave way, popping through grit caught in the hinges. The inside was dim and full of
"Evie?" Brad asked, his voice quiet as he crossed into the living room. "Are these your things?"
books, mostly, strewn from a bookcase which had been knocked over. A typewriter on a desk, a console record player, a couch inside which an animal had been living, floral in pattern and dark green.
"I... I can't remember. I can't remember how we got here," I admitted, and I watched confusion cloud the cold blue of his eyes once I'd said it.
"We were getting married," he reminded me. He picked up a plastic cup splashed with a pattern of orange and yellow daisies.
"Did we?" I asked him.
In a way, I might be a fatalist, and I could tell Brad knew it. If we hadn't gotten married, then maybe we were never supposed to. If he said we hadn't gotten married, then maybe we were never supposed to. The hand of God is fickle and frail in Gray House, and words mean everything. Fear can as easily make something true as an action, and so my question was barbed, and poisoned, and lethal. He knew it, and so he got angry.
"Of course we did, Evie," he almost spat. "What the fuck would make you ask a thing like that?"
But I could tell by his face he was only asking because he wanted me to be certain, because he wasn't either. Because we did wake up here together, with no memory of how we'd come, and now it was time to decide what had brought us here. We could feel between us it was time to choose a path to follow, and to one of many obvious fates, in true Family fashion. It's true if we say it is. It's as simple as believing you're not lost if you can find the north star. It's true if we say it is. Now who would say it first?
No, we did," I told him. "We're married. I just don't know... where this is. We were in the desert, and..."
I started to cry so fast it surprised even me. All the best laid plans of how I needed - fucking needed - to marry him in order to make sense of us were blown away in a dark second, and I'd been dropped into the wet and murky uncertainty of the Girl Soldier and all her infectious insides of the River instead. Brad put his arms tight around me, the leather of his jacket making a soft creak, and we stood there for a long time.
"Hey," he said after the long pause. "We've been married since we were born."
"Are you sure?" I asked him, almost hysterical. I felt his arms get even tighter around me, crushing me of air. I thought of the way Brad's physical pressure has always pushed against me, just this way, and the oppressive feeling of him beside me or within my rib cage has been ever-present, as my twin, smashed into a constricted uterus.
"Yeah," he said. "Absolutely. Just look at us."
I opened my watering eyes to look at us, but saw only our legs close enough to touch in matching jeans, in this strange house. The carpet was rotting around us to a strange shade of blackish-green. Wallpaper hung in long sheet unwinding from it's adhesive. There were shadows on the walls where pictures once hung. Below one shadow was the shattered glass hanging webbish in the frame over the photograph.
"We've always had fuckin' problems like we've been married forever," he sighed into my shoulder. "It's god damn ridiculous, Evie. All we've ever done is try to grow together."
I broke away from him because it seemed like a joke, what he said. It was true, in a way, but it was also a spectacular failure in many other ways. We had tried to grow together, yes, with little to no success because we were compositionally the same, like a piece of music, but played two entirely different ways. Yes, it's the same song, but one is going on the Top 40 and one is staying in the basement of the opera house forever and never meeting that guy at the mall because malls actually haven't been built yet.
While there was more uniting us, what divided us was enough to make it difficult to stand in the same reality with Brad, much less form this symbiotic partnership he was saying existed because we were always fucking arguing. It was the reason the wedding I had planned made the most sense - the desert was a place we had in common, and what was I supposed to do here?
The house became a mockery around us. Adam, even in his starched collars and business suits, would capitulate to the mold of this place, would build a fire, would find ways to trap the rabbits in the brush, would love this place inside me for what it was, would summon butterflies on his fingertips and pull worms from his garden he would plant outside. Adam would know how to love me in a way that made sense, Adam is why this fucking shadow exists in the first place, from which Brad and I could never seem to escape.
Brad, it was plain to me, couldn't stay here with me. What was he going to do, once the novelty of the camp-out had worn off? When my novelty wore off, would we just sit here reading books and waiting for the rain? Would he fix the window? Would we ever live somewhere like this together, alone, and far enough away from everyone else to feel like we'd finally escaped? Because Adam would fix the window. Adam would tell me stories at night. Adam would bring the winter down around us.
I wanted to scream at Brad, "You don't know what it's like to be this kind of animal for him," but he would never believe in anything I told him that he didn't already know.
Instead of screaming, I pushed past him to the narrow hall of the tiny house, which emptied into a bedroom in a better state of repair than the front room.
The window was intact, and so the room was free of leaves and animals, as far as I could see, but there was a layer of dust on the bedspread, which was a vague color between orange and pink I could imagine has a name like "Sunripe." The wallpaper in this room was pale green with white daisies. The light coming in through the opaque glass was early-morning yellow. It was a pretty room, and a poetic enough place to have the fight with Brad I knew I was about to have.
"What's your problem?" he asked me, coming into the room on my heels, his expression betrayed. He tossed back the brush of his hair that tends to fall smooth into his eyes, hooking it between his fingers with an irritated tug.
An age-old question, attached to an age-old dilemma. Tell the truth and lose, or lie and win.
"We can't stay here," I told him.
It was all I could make come out of me that was coherent thought. The rest of me was rising panic that we could try. We could leave somewhere and never be found if I hadn't... sectioned off whole parts of me for someone else.
"I wish I was a virgin," I whispered to him, but what I really meant was, I wish I'd never fallen in love with anyone else. Maybe I felt like I had nothing that I'd saved just for him, or just for us. That one gesture would've made us safe, and free, and clear of all the things we'd left behind us in a ruin.
"This is how we can't ever be married," I told him. "This house. That's why it's here."
He reached out to touch me, and in between the movements, I could almost see what it would take to make it all real. I could almost see it, but not quite, and it was gone before his hand met my cheek. I almost knew who he was - the boy in him which had always been alone with me. Almost, almost. Not the boy who could fix the window. The boy who'd broken it in the first place.
I struggled when he took his jacket off to hold onto what I could see, and conjure him up from the inside, behind his eyes. I struggled to just see him, and not attach as I'm prone to do the labels of story and meaning. Don't think about if we ran away. Don't think about how mad Adam would be if he knew, or Matthew. Don't think about how maybe you just want him to be Clyde.
The single tear, two inches in length, along the hem of
"Evie."
his shirt. Torn by age and wear. The shirt he wouldn't throw away. A color named something like "firebrick." How he leaned back onto a single
"We're virgins, don't you know?"
elbow in the dirt to laugh when I told him a joke, and
"We can stay here, I swear."
hit rocks into the trees with a snub of steel pipe he found in the house, listening for their fall in the brush.
He took my clothes off, slowly, and I told him I couldn't remember who we were.
There's love that's based on admiration, but there's another kind of love that has to do with seeing yourself in someone else, and therefore finding some kind of permission to exist. I wouldn't know half of the things I now know about myself without Brad, whether it was because he was the same or because he was different. Maybe I just lacked personal imagination, but there were errant punk teenagers, wild unknown species, shy and vindictive nihilists, and trees stunted and persistent in growth I found flowering in the dark shadows we cast on one another. Things I never would have seen before unless I saw it demonstrated in the lash of his tongue and the distance in his eyes.
Maybe there's no way to really know yourself until you watch yourself brought to life in front of you. At the end of the aisle, Brad has his arms at his sides, his hands balled into fists, and I could tell that every violent act of man was collapsing in on itself in his heart, and I was remembering one of our hundred mottos: He fights as you sing prick-song, keeps time, distance, and proportion.
Someday I'll write a whole book just on those three words and all the life they breathe into the heart of magic. It will be about how Brad taught magic to me, in the low river underbrush of Eden; dirt on our sneakers and shirts stuck hot to our backs.
For now I simply repeated it, trying to get to the end of the aisle, no matter where or when the end of it was. It's a motto of perseverance and the exactness of warfare. How Brad is an artist, a measured response, and a chemical reaction.
I remember the wind dying, and the sound of him breathing, close and present in the midday when I reached him. Then it was over.
I woke up in the woods, in the early morning, dew hanging on the tips of the pine needles on the trees around me. It was cold, still November, and just after a rain, judging by the smell. Beneath the rain was the copper scent of the river. The wedding was gone, or had ended, and I was alone with myself again, an event stolen or erased or lost under the weight of this existence we've chosen.
"Brad?" I called into the trees.
In open spaces, the human voice refuses to be carried for long. My yell filled my own ears and died around me, snapping small twigs in the clearing I had woken up in. I saw a brown rabbit raise it's head high enough to show me it's proud ears before disappearing into the brush.
Had we gotten married? Was I still myself? Had years gone by where I'd been lost and alone here? Had he forgotten me? Was I in another world altogether? Had I slipped through the virginal hymen that separated universes again?
My wedding dress gone, I could feel jeans underneath the blanket that had been laid over me - a yellow and brown plaid of wide bricks and lines, the fringe stuck with brown leaves. I wrapped it around my shoulders and blew a pale-colored spider from my leg before standing to look around.
The sun was burning mist off of the valley where the woods were thickest. I yelled for him again, expecting no response. Expecting the worst answers to all my questions.
"Brad?"
"Evie!" was his bark of a reply, and I turned in all directions, tricked by his voice to believe he was down every path I could find through the underbrush.
"Where are you?" I asked the blank faces of trees.
"Come up the hill!" he yelled.
I hurried to him, afraid in the forest. I hadn't been to the woods in maybe years, and while I had once counted it as my home, I had withdrawn from it so far, it made me feel exposed and endangered more than anything else. I didn't feel the sense of playfulness at the antics of this place anymore. Just the cold strangeness of a foreign land.
My boots slid over a rock and I stumbled on the way up to meet him, but I found him where the hill leveled at it's apex, standing in front of an old house that I could tell had once been painted yellow. Now it had faded to bone white, with the persistence of time and exposure. There's a pallet to the woods; I remembered that much. A range of shades all things in time are reduced to. Bone white, soil brown, poppy red, lichen green.
Some of the siding had been pulled away to reveal the ribs of the house - a battle scar on it's smeared face revealing the brown frame beneath. Rust crept over the white paint of the screen door. The windows were opaque with rain and dust. The thing which always bothered me about the woods was the way it makes death so inevitable this way. The woods come to claim all things in time, even this house, whoever lived here once, and any happiness they might've shared. If it's not moss, it's mildew, and it's rain, and it's the choking kudzu, and it's Robert Frost in all his smug brevity.
"Look at this," Brad said, tightening a brown leather jacket over his shoulders. He was unshaven, the sides of his face flushing in the cold, his hair tucked into a hat and almost as dark as Clyde's in this green and brown wilderness.
He had an intrigued smile that meant he wasn't afraid like I was. He put his arm around me, and we stood looking at the house. Four steps up to the small porch, the bottom step sinking into the mud.
"I was looking for firewood," he said to me. "I didn't get any closer, thinking maybe there's a witch in there."
I touched a rope hanging from a tree next to me in the yard, knotted at the end to hold up a swing of splintering wood.
"We should go in," I suggested, the suggestion itself clung with the steam that puffed out of our lungs and weighed down the layers of dead leaves underfoot. The woods hold witches, sure, but not any that I can't reason with. Nightmares, absolutely, but none Brad can't make even more vile with the blowing of a casual kiss.
"Yeah, okay," he agreed.
The door creaked when it gave way, popping through grit caught in the hinges. The inside was dim and full of
"Evie?" Brad asked, his voice quiet as he crossed into the living room. "Are these your things?"
books, mostly, strewn from a bookcase which had been knocked over. A typewriter on a desk, a console record player, a couch inside which an animal had been living, floral in pattern and dark green.
"I... I can't remember. I can't remember how we got here," I admitted, and I watched confusion cloud the cold blue of his eyes once I'd said it.
"We were getting married," he reminded me. He picked up a plastic cup splashed with a pattern of orange and yellow daisies.
"Did we?" I asked him.
In a way, I might be a fatalist, and I could tell Brad knew it. If we hadn't gotten married, then maybe we were never supposed to. If he said we hadn't gotten married, then maybe we were never supposed to. The hand of God is fickle and frail in Gray House, and words mean everything. Fear can as easily make something true as an action, and so my question was barbed, and poisoned, and lethal. He knew it, and so he got angry.
"Of course we did, Evie," he almost spat. "What the fuck would make you ask a thing like that?"
But I could tell by his face he was only asking because he wanted me to be certain, because he wasn't either. Because we did wake up here together, with no memory of how we'd come, and now it was time to decide what had brought us here. We could feel between us it was time to choose a path to follow, and to one of many obvious fates, in true Family fashion. It's true if we say it is. It's as simple as believing you're not lost if you can find the north star. It's true if we say it is. Now who would say it first?
No, we did," I told him. "We're married. I just don't know... where this is. We were in the desert, and..."
I started to cry so fast it surprised even me. All the best laid plans of how I needed - fucking needed - to marry him in order to make sense of us were blown away in a dark second, and I'd been dropped into the wet and murky uncertainty of the Girl Soldier and all her infectious insides of the River instead. Brad put his arms tight around me, the leather of his jacket making a soft creak, and we stood there for a long time.
"Hey," he said after the long pause. "We've been married since we were born."
"Are you sure?" I asked him, almost hysterical. I felt his arms get even tighter around me, crushing me of air. I thought of the way Brad's physical pressure has always pushed against me, just this way, and the oppressive feeling of him beside me or within my rib cage has been ever-present, as my twin, smashed into a constricted uterus.
"Yeah," he said. "Absolutely. Just look at us."
I opened my watering eyes to look at us, but saw only our legs close enough to touch in matching jeans, in this strange house. The carpet was rotting around us to a strange shade of blackish-green. Wallpaper hung in long sheet unwinding from it's adhesive. There were shadows on the walls where pictures once hung. Below one shadow was the shattered glass hanging webbish in the frame over the photograph.
"We've always had fuckin' problems like we've been married forever," he sighed into my shoulder. "It's god damn ridiculous, Evie. All we've ever done is try to grow together."
I broke away from him because it seemed like a joke, what he said. It was true, in a way, but it was also a spectacular failure in many other ways. We had tried to grow together, yes, with little to no success because we were compositionally the same, like a piece of music, but played two entirely different ways. Yes, it's the same song, but one is going on the Top 40 and one is staying in the basement of the opera house forever and never meeting that guy at the mall because malls actually haven't been built yet.
While there was more uniting us, what divided us was enough to make it difficult to stand in the same reality with Brad, much less form this symbiotic partnership he was saying existed because we were always fucking arguing. It was the reason the wedding I had planned made the most sense - the desert was a place we had in common, and what was I supposed to do here?
The house became a mockery around us. Adam, even in his starched collars and business suits, would capitulate to the mold of this place, would build a fire, would find ways to trap the rabbits in the brush, would love this place inside me for what it was, would summon butterflies on his fingertips and pull worms from his garden he would plant outside. Adam would know how to love me in a way that made sense, Adam is why this fucking shadow exists in the first place, from which Brad and I could never seem to escape.
Brad, it was plain to me, couldn't stay here with me. What was he going to do, once the novelty of the camp-out had worn off? When my novelty wore off, would we just sit here reading books and waiting for the rain? Would he fix the window? Would we ever live somewhere like this together, alone, and far enough away from everyone else to feel like we'd finally escaped? Because Adam would fix the window. Adam would tell me stories at night. Adam would bring the winter down around us.
I wanted to scream at Brad, "You don't know what it's like to be this kind of animal for him," but he would never believe in anything I told him that he didn't already know.
Instead of screaming, I pushed past him to the narrow hall of the tiny house, which emptied into a bedroom in a better state of repair than the front room.
The window was intact, and so the room was free of leaves and animals, as far as I could see, but there was a layer of dust on the bedspread, which was a vague color between orange and pink I could imagine has a name like "Sunripe." The wallpaper in this room was pale green with white daisies. The light coming in through the opaque glass was early-morning yellow. It was a pretty room, and a poetic enough place to have the fight with Brad I knew I was about to have.
"What's your problem?" he asked me, coming into the room on my heels, his expression betrayed. He tossed back the brush of his hair that tends to fall smooth into his eyes, hooking it between his fingers with an irritated tug.
An age-old question, attached to an age-old dilemma. Tell the truth and lose, or lie and win.
"We can't stay here," I told him.
It was all I could make come out of me that was coherent thought. The rest of me was rising panic that we could try. We could leave somewhere and never be found if I hadn't... sectioned off whole parts of me for someone else.
"I wish I was a virgin," I whispered to him, but what I really meant was, I wish I'd never fallen in love with anyone else. Maybe I felt like I had nothing that I'd saved just for him, or just for us. That one gesture would've made us safe, and free, and clear of all the things we'd left behind us in a ruin.
"This is how we can't ever be married," I told him. "This house. That's why it's here."
He reached out to touch me, and in between the movements, I could almost see what it would take to make it all real. I could almost see it, but not quite, and it was gone before his hand met my cheek. I almost knew who he was - the boy in him which had always been alone with me. Almost, almost. Not the boy who could fix the window. The boy who'd broken it in the first place.
I struggled when he took his jacket off to hold onto what I could see, and conjure him up from the inside, behind his eyes. I struggled to just see him, and not attach as I'm prone to do the labels of story and meaning. Don't think about if we ran away. Don't think about how mad Adam would be if he knew, or Matthew. Don't think about how maybe you just want him to be Clyde.
The single tear, two inches in length, along the hem of
"Evie."
his shirt. Torn by age and wear. The shirt he wouldn't throw away. A color named something like "firebrick." How he leaned back onto a single
"We're virgins, don't you know?"
elbow in the dirt to laugh when I told him a joke, and
"We can stay here, I swear."
hit rocks into the trees with a snub of steel pipe he found in the house, listening for their fall in the brush.
He took my clothes off, slowly, and I told him I couldn't remember who we were.
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