The History of Need: original fiction
Title: The History of Need: original fiction
Author: nieded
Rating: PG-13
Discaimer: Text taken from sources without permission, cited in endnotes. I make no monetary claims nor do I consider the quoted dialogue as my own. In no way are any of these scenes supposed to mirror and reflect the actors and the choices they made in studio (if you're reading this, Phan).
Notes, credit, and thanks at end.
Word count: approx. 4,000
Summary: Then: for a fleeting moment Mya thinks she catches sight of him again, his backpack slung over his tattered shirt as he pushes his way through the busy streets leading to Tomkins Square on a Sunday. The smoke and stench wafts toward her, a billowing plume, and she watches it swallow Torch whole.
The History of Need
I.
(One more notch I scratch
to keep me thinking of you.
Blue stands inside the doorway of the tiny, cupboard-like room, her hands wrapped protectively over her body at the sight of Torch flung on the floor at the foot of the bed. She can see his ribs through the threadbare shirt, his breath coming in shallow pants. For a moment, she thinks maybe he didn’t hear her enter. The surrounding noise permeates the room: the sound of beer cans outside being chucked against the building wall outside, Torch’s neighbor retching next door.
But before she takes a step further into the room, Torch flicks his head upward, staring at her with a dark, unreadable expression. “What if you die from it, Blue? And I gotta live with that?” he asks, fingers curled into a fist against his hip and on his knee.
Three months have passed since she last saw him, but Torch looks about the same as he always has, thankfully: the same close-cropped, military hairstyle belayed by the famished frame and bloodshot eyes. He limps now. That’s new, but his face is as smooth and clean as ever - not that she wouldn’t love him with sores - she would. She would love him no matter: his sharp angles and brittle bitterness. But she never thought it’d be like this, the first words shared between them after so long ridden with guilt. Couldn’t for once they just be happy? Couldn’t they pretend? “Come over here,” she begs.
“Answer me!”
“Come over here and I’ll tell you.”
Torch heaves himself into an upright position, his back pressed against the leg of the bed, arm outstretched on his knee towards the bowl of the toilet. “Tell me from there,” he insists. “I wanna hear this, how I can sit here and watch those nice little tits of yours shrivel up like raisins.” He pulls the collar of his torn t-shirt up to his face, wiping the sweat gathering on his upper lip from fever, throwing his head back against the side of the mattress. His words slur together, as harsh and brutal as always. “Sit here a-and watch you lose like fifty pounds in twenty-four hours while your head puffs up to twice its size, and that I done it to you. This I wanna hear.”
Blue steps through the doorway, smoothing out the wrinkles of her cheap china-blue foral dress. She wants to look nice for him. “You want pizza?” she asks, her strained smile wavering. “You got pizza. With this decal I can sneak in and sneak out.” She jabs at the positive red stamp on her bicep. “You want stickball? You got it. Want to get drunk? Want a nice t-shirt - it’s all yours. And if one of us starts to die… then a light meal, a glass of wine, and four grams of seconal.”
Torch snorts, the exhalation of breath turning into a labored cough as he turns his head away, lurching towards the toilet nearby.
She ignores it. “Two grams apiece. We could go to sleep in each other’s arms. Naked. So the guard should get off on it.”
“Are you gonna get serious, or what?” Torch snaps, but it lacks any real heat. Maybe it’s because they both know it’s true about the guard, about currying favors with exhibitionism in trade for protection and security.
Blue smiles then for real and slips into the room to the bed. She sits on the edge of the mattress looking down at him with an expression of mixed enthusiasm and adoration. “I am serious. You really like my tits? I never thought you did. Maybe my ass, but-“
He shakes head, looking up at her with hooded eyes and disbelief. “I could really see this, sure. You and me playing house here. On Sundays we take a little stroll in the park.” The illness makes him transparent, the sadness and disgust evident in the twist of his mouth. “You seen Tomkins Square lately? It’s where they pile the bodies and burn them on Sundays. We could walk around, sniffing the fresh air. We could watch the people who can’t control themselves squatting in the gutters with the shit running out of them like rusty tap water.”
Blue wants to hit him but turns away. Yeah, she’s seen them, the smoke from the pyres curling into the sky. She can see it from outside of quarantine three miles off in her own shabby apartment on the top floor. Every Sunday she wonders if Torch is part of it, if it’s him floating up into the air. The uncertainty and fear eats at her, and that’s why she had to sneak into quarantine: so she could be here with him. So she could know.
Torch keeps talking, on a roll now as the anger festering within finally finds a spigot out. “Or we could go to the laundromat on Avenue A and watch people trying to unglue the t-shirts from their sores to wash them. And then,” he sneers sarcastically, “come back and fuck with two water glasses and a killer dose of reds in this little altar next to bed. It’s the American Dream!”
But Blue stops listening, mesmerized by the jut of his lower lip, the dark smears beneath his eyes from exhaustion. She’s waited for this so long, to touch him and hear his voice even if it’s bitter and snarling. Sweat gathers on his upper lip again, and want floods her: want to taste the salty bitterness of sickness, to sweep away the months of festering anger and neglect. Her fingers curl into the fabric of her skirt. She won’t force him, not when he’s ill and not when she’ll get sick too, but she needs this - needs the pain and the hurt and the wailing in the night so Torch won’t have to suffer the pain alone. This illness acts like a separation stronger than guards and quarantine and decals between them, and she wants nothing more than to close that distance and know what he knows.
And that’s the point of coming here, she thinks as she stares at a dark bruise developing on his neck - the beginnings of Kaposi Sarcoma maybe: to fuck him and trap him with guilt so he won’t ever try to rid of her again. If she gets sick then there won’t be a reason to hold back and to push her away.
Torch taps her on the knee, jerking her from her thoughts when he leanins forward and waves a hand in front of her face. With a lilting Scottish accent he asks, “Uh, Mya? Mya?”
Blue blinks, and her chest suddenly tightens heavily as she falls back into her body. “What?”
Torch reaches from behind the bedpost and reveals a booklet of paper, flipping through it. “You’re supposed to say… Here: ‘I usta think that too.’” His voice easily transitions between Scottish and a Manhattan dialect.
“What?”
“Uh, your lines,” Calum says, waving the script in front o her face. “Torch says: ‘It’s the American dream!’ Blue says-” in falsetto-“‘I usta think that too.’” He chucks the booklet at her.
The force of the throw causes the sheets to fumble as she reaches out for it, the delicate paper slicing into the pad of her thumb. “Right, right,” she mutters, stealing a sidelong glance at Calum while he stuffs the script behind their makeshift bed - two prop boxes shoved together. She hesitates, wanting to reach out and brush her fingers of the cords of his neck, the sharp edges of his angular face dusted with a light smattering of a beard.
He huffs when he turns again to face her. “I always laugh at this line: ‘It’s the American Dream!’ Some dream.”
“It’s not actually the American Dream,” Mya answers. “I mean… Sarcasm, right? You’re just too… European.”
He rolls his eyes at her and spares her a withering look. “I get that, aye. All I’m saying is that I’m not American.” Calum is a foreign exchange student, but sometimes Mya forgets that, especially when he isn’t Calum at all, but Torch: a sick but vivacious youth segregated from the rest of their futuristic world because of a disease. He has a perfect New York accent.
“I think we need the most work on the ending,” she suggests. They’ve only run it a few times, but she gets a private thrill from it. “It needs work.”
“Right, totally,” he agrees enthusiastically. That’s how Calum is, full of professional enthusiasm for whatever lines they’re running. He smiles at her with a wide-toothy grin before hefting himself up onto the bed. But the minute they begin running the scene he’s in character and the smile dissolves into a competitive, hungry snarl.
“All right. Take off your dress,” Torch demands.
Blue spits. “You take it off.”
The words they spit at each other act just as fronts clever disguises to hide Torch’s shaking hands when he reaches up to fumble for the clasp of her bra urgently. Between them settles a thick desperation to finish this before the guilt and fear of disease separates overwhelms him. Silently Blue urges him on to hurry before he changes his mind.
He palms her between her legs, the nervousness bleeding through his jerky movements, the rattle when he speaks. “You talk pretty hot for such a dry hole.”
“You man enough to get it wet?” she retorts hotly, flipping them over so Torch sprawls over the sheets on his back. Her fingers shake too when she begins to fumble with the buttons of his shirt. The months of want bubbling forth as she lets out a muffled whine of frustration, she buries her mouth against the juncture of his neck and shoulder.
His fingers find their way to her shoulders, gently nudging Blue’s body upwards and off of his torso. For a moment she fights the separation but finally relents and sits back on her haunches. His bunches under his armpits, hiked up from her insistent hands and caught between his body and the mattress. She presses and hand against his ribcage, feeling him inhale suddenly, bone and sinew stretching outwards with his breath. For a fleeting moment, she entertains the fantasy of peeling back his skin, sliding her fingers under the bones to expand his ribcage outwards with the backs of her hands. The flesh would be moist and slick, easy to slide against with the swell of his lungs counterpointing the flexing of her fingers. She would kneel, her knees locking against his hips to hold him place as she dragged her mouth against the organs and muscle. It’d be like sucking out poison, sucking out illness and curing him with her mere possession and will.*
Torch pushes up against her then with a little more force, and it surprises Blue. “We have class. What are you doing?” he asks, wriggling his legs out from under her weight.
“I just-” Mya says, falling back to her own body. She looks down her front, the china-blue floral dress replaced with blue jeans and a t-shirt.
Calum pulls down his own shirt, fidgeting without looking at her. He slings his backpack over his shoulder, shoving his copy of the script into his deep back pockets. “We have to perform today for credit.”
“Right.”
“Don’t screw this up.”
Mya breathes. “I won’t.”
Calum skirts around their makeshift props - no longer a bed and latrine in a downtrodden housing development - and glides out of the classroom, the door clicking softly behind him.
“I won’t,” she says, stumbling backwards into the prop box, her leg buckling. Blue’s anger, pain and want simmers just beneath the surface.
II.
One more notch does the maker make
upon my face so blue.
Mya slides in late to studio for their final. Each student must prepare a monologue, and for the presentations the class has moved to the auditorium. The door creaks slightly when she slips in, but nobody notices, crammed together in the front two rows. The clear familiar Scottish lilt wafts towards her from on stage where Calum’s skinny body has commandeered the spotlight, arms waving desperately. She sees their instructor Stan Slavski, a slight brittle man with drooping jowls that sag like liver-spotted breasts, jotting notes furiously in his notebook for a grade.
Calum looks frantic, whirling his arms rapidly like windmills while shouting most admirably, but not because he’s nervous. Mya knows better now from watching him perform that underneath the façade belies a cool and certain interior.
But it’s easy to forget that all of his words are just a game of charades. “I don’t want to be by myself. I’m by myself I feel like I’m going out of my mind - I do!” he shouts, lips creasing into a tight line when inhales.
Slavski never pauses in his furious scribbling, and Mya wonders how he can merely write through this, this agony that has frozen her to the spot, speaking to her.
Calum shakes his head and a piece of hair falls over his face, the long line of his shadow melting into the swallowing dark of the stage. “I look in the mirror and I can’t believe I’m really there,” he whispers. His voice resonates hoarsely as if in awe of these realizations, the words seemingly fresh and the irrefutable truth. It washes over the class, his hands clenched tightly in fists. “I can’t believe that’s me.”**
From her shoulder, Mya’s bag slumps to the floor with a soft whump, the sound deadened by the carpet. What would it take to smear the creases gathering across his brow? Mya thinks. Could she hold his head possessively between her hands like a dog or maybe a doll, kiss him while dragging her fingers under bunches of his shirt, nails catching on protruding ribs. Would stealing the hoarse wail from his throat make it better, replacing it with something else just as desperate and frantic and needy?
Would it make her feel better?
But her legs, weighed down by the heaviness of slippery cowardice, prevent her from crawling up onto the stage to wipe away the creases of Calum’s face, follow the hard lines of Calum’s body with her hands. She could make it better she believes. She could take their pain away.
“Time,” Slavski announces abruptly, raising his hand.
Calum looks pleased, finishing right within the time limit, his expression suddenly open and warm, brimming with confidence. “Thank you,” he says earnestly, practically jogging off the stage easily to take a seat next to Heidi, another student with a soft face belied by her sharp, feral teeth.
Mya begins to move then to take up the empty seat beside him when Slavski calls out the next name. “Mya Harper.” He gives her a pointed look, his jaw flapping when he sneers, “I’m glad you’ve decided to arrive to your final. If you would be so kind to go next.”
No sweat, she thinks. She can do this monologue backwards if need be. Easy confidence may not bubble forth from her like it does Calum, but she works hard for this grade and loves the places she travels to when she lets go and slips between the words of text. But just as she passes the front row, she catches Calum slinging his arm over Heidi’s shoulder, leaning in to whisper. From the shadow of the stairwell to the stage she can watch as he mouths against her neck in the protective dark of the theatre. Mya’s stomach clenches.
She stumbles onstage. Somebody lets loose a bark of laughter from the audience, and she tells herself she’s just getting into character. “I’m…” She takes a slow deep breath. “Mya Harper. I’ll be per-performing a monologue from Women of Manhattan, the role of R-rhonda. Louise. Rhonda Louise.” More laughter, this time from the front row where she can just make out the silhouette of Calum wrapped around Heidi. This isn’t fair, she thinks. She didn’t know about them. How could Calum not have told her during all that time they spent together working on their scene?
She slumps into the chair, feigning drunkenness for a moment, breathing heavily through her mouth. And then it hits her: She sits in a plush chair - expensive - but she knows she can afford it. The slide of her legs rub against her satin dress as she shifts, waving her flute glass inelegantly in her hands as she rambles.
They were supposed to be beautiful women tonight, her three friends alone in her loft having fun without the promise of men and chivalry and sex. Instead, the sickly sweet smell of their perfume and hairspray floods the small space, and the night has withered into drunkenness: Billie sprawled out across the sofa passed out and Judy swirling her own drink around and around for entertainment.
And of course Rhonda Louise: staring forlornly at her friends while soliloquizing to the wall. “I guess my big mistake was I revealed myself to him. That’s where I really went wrong.” She feels her stomach twist in knots just at the thought of her boyfriend, and suddenly she has a flash of their relationship, the irremovable image of his sinewy arms stretched around another woman’s shoulders, another woman vying for his affection and receiving it wholeheartedly. “It took me time, but I struggled… and strove… and succeeded at last in revealing my innermost, my most personal soul to him.
“He just sat there with a coke his hand like he was watching television, waiting for the next thing!” She jerks suddenly, surprised by her own voice’s veracity. The amber colored champagne of her flute glasses splashes over and onto the white armrest. She waves her hands flippantly. Billie snores; Judy’s head begins to drop.
“But what’s the achievement?” she asks glumly. “I chose to show myself to a wall, right? That’s why I was able to do it. He was a wall and I was really alone, showing myself to nobody at all.
“How much courage does that take? Even when I got it together to throw him out - and I made this speech at him and got all pink in the face and noble and shit - he just said alright and left. What did I delude myself into thinking was going on between us if that’s how he could take it ending?” She scoffs, slouching into her seat and spreading her legs slovenly like her boyfriend used to. She drops her voice mockingly. “‘Alright. Just lemme get my tools together, Rhonda Louise, and I’ll get on to the next thing.’”
The next thing, he said, as if Rhonda Louise was just a fad soon to burn out when a newer, sexier doll came fresh off the production line. It shouldn’t have surprised her. Rhonda grew up believing things were always a little faulty, as if they hadn’t quite popped her head on correctly, or the mold of her fingers had melted together. He made her feel defective, the way she saw him sling his arms around another woman and smile so happily in a way he never looked at her.
“Sometimes,” she confesses, staring some place above Billie’s slumped body at the blank wall, “Sometimes I think I just got overheated, worked myself into a passion and fell in love with that wall right there. It must’ve been that wall and me, crazy, loving it ‘cause I needed to love.”
Drunkenly, she lets the rest of the liquid of her flute glass tip lazily onto the carpet, drizzling like piss. She thinks of him packing up his belongings, his Yankees cap frayed around the brim, his favorite t-shirt with the plain black stripes across the chest that always smelled like his sweat and deodorant no matter how times Rhonda put it in the wash. “I couldn’t have poured everything out a really, truly human man and have him just stand there and take it and give nothing back. It’s not possible.
“But when I get too far gone in that direction of thinking - and alone here some nights I do - at those times it does me good to look and see these sneakers there sitting on the floor. His sneakers.” She gestures to them, smiling fondly for a moment before she remembers the way he whistled on his way out the door, all of his belongings shoved in a single box.
“Don’t you want your old shoes?” she had asked him.
He smacked his gum in thought before shrugging. “Nah, I was planning on throwing them out,” and then he left leaving Rhonda Louise his leftovers that even after all this time she couldn’t bear to throw away.
“He was here,” Mya says to her unresponsive audience, seeing Slavski’s permanent scowl as he presses his chin to his chest. She sees Heidi’s hand curl possessively around the back of Calum’s neck, her fingers grazing his ear and her wicked grin catching in the light. “It happened,” she murmurs. “It happened.”***
III.
Oh Lord, how I know.
Oh Lord, how I see:
A small crew gathers at the airport to see Calum off. Next year they will all attend the same classes together, following the strict steady path to graduation, with the exception of Calum James. He smirks at the five of them, including Heidi holding a bouquet of roses. And Mya. He makes the rounds, hugging each person in turn, not even lingering on Heidie much except to accept the flowers. His arms feel warm and dry when he hugs Mya, and she can smell the clean nondescript shampoo he uses that she memorized during the days they rehearsed their scene together over and over.
“You were a good partner,” he says awkwardly, patting her on the shoulder.
A flare of hope rises within her. “Really?”
“Sure. You -uh - get really into it, you know? I’m not really into method acting, but-” He shrugs, then punches her shoulder lightly.
“You sure you don’t want to stay?” she asks. It’s mean tot be a joke, but the hint of desperation turns her question into an ill-disguised plead.
Calum’s smile falters. “Take care, Mya,” he says before drifting towards the gate.
As the crowd of bustles against him and gets swept along the current, beside her Heidi explains to another student, “It was just a fling, really, but I’ll be sad to see him go.” Her lips stretch thinly and her upper-teeth bite down on her lower lip.
“Yeah,” her friend agrees. They wave one last time as he retreats and turn to go. Mya remains behind, staring into the crowd of people, businessmen and families scurrying from one gate to another to reach their flights, waving tickets in the air and shouting out to one another. Calum disappears and she turns to go.
Then: for a fleeting moment Mya thinks she catches sight of him again, his backpack slung over his tattered shirt as he pushes his way through the busy streets leading to Tomkins Square on a Sunday. The smoke and stench waft toward her of burnt flesh and plastic, a billowing plume, and she watches it swallow Torch whole.
The words settle thickly on Blue’s tongue, only muscle memory now. “What you don’t want-” she chokes out, bile raising her throat, “-is me: a human being on your hands who might feel pain or make a demand. Or need you in her guts when there’s nothing left.”
She must be sick, she thinks as she turns and lunges for a nearby garbage can, retching violently. Her whole body heaves. She must be sick and it’s too late for him to see that he has no reason to push her away anymore when they can do this together. She looks up again but a man in a suit blocks her view, wielding a sign in search of some weary traveler exiting a plane.
There’s nothing left, Mya thinks. He was here. It didn’t happen.
Fin.
Only can the maker make
a happy man of me.)****
NOTES:
1. Credit goes to:
* Beruit by Alan Browne
**Boy’s Life by Howard Korder
***Women of Manhattan by John Patrick Shanley
****“The Maker Makes” by Rufus Wainwright
2.) Thanks to andiwashmyhands for making sure my transistions actually make sense.
3.) Calum and the creepiness of this story is not inspired at all by The Island by Jane Rogers. Well, maybe the creepiness. Maybe I just like the name Calum. And Colin Morgan.
4.) Did anyone get the theatre reference?
5.) Feedback and concrit welcome! This is to be submitted to my creative writing class. Thanks!
x-posted with nieded
And here is the playlist I made that accompanies the story:
Author: nieded
Rating: PG-13
Discaimer: Text taken from sources without permission, cited in endnotes. I make no monetary claims nor do I consider the quoted dialogue as my own. In no way are any of these scenes supposed to mirror and reflect the actors and the choices they made in studio (if you're reading this, Phan).
Notes, credit, and thanks at end.
Word count: approx. 4,000
Summary: Then: for a fleeting moment Mya thinks she catches sight of him again, his backpack slung over his tattered shirt as he pushes his way through the busy streets leading to Tomkins Square on a Sunday. The smoke and stench wafts toward her, a billowing plume, and she watches it swallow Torch whole.
The History of Need
I.
(One more notch I scratch
to keep me thinking of you.
Blue stands inside the doorway of the tiny, cupboard-like room, her hands wrapped protectively over her body at the sight of Torch flung on the floor at the foot of the bed. She can see his ribs through the threadbare shirt, his breath coming in shallow pants. For a moment, she thinks maybe he didn’t hear her enter. The surrounding noise permeates the room: the sound of beer cans outside being chucked against the building wall outside, Torch’s neighbor retching next door.
But before she takes a step further into the room, Torch flicks his head upward, staring at her with a dark, unreadable expression. “What if you die from it, Blue? And I gotta live with that?” he asks, fingers curled into a fist against his hip and on his knee.
Three months have passed since she last saw him, but Torch looks about the same as he always has, thankfully: the same close-cropped, military hairstyle belayed by the famished frame and bloodshot eyes. He limps now. That’s new, but his face is as smooth and clean as ever - not that she wouldn’t love him with sores - she would. She would love him no matter: his sharp angles and brittle bitterness. But she never thought it’d be like this, the first words shared between them after so long ridden with guilt. Couldn’t for once they just be happy? Couldn’t they pretend? “Come over here,” she begs.
“Answer me!”
“Come over here and I’ll tell you.”
Torch heaves himself into an upright position, his back pressed against the leg of the bed, arm outstretched on his knee towards the bowl of the toilet. “Tell me from there,” he insists. “I wanna hear this, how I can sit here and watch those nice little tits of yours shrivel up like raisins.” He pulls the collar of his torn t-shirt up to his face, wiping the sweat gathering on his upper lip from fever, throwing his head back against the side of the mattress. His words slur together, as harsh and brutal as always. “Sit here a-and watch you lose like fifty pounds in twenty-four hours while your head puffs up to twice its size, and that I done it to you. This I wanna hear.”
Blue steps through the doorway, smoothing out the wrinkles of her cheap china-blue foral dress. She wants to look nice for him. “You want pizza?” she asks, her strained smile wavering. “You got pizza. With this decal I can sneak in and sneak out.” She jabs at the positive red stamp on her bicep. “You want stickball? You got it. Want to get drunk? Want a nice t-shirt - it’s all yours. And if one of us starts to die… then a light meal, a glass of wine, and four grams of seconal.”
Torch snorts, the exhalation of breath turning into a labored cough as he turns his head away, lurching towards the toilet nearby.
She ignores it. “Two grams apiece. We could go to sleep in each other’s arms. Naked. So the guard should get off on it.”
“Are you gonna get serious, or what?” Torch snaps, but it lacks any real heat. Maybe it’s because they both know it’s true about the guard, about currying favors with exhibitionism in trade for protection and security.
Blue smiles then for real and slips into the room to the bed. She sits on the edge of the mattress looking down at him with an expression of mixed enthusiasm and adoration. “I am serious. You really like my tits? I never thought you did. Maybe my ass, but-“
He shakes head, looking up at her with hooded eyes and disbelief. “I could really see this, sure. You and me playing house here. On Sundays we take a little stroll in the park.” The illness makes him transparent, the sadness and disgust evident in the twist of his mouth. “You seen Tomkins Square lately? It’s where they pile the bodies and burn them on Sundays. We could walk around, sniffing the fresh air. We could watch the people who can’t control themselves squatting in the gutters with the shit running out of them like rusty tap water.”
Blue wants to hit him but turns away. Yeah, she’s seen them, the smoke from the pyres curling into the sky. She can see it from outside of quarantine three miles off in her own shabby apartment on the top floor. Every Sunday she wonders if Torch is part of it, if it’s him floating up into the air. The uncertainty and fear eats at her, and that’s why she had to sneak into quarantine: so she could be here with him. So she could know.
Torch keeps talking, on a roll now as the anger festering within finally finds a spigot out. “Or we could go to the laundromat on Avenue A and watch people trying to unglue the t-shirts from their sores to wash them. And then,” he sneers sarcastically, “come back and fuck with two water glasses and a killer dose of reds in this little altar next to bed. It’s the American Dream!”
But Blue stops listening, mesmerized by the jut of his lower lip, the dark smears beneath his eyes from exhaustion. She’s waited for this so long, to touch him and hear his voice even if it’s bitter and snarling. Sweat gathers on his upper lip again, and want floods her: want to taste the salty bitterness of sickness, to sweep away the months of festering anger and neglect. Her fingers curl into the fabric of her skirt. She won’t force him, not when he’s ill and not when she’ll get sick too, but she needs this - needs the pain and the hurt and the wailing in the night so Torch won’t have to suffer the pain alone. This illness acts like a separation stronger than guards and quarantine and decals between them, and she wants nothing more than to close that distance and know what he knows.
And that’s the point of coming here, she thinks as she stares at a dark bruise developing on his neck - the beginnings of Kaposi Sarcoma maybe: to fuck him and trap him with guilt so he won’t ever try to rid of her again. If she gets sick then there won’t be a reason to hold back and to push her away.
Torch taps her on the knee, jerking her from her thoughts when he leanins forward and waves a hand in front of her face. With a lilting Scottish accent he asks, “Uh, Mya? Mya?”
Blue blinks, and her chest suddenly tightens heavily as she falls back into her body. “What?”
Torch reaches from behind the bedpost and reveals a booklet of paper, flipping through it. “You’re supposed to say… Here: ‘I usta think that too.’” His voice easily transitions between Scottish and a Manhattan dialect.
“What?”
“Uh, your lines,” Calum says, waving the script in front o her face. “Torch says: ‘It’s the American dream!’ Blue says-” in falsetto-“‘I usta think that too.’” He chucks the booklet at her.
The force of the throw causes the sheets to fumble as she reaches out for it, the delicate paper slicing into the pad of her thumb. “Right, right,” she mutters, stealing a sidelong glance at Calum while he stuffs the script behind their makeshift bed - two prop boxes shoved together. She hesitates, wanting to reach out and brush her fingers of the cords of his neck, the sharp edges of his angular face dusted with a light smattering of a beard.
He huffs when he turns again to face her. “I always laugh at this line: ‘It’s the American Dream!’ Some dream.”
“It’s not actually the American Dream,” Mya answers. “I mean… Sarcasm, right? You’re just too… European.”
He rolls his eyes at her and spares her a withering look. “I get that, aye. All I’m saying is that I’m not American.” Calum is a foreign exchange student, but sometimes Mya forgets that, especially when he isn’t Calum at all, but Torch: a sick but vivacious youth segregated from the rest of their futuristic world because of a disease. He has a perfect New York accent.
“I think we need the most work on the ending,” she suggests. They’ve only run it a few times, but she gets a private thrill from it. “It needs work.”
“Right, totally,” he agrees enthusiastically. That’s how Calum is, full of professional enthusiasm for whatever lines they’re running. He smiles at her with a wide-toothy grin before hefting himself up onto the bed. But the minute they begin running the scene he’s in character and the smile dissolves into a competitive, hungry snarl.
“All right. Take off your dress,” Torch demands.
Blue spits. “You take it off.”
The words they spit at each other act just as fronts clever disguises to hide Torch’s shaking hands when he reaches up to fumble for the clasp of her bra urgently. Between them settles a thick desperation to finish this before the guilt and fear of disease separates overwhelms him. Silently Blue urges him on to hurry before he changes his mind.
He palms her between her legs, the nervousness bleeding through his jerky movements, the rattle when he speaks. “You talk pretty hot for such a dry hole.”
“You man enough to get it wet?” she retorts hotly, flipping them over so Torch sprawls over the sheets on his back. Her fingers shake too when she begins to fumble with the buttons of his shirt. The months of want bubbling forth as she lets out a muffled whine of frustration, she buries her mouth against the juncture of his neck and shoulder.
His fingers find their way to her shoulders, gently nudging Blue’s body upwards and off of his torso. For a moment she fights the separation but finally relents and sits back on her haunches. His bunches under his armpits, hiked up from her insistent hands and caught between his body and the mattress. She presses and hand against his ribcage, feeling him inhale suddenly, bone and sinew stretching outwards with his breath. For a fleeting moment, she entertains the fantasy of peeling back his skin, sliding her fingers under the bones to expand his ribcage outwards with the backs of her hands. The flesh would be moist and slick, easy to slide against with the swell of his lungs counterpointing the flexing of her fingers. She would kneel, her knees locking against his hips to hold him place as she dragged her mouth against the organs and muscle. It’d be like sucking out poison, sucking out illness and curing him with her mere possession and will.*
Torch pushes up against her then with a little more force, and it surprises Blue. “We have class. What are you doing?” he asks, wriggling his legs out from under her weight.
“I just-” Mya says, falling back to her own body. She looks down her front, the china-blue floral dress replaced with blue jeans and a t-shirt.
Calum pulls down his own shirt, fidgeting without looking at her. He slings his backpack over his shoulder, shoving his copy of the script into his deep back pockets. “We have to perform today for credit.”
“Right.”
“Don’t screw this up.”
Mya breathes. “I won’t.”
Calum skirts around their makeshift props - no longer a bed and latrine in a downtrodden housing development - and glides out of the classroom, the door clicking softly behind him.
“I won’t,” she says, stumbling backwards into the prop box, her leg buckling. Blue’s anger, pain and want simmers just beneath the surface.
II.
One more notch does the maker make
upon my face so blue.
Mya slides in late to studio for their final. Each student must prepare a monologue, and for the presentations the class has moved to the auditorium. The door creaks slightly when she slips in, but nobody notices, crammed together in the front two rows. The clear familiar Scottish lilt wafts towards her from on stage where Calum’s skinny body has commandeered the spotlight, arms waving desperately. She sees their instructor Stan Slavski, a slight brittle man with drooping jowls that sag like liver-spotted breasts, jotting notes furiously in his notebook for a grade.
Calum looks frantic, whirling his arms rapidly like windmills while shouting most admirably, but not because he’s nervous. Mya knows better now from watching him perform that underneath the façade belies a cool and certain interior.
But it’s easy to forget that all of his words are just a game of charades. “I don’t want to be by myself. I’m by myself I feel like I’m going out of my mind - I do!” he shouts, lips creasing into a tight line when inhales.
Slavski never pauses in his furious scribbling, and Mya wonders how he can merely write through this, this agony that has frozen her to the spot, speaking to her.
Calum shakes his head and a piece of hair falls over his face, the long line of his shadow melting into the swallowing dark of the stage. “I look in the mirror and I can’t believe I’m really there,” he whispers. His voice resonates hoarsely as if in awe of these realizations, the words seemingly fresh and the irrefutable truth. It washes over the class, his hands clenched tightly in fists. “I can’t believe that’s me.”**
From her shoulder, Mya’s bag slumps to the floor with a soft whump, the sound deadened by the carpet. What would it take to smear the creases gathering across his brow? Mya thinks. Could she hold his head possessively between her hands like a dog or maybe a doll, kiss him while dragging her fingers under bunches of his shirt, nails catching on protruding ribs. Would stealing the hoarse wail from his throat make it better, replacing it with something else just as desperate and frantic and needy?
Would it make her feel better?
But her legs, weighed down by the heaviness of slippery cowardice, prevent her from crawling up onto the stage to wipe away the creases of Calum’s face, follow the hard lines of Calum’s body with her hands. She could make it better she believes. She could take their pain away.
“Time,” Slavski announces abruptly, raising his hand.
Calum looks pleased, finishing right within the time limit, his expression suddenly open and warm, brimming with confidence. “Thank you,” he says earnestly, practically jogging off the stage easily to take a seat next to Heidi, another student with a soft face belied by her sharp, feral teeth.
Mya begins to move then to take up the empty seat beside him when Slavski calls out the next name. “Mya Harper.” He gives her a pointed look, his jaw flapping when he sneers, “I’m glad you’ve decided to arrive to your final. If you would be so kind to go next.”
No sweat, she thinks. She can do this monologue backwards if need be. Easy confidence may not bubble forth from her like it does Calum, but she works hard for this grade and loves the places she travels to when she lets go and slips between the words of text. But just as she passes the front row, she catches Calum slinging his arm over Heidi’s shoulder, leaning in to whisper. From the shadow of the stairwell to the stage she can watch as he mouths against her neck in the protective dark of the theatre. Mya’s stomach clenches.
She stumbles onstage. Somebody lets loose a bark of laughter from the audience, and she tells herself she’s just getting into character. “I’m…” She takes a slow deep breath. “Mya Harper. I’ll be per-performing a monologue from Women of Manhattan, the role of R-rhonda. Louise. Rhonda Louise.” More laughter, this time from the front row where she can just make out the silhouette of Calum wrapped around Heidi. This isn’t fair, she thinks. She didn’t know about them. How could Calum not have told her during all that time they spent together working on their scene?
She slumps into the chair, feigning drunkenness for a moment, breathing heavily through her mouth. And then it hits her: She sits in a plush chair - expensive - but she knows she can afford it. The slide of her legs rub against her satin dress as she shifts, waving her flute glass inelegantly in her hands as she rambles.
They were supposed to be beautiful women tonight, her three friends alone in her loft having fun without the promise of men and chivalry and sex. Instead, the sickly sweet smell of their perfume and hairspray floods the small space, and the night has withered into drunkenness: Billie sprawled out across the sofa passed out and Judy swirling her own drink around and around for entertainment.
And of course Rhonda Louise: staring forlornly at her friends while soliloquizing to the wall. “I guess my big mistake was I revealed myself to him. That’s where I really went wrong.” She feels her stomach twist in knots just at the thought of her boyfriend, and suddenly she has a flash of their relationship, the irremovable image of his sinewy arms stretched around another woman’s shoulders, another woman vying for his affection and receiving it wholeheartedly. “It took me time, but I struggled… and strove… and succeeded at last in revealing my innermost, my most personal soul to him.
“He just sat there with a coke his hand like he was watching television, waiting for the next thing!” She jerks suddenly, surprised by her own voice’s veracity. The amber colored champagne of her flute glasses splashes over and onto the white armrest. She waves her hands flippantly. Billie snores; Judy’s head begins to drop.
“But what’s the achievement?” she asks glumly. “I chose to show myself to a wall, right? That’s why I was able to do it. He was a wall and I was really alone, showing myself to nobody at all.
“How much courage does that take? Even when I got it together to throw him out - and I made this speech at him and got all pink in the face and noble and shit - he just said alright and left. What did I delude myself into thinking was going on between us if that’s how he could take it ending?” She scoffs, slouching into her seat and spreading her legs slovenly like her boyfriend used to. She drops her voice mockingly. “‘Alright. Just lemme get my tools together, Rhonda Louise, and I’ll get on to the next thing.’”
The next thing, he said, as if Rhonda Louise was just a fad soon to burn out when a newer, sexier doll came fresh off the production line. It shouldn’t have surprised her. Rhonda grew up believing things were always a little faulty, as if they hadn’t quite popped her head on correctly, or the mold of her fingers had melted together. He made her feel defective, the way she saw him sling his arms around another woman and smile so happily in a way he never looked at her.
“Sometimes,” she confesses, staring some place above Billie’s slumped body at the blank wall, “Sometimes I think I just got overheated, worked myself into a passion and fell in love with that wall right there. It must’ve been that wall and me, crazy, loving it ‘cause I needed to love.”
Drunkenly, she lets the rest of the liquid of her flute glass tip lazily onto the carpet, drizzling like piss. She thinks of him packing up his belongings, his Yankees cap frayed around the brim, his favorite t-shirt with the plain black stripes across the chest that always smelled like his sweat and deodorant no matter how times Rhonda put it in the wash. “I couldn’t have poured everything out a really, truly human man and have him just stand there and take it and give nothing back. It’s not possible.
“But when I get too far gone in that direction of thinking - and alone here some nights I do - at those times it does me good to look and see these sneakers there sitting on the floor. His sneakers.” She gestures to them, smiling fondly for a moment before she remembers the way he whistled on his way out the door, all of his belongings shoved in a single box.
“Don’t you want your old shoes?” she had asked him.
He smacked his gum in thought before shrugging. “Nah, I was planning on throwing them out,” and then he left leaving Rhonda Louise his leftovers that even after all this time she couldn’t bear to throw away.
“He was here,” Mya says to her unresponsive audience, seeing Slavski’s permanent scowl as he presses his chin to his chest. She sees Heidi’s hand curl possessively around the back of Calum’s neck, her fingers grazing his ear and her wicked grin catching in the light. “It happened,” she murmurs. “It happened.”***
III.
Oh Lord, how I know.
Oh Lord, how I see:
A small crew gathers at the airport to see Calum off. Next year they will all attend the same classes together, following the strict steady path to graduation, with the exception of Calum James. He smirks at the five of them, including Heidi holding a bouquet of roses. And Mya. He makes the rounds, hugging each person in turn, not even lingering on Heidie much except to accept the flowers. His arms feel warm and dry when he hugs Mya, and she can smell the clean nondescript shampoo he uses that she memorized during the days they rehearsed their scene together over and over.
“You were a good partner,” he says awkwardly, patting her on the shoulder.
A flare of hope rises within her. “Really?”
“Sure. You -uh - get really into it, you know? I’m not really into method acting, but-” He shrugs, then punches her shoulder lightly.
“You sure you don’t want to stay?” she asks. It’s mean tot be a joke, but the hint of desperation turns her question into an ill-disguised plead.
Calum’s smile falters. “Take care, Mya,” he says before drifting towards the gate.
As the crowd of bustles against him and gets swept along the current, beside her Heidi explains to another student, “It was just a fling, really, but I’ll be sad to see him go.” Her lips stretch thinly and her upper-teeth bite down on her lower lip.
“Yeah,” her friend agrees. They wave one last time as he retreats and turn to go. Mya remains behind, staring into the crowd of people, businessmen and families scurrying from one gate to another to reach their flights, waving tickets in the air and shouting out to one another. Calum disappears and she turns to go.
Then: for a fleeting moment Mya thinks she catches sight of him again, his backpack slung over his tattered shirt as he pushes his way through the busy streets leading to Tomkins Square on a Sunday. The smoke and stench waft toward her of burnt flesh and plastic, a billowing plume, and she watches it swallow Torch whole.
The words settle thickly on Blue’s tongue, only muscle memory now. “What you don’t want-” she chokes out, bile raising her throat, “-is me: a human being on your hands who might feel pain or make a demand. Or need you in her guts when there’s nothing left.”
She must be sick, she thinks as she turns and lunges for a nearby garbage can, retching violently. Her whole body heaves. She must be sick and it’s too late for him to see that he has no reason to push her away anymore when they can do this together. She looks up again but a man in a suit blocks her view, wielding a sign in search of some weary traveler exiting a plane.
There’s nothing left, Mya thinks. He was here. It didn’t happen.
Fin.
Only can the maker make
a happy man of me.)****
NOTES:
1. Credit goes to:
* Beruit by Alan Browne
**Boy’s Life by Howard Korder
***Women of Manhattan by John Patrick Shanley
****“The Maker Makes” by Rufus Wainwright
2.) Thanks to andiwashmyhands for making sure my transistions actually make sense.
3.) Calum and the creepiness of this story is not inspired at all by The Island by Jane Rogers. Well, maybe the creepiness. Maybe I just like the name Calum. And Colin Morgan.
4.) Did anyone get the theatre reference?
5.) Feedback and concrit welcome! This is to be submitted to my creative writing class. Thanks!
x-posted with nieded
And here is the playlist I made that accompanies the story: