(no subject)
I meant to do a lot of stuff today, but I've hardly touched any of it. x.x Bah. My sister and her boyfriend have gotten up to Slayers Try, so I had to watch that with them... (My Val-sama! *clinglove*)
Anyway, here, have the end of Citroen's story. I'm still not quite happy with bits of it, but I can't figure out what to fix, so I would *really* appreciate any serious criticism, as long as it's not worded in a way that will make me cry. n.n;;;;;;
Time kept passing and John barely even noticed; he measured out his time in classes and papers and professors, bosses and co-workers and coffee-cups, and the days and weeks and months and years flew past him on gaunt bat wings. He changed jobs three times, bounced back and forth between majors like the little white ball in Pong, found girlfriends and lost them again, wasted countless rolls of film making Sean cry that John refused to major in art, and until the night Cindy broke up with him he didn’t realize that it was three years almost to the day since he had met Citroen. He was a little drunk when he thought of it, not a lot drunk because he couldn’t afford it but a little drunk all the same, enough drunk to think about things like time; he took another gulp of cheap beer from a bottle and looked over at Citro, who was laying out old negatives in an elaborate labyrinth on his futon, and said, “Hey. Hey, guess what.”
“Fwing?”
“’S been three years. Since, you know, you moved in. Three damned years. That’s somethin’, isn’t it?”
Citroen nodded gravely and abandoned the negative maze to sit beside John. John took another drink. “So, you’re what - twelve now, right?”
“Sthai!” Citroen agreed, holding up all his fingers and then just two.
“Good for you,” John said. “Happy birthday, kid, sorry I didn’t getcha anything.” He finished off the bottle and rolled it on the floor towards the piles of junk. “Christ, what a day. Boss bitching that I’m late, advisor bitching that I don’t have a major yet, Cindy bitching that I don’t listen and dumping my non-listening ass - Christ. Some anniversary for us, huh?” He opened up another bottle and took a drink, and looked up at the stained ceiling. God he was depressed - worse than depressed, a flat empy feeling without a name that had sucked all the meaning out of words and existence like some creeping nightmarish vampire. He was twenty-two and still working dead-end jobs he hated, he still lived in the same craptacular apartment because he couldn’t afford the rent for anything better, all that had changed was that he had gotten some shelves for the books he couldn’t get rid of and most of those were on the floor anyway because Citro was always looking at them; he didn’t have enough credits for any one major and he couldn’t pick one because he had no fucking clue what he wanted to do with his life, he needed a career where he could actually earn money and lots of it but he hated business and lawyers and the medical sciences and he knew damned well he’d never make enough money at photography no matter how much he loved it; he couldn’t keep a girl for more than three months and now he had wasted money on this lousy cheap beer so he was kind of drunk and horny and lonely as hell and a little bit out of his mind, and that was the only reason he could ever think of for what he did next, which was to turn and take hold of Citroen’s shoulders and kiss him right on the mouth.
He thought, What the hell? This isn’t - what the hell am I doing? But his thoughts were drowning in a hot and bitter sea of empty lonely dreams and hormones and three and a half bottles of beer and he didn’t listen to himself anymore, just closed his eyes and stayed in that kiss, felt Citroen’s hands clinging to the front of his shirt and Citroen’s fingers clenched tightly in the fabric, tasted him through their kiss; a taste like cinnamon and powdered sugar, French toast honeysuckle vanilla, sweet childhood tastes John had forgotten or never known, and the faint summery scent of clover rising over all. One of his hands moved up Citroen’s cheek where his thumb caressed the smooth skin there and he ran his fingers into the silky red hair at the nape of Citroen’s neck, and the other slid down to his skinny little-boy chest where he could feel Citro’s heart thrumming like a motor through the thin shirt, and he could almost imagine he was kissing a really short flat girl but he wasn’t, he wasn’t and he breathed in Citroen’s ear, “Make me stop. C’mon, you can do it, just say the word, say anything, do anything, make me stop... why won’t you make me stop, just stop me, please, anything, but make me stop...”
But Citroen only whispered the same thing, over and over again, “Shantee, shantee, shantee,” neither yea nor nay, and John’s hand slid further down till it was on Citro’s hip and he was pulling down Citro’s pants and he said again, he begged, “Stop me please stop me, just say something make me stop why won’t you make me stop...” He kissed Citroen again and tasted that sweet spicy taste, felt Citroen’s arms around him and those long fine fingers on his back, and thought: Why the hell don’t I stop me?
With that the crazy alien desire that had overpowered him broke. He recoiled from Citroen and almost backed into the wall and felt like he was going to be sick. He looked at his own hands and then at Citroen and Citroen looked back in perfect untouched innocence with his pants half off his hips and his head tilted to one side like a bird’s and John suddenly wished he was dead, that he had died before this could have happened. Oh Jesus Christ what had he tried to do, what the hell had come over him, he could have hurt Citroen he would have hurt Citroen what the hell was wrong with him? What was he - an animal beast brute without self-control, bad as his old man, a monster a fiend a bad bad man... He buried his head in his hands and his nails dug into his face like claws and it hurt like a bitch but that was just fine, he deserved it, he deserved that pain. Oh shit he had to say something - anything - he had to speak, make it go away somehow make everything go away... He opened his mouth and tried. “Citro - kid - Citro - I - I didn’t mean to, I’m not, I won’t, I - oh Christ Citro I’m sorry, I’m not - I’m not going to hurt you, I swear, oh God I swear, I’m sorry...” Blindly he put one hand out, palm-up, an offer of peace - a stupid pointless gesture, he pulled it back and let it drop on the futon. Oh Jesus what had come over him, what the hell was wrong with him - he was a beast, an animal just like his old man, they should lock him up and throw away the key, he didn’t deserve Citroen he didn’t deserve to even exist in the same world; he felt dirtier and more ashamed than he had known he could feel, like someone had dumped a barrel of some disgusting sticky oil on him and it would never come off, this taint, it was part of him now: the knowledge that he was worse than a beast. His fingers dug deeper into his face and he began to sob, his whole body shook and his head filled up with crazy dancing sparks like quartz glinting out of dead concrete and asphalt and he sobbed and sobbed.
He felt Citroen’s arms go around him and he flinched back, terrified; but whatever had possessed him, whatever senseless and brutish desire had come over him, had passed. It was safe now, and he wept into Citroen’s shoulder like a baby or a bullied child, only vaguely aware of Citroen whispering to him, saying “Ssssh, sssh - Zhong bah eee, bozhu bozhu, kraien nai ji nadada, sssh, sssh - shantee, shantee, shantee...”
And the taint and the guilt and the shame and the pain were gone, and there was peace, and John couldn’t believe it, couldn’t begin to understand it. Peace was filling him, diffusing into him and through him like brilliantly warm summer afternoon sunlight, burning out everything that was wrong and mixed-up and twisted around and it all floated away like pollen on a breeze; everything was all right somehow, no, that wasn’t quite right, there were lots of things wrong and John understood them all and rejected them all and they were no part of him anymore, he was himself and all himself now and at last he felt peace that nothing could take away or change, peace not to be understood but only accepted and felt and existed, and dizzily he thought that this must be how Citroen felt, how Citroen always had been and always was and always ever would be, acceptance and innocence and compassion that kept the world going, and he managed to say in a cracked voice, “Citro - kid - is this something you’re doing?”
But Citroen only shook his head and smiled and nestled his head in John’s shoulder. “Nadada - Zhong bah, Zhong bah datta gerugebu danh, da yadvam mit leeshim, da miata k’k shurara kong - shantee, shantee, shantee.”
“Right,” John said. “Whatever you say.” And he held on to Citroen which was okay to do now and thought that he might start crying again but the peace was too strong still, too busy making him all right, and he said, “You really are something else, kid. Damned if I know what but you really are.”
“Esss,” Citroen said sleepily. “Zhong jing?”
“Yeah, sure, why not,” John said. “Too bad I don’t know any lullabies...” But another song came into his mind, one that Cindy the rock girl had gotten him hooked on, and so he sang that for them with his voice still cracked and rough from crying:
I don’t mind the sun sometimes
The images it shows
I can taste you on my lips
And smell you in my clothes
Cinnamon and sugary
And softly-spoken lies
You never know just how you look
Through other people’s eyes...
When he finished he realized Citroen had fallen asleep still on his shoulder. John didn’t have the heart to move him, and that night they slept the way they had the first month, curled up together on John’s futon under one blanket like a couple of cats or brothers, and all John dreamed about was laying on his back under a clear sky while the sunlight soaked into him and filled him with the peace that was beyond understanding and was only being.
When he woke up in the morning Citroen was gone. But the peace remained.
Many years later John was on a photo shoot in England and his wife bought him a thin book of T.S. Eliot. He moaned and groaned about it the way he always did with poetry no matter how much he liked it, and he made her read it out loud to him, one poem a night. When they got to “The Waste Land” he paid especially close attention to it, and the last few stanzas in particular, and when she was done he asked, “Would you mind reading those last lines again?”
Maria looked at him over the top of her reading glasses, which he had always thought were really sexy on her. “From ‘London Bridge’?” she asked.
“Yeah, that’d be perfect.”
And so she read them to him again, the Italian and Latin and French rolling smoothly off her tongue as if they were her native languages.
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon - O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitane à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih
“What do those mean?” he asked. “Those last da- ones, and that - shantih.”
“Well, let me check, I think they’re in the notes...” She flipped through a couple of pages. “Here we go. ‘Give, sympathize, control,’ apparently from some Hindu parable, and the last one - shantih - a formal ending to an Upanishad, and it translates something like ‘the Peace which passeth understanding.’ Sanskrit has a lot of interesting words like that...”
“Huh. I see. Thanks, love.”
“No problem.” She kissed him on the cheek, and after they had showered and called home to check up on the kids and gone to bed he looked over to the photograph he had put on the nightstand, the picture that went everywhere with him, as much a part of him as his driver’s license and wedding photos and the snapshots of his children in his wallet: that first shot of Citroen and his brilliant smile, eternally nine.
You sure were something else, kid, he thought. I loved you and I wish I’d said so, but I guess somewhere you know... Shantih, shantih, shantih.
And he turned back over to his wife and fell asleep.
And remember, if you have no idea what I'm going about, you can start reading the beginning of Citro's story here! It has links to the other two parts.
Anyway, here, have the end of Citroen's story. I'm still not quite happy with bits of it, but I can't figure out what to fix, so I would *really* appreciate any serious criticism, as long as it's not worded in a way that will make me cry. n.n;;;;;;
Time kept passing and John barely even noticed; he measured out his time in classes and papers and professors, bosses and co-workers and coffee-cups, and the days and weeks and months and years flew past him on gaunt bat wings. He changed jobs three times, bounced back and forth between majors like the little white ball in Pong, found girlfriends and lost them again, wasted countless rolls of film making Sean cry that John refused to major in art, and until the night Cindy broke up with him he didn’t realize that it was three years almost to the day since he had met Citroen. He was a little drunk when he thought of it, not a lot drunk because he couldn’t afford it but a little drunk all the same, enough drunk to think about things like time; he took another gulp of cheap beer from a bottle and looked over at Citro, who was laying out old negatives in an elaborate labyrinth on his futon, and said, “Hey. Hey, guess what.”
“Fwing?”
“’S been three years. Since, you know, you moved in. Three damned years. That’s somethin’, isn’t it?”
Citroen nodded gravely and abandoned the negative maze to sit beside John. John took another drink. “So, you’re what - twelve now, right?”
“Sthai!” Citroen agreed, holding up all his fingers and then just two.
“Good for you,” John said. “Happy birthday, kid, sorry I didn’t getcha anything.” He finished off the bottle and rolled it on the floor towards the piles of junk. “Christ, what a day. Boss bitching that I’m late, advisor bitching that I don’t have a major yet, Cindy bitching that I don’t listen and dumping my non-listening ass - Christ. Some anniversary for us, huh?” He opened up another bottle and took a drink, and looked up at the stained ceiling. God he was depressed - worse than depressed, a flat empy feeling without a name that had sucked all the meaning out of words and existence like some creeping nightmarish vampire. He was twenty-two and still working dead-end jobs he hated, he still lived in the same craptacular apartment because he couldn’t afford the rent for anything better, all that had changed was that he had gotten some shelves for the books he couldn’t get rid of and most of those were on the floor anyway because Citro was always looking at them; he didn’t have enough credits for any one major and he couldn’t pick one because he had no fucking clue what he wanted to do with his life, he needed a career where he could actually earn money and lots of it but he hated business and lawyers and the medical sciences and he knew damned well he’d never make enough money at photography no matter how much he loved it; he couldn’t keep a girl for more than three months and now he had wasted money on this lousy cheap beer so he was kind of drunk and horny and lonely as hell and a little bit out of his mind, and that was the only reason he could ever think of for what he did next, which was to turn and take hold of Citroen’s shoulders and kiss him right on the mouth.
He thought, What the hell? This isn’t - what the hell am I doing? But his thoughts were drowning in a hot and bitter sea of empty lonely dreams and hormones and three and a half bottles of beer and he didn’t listen to himself anymore, just closed his eyes and stayed in that kiss, felt Citroen’s hands clinging to the front of his shirt and Citroen’s fingers clenched tightly in the fabric, tasted him through their kiss; a taste like cinnamon and powdered sugar, French toast honeysuckle vanilla, sweet childhood tastes John had forgotten or never known, and the faint summery scent of clover rising over all. One of his hands moved up Citroen’s cheek where his thumb caressed the smooth skin there and he ran his fingers into the silky red hair at the nape of Citroen’s neck, and the other slid down to his skinny little-boy chest where he could feel Citro’s heart thrumming like a motor through the thin shirt, and he could almost imagine he was kissing a really short flat girl but he wasn’t, he wasn’t and he breathed in Citroen’s ear, “Make me stop. C’mon, you can do it, just say the word, say anything, do anything, make me stop... why won’t you make me stop, just stop me, please, anything, but make me stop...”
But Citroen only whispered the same thing, over and over again, “Shantee, shantee, shantee,” neither yea nor nay, and John’s hand slid further down till it was on Citro’s hip and he was pulling down Citro’s pants and he said again, he begged, “Stop me please stop me, just say something make me stop why won’t you make me stop...” He kissed Citroen again and tasted that sweet spicy taste, felt Citroen’s arms around him and those long fine fingers on his back, and thought: Why the hell don’t I stop me?
With that the crazy alien desire that had overpowered him broke. He recoiled from Citroen and almost backed into the wall and felt like he was going to be sick. He looked at his own hands and then at Citroen and Citroen looked back in perfect untouched innocence with his pants half off his hips and his head tilted to one side like a bird’s and John suddenly wished he was dead, that he had died before this could have happened. Oh Jesus Christ what had he tried to do, what the hell had come over him, he could have hurt Citroen he would have hurt Citroen what the hell was wrong with him? What was he - an animal beast brute without self-control, bad as his old man, a monster a fiend a bad bad man... He buried his head in his hands and his nails dug into his face like claws and it hurt like a bitch but that was just fine, he deserved it, he deserved that pain. Oh shit he had to say something - anything - he had to speak, make it go away somehow make everything go away... He opened his mouth and tried. “Citro - kid - Citro - I - I didn’t mean to, I’m not, I won’t, I - oh Christ Citro I’m sorry, I’m not - I’m not going to hurt you, I swear, oh God I swear, I’m sorry...” Blindly he put one hand out, palm-up, an offer of peace - a stupid pointless gesture, he pulled it back and let it drop on the futon. Oh Jesus what had come over him, what the hell was wrong with him - he was a beast, an animal just like his old man, they should lock him up and throw away the key, he didn’t deserve Citroen he didn’t deserve to even exist in the same world; he felt dirtier and more ashamed than he had known he could feel, like someone had dumped a barrel of some disgusting sticky oil on him and it would never come off, this taint, it was part of him now: the knowledge that he was worse than a beast. His fingers dug deeper into his face and he began to sob, his whole body shook and his head filled up with crazy dancing sparks like quartz glinting out of dead concrete and asphalt and he sobbed and sobbed.
He felt Citroen’s arms go around him and he flinched back, terrified; but whatever had possessed him, whatever senseless and brutish desire had come over him, had passed. It was safe now, and he wept into Citroen’s shoulder like a baby or a bullied child, only vaguely aware of Citroen whispering to him, saying “Ssssh, sssh - Zhong bah eee, bozhu bozhu, kraien nai ji nadada, sssh, sssh - shantee, shantee, shantee...”
And the taint and the guilt and the shame and the pain were gone, and there was peace, and John couldn’t believe it, couldn’t begin to understand it. Peace was filling him, diffusing into him and through him like brilliantly warm summer afternoon sunlight, burning out everything that was wrong and mixed-up and twisted around and it all floated away like pollen on a breeze; everything was all right somehow, no, that wasn’t quite right, there were lots of things wrong and John understood them all and rejected them all and they were no part of him anymore, he was himself and all himself now and at last he felt peace that nothing could take away or change, peace not to be understood but only accepted and felt and existed, and dizzily he thought that this must be how Citroen felt, how Citroen always had been and always was and always ever would be, acceptance and innocence and compassion that kept the world going, and he managed to say in a cracked voice, “Citro - kid - is this something you’re doing?”
But Citroen only shook his head and smiled and nestled his head in John’s shoulder. “Nadada - Zhong bah, Zhong bah datta gerugebu danh, da yadvam mit leeshim, da miata k’k shurara kong - shantee, shantee, shantee.”
“Right,” John said. “Whatever you say.” And he held on to Citroen which was okay to do now and thought that he might start crying again but the peace was too strong still, too busy making him all right, and he said, “You really are something else, kid. Damned if I know what but you really are.”
“Esss,” Citroen said sleepily. “Zhong jing?”
“Yeah, sure, why not,” John said. “Too bad I don’t know any lullabies...” But another song came into his mind, one that Cindy the rock girl had gotten him hooked on, and so he sang that for them with his voice still cracked and rough from crying:
I don’t mind the sun sometimes
The images it shows
I can taste you on my lips
And smell you in my clothes
Cinnamon and sugary
And softly-spoken lies
You never know just how you look
Through other people’s eyes...
When he finished he realized Citroen had fallen asleep still on his shoulder. John didn’t have the heart to move him, and that night they slept the way they had the first month, curled up together on John’s futon under one blanket like a couple of cats or brothers, and all John dreamed about was laying on his back under a clear sky while the sunlight soaked into him and filled him with the peace that was beyond understanding and was only being.
When he woke up in the morning Citroen was gone. But the peace remained.
Many years later John was on a photo shoot in England and his wife bought him a thin book of T.S. Eliot. He moaned and groaned about it the way he always did with poetry no matter how much he liked it, and he made her read it out loud to him, one poem a night. When they got to “The Waste Land” he paid especially close attention to it, and the last few stanzas in particular, and when she was done he asked, “Would you mind reading those last lines again?”
Maria looked at him over the top of her reading glasses, which he had always thought were really sexy on her. “From ‘London Bridge’?” she asked.
“Yeah, that’d be perfect.”
And so she read them to him again, the Italian and Latin and French rolling smoothly off her tongue as if they were her native languages.
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon - O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitane à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih
“What do those mean?” he asked. “Those last da- ones, and that - shantih.”
“Well, let me check, I think they’re in the notes...” She flipped through a couple of pages. “Here we go. ‘Give, sympathize, control,’ apparently from some Hindu parable, and the last one - shantih - a formal ending to an Upanishad, and it translates something like ‘the Peace which passeth understanding.’ Sanskrit has a lot of interesting words like that...”
“Huh. I see. Thanks, love.”
“No problem.” She kissed him on the cheek, and after they had showered and called home to check up on the kids and gone to bed he looked over to the photograph he had put on the nightstand, the picture that went everywhere with him, as much a part of him as his driver’s license and wedding photos and the snapshots of his children in his wallet: that first shot of Citroen and his brilliant smile, eternally nine.
You sure were something else, kid, he thought. I loved you and I wish I’d said so, but I guess somewhere you know... Shantih, shantih, shantih.
And he turned back over to his wife and fell asleep.
And remember, if you have no idea what I'm going about, you can start reading the beginning of Citro's story here! It has links to the other two parts.