(no subject)
The following is a short story I began a week ago and have been using to work out my feelings. It is the first piece of fictional prose I have written in over a year. It is, primarily, an exploration of my receiving of the news of Mikael's passing. If you find this to be offensive, or do not feel you are ready to read it: DON'T. Of course, the characters are close resemblances to people in Hartford. However, these are fictional representations and have been enhanced and manipulated and are not supposed to be faithfully mimetic.
Prelapsarian
Sublimation occurs when the mind directs object-libido toward objects that have nothing to do with sexual satisfaction.
-Sigismund Freud
There seems to be someone else in the room with me. I can hear his ragged breath and smell him: it’s similar to that odour that wafts down by the Reservoir. I turn around and see no one. The room is dark and I struggle to make out the other objects. A sofa. No two sofas, and a chair, and a closet in which a girl was punished. Every morning at 5 a.m. you can hear her, in the kitchen or the hallway. She’s talking with someone who is with her and you can’t help but feel contentment at their reunion. The room lights with the beginnings of the morning and recollectional flotsam of that night he spent with us. Powder white lines; wide eyed delirium. And then, as fear subsumes my stomach, I see him emerge from his room and turn quickly down the hallway. I tread lightly to the door and look down. I can form his name but dread overwhelms my voice. I take a step and notice the refrigerator starting to hum. Back in the newly illuminated Middle Room, Rutherford begins spinning in his cage. I take another step, and walk past the closed bedrooms. I suddenly hear water rushing in the bathroom and a thin, intense light streams out towards the backdoor. I look in the kitchen and see a girl hanging from the light cord that annoyingly dangles in the centre of the room. The refrigerator begins ringing. Rutherford is gaining momentum. I take a few more steps through the nothingness strip. I wrap my fingers around the cold knob in front of me and my body begins to feel. I’m lighter. I can feel an immediate expansion in my lungs, my stomach, my brain. Soon though, it begins to necessitate the warping of my body against its constraining seems. I look down at my puckering flesh and smile. My eyes begin to lose their grip as my sockets eject them to make room. I smile and jerk the door open.
“Hello?” I answer in my best 1:23 am voice. I have been waiting for a call like this all day. The digital display coolly announces Smith Sealey Calling so I’m prepared to cry.
“Hey…I’m sorry to have to give you…I felt like I needed to call you and you should know that…” Smith, my rock, stammers.
“What?” I brace myself and turn over on my stomach. I pull the comforter over my bare shoulders and glare menacingly at the window Justin left open before we passed out. I scan the room and poke my head through the doorway. He’s already gone.
“Mikael died today.”
“Oh.”
“I just thought I should call people and let them know because I figured that people would want to-“
“What happened?” I am vaguely aware that we’re talking about something different. I struggle to reclaim the first few words of the conversation spoken still in sleep.
“As far as I can tell he was walking on the tracks to work and got hit by an Amtrak train?” I feel my sphincter tighten and I understand that someone has died.
“Oh.” I struggle and find myself loathsomely unexpectant. “Wow. I’m so sorry.”
“He’s the first guy my age I’ve known who’s died.”
“Me too. But you two were closer. Obviously.” I need to feel this. Did I get fucked up last night? I take a lungful of purposeful cool air and exhale at the wall in front of me. I rub my eyes, staring at a mark left by the red tape. And then, as if the words will help. “Wait, this is really happening right?”
“Ya.” He’s seems relieved.
“Shit, I’m no longer asleep.” I can feel the actual pumping of my heart. It begins to speed up and I feel a tightening down my left arm. I rub the dull pain in my chest. “Oh wow.”
“I’m sorry to wake you up with such bad-“
“No. I mean, thank you for calling,” This is my best attempt at honeying my voice. Otherwise, my sincere tone is too downtrodden with sarcasm. And then because I need to know: “Were inebriants involved?”
“I don’t think anyone has followed it that far yet.”
He was there the first time I rolled on ecstasy. He had eaten more than any of us that night and still didn’t peak anywhere near our coating altitude. His hair was so wonderful to run your hands through. It was curly once. I can recall the shifting texture of the ringlets around my stubby fingers. It was long. He had a mohawk. The last time I saw him, in July, I think his head was shaved and had returned to natural brown. He had these wonderful earrings, always, and a most placating smile which happily did not patronize. His sinewy arms defined years of athleticism, at least in bed. His skin was a dark caramel; his face betrayed an early adolescence embittered by now forgotten acne. His body was one people would worship. Had he been alive thirty years before, he would have been the toast of the Everard Baths. But he had been born into this antipathetic generation and had survived one of its greatest tragedies.
“I think…I’m going to go…just think and…”
“Me too. Should I call Hartford or wait?” I’m subconsciously hoping for a clue.
“Wait, I think.”
“Ok.”
“I love you” you whisper unusually sentimentally and scared.
I close the phone and experiment with positioning it differently in my warming hand. I stand up, throwing the blanket off in a flurry of white and walk across to the window. The pane smacks as I slam it, spin around and then heave myself against the wall. Gravity drains my depleting energy through my hand and as my fingers fall open, and my phone falls cracking the wood, I notice a shadow in the other room. Lengthy and ill defined, probably a reflection of the maples outside. The room, half lit from a light in the courtyard below, is too small so it stretches across the floor and then snakes up the west wall. But as I wait, expecting a branch to sway in the wind and cause the shadow to dissipate, it remains tentatively motionless. I begin to realize the humanness of the form. I think he might be on the east wall as well.
I went into your room once, after you had stopped really hanging out with us but before you left a half eaten pizza with a farewell note. It was disastrous already, empty bottles and dirty dishes seemed to outnumber the paintbrushes or books. Although I doubt they really did because you had a lot of the latter, your passions and creativity fueled by your addictions. I took out a plastic bag (I might have been alone) and carefully shook out some powder onto your desk. As I went down, I noticed the screen change from the enchanting patterns of Windows Media Player to Boys in College 3. I suddenly felt awkward, intrusive and made my way quickly back into the middle room. You were sitting on the arm of the couch, pretending to be really into a song you had never heard before or a story whose inanity marveled you. I came up close, you smiled Cheshirely, and as the blow explored my blood cells and my stomach unclenched I whispered: There’s…um…gay porn on your computer right-
“Hells ya.” You yelled. “I love gay porn. In my room. Now.”
And I watched as a couple of people, Little Dog included, followed you into your room and proceeded to watch the entire clip while the rest of us continued the intake in the middle room, your absence already being felt. They eventually began to drift back to us, including E., as their thirst vanquished their curiosity. You then announced to the open hallway (but I was listening) that you were tired and closed the door. I haven’t heard the lock since.
“Hello Darlin’” You’re covering tears because you loved him.
“How are you doing?” I’m jealous and try to coax my eyes.
“Oh you know.” You’re smiling. And laughing. And trying very hard not to be overcome by your loss. Our loss.
“You must be…” I don’t really know what to say. Neither does she.
“We’re so far away. All of us.”
“It’s so true. Do you remember that ridiculous trip to Boston?”
“Yes” and Lily screams from the background “Is he in Canada?”
My gut wrenches in an appreciative chortle. I slide down the wall and curl my legs in.
“Yes, I am in Canada.” They laugh and I hear Lily’s voice, muffled by Nan’s sniffling. “Are you wearing denim?”
“And flannel.” I reply.
And we all laugh and I realize that’s its true: Laughter and tears are right next to each other.
When I heard about the beginning of the floods, I imagined you on a breaking levee, braving the pouring storm and breathing only power and wind. You are howling in defiance, your arms spread eagle ready to take you off to the sky. While people around you cower, you are man and myth embodied. Nothing can remove you from the levee. A hunk of flying Hilton sign almost crashes into your temple, but you duck and sway and triumphantly raise your middle fingers to the city. You’re yelling obscenities, your grin wide as the rain berates. And as the levee around you cracks, you are thrown off into the water but amazingly, you can swim, and you do, to shore, where you wait, laughing and taking a swig off a mickey you happen to find you left in your pocket the night before.
I imagine him to have survived heroically because he wouldn’t have any other way.
I watch my feet trace the same basic pattern around the bedroom, into the living room (where the paint was peeling to reveal sheets of wallpaper that had been ignored in the renovations), through the cramped smelly kitchen and onto the hallway and bathroom. I look into the toilet bowl and briefly consider filling it green and tapioca brown. I see myself brush my hair back and notice a growing pimple on my upper left forehead. I finger it and the pain runs directly through my skull. I pull away from the sink and duck my head into the bowl. As I struggle to bring some matter up and stop expelling bile and phlegm, the phone begins to ring. I pull up my sleeve to wipe my mouth as I hurry into the other room. Bobbie Calling.
The last time I spoke to Bobbie, really spoke with Bobbie, has to be over three months ago. She is a girl who is still so dear to me and yet increasingly distant. I used to think I could save her. But now, with her hidden desires and thinning body, her wild disregard and petulant impressionability, I am beginning to think I have lost her to the city. For as much as he tries to disassociate himself, E. is the city. And Bobbie will be Littler Dog, until she has found something closer and more pathetic.
“Hey.” I attempt to make clear that I am decidedly not upset.
“Hey. What’s up?”
I try to slide back into the groove.
She fumbles a little.
Divert attention away to the reason for the call. “How are you doing, though?”
“I’m mad.”
But aren’t we supposed to unite in our mutual sympathy and inability to fully empathize? I express my concerns for Smith,
so she asks if she can call me back “Its N and down. My screen is broken.”
And I’m left entirely believing nothing she has said.
He was standing staring at the oncoming train. He might have turned around, I think, to look at the graffiti behind him. There was a black circle with a yellow line down the middle. Next to it a well designed firebolt, amplifying blue and red and reminiscent of something hanging on E.’s wall. He becomes lost in trying to discern the faint lines, the ones which had been painted over and eroded with the late summer rains. He must hear the rumbling and I’m telling him we’re going to be late for work. I start to walk ahead because, fuck, I’m not going to be late because he’s drunk again. But the rumbling is getting harsher and I turn around to see how far the train is. Before I can notice it’s still far enough, I catch the…dedication, you know, in his eyes. His eyes broaden and his mouth kind of spreads into that smile of his, like from Batman you know - the joker, right? And he starts to laugh and I tell him that he’d better fucking quit because he’s starting to freak me out and we have got to get going because the Train is fucking coming, you shit. And he turns around and waits on the side of the track, balancing you know the way they do when you see people do it on TV right? And he’s just waiting and turns to me again and says, just fucking calmly: Tell them to drink for me and then I start yelling, but I’m afraid to go over there because I don’t want to get fucking hit so I’m yelling at him to get off and he doesn’t and then he turns his head, watches it coming, I scream, he darts his hands out and jumps smack in front as it…
I look down at the phone lying next to me on the bare mattress. It’s been weeks since I’ve had a sheet covering it and I’ve begun to feel dirty while trying to fall asleep. The chromium enamel radiates with the television reflection and I can glimpse the center of the circle of light. I reach for it and tentatively flip it open. The broken flip-top springs back and then at me. I run my finger along the numbers on the pad. I feel that familiar tightening in my bowels. Imagine every time you got nervous you constricted every muscle down there. Imagine your body violate and so fiercely dependant on your conscious thoughts that you can no longer lower your shoulders. You can’t imagine the way my nerves shatter like Laura’s glass at the possibility of disappointment. But this isn’t about me. This is about a man whose constitution is more similar to steel. A body resilient and capable of adaptation. A magnificent being alive in the shadows which would make my stomach churn and cause an inordinate rise of self-doubt. If only I could leave this place too.
“Hello.” A girl’s voice. I’m thrown off.
“Hey, Eve. How are you doing?” And I feel genuinely bad, because I know just how much he truly meant to her.
“Oh you know.” She’s fighting back amplified tears. But, as anyone in mourning will tell you, its hard to cry for as long as they want you to. I still haven’t begun.
“I’m really sorry. I know how much he-”
“Thank you.”
“No, really,” I need her to understand this, “I know that of most people he was very special to you.”
“He was. To us all.” She’s obviously confused by my sincere magnanimity.
“How’s your boyfriend doing.”
“We’ve just been getting pretty drunk.”
Of course they have. It is what he would have wanted. But to him, alcohol will always be convalescence from everyone’s expectations.
“I’ll get him for you.” And my insides twist suddenly, my sphincter constricts and I’m horribly aware of the dearth of THC in my bloodstream. My mouth dries, I’m confused. The air thickens and I am almost in a pale London morning. The verdigris hues begin to color the wall opposite, above clouds of smoke which form to blind me of the possessions I know. A steeple will rise in the middle of the town, bringing me back. I am Sherlock. I am Jack. I exist only in this painting, lined with brushstrokes of white on top and black on the bottom and sides. Everything in my intestines launches forward and I feel the need to run to the toilet.
“Hello?”
“Hey.” I smile. He probably does as well.
“I just wanted to hear your voice. I wish I knew what to say. I know that you…I’m sorry.” And all those words that had been forming in my mind over the past week seem to dissipate before I can catch anything. They are drowned in the amino acids and other mush. Jack, steeple and some others retreat back to some place of inaccessibility.
“That’s cool. I don’t think it’s really hit me right now. I’m pretty drunk.” I doubt this but I decide that this is not the time for me to call out.
“Me neither. I still haven’t cried.”
One afternoon, while everyone was napping inside, I was curled up in the broken chair on the porch. You came stumbling out from your room, where I assumed you had been drinking consistently all night and morning. I felt that weight beginning to drop inside when you threw yourself on me and hugged me. At first, I worried about the corners of my book and tried to pull out from underneath you but found this impossible. So I hugged you back. You got back up heavily and grabbed my shoulders, looking intensely in my eyes.
“You’ve got to stop caring so much, man. You fucking care too much about. No you know what fuck them. Fuck them and” and by this time you were careening on the porch waving your arms to purport your vitality. You grabbed onto the panel siding. You pulled yourself up with your triceps and stood triumphantly, looking down. And you shouted at the empty street, still lightly covered in snow, as I watched from far behind, laughing lightly and pulling myself up out of E.’s chair.
After a few seconds of silence he finds something and decides to play it: “So, you’re coming this weekend?”
“Yup.” And I didn’t just hear him spit those words.
“Well, I’m sure we’ll speak before then.”
“Probably not.” Because I know just how unreachable he is. And then, before he can disappoint me: “Goodnight dear.”
“Goodnight.”
I was asleep on the couch when he left that morning. But it was fittingly odd. I realized when he woke me with his dressing and such that it had been a while since I had seen him, even though I had been spending a greater part of my life in the middle room. He purred his greeting:
“Mister Nat.” And he drooped his head heavily to look for a black toque.
It was already morning, but early enough that Rutherford was still awake from his morning encounter with the ghosts of the kitchen.
I think I rubbed my eyes even. I might have stretched and yawned.
“Hey.” And then I continued to make sure he didn’t hate me for being inattentive, “How are you?”
He looked straight at me and stopped. He grinned but there was something behind it. He looked like he had eaten the last cookie: satiated, satisfied and ashamed.
I can smell a burning coming from inside the kitchen.
You reach out your hand.
The doors are all closed and everyone sleeping.
And you outstretch your palm.
Smoke begins snaking out from underneath the doors in large undulating white and grey swirls.
Your huge palm weighs on my frontal lobe.
I suddenly feel awake and lightheaded. I have eaten six hits of ecstasy.
I know your smile.
The lights begin turning on the house. People are beginning to shuffle.
“I know that smile, Mikael.”
Something’s burning.
“Mikael, something’s burning in the kitchen.”
You take your hand away and my eyes are so dangerously heavy.
“Go back to sleep. Sir.”
And I turn over and I do.
In the morning, before anyone had even begun to consider the last day of the weekend, I found the note.
I sat down in the chair by the window. The one next to the little table.
I looked out on the driveway below.
I found a roach lying in the ashtray and lit it while I waited.
The new spring light experiments on the patches of unmelted snow.
Jocelyn runs down the driveway with whatever she had forgotten.
A piece of overgrown grass swings in the cold wind.
My phone rings. It is time to go for brunch.
So I put my cigarette out in the ashtray.
Put my oversized tan coat on.
I leave and I walk down the stairs to a sunny Sunday afternoon.
And I have this pounding in my bowels.
Things will not end here.
I put the phone back in the charger and light a joint. The Monkees, The Beatles, Hair. I pull out the chosen album and place it on the turntable. I pick up the needle and try to place it gently on the right track but it scratches anyway. Still unsure, I find myself positively swimming in hypotheses. And then:
“I still don’t know what I was waiting for.
And my time was running wild
A million dead-streets and…”
The room is cool. And the light from the courtyard illuminates as the night rapidly thickens. I see my shadow stretch before me as I lean against the wall. It stretches across the floor and stops just short of the wall.
“I’m much to fast to take that test.”
I begin laughing, quietly, at the ridiculousness of my thoughts. I like the thought that I might be in a Wes Anderson film. I slide down into a sitting position. I bring the bending paper to my lips and inhale. My mouth grins around the filter.
“Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes
(Turn and face the strain)”
It finally strikes me. The shock and communal pain. And even though this leaves me wanting for an increasingly lost youth, I cannot help but smile.
Prelapsarian
Sublimation occurs when the mind directs object-libido toward objects that have nothing to do with sexual satisfaction.
-Sigismund Freud
There seems to be someone else in the room with me. I can hear his ragged breath and smell him: it’s similar to that odour that wafts down by the Reservoir. I turn around and see no one. The room is dark and I struggle to make out the other objects. A sofa. No two sofas, and a chair, and a closet in which a girl was punished. Every morning at 5 a.m. you can hear her, in the kitchen or the hallway. She’s talking with someone who is with her and you can’t help but feel contentment at their reunion. The room lights with the beginnings of the morning and recollectional flotsam of that night he spent with us. Powder white lines; wide eyed delirium. And then, as fear subsumes my stomach, I see him emerge from his room and turn quickly down the hallway. I tread lightly to the door and look down. I can form his name but dread overwhelms my voice. I take a step and notice the refrigerator starting to hum. Back in the newly illuminated Middle Room, Rutherford begins spinning in his cage. I take another step, and walk past the closed bedrooms. I suddenly hear water rushing in the bathroom and a thin, intense light streams out towards the backdoor. I look in the kitchen and see a girl hanging from the light cord that annoyingly dangles in the centre of the room. The refrigerator begins ringing. Rutherford is gaining momentum. I take a few more steps through the nothingness strip. I wrap my fingers around the cold knob in front of me and my body begins to feel. I’m lighter. I can feel an immediate expansion in my lungs, my stomach, my brain. Soon though, it begins to necessitate the warping of my body against its constraining seems. I look down at my puckering flesh and smile. My eyes begin to lose their grip as my sockets eject them to make room. I smile and jerk the door open.
“Hello?” I answer in my best 1:23 am voice. I have been waiting for a call like this all day. The digital display coolly announces Smith Sealey Calling so I’m prepared to cry.
“Hey…I’m sorry to have to give you…I felt like I needed to call you and you should know that…” Smith, my rock, stammers.
“What?” I brace myself and turn over on my stomach. I pull the comforter over my bare shoulders and glare menacingly at the window Justin left open before we passed out. I scan the room and poke my head through the doorway. He’s already gone.
“Mikael died today.”
“Oh.”
“I just thought I should call people and let them know because I figured that people would want to-“
“What happened?” I am vaguely aware that we’re talking about something different. I struggle to reclaim the first few words of the conversation spoken still in sleep.
“As far as I can tell he was walking on the tracks to work and got hit by an Amtrak train?” I feel my sphincter tighten and I understand that someone has died.
“Oh.” I struggle and find myself loathsomely unexpectant. “Wow. I’m so sorry.”
“He’s the first guy my age I’ve known who’s died.”
“Me too. But you two were closer. Obviously.” I need to feel this. Did I get fucked up last night? I take a lungful of purposeful cool air and exhale at the wall in front of me. I rub my eyes, staring at a mark left by the red tape. And then, as if the words will help. “Wait, this is really happening right?”
“Ya.” He’s seems relieved.
“Shit, I’m no longer asleep.” I can feel the actual pumping of my heart. It begins to speed up and I feel a tightening down my left arm. I rub the dull pain in my chest. “Oh wow.”
“I’m sorry to wake you up with such bad-“
“No. I mean, thank you for calling,” This is my best attempt at honeying my voice. Otherwise, my sincere tone is too downtrodden with sarcasm. And then because I need to know: “Were inebriants involved?”
“I don’t think anyone has followed it that far yet.”
He was there the first time I rolled on ecstasy. He had eaten more than any of us that night and still didn’t peak anywhere near our coating altitude. His hair was so wonderful to run your hands through. It was curly once. I can recall the shifting texture of the ringlets around my stubby fingers. It was long. He had a mohawk. The last time I saw him, in July, I think his head was shaved and had returned to natural brown. He had these wonderful earrings, always, and a most placating smile which happily did not patronize. His sinewy arms defined years of athleticism, at least in bed. His skin was a dark caramel; his face betrayed an early adolescence embittered by now forgotten acne. His body was one people would worship. Had he been alive thirty years before, he would have been the toast of the Everard Baths. But he had been born into this antipathetic generation and had survived one of its greatest tragedies.
“I think…I’m going to go…just think and…”
“Me too. Should I call Hartford or wait?” I’m subconsciously hoping for a clue.
“Wait, I think.”
“Ok.”
“I love you” you whisper unusually sentimentally and scared.
I close the phone and experiment with positioning it differently in my warming hand. I stand up, throwing the blanket off in a flurry of white and walk across to the window. The pane smacks as I slam it, spin around and then heave myself against the wall. Gravity drains my depleting energy through my hand and as my fingers fall open, and my phone falls cracking the wood, I notice a shadow in the other room. Lengthy and ill defined, probably a reflection of the maples outside. The room, half lit from a light in the courtyard below, is too small so it stretches across the floor and then snakes up the west wall. But as I wait, expecting a branch to sway in the wind and cause the shadow to dissipate, it remains tentatively motionless. I begin to realize the humanness of the form. I think he might be on the east wall as well.
I went into your room once, after you had stopped really hanging out with us but before you left a half eaten pizza with a farewell note. It was disastrous already, empty bottles and dirty dishes seemed to outnumber the paintbrushes or books. Although I doubt they really did because you had a lot of the latter, your passions and creativity fueled by your addictions. I took out a plastic bag (I might have been alone) and carefully shook out some powder onto your desk. As I went down, I noticed the screen change from the enchanting patterns of Windows Media Player to Boys in College 3. I suddenly felt awkward, intrusive and made my way quickly back into the middle room. You were sitting on the arm of the couch, pretending to be really into a song you had never heard before or a story whose inanity marveled you. I came up close, you smiled Cheshirely, and as the blow explored my blood cells and my stomach unclenched I whispered: There’s…um…gay porn on your computer right-
“Hells ya.” You yelled. “I love gay porn. In my room. Now.”
And I watched as a couple of people, Little Dog included, followed you into your room and proceeded to watch the entire clip while the rest of us continued the intake in the middle room, your absence already being felt. They eventually began to drift back to us, including E., as their thirst vanquished their curiosity. You then announced to the open hallway (but I was listening) that you were tired and closed the door. I haven’t heard the lock since.
“Hello Darlin’” You’re covering tears because you loved him.
“How are you doing?” I’m jealous and try to coax my eyes.
“Oh you know.” You’re smiling. And laughing. And trying very hard not to be overcome by your loss. Our loss.
“You must be…” I don’t really know what to say. Neither does she.
“We’re so far away. All of us.”
“It’s so true. Do you remember that ridiculous trip to Boston?”
“Yes” and Lily screams from the background “Is he in Canada?”
My gut wrenches in an appreciative chortle. I slide down the wall and curl my legs in.
“Yes, I am in Canada.” They laugh and I hear Lily’s voice, muffled by Nan’s sniffling. “Are you wearing denim?”
“And flannel.” I reply.
And we all laugh and I realize that’s its true: Laughter and tears are right next to each other.
When I heard about the beginning of the floods, I imagined you on a breaking levee, braving the pouring storm and breathing only power and wind. You are howling in defiance, your arms spread eagle ready to take you off to the sky. While people around you cower, you are man and myth embodied. Nothing can remove you from the levee. A hunk of flying Hilton sign almost crashes into your temple, but you duck and sway and triumphantly raise your middle fingers to the city. You’re yelling obscenities, your grin wide as the rain berates. And as the levee around you cracks, you are thrown off into the water but amazingly, you can swim, and you do, to shore, where you wait, laughing and taking a swig off a mickey you happen to find you left in your pocket the night before.
I imagine him to have survived heroically because he wouldn’t have any other way.
I watch my feet trace the same basic pattern around the bedroom, into the living room (where the paint was peeling to reveal sheets of wallpaper that had been ignored in the renovations), through the cramped smelly kitchen and onto the hallway and bathroom. I look into the toilet bowl and briefly consider filling it green and tapioca brown. I see myself brush my hair back and notice a growing pimple on my upper left forehead. I finger it and the pain runs directly through my skull. I pull away from the sink and duck my head into the bowl. As I struggle to bring some matter up and stop expelling bile and phlegm, the phone begins to ring. I pull up my sleeve to wipe my mouth as I hurry into the other room. Bobbie Calling.
The last time I spoke to Bobbie, really spoke with Bobbie, has to be over three months ago. She is a girl who is still so dear to me and yet increasingly distant. I used to think I could save her. But now, with her hidden desires and thinning body, her wild disregard and petulant impressionability, I am beginning to think I have lost her to the city. For as much as he tries to disassociate himself, E. is the city. And Bobbie will be Littler Dog, until she has found something closer and more pathetic.
“Hey.” I attempt to make clear that I am decidedly not upset.
“Hey. What’s up?”
I try to slide back into the groove.
She fumbles a little.
Divert attention away to the reason for the call. “How are you doing, though?”
“I’m mad.”
But aren’t we supposed to unite in our mutual sympathy and inability to fully empathize? I express my concerns for Smith,
so she asks if she can call me back “Its N and down. My screen is broken.”
And I’m left entirely believing nothing she has said.
He was standing staring at the oncoming train. He might have turned around, I think, to look at the graffiti behind him. There was a black circle with a yellow line down the middle. Next to it a well designed firebolt, amplifying blue and red and reminiscent of something hanging on E.’s wall. He becomes lost in trying to discern the faint lines, the ones which had been painted over and eroded with the late summer rains. He must hear the rumbling and I’m telling him we’re going to be late for work. I start to walk ahead because, fuck, I’m not going to be late because he’s drunk again. But the rumbling is getting harsher and I turn around to see how far the train is. Before I can notice it’s still far enough, I catch the…dedication, you know, in his eyes. His eyes broaden and his mouth kind of spreads into that smile of his, like from Batman you know - the joker, right? And he starts to laugh and I tell him that he’d better fucking quit because he’s starting to freak me out and we have got to get going because the Train is fucking coming, you shit. And he turns around and waits on the side of the track, balancing you know the way they do when you see people do it on TV right? And he’s just waiting and turns to me again and says, just fucking calmly: Tell them to drink for me and then I start yelling, but I’m afraid to go over there because I don’t want to get fucking hit so I’m yelling at him to get off and he doesn’t and then he turns his head, watches it coming, I scream, he darts his hands out and jumps smack in front as it…
I look down at the phone lying next to me on the bare mattress. It’s been weeks since I’ve had a sheet covering it and I’ve begun to feel dirty while trying to fall asleep. The chromium enamel radiates with the television reflection and I can glimpse the center of the circle of light. I reach for it and tentatively flip it open. The broken flip-top springs back and then at me. I run my finger along the numbers on the pad. I feel that familiar tightening in my bowels. Imagine every time you got nervous you constricted every muscle down there. Imagine your body violate and so fiercely dependant on your conscious thoughts that you can no longer lower your shoulders. You can’t imagine the way my nerves shatter like Laura’s glass at the possibility of disappointment. But this isn’t about me. This is about a man whose constitution is more similar to steel. A body resilient and capable of adaptation. A magnificent being alive in the shadows which would make my stomach churn and cause an inordinate rise of self-doubt. If only I could leave this place too.
“Hello.” A girl’s voice. I’m thrown off.
“Hey, Eve. How are you doing?” And I feel genuinely bad, because I know just how much he truly meant to her.
“Oh you know.” She’s fighting back amplified tears. But, as anyone in mourning will tell you, its hard to cry for as long as they want you to. I still haven’t begun.
“I’m really sorry. I know how much he-”
“Thank you.”
“No, really,” I need her to understand this, “I know that of most people he was very special to you.”
“He was. To us all.” She’s obviously confused by my sincere magnanimity.
“How’s your boyfriend doing.”
“We’ve just been getting pretty drunk.”
Of course they have. It is what he would have wanted. But to him, alcohol will always be convalescence from everyone’s expectations.
“I’ll get him for you.” And my insides twist suddenly, my sphincter constricts and I’m horribly aware of the dearth of THC in my bloodstream. My mouth dries, I’m confused. The air thickens and I am almost in a pale London morning. The verdigris hues begin to color the wall opposite, above clouds of smoke which form to blind me of the possessions I know. A steeple will rise in the middle of the town, bringing me back. I am Sherlock. I am Jack. I exist only in this painting, lined with brushstrokes of white on top and black on the bottom and sides. Everything in my intestines launches forward and I feel the need to run to the toilet.
“Hello?”
“Hey.” I smile. He probably does as well.
“I just wanted to hear your voice. I wish I knew what to say. I know that you…I’m sorry.” And all those words that had been forming in my mind over the past week seem to dissipate before I can catch anything. They are drowned in the amino acids and other mush. Jack, steeple and some others retreat back to some place of inaccessibility.
“That’s cool. I don’t think it’s really hit me right now. I’m pretty drunk.” I doubt this but I decide that this is not the time for me to call out.
“Me neither. I still haven’t cried.”
One afternoon, while everyone was napping inside, I was curled up in the broken chair on the porch. You came stumbling out from your room, where I assumed you had been drinking consistently all night and morning. I felt that weight beginning to drop inside when you threw yourself on me and hugged me. At first, I worried about the corners of my book and tried to pull out from underneath you but found this impossible. So I hugged you back. You got back up heavily and grabbed my shoulders, looking intensely in my eyes.
“You’ve got to stop caring so much, man. You fucking care too much about. No you know what fuck them. Fuck them and” and by this time you were careening on the porch waving your arms to purport your vitality. You grabbed onto the panel siding. You pulled yourself up with your triceps and stood triumphantly, looking down. And you shouted at the empty street, still lightly covered in snow, as I watched from far behind, laughing lightly and pulling myself up out of E.’s chair.
After a few seconds of silence he finds something and decides to play it: “So, you’re coming this weekend?”
“Yup.” And I didn’t just hear him spit those words.
“Well, I’m sure we’ll speak before then.”
“Probably not.” Because I know just how unreachable he is. And then, before he can disappoint me: “Goodnight dear.”
“Goodnight.”
I was asleep on the couch when he left that morning. But it was fittingly odd. I realized when he woke me with his dressing and such that it had been a while since I had seen him, even though I had been spending a greater part of my life in the middle room. He purred his greeting:
“Mister Nat.” And he drooped his head heavily to look for a black toque.
It was already morning, but early enough that Rutherford was still awake from his morning encounter with the ghosts of the kitchen.
I think I rubbed my eyes even. I might have stretched and yawned.
“Hey.” And then I continued to make sure he didn’t hate me for being inattentive, “How are you?”
He looked straight at me and stopped. He grinned but there was something behind it. He looked like he had eaten the last cookie: satiated, satisfied and ashamed.
I can smell a burning coming from inside the kitchen.
You reach out your hand.
The doors are all closed and everyone sleeping.
And you outstretch your palm.
Smoke begins snaking out from underneath the doors in large undulating white and grey swirls.
Your huge palm weighs on my frontal lobe.
I suddenly feel awake and lightheaded. I have eaten six hits of ecstasy.
I know your smile.
The lights begin turning on the house. People are beginning to shuffle.
“I know that smile, Mikael.”
Something’s burning.
“Mikael, something’s burning in the kitchen.”
You take your hand away and my eyes are so dangerously heavy.
“Go back to sleep. Sir.”
And I turn over and I do.
In the morning, before anyone had even begun to consider the last day of the weekend, I found the note.
I sat down in the chair by the window. The one next to the little table.
I looked out on the driveway below.
I found a roach lying in the ashtray and lit it while I waited.
The new spring light experiments on the patches of unmelted snow.
Jocelyn runs down the driveway with whatever she had forgotten.
A piece of overgrown grass swings in the cold wind.
My phone rings. It is time to go for brunch.
So I put my cigarette out in the ashtray.
Put my oversized tan coat on.
I leave and I walk down the stairs to a sunny Sunday afternoon.
And I have this pounding in my bowels.
Things will not end here.
I put the phone back in the charger and light a joint. The Monkees, The Beatles, Hair. I pull out the chosen album and place it on the turntable. I pick up the needle and try to place it gently on the right track but it scratches anyway. Still unsure, I find myself positively swimming in hypotheses. And then:
“I still don’t know what I was waiting for.
And my time was running wild
A million dead-streets and…”
The room is cool. And the light from the courtyard illuminates as the night rapidly thickens. I see my shadow stretch before me as I lean against the wall. It stretches across the floor and stops just short of the wall.
“I’m much to fast to take that test.”
I begin laughing, quietly, at the ridiculousness of my thoughts. I like the thought that I might be in a Wes Anderson film. I slide down into a sitting position. I bring the bending paper to my lips and inhale. My mouth grins around the filter.
“Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes
(Turn and face the strain)”
It finally strikes me. The shock and communal pain. And even though this leaves me wanting for an increasingly lost youth, I cannot help but smile.