purge #2
LOTR RPS
Dom POV
Monaboyd
PG
Beta &hearts: Charlie (miss you! getcomputerSOONnow!) & Shannon.
Note: Fragmentary grammatical structure and far too much Winterson on the brain.
Contains mild to moderate angst.
Been holding onto this since the beginning of May. Now I’m not, so the house-cleaning is complete. Now I have to write something fresh. Or.... *glares at W.I.P.s*
Risk
It was the end of the Earth.
Atlantic City. Not what I’d expected. It didn’t help that Elijah had made us watch Carnival of Souls the night previous. And now everyone looked like a zombie to me. At the slot machines, in the all-you-can-eat buffets, on the boardwalk up and down. Child-sized zombies, bright and nuclear pink. Hunched-over zombies, faded and sunken like they were eating their own flesh. Or it was eating them. I thought Nietzsche. I thought of Sartre and grey hands.
You always exaggerate everything, Elijah had said. I thought you’d like it here.
I did.
~
We were in an arcade, playing skee ball. A man behind the counter where you cashed in your tickets for toys kept staring at me, licking his lips. It couldn’t have been more obvious. His eyes were so black, I couldn’t see the pupils. His hair greasy, combed over a mottled forehead: white on white, like his bone was showing through. I kept hitting the 100 ring, despite my shaky hands. He jingled the highest prize, a watch, and gestured for me to keep going.
Keep going?
Then I reached down for another ball and clutched skin instead. I looked down at my white knuckles over Billy’s hand. He laughed. He always laughs. The man-at-the-counter’s tongue was so far out, he scraped his chin. It was Kierkegaard. Either/or.
Death or life, I’d muttered.
Cake or death? Bill’d asked.
And we laughed. Billy and I. And he took my hand and we ran together. Right out of that arcade. Right onto the boardwalk. Through the crowds, who stared but parted anyway. Right down the grey stairs and onto the brown sand. My hands were sweating and my legs were weak. But he looked at me, looked into me, and I couldn’t stop. He was all green and amber, defiant against the weather-beating, defiant against the bleaching of the sea. The rain. It ran too. On us, over us. Brown sand became darker, splattered our legs as we ran. And it was Newton. And it was Einstein. Falling and motion. Just motion. It was, it was....
It was everything.
Fuck theory. This was proof.
~
Ptolemy was wrong when he said the sun revolved around the Earth.
He told me I was wrong when I said my world revolved around him.
I still think I’m right.
Though it turns out my evidence was false.
~
I thought if I’d just paid attention more in school, I would have known. I should have. I thought: two bodies in motion tend to stay in motion. Don’t stop, Billy, don’t stop. If I’d just told him, don’t stop. Don’t ever stop.
If we’d kept running....
But there was the ocean. How far can you run before you have to swim? How far can you swim before you drown?
How far can you go before you’re right back where you started? It’s inevitable.
Like gravity. You’re up on the moon at the time, you have no sense of it. But you break through the atmosphere again, because you have to, because you can’t live on thin air. And it’s there then, gravity is. You’re back down. It’s like Plato, thinking there’s division of your body from your mind. He was wrong. It doesn’t work. The sense of levity is a deception. As if your head is some child’s balloon attached with string to your neck; your body, an anvil holding your soul down. Our bodies are more apt to float, our minds to weigh us down.
Even on the water, you can float. I remember surfing with Billy, thinking the board certainly could not maintain us both. Not with any certainty, no. Just seafoam and hope in equilibrium.
But your weight can’t be carried forever. Hold yourself up or fall.
Fall. Down deep. And don’t ever stop.
~
I could never fathom space and time.
But it didn’t matter when he had my hand and I could make him laugh.
There was no thought in that. And the loss of that burden made me feel free.
The loss of him does too. Though he’ll still tell me he’s mine. And I can still make him laugh. But it’s just sound, it never comes from his eyes.
He looks at me and it’s seaweed, against my ankles. Salt in my eyes.
~
And so I’m back here, in Atlantic City. Doing arithmetic at the blackjack table. Each time I try again, one plus one comes up as three. Which is a trinity in the Bible. But there’s nothing biblical about this.
Everything changed when they discovered the zero. Invented it, really. Wasn’t it always there? Well, everything changed when I discovered the new maths, where three necessitates that one number be cancelled out, become silent. Like an extra ‘e’ tagged onto some word I’ve heard.
Some word. I’ve heard it in my ear. Heard it through my skin when my ears were full. I heard it in eyes. A different kind of silence. Not a silence at all.
And there’s no silence here. Nothing stops. As a consequence, nothing stays. Not the roulette, not the shot glasses nor the pints. Nor the hands of the girls. Or the lips of the boys.
Nothing stays. But me. Witness to my own entropy theory. In a room of machines and no sunlight. In a country that’s not mine. Where they sell dreams in brouchures. Never telling you, it’s just another fairy tale dressed up in colloquialisms and contemporary font. Clean. Like my dreams: a schoolboy wiping slates, a snowfall erasing the city.
Waves washing over the shore. Come and go. Press your footprint fresh into the sand. Watch it taken away. Start over.
Tabula rasa.
Here. Like anywhere. You can’t get everything you want. No matter what they tell you. In words or touches. No matter how much you smile and say, please.
Dom POV
Monaboyd
PG
Beta &hearts: Charlie (miss you! getcomputerSOONnow!) & Shannon.
Note: Fragmentary grammatical structure and far too much Winterson on the brain.
Contains mild to moderate angst.
Been holding onto this since the beginning of May. Now I’m not, so the house-cleaning is complete. Now I have to write something fresh. Or.... *glares at W.I.P.s*
Risk
It was the end of the Earth.
Atlantic City. Not what I’d expected. It didn’t help that Elijah had made us watch Carnival of Souls the night previous. And now everyone looked like a zombie to me. At the slot machines, in the all-you-can-eat buffets, on the boardwalk up and down. Child-sized zombies, bright and nuclear pink. Hunched-over zombies, faded and sunken like they were eating their own flesh. Or it was eating them. I thought Nietzsche. I thought of Sartre and grey hands.
You always exaggerate everything, Elijah had said. I thought you’d like it here.
I did.
~
We were in an arcade, playing skee ball. A man behind the counter where you cashed in your tickets for toys kept staring at me, licking his lips. It couldn’t have been more obvious. His eyes were so black, I couldn’t see the pupils. His hair greasy, combed over a mottled forehead: white on white, like his bone was showing through. I kept hitting the 100 ring, despite my shaky hands. He jingled the highest prize, a watch, and gestured for me to keep going.
Keep going?
Then I reached down for another ball and clutched skin instead. I looked down at my white knuckles over Billy’s hand. He laughed. He always laughs. The man-at-the-counter’s tongue was so far out, he scraped his chin. It was Kierkegaard. Either/or.
Death or life, I’d muttered.
Cake or death? Bill’d asked.
And we laughed. Billy and I. And he took my hand and we ran together. Right out of that arcade. Right onto the boardwalk. Through the crowds, who stared but parted anyway. Right down the grey stairs and onto the brown sand. My hands were sweating and my legs were weak. But he looked at me, looked into me, and I couldn’t stop. He was all green and amber, defiant against the weather-beating, defiant against the bleaching of the sea. The rain. It ran too. On us, over us. Brown sand became darker, splattered our legs as we ran. And it was Newton. And it was Einstein. Falling and motion. Just motion. It was, it was....
It was everything.
Fuck theory. This was proof.
~
Ptolemy was wrong when he said the sun revolved around the Earth.
He told me I was wrong when I said my world revolved around him.
I still think I’m right.
Though it turns out my evidence was false.
~
I thought if I’d just paid attention more in school, I would have known. I should have. I thought: two bodies in motion tend to stay in motion. Don’t stop, Billy, don’t stop. If I’d just told him, don’t stop. Don’t ever stop.
If we’d kept running....
But there was the ocean. How far can you run before you have to swim? How far can you swim before you drown?
How far can you go before you’re right back where you started? It’s inevitable.
Like gravity. You’re up on the moon at the time, you have no sense of it. But you break through the atmosphere again, because you have to, because you can’t live on thin air. And it’s there then, gravity is. You’re back down. It’s like Plato, thinking there’s division of your body from your mind. He was wrong. It doesn’t work. The sense of levity is a deception. As if your head is some child’s balloon attached with string to your neck; your body, an anvil holding your soul down. Our bodies are more apt to float, our minds to weigh us down.
Even on the water, you can float. I remember surfing with Billy, thinking the board certainly could not maintain us both. Not with any certainty, no. Just seafoam and hope in equilibrium.
But your weight can’t be carried forever. Hold yourself up or fall.
Fall. Down deep. And don’t ever stop.
~
I could never fathom space and time.
But it didn’t matter when he had my hand and I could make him laugh.
There was no thought in that. And the loss of that burden made me feel free.
The loss of him does too. Though he’ll still tell me he’s mine. And I can still make him laugh. But it’s just sound, it never comes from his eyes.
He looks at me and it’s seaweed, against my ankles. Salt in my eyes.
~
And so I’m back here, in Atlantic City. Doing arithmetic at the blackjack table. Each time I try again, one plus one comes up as three. Which is a trinity in the Bible. But there’s nothing biblical about this.
Everything changed when they discovered the zero. Invented it, really. Wasn’t it always there? Well, everything changed when I discovered the new maths, where three necessitates that one number be cancelled out, become silent. Like an extra ‘e’ tagged onto some word I’ve heard.
Some word. I’ve heard it in my ear. Heard it through my skin when my ears were full. I heard it in eyes. A different kind of silence. Not a silence at all.
And there’s no silence here. Nothing stops. As a consequence, nothing stays. Not the roulette, not the shot glasses nor the pints. Nor the hands of the girls. Or the lips of the boys.
Nothing stays. But me. Witness to my own entropy theory. In a room of machines and no sunlight. In a country that’s not mine. Where they sell dreams in brouchures. Never telling you, it’s just another fairy tale dressed up in colloquialisms and contemporary font. Clean. Like my dreams: a schoolboy wiping slates, a snowfall erasing the city.
Waves washing over the shore. Come and go. Press your footprint fresh into the sand. Watch it taken away. Start over.
Tabula rasa.
Here. Like anywhere. You can’t get everything you want. No matter what they tell you. In words or touches. No matter how much you smile and say, please.