black brid singing in the dead of night, shed your broken wings and learn to fly
Exert from Black-Eyed Sinner's Pact, Frank's POV
Gerard’s huddled into a corner of the apartment’s approximation of a dining room mainlining coffee as if it were whiskey and smoking like he’s daring cancer to nut up and do something about it already. I hear the soft scritch-scratch-swirl that means he’s working with charcoal-that, and the dark smudge on his face that, in lesser lighting, would look like a bruise.
The window’s open, sharp March breeze lifting the edges of Gerard’s paper, the strands of Gerard’s hair.
“You know Gee, I came in here to get out of the cold.” I take off one glove, decide fuck no, and slip it back on. “It’s worse in here than it is outside.” Expectations trick you like that, the fuckers.
Gerard makes no indication that he heard me. The charcoal just keeps scratching insistently at the pad of paper. A few half-finished drawing ring around him in a semi-circle, and I see his eyes flick over them once, twice. He’s either having trouble with whatever he’s working on, or the transference of the mess in his head to paper is so convoluted that it’s taking a series to extract it all.
“Is the heat on? The heat better not be on, motherfucker, if you’re gonna leave the window open.”
Scritch scritch scritch.
“It’s the dead middle of March.”
Scritch scrath.
“Your fingers are gonna fall off.”
Scratch scratch.
“Which would be an awesome scene to draw, except oh wait, you don’t have any fingers, crazy.”
Scritch.
I sigh and laugh at the same time, unsure which one I mean more, and busy myself with the never-ending task of watching out for Gerard while he’s up there in his headspace. It was Gerard’s therapist who recommended that he put to paper the swirling mess that’s in his head with charcoals and paints, the same way Pete’s own prescription therapy is a pen, paper and nonsensical lyrics. Gerard’s always been more expressive on paper and canvas than with words and conversations, but it was mood expression before. Now it’s thoughts he sketches, dreams. Nightmares. I close the window all but a crack in case he needs the sharp slap of air and turn up the thermostat five degrees. Between the two it should warm up to early fall temperature soon enough, which bolsters me enough to take my coat and gloves off. The coffee in the pot is cold, so I empty that and set a new one to brew while I wash and dry a few mugs, a plate, and some spoons scattered around the kitchen.
By the time I’m done making and eating two cheese sandwiches, the coffee is done and Gerard is using the blending tool to solidify his deep, deep shadows.
He finally looks up when the aroma from the mug I’m holding directly in front of his face breaks through all the concentration. At this point I’ve directed a straight-up monologue in front of him and he doesn’t so much as blink, but the smell of caffeination snaps him back to reality faster than a slap to the face.
“Frankie,” he intones like it’s a grand declaration. “You’re here.”
“Yeah, Gee, I’ve been here for, like, twenty minutes.” I motion towards the wall. “You left the window wide open.”
“Oh.” What part of all this new barrage of information he’s responding to I don’t know, but there’s a new set of smudges on his face just under his eyes, like maybe he rubbed them in concentration. It looks like he hasn’t slept for days and even though I know those smudges weren’t there five, ten minutes ago, I get the sick sense that they’ve been there forever.
Gerard reaches out and touches my leg, smearing charcoal on the denim of my pants. He’s still looking up at me, eyes big and luminous above the coal.
“You look like a demented raccoon,” I tell him.
He sort of sputters at that, and reaches for his face as if his hands will tell him what I’m seeing. It only worsens the damage of course, deepening the shadows on his face to match the ones on the paper. “Every time,” he mutters like it’s nobody’s fault in particular. Just a fate to which he’s resigned.
“Take your coffee, Gee,” I say fondly. “I want to drink mine sometime soon.”
He does so without any further prompting, cradling it with both hands despite the piping heat. I’m almost surprised to not see steam rise from the contact. “God, that’s good,” he breathes as he closes his eyes to savor the heat. With his eyes closed the sockets look hollow, and I have to avert my eyes until they’re open again. Prolonged contact with the manifestations of Gerard’s psyche is wrecking havoc on my own imagination.
I catch a glimpse of a leafless tree on his sketch pad, looming.
I nudge his ankle with my foot. “What are you working on?” I ask, prepared to be shrugged off and dismissed. Sometimes he tells me, sometimes he doesn’t, which is fine; sometimes I want to know; other times, I don’t. When it comes to these drawings my instincts push against each other like the polar opposite that they are, two sides of the same fucked-up coin. I want to know because I love him in whatever way he needs me to love him, for everything and anything and especially the ugly. If he could come to love them the way I do, maybe things would be okay for the first time in a decade. Maybe catharsis will come, and he’ll believe he deserves it. But another part of me, a selfish part of me, doesn’t want to know-doesn’t want to see Gerard’s skilled hand massacre portions of our lives that I want to remember as good, even if I always knew on a base, instinctual level that they never really were. His renderings are abstract, symbolic; I see things in them in ways I never could before. There’s so much pain in them that it hurts just to look, much less to understand.
I always ask, though. Sometimes, I think it was easier to love the ugly before I knew what the ugly was, but that’s before I remember that not knowing drove me insane with sadness, with anger, with fear of the unknown. I’d rather take a chance at knowing than take guess after endless guess, risk the millions of possibilities.
I’ll always ask, even if he won’t always tell me.
Gerard sighs, fingers twitching restlessly against his mug. “It’s not done,” he hedges, but that’s an invitation if I ever heard one. I move one of the sketches he has circling him out of the way and curl up against the wall next to him, prepared for Gerard candid, at his most rare.
“I can’t seem to finish.” The expression on his face is puzzled, bewildered. “It’s weird. It’s never happened before.”
“So, what does that mean?” I take a sip of scalding hot coffee and wince. Should have blown on it first. Gerard drinks it like that without flinching, the crazy motherfucker. “You’re out of ideas? Or you just…stop?”
Gerard goes to touch the outline of the ancient-looking tree with his charcoal smudged finger, then thinks better of it and stops, hand hovering over the scene like some sort of specter. It’s different from what he usually draws, sparser, more of a landscape. The posts of the fence behind the tree are alight with fire. A noose with no occupant swings from the thick lower branch of the tree. There’s a breeze.
“No,” he says, infinitely frustrated, and, in the next breath, infinitely sad. “It’s just…it’s a dream I’ve been having for the past month. But I always wake up too soon.” He gestures to the half-circle of drawings surrounding us, and I realize that I was close to being right. It’s a series of beginnings, of middles, parts of an unfinished whole; in the first one, only the tree and the sky; in the second, the fence is in place, the sky darker, heavier than before; in the third the fence has caught on fire, bright halos of white breaking into the encompassing darkness; in the fourth there’s a horizon line, the earth stretching towards it bare, like maybe the fire got to it. The fifth one is the one he’s working on now. The one with the noose. “I can’t finish because the dream won’t finish.”
It’s not the kind of explanation I was expecting to hear. The symbolism remains up to my interpretation, which could be for better or for worse. It does explain why he’s kicked me awake a couple nights over the past few weeks. Gerard usually has his nightmares quietly. Whatever this is, whatever this means, unsettles him more than the others.
“Maybe you’re not supposed to finish.” I test the coffee with the tip of my index finger, then take a small sip. “A never-ending story, you know?”
“No, it ends.” He sounds absolutely sure. I don’t question why. “Someone’s supposed to hang, I think. I just don’t want to see.”
I nod solemnly, accepting whatever horror this is as mine too, mining to the heart of it. “Do you think it’s supposed to be you?”
Gerard shakes his head, a strand shaking loose over his eye. It’s getting long again. “I think I’m the tree.”
I shake my head. “That doesn’t make sense, though. You can’t be the tree. You see the tree, so unless you’re seeing yourself, you can’t be the tree. Dreams are always in the first person, aren’t they?” I remember that much from my psychology class in high school. You’re always the subject of your dreams.
“It might not be a dream, though.” He bites his lip, looking frustrated. “That one where you’re falling from the sky, that drawing, you remember?” I remember. The sky was raining blood in that drawing. After I nod he continues. “Well, I think this is that. It’s not that I’m drawing a dream. I’m dreaming a drawing.”
“But not the whole thing.”
He nods, looking not just defeated, but resigned again. “But not the whole thing.”
I hate seeing him look this way-like nothing can ever change. It makes me want to lean in to him. Put my head on his shoulder, bury my face in his neck to breathe in the scent of him. Turn his face toward me and press our lips together like I’ve wanted to, like I haven’t been able to for so long it seems like need more than desire. Like the way he needs me to love him is the way I actually do.
But I don’t do any of that. He won’t want me to touch him now, not while he’s twitchy with caffeine and fear and the always present ache of recovery. It never stops, he told me once. It’s never going to.
“You’re not going to hang anybody, Gee” is what I say instead of what I want to say. You’re not the only one with an ache that doesn’t go away. You’re not the only one afraid. “It doesn’t have to be bad.”
He turns his head towards me in slow motion, eyes wide open and lucid. My heart stutters, stops, starts again. “Yes it does, Frank,” he says quietly, clearly. “The world’s just like that.”
I don’t say anything. Can’t say anything really, not that he’ll believe. I just sit with him, gazing at the landscape in his lap, the scattered scenes on the floor that belong to something bigger, something not yet done. Living is exactly like that, I think, by definition lacking an end. There are dark shadows, but there are points of light too, and if it’s up to me, if the interpretation is mine, I choose to focus on that. Because somebody needs to, and Gerard can’t see past the deep dark.
When he’s done, I’ll ask if I can keep the one with just the tree and the sky. It would make a good tattoo, I think.
I sip my coffee.
He lights a cigarette.
We sit like that until the sun goes down.
Gerard’s huddled into a corner of the apartment’s approximation of a dining room mainlining coffee as if it were whiskey and smoking like he’s daring cancer to nut up and do something about it already. I hear the soft scritch-scratch-swirl that means he’s working with charcoal-that, and the dark smudge on his face that, in lesser lighting, would look like a bruise.
The window’s open, sharp March breeze lifting the edges of Gerard’s paper, the strands of Gerard’s hair.
“You know Gee, I came in here to get out of the cold.” I take off one glove, decide fuck no, and slip it back on. “It’s worse in here than it is outside.” Expectations trick you like that, the fuckers.
Gerard makes no indication that he heard me. The charcoal just keeps scratching insistently at the pad of paper. A few half-finished drawing ring around him in a semi-circle, and I see his eyes flick over them once, twice. He’s either having trouble with whatever he’s working on, or the transference of the mess in his head to paper is so convoluted that it’s taking a series to extract it all.
“Is the heat on? The heat better not be on, motherfucker, if you’re gonna leave the window open.”
Scritch scritch scritch.
“It’s the dead middle of March.”
Scritch scrath.
“Your fingers are gonna fall off.”
Scratch scratch.
“Which would be an awesome scene to draw, except oh wait, you don’t have any fingers, crazy.”
Scritch.
I sigh and laugh at the same time, unsure which one I mean more, and busy myself with the never-ending task of watching out for Gerard while he’s up there in his headspace. It was Gerard’s therapist who recommended that he put to paper the swirling mess that’s in his head with charcoals and paints, the same way Pete’s own prescription therapy is a pen, paper and nonsensical lyrics. Gerard’s always been more expressive on paper and canvas than with words and conversations, but it was mood expression before. Now it’s thoughts he sketches, dreams. Nightmares. I close the window all but a crack in case he needs the sharp slap of air and turn up the thermostat five degrees. Between the two it should warm up to early fall temperature soon enough, which bolsters me enough to take my coat and gloves off. The coffee in the pot is cold, so I empty that and set a new one to brew while I wash and dry a few mugs, a plate, and some spoons scattered around the kitchen.
By the time I’m done making and eating two cheese sandwiches, the coffee is done and Gerard is using the blending tool to solidify his deep, deep shadows.
He finally looks up when the aroma from the mug I’m holding directly in front of his face breaks through all the concentration. At this point I’ve directed a straight-up monologue in front of him and he doesn’t so much as blink, but the smell of caffeination snaps him back to reality faster than a slap to the face.
“Frankie,” he intones like it’s a grand declaration. “You’re here.”
“Yeah, Gee, I’ve been here for, like, twenty minutes.” I motion towards the wall. “You left the window wide open.”
“Oh.” What part of all this new barrage of information he’s responding to I don’t know, but there’s a new set of smudges on his face just under his eyes, like maybe he rubbed them in concentration. It looks like he hasn’t slept for days and even though I know those smudges weren’t there five, ten minutes ago, I get the sick sense that they’ve been there forever.
Gerard reaches out and touches my leg, smearing charcoal on the denim of my pants. He’s still looking up at me, eyes big and luminous above the coal.
“You look like a demented raccoon,” I tell him.
He sort of sputters at that, and reaches for his face as if his hands will tell him what I’m seeing. It only worsens the damage of course, deepening the shadows on his face to match the ones on the paper. “Every time,” he mutters like it’s nobody’s fault in particular. Just a fate to which he’s resigned.
“Take your coffee, Gee,” I say fondly. “I want to drink mine sometime soon.”
He does so without any further prompting, cradling it with both hands despite the piping heat. I’m almost surprised to not see steam rise from the contact. “God, that’s good,” he breathes as he closes his eyes to savor the heat. With his eyes closed the sockets look hollow, and I have to avert my eyes until they’re open again. Prolonged contact with the manifestations of Gerard’s psyche is wrecking havoc on my own imagination.
I catch a glimpse of a leafless tree on his sketch pad, looming.
I nudge his ankle with my foot. “What are you working on?” I ask, prepared to be shrugged off and dismissed. Sometimes he tells me, sometimes he doesn’t, which is fine; sometimes I want to know; other times, I don’t. When it comes to these drawings my instincts push against each other like the polar opposite that they are, two sides of the same fucked-up coin. I want to know because I love him in whatever way he needs me to love him, for everything and anything and especially the ugly. If he could come to love them the way I do, maybe things would be okay for the first time in a decade. Maybe catharsis will come, and he’ll believe he deserves it. But another part of me, a selfish part of me, doesn’t want to know-doesn’t want to see Gerard’s skilled hand massacre portions of our lives that I want to remember as good, even if I always knew on a base, instinctual level that they never really were. His renderings are abstract, symbolic; I see things in them in ways I never could before. There’s so much pain in them that it hurts just to look, much less to understand.
I always ask, though. Sometimes, I think it was easier to love the ugly before I knew what the ugly was, but that’s before I remember that not knowing drove me insane with sadness, with anger, with fear of the unknown. I’d rather take a chance at knowing than take guess after endless guess, risk the millions of possibilities.
I’ll always ask, even if he won’t always tell me.
Gerard sighs, fingers twitching restlessly against his mug. “It’s not done,” he hedges, but that’s an invitation if I ever heard one. I move one of the sketches he has circling him out of the way and curl up against the wall next to him, prepared for Gerard candid, at his most rare.
“I can’t seem to finish.” The expression on his face is puzzled, bewildered. “It’s weird. It’s never happened before.”
“So, what does that mean?” I take a sip of scalding hot coffee and wince. Should have blown on it first. Gerard drinks it like that without flinching, the crazy motherfucker. “You’re out of ideas? Or you just…stop?”
Gerard goes to touch the outline of the ancient-looking tree with his charcoal smudged finger, then thinks better of it and stops, hand hovering over the scene like some sort of specter. It’s different from what he usually draws, sparser, more of a landscape. The posts of the fence behind the tree are alight with fire. A noose with no occupant swings from the thick lower branch of the tree. There’s a breeze.
“No,” he says, infinitely frustrated, and, in the next breath, infinitely sad. “It’s just…it’s a dream I’ve been having for the past month. But I always wake up too soon.” He gestures to the half-circle of drawings surrounding us, and I realize that I was close to being right. It’s a series of beginnings, of middles, parts of an unfinished whole; in the first one, only the tree and the sky; in the second, the fence is in place, the sky darker, heavier than before; in the third the fence has caught on fire, bright halos of white breaking into the encompassing darkness; in the fourth there’s a horizon line, the earth stretching towards it bare, like maybe the fire got to it. The fifth one is the one he’s working on now. The one with the noose. “I can’t finish because the dream won’t finish.”
It’s not the kind of explanation I was expecting to hear. The symbolism remains up to my interpretation, which could be for better or for worse. It does explain why he’s kicked me awake a couple nights over the past few weeks. Gerard usually has his nightmares quietly. Whatever this is, whatever this means, unsettles him more than the others.
“Maybe you’re not supposed to finish.” I test the coffee with the tip of my index finger, then take a small sip. “A never-ending story, you know?”
“No, it ends.” He sounds absolutely sure. I don’t question why. “Someone’s supposed to hang, I think. I just don’t want to see.”
I nod solemnly, accepting whatever horror this is as mine too, mining to the heart of it. “Do you think it’s supposed to be you?”
Gerard shakes his head, a strand shaking loose over his eye. It’s getting long again. “I think I’m the tree.”
I shake my head. “That doesn’t make sense, though. You can’t be the tree. You see the tree, so unless you’re seeing yourself, you can’t be the tree. Dreams are always in the first person, aren’t they?” I remember that much from my psychology class in high school. You’re always the subject of your dreams.
“It might not be a dream, though.” He bites his lip, looking frustrated. “That one where you’re falling from the sky, that drawing, you remember?” I remember. The sky was raining blood in that drawing. After I nod he continues. “Well, I think this is that. It’s not that I’m drawing a dream. I’m dreaming a drawing.”
“But not the whole thing.”
He nods, looking not just defeated, but resigned again. “But not the whole thing.”
I hate seeing him look this way-like nothing can ever change. It makes me want to lean in to him. Put my head on his shoulder, bury my face in his neck to breathe in the scent of him. Turn his face toward me and press our lips together like I’ve wanted to, like I haven’t been able to for so long it seems like need more than desire. Like the way he needs me to love him is the way I actually do.
But I don’t do any of that. He won’t want me to touch him now, not while he’s twitchy with caffeine and fear and the always present ache of recovery. It never stops, he told me once. It’s never going to.
“You’re not going to hang anybody, Gee” is what I say instead of what I want to say. You’re not the only one with an ache that doesn’t go away. You’re not the only one afraid. “It doesn’t have to be bad.”
He turns his head towards me in slow motion, eyes wide open and lucid. My heart stutters, stops, starts again. “Yes it does, Frank,” he says quietly, clearly. “The world’s just like that.”
I don’t say anything. Can’t say anything really, not that he’ll believe. I just sit with him, gazing at the landscape in his lap, the scattered scenes on the floor that belong to something bigger, something not yet done. Living is exactly like that, I think, by definition lacking an end. There are dark shadows, but there are points of light too, and if it’s up to me, if the interpretation is mine, I choose to focus on that. Because somebody needs to, and Gerard can’t see past the deep dark.
When he’s done, I’ll ask if I can keep the one with just the tree and the sky. It would make a good tattoo, I think.
I sip my coffee.
He lights a cigarette.
We sit like that until the sun goes down.