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Call It Affection
John Nolan/Conor Oberst
R
Sex, violence, bloodplay
For
mumblemutter
They’ve all looked like you this month. All five. Dark-haired little things that smile too much. Doesn’t that just mean something?
-
They agree to meet up - Conor goes east, John goes south and they meet in the kind of town where sand blows in the wind. There’s no humidity, just quiet people with cut up palms and layers of dust and grit clinging to them like skins they’ve yet to grow in to.
They take the girl out to a place where the sky’s blank blue and the ground’s burned red (she’s the same ruddy colour and has the lumpen hopelessness of a girl not pretty enough for the press), and they prise up shovelfuls of dirt til they see salt on their shirts then they lower her in. John lays her out neatly, head turned to one side and rested on her palm, like she’s sleeping, because this is his turn and he’ll do as he pleases, never mind that Conor climbs down two minutes later and cuts out her eyes and the flesh of her cheeks and drapes them round her throat like jewels. John tries not too look as they bury her, but he can’t stop himself seeing the blood vanish as the earth mistakes it for water, or the way the cuts have exposed a row of teeth and tongue and glands which are, in their own way, beautiful, even if he’s not as in awe of them as Conor seems to be.
“I like cutting them up,” he’d said the first night, in the place by the sea (and his shirt had smelled of salt then, too). “I. Inside them, it’s just. Like marble or.” He’d held his hands under the water and spread the fingers out, letting the tide drag the blood from under his nails. The water swirled coloured for a second then cleared. “I want to make maps.” Which is why Conor’s a lunatic, and why he has pages from biology textbooks pasted up in the back of his van. He has to change them after each time, he told John by the sea, because when he hits them - his boys, his girls, his people - with the rock (the rock is large and roughly round, wrapped up in a white muslin sack) it spatters blood and bone in stripes and circles across the walls. He collects the bone shards but rinses the rest away.
John does chloroform, which is neater, but Conor resolutely refuses to change. He likes the way they move when they’re face down with his foot pressed between their shoulder blades, likes the way they stretch and (always, for no good reason) reach forward just before he brings the cosh down. He claims he can feel their muscles moving as they strain under him, and that one moment when they’re fluid and fast and alive makes it all the more rewarding later. “’Cos they fight you,” he explained as he lifted the first section of skin away, “and then you get to see what they fought you with.” He’d placed his palm against the wet mass of muscle and tissue and let the blood well up from under, work its way under his nails and into the minute creases of his skin. “Warm,” he’d breathed, and grinned crooked-toothed, like a child.
But that was by the sea, when they did things Conor’s way, and it’s not like that now.
-
You have medicine, I have art. You map them out and I’ll make them into mysteries. They’ll be statues in people’s minds, and monuments in ours.
-
John’s never killed anybody. He’s just drugged them and put them under a weight of soil. He supposes they suffocate, their lungs clogged and crushed by the press of damp earth around them, but he likes to think some of them wake up, and maybe those that wake up have heart attacks because they’re scared (and of course they’re scared, no matter how sleep-pretty he makes them look), or maybe they vomit because of the chloroform only there’s no space for them to vomit into and so they die with their lungs full of dirt and sick, not knowing where they are. Maybe some try and claw their way out but don’t make it (Conor had suggested that, when he’d giggled and grinned and said hey, how do they know if they’re facing up? What if a whole bunch of them just dug deeper? and you didn’t think that was possible, but for him).
John doesn’t want to know how they die, really. He doesn’t want to see it happen. He thinks people work better as secrets.
Conor says, no, no!, they’re human and he reels off names and dates of birth and calls them his siblings and subjects and that’s why Conor’s a lunatic, John thinks, sometimes, when Conor isn’t there to hear.
-
Conor sends pictures in the post. Photographs of faces layered over with textbook annotations; diagrams showing networks of synapses and veins, and then again with swirling colours and numbers, an impressionistic map all of his own. John hangs them on the wall for a week then burns them.
-
They agree to meet up - Conor sticks out his thumb and hitch hikes east, and by the time they’re face to face he’s crumpled and stale-smelling but smiling from ear to ear, delighted, with his hair falling into his eyes and his jeans fraying at the seams and his tshirt washed out and translucent, slicked against his skin with sweat and John pulls up, climbs out of the rental and steps oncetwice before cupping Conor’s face with his hands and tilting it back, up, into the sunlight.
“So fucking long,” says John. Conor’s head’s buried in the crook of John’s neck, but he nods in agreement and mumbles something against his collarbone.
“I saw someone while I was waiting,” is what he says. He lifts he head, looks up at John, wide-eyed, biting his lip. “We should go fetch her.”
The bottle in John’s pocket is heavy, pungent and cold. He tips the liquid onto the cloth, wonders, if he does this enough, will his fingers get stained? And then they fetch the girl with the sand in her hair and the earth mistakes her for water.
-
Conor sends emails which are crude. He asks things like: “Do you ever fuck them, the ones that are me? Or do you just stroke off and hope the cops don’t have your DNA on file?” And the next night John’s rubbing semen into the dirt, trying to mix it in with soil to hide it in case he isn’t paranoid enough, even though he’d never thought of this like that before.
-
The second time they meet, in the sand place, after they’ve spent months sending each other words and fingerprints and spit, they climb into the back of John’s car and it’s fingerprints and spit all over again but this time with bruises to remember them by. Conor’s wiry, all muscle and bone, and John can see, a little, when his hands are tracing across Conor’s chest, why someone would want to turn people into maps. There are so many pieces and they fit together so (Conor’s hand fisted in the small of his back, their legs locked between each other’s, his hand against the curve of Conor’s throat) intricately, they’re so perfectly designed it just. It’s beautiful, if he lets it be.
“I’d like to look at you,” Conor says later, when they’re crumpled together somewhere between the seat and the floor and the dark of the windows. “I’d like to see. I mean, I wouldn’t. You know. That. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to.” His hands are tracing patters across John’s skin as he says this, marking the places where the cuts would go and somehow, before he even knows it, John’s saying “Show me” and closing his eyes.
Conor slips off somewhere (it can’t be more than millimetres away but there’s no light for miles so if they’re not touching they could be infinitely apart and not know the difference) and when he comes back into view he’s folding out a flick knife and guiding John down, back, with touches that are almost reverent. His face is dark, serious, suddenly older and more ordered, and John lies there on his back with Conor straddling his hips and he’d breathe if his lungs would open but no. He can feel a hand against his chest, warm and damp, fingers splayed and Conor is pushing him down, the pressure light but insistent.
“You’ve gotta be quiet,” he whispers. “Still. You just need -”
His mouth sets into a hard line and the pain in John’s shoulder in sudden and sharp.
-
I drowned one once, in memory of us. I didn’t know at the time, but it must have been the first of you.
-
There’s another one to match, lines at the tops of his arms, and he can feel the blood trickling back and sideways, pooling between his back and the seat. His chest hitches and he’s breathing again, fast and shallow, a tiny breath for each of Conor’s careful movements as he cuts a line across John’s chest deep enough for the hurt to be slow and dull rather than surface-sharp but not enough to tempt him to twist up and scrape away the skin a layer at a time. He can feel the knife moving across his chest in increments as Conor drags it then presses down, lets the blood run dark and sticky under his nails and into the minute creases of his skin. His eyes are wide and feverish, he’s shaking but his grip on the knife has a looseness that comes from confidence and practice and John can swears and prays and doesn’t make a sound because oh, oh, there can be nothing like this.
“God,” Conor tells him. “You’re just so. Fucking hell.” He holds up his fingers. They’re wet and red and sour when John sucks them into his mouth. He can feel blood on his face, in his hair, but he can’t taste it. Conor giggles, flashes a smile for a second. “We’ve just got to…Like this. Like,” he turns the blade, swipes downward, a vertical gash, and John shudders at the movement. This is it, he wants to say, this is what we met for, but the words are coming out as low moans, soft noises. His fingers tighten against Conor’s thighs and it’s a plea for something he can’t name.
“You’ve got to have that,” (fingers running along the ragged edges of the cuts, nails scraping at the gaps and digging in and it hurts but it’s perfect, done with such love. With care) “they’ve got to go the right way or. Or they close up.” And then they’re kissing, fast and hard, all teeth and tongue and John can taste it now, almost, at the back of Conor’s throat.
Then his legs are hooked over, up, and the cuts are al pressed into tight, red lines that are almost invisible. Except the vertical one, which gapes and bleeds and smears Conor’s chest with blood when he leans forward, heavy against John’s legs, and pushes in, hard, fast, and then they’re fucking, finally, and it burns and aches and John can feel his chest tighten and sting, but he’s got Conor’s skin under his nails, red flecked through his face, his hair, on his chest like warpaint and as he twists, arches, comes hard against his own stomach, he thinks there’s nothing, there can be nothing like this in the world.
Conor giggles after, drags spit-soaked fingers through the blood that’s dried on his chest. “I look like such a psycho,” he laughs. “Like I’ve just killed somebody.” He rests his head against John’s shoulder, carefully avoiding the cut.
“How do I look?”
“Like you survived.” He hitches his trousers up, slips the flick knife back into his pocket. “It suits you. If I think about it right.”
Outside, the sky opens. The raindrops hit the roof with a noise like bullets, and the earth drinks as eagerly as if it were blood.
John Nolan/Conor Oberst
R
Sex, violence, bloodplay
For
mumblemutter
They’ve all looked like you this month. All five. Dark-haired little things that smile too much. Doesn’t that just mean something?
-
They agree to meet up - Conor goes east, John goes south and they meet in the kind of town where sand blows in the wind. There’s no humidity, just quiet people with cut up palms and layers of dust and grit clinging to them like skins they’ve yet to grow in to.
They take the girl out to a place where the sky’s blank blue and the ground’s burned red (she’s the same ruddy colour and has the lumpen hopelessness of a girl not pretty enough for the press), and they prise up shovelfuls of dirt til they see salt on their shirts then they lower her in. John lays her out neatly, head turned to one side and rested on her palm, like she’s sleeping, because this is his turn and he’ll do as he pleases, never mind that Conor climbs down two minutes later and cuts out her eyes and the flesh of her cheeks and drapes them round her throat like jewels. John tries not too look as they bury her, but he can’t stop himself seeing the blood vanish as the earth mistakes it for water, or the way the cuts have exposed a row of teeth and tongue and glands which are, in their own way, beautiful, even if he’s not as in awe of them as Conor seems to be.
“I like cutting them up,” he’d said the first night, in the place by the sea (and his shirt had smelled of salt then, too). “I. Inside them, it’s just. Like marble or.” He’d held his hands under the water and spread the fingers out, letting the tide drag the blood from under his nails. The water swirled coloured for a second then cleared. “I want to make maps.” Which is why Conor’s a lunatic, and why he has pages from biology textbooks pasted up in the back of his van. He has to change them after each time, he told John by the sea, because when he hits them - his boys, his girls, his people - with the rock (the rock is large and roughly round, wrapped up in a white muslin sack) it spatters blood and bone in stripes and circles across the walls. He collects the bone shards but rinses the rest away.
John does chloroform, which is neater, but Conor resolutely refuses to change. He likes the way they move when they’re face down with his foot pressed between their shoulder blades, likes the way they stretch and (always, for no good reason) reach forward just before he brings the cosh down. He claims he can feel their muscles moving as they strain under him, and that one moment when they’re fluid and fast and alive makes it all the more rewarding later. “’Cos they fight you,” he explained as he lifted the first section of skin away, “and then you get to see what they fought you with.” He’d placed his palm against the wet mass of muscle and tissue and let the blood well up from under, work its way under his nails and into the minute creases of his skin. “Warm,” he’d breathed, and grinned crooked-toothed, like a child.
But that was by the sea, when they did things Conor’s way, and it’s not like that now.
-
You have medicine, I have art. You map them out and I’ll make them into mysteries. They’ll be statues in people’s minds, and monuments in ours.
-
John’s never killed anybody. He’s just drugged them and put them under a weight of soil. He supposes they suffocate, their lungs clogged and crushed by the press of damp earth around them, but he likes to think some of them wake up, and maybe those that wake up have heart attacks because they’re scared (and of course they’re scared, no matter how sleep-pretty he makes them look), or maybe they vomit because of the chloroform only there’s no space for them to vomit into and so they die with their lungs full of dirt and sick, not knowing where they are. Maybe some try and claw their way out but don’t make it (Conor had suggested that, when he’d giggled and grinned and said hey, how do they know if they’re facing up? What if a whole bunch of them just dug deeper? and you didn’t think that was possible, but for him).
John doesn’t want to know how they die, really. He doesn’t want to see it happen. He thinks people work better as secrets.
Conor says, no, no!, they’re human and he reels off names and dates of birth and calls them his siblings and subjects and that’s why Conor’s a lunatic, John thinks, sometimes, when Conor isn’t there to hear.
-
Conor sends pictures in the post. Photographs of faces layered over with textbook annotations; diagrams showing networks of synapses and veins, and then again with swirling colours and numbers, an impressionistic map all of his own. John hangs them on the wall for a week then burns them.
-
They agree to meet up - Conor sticks out his thumb and hitch hikes east, and by the time they’re face to face he’s crumpled and stale-smelling but smiling from ear to ear, delighted, with his hair falling into his eyes and his jeans fraying at the seams and his tshirt washed out and translucent, slicked against his skin with sweat and John pulls up, climbs out of the rental and steps oncetwice before cupping Conor’s face with his hands and tilting it back, up, into the sunlight.
“So fucking long,” says John. Conor’s head’s buried in the crook of John’s neck, but he nods in agreement and mumbles something against his collarbone.
“I saw someone while I was waiting,” is what he says. He lifts he head, looks up at John, wide-eyed, biting his lip. “We should go fetch her.”
The bottle in John’s pocket is heavy, pungent and cold. He tips the liquid onto the cloth, wonders, if he does this enough, will his fingers get stained? And then they fetch the girl with the sand in her hair and the earth mistakes her for water.
-
Conor sends emails which are crude. He asks things like: “Do you ever fuck them, the ones that are me? Or do you just stroke off and hope the cops don’t have your DNA on file?” And the next night John’s rubbing semen into the dirt, trying to mix it in with soil to hide it in case he isn’t paranoid enough, even though he’d never thought of this like that before.
-
The second time they meet, in the sand place, after they’ve spent months sending each other words and fingerprints and spit, they climb into the back of John’s car and it’s fingerprints and spit all over again but this time with bruises to remember them by. Conor’s wiry, all muscle and bone, and John can see, a little, when his hands are tracing across Conor’s chest, why someone would want to turn people into maps. There are so many pieces and they fit together so (Conor’s hand fisted in the small of his back, their legs locked between each other’s, his hand against the curve of Conor’s throat) intricately, they’re so perfectly designed it just. It’s beautiful, if he lets it be.
“I’d like to look at you,” Conor says later, when they’re crumpled together somewhere between the seat and the floor and the dark of the windows. “I’d like to see. I mean, I wouldn’t. You know. That. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to.” His hands are tracing patters across John’s skin as he says this, marking the places where the cuts would go and somehow, before he even knows it, John’s saying “Show me” and closing his eyes.
Conor slips off somewhere (it can’t be more than millimetres away but there’s no light for miles so if they’re not touching they could be infinitely apart and not know the difference) and when he comes back into view he’s folding out a flick knife and guiding John down, back, with touches that are almost reverent. His face is dark, serious, suddenly older and more ordered, and John lies there on his back with Conor straddling his hips and he’d breathe if his lungs would open but no. He can feel a hand against his chest, warm and damp, fingers splayed and Conor is pushing him down, the pressure light but insistent.
“You’ve gotta be quiet,” he whispers. “Still. You just need -”
His mouth sets into a hard line and the pain in John’s shoulder in sudden and sharp.
-
I drowned one once, in memory of us. I didn’t know at the time, but it must have been the first of you.
-
There’s another one to match, lines at the tops of his arms, and he can feel the blood trickling back and sideways, pooling between his back and the seat. His chest hitches and he’s breathing again, fast and shallow, a tiny breath for each of Conor’s careful movements as he cuts a line across John’s chest deep enough for the hurt to be slow and dull rather than surface-sharp but not enough to tempt him to twist up and scrape away the skin a layer at a time. He can feel the knife moving across his chest in increments as Conor drags it then presses down, lets the blood run dark and sticky under his nails and into the minute creases of his skin. His eyes are wide and feverish, he’s shaking but his grip on the knife has a looseness that comes from confidence and practice and John can swears and prays and doesn’t make a sound because oh, oh, there can be nothing like this.
“God,” Conor tells him. “You’re just so. Fucking hell.” He holds up his fingers. They’re wet and red and sour when John sucks them into his mouth. He can feel blood on his face, in his hair, but he can’t taste it. Conor giggles, flashes a smile for a second. “We’ve just got to…Like this. Like,” he turns the blade, swipes downward, a vertical gash, and John shudders at the movement. This is it, he wants to say, this is what we met for, but the words are coming out as low moans, soft noises. His fingers tighten against Conor’s thighs and it’s a plea for something he can’t name.
“You’ve got to have that,” (fingers running along the ragged edges of the cuts, nails scraping at the gaps and digging in and it hurts but it’s perfect, done with such love. With care) “they’ve got to go the right way or. Or they close up.” And then they’re kissing, fast and hard, all teeth and tongue and John can taste it now, almost, at the back of Conor’s throat.
Then his legs are hooked over, up, and the cuts are al pressed into tight, red lines that are almost invisible. Except the vertical one, which gapes and bleeds and smears Conor’s chest with blood when he leans forward, heavy against John’s legs, and pushes in, hard, fast, and then they’re fucking, finally, and it burns and aches and John can feel his chest tighten and sting, but he’s got Conor’s skin under his nails, red flecked through his face, his hair, on his chest like warpaint and as he twists, arches, comes hard against his own stomach, he thinks there’s nothing, there can be nothing like this in the world.
Conor giggles after, drags spit-soaked fingers through the blood that’s dried on his chest. “I look like such a psycho,” he laughs. “Like I’ve just killed somebody.” He rests his head against John’s shoulder, carefully avoiding the cut.
“How do I look?”
“Like you survived.” He hitches his trousers up, slips the flick knife back into his pocket. “It suits you. If I think about it right.”
Outside, the sky opens. The raindrops hit the roof with a noise like bullets, and the earth drinks as eagerly as if it were blood.