Now There Was One
Previously published in Yellow Medicine Review, in an edition edited by Chip Livingston, Now There Was One was written under the title, Beatitude, and drew largely and obliquely from Dr Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent, which would spin an anecdote of child prostitution, child rape, and then blame, instead of human actors, the comic books the child enjoyed.
Now There Was One
Travis Hedge Coke
For Steve Gerber and Mona Dahl
i lose my already faint reflection when the mirrored hand goes against mine in perfect symmetry. the glass judders against my palm, the thrum rises through my fingers and I hold my hand there, knowing the other side is ice cold. it has to be; everything on that side is ice. iced condensation. ice cubes bound in stiff clear plastic. ice cream. popsicles, which are just icicles with some sugar, some dye, and a pretty wrapper. and yet, on this side, the glass is warm. the cold is sealed off by glass limned in metal lined with rubber thrumming methodically at the back of a convenience store so small and nondescript it shouldn’t even rate a name, a chain, but does.
one hand holding the metal edge of the door, i grab the tub of fat-free mint chocolate fast with only fingertips; swing shut the glass. still too long and the refrigeration erupts outward and envelops me like the last desperate exhalation of bad air from the depths of a drowning woman’s lungs. bad cold air puts visions of Julia in my head: Julia drowning. Julia breathing. hair rising buoyantly towards a surface she cannot reach.
i’m getting just a bit too maudlin with all this. it’s not exactly a deathnote she’s set for, but these small things seem so monstrous it can get easy to forget how important the slightest optimism, the finite gesture, how necessary triviality can be. it’s easier to be a saint than not be an asshole, because they won’t saint you until you’re dead, but you can only avoid being unnecessarily assholish while you’re still in the game. maybe.
don’t know why i pulled so desperately for the ice-cream. it’s just cold and the suddenness meant i had to immediately cradle the tub against my chest with the whole length of my bare arm. the ice goes through the crook of my elbow to the point. i avoid detailing to myself what it does through cloth, towards my heart, my spine. it’s just ice cream.
i pause at the liquor. brands so familial they need only be known by initials, by letters, by folksy names that ring with illegitimacy that might turn to a taste of intimacy. Third taste, maybe.
can Julia? i realize i don’t even know the measure of a trimester. a measure for each, for parents, for child, but are they even? i know what Julia would say, but it isn’t my child and it never can be. there are so many reasons, not the least of which is that it’s impossible.
maybe it isn’t. maybe the very next thing they teach you in school if you don’t leave at the age of twelve to be a dockside rental, is how it is not impossible. should not bother me at all the way it does. it doesn’t have to be mine, i tell myself. it does not have to be mine.
i turn my back on the bottles, mint chocolate in a waxy tub burning ice crystals down into my chest while i lingered and only hitting when it was all there, full force cold.
eye the magazines while the clerk finishes an oh-so-important phone call in a language i will never fathom: service. is it the language of small people suddenly finding themselves in power? is it the tongue of frustration and elevation? or, am i more than a bit bitter than i cannot ever deliberately take advantage of some authority someone else has bestowed on me? i cow in. i give. i rarely say “no,” and i doubt i’ve ever ended a conversation on it.
right away, sir. just give me a minute, ma’am. of course i will! yes, just a moment. soon as i can. why, you don’t even have to ask!
the clerk’s still buzzing away on his cell. the tub sheds softening ice across the counter, which neither of us comment on, but i know he watched as closely as did i. the wax plastic scent of the tub is giving way, the cold is giving, as the chocolate and mint and cream and sugar rise from the tub and i scan the magazines again.
hair windswept upward in tendrils breaks the masthead of one of the magazines. one of the magazines behind stiff black plastic shields that beg off the underagers, at just the right eye level for the kiddies to read. i tip the black plastic back and chew the corner of my mouth. the hair’s the same rust red, could easily be the same style. i’ll have to remember and tell Julia; she’ll take it as a compliment. as a compliment, this woman who, too, will never get to rise out of that water, frozen in the image, frozen on the covered cover.
moments later i twist the plastic bag around my hand until the loops are taut over palm, pay my seven thirty five plus tax and hope varying temperatures of the ice cream, the pop can, and the four-stick package of chewing gum don’t somehow violate one another. maybe the gum will get too chilly and go brittle. the can will warm the ice cream and chocolate will leak out of a weak corner I could have noted if i’d inspected the tub, but now will be unable to account for until home, when it will have already been ruined.
what did i say to him? was it something about the magazine? was it something about the model? about Julia? did i say, “she looks like my –” what did i call her, then?
and did he think that would actually work? my brother has this sort of studio. in his garage. how often had this stuff be laid out? i’m kind of a photographer.
maybe it worked all the time. none of my business, really. lot of people in the world, surely someone doesn’t think that smacks of desperation as much as i do and anyway, what good is my judgment in a situation like… well, like any? surely, in this world, are people pimped out, surrendering themselves to opportunity, to chance, to optimism or condemnation every inch of the way, every tick of the clock touching on some new avenue of possibility.
the ice cream is fine as i transplant it from soft plastic of amniotic-white to the sturdy, well-insulated confines of the freezer’s second shelf. i slowly push the freezer shut and the little magnet-backed photos of Julia and i that grace the rippled façade of the fridge feel more like home to me than standing on the floor, surrounded by the walls encapsulated in building c of the darla arms ever could. suppose it’s useful, then, that’s where the photos and fridge are.
Liebestod roars in earbuds as the sky screams past us cold and black and full of jerks and speed of the train car beneath us! I’ve music in the left ear, the other bud plugging up his right as he bears down on me and we roll over ought to be terrified of going off the train but fuck it don’t give a damn in all actuality and some fictionality too! Never had sex atop a moving train before! He squeals and the sound of it almost puts me off my money, too tight and eager and childish! Spine lined with bruises, slam down pelvis probably purple, already hard to tell which twitch is his, mine, a catch in the tracks. Hips buck fast hard without my accord and there goes the cord, headphone jack flapping in the slipstream as the train goes forth and the cassette player swings off dejected into a ditch I and I suppose, or against some smalltown pavement – in deepdish cell division life spurts who actually cares for accuracy?
Sharp silence of rushing air and pulsing blood all inside hearing. Internal. Organic. Flesh slaps and creak of joints jostled going chill even as enthusiasm thrums, zipper teeth pressing a love tattoo into my thigh as he bites chews gnaws my shoulder with little rat teeth for anchor for hope and I and I and he tear down across the anglo twilight cattlecar warmth and the smell of the thousand drywall cases, chemical tankers, and ancient freighttrain come boiling through nostrils now that exposed orifices are all open and freed. Iced air speeds over always hot skin, hairs freezing erect as the various exuded juices of life dry and ice on hot goosepimpled anxious flesh. Every possible pore pulls open and even our lower intestines’ tweaked, dilating and winking like a long internal eye in the gut thud and twitch of terminally alive all-loving veins vacuous and true and eagerly waiting new trips, tricks, and tactile expressions as the train shudders to a halt and the boy beside fastens his fly and rolls up his sleeves as I and I and he slide down off the car to a graveyard of freightbearers and timeweathered hulks at the tracks’ end.
End of all tracks.
into me, she steps, backwards, and at first i press myself to the shower wall, but even the water’s gone lukewarm and no way i could stand that hard cold wall on skin so recently denied other heats. my back leaves the wall with a cold, soft suction, and i push my fingers into her scalp as i lean forward, froth and heat over my hands as i massage her head. she’s got the jet down and hardly any spray reaches this far back, and i find myself leaning even closer, trying to move forward as though i could push through her or as if her body would simply be absorbed, caught up in mine as i advance.
her scent comes through the lathering shampoo (supposed to be strawberries, it smells of citrus and ammonium sulfates), the cake to the left of us (perfumed with acrid flowers that never grew in reality, in real earth) past the hard water and the bleach sting hanging like a phantom since yesterday’s emergency cleaning of the tub and surrounding floor tiles. i know they only inhale lovers in old french novels and movies with sentimental denouements that would have made frank capra lose his lunch, but i do. i inhale, i try to hold that scent in my nose, hold her in my head, and another thought of absorption passes through me as the shower starts gurgling as new heat erupts through the tepid rain.
heat from her skin and mine, between her head and my hands, her thigh braced back between the fronts of mine kicking her pulse into me and i feel like falling. i steady myself on nothing, or else on her. gravid gravity between. falling. my hands freeze, fingers interlaced with her hair as she asks how i refer to her. “when people ask,” she says.
she disentangles herself, pulls free of me, and like that, i stand with lathered hands as she turns and addresses the showerfall to her hair, running the shampoo out, a jet glances off an ear and catches me full in the face. she knows how i feel about this and yet she pushes the issue. the agenda.
is it fair to call it an agenda? sister. sister. sister.
“just tell them i’m your sister.” she says, turning – always turning – and smiling at me. shampoo hidden somewhere near her roots is revealed in rivulets, in soapy streams that run off her scalp, down her neck and blur themselves against her body. i get the urge to push her back under the charge of water, renewed with heat, with pressure and life; i don’t.
a hand on either shoulder, she replaces herself with me, leaning against the cool wall as she pushes me under the falling wet warmth. i turn back to say something, but she directs my head with a stable hand against the nape of my neck, and i knock the inconsistent showerhead to the left to get the water out of my eyes and it smacks off the wall in great gouts like it isn’t water at all. deflects right back into my eyes and i close them, Julia pushing two palms of shampoo against the back of my head, sliding all ten fingers up and over until she’s tapping her fingertips on my forehead, playing an etude in concert with the whisper of water on the wall, the crackle of the light in the middle of the ceiling, the rattle of the water heater the next room over, hum of the toilet not too far away.
i lose the scent of her while she works the shampoo in, acrid lemons replacing her, impossible to anticipate pressures and sudden vocalizations become the only remnants as i stand in the reddish darkness of closed eyes, closed form, not feeling close at all as her hands slip away from me entirely.
she leaves me with “rinse.” i am abandoned as the syllables subside into silence incapable of faith that she will return as soon as i open my eyes.
Exit the graveyard, as remnants of the boy dry and flake off! Stageworthy bravado loud in stride but ain’t nobody there to see it. No time and no sense, sniffing the air for cues. And how sad that the dead don’t ride dead trains any more than their contemporous living.
No time for grief. No time and no cents. Can’t afford the wait. Why would I?
It’s a loop the train it comes back every and always and it’ll be waiting for me here if I and I come back and wait for it. Fair’s fair and all’s fair that can be cheated sweet. Hell, don’t get it here, catch a car in town down the line, maybe catch the timetable right and meet up with myself. Give myself a leg up or a gift, tell myself my troubles.
No sense going on flat, but fuck! What’s missed? No score, no pay, no time. What’s missed mourning? Directive incinerates any ounce of sentimentality straight from veins now seared with rage petulance determination and oh so sad sick desperate succulent knowledge! I know too much. So much no one ought to have to bear, and i slough it off like shedding the dead the boy’s aethers all over me like a sick skin of old fading lusts as I make for civilization!
Dark clouds plume looking light against the deep unparalleled pure black of the starless moonless helpless sky! Underbellies of clouds bronzed bright with the light of the fires furiously fucked into life by a few vicious chemical assertions and an indelicate act or three on the part of yours truly! It’s a gas how much shit people stock onto trains burns so damn well!
The smoke spelled out deicide. I paced the rest of its message walking off to town air incinerating and scoring my naked back through the borrowed shirt some lost boy wouldn’t never need no more. Born broke, wrought wrong every inch of existence, we are the deathknell the coffin nail the hard sell hammered deep into anyone worth a damn! Imperfect we enter the world, to say the least, but even the least of us can act the damn part!
Spit the last of the boy on the ground, tired of the taste. Boy got boring fast, got slow, too soon.
City of wind and fire. All that good stuff. Busted concrete juts from soft earth at the edge of town, splintered sewage pipes like corrugated vines with iron flowers belch the products of living into the cesspool outskirts. Jet across the chunks of upturned sidewalk like a regular dandy, just fine and paced and eager to get mine and maybe six other people’s too; they ain’t using any better than yours truly might.
“i can’t just say you’re my sister,” i tell her, trying not to argue. trying not to be dead.
she disagrees and continues drying her hair with a beige handtowel. her feet refuse to remain planted as she soars and dries about the room.
from the couch, i argue it “would look suspicious” if i did anything out of line.
“what’s out of line?” she wants know.
i’m not so naïve in the world i don’t know a wind up when i see one. awkwardly, part of me desires to play along, take the set up like a good sucker and let the thing come off. who knows; could be far more profitable or funny than i’m giving it prescient credit for.
knees to chin, hugging my shins, i try to watch television while Julia climbs over the back of the couch, supporting herself on my right shoulder, sliding behind me. i scoot forward and keep my eyes on the television, barely perched on the edge of the cushion now, feet flat floor, toes digging into the carpet. her nose bends against a shoulder blade, an eye– surely closed, but seeping something not quite tears – pressed to me along with the whole side of her face. her lashes flit on skin and then catch, she pushes herself harder against me, breaths pulling across my back into her mouth, just the corner of that mouth stuck to my skin as she moves it, speaking and exhaling almost a trill through her one free nostril.
this is what we do. if it’s not the baby, it’s the sister thing, and if it is not sisters, she’s telling me i’m wrong about all sorts of other things. i kiss like a girl. she likes to tell me that and i don’t even know what that it means. i can expect it, though. i can anticipate her part in this just as she probably knows what i will say in response or to get a response.
she must turn when she is not with me; is that what i’m afraid of? she tells me how i am. it isn’t true, none of it. maybe a little.
i know everything she is telling me, holding her face to my skin, holding herself to me in a way that we can be close without having to see one another, without necessity of recognition. i hear every word and breath, i feel them on newly cleansed skin and know they are true. she tells me she loves me. she tells me to tell people she’s my sister. My sister and this then, this will be my nephew. i ask her what i should tell him? the baby, when he’s born? when he’s older? child of my sister who’s slept with god knows who and going to have this baby she expects i’ll raise like he was my own.
“our own,” she corrects softly. she twists to lie lengthwise on the couch and wrapping a leg around my knees, holding my shoulder in her hand, she pulls me alongside her. “we’ll raise her like our own.”
her hair spreads damp over my face, sweeps over my face as she moves around me, off to the kitchen. i lie on the couch alone, television impossible to attend to, still feeling her hair, thinking of that model on the magazine cover, that forever-drowning airbrushed nude in soft-lighting and heavy makeup that conscientiously, that kindly, hides all hints of wrinkle, of time, hides all and any, hides bruises and pimples, subverts scars into smoothness that renders recognition unnecessary. i choke on air, throw out a temporary hand seeking something, when she returns and rolls over me to retake her space, leaving me to settle, bared to her, to the ceiling, and to the bright, listless, pointless television set turned down too low to hear a sense of, she between the cushions and me.
The horizon is teeming with tents, lean-tos and sheds as I enter the outskirts fires still flaring back the graveyard big and loud and full thirst as am I! Hunger bites like fleas like mosquitoes in my marrow and somewhere out there’s a dog crying its head off, shitgiggles of coyotes and screaming crowing soon desiccated chickens! Somebody sings and it whips through the small structures, it sails under loose doors and stutters past windows papered over or holding cracked halves of panes, glass run thick at the bottom with age. Banshee winds pick up off the fires and rush the outskirts, hot air blue and red clay underfoot vomiting moisture sour and ammoniac!
Slosh through the soot and shit and summer night seeking a quick pay an out, an in, a method by which to procure that which is necessary to the continuation and deliberation of yours truly the one and only! To meet a man like Richard Rich rich Rick Ricky-o gonna need to get fixed up smoothed out settled down and stabilized first! Orders of business must be observed.
To Blaines deicide on the dank air!
Cockeyed rejects with congenital blacklung paean the mines of their ancestry and clutch the cuffs of yours truly! Dank stains on the trouser legs from their desperate hands and know they’ve been digging in the clay, tearing at the earth ravenous for the fix of their parents, seeking to score the same satiation their grandpappies and grand dames of old must of known!
“Musta known!” the screech. Bellow and beg all about how “If they’d only just re-open the mines!”
And I take a few underwing, it’s true. “Just calm yourself, son, i’ve got you.” “Girl, don’t you worry ‘t’all, I have a plan!” and I have, too. I carry a few along, entourage of beggars and collapse cases, hold’em right close to me like a regular from off high messiah, hands freely about their mucky forms, embrace’em right close and drop them one by one as i collect up some cash here, a ring there; weak wallets and billfolds and checks from wealthy relatives, hopes, memories, druthers and prayers, prescriptions writ to be sold, family heirlooms and anything else a pawn won’t question if I need to visit one.
I’ll even do it local, so these poor unfortunates can buy their crap back without having to walk too far. I may be your goddammed messiah but I ain’t about to insist moving in mysterious (which is messiah-speke for “fucked up”) ways!
i wish some time i could actually remember the real moment of falling asleep. seems an unfair fall, you don’t remember it. too easy to turn into unjustified self-recrimination and lord knows i am exceptionally good at those.
to be fair, there is no more precise recollection of waking, this last time or any other. no clarity or intensity of moment, pushing myself into the mattress already molding with the shape and weight of kneecaps and downturned cheek, but there is precision. the clockwork of coming to, the precision of pillows, of reluctance to cast off comforter, to slip from warm worn sheets to the cold, clear reality of whatever time it is in actuality. time is immaterial in bed so long as no one else knows you are aware in there.
we lie together, Julia and i. she doesn’t roll over and tell me we are the dead and we don’t acknowledge that either of us might not be there when the other is closed up in sleep. we lie there. lie there trying to make a world, to make a place out of objects and people, but it never catches. lie like that trying to avoid physicality or actuality – actualization – for god knows how long, last night long over and morning unhinted by the alice blue shaft of streetlamp and neon ambience coolly displaced through the room’s solitary window across depthless space until it terminates in the glistening nylon carpet curls. contents of a flue without shaft, the shaftless shunts sudden as outside a sign comes on, scalpel slicing in or slithering sonora alice blue; this is blaines americana opening up, which makes it about one o’clock.
i let my attentiveness rest. she’s so pretty. don’t know what she does when i’m not looking, and i don’t wonder.
she undulates against my spine, ladle-like, if find myself, lying with her. bank and brook, like the lethe. her knee kicks into the backs of my calves below the comforter and she sniffles into the nape of my nude neck. her fingers fit in sleep between my ribs, paced, pleasant enough to cut in, but they – bless her heart – don’t. don’t, is what i ought to tell myself, if i could find myself. cannot find her when she sleeps. i allow myself without reprieve, that she sleeps masculine. no, isn’t that. i can, i tell myself, shifting to my feet, flat and frozen against icy carpet, floating exactly how you don’t move in dreams from the bed to the window. like lying flush to a mirror, maybe, more than anything. she probably is all of that whenever she is apart from me; more than ever am.
Julia whispers dreamwords now that i am gone, addressing better company than i might ever manage to be. breathing and whistling wishes, roars of soft exhalation warming her pillow, wishes or wants or horrors; can’t hear from here, distance doubtlessly immaterial.
the window is set at a child’s height, displaying what the butlers seen, drunkards sown, romance and remorse. all in broken arabesques, in aurora borealis, in neon and glass and the smog throwing it back down renewed, behind those bluegrey and amberorange billows hints the moon. it comes slow and slick through the haze, our snaking satellite, brilliant and brylcreemed, lovelabouring luna.
“did i wake you?”
she gasps (small reward there) and still half asleep says, “no. i thought you were still in… i thought you were right next to me, until you… thought you were a ghost… dead…. a zombie at the window after me!”
i should turn to her, but i want to delay it. i don’t want to face her until i can, myself, feel i am not haunting her, but that i am an active, integral part of her life, as her pregnancy is, as is this apartment, this city and the window-framed silhouettes of shuffling lights pouring past me to the floor. to recall the color of her eyes, the feel of her front teeth on my lower lip, the weight of her palm on my knuckles as she rises from a checker-clothed table in a plastic restaurant of another coast. are her eyes the blue of the quixotic light that culled me from our bed? are they grey, gold-flecked or milkwhite as the moon?
making her up is a failure; i surrender to inability and let myself look on her in the flesh, in the bed, twilit and yawning, the calor of the moon if not the color, eye or flesh or bed all the same. this is some horrible failing of mine.
Marrow deep in the bones of the city with an unmourned legion taking up the back. The streets come up to greet us and the summer in our chests beats out the broad season everywhere outside my skin and influence. Fuck’em.
I’m what you do when no one’s looking. Nothing prettier than that.
I stop at the tombstones and descend gifts to the girls. A doll for Mona, new dresses for Peg and Sarah-Jane, a timely revelation for Marie, scissors for Anne and some frozen flowers, an ocean for Julia, fresh fruit for Eve and Ada and Lili to share.
Visiting hours are over. Get on with it. Jobs wait for not a soul and whose soul you give a shit for, anyhow? Anywho? Not a one and no time for two.
“do zombies come in windows?” she asks.
she seems so much younger. stealing a bit of her warmth, i keep myself close to Julia, practicing a sororal projection with my not dispassionate embrace, struggling to shake the sentiment she’s still sleeping, the wakefulness only a façade. frequent yawning and lapses of attention go a ways to confirming, but no, it’s a rude conjecture, if nothing more.
“only if there’s something worth climbing in the window after,” i suggest.
“you used to be awful scared of zombies,” she says. “when we were younger. and then you weren’t, which always seemed weird, but, well, you weren’t and weren’t talkative, so i…”
“can’t possibly be feeling me out over something from our then, could you? i was and then i wasn’t, that’s all.”
“still,” she says and is. “it was so sudden and awful peculiar. i mean, yours truly is still afraid of everything i was even though i’m older. i got good at forcing myself to deal with things despite being afraid, but, well, you used to wake up screaming your fool head off and then there’s not a whimper or whisper of zombies in the night.”
“this isn’t going to end, is it?” i suggest, mistakenly. “if it sates you at all, when momma took me down to the docks to work – i’d been to the docks before, we both had even if you were tiny then and probably don’t remember it now – i thought there was going to be a zombie. okeh? when pop took us, it was sunny out, warm and there’d be popcorn and hotdogs and ice cream the waves twinkled and pop said it was mermaid diamonds under the water and now momma’s going to take me and there’s no ice cream or mermaids, no moon and no stars and momma’s holding my hand but hers is tiny like she’s shrinking right there while she holds mine and maybe – i think – she knows there’s this zombie shambling in from the sea all rot and hunger. i thought she was going to feed me to –”
Julia laughs. not a small or hidden laugh, not convivial at all. this is how Julia has grown since we were young and she so small.
“and you never told me that, because…?”
she asks it so innocently. we both probably sound so; we regress in these hours, talk to each other like nothing at all has passed since we were tiny together. she sounds innocent and asleep, lurching awareness at best. so much asleep it is only great conscientious effort that allows me to admit she is entirely awake.
“you were so little,” i tell her, “I couldn’t weigh you down with what happened at the docks.”
she smiles in absence of more laughs, holds me a little tighter, pins me to the bed and squeezes eyes tight.
“i’m hardly any younger than you!”
“this isn’t about that, anyway.” i insist. “why don’t you just tell me who the father is?”
eyes kept closed, limbs all locked around me, her lungs make a hollowness below her words when she says: “i can’t. there isn’t any. it’s ours. our baby.”
“yours.”
“ours.”
“yours.” i repeat, wishing for something more permanent to put at the end there. if we ever will get an end. “what, when the kid’s born, i’m just going to stand there and ‘well, babe, this here is winter and this is the warmer coast, so there’s no snow, but eventually you’ll get to see some. and, sorry, no, I have no idea who your daddy might be. baptist preacher pushing on through the state church to church? some passing construction worker? no clue, kid. maybe your momma had you sung up in her by a little bird on a bough someplace.’
“that’ll go over well.”
“you’re horrible.” some ribs threaten to dislocate with the pressure of her hold, but she just tightens down, fingers of one hand splayed and hooked into the snug skin of my back, the other cupping the back of my right thigh, refusing to release even in the slightest.
i wait for her to let go, for her to go back to sleep, before i slip off the bed, again, and start dressing for the weather and o’clock outside. she has the comforter over her eyes, up against the hairline, rich tresses bouyant across the plain pillow all to be seen of her. i lay the back of my hand across the free hair, and feeling an idiot, recede from her, from the bed, distracted by her bared foot poking out at the bottom, hanging off the mattress, hanging with the skirt of the bed lace and limp and not machine washable. i kiss her sharp ankle as the window-spawned shaft shifts once again, businesses open, business concluded, desire and service and advertisement flaming cold in electrickery like a broad horizon of night.
Chill digs in as I suck the town’s gristle and marrow and love. Getting old. Getting boring. Liven things by lighting up a few of the bums who followed me in.
They charge out like damaged moths, hobbling like birds with broken wings but on fire too, flicking off yours truly in a parade of dispersal, beggars become shrapnel arms enflamed, faces melting, lit nates and charred ribs perfuming the dull night. No one applauds, but do i care? No, for I am all about business and I and I am, if nothing, a magnanimous soul. Practically a goddammed saint, touring down Bleecker with all these bastards and barely abandoning only a few to the torment and torture of their lives. How many have I freed in my time, from theirs?
I am, oh faithful, held at gunpoint. Would you believe? The indecency! The insult! What can I be expected to do?
Hate the I in presence. Whiffs of Ricky-O on the air and I have never been an I, except maybe inside. Out here I am not an I and you’d be a fucking fool to believe so.
Take their guns from them and some of their eyes – just enough - let them join the ranks remaining, for, again, am I magnanimous, kind, and enthused by fresh flesh flocking to further my aims. Faith flushes in them. Unity between us, like flesh on bone. Friction of skeleton and skin, too. Burns like brushfire.
seeking a sympathetic bartender and some bourbon in blaines as is my wont. blaines americana is a nighthawk’s nest away from, snuggled between sunset and bleecker, kittycorner to the darla arms and only open twelve-fifty-four to quarter of eight six nights a week. some way to circumvent the irs, but surely there are better, simpler, more reasonable ways to run a business?
i think the owner must be at least a little bit deranged, but it’s his joint, not mine, and besides, i have never, in all my visits as customer, curiosity-seeker, and escape artist never once seen the man.
nobody in but a set of twins who never seem to leave the back booth, both always in patchwork blouses and bluegreen peddlepushers, rooted to the plush pink upholstery sucking soda through identical straws, and me and mona sharing the bar between us. tired sweetheart, mona, who haunts as frequent as the twins, but somehow collects a check out of it, fetching orders and keeping the suicidals from getting too drunk, or the drunks from getting to be suicides.
“like my ‘do?” she asks, patting her head with patent pleasure.
it reminds me Julia’s, actually and honestly. a mistake to tell her, to tell anyone something like that, but maybe that’s why i do it.
“how’s life in the convent, then?”
why she has to call it that, when she’s so free, i cannot pretend to understand. “the convent.” what’s that supposed to mean, anyway?
“who busted your dolly?”
“same gal who’s fucked up yours, kid.”
i assure her that isn’t – can’t be – the case. i assure her everything’s fine and order in the hopes of getting her gone.
we’re always saying the same things, i suppose, always finding new words to do it. and how often am i speaking to Julia when i talk to mona? she reminds me too much of Julia, is the problem, even as i recognize that i’ve lost a real sense of Julia. memory of effigy; Julia with pearl-handled eyes gone old and she probably just as often speaking to Julia at me.
of course they’re out of jack. what was i thinking, assuming if they had bourbon they’d have –
i stop myself dead. dead to rights, dead in my tracks, i don’t know; i’ve already ordered, haven’t i? How embarrassing.
grief turns to a laugh in a lethal cup. small glass, anyway. drink. meekly now. bittersweet inheritance on earth.
help myself at another pull of pappy’s as mona drifts off and puts some coltrane on the juke. do they still call them jukeboxes? can’t even recognize the little thing that spins out the song, knowing now nothing makes one feel so old as much as new formats for old familiars. well, that and age. that, age, and the despondency that grows an abcess in empathy.
soon we might not have any empathy at all. anything to go by. “maybe, sympathy goes next,” mona says like a schoolgirl.
mona does not fill me up; just a splash. little jigger. i wash it round in my mouth, tasting it and old times in a single go. i try to put Julia together again while i swallow. try to visualize her whole, put her altogether all together because i know i can’t quite. pieces so passionate not too long ago go septic, silly, dance off into idiocy. her sighs are sardonic, her whispers, laughs, laughs that third hit of the evening, the one where a knuckle might just take out a molar and then where you going to be? her leg between mine, wet and warm is not, the pulse is not moving from her to me in a constant flutter. pulse gone, flesh thick and fake, cheesecloth skin on cheesecloth pretending to be human. soundless and scentless and irretrievable, which is why i make the effort. tin head and tired spoof of a woman, still as i have another drink her image comes apart as i stitch it up in glass eyes that close soon as they are brought to bear, bare arms become plaster of paris, her soul showing like the denuded flue of our bedroom window.
a roar.
The ranks tear into each other while we fuck in the street, this sleek young boy with eyes like a starved greyhound, washboard stomach dimples dynamic biceps and determined chin. They rip clothes and skin from each other, from themselves, and everybody’s having a feast of it while I ride the kid right into the pavement and half the bums manage to get themselves on fire and go spiraling out from the mess to broaden the range breaking into buildings into homes and hostels, churches and hospitals within reach and the kids coughing up blood in time with our impacts!
Oh, faithful, when the fuckers are extinguished or just burnt out things begin to get boring again. The boy didn’t last, of course, but he had some style sure, and so I steal his leather jacket and his cadillac and skeleton and get on my way alone.
Here’s me like a streak of steel fire and modern manufacturing down the dim street to my man’s having taken the kid, taken his ride and taken and rode and wearing it all. Dressed for thrills in clothes and car and carriage, pimped out post-ww3 style on my way! Full of mission and determination, grit and fury and righteousness, ready for justice, ready for action and owning the goddammed road taking the beast of a car from one lane to the other, riding the mainline right down the middle king of the dead city saint of fires theft and small gestures in the city of the dead!
i buy drink by drink as i take them in, having lost Julia wholly. having now lost all hope, all optimism of holding her in mind without her there. Julia dreams trains, maybe, when i am gone from her. no sense is focusing on what cannot be wtinessed n now. i take in what i can, again, the crowing of roosters, themselves somewhere far off and unseen, the twins sharing eggs and sausage, mona somewhere in the unseeable back rooms, taking to someone. mona, loud enough i have to hear something about a caddy. that’s just fine, i think and buy the bottle.
Bought the bottle to bring back to Julia, because it’s bringing me back to her. To our baby! Bring the bottle with me out onto the street, not empty at all, full of air and swagger. The bottle, I mean, but maybe me too. Air and swagger. And heat! Heat like you wouldn’t believe, so when I hit the outdoor air it crackles against my skin. My eyes flash with it, my fingertips flare up like points of pure sun golden and thick and radioactive as all hell. Dawn’s crawling up over the unlit signs and darkened windows in the distance and the moon has its moment. Smog has subsided and the moon is laid big and bright and bare up there in the purpling air of almost-lost night and I fumble for my cell checking every pocket until I catch hold and take it out, set it for pictures with numb fingers eager and admirably accurate and hold it up to snatch the bold bonewhite… bad angle; have to stand right out in the street head swimming with echoes of engines of heat and bourbon right out on the double white lines to get it and bring it to Julia.
Loves grow like vines in time around the trestle of the night, flammable and flickering, cold in a snapshot like people turn cold sometimes when you take them out of context. Julia is always better in flesh than photograph.
We’ll lie together. Sure, we’ll lie together, why not? Lie together just and it’ll all be true and fine! I have her in mind, out in the street, singing silent songs saccharrine in a sweet sappy smile, beaming bright out at the moon and the unstirred sky. Out in the middle of the street on the way to our baby, like at a train station, like finding myself pregnant, our baby, on our way to bring Julia the moon!
Pavement rolls beneath the big bad beast of a car as I cruise alone, tooling down the depthless drag at exceptional speeds! Street slides, oh my! a slow silver stream, signs and bricks and windows flickering interuptions as they vanish! Ricky-o best be ready for me when i get there. No time for fucking around this is serious business serious time serious stakes set and we must rise to the occasion even that lazy bastard!
Generations of desperation peel off. I become the car feel the alabaster wheels and the shiny rims and the angry autoplathic fells of the flatline-living lusty bastard beast belches black jets from the tailpipe all like bone and gristle, vein and privacy to me. I own! I am! Nothing prettier than that. I own it all, on my way, on my way to Ricky-o that mad bad dyejob joker conjob croaker soon to be known as conscript numero uno, oh ye – what the fuck was that? I interrupt myself as i jump a lump in the street and wheel my way round to the side of place. This is the place, so he better be ready and for a moment again I wonder what it was, why it was wearing pants, but i have business so curiosity and morbidity will just have to wait. I ever even get to it, which I might not at all just plow on forth fulfilled in the canny kenning that my supremacy comes right out of surviving all the rest!