They look brave on the floor. Their shadows are cast larger than life by the moving lights, their hips move with the sharp motion of bodybuilders, their footing sure like sprinters. Yet they twirl and appear close to falling, and it's so clean it's obviously illusion. You seen the muscles bulge and shift under the weight and strain of catching hat motion and redirecting it. Really, though, they dance because they're scared.
What are you going to be if you stop moving? It's the obvious shit, for one you'll be a target for Lotharios, and you'll have to find a place to sit or a wall to lean against. But more than that, who will you be to the music? The religious define their lives by their piety. Your life is worth what you worship.
If we had gods, we don't know their names. It may be they have none. One is the warm tingle of your hips revolving. One is the brush of stray fingers across your back. Different faces of some god of lust and sensation. The church is an end unto itself.
You said you don't dance and it made me wonder about you. Who the hell you think you are to refuse. Too scared? Boy, you ought to be scared not to. If you were naked and primitive, you'd give in without a thought, jump under the stars like something in the throes of death. But here, against a floor of people covered in sweat, eyes blank with meditation, you just sit and drink your beer. That's no way to find heaven. It's not as scary as it looks.
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Thursday, February 21, 2008
young girls in men's underwear
Becca slowly rolls the cigarette between her fingers. The smoke catches under her fingernails and the veil disintegrates before it gets to the screen. She taps it into a dollar store ashtray which bears a sentimental similarity to the ones at Denny's. She lays the cigarette dow in one of the notches on the ashtray's lip.
Ashley lets it sit a second, then picks it up and takes a drag. This time the air from outside pushes the smoke back in. The door to Becca's room is closed and her mom won't be home for two more days, so the smell is not so much a concern. Nonetheless, Ashley feels a little ashamed, a little bit a bad houseguest, a little less glamorous than Becca, a little younger, a little more awkward.
They sit back down on the floor once the cigarette is finished. They have two more Salem Lights in a pack they charmed off the brother of a friend of a friend. Or Becca charmed him. Ashley just stood behind trying not to be obvious about the dilemma over where to put her hands. They're wearing matching outfits, big loose t-shirts and men's boxers. A few years ago, when grunge was still something, this and some combat boots would have passed for an outfit. Now clothes are different and it's not something they'd leave the house in. It's a teenage version of a little girl's summer outfit, halfway to sexy for being borrowed from the opposite sex, yet not revealing or tight enough to pass for sexy in any modern schoolyard or parking lot.
Like witches they sit Indian-style on either side of the ashtray. They have that, the near-empty cigarette pack, a cheap lighter with the child guard pried off, a candle, a razorblade, some pens and paper. It's just shit that's worked its way out of Becca's drawers over the past 36 hours or so. Things that might come in handy or are good to fidget with.
"We have to get some beer," Becca comments, tracing the razor blade over the pink blister bubble of her big right toe.
"I know," Ashley agrees, watching the blade press a furrow in the skin, but not cut. It's getting darker and the light is a doilie of golden spots. When the breeze shifts Becca's toe passes into the negative space of imminent night and Ashley can't see if she's making herself bleed or just flirting with the notion.
"Should we call Dave's brother?" Becca is suddenly all dark, except her eyes which look predatory and determined, glowing through the humidity. It feels to Ashley like that moment when you're high and you've been lost in some moronic thought, then you come back to reality and there's a new plan, everything's different. Becca likes Dave's brother and she probably doesn't care about the beer.
"I don't know. Is he gonna come over?"
Becca just shrugs, pushing herself up with one hand as she grabs the ashtray with the other. She pads down the dark hallway to the bathroom and Ashley hears the toilet flush, carrying out the stale smoke smell and the evidence. When she comes back, she has the cordless phone, and plops down next to Ashley. "You call him," she hands Ashley the receiver.
"Fuck no, it's your idea." Ashley drops the phone back in Becca's lap, crossing her arms, leaning back against the bed and looking up at the faint glints of sparkle nestled in the popcorn of the ceiling.
Becca calls him. They smoke the last two cigarettes on the porch, feeling safe under the cover of darkness. Dave's brother charges them way more than it should cost for a six-pack of Schmidt's and a pack of Camel Lights. Becca doesn't say anything, it doesn't even seem to register that he's leaving until he's gone and she's just a scratched-up fourteen year old standing in the dark in boxers she didn't take from a man but bought new at Target.
They drink their beers mostly without words, feeling frustrated and jangly, looking out at a weak spread of faint porchlights wondering if anything's happening anywhere. Until they're drunk and bouncing on the bed to the radio, just little girls in their innocent boxer shorts. They fall asleep like puppies and the next day goes the same.
Ashley lets it sit a second, then picks it up and takes a drag. This time the air from outside pushes the smoke back in. The door to Becca's room is closed and her mom won't be home for two more days, so the smell is not so much a concern. Nonetheless, Ashley feels a little ashamed, a little bit a bad houseguest, a little less glamorous than Becca, a little younger, a little more awkward.
They sit back down on the floor once the cigarette is finished. They have two more Salem Lights in a pack they charmed off the brother of a friend of a friend. Or Becca charmed him. Ashley just stood behind trying not to be obvious about the dilemma over where to put her hands. They're wearing matching outfits, big loose t-shirts and men's boxers. A few years ago, when grunge was still something, this and some combat boots would have passed for an outfit. Now clothes are different and it's not something they'd leave the house in. It's a teenage version of a little girl's summer outfit, halfway to sexy for being borrowed from the opposite sex, yet not revealing or tight enough to pass for sexy in any modern schoolyard or parking lot.
Like witches they sit Indian-style on either side of the ashtray. They have that, the near-empty cigarette pack, a cheap lighter with the child guard pried off, a candle, a razorblade, some pens and paper. It's just shit that's worked its way out of Becca's drawers over the past 36 hours or so. Things that might come in handy or are good to fidget with.
"We have to get some beer," Becca comments, tracing the razor blade over the pink blister bubble of her big right toe.
"I know," Ashley agrees, watching the blade press a furrow in the skin, but not cut. It's getting darker and the light is a doilie of golden spots. When the breeze shifts Becca's toe passes into the negative space of imminent night and Ashley can't see if she's making herself bleed or just flirting with the notion.
"Should we call Dave's brother?" Becca is suddenly all dark, except her eyes which look predatory and determined, glowing through the humidity. It feels to Ashley like that moment when you're high and you've been lost in some moronic thought, then you come back to reality and there's a new plan, everything's different. Becca likes Dave's brother and she probably doesn't care about the beer.
"I don't know. Is he gonna come over?"
Becca just shrugs, pushing herself up with one hand as she grabs the ashtray with the other. She pads down the dark hallway to the bathroom and Ashley hears the toilet flush, carrying out the stale smoke smell and the evidence. When she comes back, she has the cordless phone, and plops down next to Ashley. "You call him," she hands Ashley the receiver.
"Fuck no, it's your idea." Ashley drops the phone back in Becca's lap, crossing her arms, leaning back against the bed and looking up at the faint glints of sparkle nestled in the popcorn of the ceiling.
Becca calls him. They smoke the last two cigarettes on the porch, feeling safe under the cover of darkness. Dave's brother charges them way more than it should cost for a six-pack of Schmidt's and a pack of Camel Lights. Becca doesn't say anything, it doesn't even seem to register that he's leaving until he's gone and she's just a scratched-up fourteen year old standing in the dark in boxers she didn't take from a man but bought new at Target.
They drink their beers mostly without words, feeling frustrated and jangly, looking out at a weak spread of faint porchlights wondering if anything's happening anywhere. Until they're drunk and bouncing on the bed to the radio, just little girls in their innocent boxer shorts. They fall asleep like puppies and the next day goes the same.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
the russian house
Technically, she sent him away. In truth, though, he'd been gone for a while. She just did the dirty work of goodbye.
The limp sentiment of her desire had followed him around for years, hiding in shadows, scared to show itself. It took one casual caress, just a simple thoughtless kindness, to set it off. It became a monster, a glutton, a cancer. When that happened Marchette's life changed. Her adoration of him was her life.
That pretense was where she built the Russian house. In the Russian house, she pretended he loved her back.
The fruit was made of glass, like jewels from The Arabian Nights. The coffee and tea were excellent, but the water came in straight from a river of ice and was too cold to drink. There were cigarettes in dusty boxes on tables choked with ashtrays and teacups.
The house itself was windowless, like Chinese restaurants from the fifties. Inside it was a different world than out, you were boxed up like some delicate doll. The walls were covered with brocades, velvet curtains, sumptuous to conceal the evidence that the house was a prison. The rooms crawled with haphazard antiques, looking like they'd frozen in the midst of an evacuation. The only natural light was from the skylights in the ceiling, the silver glow of wet clouds or the occasional screaming of moonlight.
So picture Marchette laying against the threadbare velvet of some 200 year old wingback chair, her cigarette yellowing her pale fingers. Picture her wandering around the house in a slip and long socks, asphyxiating in the heat of the battalion of old radiators that could only be on or off. Picture her loving him hopelessly, even as he was fading, falling back alone onto a dusty bed and dreaming he fell with her.
The entire world outside whizzed and sighed and she forced herself to ignore it. She stayed in her Russian house and refused to hear it. She conjured up his presence from scraps of notebooks and radio static in empty speakers. She made herself feel him. And she begged him to join her there.
He didn't, though, he wouldn't. Maybe the structure flattered him, but he wouldn't go inside. He admired it and encouraged her, but never passed its threshold.
Finally she told him to take his drinking glass from the wall and leave. She was ashamed. She felt grotesque, so in love she'd been willing to be rejected over and over, despite the hole defeat carved out of her soul. She never blamed him. She'd toyed with men who set themselves up to be playthings, and it would have been hypocritical to begrudge him the same conceited entertainment.
She doesn't know whether he looks for her on the plain, dull streets of real life. She'd pretty sure he's stopped looking for her at all. But she still looks for him. When the emptiness of real life leaves her thinking she should end it, sometimes she goes back to the Russian house. She lights a cigarette and waits for him, even though she knows he isn't coming.
The limp sentiment of her desire had followed him around for years, hiding in shadows, scared to show itself. It took one casual caress, just a simple thoughtless kindness, to set it off. It became a monster, a glutton, a cancer. When that happened Marchette's life changed. Her adoration of him was her life.
That pretense was where she built the Russian house. In the Russian house, she pretended he loved her back.
The fruit was made of glass, like jewels from The Arabian Nights. The coffee and tea were excellent, but the water came in straight from a river of ice and was too cold to drink. There were cigarettes in dusty boxes on tables choked with ashtrays and teacups.
The house itself was windowless, like Chinese restaurants from the fifties. Inside it was a different world than out, you were boxed up like some delicate doll. The walls were covered with brocades, velvet curtains, sumptuous to conceal the evidence that the house was a prison. The rooms crawled with haphazard antiques, looking like they'd frozen in the midst of an evacuation. The only natural light was from the skylights in the ceiling, the silver glow of wet clouds or the occasional screaming of moonlight.
So picture Marchette laying against the threadbare velvet of some 200 year old wingback chair, her cigarette yellowing her pale fingers. Picture her wandering around the house in a slip and long socks, asphyxiating in the heat of the battalion of old radiators that could only be on or off. Picture her loving him hopelessly, even as he was fading, falling back alone onto a dusty bed and dreaming he fell with her.
The entire world outside whizzed and sighed and she forced herself to ignore it. She stayed in her Russian house and refused to hear it. She conjured up his presence from scraps of notebooks and radio static in empty speakers. She made herself feel him. And she begged him to join her there.
He didn't, though, he wouldn't. Maybe the structure flattered him, but he wouldn't go inside. He admired it and encouraged her, but never passed its threshold.
Finally she told him to take his drinking glass from the wall and leave. She was ashamed. She felt grotesque, so in love she'd been willing to be rejected over and over, despite the hole defeat carved out of her soul. She never blamed him. She'd toyed with men who set themselves up to be playthings, and it would have been hypocritical to begrudge him the same conceited entertainment.
She doesn't know whether he looks for her on the plain, dull streets of real life. She'd pretty sure he's stopped looking for her at all. But she still looks for him. When the emptiness of real life leaves her thinking she should end it, sometimes she goes back to the Russian house. She lights a cigarette and waits for him, even though she knows he isn't coming.
Sunday, February 17, 2008
things you catch in clubs
It's I don't know how late. We've just eaten and we're in the bathroom, me and two girls I don't know. It's barely lit by pink bulbs and I'm puking in the sink. They're in the two stalls.
I raise my head and drop my hair. It's messy on purpose anyway, it still works. I rinse my mouth and the extra drops spill down my chin. I grab my touch-up kit befor either of them can weasel a space in front of the mirror. I lay fresh foundation across my cheeks. It's a little dark, it hides the post-puke paleness. I have eye drops, too. Then we all light our cigarettes and we go, talking to each other about I don't know what, some bands, some boys. I don't know these bitches.
The club is new and filthy. It used to be something else that used to be something else and now it's this, unadvertised, exclusive as hell. I lose those girls and the guys we were with. Doesn't matter, I'm having a good time, dancing, doing lines in the bathroom with whoever.
I meet this guy and he's pretty nice. He's got a pinstripe jacket and a scarf and about a week of beard growth which scratches my face. I go home with him. Find out later the condom broke so I email myself from my phone a reminder to get a morning after pill.
About a month later that club is old news and they're taking street style photos of last year's socialites outside. We're going to some new place painted all white inside and barely lit so it's supposed to look like you're dancing in the belly of a ghost. I'm sharing a cab with some guy I don't know. He's got his hand up my skirt and I'm texting this girl who's going to meet us there. I keep swatting him away and he keeps pretending he forgot.
And then it's just like I heard something. Some animal over the tire noise and the driver speaking another language into his cell phone. And it says something true, it says, "You smell their blood." I do, I smell it. The pervert next to me and the oblivious cabbie. It's good.
He pulls his hand away and I look down to see hair growing fast, like time-lapse. Trippy. I bite right through his neck. Takes a minute for the cabbie to notice and I eat and eat. The cab stops with a screech and I jump out, into darkness, trailing neck blood.
I just charge from one meal to the next, through the alleys where the kids fuck up against slick walls and buy their drugs. Where people mind their own business. I move through so fast I'm gone before they find the bodies, they probably think I'm a slasher or someone's illegal pitbull. When I charge at them I can smell the fear and it smells good.
There's a fmiliar smell then, in some alley in I don't know where, I don't know how far I've run. My blood knows it, it's in my blood. It comes around a corner, just like me, covered in hair and other people's blood. I stand still and it raises its wet nose to my neck, makes my heart beat. I hear my own steamy panting roughen as it examines me, smelling me and the blood in my mouth. It grabs me and we run. We go until dawn.
Same guy from a month ago. I wake up in his bed, confused about why it's familiar. His sheets are smeared with dark stains, and the blood on our skin has dried to dark brown.
It occurs to me I should call the people I've slept with since. But the light hurts, so I just go back to sleep.
I raise my head and drop my hair. It's messy on purpose anyway, it still works. I rinse my mouth and the extra drops spill down my chin. I grab my touch-up kit befor either of them can weasel a space in front of the mirror. I lay fresh foundation across my cheeks. It's a little dark, it hides the post-puke paleness. I have eye drops, too. Then we all light our cigarettes and we go, talking to each other about I don't know what, some bands, some boys. I don't know these bitches.
The club is new and filthy. It used to be something else that used to be something else and now it's this, unadvertised, exclusive as hell. I lose those girls and the guys we were with. Doesn't matter, I'm having a good time, dancing, doing lines in the bathroom with whoever.
I meet this guy and he's pretty nice. He's got a pinstripe jacket and a scarf and about a week of beard growth which scratches my face. I go home with him. Find out later the condom broke so I email myself from my phone a reminder to get a morning after pill.
About a month later that club is old news and they're taking street style photos of last year's socialites outside. We're going to some new place painted all white inside and barely lit so it's supposed to look like you're dancing in the belly of a ghost. I'm sharing a cab with some guy I don't know. He's got his hand up my skirt and I'm texting this girl who's going to meet us there. I keep swatting him away and he keeps pretending he forgot.
And then it's just like I heard something. Some animal over the tire noise and the driver speaking another language into his cell phone. And it says something true, it says, "You smell their blood." I do, I smell it. The pervert next to me and the oblivious cabbie. It's good.
He pulls his hand away and I look down to see hair growing fast, like time-lapse. Trippy. I bite right through his neck. Takes a minute for the cabbie to notice and I eat and eat. The cab stops with a screech and I jump out, into darkness, trailing neck blood.
I just charge from one meal to the next, through the alleys where the kids fuck up against slick walls and buy their drugs. Where people mind their own business. I move through so fast I'm gone before they find the bodies, they probably think I'm a slasher or someone's illegal pitbull. When I charge at them I can smell the fear and it smells good.
There's a fmiliar smell then, in some alley in I don't know where, I don't know how far I've run. My blood knows it, it's in my blood. It comes around a corner, just like me, covered in hair and other people's blood. I stand still and it raises its wet nose to my neck, makes my heart beat. I hear my own steamy panting roughen as it examines me, smelling me and the blood in my mouth. It grabs me and we run. We go until dawn.
Same guy from a month ago. I wake up in his bed, confused about why it's familiar. His sheets are smeared with dark stains, and the blood on our skin has dried to dark brown.
It occurs to me I should call the people I've slept with since. But the light hurts, so I just go back to sleep.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
yes i still miss you
A depression is a dent. Just some place where the material supporting the surface has weakened or given way, or where external forces have crushed the surface in one place. Now what I have, what I have is a cavity. I have perfect hollowness, I have what you get when you scoop out a Halloween pumpkin to carve it up. I have ragged, vulnerable nerve endings trailing into a dark and empty space, repeatedly relaying the message that nothing's there.
I get aches, still, when I hear some songs, when it warms up and the sun shines silver. I get excited thinking about a new home in a different part of the world and then remember I have nothing to get excited about. I'll never know whether I've gotten closer to you or farther away. Even if I knew it was the former (and didn't just suspect), you're not there anymore. You're gone, it's my fault, and goddamn me I keep forgetting.
It's not different, though. Not really different. Still, you're the only thing I care about. Don't argue with me and don't tell me what I think. You're the only thing I care about. You always were. But you always left that cavity. It's just now I can't throw some leaves over it and call it a depression.
I get aches, still, when I hear some songs, when it warms up and the sun shines silver. I get excited thinking about a new home in a different part of the world and then remember I have nothing to get excited about. I'll never know whether I've gotten closer to you or farther away. Even if I knew it was the former (and didn't just suspect), you're not there anymore. You're gone, it's my fault, and goddamn me I keep forgetting.
It's not different, though. Not really different. Still, you're the only thing I care about. Don't argue with me and don't tell me what I think. You're the only thing I care about. You always were. But you always left that cavity. It's just now I can't throw some leaves over it and call it a depression.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
some things just don't work if you aren't smoking
You need those dirty stucco-upon-styrofoam walls that catch the black dust of the parking lot on the grooves of their teeth. You need big, flat, even sidewalk squares, all of them perfect and none halved or quartered to fit, like Legos or squares on a grid. You need unseen crickets and lamps in the parking lot that have just begun to flicker, marching away across a flat and empty expanse of welcoming and uncaring commerce.
In your room, you need cable TV. Five channels of ESPN and obligatory HBO but none of the good stuff. You need the Weather Channel scrolling FLASH FLOOD WARNING across the bottom of the screen and the repeating graphic of the tentacles of a low pressure system moving down into the area from (name of scapegoat state here). You need ashtrays hidden like Easter eggs one every cheap laminate surface, your nearly nude reflection watching itself ash rebelliously into the bathroom sink, sitting on a counter wide enough to unload your entire suitcase on.
You need that motel smell that clings to you after just a few hours, the cloud of cleansers that will follow you home in your bags and will survive the recycled air of the pressurized cabin. You need the feeling of thin carpets in ugly patterns under your bare feet as you wander the empty hallways after midnight, mid-week.
Finally, you need the storm. You need the crash that hits the giant window you can't open, the sudden hesitation of the air conditioner as it gets cooler outside. You need the plastic card that opens all the doors and the softpack of not-your-brand you bought in an unfamiliar chain convenience store five parking lots away, and your flip-flops. You run down the back stairs that don't cross the spotlight of the lobby and stand outside with your back to the dirty wall. It takes you ninety seconds but you get one lit only to watch it turn brown with dampness as you try to smoke it. You need to feel the warm rain flowing down your bare legs and soaking your hoodie. That cigarette in that storm is what you came for.
In your room, you need cable TV. Five channels of ESPN and obligatory HBO but none of the good stuff. You need the Weather Channel scrolling FLASH FLOOD WARNING across the bottom of the screen and the repeating graphic of the tentacles of a low pressure system moving down into the area from (name of scapegoat state here). You need ashtrays hidden like Easter eggs one every cheap laminate surface, your nearly nude reflection watching itself ash rebelliously into the bathroom sink, sitting on a counter wide enough to unload your entire suitcase on.
You need that motel smell that clings to you after just a few hours, the cloud of cleansers that will follow you home in your bags and will survive the recycled air of the pressurized cabin. You need the feeling of thin carpets in ugly patterns under your bare feet as you wander the empty hallways after midnight, mid-week.
Finally, you need the storm. You need the crash that hits the giant window you can't open, the sudden hesitation of the air conditioner as it gets cooler outside. You need the plastic card that opens all the doors and the softpack of not-your-brand you bought in an unfamiliar chain convenience store five parking lots away, and your flip-flops. You run down the back stairs that don't cross the spotlight of the lobby and stand outside with your back to the dirty wall. It takes you ninety seconds but you get one lit only to watch it turn brown with dampness as you try to smoke it. You need to feel the warm rain flowing down your bare legs and soaking your hoodie. That cigarette in that storm is what you came for.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
how i almost died on the couch
It's strange to realize how much people are willing to overlook. You can be as invisible as you like by making the people around you uncomfortable. You can scream in people's faces and they will smile blankly and praise your vocabulary, not focus on something else but change the subject subconciously, blocking the unpleasantness, easy as breath.
I confessed and no one said a word. And then I felt stupid for all the years I've spent concealing the things in my head. I was flattering myself to think people would care or try to hold me back. It's not that people are disinterested, it's that their minds filter those things automatically. It's kind of impressive.
It happened on the couch, it happened because I was drunk in the dark, tired, sore, defeated. I felt closer to the couch than to other people, the people outside, the people in the other apartments, they all felt like fiction. Me and the couch were real, the same. We were stationary and unchanging, our existances valueless to ourselves. All our days were the same. We endured without hope, silent and ambivalent. We were capable of observation, and that was it.
So I broke from the couch and went to where I'd hidden the sleeping pills behind my computer at another time when I felt too fat (different kind of couchlike) to leave the house. I wrapped my hands around them like they were some light-sensitive insect or a baby bird I was smothering the life out of. They were fully hidden and I lay down on the couch again to think about it. The couch didn't care at all. Not that it would have changed anything, not that the opinions of couches ever hope to.
The music was on shuffle and the succession of songs seemed designed to prompt me to action. I finished a glass of red wine, which was the end of a second bottle. It was Teenage Fanclub, If I Never See You Again. Something happens, a song changes, the wine's gone, I forget. I stand and quick with fear I'll change my mind I swallow all the pills straight from the bottle. They don't even make a sound, they just fall onto my tongue like Tic Tacs or rice, sitting obediently until I take a drink of water and wash them down. And I stand there at my computer where the bottle of water is, taking long swallows, staring at the wall, trying to think. My mind goes yes, no, yes, no.. I find myself wnating to laugh. Crazy doomed laughter. Disbelieving laughter.
It takes me a long time to pass out. Before I do I'm up, talking, walking around. Sleeping pills don't seem to work on me. Maybe that's why it didn't take. Maybe I didn't take enough. I'm no chemist.
And now it's been two weeks, maybe, and it's as good as forgotten. Nobody knows, because nobody wants to. And I wonder if before I leave I'll go to my friendly prescription-happy doctor and tell him I can't sleep. In case it doesn't work out, or in case it does and everything's perfect and I continue to hate myself. Everything in me says yes, do it, you know it's what's needed.
I'm not good at making up my mind. I need to try things before I'm sure of them. But now that I've tried it, I'm pretty certain I'll be ready to go next time. Fall down on some new couch and together refuse to be.
I confessed and no one said a word. And then I felt stupid for all the years I've spent concealing the things in my head. I was flattering myself to think people would care or try to hold me back. It's not that people are disinterested, it's that their minds filter those things automatically. It's kind of impressive.
It happened on the couch, it happened because I was drunk in the dark, tired, sore, defeated. I felt closer to the couch than to other people, the people outside, the people in the other apartments, they all felt like fiction. Me and the couch were real, the same. We were stationary and unchanging, our existances valueless to ourselves. All our days were the same. We endured without hope, silent and ambivalent. We were capable of observation, and that was it.
So I broke from the couch and went to where I'd hidden the sleeping pills behind my computer at another time when I felt too fat (different kind of couchlike) to leave the house. I wrapped my hands around them like they were some light-sensitive insect or a baby bird I was smothering the life out of. They were fully hidden and I lay down on the couch again to think about it. The couch didn't care at all. Not that it would have changed anything, not that the opinions of couches ever hope to.
The music was on shuffle and the succession of songs seemed designed to prompt me to action. I finished a glass of red wine, which was the end of a second bottle. It was Teenage Fanclub, If I Never See You Again. Something happens, a song changes, the wine's gone, I forget. I stand and quick with fear I'll change my mind I swallow all the pills straight from the bottle. They don't even make a sound, they just fall onto my tongue like Tic Tacs or rice, sitting obediently until I take a drink of water and wash them down. And I stand there at my computer where the bottle of water is, taking long swallows, staring at the wall, trying to think. My mind goes yes, no, yes, no.. I find myself wnating to laugh. Crazy doomed laughter. Disbelieving laughter.
It takes me a long time to pass out. Before I do I'm up, talking, walking around. Sleeping pills don't seem to work on me. Maybe that's why it didn't take. Maybe I didn't take enough. I'm no chemist.
And now it's been two weeks, maybe, and it's as good as forgotten. Nobody knows, because nobody wants to. And I wonder if before I leave I'll go to my friendly prescription-happy doctor and tell him I can't sleep. In case it doesn't work out, or in case it does and everything's perfect and I continue to hate myself. Everything in me says yes, do it, you know it's what's needed.
I'm not good at making up my mind. I need to try things before I'm sure of them. But now that I've tried it, I'm pretty certain I'll be ready to go next time. Fall down on some new couch and together refuse to be.
Monday, February 11, 2008
the robot queen
The robot queen is only half. Her biological components were replaced over the years in a series of back alley operations, leaving her filled with ticking organs as imperfect and personal as prison tattoos. As a queen, she is not so much ruler as representative. She yells for the voiceless.
There are other humans who've had as much work done, but it's careful, it's cosmetically sound. Not like the robot queen, with her waxy preserved flesh banded by chains of rivets and puckered by access hatches and indicator lights. Those others, unless you ripped them open, pass easily for men or women, while the robot queen, naked before you, looks more like a dirty city.
You could say she does odd jobs. Or you could call her a whore, because there are stronger robots, colder killers, better cooks, more attentive maids. It's this that makes her a robot, though, this working to live which humanity left behind a century ago. While there is a servant class she is of it and the servant class is growing all the time. And tonight you're just lucky, you just happened to end up waving a fuel credit at the girl who runs the show as far as your kind is concerned. To shield her from this dirty work wouldn't be the robot way. You wonder if she even feels it. If she still cares what intimacy meant to her old body. There's no question her reproductive organs were scooped out to make way for something more useful. What about the nerves that made it worthwhile?
You can't tell and she won't tell. She watches you with dead eyes, not appearing to breathe, waiting for an instruction. So you summon her and she kneels. It helps you put it out of your mind, that this thing used to be human and your curiousity over how it experiences its work.
You've leaned your head back, watching the cracks of darkness that worm their way through the ceiling's crumbling plaster. The kife is so quick that you feel only the choking sensation and a flash of terror as you try to draw air and cannot. Then it ends, and she takes your wallet and is silently gone. And if you were still awake inside that organic shell you might realize that her leadership is what's left of her humanity, and the humanity all robots can't help picking up from their creators. They hate you.
There are other humans who've had as much work done, but it's careful, it's cosmetically sound. Not like the robot queen, with her waxy preserved flesh banded by chains of rivets and puckered by access hatches and indicator lights. Those others, unless you ripped them open, pass easily for men or women, while the robot queen, naked before you, looks more like a dirty city.
You could say she does odd jobs. Or you could call her a whore, because there are stronger robots, colder killers, better cooks, more attentive maids. It's this that makes her a robot, though, this working to live which humanity left behind a century ago. While there is a servant class she is of it and the servant class is growing all the time. And tonight you're just lucky, you just happened to end up waving a fuel credit at the girl who runs the show as far as your kind is concerned. To shield her from this dirty work wouldn't be the robot way. You wonder if she even feels it. If she still cares what intimacy meant to her old body. There's no question her reproductive organs were scooped out to make way for something more useful. What about the nerves that made it worthwhile?
You can't tell and she won't tell. She watches you with dead eyes, not appearing to breathe, waiting for an instruction. So you summon her and she kneels. It helps you put it out of your mind, that this thing used to be human and your curiousity over how it experiences its work.
You've leaned your head back, watching the cracks of darkness that worm their way through the ceiling's crumbling plaster. The kife is so quick that you feel only the choking sensation and a flash of terror as you try to draw air and cannot. Then it ends, and she takes your wallet and is silently gone. And if you were still awake inside that organic shell you might realize that her leadership is what's left of her humanity, and the humanity all robots can't help picking up from their creators. They hate you.
a disappearance in a casino
We're searching for each other in a casino with nice windows after he's finished with the Keno and I with the buffet. You don't often see windows in a casino, even these middle of nowhere tribal jobs. He said he was going to play the video poker, but all I see are slot machines. Everyone's smoking, but the air is the cleanest air ever, shining and super-oxygenated. Still, I can't find him.
A casino is much like a factory, like a toy factory making the biggest brightest animatronic wonder the world has witnessed. One after another, the slot games roll past like marvels paused on an assembly belt, jingling and twinkling. Like million dollar debutantes, they all start to look the same. They're not meant to be lined up together. Each is so ripe and fearsomely adorned that, taken as a group, they're just so many unwinnable fairy tales.
The only people who seem happy are the little old ladies. The women especially, the younger they are, the more they look like they're out of time. I don't talk to them - I keep to myself. I can only wonder who they are, how there are so many of them who've driven 50 miles from the nearest freeway, dolled up but dreary in J Crew and Chanel No. 5.
I sit in the lounge to wait.
The bartender is a mountain of a woman with some sort of glitter stuff in her frizzly blond hair-cloud. She refers to me as "Honey". Everyone in the casino calls me "Honey", although I'm pushing thirty and have two kids. All the world is a truck stop and I am just one more empty mug to be filled with greasy coffee and the cheap affectation of affection. Maybe it's just that I'm short.
Her name tag says Kimberly, but she doesn't look like one. Sometimes I wonder if people who have to wear name tags assume names, or share names, like phone sex girls. "Kimberly? This is Kimberly? Do you have a cold?" Or maybe phone sex girls don't do that. I would. After all, it's not you they're calling for, is it? It's the Kimberly you pretend to be, the one who blinks out of existance when you go home and make a meatloaf and put your feet up. Shouldn't the swing shift take over for Kimberly, so Kimberly is always there when the customer needs her and the customer doesn't have to reintroduce himself and explain his diaper fetish to Miranda or Pam or Brianna?
Kimberly and her thunderhead hairdo waddle off after my Whiskey Daisy. If we were in an ordinary bar, it would be empty now (2pm on Thursday), but there are no time zones here, no happy hours and no last calls. People aren't even necessarily drinking. A gang of boys is sprawled across the corner booth, drinking Mountain Dew and waiting on some hundred dollar poker tournament where they'll showboat for each other, pretending to be the guys in sunglasses on TV.
The bar feels like a wake, so quiet and clean. So serious.
In one booth, a woman is staring at her cell phone, which is sitting on the table in front of her. It lights up and does a whirring dance around the table, drawing tracks in the pooled condensation from her drink. She doesn't answer it, and she doesn't turn it off. Her drink is finished, but she sits there and stares.
I check my own cell, but he hasn't called. I hate him for taking so long, but I'm so happy. I don't want to get into the car and drive back to the base, outside where it's cold and grey and the roads are banked with the trash of a week-old Christmas. I don't want to sit next to him for that long. If I could forget how much he annoys me for five minutes, I could miss him.
From nowhere, there's a man over my shoulder. He's a sort of collapsed looking old Indian. If you stretched him until the wrinkles fell out of his face and the hunch from his back, he would look at home on the cover of a romance novel. But he's just an old guy in a golfing shirt and Wranglers, and I can hardly deny him a seat.
"Well, thank you very much, Honey." He says, motioning to Kimberly. "It hasn't really been my day. Wasn't relishing the thought of drinking alone."
I shrug, graciously, I hope. I don't want to be rude, but neither do I feel up for small talk.
"How about you, Honey? How's your luck been?"
"I don't gamble."
"No? Hmm. Well I guess that's pretty smart."
Again, I just shrug.
"So whatcha doing in the casino not gambling? You work here?"
I almost say something to the effect of white people aren't allowed to work in the casino, but I think of Kimberly and realize I don't know what I'm talking about. "No, I don't work here. I'm just waiting for my husband."
He gets an odd look. Resigned. "Been waiting long?"
"I don't know. About half an hour, I guess. That's when his Keno game ended. But if he won..."
"One of those."
"Yeah."
We sip our drinks, but not at the same time. We alternate. The monumental bigscreen is playing some football game and we both pretend to be absorbed as they stutter along, pausing every few seconds for some tumbling and flag-waving.
The old Indian guy removes a roll of mints from his pocket and holds them out to me.
I hate to be rude. I say thanks, take one off the roll, and pop it into my mouth. It's attached to a bit of pocket-lint, which I pick off of my tongue. It tastes medicinal. When I first quit smoking, I carried all sorts of candy to snack on when the urge for a cigarette hit me, but the doctor said that wasn't helping my weight any. I've gotten used to the taste of sugar free, but I haven't seen any difference in my weight.
He takes one, lint and all, and sucks on it. Maybe he's thinking what I'm thinking, that bourbon and sugar free mint complement each other in a way that's nice without being especially tasty.
I check the time display on my phone. He's 45 minutes overdue. I slurp the last of my drink and leave Kimberly a five tucked under the coaster.
"Gonna go find your old man?"
I nod.
What's in his eyes looks like pity. "Well, thanks for the company, Honey." He turns back to the game, which is either over or very badly stalled.
Stepping out of the relative quiet of the lounge, the casino is like some frozen Mardi Gras, paused mid explosion. The jubilant ringing of slot machines paying out hangs unappreciated in the air, confetti caught in time and fading. Most of the ringing is for payouts of 5 or 10 cents. The gamblers keep their heads down and keep playing, paper mache gargoyles all wearing the same black leather jacket.
I wander up and down the aisles of machines, wondering if they make a clever pattern when you see them from above. I still have yet to find the video poker, though I do find electronic Keno. I stop and watch one lonely card table with a low bid game going. All the players are retirees, or look it. The dealer is the only one who speaks.
A casino is much like a factory, like a toy factory making the biggest brightest animatronic wonder the world has witnessed. One after another, the slot games roll past like marvels paused on an assembly belt, jingling and twinkling. Like million dollar debutantes, they all start to look the same. They're not meant to be lined up together. Each is so ripe and fearsomely adorned that, taken as a group, they're just so many unwinnable fairy tales.
The only people who seem happy are the little old ladies. The women especially, the younger they are, the more they look like they're out of time. I don't talk to them - I keep to myself. I can only wonder who they are, how there are so many of them who've driven 50 miles from the nearest freeway, dolled up but dreary in J Crew and Chanel No. 5.
I sit in the lounge to wait.
The bartender is a mountain of a woman with some sort of glitter stuff in her frizzly blond hair-cloud. She refers to me as "Honey". Everyone in the casino calls me "Honey", although I'm pushing thirty and have two kids. All the world is a truck stop and I am just one more empty mug to be filled with greasy coffee and the cheap affectation of affection. Maybe it's just that I'm short.
Her name tag says Kimberly, but she doesn't look like one. Sometimes I wonder if people who have to wear name tags assume names, or share names, like phone sex girls. "Kimberly? This is Kimberly? Do you have a cold?" Or maybe phone sex girls don't do that. I would. After all, it's not you they're calling for, is it? It's the Kimberly you pretend to be, the one who blinks out of existance when you go home and make a meatloaf and put your feet up. Shouldn't the swing shift take over for Kimberly, so Kimberly is always there when the customer needs her and the customer doesn't have to reintroduce himself and explain his diaper fetish to Miranda or Pam or Brianna?
Kimberly and her thunderhead hairdo waddle off after my Whiskey Daisy. If we were in an ordinary bar, it would be empty now (2pm on Thursday), but there are no time zones here, no happy hours and no last calls. People aren't even necessarily drinking. A gang of boys is sprawled across the corner booth, drinking Mountain Dew and waiting on some hundred dollar poker tournament where they'll showboat for each other, pretending to be the guys in sunglasses on TV.
The bar feels like a wake, so quiet and clean. So serious.
In one booth, a woman is staring at her cell phone, which is sitting on the table in front of her. It lights up and does a whirring dance around the table, drawing tracks in the pooled condensation from her drink. She doesn't answer it, and she doesn't turn it off. Her drink is finished, but she sits there and stares.
I check my own cell, but he hasn't called. I hate him for taking so long, but I'm so happy. I don't want to get into the car and drive back to the base, outside where it's cold and grey and the roads are banked with the trash of a week-old Christmas. I don't want to sit next to him for that long. If I could forget how much he annoys me for five minutes, I could miss him.
From nowhere, there's a man over my shoulder. He's a sort of collapsed looking old Indian. If you stretched him until the wrinkles fell out of his face and the hunch from his back, he would look at home on the cover of a romance novel. But he's just an old guy in a golfing shirt and Wranglers, and I can hardly deny him a seat.
"Well, thank you very much, Honey." He says, motioning to Kimberly. "It hasn't really been my day. Wasn't relishing the thought of drinking alone."
I shrug, graciously, I hope. I don't want to be rude, but neither do I feel up for small talk.
"How about you, Honey? How's your luck been?"
"I don't gamble."
"No? Hmm. Well I guess that's pretty smart."
Again, I just shrug.
"So whatcha doing in the casino not gambling? You work here?"
I almost say something to the effect of white people aren't allowed to work in the casino, but I think of Kimberly and realize I don't know what I'm talking about. "No, I don't work here. I'm just waiting for my husband."
He gets an odd look. Resigned. "Been waiting long?"
"I don't know. About half an hour, I guess. That's when his Keno game ended. But if he won..."
"One of those."
"Yeah."
We sip our drinks, but not at the same time. We alternate. The monumental bigscreen is playing some football game and we both pretend to be absorbed as they stutter along, pausing every few seconds for some tumbling and flag-waving.
The old Indian guy removes a roll of mints from his pocket and holds them out to me.
I hate to be rude. I say thanks, take one off the roll, and pop it into my mouth. It's attached to a bit of pocket-lint, which I pick off of my tongue. It tastes medicinal. When I first quit smoking, I carried all sorts of candy to snack on when the urge for a cigarette hit me, but the doctor said that wasn't helping my weight any. I've gotten used to the taste of sugar free, but I haven't seen any difference in my weight.
He takes one, lint and all, and sucks on it. Maybe he's thinking what I'm thinking, that bourbon and sugar free mint complement each other in a way that's nice without being especially tasty.
I check the time display on my phone. He's 45 minutes overdue. I slurp the last of my drink and leave Kimberly a five tucked under the coaster.
"Gonna go find your old man?"
I nod.
What's in his eyes looks like pity. "Well, thanks for the company, Honey." He turns back to the game, which is either over or very badly stalled.
Stepping out of the relative quiet of the lounge, the casino is like some frozen Mardi Gras, paused mid explosion. The jubilant ringing of slot machines paying out hangs unappreciated in the air, confetti caught in time and fading. Most of the ringing is for payouts of 5 or 10 cents. The gamblers keep their heads down and keep playing, paper mache gargoyles all wearing the same black leather jacket.
I wander up and down the aisles of machines, wondering if they make a clever pattern when you see them from above. I still have yet to find the video poker, though I do find electronic Keno. I stop and watch one lonely card table with a low bid game going. All the players are retirees, or look it. The dealer is the only one who speaks.
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