March 31, 2012
NATIONS (unfinished)

On the day the veil was lifted I sat with him in the yellow room. There were eight of us in the yellow room where he held the turbine in his lap. It had been planned a long time ago. We sat in a loose kind of circle and we waited. I remember a few times while we waited I picked my head up and looked around. There he was, and across from him, me, and around us six more, you know their names. Their heads were bowed. It was a room in his old school on Pearl Street up on the hill. There was a rainbow painted on the wall above the chalkboard and the chalkboard was smudged and there were the ghosts of letters on it, and I tried to read them. I tried to read what had been there and I could make no coherent sentences from it. It was like a scroll had been placed before me and I could pick out the words. I picked out the words one by one and when I combined them they made no sense.

Outside there were ten people, seven men and three women, you know their names, with semiautomatic weapons.

In the gymnasium down the hall there were seventy-one men, women, and children.

Believers.

Miscellany.

That blurred and quiet nation.

There were eight of us in the yellow room. At 11:54 AM we heard the first gunshots, and I counted them. There were twenty-four. At 12:02 PM Eastern Standard Time on March 23 2011 Kenneth Price, ten years old, a sandy-haired and freckled and comfortable kid raised by middle-class parents I had helped to kill three days before, the prophet, Ken Price, the seer, the worker of miracles, slowly looked up at me, pale-faced me with the sun through the window on my face, twenty-one, having done a thousand things for it all, having torn any familiar vestiges of myself asunder, a stranger to everyone I had ever loved, and he smiled, because the veil had not been lifted, because the world as we knew it had remained the same, and because I, who had purchased the ten guns, and not he, who had told me to, was responsible in one way or another for the deaths of twelve people.

 ————————

all my noodling in this vein (there’s a lot more) is based on a dream i had in early september… i woke up at 6AM and wrote this down on a piece of paper: “spool gray thread child prophet red ink on his face gray clothes “turbine” everybody in a circle bowed shoulders something supposed to happen not happening WAITING waiting for something to happen maine winter red jeeps guns graffiti.” i think i can’t write this because it’s extremely disturbing to me and it kind of scares me when i even try. so it is unlikely this will ever be finished. it takes place in portland maine which has always been kind of a weird place for me. 

most importantly, a story i wrote about sexual frustration and the delphic oracle called “colloquial eras” will be published here within the next few weeks; i would love if you would check it out. it is the first piece in a puzzle i am working on called “dust rules everything around me” 

7:45pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZDlYKyItE_F0
Filed under: fiction 
November 24, 2011
TWINS

19. Accept loss forever

20. Believe in the holy contour of life

 - from Kerouac’s “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose”

 

They found Franklin’s body in the tar pits on Thursday. It had been a month and he was preserved like an insect in amber. I went to go see Colin on Sunday. His mother was making funeral arrangements and she set the paperwork aside to make me a mimosa. The champagne was flat but it was okay. It was sunny out, the sky wide and bright and clear, but there was a cold bite in the air. It was November. She had unplugged the phone.

 —-

Walt was asleep on the beach when I went down to Santa Monica that afternoon. I sat next to him and he stirred and looked up at me with bleary bloodshot eyes and pulled his shirt over his back to hide the long, red burn scar. It had been there as long as I’d known him but he always pretended none of us knew. Of course we did. Walt didn’t like to say a thing about anything. We packed a bowl and smoked it, cupping our hands to protect the light from the wind. The ocean looked endless. I said “Colin’s lost his shit.” Walt made this hmm sound, a buzz through his thin, pursed lips. His eyes were closed. When dusk was heavy over the water he told me in a whisper all he wanted was to go back to Hawaii.

 —-

When I was ten in Texas my father’s company drilled a well that started to gush. It started to gush for real so we went out to see it. You can’t possibly know what it’s like until you see it. There is blood that runs in the earth. You are the same all the way down.

 —-

Julian came down from Seattle and I went to pick him up in the freight yard. I got there before his train did and while I was waiting for it to come I realized I’d never seen Julian get off a train before, only get on. It was fun to watch him get on. I always used to drive him to the yard and stay to watch him get on. When the train came in, brakes wailing, I looked for him as best I could but it was just all of a sudden he was there, having leapt from somewhere I couldn’t see, jogging over the gravel in the freight yard. The sky was very blue. When Julian came up through the hole in the fence to the hill above the yard where I was parked he was freckled and tan, soot dark in his red hair and dusted on his clothes. When he hugged me tightly he smelled like sweat and metal. He was very jittery and very alive.

It was wonderful to see Julian because it had been a long time. He didn’t work the way I did. Julian didn’t work the way most people in L.A. did so it was refreshing just to look at him. In the car on the way to Walt’s he put that Turbo Fruits song on, the one that goes “Mama’s mad ‘cause I fried my brain!” The second line goes “Brother’s dead and it’s killing me,” and we both got very quiet. It was maybe 3:30 and the sun was low in the sky. It was all smooth haze over the freeway. We let the song play to the end without speaking and then Julian put on something else. He said “That’s a good song. Isn’t that a good song?”   

I didn’t say anything and Julian found some classical station on the radio. They were playing Bartok. It was one of those beautiful violent Bartok pieces. We were stopped in traffic and I lifted my hands from the wheel and pulled the strings up with me. I found the beat. I felt it, I counted. I conducted. The pulse of it was the pulse of my heart, that quick sad pulse, plodding toward something tremendous, something beautiful and terrible. I tried not to think about it anymore.

Julian had a scar under his eye the shape of West Virginia. It was newish, still raw. His face was drawn but in a good way, a handsome healthy way. The fat, the well-fedness, the fake youth had gone from his cheeks. When he took off his sweater I saw, on the rounded, smooth muscle of his arm, a homemade stick-and-poke tattoo of Brunelleschi’s dome.

“How’s Walt?”

It was the end of the song and there were these four big chords and I let them go on before I spoke. “Don’t ask him about Hawaii.”

“He was in Hawaii?”

“Followed someone there.”

“Poor guy.”

“I don’t know much about it.”

The next song was Shostakovich and I wondered how I knew this. Julian said, very quietly, “And Colin, how’s Colin?” He was looking out the window when he spoke and there was this tenseness to him that was tangible.

“How do you expect?” Julian didn’t say anything. “He’s exactly how you expect.”

“Awful what happened.”

“He was just gone. Franklin. One day then the next. You know. You know he was missing for a month before they found the body.” Someone behind me merged over the rumble strip and drove for a while in the breakdown lane. “What gets me is they still don’t know what happened. They don’t know if he just got taken or what. Or by who.”

“Scary.”

“Yeah.”  

Traffic was still stopped and the haze still heavy and the sun lower and all the cars lined up like cattle going to the slaughter and that line from that Keats poem started to circle in my head like vultures: Who are these coming to the sacrifice? Who are these coming to the sacrifice? Who are these coming to the sacrifice? And Julian said what I had been thinking for a month, for a cold and vacant month, empty as the desert, infinite as the ocean: “That’s L.A.” That’s L.A. That’s California. California was waiting to seize you; you would turn around and the dark would be there. It was a matter of time. In L.A. you have the ocean before you and the mountains at your back always, shoving up every second higher and higher. Everything works to keep you in. After Shostakovich was Tchaikovsky. Julian fell asleep and I turned the volume down. The beat was harder to find but I found it. Asleep he looked very young.

 —-

In high school Franklin had a fake ID but it didn’t matter anyway. In high school you’re all about flavored vodka because it’s sweet and mixes well and you can’t taste it. I remember raspberry. I remember smoking those cigarettes that leave the taste of sugar on your lips. I remember thinking it was what adults drank, what adults smoked, and walking home drunk thinking I was an adult. I was not an adult. In college I started drinking whiskey and ginger ale and I realized I was not an adult. It’s not about what you drink. Taste doesn’t mean anything.

 —-

Walt was living out of cardboard boxes on the fourth floor in Silver Lake. Julian took a shower and ironed his nice clothes and then the three of us went for ten minutes to the wake in the Hills. Colin wasn’t there but his mother was and we said our condolences one by one. It was a closed casket thing and my eyes wouldn’t come off it. None of us ever saw the body. I don’t think Colin ever saw the body. Julian chewed his nails. There was a thin crescent of dark grease beneath each one. Most of the people there I hadn’t seen since graduation. We said hello, and then we said “I’m sorry.” There was nothing else to say.  

 —-

It was only seven but very dark when we got back to Silver Lake and we packed and smoked a bowl with the lights off on Walt’s couch. Seattle, said Julian when we pried, was fine. Finer than fine. It wasn’t really Seattle because it was a squat in the woods near Tacoma, but it was lovely because Tacoma was lovely. It even sounded lovely. It sounded like snowmelt running in the river, Tacoma. It sounded like the rumble in the earth, like the blood running, Tacoma. Did we like his tattoo? We did. Sure we would come up sometime, we said. Julian looked at Walt and I with those big blue eyes like he didn’t know who we were.

—- 

At Mita’s after the funeral she got Mexican catered and it was spread out on a white-clothed long table just inside the door and they were milling around it inside, twenty people maybe, thirty, all in black. When they broke apart you could see for a second the punch in the hollowed watermelon and the earthenware pottery piled high with spicy guacamole and the tricoloré pico de gallo and corn chips, white and yellow and blue corn chips, sharp-edged, salt crystals gleaming under the track lighting. Inside they drank Dos Equis and they held foil-wrapped steak burritos the size of small babies that oozed rice and refried beans. Inside they drank horchata and rum. If they were mourning inside I couldn’t see. I wondered if there were people crying in another room. I could taste pico de gallo, that sterile taste, and I wanted to go inside and get some but I could hear them laughing and their glasses tinkling and that Geiger-counter ping of the silver spoon against the earthenware and I did not want to go inside, but I felt like I had to, and so I did. I looked at all the food and I realized I did not want any. People said my name and I shook their hands and they smiled at me and I could not bring myself to smile back. I didn’t want to speak to anyone but sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do. You have to do things that disgust you. That’s how you grow up.

When I came outside Colin was there, which was a terrible idea. He was sitting on the end of the diving board with his feet in the water. Walt and Julian sat together in a folding chair by the pool, Julian at the foot and Walt leaning against the back, knees bent up. They held a beer apiece. Julian had combed his hair. The sleeves of his black sport coat were two different lengths. Walt said Colin hadn’t moved all night and didn’t want to speak to anyone, not even him. I took a sip of his beer and it just tasted like metal. Julian blew across the lip of the bottle and it made a low, infinite kind of sound. A chill went up my back.

When I went up on the diving board behind Colin I bounced it and he made no attempt to keep himself from falling but somehow he didn’t. I crouched behind him and eased my fingers into the tight knots of muscle in his long back. His spine made the curves of a shallow S. He smelled like whiskey and cigarettes. I said “You okay honey.” Colin shook his head. There are some people you can never get it right with and I could never get it right with Colin. I never knew what to say to him. I’d made a lot of mistakes.  

 —-

Julian went back to Walt’s alone on the bus and Walt went home with someone he once emphatically swore he’d never go home with and I took Colin home because he was drunk. Everyone was asleep in the house. Out through the wide window in Colin’s bedroom I could see the ocean. It was still endless. When Colin got in bed I leaned over him to kiss his forehead and he held my wrists for a long time and looked into my face like he wanted me to tell him a secret. His eyes were dark and wet and saw nothing. When I didn’t say anything he said “How long’s it gonna feel like this?”

“How should I know.”

He let go and I leaned back and crossed my arms. The moonlight dusted silver over the outline he made in the sheets. He was very pale. That was a pale November. There was nothing else to say.

 —-

By the time Julian and I woke up Walt was back, sitting at the kitchen table reading the paper, and he asked me to shave his head. It was just past midday and we were all drunk because Julian had made mimosas and cream of wheat for breakfast when we ordered Chinese in and did it on the balcony. You could not see the ocean. “L.A. is an infinite city,” Julian said coldly. One loose curl of Walt’s dark hair lay limply across my foot. I kissed the top of his head, newly bristled. Maybe it was 70 degrees.

Walt squeezed his eyes shut when I slid the electric razor over the last of the illustrious curls right over his forehead. I thought I heard a wince but it was a car door slamming down the street. I asked “Why’d you want to do this.”

“People love my hair,” Walt mumbled. He said no more. When I was done he picked up one of the curls from the ground and rubbed it between thumb and forefinger to separate the strands of hair enough for the light breeze to take all the pieces away. With the palm of one hand he smoothed the goosebumps on his forearms. I saw his broken heart before me clear as day.

 —-

I fell asleep drunk on the couch and dreamt I was underground in a hot room full of crystals. Walt was there, dead-eyed, fresh haircut and suit, and when I spoke to him he started reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. I held his shoulder and shook him and he didn’t see me and I kept saying his name but it was all empty, wide and vacant as the desert. Then I heard Franklin’s voice, but when I turned around it was Colin, but it was Franklin. It was Franklin but parts of him were missing – fingers, teeth, an eye, chunks of ear and lip and nose and gouges of scalp, skin scraped from his jaw and shoulder and arm. Visible bone gleamed in the dark. I wasn’t afraid of him though it was impossible that he was alive. Even in the dream I knew it was impossible. I said “Can you help me?” My voice echoed and distorted until I wasn’t sure what I had said. I said “Franklin can you please help me?”

“What’s wrong with him?” said Franklin. He came up beside me. Dried blood was caked in his dark left eyebrow, spiderwebbed from a cut on his temple. One eyelid was collapsed over his missing eye. There was a chilling and terrifying beauty in him, like that of a damaged Greek sculpture. Franklin put his hand on Walt’s other shoulder. “Is he okay?”

“No one’s okay.”

“Is Colin okay?” said Franklin. I could not speak. “Are you okay?”

When I woke up with a champagne headache three of my fingers were numb. Julian was sitting in Walt’s dumpstered easy chair smoking a cigarette looking through our high school yearbook. “Look at us,” he said softly, sad smile wrinkling his left cheek. I looked and I saw myself with my arm slung over Franklin’s shoulders and I had to look away.

 —-

I drove Julian back to the train yard and when I was watching him squeeze through the hole in the fence there was this quick madness in me and I ran down after him. I followed him across the yard over the tracks and around the parked trains and down the thin shaded corridors between them. My shoes were full of gravel. In the narrow alleys between the trains it smelled like metal and gasoline and I thought of Kerouac, the mirrored lines of boxcars like the alleys of his hometown, the sense of the coming night. It was silent as a grave. I tried to remember the last time I had heard a silence that complete, and then I remembered Franklin’s wake. Julian walked with great purpose for a while toward the head of the train and then he stopped and turned to me and said “Are you coming?” Suddenly I remembered where I was. Julian said “The ladder’s there.”

“I didn’t bring anything.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“I’m – I have a dress on.”

“It doesn’t matter. Go on. Come up. Go up, Temple.”

I held the ladder in both hands. It was cool iron, blue paint peeling. Shoe marks made muddy treads. Flakes of paint and dirt fell at the touch of my fingers and swirled in a shaft of light. I could hear myself breathe. Julian said “Go on, Temple, go on.” There was nothing in my head. The sky was very blue. Haze hung, heavy and viscous. There was an ocean between Julian and I. It was full of everything. There were currents in it, deep and languid, moving like blood. Like tar, like oil. He said “Don’t pretend there’s nowhere else. Don’t pretend you can’t.”

“I’m not like you.”

“We’re the same, all the way down.”

We were not, so I let go of the ladder. “In the spring maybe, maybe for spring break I’ll come up.” I hugged Julian goodbye and I put my face in his neck and he was so alive and I wanted to feel so alive. I wanted some of it to get into my heart but it doesn’t work that way. There was nowhere else. I went back up to the car and sat on the hood in the sun until the train left, and then I got back on the freeway and drove back to Walt’s.

 —-

It was a bright day, clear as ice, when Colin called me and was typically vague on the phone. When I went over he was sitting in the bathtub having taken a nice cocktail of pills found in his mother’s medicine cabinet. He looked at me with unfocused wet eyes and leaned on me, head damp on my chest, when I called the ambulance, folding my hand through his hair. In the waiting room at the hospital my father called and I did not answer and he sent me a picture message of oil seeping, dark and thick, through thin white sand. When I looked at the picture for a long time I realized I didn’t really know what it was. It could’ve been anything. I deleted it. Colin’s mother came and sat with me and wept bitterly for a long time and I rubbed her cashmere-sweatered back with the palm of my hand and she rested her head briefly on my shoulder. She had Colin’s warm dark hair. “Both my sons,” she whispered. “Both my sons.” I don’t know what she meant because Colin was fine in the end and when we could go see him she went in before me and I heard her screaming in the hall, and when I went in ten minutes later as she was leaving Colin was sitting up in bed, arms crossed, playing with the IV in the crook of his arm, looking in an unsatisfied way into nothing. It was midnight by then. Franklin had been everyone’s favorite and Colin’s being the same all the way down, all the way into every cell, did not suffice. He never told me why he’d done it or why he called me of all people.

I sat for a long time in the chair by Colin’s bed as he chewed his fingernails and the skin around them. He did not seem to know I was there. I thought about the picture message my father had sent me for a long time. I wondered why he had sent it to me. You are the only one, the blood in the earth said to me. You understand. I thought about writing back but after a while of trying I realized it was no use.

The snap my phone made when I hurriedly closed it woke Colin up from whatever druggy reverie. He had these tired and heavy-lidded eyes when he looked down at me. They wanted something. I went to hold his hand but he crossed his arms. I said “Hi there babe.”

He put his face in his hands so when he spoke it was muffled. “Why do you call me that?”

“What.”

“Babe. Honey, whatever.”

“It’s a term of endearment.” Colin kept playing with the IV in the pale inside of his elbow until blood started to well up where the needle slid beneath the skin into the blue vein. I said “Stop that.”

He did not. “It’s because I look like him,” he said.

“What?”

“Isn’t it? We’re the same. All the way down.”

There was so much ice in me. Of course it was true. “No. No, no. Why would you even think that?”

“How can I not?”

I said “I’m sorry.” I said “What else do you need me to say?”

“That’s it. That’s all,” said Colin. I took his hand and I didn’t want to imagine it was anyone else’s but of course I did. You didn’t know them so you can’t possibly understand. Only their eyes were different. When I looked up and into Colin’s there was so much pain in them I couldn’t even imagine.

“I don’t want to make you anyone else.”

“Then don’t.”

I didn’t say anything for a long time and I ran my thumb over his knuckles until I couldn’t feel them anymore. Outside a siren cut through the night. The sky was a thick, heavy red, the fog still low through the window. When I could speak I said “Gonna take me a while.”

 —-

I like to remember Franklin asleep in the early afternoon in April, sun a yellow blanket over the heap of white duvet and skin in his apartment just off the UCLA campus. I had gotten up to get a glass of water and when I came back the clouds had shifted and he was lying in smooth, pure light. I stood in the doorway for a long time. I was not the only one and I wanted so badly to be, then, looking at him asleep with his hair spread out on the pillow, but I never was. I do not like to remember Franklin when we were driving back from Mita’s late in September and he told me I was thinking this was something it was not because we weren’t supposed to hold hands and we weren’t supposed to be anything. I do not like to remember the sound of my voice when I said “You can’t just tell me that.” Most of all I do not like to remember when were stopped at a red light and the glow of it was a thick blush on his face and not looking at me he said “Colin likes you,” as if this mattered, as if this meant anything, as if they were substitutes for each other, as if that were possible. Four days later he was gone. For a long time that was the only Franklin I could remember.

 —-

The coroner’s report came back and they said Franklin bled out. He was dead before they threw him in. There were still no leads. Colin came down onto the beach with Walt and me that afternoon to tell us and he slid his hand over the bristles on Walt’s head and sat between us and leaned back with all his weight on the heels of his hands. There was still a bruise from the IV, spreading yellow and brown around the visible veins in the inside of his elbow. He was wearing one of Franklin’s shirts, the thrift-store teal polo with the big wide white stripe. Franklin used to wear it to class with blue jeans and you could always tell from far away because it was so bright. Colin didn’t dress so bright. That was how you could tell them apart. We did not speak for a long time. The ocean looked endless and we all tried to see across it but there was nothing there. 

———

happy thanksgiving. 

you should read this while listening to a song by zephyrs called “twins” which is my favorite song of the year. this story is basically about my vision of california which is entirely based on bret easton ellis and joan didion novels. i have never been to california. 

i am sorry i have not been posting much here. i will try to be better about that. 

10:47pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZDlYKyCNqDOg
(Notes: 4)
  
Filed under: fiction 
August 21, 2011
DEAD AS THEY COME

I came back with nothing and Lee was out on the back porch. He’d parked the car down the street so I didn’t see it and he surprised me when I came around back with the bow in the case unbuttoning my flannel with my bad hand. “Ez,” he said and I jumped two feet. The scar on his face looked a little better but it was still bad. I was trying to remember how he used to be handsome. He followed me inside and I put things away and got a glass of water from the sink, thinking if I ignored him he would go away. “No luck today?” he said. He knew I was a bad shot having to pull back all that weight. I used to just shoot at contests or whatever and then I was good. “Your hand’s better?” It wasn’t and maybe this was the problem. I was holding the glass of water with my bad hand and he was looking at it so I put it in my pocket and drank with the other. It was all cramped and tight in that space and it hurt like hell but I didn’t want him to see it because I still couldn’t bend most of the fingers. I shouldn’t’ve taken the cast off probably but I’d thought it was better and I’d had to quit going to the orthopedist. Lee sat down on the couch and said “I’m going to sit here until you talk.”

“What do you want me to say.” He didn’t say anything for a bit and he looked at the wallpaper and I remembered my mother picking it out in a book ten years ago. Thinking about her it started to seethe in me and I said “Fuck you, Lee, what do you want me to say?”

“I want to hear you get angry.”

“I am angry.”

“Angry like you used to get. When you were such a good shot, you know. You had something to aim at.”

“I’m better now.”

“Drugs.”

“No.”

“I thought they’d be giving you medication.”

“I don’t need it.” The bottles were all in my medicine cabinet, behind the cracked mirror, stacked up on top of the painkillers for my hand, full. I’d broken the mirror myself with a fist the night Lee’s face got fucked up and then I’d looked at myself in it, face distorted in the cracks, for a long time. They told me later I’d broken four bones, two shattered, but I didn’t feel anything. My knuckles were all cut up and bled sluggishly and with each of them, my hand trembling, I drew a thin line in blood on each of my cheeks just beneath my eyes. That night I dreamed all my teeth had fallen out. I’d had terrible dreams after it all so losing the teeth was like nothing. I lay awake and looked at the wallpaper. When I got up my hand looked and felt separate from me.

“You’re not the kind it just goes away.” Lee had seen me do awful things. I used to have this fire in me, the white-hot kind you can’t explain. Outside it was beginning to rain. “Sit down, Ez.” I can’t even tell you how much my hand hurt then and I was too ashamed to take it out of my pocket. I didn’t want to look at it and I didn’t want to watch Lee look at it. I didn’t think it even hurt that much when I broke it. I felt all the bones, each of them, separately. “Stop hiding your hand from me. I can see it hurts. You’re white as a sheet.”

I shook my head. “What are you doing here, Lee.”

“I miss your face.”

“You miss your face.” I took my hand from my pocket and crossed my arms tightly and it hurt less. I felt all the blood rush back. “You miss your put-together face.”

Lee looked up at me in this pleading way and through the scar it was terrible. I wanted to tell him not to look at me. I couldn’t look at that face because maybe it was my fault. “You ever think of things that could’ve been.”

“Maybe.”

“There were a lot of things that could’ve been.”

I uncrossed my arms and sat on the couch and rested each hand on a knee. Lee and I looked at the scars on my knuckles and I remembered coming home late, drunk, wrapping my hands up in gauze. I remembered holding Lee’s balled-up shirt to my bloody nose. I remembered looking down the sight of the bow down the range at the target and feeling my heart thrum in my ears, that fast urgent thrum, and I remembered putting all the faces there and hearing all their voices in my head, and I remembered with this cold chill in me my stepfather’s beneath everything, that constant churning rhythm like waves on a beach, “I’m sorry Ezra I’m sorry Ezra I’m sorry Ezra,” but no one was ever sorry, you know? I was always sure he only said that for the court sympathy but no one on the jury cried and I sat back behind the DA cracking my knuckles, cracking and cracking and cracking them all, I guess I was sixteen then and that was before it all. I remembered everything breaking in me when he was sentenced. At the range I would just stand and breathe and hear the rumble of his voice and the bow would feel like nothing in my hands and I would see everything I had to see. Maybe I got soft when he finally died; it was as violent as he deserved. It was just after I’d fucked up my hand and I sat there on the couch on the phone with the warden chewing on the aluminum brace on my index finger while he told me everything. When I thought about it then it seemed to me he was all I ever saw. I was all done with it then and when I hung up the phone I sat for a long time watching my hands shake. 

——- 

i wrote this last summer in a very fast burst of crazy energy and no longer have any recollection of the inspiration for it. this is one of my favorite things i have ever written. 

8:21pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZDlYKy8c9HKy
(Notes: 5)
  
Filed under: fiction 
July 22, 2011
BOYS I MET IN JUNE

I met a kid at the library – Luke, 24, stockbroker. Beneath the fold of one rolled-up white sleeve a messy stick-and-poke tattoo of the skeleton of a dinosaur spread across the pale skin of his inside forearm. He told me, when I asked, that it was based on a recurring dream he had had as a child when shipwrecked with his two brothers on a small and uncharted island in the Phillippines, where his parents had been sent on missionary work. They had died in a storm between two posts, swept from the deck of the boat while the boys were in the hold. Luke was four at the time and had grown tall and thin with the set and unexpressive face of someone who has lived in New York too long. The tattoo he had done himself drunk in his Columbia dorm room before dropping out after two semesters when he was recruited by the firm at which he now worked. It is advantageous in the field to be feral, to love no one. Luke cared for his brothers and them alone, the way animals care for their kin. They had lived on that island for two years. When fishermen found them the boys balked at the sight of people. They were sun-browned and had forgotten most English. They had forgotten their names.

 ——-

When Marsden killed himself his parents were in Cannes so I had to go up to Allsaints and make the provisions for the funeral. In doing this I met his roommate, Nate, 22, who had found the body, and who shyly showed me the drawings of dreams he had had when I asked about the stacks of paper on his bedside table. They were all abstract gray fields. When I looked into them closely I thought I could sense something looming in the darkness. It was not apparent but it was there, very present, and when I put the drawings facedown on the table I thought I could still feel it. Nate had big eyes, the kind that asked something to which you wanted to say “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.” I asked if Marsden drew anything and Nate said he didn’t think so.

Nate and I went for lunch in town to talk about plans for the funeral. He ate ravenously. Marsden was to be buried in his family’s plot in Westchester as per his parents’ request. We spoke for a while and Nate told me he thought maybe he had been in love with Marsden once but it was a long time ago and nothing came of it. He wasn’t sure if it was love really because who knows what love feels like? It was like looking into a black pool and seeing it went all the way down, seeing nothing, not your own reflection. Like being swallowed, like opening up into nothing, like walking the edge of yourself. Feeling the exterior possibilities. Nate’s eyes got bigger when he spoke about it, his gestures more animated. It felt, he said, a long time ago, when he looked at Marsden, exactly like it had in that moment, that beautiful and crystalline moment in that cavernous test room at NYU when the course of his life revealed itself, as though it had been obvious all along, and he took hold of the corners of his Formica desk in his hands and smashed his head against it, once, hard. I was thinking about whatever it was moving in the darkness in the dream. Nate said again “It was a long time ago.” He meant everything. “It wasn’t Marsden anymore in the end, if it makes you feel any better,” he told me. It did not make me feel anything.

 ———

At Marsden’s funeral I finally met Lev, 23, the best friend from college Marsden had always talked about with a weird knot in his voice. As was his custom Lev had taken two vicodin prior to the ceremony, purportedly to relieve his jet lag. He had taken after relatives in Israel and was prospecting on oil in Saudi Arabia. He had flown in, two nights earlier, from Dubai on the red-eye to Newark. Marsden had not had many friends by virtue of his aloofness. He was a person whose very existence seemed alienating. It ended up Lev and Nate and I stood together among the sparse elderly family who had deigned to hear his eulogy read in the rain. It was a brief eulogy because Marsden had done nothing much of consequence in his life and it was hard to know if anyone would miss him.

Nate had brought an unopened sheaf of papers he had found beneath a floorboard on Marsden’s side of their room, and he and Lev and I looked through them at a diner down the road from the cemetery. It was mostly math, weird reasoning of numbers and symbols, of which none of us had any comprehension. Nate asked Lev and I if Marsden’s parents had been there and I shook my head while Lev said “No.” The vicodin was wearing off and his hands trembled like a bird’s wings. He told us Marsden had once told him he was raised by birds, the kind that collect shiny things and fill their nests with them just to have them there. 

——-

this is unfinished and probably will not go anywhere but i wanted to post it here. i like making up characters especially if they are feral or institutionalized and i was bored at work and wrote this because there was nothing else to do. the math thing is inspired by THIS fabulous story i read randomly. 

there are two things i am working on right now that i am really proud of so i will tell you about them. one of them is called “the lives of the saints” and it is about THIS and THIS. the other one is called “the seven vivian girls” and it is about THIS and THIS except HERE. neither of them are done yet but maybe i will post pieces when they are. 

5:33pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZDlYKy7PPV64
(Notes: 5)
  
Filed under: fiction 
June 25, 2011
BACKSEAM

I couldn’t sleep so after a bit I got up and found my tights on the floor and went to go wash them in the sink. On the way to the kitchen I started to untangle them – they were old tights and a gift from an ex, nude with a black seam up the back. My mother told me they were too sexy because they drew up the eyes to the ass. They were all full of runs anyway and for a minute I hesitated by the trashcan with one bare foot resting on the lever ready to throw them out, but it was cold outside and if I was going to take the subway home in the morning I didn’t want to walk back to my apartment without tights. Normally I wouldn’t have washed them but there was a little blotch of blood from when I’d cut my ankle shaving and adjusted the scab when I fixed the tights to hide a run under my skirt. It was about the size of my thumbnail, the color of a bruise or a dead flower, and it had been driving me crazy all night. It spread quickly and without stopping over the expanse of pale fabric around my ankle. At dinner I tried to surreptitiously put my foot on my knee and press on the cut until it stopped, and when it finally did there was blood on my fingers and palm, not much but a telltale, sticky layer. The last word I heard him say before I excused myself was “Nantucket.” I had vowed once never to date boys obviously wealthier than myself, but with this resurgence of thrift-store fashion and beat-up oxfords I couldn’t tell anymore. Thus – I’d known since minute one that this was a bad idea but I have a libido. What does this say about me?

I moved all the dirty dishes to one side of the sink then filled up the empty side and put my tights in with a squirt of dishwashing soap. I went back out to the bedroom to get my dress – as quietly as I could because I didn’t want to risk waking him up, but I didn’t want to keep standing in his kitchen in my bra. His name was Keith Lane; his friends called him by his last name but this was too Franny and Zooey even for me. We’d met not two weeks before and this was our second date. He wasn’t a good kisser but the sex was alright. Beginning of junior year I started to have time for boyfriends and embraced this, but there were a lot of things I felt I had a moral obligation to do by myself. I lived alone four stops up the subway in Washington Heights by the hospital, and sometimes at night I’d wake up to breaking glass or shouting. My neighbors were quiet and invited me to Christmas parties and it was a short three blocks to the subway which had once seemed to get longer the later and darker it got. It had been about two and a half years since I moved there and now on the walk home I would look up into the sky as it darkened – it would go from blue to purple to red, and usually it was purple when I was coming home, this dusky pale color, I suppose you might say ashen. I would get to the apartment and I would clean my tights and I would write my papers and then if someone asked me I would go back out the subway and take it down wherever, back to the campus or down to the village or to some museum in Midtown those nights they stay open until nine.

I used to go up when I had time to Fort Tryon to the garden – I had to write stories for a class I was taking then and I would go up to there to think a bit and walk around, across the bridge or around the park or the Cloisters, and you could hear like thunder the West Side Highway rumble from below. When you walk over the bridge sometimes you can feel it shake at its joints, this smooth vibration when cars go by, a sound like something falling.

At dinner with Keith with blood on my hands I thought about how much blood might be in me. I’d just told him about my only experience on Cape Cod as a child, in a motel three miles from the beach, and I pretended to listen as he described Nantucket in excruciating detail. Blood meant I was living and blood meant I could die. I watched it spread over the fabric of my tights and tried to contain it. I wanted to tell him I didn’t care. I was seized with the momentary desire to tell him I just wanted to fuck him and be done. The blood on my tights was like the defeated red-brown of a wilted rose petal, and I thought of the gardens at Fort Tryon. In the fall there would be very few people, some walking dogs or with covered strollers, all with posture slumped, hands in pockets, all walking down some path to a funeral.

I looked at Keith over the table; in candlelight he was quite handsome, angles of his face lit flatteringly. I knew he lived off campus and down on Central Park West, and I knew I would go there. I knew I would never take him to Washington Heights, I knew he would never walk up in Fort Tryon, around in the Cloisters and through the courtyards there in the winter and understand what I understood. Everything fragile and disintegrating. You get to realize how living you are then, when most of everything around you is dead. I did not listen to what Keith was saying but I watched his mouth move as though it would tell me something, as though the shapes his lips made would tell me more than the sounds they produced. I would never be him or be with him in the lasting, emotional sense, but it was never my intention to be either of those things, as we were too different and I knew impossibility. I wondered if we would take the subway to his apartment or if he would try to feel me up in a cab he would call out on the street. I realized I had stopped bleeding, and I asked him to excuse me. Whilst washing my hands I started to realize it, I started to think about the implications of all this, and it was very apparent to me then as I stood washing my tights in his sink: if we were all walking hunched to our funerals at Fort Tryon then death was possible, and if I was here in Keith Lane’s apartment then sex was possible, and if sex and death were possible and there I was washing my tights in the dark in the kitchen sink on the West Side by the park and I couldn’t sleep for the quiet, what does that say about me?

———-

i wrote this my senior year of high school in the middle of what has been, to date, the worst period of writers block i have ever had, which lasted from maybe september 2008 until june 2009. i wrote this in january and it was the only thing i wrote during that time. it isn’t really even a story, it’s more like existential theorizing on sex and death - HEAVY SHIT. i was eighteen. i had just read “franny and zooey” obviously. then i watched this video and realized for the first time that the lyrics are “i look up at the buildings / i imagine who might live there / imagining your wolfords in a ball upon the sink there” which i thought was so sexy and which utterly blew my mind. so then the next day i wrote this, and then it went away again until i wrote TWENTY-TEN in june. 

3:41pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZDlYKy6RzqWL
(Notes: 1)
  
Filed under: fiction 
May 23, 2011
WHATEVER DEMONS

After his grandfather died Graham lived in the house alone. The rumor was that the old guy kicked off and Graham didn’t notice it for a few days until it started to smell, but that isn’t true because Graham called me in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, which was where the old man died about three hours later. I was in Moscow then and the first thing I said was “I can’t talk long.” The two of them had never been close – the house was big enough that they barely saw each other – but I think somewhere in Graham was a feeling of responsibility. He wept bitterly on the phone. “This is going to cost both of us quite a bit,” I told him.

There were a lot of rumors. There was a tall, gray-painted wooden gate on the end of the driveway that fronted the street, and trash started collecting around it, and in the fall a pile of leaves six inches high, because no one ever went in or came out. This is what people told me, because I was in Russia then, but I knew Graham was walking his bike out through the woods the way he always used to and biking into town to buy cigarettes and drugs and groceries to bungee-cord to the shelf over the back wheel. The people who went into the house, those few who knew well enough to walk around the back through the woods over the flattened path where Graham walked his bike, said that, though it had always been run-down, it was worse now: hookah ashing all over the engraved cherry coffee table in the high-ceilinged living room, marinara sauce caked onto the counters and stovetop in the kitchen, shades drawn, cobwebs, dust, clothes strewn all over the floor. They said when no one was over, which was most of the time, Graham padded the dusty wood floors naked and mixed weird drinks and dropped acid or ate mushrooms and painted bizarre murals on the walls on the third floor, where no one was allowed. They said when people were over they would smoke the hookah and make ridiculous, ornate, multi-course meals and that Graham would lapse, for longer and longer periods each time, into these trances where he would just stare, mouth frozen in the act of chewing a fingernail, into space. I think, someone wrote insightfully via email I checked in a crowded café, humid with breath, as it snowed in St. Petersburg, Graham is retreating into his own head. Of course we had always known it was only a matter of time, but to hear it was finally happening was difficult to reconcile.

I was only home for a week before my flight to Cairo so I went up to see him in Pocantico Hills. The phone went unanswered, as I had expected it would. I parked on the back road and walked that tamped path through the woods where Graham walked his bike. The house was huge and stone and unkempt, ivy crawling, garden grown over the brick edging, jarring in its unkempt fecundity, grass past my ankles, wet with the previous night’s rain. I pounded on the back door for about three minutes shouting Graham’s name until he came to the door and unlocked the screen with great effort. He was shirtless, wearing only boxers I could tell he had picked up from the floor, pale, freckled skin flecked with splatters of blue and orange paint. Without speaking he hugged me very tightly. He smelled like sweat and cigarettes and pot and tequila. I rested one hand on the back of his head, flattening soft, unwashed red curls. “Hi pretty,” he said to me, with this thick, drunk New York drawl. “Hi, hi, hi.”

“There’s paint on you.”

“I’m painting. Do you want to see?” The hallway on the third floor was lined, end to end, with an elaborate mural, childlike and bright, of a beach, surf breaking bone-white against golden sand, sky, white wisps of cloud interspersed, meeting the sea at some point far out. It was as though we were standing on some long, thin peninsula, sea on either side as far as the eye could see. Graham had painted the floor to resemble golden sand though it was peeling and chipping in places to reveal the floorboards. “Come see the rooms,” Graham said, taking from the floor a fingerprinted wine glass of something clear, bubbles rising from the widening end of the stem.

There were four and each was a different place: the chateau de Chenonceau on the Loire in France, St. Peter’s in Rome, Piccadilly Circus in London. In the far room, the room where I used to sleep in a queen-size bed – when Graham’s parents, when they were still alive, believed I would save their son from whatever demons – and wait for Graham to sneak in, in the dead of night, and slide his hands beneath my nightgown and over my stomach and press his lips against my neck, I think we were fourteen, maybe thirteen, then, in that room, there was a poor rendering of the Church of Our Savior on the Spilled Blood, on the river in Saint Petersburg. “I looked it up on the internet,” Graham said, grinning, showing me the paint-smudged Google images printouts that sat in a neat pile on the floor in one corner. “It’s not done yet.”

I didn’t say anything for a while and Graham began touching up one of the onion domes. The stem of the wine glass extended from between his ring and middle fingers, clear and straight as an icicle. “Is there any significance? Or do you just paint whatever?”

“Places I want to go.” He took a few steps back then and stood beside me and bent and eyed the wall, twisted his head and eyed it again, turned his head on the side and eyed it again.

“Why don’t you come with me, then.” The strangest thing was I meant it then although I had never given it a second of thought and when I left I would wonder what I had been thinking. “I’m going to Cairo but we can figure out a flight to De Gaulle from there.”

Graham stood up straight. “I can’t leave.” He set the brush down and I followed him out into the hallway and looked out at the painted ocean, peeling to reveal faded, flowered wallpaper, and remembered with this jolt in me that Graham’s parents had drowned, six years ago, in a riptide off the Hamptons, and that Graham had run along the shore and watched them go, silently over the wind and the waves and the gulls, as they waved a wordless and passionate goodbye. You can’t live in such a tight space.

———-

i wrote this last summer. my brother and i were driving home from tarrytown past the rockefeller estate. i really like the end of this story. 

2:34pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZDlYKy5O5d4_
Filed under: fiction 
April 16, 2011
SPOOL

“Now,” says Lev, the only red-headed Jew I have ever met, blood in his eyes, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

 ———

I wake up at noon at my mother’s on 23rd Street.

 ———

Lockett, the only portal to the dream world, works at a fabric store in Chelsea, a place with many rooms. I follow him down the narrow hall and he indicates with one hand the rolls of black Jersey. “Been a little while,” I say.

“Sure,” says Lockett. “A couple days.” This means nothing to me. “You must not remember.”

Lockett always looks fucked out, like someone has slowly unraveled all of him in the back room, but he’s the handsomest kid I know and functionally asexual. I don’t hang out with him much anymore. None of us do, because Lockett’ll mess with your head.

I ask for two yards of the blackest black Jersey.

In the subway I remember the last time I saw Lockett, which was in a dream, a shadowy room with high ceilings. I don’t know what that place was or why I was there but I felt I had been there before, a thousand times. I was always there. Lockett smiled at me and all his teeth fell out. I woke up.

 ———

Lev is still wearing the suit from his brother’s Bar Mitzvah. When I sit down he is folding his black yarmulke. “For the nth time,” he says, “I raised my fist to the heavens, and cursed God.” Lev is twenty, thin and pale and strange, moreso since his nervous breakdown. I did not see him in the hospital.

“You cursed him for what?”

Lev loosens his tie. “Fucking with my brain. For life.” He is talking about his partial aphasia. He points with one nail-bitten finger at the paper bag at my feet. “Did you see Lockett?”

“Briefly.”

“I just saw him last night.” I wonder where because Lev doesn’t go out anymore on account of his seizures and even if he did none of us really see Lockett, and then I know. “You don’t have to see Lockett to see Lockett,” he says, which is a nice way of putting it. “We were in the hospital, reading the Auchinleck manuscript. And I could read it.” I don’t know what that is. “It’s Middle English,” Lev says. “It made perfect sense to me.”

——— 

I run into Cooper on the street. We drink more coffee and I tell him I am really sick, dying, even, very slowly, and there’s nothing he can do about it. He is very pale, mouth slack, and when he starts crying I can’t look at him. What beautiful destruction. I tell him parts of my brain are turning off, one by one. “The compassion part,” I say, “was the first to go. I probably would have loved you if I was physically capable.”

“Don’t speak about yourself in the past tense,” Cooper whispers, his voice cracking. “Please don’t talk about yourself like you’re already – I can’t deal with that.”

“You’re gonna have to.”

“Don’t,” says Cooper. He palms tears off his face. “Jesus Christ, Rhea.”

“It explains a lot about how fucked up I am,” I tell him. “It explains a lot about why I treated you like shit.”

“I don’t care about that now.”

“You’re damaged goods. You don’t care that you’re damaged goods?”

Cooper doesn’t answer. Cooper cares that he’s damaged goods. He cares very deeply. Some people like to reassemble those who have been ruined, some good people, but Cooper doesn’t want those people. He wants bad people, people who can see bruises. “I suppose if I ask you if you need anything you’ll say no.”

“I don’t need anything, no.”

We sit for a while in silence. Cooper is shaking. He says “I feel awful leaving you.”

“That’s the one thing you can do for me.” 

  ———

Lev calls. “You’re not really dying, are you.”

“What did Cooper say?”

“I am not telling you anything except my honest opinion, which is that this has gone too far.”

“Not you too, Lev.”

“You can’t do this to people.”

“What am I doing to him.”

“Driving him crazy. Let me tell you that you don’t know what that feels like and I do, and it feels awful.”

“What’s with you? You could probably fuck him if you wanted, if that’s it.”   

“I’m not emotionally prepared for a mess like Cooper right now or ever,” says Lev. “I can barely deal with myself.”

Lev’s text messages to me still read like Coffee hi? Broom broadway! Apparently it was spectacular when he lost it, three semesters into a Neuroscience and Behavior major at Columbia, in the middle of his Comparative Biomechanics midterm – it was cinematic, shocking in its swiftness, its suddenness, its convergence from clear skies with no warning. I heard what happened through several tightly woven grapevines, so you never really know. The general consensus is that Lev had carefully placed the instruction sheet inside the blue essay booklet, grasped the Formica table with both trembling hands, and smashed his head against it, once, hard. “You’re too good for him anyway.”

“Good,” laughs Lev, “me?”

 ———

Lockett is not in the dream, but Lev is, chewing the sleeves of his sweater. “All of us is one of us,” says Lev, not looking at me. “There is one of us, one thread.” It is a high-ceilinged room, shadowy, and the bars in windows cast lines like the stripes of animals on the wood floor. I have been there before. I am always there. And then there is blood in Lev’s eyes, and shards of glass at his bare feet, jagged shapes in a bloody circle. “I did it do you know why?” says Lev.

“You don’t have to tell me.” But of course I want to know. Lev palms the blood from his face, traces a line from the wound on his forehead down over his long nose, the indentation in his top lip, the round bone of his chin, over his throat and into the hollow. Against the white-washed wall his whole face is ice.

“I unwound all the way. It took, it pulled every day and there was none of me left. And what do you do then, I don’t know. It wasn’t me anymore. It was just blood.”

And then it is someone’s funeral. It is Cooper’s funeral and he lies, amid flowers and starched fabric folds and his little sister’s doodles, as though sleeping. It is the same room, the only room. And Lockett is there, but it’s Lev, but it’s Lockett, who is beside me, shoulder pressed against mine, holding Cooper’s bloodless left hand in both of his, tightly, tears welling in his pale eyes. I cannot look at Cooper. What beautiful destruction.

“What happened?” I say. I am drumming on the coffin with my index fingers, rolling like waves on that smooth wood. “Lockett, what happened?” He doesn’t say anything. He hasn’t shaved in a few days and the sparse blonde curls along the sharp line of his jaw catch the light behind his head. His fingers knot with Cooper’s and I cannot tell whose are whose. I try to untangle them because they are not the same. But they are. They will not unravel.

Cooper’s mother comes past and she smiles at me and clutches my hands. She kisses my cheek. She smells like lavender. “Oh, honey,” she says. “Honey. This is what you wanted, isn’t it?”

And the sharp cliffs. They go down to the sea. When I was drunk I wanted to kiss everyone. I wanted to know what they felt like. The cliffs went down to the sea. I stood for a long time at the edge of them. None of us ever wanted to die on purpose, only accidentally. Lev is beside me. In the wind his bloody hair leaves tracks on his face, Octavian’s curls like a set of claws. “Now,” he says, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” 

———

i am aware that this story is really nuts and like twenty stories at one time. i wrote it for a lot of reasons. i suppose THIS is the biggest direct inspiration for it. i had a hard time with this story because that idea of being a portal to the dream world is so compelling but i couldn’t really figure out exactly what it meant and didn’t want it to be too much like “inception.” lockett is named after deerhunter’s guitarist / songwriter / fuzz genius of the same name. 

anyway i thought i would post this because though it makes little sense i think there are some cool ideas in it which have worked their way into other stories of mine, one of which is called “colloquial eras,” which i sent to a bunch of magazines the other day, along with a story called “things that weigh nothing” and a story called “wolves” which was 26 pages when i double spaced it, which led to me almost starting to cry in my roman art class. 

i hope you like this! if you go to mount holyoke or one of the five colleges please come to RADIO WEEK this friday and saturday. my ask box is open if you ever have any questions about anything. 

10:31pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZDlYKy4MoMN4
(Notes: 1)
  
Filed under: fiction 
March 26, 2011
MUTUALLY ASSURED

Very rare, very, very rare blood condition, they told me. It would have been impossible to know. When I think about Kemp, which I do not do often, which I do when I am alone in some crowded place, I see him in a dream, dealing Tarot cards. He removes the tin drip percolator from the top of his glass of Vietnamese coffee and spreads the grounds out on the table while he stirs the condensed milk up from the espresso until it blushes, a bitter-looking caramel. Death, he deals, because of course he does. Then the lovers, and he looks up at me. I would like to say I saw it coming, anything, really, walking slowly down the path out of the shadow, but I was a horse wearing blinders in those formative days.   

 ———

In the surgeon’s teak-paneled office, Cooley Dickinson, February –

“Mr. Kemp,” said the doctor. He wore a gray suit, three-piece. “You’re a direct match for Mr. Byrne.”

Beside me Kemp exhaled slowly the soft sigh of the very relieved.

“We believe his body will accept your kidney.”

Kemp looked up and across the desk at the surgeon. There was this hot, heavy weight in my stomach, a monster, like too much oatmeal. Kemp’s eyes were red, lower lip between his teeth, hands clasped tightly in his lap. He nodded a few times, resolutely. “When can you do the surgery.”

“The first week of March, probably.” The doctor turned to me. I thought about what I would be capable of if I could breathe fire, what beautiful destruction. “Miss Leyden, I’m afraid your blood type – ”

“I understand.”

I could feel Kemp’s eyes on the side of my face. We went outside together and did not speak as we walked to the bus stop. The wind came up over the parking lot as though through a tunnel. Rubbing his hands together Kemp said “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“I feel bad.”

“You feel bad I don’t have to have a dangerous surgery?”

“You know what I mean.” Kemp looked at his hands, at the lines in them. They were shaking. He got off without speaking by the post office in Northampton and when the bus pulled past him I saw the smile spreading across his face through the blurry window. He would walk for five minutes or so down Main Street into the cold sunset with his hands in his pockets and then he would walk though that empty apartment above the record store into the bedroom, wood-floored, light in knife-sharp slats through the window, where Nathan and his dialysis machine lay gazing at each other. He would sit in the chair beside the bed and he would tell him. I tried to see the look on Nathan’s face but I could not because it was too beautiful.

When I got home I made a strong drink and I sat on the futon and told myself it didn’t mean anything and you could get a kidney from anyone. I was drunk when Nathan called. “Hi baby,” he said.

“Kemp still there?”

“No.”

“I guess he told you.”

“He did.”

“Okay.”

I wanted to ask what happened. I knew what happened. Kemp’s jeans were always too short, eyes too big. He was the kind of person you looked at in bars in the dark when you thought no one could see. Even in silhouettes in the dimmest light you could tell he was a handsome kid, face cut out of sharp angles, a long body that was all legs.

“Are you jealous, Sou?”

“No.”

“You’re jealous. You’re jealous because Jonah can give me his fucking kidney and you can’t.”

“Don’t.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“He’d be jealous if it were me.”

“Don’t put words in his mouth.”

“Don’t try and make him look like a better person than me because you know he would be a fucking mess over this if it were the other way around.”

“I don’t understand why you can’t just be happy for me.”

“I am. I am, of course I am. I’m happy for you.”

“Then don’t make this about Jonah.”

I hated nothing more than Nathan calling Kemp by his first name. It was an infinitely sighable name. It begged for you to stretch out the last syllable, for your voice to break over it. I chewed my nails. “I’m going to come see you tomorrow,” I said.

“Sure,” said Nathan. “Sure you can.”

 ————-

On the street outside the emergency room, October –

Kemp came barreling into the parking lot in his friend’s old Volvo, rust around the wheel wells, and ran up to me when I was outside smoking. “He’s okay,” I told him. I gave him one of my cigarettes from the peppermint Altoids tin I kept them in. Kemp’s hands were shaking when he tried to light it. “It failed finally.” I watched Kemp struggle for a while, biting my lip to keep from smiling, before I leaned forward to light it myself.

“But he’ll live.”

“Yeah. Dialysis. He’s sleeping now.”

“You see him?”

“Took him here, yeah.”

Kemp chewed the inside of his lip and turned away from me. I bowed my head so he wouldn’t see the red in my face. When we went inside we sat on either side of Nathan’s bed, not speaking. I fell asleep to everything around us making soft sounds, breathing, beeping, and when I woke up Kemp was standing, smoothing Nathan’s hair from his forehead, and jealousy watched through my eyes, through those strange windows, stained-glass, as Nathan reached up and touched with those long fingers the sharp bone of Kemp’s cheek.

 —————-

At a bar in Amherst, April –

“This,” said Nathan, “is Jonah Kemp. And this is Alisoun Leyden.” And we shook hands. “What’re you drinking, babe?”

At the same time Kemp said “Old-fashioned” and I said “Whiskey sours.”

In the end of March I had told Nathan I wanted to be exclusive, and he had asked me to give him a while to break something off. The way Nathan looked at Kemp I could tell he had no intention of breaking anything off. I excused myself and went down to the bathroom and threw up, violently, standing on one foot. When I came back Kemp was sitting running his finger around the rim of his bell glass, amber liquid threading the inside. Nathan leaned on the bar, gazing down the open collar of Kemp’s blue button-down shirt at the narrow V of exposed skin, pale and freckled. I left without saying goodbye.

Nathan called the next day. “What happened last night.”

“It’s him. Isn’t it him.”

“Yeah.”

“What’re you going to do about this.”

“I don’t know.”

Nathan did not have the desire nor the strength to tell one of us it was over and he assumed that either Kemp or I, weary of this ridiculous and fundamentally unsatisfactory relationship, would eventually leave on our own. As the summer came around it became clear that neither of us had any kind of desire or strength of our own, and thus it came to be that Kemp and I divided up this man and his affections both physical and otherwise like divorced parents, just barely civil, and the child they reluctantly share. And like those divorced parents we each tried to poison him against the other and the things we did, the things we did so he would love us more! And thus it came to be that in October Nathan’s kidneys finally decided they had had enough and that the donor list was too long and dialysis painful and embarrassing and expensive, and in January Kemp and I went for the requisite tests, because what else was there to do? And perhaps this was the pinnacle, the final obstacle in the steeplechase, the final freezing pool to wade through, shaking, bleeding, dead on your feet. Perhaps after this it would be done, it would be one of us, chosen, and the other as good as dead in the gutter. Nothing is ever that easy but you can pretend it is, you can convince yourself it is. Kemp and I had been running for a long time and we hurt all over.

 ————-

In the pre-surgery hallway, Cooley Dickinson, March –

I went to Kemp’s room, where he sat up in bed reading the paper. I said “Good luck today.”

“It’ll be fine.”

“I hope so.”

He folded the paper up carefully, not looking at me. It was the travel section. The front picture was somewhere in the Caribbean, water so blue it could not have been real. “I’m sorry about this whole thing.”

“I am too.”

“I mean the whole thing. I mean top to bottom, I mean this whole last year. I’m sorry about it.”

“You’re sorry it happened?” 

“I guess so, I mean – I don’t know.”

“What don’t you know.”

“Well, he doesn’t really like either of us, you know?”

“How can you – ”

“I mean, he likes fucking us plenty.” I could not breathe. “But I think that’s where it ends. And look at me. Look at what I’m about to do. It’s easy for me to hate myself.”

“You gonna try to – you gonna be – ”

“Am I gonna wake up with one of my vital organs in that kid and try not to love him anymore, is that what you want to ask me? Because you can ask me, because it’s a good question.”  

“You can answer it.”

“Of course I am. But you can’t just turn it off, your heart or whatever, and I’m sorry for that. I want to leave you with what’s yours.”

“It’s not mine. No one’s mine.”

“No one’s mine either.” He sighed. “He’s just gonna owe me is all, owe me and owe me forever and I’ll never get any of it back. He likes you too much. He likes fucking you too much.”

I hit him as hard as I could. “Fuck you, Kemp,” I said. “I hope that shit happens where you wake up when you’re anesthetized and you feel everything.”

Kemp just looked at me and cocked one eyebrow. “Me too.” 

 ———————

I stood with Nathan by the wide window and watched them put Kemp under. On the gurney down in the bottom of the theater he looked very small and vulnerable. The only exposed skin in the room was his, white and milky in the bright light. Once his eyes closed they were quite rough with the IVs and the oxygen mask and the scalpel and finally they closed the shades and the nurse came for Nathan and I sat in the waiting room and looked out at the parking lot and the wide and undisturbed fields of snow, my forehead pressed against the glass. Nathan would come out of this and there Kemp would be, in a neighboring bed in a room full of flowers, asleep, just breathing. And there would be life in Nathan again because of Kemp and a big scar so none of us would ever forget it. There would always be Kemp. Pieces of Kemp inside, all the way down. I swallowed the taste of vomit in my mouth. After a while I fell asleep in a chair with my head against the wall.

 —————

The nurse woke me up. “Are you Alison?”

“Alisoun.”

“Alisoun. You’re Jonah Kemp’s – ”

“Friend, just a friend.”

And then she said “This is difficult for me to tell you.” And then she said “There were complications.” And then she said “No one could have known.” And she said “It was completely painless.”

 —————-

In Nathan’s apartment, November –

I found Kemp’s socks in the bathroom and eyed the plates stacked up to dry in the kitchen, aching to smash them. Nathan was sitting up in bed absently fiddling with the needles that connected him to the humming machine by the window. I put Kemp’s socks on the bedside table and I said “Make sure you give him these.” Nathan just eyed me. “I don’t understand.”

“What.”

“Why you – never mind.”

“Sexuality is complex.”

“What I don’t understand is why I’m not enough for you.”

“Because I like Jonah.”

I chewed on my lip and then on my nails and then on the skin around them. I sat in the chair by the bed with my feet up and when Nathan fell asleep I climbed in beside him and wrapped myself around him. I woke up with his arm around me and I lay there for a while as the sun came up and the light came in on his face.

 ——————

The surgeon told me in hushed tones in the hallway outside Nathan’s room that they had managed to get Kemp’s kidney and it was only once it was gone that they had lost him. So Nathan was fine, stitched up tight, and based on initial tests it looked like Kemp’s kidney was a good match. I sat by Nathan’s bed and after a while I reached up and held his hand in mine, stroking my thumb over the dry knuckles. Kemp’s newspaper was on the table, travel section on top, and for a moment that impossible Caribbean blue was all I could see and Kemp’s voice was all I could hear – “He doesn’t really like either of us, you know?”

I had to turn it over. After a moment I realized I was very alone.

————-

i am really unsatisfied with this but it’s not awful, so you can read it! i hope you like it. i thought up the idea when i couldn’t fall asleep and then of course had an even harder time getting to sleep because i was thinking about it so much. i think i am so unsatisfied with it because i couldn’t start writing it right away as it was like 4am and it’ll never be as good as it was when i imagined it originally. this is the first thing i’ve written that takes place where i live now, in the pioneer valley in massachusetts. 

8:27pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZDlYKy3rcJgf
(Notes: 3)
  
Filed under: fiction 
March 26, 2011
playlist for “wolves,” which i am cleaning up now and intend to send out to magazines starting next month. 

playlist for “wolves,” which i am cleaning up now and intend to send out to magazines starting next month. 

8:21pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZDlYKy3rbuFH
January 27, 2011
INT’L PHONETIC ALPHABET

My resurrection sickness stemmed from an October incident. I took a leaf from Pope’s book and carried my lost teeth for a while on a string in my jacket pocket. Not too good at talking with my fists. No – they make me listen. I’m such a good listener.

I’m real sick anyway, swallowing blood like cherry kool-aid and I cough it up now with this metal-taste under my tongue. Big holes in my smile where my teeth were, the smooth wetness of my bloody gum. Oh I’m gonna have scars. Girls love a mess, on the outside. My black eye, the arching cut above, bruises on my face with the slicing of someone’s ring.

Kids took my left back molar. Fuckers. I went to the dentist and gave him my real teeth. I don’t know what he’s going to do with them. Maybe it’s true that teeth make the clicking sound in spray paint cans. I think they’re making fake ones I can just slide in and out when I have to. Pope’s got two of those. Pope’s the one who sent me off in the first place – the eve of my birthday escorts me via subway to Brooklyn, tells me to go start up a conversation and shoves me down a dark alley before disappearing into a bar to fill his daily quota of Pabst Blue Ribbon. After the conversation I so graciously lost I pick myself up off the concrete and pick up my teeth; Pope comes out of the bar and in the light of his cell phone counting teeth in my hand versus holes in my face determines I’m missing one. Fuckers! What are Brooklyn kids going to do with my left back molar, sell it on fucking eBay?

I come home around two bloody with my teeth in my hand, split lip and black eye. The door slams behind me. I wince and my bloody lips drag on my bloody teeth. This suction sound in my mouth, hungry. I hear my aunt stir, rise, her steps in the hallway, her “Oh my God, oh my God. Oh Jona baby. What happened?” I put on my Jona-lost face and tell her I got mugged. Ha! She comes to me. Her fingers fold through my hair and come away blood-dark. Her hand on my shoulder. In her green-olive eyes the innate female sense of matriarchy. “I’m calling an ambulance.”

“No – no, no, no. I’m fine. I just got beat up. Pope came along and they scattered. They didn’t take anything.”

“Oh, thank God for Benedict.” She looks in my mouth and opens the bloody ball of my fist. “Jona, baby. You’re missing all those teeth…”

“You can call the dentist in the morning. I just want to go to bed.”

“Did you swallow a lot of blood, Jona?”

“I don’t know. I think so.” You can swallow a pint before you get sick. A pint is an amount of blood I cannot even visualize. I suppose I must’ve swallowed that much, maybe more. It didn’t seem like it. It seemed manageable. Being so inept at speaking with my fists has left me with a skewed imagination of the manageability of my injuries.

I fall asleep. In the morning my aunt looks at the blood on my pillow with horrified sympathy. What she doesn’t understand is that getting the shit kicked out of you is a rite of passage. I’m gonna be eighteen, get it? In countries like Chad and Myanmar they flatten your skull or put needles in your balls. In New York City you’ve got to talk shit and lose your teeth and get the blood-coughing resurrection disease.

Someone sleeps with my tooth under his pillow. Someone wears it on a necklace like an Indian war chief. Manhattan’s scalps are the white teeth of bad conversationalists.

 ———

I got struck down with this lightning bolt of blood-coughing holy vengeance while walking with Pope around midnight in Harlem. To say “walking” is an overstatement because I limp along gasping for breath beside calmly sauntering Pope. He wouldn’t hear it when I said I couldn’t go out. Maybe three days since the proverbial ball-piercing and I carry my teeth talismans in my pocket. Pope’s got his on a bracelet he wears under his sleeve. Near 125th street I cough. There’s blood in my hand red-brown. I look at Pope with this real shock and he gives me this hearty back-pat like burping a baby and the cough and the blood comes again. Fuck! Pope swipes my Metrocard for me. I get on the six and limp home from the stop near Astor. Midnight six train Harlem everyone’s coughing blood or spurting it or drinking it.

Neo-zombies. Make my tooth a milkshake. Fuck you. I ruined my Gang of Four t-shirt. Alone in the mirrored elevator I look like Halloween, horror-film fake. All I want to do is pass out. My aunt when she sees me flattens her hand over her mouth. “Jona! Baby what happened!”

I’m too sick and too scared to put on my lost face. “I just started coughing.” Punctuating this point I hack up what might be something vital. I look up all dripping blood from my nose and mouth like some kind of ridiculous vampire. The lost face comes without asking. My aunt looks – God. You never saw such a look. She takes me to the hospital. At every stoplight she stares at me. She folds my bangs into my hair. She rubs my shoulders. She says, “Oh, Jona, baby.” The contents of the box of tissues she made me take in the car are crumpled into red balls on the floor of her sedan. I can’t stop shaking.

Laid low a few days. I soak my teeth in a big clear glass of mouthwash. My aunt puts the back of her hand on my forehead. Her wedding ring is cold. I feel myself hot. I feel blood dripping from my mouth. I live for a while in this kind of purgatory zombie territory.

All I want is my tooth back. All I want is to grow fangs.

 “Jona baby,” she says, “you’re burning up.”

 ————

Pope calls. “Jona! Resurrected!”

And I tell him, “What the fuck.” I have coughed myself inside out and ripped up my throat in the process. I speak like Friday night gridlock, trainwreck. My bed is blanketed with cough drop wrappers. My aunt’s wet cloth is slipping off my forehead. I ball it up in a fist.

“Resurrected. You, figuratively, died, and now you’ve got the resurrection disease.”

“That is the stupidest fucking thing I have ever heard.” Cold water drips over my fingers. I let the cloth slip onto the floor.  

Dying in reverse, with the resurrection disease. It was the Chinook or something who flattened skulls. And they let themselves do it why? In New York we lose our teeth. And why?

You have to believe!

“You’re reborn. Like, a whole new person, Jonathon Howard.”

“Jonathon Howard, esquire. Maybe.” The smile spreads across my face. My dry lip splits, snagged on my chipped front canine.

Pope chuckles. “I’m coming over tomorrow.” He hangs up. I cough gobs of blood the shape and color of rotten raspberries into a fistful of snow white tissues.

 ————-

When my aunt goes to work Pope comes over with chicken broth to show me his new tattoo. Pope’s newly twenty one. Eighteen the shit gets kicked out of you by people who so eloquently speak with their fists, neo-zombies who stole my teeth and killed me in metaphor. Twenty one, largely alcohol-motivated, you get yourself something that turns your blood to boiling ink. Pope, on the pale inside of his blue-veined wrist, has got the art on that Joy Division album, the first one, the lines that look like mountains or sound waves but they’re pulses from this distant celestial body, black on his white skin.

“Nice,” I say. I had expected him to get a pontiff hat. Pope starts singing Shadowplay. He heats up the chicken broth. “To the center of the city in the night waiting for youuuuu,” in his cold low Ian Curtis drawl. I wrap myself in an afghan and slurp my soup like neo-zombie tooth milkshake.

I can’t believe they took my tooth. I want to find them and say I’ll do anything for it back. I’ll get on my knees! I’ll do horrendously lewd things, I can’t even describe. I want to slip it up in my gum. Puzzle pieces. There’s an awkward emptiness. I keep feeling that bloody, naked space and wanting more.

 ———-

I get a little better and me and Pope go out to Brooklyn to get some fresh air. I still feel cold all the time and it’s December and the wind’s got a bite in it. Pope says this. I’ve got fake teeth now, five of them. The only jokes Pope can make are tooth-related. I wrap my scarf tighter and tell him to shut the fuck up.

We walk past the block where I had my coming-of-age conversation. My shoulders seize and I cough into my hand, dry, bloodless. This is animal instinct. I still feel like turning inside out.

Pope gives me a big grin. “You’re alive, Jona!”

Alive. I still feel dead. I still feel for the toothless piece of soft gum. Maybe I should put up missing posters.

But Pope grabs my shoulder. The bandage that wraps his tattoo is bright white, clean. It’s the bandage they put on attempted suicides. Pope would never slice himself open. He loves living. He loves being resurrected. “You learned to speak. You lived.”

I always knew how to speak. You are born communicating the secret desire for fight or flight. These kids who stole my tooth, they don’t speak my language. I look at Pope and see him speak the dialect of some fucked-up warrior Vatican. Brooklyn kids communicate with the hungry fists of people who don’t know better. I speak in the international phonetic alphabet of my exhausted bruised body. I’m tired. I am so tired.

Jona – me, Jona, who is Jona but always lost. Tell me whatever shit you want about the Tower of Babel, Esperanto. There is a universal language and it is as infinite and unmanageable as swallowing a pint of blood. 

———-

major throwback. i wrote this in 11th grade but i looked through it again today and i’m still proud of it. jona is named after spoon’s “jonathon fisk,” because i wrote this just after i saw spoon play at roseland ballroom in new york, and because “jonathon fisk” goes “jonathon fisk, always a risk / he tells me he counts my teeth every night” which is one of my favorite lyrics. it was just after i saw darjeeling limited too, you know how owen wilson’s character pulls his teeth out of his face? i think i also had just read fight club. my brother was playing lots of world of warcraft and when you die in that game you can resurrect yourself but have limited power i guess, ie “resurrection disease” (my brother lol’d when he read this and saw that). despite its obvious influences, i really like this story. it was one of the first things i tried to publish. 

11:25pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZDlYKy2n5ksC
Filed under: fiction 
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