| Day Twenty-One: |
[Jun. 22nd, 2009|09:20 pm] |
Tattoos
"This is permanence," thought Character.
"This is useless," thought Harry.
Antimony's mind was elsewhere.
Character was showing his roommates the finished and collected blood pieces. There was a sort of boyish excitement in his eyes not often seen. Neither Harry nor Antimony noticed. Perhaps, in happier times, they would have, and perhaps not. At some point in the near future, none of them were sure when, the paintings were going to go up in a nearby building, in a room devoted to art and its appreciation, where they could be seen, and judged, and discussed, and reflected upon by anyone and everyone, though in the end they would only be seen by the types of people who frequented such places. Nevertheless, it was an exciting prospect for Character, and he was burgeoning with the frothing, gnashing folly of a youth who is getting just exactly what he desires of the present.
Harry, in his angry state, was puerile, incessantly petulant. Any small success of Character's brought forth in him either cursing diatribes or trite compliments cloaking his sarcastic ire. Dagger baked into little cakes. Of which only a small portion did he speak aloud. The ones he kept quiet froze in his Antarctic chest, becoming more brittle and sharp with each passing day. And in the light of this cold, inhuman anger he bathed, calmly, waiting for the first of August, envisioning his moment where he would unshakingly produce his quiver of poisoned arrows and kill what was left of Character's fleeting soul with a few volleys from his teeth and spitting tongue. As for Analae, he had forgotten her, and whether this was his intent in turning on Character as the source of his discontent or not was clear neither to him nor anyone.
Antimony was dying. His eyes had gazed intently at the paintings, and they had captured the curves and the valleys and had caught the nuances and he had made insightful comments as to the meaning and the interaction of the media with the message and if anyone had been watching, with expensive video cameras, and Woody Allen circa 1974 in a chair, there might have been subtitles put around his knees in post-production to indicate that as he was saying these things he was thinking absolutely nothing in the most direct and entirely capitalized fashion he ever had in his life. He was thinking nothing, nothing, nothing for what was in his head existed at a level entirely different from worded thought. And so now, Character's mini-exposition, fruitless as it had been, over, as he was walking through the sweltering streets of Montreal in the summer, Antimony was dying.
He had fallen, for the first time in this thing that he called his life, in love.
He did not love, as Harry did, without abandon, angry, godlike. He did not throw himself, as Character yearned to someday throw himself, into love as though it were a swimming pool, a water perfect blue and sterile, a sun bright but not overwhelming, and friends, smiling, laughing all around under umbrellas, and a music, playing somewhere somehow, perfect. He knew he did not love like this because he never had, and he never would, and love was not something he expected of life. And he wasn't unaware that love could take one by surprise. He was not a fourteen year-old girl, or anything resembling. He understood it was exciting and maddening and unpredictable. He had existed parallel to this exact conception of love for years now. And though he had never before experienced it, in the heat of it now he was ashamed of himself. He was not, he raged, a teenager anymore, spitting in the way only people who are too close to what they fear can be angry. He had not felt like one for a couple of years now, but he had proof several times over in his wallet that he was not one any longer. He did not look like one, did not talk like one, did not act like one, and all his pieces of identification showed that he was not, printed on plastic. They would sit in dumpsters for millennia after he and all of humanity were gone, proving to no one and everyone that he was not a teenager.
Even the pettiness of such an anger angered him. And wrapped up in all his convoluted fears and angers was this love, this love that bored into his head and his heart and his hands and which he bore without happiness or hope or help from anyone.
The man he loved, for it was a man, of course, was not entirely unaware of all this. He was not entirely without interest in the matter, either, only he knew and cared with the same innocent cruelty of someone who knows and cares more than he lets on, and lets on less about how much he cares and knows for fear of getting burned. And so to Antimony's halting, stuttered advances he replied with a disarming air in jokes and non-sequiturs, and to Antimony, despite himself, these became riddles the solutions to which could hold naught but everything he desired of the man, and he wrapped himself up, despite himself, in their words and tried to play along with a game whose rules he did not understand and whose existence was not entirely clear to the object of his affections.
The man he loved, for it was a man, of course, was one of his professors, and for fear of getting fired, he could not, could never, love Antimony back. But this inability to love a young man who himself was, this particular case notwithstanding, unable to love, did not stop him from letting himself be guided to the edge of the precipice.
Antimony, during the spring semester, had, enrolled in the man's class, sunk slowly into this mess, as he had seen Character, who had skin that was very, particularly sensitive to heat, once ensconce himself in a hot tub, inching his way in over a period so long that by the time he had submerged himself up to his armpits and gotten comfortable, Antimony and Harry had had their fill and withdrew their soaking bodies to the deck, looking for the clothes, dripping patterns on the painted wood in the summer night air. Unlike Character, however, the deeper Antimony got, the less he could tolerate the hot water surrounding him.
And by the time the semester ended, and his final marks showed, emptily, that his strategy, his lengthy and painful slaving over his essays as though they were love letters, was a rousing success, his classmates all got out of the hot tub, leaving him alone tied to this man, aging handsomely, charismatic, opinionated, grinning. He could not leave. And so he enrolled in a summer class, an addict, broken. He thought wearily to himself that he was now nothing more than an abused housewife, unable to leave the source of his most desperate and terrible pain. But these things he told to no one, and could not stoop to write them down in a diary or a blog, and so, with each passing day, with each passing email to this man—his love, his Ginsbergian angel—buried himself deeper in his secret folie à deux that was really only a folie à un projected by the one onto another, and reflected back, unstudied, unmarked.
~~~~
While Antimony had coffee, one weekend afternoon, with his English professor, and did his best to appear roundly within the rigid bounds of sanity, Character as well was pursuing a similar sort of feeling, albeit very differently.
At school, during the fall, in the hallways of this Concordia building or that, he had seen her for the first time. She had a face of the lightest brown, framed with caramel hair, an angular jaunty jawbone that stuck out a certain way. She wore white, thick-framed glasses, and a pair of headphones around her neck, grazing in the folds of her perfect-green hooded sweater. She smiled and had such white teeth.
He had kept on looking back at her, his eyes piercing this copse of crowd or that, darting, unable to be left behind. She was a vision. He did not, at the time, think of touching her, of kissing her, of fucking her. She was an aesthetic pleasure of such magnitude that he could not properly wrap his mind around her entirety. She was the Venus de Milo. He was but a towel, a sheet, and too small, at that. It was not until later that day, after work, after he got home, after he had made and eaten his dinner and exchanged half a dozen half-hearted words with his roommates, closed off his bedroom light and collapsed to bed, that his hands and his mind began to agree about her.
Then she showed up in his Politics & Art class in January, and through blood was birthed their awareness of each other. It was a slow affair, and they each came, at their own pace, to the emotion, to the realization, and through it all, he painted for her and for her alone, but could not tell her this for he feared and he knew that she would scorn his unadulterated, childish affections. She was too—she was too adult. So he loved her stoically, in spite of himself.
After a few months, they were here, sitting together in a small city park, one from Character's childhood, sharing a small bottle of spruce beer mixed with Jack Daniel's. They had eyes only for each other.
"So what now?"
"I dunno. I've done the blood and guts. Which is nice, but it'll only go so far. So now... Now, I guess I try to bring out my doom."
"Really? That sounds kinda, you know, ambitious. For you, I mean."
"Alright. A small, modest doom, then. I sound like an insurance salesman. Where are we going with this?"
"I don't know. Does it matter?"
"No."
He took a swig, and then another, and rode it around in his mouth, pushing it and pulling it through his teeth, making of his mouth an ersatz sluice. He spat a little bit through his teeth into the sand, an amber arc whose colour was lost to the fading light, a stain that would be cat piss to the next people to sit there. He ran his fingers along her vest, feeling the corduroy lines, smiling. She was frank, almost manly, in her ways, as though conscious of her overwhelming beauty and trying to compensate for it. He had not yet used the word 'love,' but he could feel its pending presence. It was waiting, a bulge in his pocket—she could see it, and he could feel it—but it had not come out yet. And she knew it was too soon, and she knew it was too early, and she—and yet. She rather liked it, in that way she had, of being liked, of being loved. And so she waited for him to say it, and she waited to hear herself lie to him, "I love you too" and all the little kisses that would ensue, and it wouldn't matter what they felt because they would both feel happy and that was enough, really.
Tonight, though, they were talking about his future as an artist. It was strange, to him, a piece of glass washed up on a beach. He had worn, with his thoughts, all the sharp edges off over time, but he could not stop caressing it. It was green and beautiful to him in a way he had difficulty expressing, all the neverending length of his desires and hopes tied up and toe-tagged as unrealizable unfolding at speeds he was unable to put into proper perspective. He was like a passenger who had realized that his steed was a machine and not a real horse and that it was accelerating at an exponential rate and who could do nothing but picture a parabolic curve flying off, onwards and upwards to infinity, and vacillate between perfect fear and perfect bliss.
She kissed him. He smiled, though his eyes were already far away.
~~~~
Harry was lying in bed with his laptop. As Character had those many years ago, after breaking up with his first girlfriend, Harry was dealing with Analae's absence by writing, although to his credit, he was not writing poetry. He was writing a short story, the first of many to come.
He was not a bad writer, in many ways. He had always distanced himself from his peers in his command of spelling, of grammar, of syntax, in school. He would compose pieces in spurts, quiet, raging worlds of no more than three or four hundred words, and show them to his English teachers. Invariably, though, they would rely on a melancholy, almost haunting last line for most of their potency. After graduating from high school, however, he had, in attempting to change his image, which had failed spectacularly to make him feel good about himself in any kind of way, given up this habit, this penchant for scribbling down his fears and masquerading them to anyone who would read them as fiction. Sick of being last, of settling for his role as the good-hearted boyfriend with the five-second finish, the sensitive, writerly-type, he swore himself to reinvention.
"I will," he thought, "rise above myself." He had impossibly high standards, but his attempts were not ultimately without fruit. In time he grew more and more into the image he created and then held of himself, so that even the girls he had lusted after in high school began to notice him in grape-like bunches, twos and threes and occasionally ones, and he groped, hands and mouth, in his mind, at the idea of it.
But now, post-Analae, he was nothing, not the type, not the sort—in his mind he was makeless, a horse, wild, unbranded, in a novelty, Model-T world—to pull anything off. He was glum and he wrote and he wrote and such was his life. The days trudged past, and he sweated ceaselessy and ate meagerly and softened, slowly, like an apple core.
His stories flitted about his mind, and he dreamt of them night after night, stuck in his own terrible and terrifying stories, half-formed, simple and cruel, like children. He was not even glad to be rid of Chernobyl on such occasions, but within minutes of waking, opening and closing his mouth noiselessly, he forgot what his dreams had been about, wisps escaping his mind's fingers, dancing just out of reach, and the harder he struggled to remember, the less he seemed to manage to. And so he would have continued to sink, deeper and deeper into his apathy, had it not been for Character and his forgetfulness, for once fortuitous.
And thus it was that Harry, one lackadaisical afternoon, his sheets twisted around his body as he one foot two foot stumbled out of bed, ran into a book, lying on the floor of the living room. It was from the neighbourhood library, Harry divined, in his sleep haze, his thoughts simple, short, straightforward. He flipped it over and read the front cover. It said, in big, brave letters: THE GOOD EARTH.
He was bemused. The Chinese farmer on the front cover stared meekly at him, gauging, calculating, not sure what to make. Harry made up his mind and went to make himself some breakfast. But he took the book with him. It stuck, for some reason, in one of the nooks of his mind, and, exhausted, childlike as he was, he did not try very hard to shake it free.
Over his bowl of cereal, his oat clusters, his milk, infected with sweetness, his steadfastly obedient spoon, he began to read. At first it was mostly out of a sense of curiosity. Though he had not been a reader for almost as long as he had not been a writer, he was not consciously trying to return to his old ways. What caught his head most about it was the curious quaintness it seemed to exude. He had so long been surrounded by, and in turn, surrounded himself with, technology, with modernity, that such a book, steeped as it was in another era not only alien to him, but to whom his existence, and that of the society around him, was alien too, was strangely enchanting. He considered, vaguely, between bites, and without words, such a gulf. It was beautiful, mathematical. Perfect. He closed his eyes for a moment.
He was aware, of course, that such books, and older ones, and older ones still, existed—he had read his share of Shakepeare and Milton in school, hating them and loving them in equal parts, and sordidly, all—but he did not encounter them nor their ilk anymore, choosing as he did to avoid them, in general and on principle. This one, however, had insinuated itself, by some means unobvious to him in his waking state, right into his living room, and he could not un-see, could not un-think, could not un-know it. It, infuriatingly, was. And so, grudgingly, and without betraying his odd fascination with the thing to all of the non-present onlookers, he began to read.
~~~~
"Well," he began, pausing, eyeing Antimony, stirring the coffee and the cream together, "it just so happens that there is, or rather, there was, at the time, another Alan on staff. He was a great guy, you know, but he was also pretty bald. And at a pretty young age, too. He was like twenty, twenty-five, or something. At first I just assumed that that's how he wore his hair, you know, non-existent. Some people find it a hassle." He took a sip, testing it, peering at Antimony over the far rim of his mug. "Anyway, one night, we went out drinking, a few of us, and he confided in me that he kept it so hairless, so smooth, because he had a bald patch the size of, and these were the exact words he used, 'a bald patch the size of Indiana,' on top of his head. I remembered that because it was such a strange way of exaggerating size. Plus, he wasn't even American. I think he was a Serb. He was a funny guy like that." Another sip. "In any case, in my naiveté, I happened to tell one of the female teachers, which one I don't remember. They all blur together sometimes. And before long everyone was aware how prematurely bald this guy, Alan, was, and that it was something of a sore spot to him. From that point on he was always kind of stand-offish to the other teachers. Anyway, one day, around lunch, someone pointed out that I looked kind of like Alan Alda. Which is, if I must be asked, more or less true. At least, from his MASH days."
Antimony smiled. "I always thought you looked like a Hawkeye."
"Hah! Hawkeye." He glanced out at the street, and stared at it for a few seconds, his eyes still. He pinched the table cloth slightly, rolling the material between his thumb and forefinger. "If anything, I'd be Cockeye. I was always the king of bad ideas. 'Course, if I was any more of a cock, I'd be a rooster."
A grin. "I'd let you wake me up." He wasn't really listening.
The older man swallowed, conscious, suddenly, of his age, and then brought his mug to his lips, briefly. "Well, anyway, we got christened Alan Alda and Alan Balda in pretty quick succession. Only they settled for calling us by our initials, out of a strange sense of politeness towards the other Alan. And I guess it sort of stuck. So that's the story."
"Huh."
He stared off into the street, the passing traffic. "Alan Balda. Sir B.; the acerbic Serb. Always busy, always buzzing. What a strange guy."
Before long they were at Antimony's apartment. He had instinctively wanted to avoid this, but the desire he felt in him, the fire that had cooked his clay body hard, forming from his unsolid fearful self a confidence he had not known he could muster when thinking of men, was beginning to become overbearing. Cracks, he knew, would start to form if he waited much longer. The much longer trip to his professor's house was in light of this unappealing. He fitted the key into the lock at the front door, feeling it slot in, the perfect little thunk as it hit the back of the mechanism, praying fiercely that Harry and Character would either be dead, asleep, or gone.
They were both gone. It did not take much, neither in the departments of time nor effort, for the two men to begin in Antimony's bedroom what they had set out to accomplish during the first week or so of the Spring semester. Antimony's hands tore hungrily at Alan A.'s clothes, and with the few thoughts he could manage he thanked the lord that it was summer and that neither of them was wearing much. Soon he was sucking hungrily at his teacher's erection, like a piglet at its mother's teat, knowing what it wants, and vaguely why, but not much else. Alan A. leaned back and closed his eyes, trying to shut out the thoughts of his super ego ("He's your goddamn student for Christ's sake") and ego ("God knows you've gotten better blowjobs") and enjoy the wordless, holy guttural moaning of his id. He found before long that he was not going to succeed entirely and so resorted to suggesting to Antimony a change of pace he knew the young man could not, would not refuse. They fucked. His mind shut up, if but for a short while, and they loved each other, tensely, profusely, in their own ways.
~~~~
Harry was in his bedroom, under the bed, typing on his laptop, writing. He did not hear the subtle uttered noises coming from Antimony's bedroom. He was tied up in his words, kidnapped, captured, shanghaied, stockholmed. He pressed on, forging his way through the forest, his machete not for the vines that bind but rather to dance flashing wild patters in the air, in the drops of light that fell through the canopy down to the dark underworld of the cold floor and the dusty palace it was.
~~~~
Character woke up in the middle of it. She was taking his t-shirt off. His pants were already gone. She was into it, obviously, already. He couldn't remember how he'd fallen asleep. He tried in his slowbrained numbness to catch up to her, but she was so far ahead, already fully naked, already horny, already intent on him. It wasn't until he was in her mouth that he remembered that they hadn't ever even fucked before.
He couldn't think, in the moment, of a good way to broach the topic, so he stayed quiet and let his head loll back onto the pillow. He tried thinking, but ever little lick and kiss and flickering flick seemed to wipe the black board of his mind yet darker, a large wet sponge in capable, janitorial hands.
After a few minutes, when he was good and hard and wet, she came up to meet his mouth, and he remembered to start touching her nipples. She pressed her forehead to his. He kissed impatiently at her rubicund cheeks, dancing around the drawing in of skin, trying to bruise and to not-bruise at once, his two motives motile, circling each other.
Heads still pressed together, breathing her deep, silent breaths, she spread her knees and straddled his waist. She reached down and, fishing for it, found.
He watched himself disappear into her, Ouroboros.
~~~~
He wakes up.
The first thing he remembers is that he can't remember anything.
Then: things.
But mostly: light.
The light is everywhere. He closes his eyes as tight as best he can but it gets in anyway. The pain is infuriating. His head is entirely out of his control and the world seems to swing around. Slowly he works things out, opening his lids bit by painful bit. He sees what there is to see long before it starts to make any sense to him. It's just lines and different shades of darkness for a long time. Even before he can put words, letters, ideas, concrete thoughts to what he is perceiving he knows it to be wrong. He still doesn't remember anything, but he knows, he feels it inside of him, that this is wrong.
Eventually he realizes that he is in his highschool cafeteria. The tables, yes, the tables are all there, all the same. These are they. The ceiling is much higher, though; and before long he remembers that this ceiling and these walls and floor are actually his elementary school gymnasium. With the tables from his high school cafeteria lined up just so inside. Only and he was fairly certain of this there weren't any statues of the gospels in either of those buildings. And it is on the whole brighter. In fact it seems like all the walls are painted white, as well. And so.
He is faced with a problem.
He needs to not think about it because in the back of his
head
he knows what it all means and he is scared shitless of thinking that thought those thoughts that that that ONE THOUGHT he is so goddam scared. So
he doesn't think it. Not yet at least. He pussyfoots around the subject. He does not even let himself think "I tried to kill myself." He forgets everything, everything ever, willingly. The less he is tied to anything the less he is tied to this problem. So
like a child he goes exploring. That seems the most rational thing to do, under the circumstances. He gets up, slowly. His head still hurts somewhat. He is wearing a white wifebeater. He knows that he owns/owned one and he knows that acknowledging this might be comforting but he doesn't anyway. He is wearing some nondescript grey boxers. Same for them. He is wearing some white sweatsocks. Two of his toes are poking through the left one. He walks slowly through the tables towards the nearest door. He breathes in and feels his nostrils. He thinks it is a funny thing to contemplate one's nostrils and he tries the door. It is locked. But
there is a little bit of give to the door. He steps backward half a step and tries to figure out how to think about this problem without thinking about the larger problem at hand all without thinking. It is not an easy task. He scratches at the doorpaint. Some comes off in his fingers. A little unperfect line of stupid beige on darker stupid beige. He breathes in and hits his head against the space between the doors, angry. He caves. He's empty and falling into himself. He knows it he knows it all. He opens his eyes.
"I am in hell."
And breathes out the rest of the students and the general clamour.
The food smells the talking and laughing and shock.
"Maybe," he thinks, "not?" He looks around. He recognizes this all. He thinks:
"The ceiling is back to normal height." And:
~~~~
They lay on Antimony's bed together for a few hours, drifting in and out of consciousness, in and out of each other. Antimony had difficulty taking his hands off his lover's thighs. They were not as thick and muscular as they must have once been but he took a strange, ineffable comfort from their remaining solidity anyway. The mist of lazy sunlight coming through the mottled grey curtains played on their skins, a quiet coda of slowly listing longing, a scene dead and carved in marble encased behind bulletproof glass for five-hundred years or more. He was so still. He was barely even breathing anymore.
It was still Spring, somehow, two days now to the Solstice. It felt like auburn Autumn inside, a kindly cold brought on by thick walls and strange tricks of circulation keeping their bodies close and bound together under the sheets. Small mercies. He smiled.
Graceful.
~~~~
Harry got up, stiff from having barely moved for hours, dusty, his body badly in need of many, many things he had neglected to provide it with over the course of the day. The story, though, he grinned to himself, shuffling with his laptop oblivious past Antimony's bedroom, was coming along along. Along.
~~~~
Antimony woke up slowly. He spent a few minutes breathing, eyes closed, telling himself that Alan A. wasn't gone. He exhaled, feeling the cliché envelop him, smoldering in his emotions, angry, betrayed, animal. He was over-hot and had been sweating in his sleep. He felt disgusted, disgusting. It was too late, it was too dark out, he shouldn't be waking up now, like this, no, not. A dog barked outside, somewhere along the courtyard's concrete tiles.
He got up, pulled on the t-shirt he had thrown to the floor earlier in the day, forgetting to clothe the rest of his body, and stumbled, after a second, tired-drunk, into the hallway, dark and empty, slumbered towards the kitchen, and opened the fridge door, peering into the light. He closed it. He couldn't, he wouldn't eat. He refused, remorseless, to feed the bastard hunger that had been festering for the hours he'd slept. He sat down on the floor, knees bent outwards, holding his stupid feet and leaning with his great back hunched inwards. He wondered how it had happened, whether Alan A. had fallen asleep as well, and woken up decision made, whether he had faked sleep for a half-hour, heart racing in his misdeed, or calm and merciless, whether he had debated and mulled, uncertain. How quiet he had been in creeping out. He wondered whether it had weighed on him, whether it weighed on him now, where he was, whether he was with someone else. He wondered if he was smiling, at that very moment, with beers in his belly and something's neon glow on his face and his friends at his shoulders and the cameras going off chorus to his fake tint plastic happiness. Fuck.
He strode resolutely back to his room, avoiding, savant, the clutters littering the living room floor in the dark, and got quickly and surgically dressed. He was going out, he was going nowhere, he was going everywhere, always. He turned and locked the door behind him, slipping the key into his left sock, behind the outside ankle, and took off jogging in unfrantic steps, plodding slogging slugging his way through the crowded Saturday city night, dancing around drunken groups of girls and hooting bands of boys, his heart pacing, his eyes half-closed. Before long, he began to tire, but ignored it this his limitations, his starving muscles begging for mercy, forcing himself staggeringly onward, onward.
It was almost midnight when he finally, eventually, collapsed, though he didn't know it. He fell asleep on an empty wooden bench in some park somewhere, and dreamt Harry's Chernobyl dream, crying because he was afraid Evgeni Malkin would get irradiated, and die of terrible cancer long before making it to the show.
~~~~
He wakes up. And then he remembers. He tries breathing slowly but he cannot stop and the breaths keep coming faster. He imagines being buried alive and whether it would be worse. He trembles stemmer tramor stammer tremor febrile in his dementia.
He opens his eyes. "I am in hell."
He opens his eyes. |
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