For Ash
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Here's Chatterbruck the dying lesbian rolling dough.
Flour and water, sprinkled yeast, there’s dough, swaying apron, teaspoon of salt, drydowning a Hexalen per doctor’s orders, bald as the sun, alone as every good widow should be.
Chatterbruck stops kneading, pushes her chin in her chest, gulps like a guilty rapist at a lineup. She pauses for brief reflection to face the open window and with everything in her creaky gay bones smacks a palm against the steeltop counter, whasshhiinnnggg, bilges some sick indulgent sh*t to the houseghost, whimpers to herself about weakness sanspartner, unlovable trollop, fat ugly buffalo, trollbridge bitch, old levy who can't hold no water, and these hushes of plainly lonesome domestic music spill from their sills and anesthetize us, the quartet passing her acres, at least for a while, Waldeck the polymath sh*thead in front, Iraheta the rookie worldchild trailing, aloof hohum me and Choisy the painting fibber side by side at the back, heads gophering toward the curtainless open window.
Chatterbruck’s smack birthed a sequence, sound to action, visible in real time to anyone observing. So here goes the smack, sails specter to the chase and bluebird, and here goes a Provisional Assembly goonsquad (that's us) along Greenock and Towne, Sugarhouse and Brazier, piqued at the granola dyke mewling in a minimansion designed by her dead architect wife, pillar of the town, wasn't in Vermont longer than a year yet did more than I have in three, spent six weeks sleepless in her fifties surviving on halfsmoked Alluvés and room temp Earl Grey blueprinting the new Montpelier Community Center, uploaded videos of her overworked mania online, commissioned renovations of the Coop on Granite and Bear Pond Books, sold racially inclusive LGBTQA+ glutenfree cookies at the ArtWalk last Spring, halfmoons and jammies, macarons and tirggels, rumballs and broas, and damn are women like her missed in the thirteen left, nigh celestial compared to what we have, here they go, who we have, a den of hawing juniors spooked out from a wash buying αET from Lockly Gables the local Empathogen trafficker, who we suspect barters hand&mouth stuff for his stock but he's too paranoid and lowlevel besides to warrant a fiscally and computationally taxing personal investigation (he's an 'anarchocryptofascist with an Azerbaijani VPN' Iraheta tells me after some dutiful research, but I've no real idea what that is) and the kids never narc on him when queried anyway, probably because Lockly is the only guy in town invested enough in Shulgin derivatives and designer rockmeoffs to supply them routinely, so as the doomed youth scurry home they are too preoccupied with self to look out enough to see, always happen to miss the pollens skiffing flower to flower, the bassinets of hares leering black and vacantly at dells lost to knowing, the airstreams and lifelines rushing sugar over Hubbard Park, the tower, nesting warblers cooing comely nonsense from their incubators, bluethroats drowsing in a staked sapling like buoys on calm water, whose children grow by way of worm, literal growth, meat in meat, tree in tree, and the kids think nothing of this, as if their patter didn't start the propulsion, as if nothing they enact could cause, and so of course since we have established they are sh*t at uninvolved observation, noticing stuff, they miss the people, too, miss the Éwanjé's scooping dead mallards out of the pool we advised them not to build in the first place and the Zuckman's preteen quintuplets forced into slave labor with an impromptu assembly line put up of exorbitant Universal Holiday decorations and of course they miss my favorite of all, the tardy for mass Comăneci's unwittingly strangling their carsat infant daughter with a stringed bonnet so frilled and gigantic and stupid it could have been specially sowed for the duch*ess of Devonshire or whatever. And this happens on daytime strolls.
Come evening we chuck old women from balconies.
Mean to do it and everything.
Head's split, bleed some, two story falls. They were fineish. Not dead at least.
We told them,
'We want your food and your stock and everything you can give us and we will beg inside your living rooms carrying compacts on our ankles and bombs in our crotches and comically huge knives, you poor innocent bastards, we are here in the night slinking like faint ships, haunting the boulevards, planting the seeds of a choir so grand and simple it is a wonder it is not already sprouting in the wired heads of the world.'
Left ear, Brian Eno’s 'Music for Airports', soothing, treats me gently.
Waldeck abducts a rhubarb pie from a minifridge out back and eats it with the dislodged end of a shoehorn. The four of us have nothing else now and are broken men and have lost too much too quickly to care about our own caring.
Mongrel dogs.
"A pack you don't want to see coming."
On the drivewayside street Iraheta inspects the felled widows to ensure their pulses and since Chatterbruck looks good for her age he gropes her momjeans and spanks her and she thrashes on the pavement brokenknee'd, pitiful cougary jitterpangs, scratches at the blacktop in clawed arches, which he considers a swell and obvious signal of her okayness.
I shake my head. So does Choisy on the couch, charcoal sketching the facedown dowagers in a black notepad, letting out a murmur of curses under his breath. Stupid perfect f*ckwit dumbass. Iraheta's a SpanishJapanese boybandy heartthrob who only wears hoodies and ratty jeans like he's a social media billionaire mogul already, which he isn't, and really he hasn't done anything in his life except go to a couple firing ranges and get a Mechanical Engineering Masters and a tattoo of the Iberian Peninsula above his heart, maybe probably banged out a bunch of overdose potentials at PanAsian Alliance sh*theel ragers.
"They're okay," Iraheta shouts jogging to the front door. He stops at the bricked plastermold frame, leaning, armpit at his eyeline, Adam's apple so pronounced he may as well have a plum lodged in there.
"Praise be," Choisy chants next to me sarcastically or maybe not sarcastically, I can't tell the difference anymore. Choisy's a ginger cherubfaced former NetSec admin surrealist painter who drones his parents crates of cash every month to sustain their chronic gambling habits and lies for fun so often he's legitimately forgotten what's true about the life he's lived or not lived, and really he's appealing for no good reason I've discovered thus far. Choisy's spirit is in you without you wanting it there, though, make no mistake—it is a subliminal master at interpersonal, metaphysical imposition.
"Can we go?" Iraheta asks yawning, patting his knuckles against his lips. "They’re from Idaho."
"Got out of Coeur d’Alene before the carpet," Waldeck says, rhubarb mouthful dribbling into the gaped spandrel of his pants. "Kinda' impressive for olds."
"Probably circ*mstance," Choisy notes.
"Just grab the food. Everything's low," Waldeck says.
He's right.
We're desperate.
Hungry, drooling.
Beat ourselves out of tiredness, howl at passing trains.
Throw rocks at lit windows.
Talk shop over trashcan fires at midnight, philosophy, war, guns, women, anything, one in the morning, nightingale hour.
Sorites, Erewhon, Defuzzification.
CZ75 compact. PP91. M4 Carbine.
Wellington. Lasalle. Suvorov. Tamerlane.
Thoughts that needn’t be announced like: "Munqidh was unusually chummy with the Franks and we think he kinda hung out with the Templars. Pretty cool. The medieval period likely consisted of a much richer multiethnic connection of relationships than we previously realized.”
It is up to us to stomach orders we would not stomach otherwise.
It is the violence of a better future whether they see it or not.
At least know in my heart I only take pleasure in it when I choose and every now and then I halfway feel a tinge of sadness, distant remorse, although you must know in the interest of pure honesty unadulterated, after seeing so many toothless mademoiselles and hunchbacked seething geriatrics and Swisshole'd cheerleadertypes with Glock rounds in their chests, you sorta get numb to it all even if you don't want to.
You must be numb to be a tireless tendril. Numb to be a patriot.
And I'm a fine enough patriot, if not a milquetoast one. I amenably f*ck my girlfriends (like you) who hate me or don't love me as much as they say (like you) and eat chicken and create art and pick up the slack and volunteer and pet kittens and puppies and love as much as I can. I read history and what came before. I try to understand. I pour myself into pursuits and open my heart to the world. I jog in the mornings. Wake up at 5:30.
I live freely.
I do the things my freedom affords.
Like watching the first Western sieges unfold at Waldeck's house in Greece while sipping drinks with umbrellas in them. Violet Waves.
They start with the dogs. Always the dogs.
Demotivational technique or something.
Then it's a peaceful Saturday afternoon until a smooth uninterrupted coating of Molotov Bread Baskets whistles steelfire into your backyard, ordinances they bought from GodKnowsWho, manufactured in the insurgent basem*nts and sewers of GodKnowsWhere.
They carpet bombed the wharfs up to Bodega Bay, smelted the mountains to flatland.
In San Diego chicks in modulated quadcore Phrygian caps used light infantry and aerial blitzkriegs instead, knocked senseless battalions of phlegmhacking keeling state troopers and Coast Guard seamen with shockcollar'd milkmaid yokes, autobranding meteor hammers that stitch in your slavery the moment they cocoon your ankles or wrists, rode in on retrofit Vespa 150 Taps (antitank scooters popularly used by French paratroopers during the Algerian War) heaving white phosphorus and glassjaws, boomboomerangs, hexachloroethane, and whoever was unlucky enough to escape the earlymorn Oerlikon was vaporized by the Mechskeleton'd wristcannon'd girls tracking prey on the beaches and city edges.
In two days it's over. Nothing to be done.
In one vid they forced a twelve year old boy to say,
'We deserve this for what we've done throughout history, for what we are by nature.'
And then they shot him in the back of the head and threw him in a stack of his contemporaries lining Venice.
They laughed and told jokes afterward, wiped the sweat from their brows as if bolting cattle or picking weeds. When they smiled we could tell they were in love with their cause, could tell they could not see what we saw, imbued by their conduct. They were happy. Righteous.
Just like us.
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We amble down State House way, steelcuff a glitter of soft twinks lighting effigies of the Provisional Assembly's president on the top steps of the Supreme Court, seven against our four, a welcomed scuffle in our eyes, a chance to prove the whitebread immutable truths of centralized government.
In their faces I see history and family, a nice case of the whatcamebefores, and I will remember them always like I remember everyone else always and have no choice but to relish their approximate distance to mine, alive with them in the same time and place. Let us share the Vermont air.
Here together.
Distantly related. They turn. They are afraid of us but not like I am afraid of us.
Waldeck grabs a 5'4" Liberian imp wearing a glitzy mauve parka and flips him into one of his own burning puppets which, you know, sets the poor pintsized rascal on fire and stuff and he sprints aglowing across the green to the State House, his remaining comrades rightfully horrified but also readying their blackjacks to greet us with a flurry. Luckily I'm at back of them and Choisy steps in front of me anyway, swishing out an oaken cudgel he whittled himself from a pair of soledisemboweled laceless Chelseas and he harshly thwacks two of the sham insurgents in their tummies, the nihilistic pretend terrorist motherf*ckers, and they spill down the steps like stupid little rolypolys, land in exaggerated poses at the bottom, hunched, spinecurled, forearms spread lengthwise over their foreheads, armpits showcasing worms of unbathed hair, gradual deposits of spoiling tan dandruff.
A little aways Iraheta beats down Lockly Gables with an extendable baton. Lockly cries out for the death of the Provisional Government and the Montpelier Militia and for all Uncle Sam shadowpigs to be culled at once, remarkably eloquent for a guy getting his face bashed in. A prism'd assortment of pills fall from Locky's elkskin vest when he finally shuts up, all of which Iraheta pockets.
A bit ill at the jostling I pull out an H&K Pocketpuss* I found on some dead blonde 1488 girl in a creek few weeks back and click four rounds in the air, scaring away the rest of the douche assemblage and rustling awake a pondlost nest of loons who dart northward panicked and squawking. Waldeck, busy smithereening the face of some porridgebrained blonde twirp, sighs at the shots and drops the kid callously, skull trampoling off the concrete, strawberrytongue folding sickle on a puffed and toothless track of bottom gums.
"Some discretion would be cool," he says.
"I'm sorry you feel that way," I reply, sitting on the front steps. I stretch out to probe the sky, starfish, a bit too nostalgic, branding volleys of helium and sunmelt and willowwhirl stellar vapors spooring crosswise, some waltzing, some indented in the black and smoldering there, charming now n' thens, small glistens for the heart strings.
Iraheta plops four steps down and offers up some pills coral colored and capsuled.
"What are they?"
"Dunno," he says, taking three at once dry.
"Okay," I say and take three with him.
Choisy jogs over, tattered Molle vest, jiggling Shiraz corks strung round the taper of his bush hat to ward off insects. He takes four to 'show us up'. Later I watch him from afar sh*tting in the Dog River, cursing and cackling at the moon.
She told me on the Seine before departing away forever in a yellowcab,
"You're a pack you don't want to see coming."
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(Provisional President Haxo, cerise frock coat, knee breeches, periwig, orating seven weeks ago at the renovated Hildene Lincoln Family Home, formerly the summer getaway estate of Robert Todd Lincoln, 99 elected officials in attendance, eight thirteen in the morning, August 20th, and I forget much of what was said except the last part, the part pertaining to me and mine:
"This is our Levee en masse and also Vermont's first Dragonnade, God help us.
There is no other way.
Maybe in the attempts to restore our nation we will die and so I beg you brothers and sisters, if you find yourself on the precipice of death please smile at the rightness in your hearts, laugh when you realize you have died for liberties so enmeshed with the human spirit they can never be disjointed and will forever rise in the spines and heads and chests of men and women everywhere until the sun eats the world.
Cold history is with us and it is the heartbeat of a dream.
I love you, brothers and sisters.
And I am sorry for the perils to come.")
"It'll help conscription rates," Haxo explains, picking at a platter of chile de árbol with his fingers from the safety of his chamber throneage, shrouded in the changling strip overcasts of fanblown vertical blinds. "And we get free stuff. I love that part."
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I own a baseball bat but I have never played baseball. Baseball (I am sure it says this in some ancient codex somewhere) is a tedious and unsexy thing, like sleeping with a fat girl or milking a cow.
But I still go to the batting cages sometimes. I've been four times this month. I've told no one I go. If baseball was just hitting home runs I would watch it every day.
I go alone and make sure to hide my face, Clark Kent glasses, black hat, pushed up turtleneck. Cedars cast shadowlines over me catching the infield lights, march up the enclosing hills fidgeting slate, duskdim quakes of leaf and outbloom. I'm sh*t at hitting anything but when I do connect I crack the heck out of them, swing like I mean it. And I do mean it. Maybe too much. That crack is more useful to me than therapy.
Pause to breathe in.
Trees have always given me a certain kind of calm. Can't explain it. Nostalgic calm, I guess it is. Trees and wind do it. Leaves swaying. Branches crackling underfoot. The tart sugar of a fresh cherry on your lips.
There's some things that make me stop to think on the tuft of it all. At first it's overwhelming and hurts and bigness has no place in the human mind and the Everything of Everything is too knotty, too multiform, but then there's something freeing about the ignorance. It's too much stuff, so let it go, see what you want to see. There is a point where it becomes impossible to understand anything, where every line of exposition requires ten lines of context, each of those requiring ten more and so on, fractally. And so what? Should we shudder at the irreducibility or marvel at the sureness of our misunderstanding, which is an understanding in itself?
If you have lived and perceived you have seen it close enough to be sure of its capacity to exist even if it has not existed for you. Intakes. A fly on a cup on a plate, heart patterned, ruffled handkerchief next to it stained in Bordeaux and bisque fingerprints. A cherry in your mouth when you're ten, spit out the center. The sweet trace of a lover's perfume lingering above her neck. Tricolored fireworks flashing and disappearing into thinsmoked contrails over a river in Saigon. Napalm turning your sisterwife to goop. Glorious hail in the Riviera, black day, in the town square a twenty two year old (secretly white nationalist, openly hom*osexual) bicycle courier is run down by a second wave Ukrainian feminist in an electric blue cargo van, above them some twenty meters up in an apartment building built during the 19th century, a thirty five year old brown haired brown eyed perfectly average couple have penetrative sex for the 2,143rd time together and the woman goes into the bathroom to cry afterwards, realizing she no longer loves her husband like she used to and is bored of him and is instead now totes in love with Jerry or Mike or Ed or some other former "friend"/coworker/FWB and not Chosen Husband Person because reasons and feelings, reasons and feelings she doesn't really believe even when she convinces herself of them.
An Elantra blows up in Homs, prompting a grandfather of eight,
"How many dead this time?"
A heron flies over a gully, crests and takes off, spreads itself for no one, I saw this in St. Cloud and in the swales of Louisiana, most of the South.
The gully's stacked with skulls. There's so many they rise out of the water and slick together and grind themselves down to chalk during the summer storms.
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A decade before The Women of the West, before the shock and awe, the mass conscripted crucifixions and 747 drownings and ritualistic dog cullings, when you were just a database administrator or accountant or art director or PHD student or whatever you were and not spread like you are now and when I was just a farmerpoet in the baking cuts of Arizona, you and I dressed Red Carpetishly well for a party at Waldeck's place in Porto Rafti even though it was only a casual soirée with like fifteen close associates, mostly couples and coworkers, everyone else in tshirts and flipflops.
Waldeck's wife Isla (Fran Drescherishly obnoxious but thinks she's still hot New Jerseyian Jewess) told one of his exemployees she wanted to have a threesome with him and his new (these are her words, not mine) 'quadroon' wife. She told this wife her skin looked like her morning mochas. The exact words,
"Wow, you're so pretty! Your skin looks just—and I mean just—like my morning mocha, girl, haha. Seriously."
Later on after five Rum and Diet co*kes, Isla windowkissed a short doughfaced idiot with a pompadour fade through the sliding glass door leading to the balcony. Waldeck didn't seem to mind. Ignored it. Shrugged. Must not have cared, born with ingrained pillars of integrity and good vibes and earnest understanding, a kindness long forgotten.
He cooked for the party. Basmati and lemon'd chicken and stuffed grape leaves and grilled artichokes and bowls of olives, fresh loaves of psomi, a mangohabanero spread we put on everything. He spoke to everyone and they spoke to him. Respected him. Were glad to see him doing so well. Patted his back and laughed with him and sang songs and reminisced and told stories from college, from old work, from high school, 'that one time we ran from the police in Tempe after getting caught spraypainting hom*osexual slurs on the drivethru windows of the ChickfilA, that one time you saved us from bedbugs by recommending Diatomaceous Earth, that one time [actually four times for funsies] you got a perfect BUD/S score but turned down any involvement in crucial military operations to stay freezin n' wheezin' in foxholes with unpromotable 'fair to middling' friends, that one time you had to explain to a whole Computational Mechanics classroom you weren't enrolled in the difference between Quine's statement that "no statement is immune to revision" is immune to revision and Quine's statement that "no statement is immune to revision" isn't immune to revision and everyone walked away more confused than before so you did a bad job but you're not a CompSci teacher so it's okay you Prussian PanGermanic Visigoth outlander motherf*cker, I still love you."
They didn't pay much mind to his wife, though. Why do you think this is, my love?
I overheard Isla using this jacko*ff quote unquote "inventor" Villatoire (you remember him and don't lie to me, thank you) as a surrogate therapist on the balcony, you were there, we were sharing a 27 in the far corner leaning on the Plexiglas railing trying to be alone and I had my hand around your waist and you had yours in my back pocket and you told me to shhhh so we could hear their conversation so I leaned to put my head on your shoulder and swayed with you to the muzak of the sea, the slishslosh of night waves, the oscillating warbles of beach owls, the wet smacking of naked teenage feet somewhere on the shoreline sand, and we listened to an uninhibited Isla spill out her Iscariotguts to one of her husband's oldest friends, a guy he met in a Milwaukee Middle school for God sake, who couldn't wait to jump the bones of his confidant's wife and forget the antecedent twenty years of friendship and good times and trust.
All for a little warmth and wetness, eh?
She said,
"Hey, Anton, your neck muscles look strong. What are those, again? Lats? Quads? Haha. You are what I could have had, if my life went right. Now I just have two chubby C plus kids and a husband who thinks I'm a shrew and doesn't come home most nights. What am I supposed to do with that? Anton—listen, Anton. I need you to tell me something. Am I still hot? Am I... worth f*cking?"
Villatoire picked up her hand and kissed it.
"Of course, Isla. You are resplendent."
Sunsets are sometimes resplendent. Mountains. Forests. Lakes. Crevasses. A really good crack at a ball. A well written passage. A meeting a long time coming. A cherry picked from the first season's harvest, a freshly sculpted guitar. All those things can be resplendent, for sure. And many more things. But a fortysomething cheating housewife with an associates degree in theater, too much expensive makeup and a couple extra pounds in her tummy/neck/thighs from the pregnancies of her dumb ugly kids? No, that's not resplendent, it's not close to resplendent and it never will be, no matter what stupid horny Anton Villatoire says.
Villatoire and Isla exchanged numbers. You scoffed at her and remarked at what a terrible person she is and I told you that you do similar things and are not as unlike as you're pretending and I see everything, my dear. In response you told me if we saw everything about one another in detail we would only hate ourselves and each other more, to not kid ourselves, to think on the future pastless, train our amnesia to bolster our want. You said,
"Think about how many oranges it takes to make a single glass of juice."
I didn't think you were right then but I think you're right now. There are so many things I haven't the heart to tell you, things that would in no way make anything better if you knew them despite their truth. About the girls, about the cabins. About the dumbstruck codgers who couldn't save their wives, hugging each other on the bottom stairs like a couple of frostbitten yearlings, amniotic almost, dawdling tearsnot concoctions sashaying above their lips. We loved them for being so pitiable.
I will tell you of one, in the interest of pure honesty unadulterated.
Just one. Apply it to the others as they were not much different. Celebratory flares from other tendrils to the north, doing the same and not encountering much trouble.
It's redoak, silverscreened windows on the top floor, a three story wraparound deck up to the front door sitting on top of a two car garage, half acre of autumnleave'd backyard crinkling like cellophane. A Toyota Tacoma and a beat up crimson Prius idle in the driveway. Out back the propane grill and above ground pool both spill warmly mists from their centers.
A clutch of whispered female voices emit woodenly from the front door. No men.
8 PM, cloudless.
Choisy kicks open the door, flashlight AK tucked into his shoulder. Me, Waldeck and Iraheta step in after him unarmed, stretching, yawning, greeted by five twenty somethings laying flat stomached in a circle in their PJ's reading each other's tarot cards. Adjacent to their little powow the chromesilver kitchen whirrs applianceishly, lit by mottled lights buried behind the transluscent fridge. Nearer to us the girls panic, roll and curl themselves into balls and retreat into corners but Choisy rounds them up quick, kicks them back to the center.
Five college sophom*ores, petite and pretty and isn't it our lucky day? Waldeck drools the most. He's been on a tear and not a healthy one, either. He'll f*ck a swan and a manatee and not see much difference 'cause, hey, they're both mostly in the water, right? To NewWaldeck, it's about the thwarting. The subjugation. The right to have won and to keep winning, victory after victory.
To be honest though love lately its been hard to take him seriously. He's aging years in weeks from the overconsumption, the Scotch breakfasts, dumbbells and treadmills no match for three thousand calorie drunken binges, uglygrand feasts of salt and sucrose, and he dresses now like he picks his clothes out of the closet blindfolded, a surrealist cartoony mixture of Pancho Villa and ultradashing ecosophisticate millionaire, scaled down strawfelt Sombrero, rectangular ballistics goggles, intricate (see: hideous) titian floral shirt tucked into a pair of umber slacks overlayed with pouches of .38's.
Iraheta ropeties the girls without a change in expression and bounds their mouths and hands and feet and we pilfer whatever we can. Iraheta's the only one without a mask. Iraheta never wears a mask. Says,
"What are they gonna' do? Have me arrested?"
The girls wriggle and cry, wordlessly beg garbled nothing.
The only redhead in the group rolls to her back, calmest of the gaggle, gazes up at the shedding popcorn ceiling, a glisten of soft moonlight lighting her face in sepia. I notice a symbol patched into the right sleeve of her shirt, a wagon wheel superimposed over a dandelion...
There's a Segway gang in current day late 21st century (or 1st Era, depending on who you ask and what calendars you're buying) Montpelier called The Easy Riders and boy oh boy do these vigilante freelove schmegmaeating retards really piss me off. Every time we've come across them in person they offer us peace ('No hard feelings, guys, promise, honor to Mama Terra') and a joint and maybe a "shared shag" with one of their zonked out concubines but a few days later they'll be glassing an Assembly allied cafe and man it makes no god damned sense. Infuriating co*cksuckers, the lot of them. Shouldn't even be around anymore but the amount of pretentious richparented counterculture artfa*gs in New England is astounding, blinding almost, even to someone from Los Angeles.
In the fridge: two handles of Svedka, four liters of root beer, four cherry pies, a bag of celery, Extra Hottt salsa, WonderBread, three cartons of Camel 9's (the pink pack), batteries, a broken water purifier and about forty five cans of Coors Light, a quarter already opened. Choisy and I throw it in our mishmash of sh*t.
In the freezer: five cartons of vanilla Häagen Dazs, six bags of frozen meat, mostly deer, eleven bags of frozen mixed vegetables, and another handle of Svedka. We leave nothing for them but the ice trays.
Waldeck peeps the girls pacing back and forth. Iraheta collects wallets from their pockets and reads through their personal information.
Waldeck says,
"Which one you guys want?"
"Redhead," I say and the redhead doesn't squirm at this or look at me or do anything.
"Okay. I want the black one," Waldeck says and he grabs her by the arm, dragging her down the spiral staircase whistling something vaguely Gaelic and triumphant. Ailein duinn, maybe. She kicks at his back but Waldeck's a bit fluffy now around the lovehandles her foot's reaching so he hardly feels it and keeps stomping circularly downward without a care. Choisy examines his options, scratching his chin, extracting a slip of fuzz. Iraheta mouths eeny, meeny, miny, moe before snapping to the girl on the far right, an ethnically indeterminable Latin/Middle Eastern/Polynesian in pink unicorn gear.
"Gotta' stick with my people."
"Who are your people again?" Choisy asks.
"The world is my people, brother."
Iraheta picks her up over his shoulder and smacks her ass as he does so and moves to the master across the living room, slamming the door shut with his foot. Choisy and I swivel and look over the rest of the girls.
"You know what, buddy? I'm kind of tired," Choisy says. He extends his orangejello arms out in an X and pushes a trail of fake highpitched whinnies from the reaches of his gut, inexplicably bending over to touch his toes five times with the tips of his fingers.
"Me too," I say.
"Let's relax, then. Have a proper date."
Three left: blonde, redhead, Asian. Girls really have their diversity quota covered, anyway.
Choisy grabs the Asian (XL navy turtleneck, midcalf socks, black ponytail, nothing else) and the blonde (pajama bottoms with Pug faces on them, bronze bralette, wavy bob) and sits them up at the kitchen table. He grabs the recently stolen vanilla ice cream from his satchel and eats it in front of them with his hands. The blonde girl's in hysterics and doing too much sobbing to see anything probably, but the Asian powerstares back at Choisy, intense and unblinking, brickwalled. Choisy placidly eats the ice cream with his fingers, lets it drip into his lap, lets it soak into his perfectly manicured five o'clock shadow, grinning a Cheshire fang'd sneer at the Asian. Her brows shoot up, quiver. He dislodges a chunk of ice cream from the container and holds it in his lap and stands to remove her gag.
Pause to breath in.
Choisy presses the vanilla chunk to her lips.
"Eat."
She does. She eats. She chews at the chunk. He presses harder and rubs his stained hand over her face, her eyelids, her nose, her cheeks. He paints her like he paints everything. Her expression reminds me of Truth Coming Out of Her Well.
Once the chunk is completed, Choisy cleans his hand with her hair, digs in, scratchy nails, tickles her scalp creamladen.
"What's your name?" Choisy asks, leaning back in the chair.
"Mmm. More," the Asian girl whispers.
"What? Speak up. Moore? Mary Tyler? Julianne?"
"Mandy," I say.
"M...ore," the Asian girl says.
"Oh, M-uh-ore. Is that Italian?" Choisy asks.
"Amore?" I ask.
"Like the eel?" Choisy asks.
"That's a Moray," I say.
"More," the Asian girl squeaks.
Choisy points to her sniffing in bursts, shaking his head, eyebrows raised a tinge under the start of his hairline.
"This some kind of fetish or something?" he asks.
"I'm hungry," the Asian girl says.
"Suit yourself."
Choisy stands grabbing her scalp, stepping behind her, jerking back her head and nearly jolting her from her chair. She squeals a bit but nothing more. Incredible composure, honestly.
He grabs the rest of the cream in a single mass and pushes it into her mouth and nose. Her legs kick. She's drowning in sugarmilk, dead skin, marl speck skimming from the vents, she's trying her hardest to gulp it down at fast as possible and wiggling her bound hands and unintentionally arcing her back enough to crack it.
Choisy doesn't stop. He's holding the halfmelted mass by a palm now, really getting in there, squishing deeper to deepest like a true All State Champion of Iced Cream.
She's a trooper and finishing it.
"Gee, you can really guzzle," Choisy says.
He spreads the cream again, this time gaping open her mouth and spreading it around the inside of her cheeks and gums, up her nostrils.
Then she bites down with her front teeth and takes his index finger with it.
An impressive spritz of blood fountains out of Choisy's bonestump, mustaching the Asian girl in deep red. She exhales. Choisy curls over and shrieks into his stomach. He flails, stumbles, takes too many steps, crashes into the fridge and a couple Kachinas and macaroni picture frames embarrassingly spill on top of his head and he collapses holding his bleeding hand and grunts and pants and says f*ck about a million times. Asian girl spits his finger out on the kitchen tile.
"Worthless slant c*nt," Choisy screams.
A shirtless heartboxer'd Iraheta pops his head out from the master bedroom and shouts,
"Everything okay in there, boys?"
"Choisy got his finger bit off."
"Wow, how did that happen?"
"Estupido," I shout back and Iraheta bellylaughs and disappears back to his likely ongoing rape scene, although I suppose I have no real hard evidence. Choisy's still on the ground holding his hand and panting.
"You know," I say, strutting to the divide of the kitchen and living room, "this might be more trouble than it's worth."
"What?"
I point to the patch on redhead's jacket.
"Those tophatted queers won't do sh*t," Choisy says.
"Are you sure?"
Silence. Doesn't answer. Bleeds to himself like a molesting idiot. Finishing quicker than usual, Iraheta exits the room alone and stretches and goes 'ahhhhhhhh' and says good morning for some reason.
"Where's the girl?" I ask.
"Oh, she's just resting," he sleepily replies.
I drag the redhead to the master bedroom and plop her down beside her unconscious partially naked ethnically ambiguous friend and shut the door. The pillows have cute pink ducks embroidered on them. Redhead shifts to her ass and sits up, pauses to breath in.
I sit Indian style on the floor adjacent to her under the single window, candycane curtain rippling behind me soused in the 'ol skygloss, the satinbend of the moon. I lean up to remove redhead's gag.
Her eyes dart to the terracotta shine uncoiling languid along the walls, the witchdark quantum shadows skipping splitframed under the bed, and when she jitters sternum to heel at my retch I laugh at her as hard as I can muster and she does not understand, really does not understand, as much misunderstanding as possible, so she continues to squint nervously at the sho*racked closet door stuffed with stilettos and pumps and sneakers from the Orient, 'cutefab greyblack flats from Mephisto', probably searching for the sharpest of them to make her brave escape against the bourgeoisie corporate stooge or whatever I am to these sucklings.
I laugh at her again.
"I'm not gonna' do anything."
"Why not?" Her voice changes halfway through. The why is up and the not is whispered.
"Girls like you aren't so hard to find if you look in the right places."
I try to smile as pleasantly as I can after saying this but it's not so pleasant as my teeth are ruined from two decades of chain smoking and putting too much sugar in my morning coffee(s) and just generally forgetting to put any thought or effort into a daily hygienic regimen.
I bathe more in tributaries than in bathtubs.
No answer. She looks down and lets her hair fall and she shakes.
"What's your name?"
"Can I not say?"
"Sure. What's with the patch?"
"Can I not say?"
"No, this one you gotta' say."
"Why? You said you're not gonna' do anything."
"Okay, so this one you gotta' say or I will do things. Better?"
"Boyfriend."
"Name?"
"Mother Teresa."
"Would you like anything? Water?"
"Let us go. Don't do this."
"What do you think I'm doing?"
"You're letting them rape my friends."
I sigh and nod and push my cheeks in between my teeth.
"Welp, there's three of them and one of me. How do I get around that?"
"Kill them in their sleep."
"You want to hear a secret?"
No reply but I tell her anyway.
"I sorta' think the Waves are right sometimes," I say. I pause. Peer up at her with my best take on puppy eyes and remove the turtleneck mask. "Men are dangerous. At least the big gruff n' tough testosteroney ones are and there's a lot of those in my experience. Can't really do much with somethin' that brutish except conscript it to cannon fodder. So take solace in the fact that we're cannon fodder and I'm gonna' get bricked and you're not, okay? I know that's some pretty cold comfort given the circ*mstances, but it's the best I can do."
"I hope my boyfriend bones your dead face."
"Now, see, I don't understand." I light up a smoke. "We're the only thing keeping you cushy and alive and gettin' an education so what choice do you have? You want to live in San Francisco right now? You think your boyfriend and his genderfluid spindly friends can fend off a horde of chicks with buckets of hate in their hearts and bazookas and robot suits? Probably not, right? Well me and my friends can, or sort of can a little sometimes, which is better than not at all I reckon. So yeah, we are taking your stuff 'cause we need it more than you do. Montpelier and all free cities, well, they've got to count their pennies or the state—the nation they're rebuilding—is gonna' be a sinkhole, radioactive goo farms from Roanoke to Bangor. You want that to be your life?"
I have a penchant for monologing, especially to girls. It's something I'm working on. I have a lot of bad traits and this is among the worst. Unbearable and time wasting and not efficient. I know I've done it to you before and it makes me wince and want to jump off of Mansfield.
Ten seconds, no answer, then:
"N... No."
"What's your boyfriend's name?"
Commotion in the other room. No voices, no gunshots, silverware clacking against itself, pans rattling—probably just Choisy losing blood, which he deserves.
"Dylan St. Just."
"Fitting."
She doesn't respond.
"What're his haunts?"
"They go all over."
"Where's he sleep?"
"Any gutter he can find."
"Where's his favorite one?"
"Along the Winooski. They camp there a lot."
"Thank you. You've been very helpful."
I gag redhead again and drag her back to the party.
Waldeck's back, serene, hair static and wiry across the whole of his scalp. He's smoking, which he quit years ago, and drinking a Coors, which he also quit years ago (drinking light beer was the quit, not quitting drinking in general, which is insane and illadvised). Iraheta spanks the blonde on the floor and tells her she's a bad, bad girl and she sobs into her rags.
Choisy's at his chair now, holding his AK into the Asian girl's chest.
"Let's go," I say.
"Go?" Waldeck shouts back. "Party just started, blanco."
"She told me where they are," I say.
"Who?" Waldeck asks.
"Easy Riders."
"What if she's lying?"
"Take her with us, then."
Waldeck chugs his beer, tosses the crushed can at the Asian's forehead. He saunters up to me, chest puffed out.
"Where?" he asks.
We leave the girls and stroll along the banks around eleven and extort a donut shop on the way and Choisy decides to go the Montpelier Provisional Assembly hospital like a girl. So it's just me and Waldeck and Iraheta.
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The Taproom glows invitingly tealrouge along Main Street, only establishment open at this hour. I smack a streetrat sitting on his motorcycle outside the closed down Sunoco next door. The impact of my bat on his silly Speed Racer helmet rattles his brains, forces his visor'd face into a set of chainwrapped ultracoolguy handle bars, which also rattle his brain, crotchrocket tipping and crushing his leaning leg. Waldeck brings him down clean with a wallop to the back of the head using an exaggeratedly giant steel wrench I didn't even know he owned. He takes the kid's wallet --
Jeremy Tryke of Charlotte, North Carolina, age 23, 5'10", 155 pounds, dimmed ochre hair, hazel eyes, $230.54 on his person, fauxgold watch, ermine jacket, nickel belt, breath mints, Zojirushi steel mug, screencracked late 2020's blackberry, a locket of his mother with the inscription,
"Sois libre et aime."
We leave him there. Iraheta takes five fillings from Tryke's mouth.
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Maybe seven years ago before the Big Stuff we met up with Waldeck and Isla and Villatoire the fake inventor in the presidential suite at the Cosmopolitan in Vegas. Villatoire brought his then mistress slash assistant (missistant? asstress?) Mae, an extravagantly outfitted Cruella de Vilish Dutch whor* he found somewhere in the Alps who wreaked of plastic surgery, botched parts. Her whole demeanor said,
"Let me be young again, please, I will do anything, I will do anything. A-n-y-t-h-i-n-g."
Villatoire told stories of his time in the Arctic protecting stupid whales from the Japanese and the Norwegians. You were enamored and so was Isla, of course, and so was Mae. Waldeck and I crossed our arms and huffed. Me out of envy, Waldeck out of ennui and the daily fatigues of supporting himself.
Okay, like, so what, you saved a couple of whales? Who gives a sh*t? I could save whales if I really cared enough...
He told stories of his time with the Arma dei Carabinieri in Rome, raiding opiate dens and liberating illegal brothels and rescuing underage girls from sex traffickers in the Balkans.
Okay, like, so what, you saved a couple starving underage hookers? Who gives a sh*t? I could save a couple starving underage hookers if I really wanted to...
But seriously I'll never be able to top a guy like Villatoire. He radiates an Italian magic suaveness that scares the living sh*t out of me and on top of that he's perfectly polished at every moment, pressed grey suit, Versace watch with a diamondblue head as big as his whole wrist, some nuts expensive loafers so beyond my scope I probably couldn't pronounce the brand name, etc, etc. And if you take out the impeccable ladykiller lonewolf Slayer of All and Every Last Damn puss* vibe, he is still a polyglot who can conversationally get across most of mainland Europe without any real trouble despite being born in Camden, New Jersey and living in the insufferable frozen hellhole of sadsad cityvillage Milwaukee for the first nineteenish years of his life. I only know this because he told us, loudly.
Your feet pointed toward him. Your whole posture changed. You perked up to listen and leaned into the table and put your knuckles to your chin like a fawning groupie. Isla and Mae did the same. The three of you had the biggest eyes on I'd ever seen. I'm surprised your collective underwear could hold in the deluge.
"When I was twenty five I built the world's first fully robotic elbow joint. Boston Dynamics got the patent first but I built it first, so I kept on building stuff ever since."
"Oh yeah? What have you built since then?" you ask. You're lit up. Clearly interested. If I wasn't there and you were at some bar and Villatoire was there you'd rush to him in a second and forget I existed and don't lie to me, thank you. Villatoire and Old Waldeck are the Apex, the wolves who can eat any sheep.
"I built a holographic interface for car dashboards, that one started selling in Seoul last week. Also a nanofabricator. It's essentially a portable 3D printer that can construct small objects out of elements it passively funnels in the air."
"Wow," you say. I ball my fists. My toes curls involuntarily.
I get up, slosh my Riesling, Vegas out the window. The city's confused, blurred, too much, moneypit, aurelian mishmosh, paralyzing and pastiche, functioning in spite of itself. I grip my glass so hard it nearly shatters in my hand.
Die you Italian homewrecker. Aneurysm. Stroke. Choke on a pistachio. I don't care. Electrocuted in a bathtub. Whatever. Just please die and stop giving my hot girlfriend ideas about how inadequate I am and how much better she could do.
The way you get entranced with other men is how I get entranced by pretty lights. I suppose we're both simple creatures. Maybe this is why we have found each other so delightful over the years.
We go drink together on the Strip and it's a fun enough time, but I feel you centered to his gravity, pulling away to his equator. You get closer every step. You sneak affectionate strokes of his arms and thighs when you think I'm not looking. You use him as support. You put the tips of your fingers on his collarbone when you lean into him to yell above the music. Mae and Isla do, too.
Infidelity has warped my psyche worse than dead cats. I am crippled at the thought of not being enough, which I am not and never will be. You will fall for someone like Villatoire one day and I will not be able to handle it any better than I'm handling this war, which is lousily and shamefully, with little dignity.
You will leave and not look back. It is so easy to leave and not look back when you are a thing like you and not a thing like me. It is so easy to forget.
It shouldn’t be so easy to forget.
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We walked the banks holding our heads down, hands in our pockets, quiverbits, sheets of lateyear flurry caress. The Easy Rider's made camp at the edge of the banks, four doublewide tents nestled away under an enclosed wrapping bramble of cottonwoods, two genny's feeding a nest of modems and floodlights and a stolen marble stovetop. Their Segways plug directly into a secondary generator humming electricity. We crouch on a knoll fifty meters away, wait and observe.
No movement.
Catching z's.
Walbeck approaches bent kneed, Mateba pushing at the tent's flaps and ready.
We each take a tent, one left untended.
In mine: three bedrolled cutesy caterpillars, a chunky reddish kid with those kingsized gauges in his ears, a mochacolored somethingoranother snoring apneaishly with a bronzeplated AK half under his pillow, and a Korean guy of some age between 18 and 47 sleeping in Hello Kitty socks too small for his feet.
Waldeck puts up three fingers. Iraheta puts up three fingers. Waldeck checks the last tent and puts up three more fingers. We reconvene on the hill.
I say,
"St. Just?"
Iraheta says,
"My tent."
"Okay."
Waldeck kneels, rifles through his mess of a satchel. He removes two bricks of C4. He looks me in the eye but not really, there's no one home, he's looking inward, grappling with the weight of himself.
"J'aurais dû mourir à Waterloo," he says.
And he's right.
Much like Napoleon, Waldeck too ought to have died at Waterloo.
More specifically, Braine-l'Alleud.
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He and I were in Belgium on our every now and then European summer trips, where we do nothing but try to cheat on loved ones and smoke too many cigarettes and drink too many ewers and act like children again for the sake of it, reminisce to a sappy and disgusting extreme, as I think most humans are prone to do sometimes.
We (and by we I mean Waldeck) picked up two French girls on the Lion's Mound, offered to race them down to the bottom, which he won and gloated about and wiped the sweat out of his eyes and pushed out his chest and did the things actual 'Real Men' do without trying, au naturale. They both loved him. They both said it after about five minutes.
"Oh my God, we like totally love you, you're really cool for an American."
The one I ended up with, a bookish twenty seven year old FrenchRussian with shoulder length blonde hair and a Masters in Linguistics and a fun accent (but perfect English) told me, 'You're cute in a cute way, you know?', which tells you everything you need to know about a) our interaction together and b) how women function when they end up with the lesser male. Mostly, they ignored me and thought I was too mean, which I am sometimes.
Thérèse and I lagged behind Waldeck and his date, the prettier of the two, a twenty five year old Anthropology student named Francine, an ugly name, one I'm not too fond but it hardly matters when you see her, the white sweater lopped off at her midriff whenever she bends, opaline thoracic, black skirt riding the line of modest or slu*t? You decide! cloaking away a set of hushush dandybits too recherché and spanspick for a dumbheaded unsophisticate of my rank and file.
Thérèse was too good for me nonetheless, as are most the girls I've been with. Suppose it's why you get bored so easily and leave sooner rather than later, haha. At least I have you in the vaults. And while memory sucks in general, it's good at picking out those kind of moments. Why wouldn't it be? You and the others did those unforgettable things to me, haven't you, and I to you, things we wouldn't talk about in a crowded restaurant, right? That's there forever. Stamped in. If you hate it, you hate it. But I'd rather look back in reverence. Not as stressful. Keeps the blood pressure low.
I actually have to try to be interesting with Thérèse 'cause she wants to jump Waldeck like her cuter friend is def going to and honestly if Francine wasn't around Thérèse would be plenty cute enough for him, but fate decided to give her a lanky scarfaced Ashkenazi instead and not the affluent broadarmed (retired at forty) conventionally attractive DutchGermanBlondiesomethingoranother. Despite her loss, Thérèse is kinder than she ought to have been. I had to try but she tried too and I do think she enjoyed me in her own way, often whimsical and prone to agreeing with my provocations.
I didn't ask her any of the interviewy stuff. Gets old. So I asked her if she'd kill the cutest puppy in the world for a million dollars. She said she wouldn't do it for any amount of money and I told her that's not possible and she would fold as the numbers grew. I asked her if she had any concrete ambitions beyond studying languages. She tells me she's always wanted to join the Légion étrangère but she's too lazy and likes pot too much and doesn't have much motivation to do anything but sit around and read about allophones and phonemes and how Vulgar Latin became Gaulish, Frankish, Old French.
We take them to Cafe Kattecop, a cozy redbricked snuggle up ten minutes outside Waterloo Proper, a hip place for (then) a couple thirty somethings like us with no real goals or reason to be around, soft albino China lights swaying from the sevenish foot ceiling, rows of cinnamon candles enkindled along the back arches of the booths. We sit in a corner booth behind one of those doorbead things, whatever those are called. Thérèse and I press together against the wall, Francine and Waldeck parallel on a purple couchchair. We order coffees except Waldeck who gets a bottle of crème de cassis and pâté and a charcuterie board for the table.
We eat duck's liver and laugh. We drink blackberry liqueur and laugh. We eat the flesh of slaughtered pigs and laugh and they too once remembered their families when they did not want to.
I ask Thérèse if she'd slap a stranger's baby for fifteen hundred USD.
She says,
"Is it an ugly baby?"
I ask Thérèse what historical event she'd change the outcome to if she could. She tells me it's the Battle of White Mountain 1620, the Bohemians against the Roman Empire. She says she wishes Christian of Anhalt won. Says the Bohemians deserved sovereignty, to preserve their own culture. Says being deprived of these freedoms for almost three hundred years under Hapsburg rule was unjust.
As an ethnic Czech my heart dips when she says this and I imagine myself marrying her and having children and how she'd look standing in our imaginary yard at dawn overlooking the crop, flowing translucent dress or whatever, Carpathian bellyfog blanketing our lea, a pinkred sun marching up the spine of the mountain.
I kiss her on the back of the neck and grip her sides and she says,
'Everything is so right here, darling. But what would it be if the Bohemians won?'
Francine overhears us and stops her unnecessary conversation with Waldeck (they are going to sleep together with or without the talking, as happens with statistically attractive people) and she leans in, left eye twitching a bit,
"I wouldn't change anything."
"Why not?" I ask.
"It's too big," she says.
"Too big?" I say/ask.
"Yeah, too big. You try to examine the scope of history and you might as well be looking at the bottom of the ocean. We don't know what happened. We don't know how it was, how they were, or why it was the way it was. Unless you're around to perceive it you have no say in how it goes. So I wouldn't change a thing."
She harumphs. Here's where I'm so entranced by Francine, making sure to breath in everything she's putting out, I notice a modest gold band on her ring finger. I notice a similar band on Thérèse's finger. I gulp and say nothing and keep chewing murdered pig.
It's no fun being ethically vegetarian and also having no willpower.
Francine invites us back to her parent's summer home, a recently built luxury cottage on Lake Genval. It's only a single story but long, winding, labyrinthine, seven small bedrooms, three living rooms, an outdoor entertainment area complete with sauna, hot tub, enclosed glassroom bar.
Waldeck shambles to the hot tub and the girls shamble with him. They get in while I sit on the edge with only my feet submerged because I am still ashamed of my body being not quite as thin as I want it to be. No matter how many of my ribs you see or how little I eat or how many miles I jog a day, to myself I am still the insecure thickthighed chubby asshole from my adolescence with the babyface and the pocked everything and the milelong nose. Thérèse draws circles on my knee, rests her cheek on my shin. She tries to convince me to come in and I deny her and she tells me I am no fun and a waste. We share a cigarette. Waldeck and Francine halflay halfsit together on the parallel step, his arms circled around her waist, both hypnotized by the luster.
Francine plays an early 21st century pop song.
The lyrics I remember,
They said to watch out for your kind
I watched out and it blew my mind, yeah
They say that romance makes you blind
Well, I'll be blinded for a lifetime
Waldeck and Francine make out. I blush. They make out like Thérèse and I aren't there and wow my love I've never seen Waldeck kiss Isla half as passionately and I was the best man at his wedding and yes both these facts absolutely razor my insides. I hate feeling sorry for bad people. Isla's in Greece with the kids. Waldeck's on a "BUSINESS TRIP". She will die not knowing and for this I feel rotten.
Despite Waldeck's (likely) congenital "alphadom", he is still prone to spells of lovelust, of believing his own bullsh*t about finding the right one finally that makes the others look tertiary and plain and not worth chasing. We're both inclined to this notion. We are both engaged in a lifelong pursuit for our raison d'être in the shape of a woman who ushers us away from ourselves. We recognize the baseness of our own natures. Only something worth having can repel them, keep them at bay, something worth having like the love of a woman who cares not because she has to or has been persuaded to but because she is stirred to you by forces she does not control, a fixed cosmicl*te magnetism, a knowing which reels in both of you and emits from your cores.
Thérèse tilts her head down to avoid staring. She gets out of the hot tub silently and dries off and as she's toweling her hair at the speed of sound she holds out her other hand and I grab it and we canter inside like tranquilized fawns, batting at each other, grabbing butts, sticking my fingers in her mouth. She takes me to the eastwing living room. There's a circular ten person denim couch and an autofireplace and a strip of triangular pinkorange lights on the ceiling pulsating, wafting, a slowed heartbeat of blooming hue. She plops me down and kisses me and I put my hand around her throat.
"I’ve never slept with an American before," she says.
We kiss for too long. Eventually she stops, leans over to the coffee table, sips her liqueur, comes back to it. We lay there and she plays with my hair and I almost seize (or vomit) at the romance of it all, the sap, the accumulated sludgegoop of affection.
She changes colors.
She is velvet and impermanent, hipbones jut out like spires.
I run my thumb atop their summits.
We hear Waldeck and Francine burst in through the backdoor and it slams and they howl like jackals at themselves. We hear them f*ck while we f*ck and Thérèse touches herself to get herself off, probably to the sound of her prettier friend getting jackhammered by the better looking built rich guy, but she still leaves prizes of enthusiasm on my neck and crimson scratchlines on my back and indentations of her nails along my sides as temporary reminders of her enjoyment.
I try my best like I usually do or when I am fully able.
It's not always one can do their best.
You must only truly do your best when you're damn good and able.
After we're finished we smoke a cigarette together on the couch and she tells me she is glad she met me tonight and she gives me her phone number and later as she's drifting to sleep she tells me Charlemagne probably spoke a Rhenish Franconian dialect and I tell her I don't really know what that means, okay?
Come morning we're woken to the front door slamming and a male voice at the entrance,
"Francine?"
Thérèse perks up right quick, palms my chest, says,
"Leave out the back, don't let anyone see you."
"What? Why?"
Francine's husband, who I only know by voice at this point, shrieks a strings of curses when he finds Waldeck and his wife, beginning with 'you f*cking' and ending with 'traitor slu*t'. I push Thérèse aside and speedwalk through the house, grabbing a carving knife from one of the kitchens on the way to the front door. Thérèse whispers,
"Why are you grabbing a knife?"
"I don't want this to turn violent," I whisper back.
"So you grab a knife?"
"It's an equalizer. Shut up."
When I reach them Waldeck's zipping up his slacks and apologizing, gesticulating too much, inadvertently flexing, saying something like Oh I'm so so sorry I banged out your smokeshow wifetobe, let's not make this ugly, I screwed up, I'm sorry, I'll leave forever now I promise I'm not even from here dude.
Francine says (whimpers/begs pathetically, near sobs, etc),
"Pierre, please."
Pierre's something of a pseudoalpha himself, an okay matchup for Waldeck, definitely some kind of distinguished inbred aristocracy right at the sight of him, his jacket nearly long enough to be a justacorp, silvery waspish hair, a satchel with a Blue Helmet (hint: UN Peacekeeper) patch, so I guess he's kinda a legit adventurer dashing rogue type and has a couple of inches on Waldeck to boot, roughly my height and in better shape than both of us.
He turns around to my dumb hungover saunter.
"Oh, nice, two guys? Really? Francine, I—just—God, really?"
The front door slams. Pierre pushes past me and he shoves me hard against the frame of the bedroom door. He shouts to the front,
"Saiid, you're not going to believe this, mate."
Waldeck and I follow him to the door, still buckling our belts and truth be told I was sort of just looking around for coffee. Francine and Thérèse convene in the doorway of Francine's room and whisper to each other and shake their heads and curse under their breaths and call each other dumb slu*tty idiots, which they are and are not, both at once, Schrödinger's Strumpets.
Saiid's a five six hundred forty pound Algerian tryhard, doughy at the waist, Morpheusesque Cyberpunk goggle/sunglasses glued to the bridge of his nose, oversized leopardtrimmed peacoat quaking in cadence with his scared inwardly bent (haha) knees. He squeezes his fists and scowls at me, at Waldeck, the girls behind us. I look back to Thérèse, unbuttoned jeans, skyblue tanktop, and darn she looks wicked good in the mornings and I wonder why she would date down so much.
I'm still stained on her stomach, as evidenced by morning light.
Rarely does this happen, but I know instantaneously I am better than Saiid and I am not surprised his wife decided to abscond on his trust. Saiid, viciously ogling me, my shirt still open, his wife's marks on my neck, screams,
"Bro, dude, did you f*ck my wife?"
"We're leaving," Waldeck says.
"Answer the question," Saiid shouts, accidentally spittling at us.
"She didn't say anything about being married," I say.
"Oh gee, thanks a f*cking lot Thérèse," Saiid screams, hands on hips. "Super glad I bought us a f*cking muhuhansion in the Netherlands, Thérèse! Definitely now way glad I paid for your entire f*cking college f*cking college f*cking education, Thérèse! Thank you, Thérèse! Thank you!"
"Look, we'll go," Waldeck pleads.
"We should beat you to brains," Pierre says.
"Be mad at your wife, not me," Waldeck says. "I didn't know."
"Shut your f*cking mouth," Pierre yells, teenagerishly squeaking. He spits on Waldeck's shoes, gets in his face, pointed index finger an inch from Waldeck's nose. "You're a stupid American c*nt even for a stupid American c*nt, aren't you?"
"I just wanna leave and you're in my face," Waldeck says.
"What are you gonna' do about it?" Pierre shoves Waldeck's left shoulder.
Waldeck sweeps out Pierre's feet with a single kick and cracks him one in the nose on the way down. Pierre whacks his head on the tile, bleeds from his nostrils and upperlip, wheezes, concusses, woo baby out like a light, star town.
Saiid rushes me (dumb), so I boot him as hard as I can in his concave baby chest and he flies into the front door and indents it with his back and a squirt of sawdust propels from the ceiling and he crumples to the floor, flopping to his stomach and heaving, trying to catch his breath. I felt pretty bad but also super cool and powerful, like when you shoot a gun for the first time and you're like, 'Wow this is way too fun, it shouldn't be this fun, it's not fair it's this fun.'
So I guess it's safe to say Saiid's when I learned kicking people and making them not be able to breath for a couple minutes/hours/months/whatever is satisfying as hell, although morally inadvisable on many levels.
Francine and Thérèse screech and rush to the aid of their downed fiancé husbands and sob at the outcome of their poor decisions, their treachery and lack of feeling for other human beings. Francine says 'Oh baby, I'm so sorry baby' more times than anyone should want to count. Waldeck and I apologize and leave and on the long walk back to Waterloo we laugh to each other about the start of our great European adventure. We can hardly contain ourselves, delirious with conquer, buzzing, lapping up invisible cups of hardwon glory.
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Train to Amsterdam, stop by the Beurs van Berlage and Willet-Holthuysen and van Loon and generally do touristy things until around dusk, where we settle up in a backalley anarchist sexhut weedshop tucked in the Jodenbuurt (Jewish Quarter). There's seating for roughly twenty but there's forty five people in the place, it's stuffy, populated exclusively by punkrocky studded children reading Proudhon and Godwin and most of them have 'A's' stitched somewhere on their person and they discuss loudly their deference for individual rights over state control or whatever. I guess I agree with them to an extent but I also gave up caring a long time ago.
Causes leave you with age and labor.
Life's more enjoyable when it's spent on pretty things.
Waldeck books a 35 year old Spanish lady who is way too old to be dressing like she's cool, fishnets, denim short shorts, a black shawl over a grey tee, but she's objectively attractive so I guess it's okay for her to try too hard. I talk to a few girls and each one rejects me (par for the course) so I sip a mead at the back of the bar and watch Waldeck eviscerate poor Spanish lady's world one silver phrase at a time. In a mere fifteen she is mentally capsizing, encapsulated, ensnared, ready to be whisked, flapping her ringnail. What can she do?
I wonder what it would be like if you were here. What you would persuade me to do. Probably get the hell out and go to an arcade, I bet, or some kind of music event, you seem to like those and I suppose I do too but my goodness are crowds a whole different kind of hell for me. I'd peer at you and try to shake out the truth with a look. You'd peer back and say You Are It and You Will Never Know in the same glance and I will unhappily accept both answers and nothing changes and nothing will change and it is cemented into our pattern—we will be gone and come back, be gone and come back, a shoreline, rain, a cycle not unlike the ebbing of the sea.
We are borne from a noose, a circuit, a wreath.
Do you remember hail in the Scottish Highlands?
Do you remember the baking wet mirage lines ascending on the Mediterranean over in Tripohlee?
You will drift into the diaspora, ghostly most days, and blink back whenever you choose and it will feel like it was meant to be and I will lie to myself about your nature.
I will convince myself you are only really whole when you exist with me.
Waldeck goes back to Spanish lady's hotel and gives me some cash for a room cause he knows I can't afford one myself, so I walk around and get a kabob and a beer and contemplate buying a prostitute. I decide against it and instead go to sleep alone in a sh*tter hostel in the Red Light District, refusing to spend too much of Waldeck's cash.
The next morning he and I meet up for a baguette and some coffee and travel to Prague by train. I want to sleep but can't sleep so I rest my head on the window and watch the rumbled countryside sweep, the washgreen thickets and brushes of posy, steel, byways and power lines and missing slices of copse, industrial proddings, and then the wood again and cool breezes and the cries of godwits, nightjars, the brays of red deer. We arrive in Prague at noon and get a Pilsner and some smažený sýr (fried cheese, don’t judge) and go to the shooting range, where I shot a Mossberg 500 for the first time, a mass produced but still neato tactical shotgun that tore apart everything and made me feel pangs of victory so vibrantly in my sternum I wanted to sob and kiss the stock all over.
I have small advantages over Waldeck in the Czech Republic. Namely, I can speak the language. Not that it mattered, by midnight he was plotting a threesome with two college aged Irish expats and I was lasered in on their twenty three year old American friend from the start, unfortunately named Constance so I'll mostly call her Con or Connie. Didn't matter like it didn't matter with Francine, though.
AiryPink bob, Miyazaki hoodie, torn rolledup jeans, silver nose ring, concurrently hyper social and cold disposition'd. Constance and I got along right away. Double major in European history and 'illustration'. We joked about committing mass murders and blowing up government buildings and throwing babies out of cars on the freeway and shouting Bon Voyage, Baby!
We stroll the Charles Bridge and the Old Quarter, stop to admire the Orloj reaching beams through the darkness. One of the Irish girls throws up on the steps of a cruelly named delicatessen, The Happy Cow (Šťastný Kráva), and gets a cab home.
Waldeck's dream of a threesome departs with the disappearing brake lights of the taxi, but like the trooper he has always been he holds his head high and presses on with his singular victory (poor him, right?), a tall slender Belfast gal in a sparkly dress and matching sparkly flats. For the life of me I cannot remember her name, so I will continue calling her Irish Girl or Belfast Gal or Belfast Girl or Irish Gal.
Con's quick to kiss but doesn't let me do anything else. It's nearing one in the morning. We go to a shady walk up club nearer the hotel called The White Mountain. Inside there's seven foot tall jacked bouncers carrying expandable batons and I don't mess with giants carrying batons so I smile meekteeth at them and surprisingly they smile crookedly back. The fifteen seat pannevelvet Discotech's empty save for two vaguely Mongolian dudes in track suits and Raybans smoking at the far end. Over the speakers I hear,
I'm a shadow, I am cold
And now I seek for warmth
Stitch your skin onto my skin
And we won't be alone
Irish Girl gets everyone shots of rum for some reason, an odd choice but we took them, Connie took three actually and cheerily admitted to me she was an alcoholic. I said something like That's cool I guess and asked her if she would bomb Tokyo to save Europe and she says,
"I would just do it anyway."
I fed her many beers for this response.
Waldeck and Irish Girl practically f*ck on the pool table. The bartender shrugs and keeps on cleaning his glasses and the bouncers play with their phones and yawn and smoke fat cartoon cigars. The two Mongolians in the corner continue gorging free cashews.
Connie's a woman of many confessions. Never sounds like she's speaking properly, only telling you about something terrible in her life and how pisspoor it's going. She confesses she has major masoch*stic tendencies, in the bedroom and out, and how the only thing that has ever really gotten her off is her own pain and discomfort and I say That's wonderful because I'm a sad*st, really only I can understand your pain on a fundamental level cause I'm the one happy to inflict it.
Connie gives me her phone number right then and there.
We leave The White Mountain a few minutes after two and catch a cab back to Irish Girl's and Connie's hotel. Separate rooms, thankfully, not that Connie would let me do much. She said she'd rather get to know me before sleeping with me. I find this faux pas insulting and I say so and she disagrees and says tough sh*t that's how it is, so I try my luck and we make out some more and I finger her like a high schooler and she comes with her chin pressed into my chest, stifling herself, lips circled on my shoulder, open jawed, and we stay like this until morning.
The next day we get bagels and beer for breakfast and toast ourselves on a job well done. She says she'll call me when she's back in New York. I say, Okay sure you will.
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Waldeck and I catch a train to Austerlitz, or former Austerlitz, now Slavkov u Brna. We visit Žuráň Hill and The Old Vineyards and dream about Napoleon sweeping the world over in Tricolore.
Unfortunately (and of coursedly) in the courtyard of Slavkov Castle, five PM, Pierre shows up with a bandaged nose and a miniature metal bat and whips Waldeck in the jaw. We didn't notice him until the metal hit the marrow.
Waldeck went down and his jaw hung loose and his bottom row of teeth spread to the courtyard grass.
Pierre spat in my face, a real good one, too. Landed in the crater of my left eye.
"You want one too, kike?"
"Just let me get him to a hospital."
"Yeah, you do that."
Pierre limps away, smirking at whatever petty vengeance he thought he earned.
So I suppose it's not correct for Waldeck to say, "J'aurais dû mourir à Waterloo."
More like, "J'aurais dû mourir à Austerlitz."
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Happy days and happy thoughts. Here and now, or the then of the now if you wish, Waldeck plants two C4's on two of the Easy Rider tents and fires his pistol once in the air.
Shouts,
"Hello, gentlemen. There's a few bricks of C4 around your tents right now and if you don't believe me I'll blow one and then you'll believe me and if you don't give me what I want like right away right away I'll probably blow one then, too—so what do you say, guys, are we gonna' be good puppies or bad puppies?"
Hushed contemplation. A rifle's barrel pokes out from the tent in front of us.
"What do you want?"
"Dylan St. Just."
More contemplation, scurrying, 'They want Dylan, they want Dylan.'
From Iraheta's tent, Dylan St. Just willingly reveals himself, hands up, checkerboardish thriftstore suit torn midarm, no shoes, splecks of horsehide skin, feet like a coal miner's socks. He's a bucktoothed hickorychewing country yokel with a stunted Kentucky twinge on his voice, says,
"I'm Dylan St. Just."
"You run this queer brigade, St. Just?" Waldeck asks.
Pause, soft chatter from the tents, giggles, grasshopper altos.
"We all run this queer brigade, sir," he says.
"Cause everyone's as capable as everyone, that right?"
"That's right." St. Just grins politely.
"Okay, well. Give us your sh*t and we won't kill you."
"You'd murder us without a trial, sir?"
"I can turn you into pancakes with impunity. No more talkytalky."
"I'm listening, sir."
"Strip. Now."
St. Just strips and so do the others. They throw their possessions from their tent flaps and we collect them, string them over ourselves proudly. Iraheta rips a bandanascarf out of a sh*tty XXL sweater and I tie to myself a few pairs of black pants and a few shirts and pick up some Raspberry Schnapps and a Smith and Wesson M&P subcompact and a carton of Camel 9's. Waldeck smacks their genny's with his wrench until they're flaming. He unloads a clip into the air just to scare them, just for fun, just to make them question reality.
We leave them naked and foodless on the banks of the Winooski, winter fast approaching, consider them a dead tribe, tell the Assembly of our good deeds. We are praised and lavishly rewarded and spend our ethically earned dollars on shiny guns and shinier women and the blood of animals. Choisy spends his on a fancy new Zircon finger and on his parents who refuse to leave Atlantic City and also on elaborate computer setups where he's in this like sphere workstation thing and can rotate freely while also still being a lazyass on his computer and sh*tposting on NetSec and fine art forums.
Iraheta, sensibly, saves. Plays around with some cryptos and nothing else. When I do seldom see him, he's scribing in a miniature Netbook and shielding his screen from passerby's and mauling his hair and when asked what he's working on he'll say,
"Um, just, um, I'll tell you later."
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Jeremy Tryke, the kid we beat up at the Sunoco, suicide bombs the Assembly on Christmas Eve. Runs in from nowhere (the woods) with a vest. Half of the MPA dead or gravely injured. Forty five left.
Robert Todd Lincoln's summer home destroyed, a mass at its center relegated to toothpicks.
The MPA uses the Montpelier High basketball gymnasium as their homebase now, as embarrassing as that is.
All 'cause we took some teeth.
For shame.
Haxo lived, though, a small victory.
You text me wishing me a Merry Christmas and Happy Jewish Holiday, too, and send me a kissy face emoji. I die from relief.
Connie invites me to her apartment in Manhattan. Choisy comes with, citing an old fling in Hell's Kitchen. Waldeck declines and spends his holiday in Greece with his children and overworked (but still a bad person) wife.
On the bus to New York Choisy and I hear the Waves have breached the wall at Navoo Station in Illinois. Chicago is lost. They order new bulwarks in D.C. and New Hope and evacuate the remaining refugees to Montreal.
A few people at the front of the bus sob into their phones.
It's squally and cold when we get to New York. Choisy and I watch the Times Square Christmas Tree threshing its own ornaments and we chainsmoke the Easy Rider's purloined Camel 9's and pick up a slice from Joe's. He shows me a picture of his Puerto Rican ex from Hell's Kitchen and no joke she's holding a butcher knife as big as her forearm up to the camera and behind her there's a wall of rosaries and a gypsum bust of Julia of Corsica and about twelve sugaraddled teenagers encircling a sadgirl™ wearing a shirt that says, 'It's my quinceañera and I'll cry if I want to' and she is in fact crying a whole lot from my brief look at it.
Choisy leaves, takes the subway. I begrudgingly walk seven blocks to Connie's place 'cause I'm too cheap to get a cab. I'm soaked and shivering when I get there and ring her buzzer at least twenty times. She lets me in. She's gained weight but it's good weight and she's even hotter now but I can tell she's insecure about it, closed off postures, hands and arms inwardly fixated. She's in a parka and nothing else, shrouded by a duvet. We cuddle on the couch in her beatup artist's apartment half paid for by her parents still and she drapes her legs over my crotch and we order Chinese food and watch a reality show called Little Billy Ghost about a Virginian six year old who started speaking perfect French out of nowhere, can accurately recite the names of dead French cavalry, Napoleonic street names, dates of death and burial, sh*t like that. He says they speak to him in his dreams. His name's Wickets or something. William Wickets the six year old who talks to the dead in his dreams. This is a reality show.
Glaring into the tube, stuffing noodles in my face, I am hit with what Francine was talking about, the history of lived moments, of it all being too much. Bellum omnium contra omnes. Connie flips the channel. It's a man falling over a bay. Just some bay, just some man. Ah, news.
Right now in California the Women there put on rigged winged suits and grab a couple of slaves or stragglers and blare Flight of the Valkyries over the speakers and drop the poor dudes over the cityscape, sometimes tie them in sacks, shoot them with M16's while plunging, drop them in the ocean to see if they survive the fall and pick them back up if they do. At the aquarium coveys of girls wheelbarrow in epoch's worth of removed ears and tongues and testicl*s and drippy dicks and drippier noses, clamhappy TechnicallySomeone'sDaughters organizing photo ops for themselves posing with the misappropriated parts, snapshotting and live streaming, incessant buzzing around the monument, they throw the weeping limbs over their shoulders blindly to their friends like a macabre bouquet toss at the sh*ttiest wedding ever, they bunch up the appendages and burn them in hexed circles and others cast nostril cartilage into the Pacific sermoning passages by Koedt and Germaine Greer and Pol Gosh Darn Pot, sure as you're born, and others still mush the fleshstuff with their bare feet and remark how 'squishygross the necrotic flesh feels haha!' or they punt Elmer glued potpourri balls of co*cks into a recently 'liberated' penguin habitat and laugh and kiss each other flamboyantly on their way home.
"Women exercise agency in order to survive the power relations and oppressive circ*mstances in which they find themselves," some purple mohawked Beluga screams into a megaphone from a parapet of appropriated thighs. "The theoretical task is for radical feminist theory to theorize freedom in terms of women’s collective political agency. This task requires an understanding that freedom is not negotiating within a situation taken as inevitable, but rather, a capacity to radically transform or determine the situation itself."
Waldeck's surrounded by harping ventilators, Isla crosslegged in the corner on a cerulean recliner with her palm on her forehead legit crying but I only feel bad for him not for her and then I feel bad for not feeling bad and I don't know what the hell is going on anymore. I don't know what's okay and what's not okay.
Connie glides to the window, cracks it and lights a Pall Mall. She says it's too cold to smoke outside right now, 'but I really want one' and I agree and I smoke with her and we trade pecks and do oversweet pats with our eyelashes and remind ourselves we will be dead one day. A spackle of rain flits the glass. I whisper in her ear,
"Would you f*ck a relatively attractive octogenarian for five thousand dollars?"
And she whispers back,
"I'd do it for free, hun."
I tell her I've invented a catapult specifically designed for launching onfire adolescents as far as possible, with no real practical use in sieges, like a really expensive and difficult to engineer golf driver. She whispers back,
"Where should we elope? Palace of the Sun King? Casablanca?"
Connie and I watch Little Billy Ghost for a while longer then she rejects my notions of sleeping with her and barters them for halfhearted fellati* and falling asleep on top of me on the couch. We shower together in the morning and she makes me cinnamon flavored coffee and we zombieishly saunter to a hipster breakfast spot, Muffs N Stuffs, where I get like three crapes and a bagel with lox and Connie makes fun of me for being such a skinnyfat dipsh*t who doesn't know how to take care of himself. We talk on the balcony for two hours, people watching, playing with each other's fingers --
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When Waldeck woke up he asked for Isla and only Isla and they fell in love again thanks to the built in simpatico of a hospital bedside. She fed him pudding with a plastic spoon. They watched Eyes Wide Shut and Little Children and Die Hard and In the Bedroom, unorthodox choices for rekindling a marriage, but it briefly worked. She showed him videos of the kid's soccer games over bags of kettle corn he could barely get down.
This love ended the moment he regained use of his legs and senses, fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, but you should look at it from the perspective of both of them being opportunists and traitors and flatout liars, human vultures, so it's good for him to explore his options while she routinely betrays him throughout a loveless, deadbedroomed marriage).
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Choisy and I buy gyros from a street vendor. We douse them in tzatziki, scarf them down on some redbricked stoop, pepper it in goat yogurt blotches and dill. Choisy takes an uncouth bite, slopsays,
"Hey man, I gotta' talk to you about something."
Choisy's one of those friends who you've had for a really long time and gone through a lot with but you never really appreciate the closeness until something big and earthquakey comes up. He was one of Waldeck's old college buddies. We met when Waldeck brought me to Choisy's barely functional Long Beach apartment, inoperable stove, smoking indoors, wall to patio littered with painting supplies, overnight arthouse benders thrown every week or whenever he could muster up the sheckles for a 30 rack. In his 20's and 30's all Choisy did was paint and lie and vandalize and maliciously screw and cocaine, and he was damn good, too. I could recognize an original Choisy from miles away, a watercolory mix of realistic surrealism and pop art, Dalilite, notes of Banksy, Monet.
The tides have turned, but back then none of us had anything on Choisy. Our wallets may have been slightly bigger but enigmatic charisma will get you further than cotton and cloth and while Choisy's not ugly he's not particularly pretty either, barrel chested, tall, but with a tucked out pumpkinbelly and lovehandles and layers of babyfat still nestled in his neck. So it's not his good looks getting him all the girls, it's his, and I think this is the Secret of Secrets for lonely men, but it's his ULAF, his Utter Lack of All f*cks, so I say amen.
Choisy didn't and doesn't care. He'll lie, no blink or hesitation. He'll tell you anything, makes up fake names and fake titles, tells people his parents were Lebanese refugees who got stabbed in Texas for wearing hijabs, tells people he's the son of a syrup magnate in Brussels, tells people his name is Lancaster Dodd and informs them of their thetan levels. He does this kind of thing (as well as incessant sh*tposting) because he is an exhibitionist that needs attention the same way a sadomasoch*st needs to be stuck with needles while being sodomized with a studded piece of polished steel. It is a disease that is simpler to accommodate than treat, this hunger to exist in other people's consciousnesses, to not be alone with himself. It doesn't matter whether he himself is receiving the attention, or an invented proxy, (e.g. Edward Bonebiter, a fictitious demisexual polygendered web developer living in New Areola who's neither brave enough to come out of the closet to his parents and siblings nor cowardly slash selfish enough to feign straightitude for the purpose of base human companionship) he is playing the part and this feeds him in one way or another, or makes him him, he is the part of the part player.
"What?" I ask.
"My ex wife," he says.
"The one in Hell's Kitchen?"
"No, that's an ex girlfriend, my ex wife..."
"Is she in New York?"
"Poughkeepsie."
"What does she want?"
"It's going to sound ridiculous."
"Okay."
"I'm broke, man."
"How are you broke? We just got cash."
"The... workstation... you know..."
I take a bite of my gyro and savor it for as long as possible.
I shouldn't be eating lamb.
"Yeah, the weird robot gravity chair, yeah, I got it."
"And some... you know... girls...my parents..."
"I get it, man. What do you need from your wife?"
"A painting, a bottle of brandy and answers. Does that satisfy you?"
"Really?"
"The brandy is like sixty thousand dollars. The painting is way more."
"Why do you have a sixty thousand dollar bottle of brandy?"
"I'm going to open it on my deathbed and say, 'Now I am a man who has drank a sixty thousand dollar bottle of brandy' and fall asleep and die."
"Okay, you know what, fine. Buy me a couple dinners or something."
"More than a couple. And other things."
Choisy and I take the train to Poughkeepsie. He's pale and underslept, a lazed meander in his jaunt. When we get there we rent a Prius and go to an unnamed seafood joint along the Hudson, Choisy gets lobster even though he can't afford lobster and I get Clam Chowder cause I can afford a more luxurious dish but choose not to because of innate financial sensibility. Big תודה to my (not chosen by me, I swear, please don't shoot) ancestors.
Choisy's ex wife lives in an estate in the woods north of Poughkeepsie, recently built by her husband Lord of Mulberry and I seriously don't know his real name 'cause he insisted we call him Lord of Mulberry or Master Mulberry or Lord Mulberry, which I obliged because I thought it was funny. We pull up in the stupid rented Prius and the Mulberry estate makes me wanna die, it's held up by pillars for god sakes, twelve skyscraperish granite columns, and still it sort of looks like (an exaggeration of) any upstate country townhome, nine foot cedar door, bay windows, polished Glulam exterior.
Before we get to the front door, Master Mulberry and Choisy's ex, now Mrs. Mulberry, formerly Rebecca Choisy, formerly Rebecca Katinski, approach us on their lawn, an acre wide perfectly hedged lawnpatch of bright New York air. Mulberry's older than I figured, bald, sixties, thick rimless glasses, a coat and matching trousers straight out of Madame Bovary or some sh*t. Rebecca looks like any ol' claptrap New Jersey beachgarbage, totally Choisy's type, a botox'd monstrosity, but hey, whatever, decent figure for her age I guess, nice cuticles.
"What are you doing here, Choisy?" Rebecca buries her hands in her face.
"Brandy. Painting."
"Mmm. I know the brandy," Mulberry says, raising his ponce snout to the air and sniffing vigorously. Mulberry steps up with a skullheaded cane and stomps two times on the grass with it and a bit kicks up to both of their shoes. "I'll fetch it, she's told me of it, you can have it. The painting has to stay, I'm afraid, you have no way of transporting it securely and unless you can come up with a feasible way to do so it'll have to remain locked away."
"It's my painting."
"Currently in my estate. I will not let you transport it without taking the appropriate measures."
"Do you understand what's happening, old man?" Choisy raises his voice here, not like him, I get worried, wiggle my toes to feel the pistol jiggling at my ankle.
"I believe I do, I --"
"They wanna' blow me up and I don't want to get blown up. You have more money than you know what to do with, a house with more rooms than you can fill. Give me my things. Let me not get blown up."
"Oh my," Mulberry says. "And here I thought men joined militias out of honor."
"You'd rather me die, then? Is he a psychopath, Rebecca?"
"Stop," Rebecca says. "I'll get them."
Choisy spits near her.
"Rebecca, the painting is too valuable," Mulberry explains.
"It isn't," she says.
They storm off, gone for fifteen minutes. We smoke on Mulberry's lawn as Rebecca disobeys her husband's commands. She comes back out alone with the painting and brandy wrapped together in polkadot bedsheets.
"Here."
"Thanks, Reb."
Rebecca gazes out at the dusk of her lawn, not noticing her own swaying. Fireflies nip at the grass. Moths rush the estate lights, winnowing, cranberry bulbs stuck to the banisters, vibrating antennas, pinlegs bending at the wind.
"Why'd it all happen like this?" Rebecca asks, sighlaughcrying after.
"If I knew the answer, we wouldn't be having this conversation."
"I don't think you stop loving people," she says. She chokes on air.
"Sometimes you do, sometimes you don't. Depends on what they did. But really, you start wanting something new. It's cruel and not fair and yaddi yaddah. We could have grown old and bored with each other but we called it quits when we were still both young and hot. We made the right call even if it hurts and it still does. Trust me. But hey, at least I don't have to widow you now."
"You gonna' be okay?"
"I'm not the one that has to blow Lord Pedophile in there, so yeah, I'll be okay."
"Really? Cheap shot?"
"You deserve worse."
"I know."
"Thank you, Rebecca. I hope your life with a geriatric is, uh, interesting."
"Don't get into too much trouble."
"I am a paragon of virtue," he says and we get back in the stupid rented Prius.
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At the MPG Christmas party Waldeck f*cks the new intern secretary in a storage closet. She has a fiancé who looks like a gay watermelon named Layton Kerpushnick.
I find Waldeck sitting alone in the driver's seat of a security cart, pants unzipped, belt undone, smoking a spliff in the hotel lobby, carrying a two third's finished bottle of Merlot.
"What's up buddy?" he asks.
"f*ck the whole world huh?"
"That's right, boyo. f*ck the whole world. Praise be."
"You must be getting close. How was Karen?"
"All lovely in their own way, aren't they?"
"Praise be."
"How are you and... you know?"
I shrug and don't respond and inhale my cigarette so hard it hurts and I cough and I stifle my cough so I cough more due to the stifling and I viscerally hate everything.
"If you wanna have a go at her, tell her you love Depeche Mode and REO Speedwagon."
"I can't lie about something that important."
"Suit yourself, she's fun, you'd like her," he says, exhaling a chain of crooked barbhem smoke ovals (smovals?).
"Gotta' say, I'm tired of it."
"What? Girls?"
"I want someone to care. I never mean anything."
"No one means anything. Does this sate you?"
"It kills me she'll never really love me."
"Listen to yourself." He quadruple beeps the horn of the security cart. "That's what you sound like. An annoying, lame horn attached to a fa*g's cart. Look, imagine being a woman. Imagine being one of our girls, you know, hot, put together, smart, clever, largely the good stuff. Unlimited good options for a lifetime with no real effort. We can't beat that. I can't beat that. Soon I'll plateau and the college ones aren't gonna' bite anymore and the middle aged ones are gonna' bite less, so there ya' go, I'm finished, f*ckin' fatties and oldies for the rest of my life. So yeah, she's never going to love you like you want to be loved—but she still might love you, and she still might choose you for more than a moment. And think—a girl with unlimited options giving you her time for more than a few moments. Don't you think you owe her?"
"What, should I kiss her feet for getting railed when I'm not around?"
"I've been with Isla for fifteen years and I'm still not sure if she is attracted to me. Hell, paying the bills has helped more than anything I've done interpersonally. On the whole, we've done better than most men, yeah? So, praise be. Try to enjoy your turn and once she's finished with you, move on to another Italian. Lord knows the Catholics made too many."
"Why can't I ever stop thinking about her?"
He guffaws at this, snorts, squeals, spills Merlot on his cuff.
"Well, that's the eternal question, really, I still think about the masseuse, but in this instance you're focusing so hard on the outcome of a single possibility that you ignore every other."
"Sorry. I suck."
"Nah, you're fine, you think you suck, which kinda' makes you suck, but when you think you're cool, you're cool. Hey, come to France with me and Isla. Bring Connie or whoever."
I invite Connie and she declines, stating being too busy with school and having a full time job. Bad reasons, but I let it slide. I fourth wheel with Iraheta and Iraheta scores more than he's ever scored and is so much better than both Waldeck and I it hurts and nearly every night he was with a new woman.
We called it The Gutting of Paris, the second massacre at the Champ De Mars.
I barely tried to sleep with anyone.
The the marry on the spot ones broke me, made me introspect about my time and the nothing I've done with it.
Look at what they've done to me so far.
Look at what I've done to them.
I see at least a few a day. In front of Notre Dame, low bun blonde, Corduroy beret, internally pronounced my commitment to her; again in the lobby of our hotel, striped puce mini skirt, midwaist black hair, Hollywood face, Hepburnesque, red flats, gold top, I think of proposing right then and there and she leaves and I will never know her name.
We eat Gratin dauphinois and Gateau des rois and Tête de veau (which I felt bad about and still feel bad about and I continue eating meat despite my reservations with my own behavior). Waldeck pays.
Isla laughs too loud at the waiter's bad jokes about uncooked eggplant or whatever, said in an egregiously thick French accent. I ask Isla where the kids are and she loudly replies,
"GRANDMA."
She flirts with everyone. 'Practices her French' on museum curators. Tells our baristas to 'show us around later' and I can practically feel her flashing her puss* at them.
Later I stroll alone along the Seine, watch the moon skim across the water.
Couples neck each other on the benches.
Francine, Robespierre mimicking, beams in again:
"Our revolution has made me feel the full force of the axiom that history is fiction and I am convinced that chance and intrigue have produced more heroes than genius and virtue."
Day 2 Isla complains about a headache and stays back while me, Waldeck and Iraheta explore Paris, the Atelier des Lumières, Place de la Concorde, the Champ De Mars, a few gardens and bookstores. Iraheta casually lands a model in a tangerine sundress ('Yo, you crypto?') and I literally watch him buy her a swirl ice cream cone from McDonalds.
They disappear.
Waldeck and I hide ourselves on an outdoor patio and drink scotch, 'cause that's what Waldeck wanted to drink and I have no preference when it comes to drink 'cause they all taste equally sh*t to me. We share a plate of mutton chops. I think of the poor lamb that had to die for me to be momentarily gratified by its flesh. We sulk for hours.
I read the placards for every flower.
I read the placards of men who got their heads shot off by cannonballs.
Girl in a short denim jacket and a French RollerLeague cap and a brown ponytail—I love a girl in a hat, not sure why, more random unchosen depravity I guess—she leans over to pet an obese Malamute and lets it lick her face. She sits next to us on the outdoor patio and I sneak glances at her whenever she's not looking. Her tote bag says McGill. Her camera satchel says Nikon. I hear her speaking in perfect English on the phone, cute aboots thrown around in there.
Canadian girl.
They slaughtered so many beavers there, way back when. Brooks ran red with their iron.
Imagine someone making a hat from your skin.
She orders a tea and a croissant. She eats in polite, petite nibbles, an ardent (perhaps overzealous) supporter of napkin use, swipes her mouth after every chew.
Around here I lose grip. I grow more depraved by the hour, manic, alone, lustful, crazed. I can't go a minute without staring at her, clawing at my own scalp, twisted in on myself, malformed, pathetic, the betaist bitch breathing, even more beta than those super betas getting castrated out west. I wheeze and sniffle, get up and introduce myself and tell her I am a dragoon in the new Grande Armée. She tells me she's Haylee of the Great Northern Forest of Alberta, a Master's student in Botany, in France visiting family. I tell her I was a gardener for many years and there we have it, ladies and gentlemen, the honest truth and lady luck rolled into one.
Reluctantly I introduce her to Waldeck and the three of us order a round of Amaretto sours. She jokingly says,
"You guys are fun but you're not supposed to go to a second location, haha."
Waldeck knows I love her more than my own life, saw me creepin', says,
"Don't worry, he's a softy," and winks at her. Haylee of Alberta blushes and eyes me and I blush and eye back and hoo boy it's darn cute.
Around 3PM we're too drunk to do anything so Waldeck finds some easy street meat to temporarily abduct and Haylee of Alberta and I go to the old site of the Gibbet of Montfaucon, where they hanged folks for centuries and cut up horse carcasses and dumped sewage and we stroke each other's knuckles and talk about nothing until dusk.
Bicyclists in slimming yellow jumpsuits speed along the paths when we get there, tracer bananas, swoosh, I'm losing my mind, I'm seeing secretaries fondling their HR department in the foliage, I'm watching Choisy's finger getting bit off on repeat, there's a few hyperblonde teenagers in lederhosen linking arms and literally skipping towards the starting path of the Île de la Belvédère carrying branchwoven baskets of gravity resistant cherries, plush red orbs immobile even after the wiggles and jumps and frenzied clasps of adolescent energy.
We stroll Davioud's paths on the Belvédère. Haylee explains faux bois, the handrails meant to imitate tree bark, the tangled lines and etchings, pseudopatterns, and it reminds me of the way it has been and never will be again (and I also tell her faux bois is definitely the best name for an androgynously focused pangendered bordello), the Stuff that came before. Moments of beauty so intolerably huge as to be fictions, winks of divine and irreducible bliss, smothered loves and notions of a world gone Good, snuffed away, perished—you have no room in time to be glued there, you have no essence when the clock has stopped, the moment is the moment and nothing more and when too much has gone on your tapestry will be as ephemeral as the rest. In remembrance, in legacy and what you've left behind, the mattering minutes migrate, render themselves untraceable. No one will be able to get to them. They happen and there is nothing to be said or remembered about their happening. They are yours and only yours just as much as they don't exist when you're sayonara.
Out New Mexico way there's columns of loose planar yellow, moorland transmuting to wax dollops, emerald later, trees slaked and fat with monsoon rain. I stay in a hippie woman's hutgazebo outside her main property, a Victorian styled single story ranch house, I sh*t in a compost toilet, shower outside under a drain she installed herself connected to her bedroom's plumbing.
She encouraged me to walk around without clothes.
I did not take her advice.
I play in the woods and she lets me feed carrots to her horses, a black stallion and a white mare and a brown spotted mustang named Cow. She shows me her art buried in three apartment sized sheds behind the main property, mosaics, anamorphic sculptures, glassblown pipes, portraits of her dead husband, a Sam Elliott impersonator by the looks of it, intricate hooped needleworks of southwestern landscapes, retrievers, Maine Coons, dead Gods, Krishna's arrowsacked corpse ushered to weird Galactic Hindu Heaven on the back of an angelic turtle flying through space or whatever, an elaborate multiwall appliqué of a ginger squire in chainmail eating a neverending bag of worms, the Golden Horde behind him atop their warhorses, Mongols waving scimitars and spears, hand cannons and scalps.
I sink when I see them.
Haylee names trees—Hackberry, Alder, Beech.
Under the warbling shade she looks like death becomes me.
Haylee and I join Waldeck and Isla for a late dinner at an unnamed rooftop hashery a hop away from the Musée d'Orsay, operated clandestinely by Waldeck's old Gypsy college buddy Stu (actually Stuletens Morlay Fenkraery), a man who may as well have been born a bear. Stu's 6'5", a strongfat cosmopolitan werewolf of true mutt origins, an ancestry built on people who couldn't stand to seed their own. Greeting us, standing behind the bar washing a god damned cauldron, his biceps look like cannonballs but his stomach looks like a sea of bloated cream, seriously, like one whole to scale ocean of cream and waggly numbles.
Stu refers to his place as Food Area, decorates ultramodestly, six walnut tables with no cloths or silverware or ornamentation of any kind, three lopsided chairs each, an enclosed glass cigar room in the back next to the kitchen and industrial smokers. The staff's comprised of three 50something Slavicl*te women with blistered hands and multipack a day smoking habits. Stu calls their only dish mishmash.
We order the mishmash and a café Viennois each. Isla texts mysteriously and feigns engagement. Waldeck's so drunk and layfatigued from whatever college doxy he picked up the night prior he can hardly keep his eyes open or his head up but there's a firm, permanent lethargic smile on his lips, a dishonest grin, fueled by a desire to always be okay and excuses like, 'Nothing's wrong, it's all cool, I promise' and 'Don't worry about me, got it covered, any kind of totally normal human vulnerability is like so beneath me bro.'
One of the Slavicl*te ladies brings us the mishmash, three broad silver plates of diced mystery meats over beds of injera. Iraheta and his new failed tennis champion temporary Europe girlfriend Nina (the one he bought the vanilla soft serve) enter as it's being served and they dig in like they've been there the whole night. They're both adorned in tennis gear, stained heads bands, thighhigh white shorts, Yonex Vcore rackets hoisted over their shoulders.
The second they sit down, Haylee forgets I exist. When Iraheta first sits, Haylee eyef*cks the living daylight out of him. She does the same to Nina, who deserves the eyef*ck, as she's so conventionally attractive all I have to do to describe her to you is mention just how conventionally attractive she is and you will know exactly what she looks like and is, you know, in her heart.
Stu leaves momentarily through a stainless steel door behind the bar and comes back with a viola and he plays us an original composition entitled, On va pas se mentir.
I nearly wept.
I kept my head down, couldn't stand to watch.
I don't know. Something about it. We stopped. We stopped eating and drinking and this fat hairy man who I've known for like a half hour, who could probably beat a gorilla in a street fight, starts playing this song on a children's viola, full of dips and changes in signature and low, extending oscillations of bittersweet ambient notes, and I didn't know what to do with myself or where to look or how to act and every nerve in my head told me to cry and to never stop, because it is all so beautiful, and it’s all so sad.
And not a second after feeling this I glance at Haylee and she's still eyeing Iraheta and Nina and instead of sadness, pity at my station, I feel disgusting breadth, immensity, how it must have felt to sack Carthage, how it must have felt to be Wellington overlooking the ashes of Assaye, or Waterloo,
"They came at us the same old way and we beat them the same old way."
Iraheta will win. He is the youngest and smartest and strongest and now after the crypto sh*t, likely the richest. Waldeck's out of commission, Stu's fat and old and I'm an ugly retard. f*cking stupid perfect f*ckwit dumbass. Isla stops paying attention to her phone and starts paying to Iraheta, Stu laying out some afterthought noodlish notes.
Oh no. Is this happening?
Haylee pulls down her skirt for some reason and swaps crossing her legs for sticking her left foot under her ass. She cautiously samples the cream in her Viennois, sniffing before tasting it, pecking at it more with her nose than her lips.
Stu finishes the song and we clap and shout encore but he refuses and goes back to drinking from a bottle of a Cyrillic scribbled scotch, laying the viola on an empty table next to us. Stu scoots close and waves us in and we lean toward him and he looks to everyone individually and says,
"Do you... experiment?" Stu asks.
"What does that mean?" Iraheta asks.
Haylee puts her hand on my thigh. Doesn't look at me.
"All right, American," he says to Iraheta. "It means let me call some friends, let us have a good time, yes? It is a night for celebration."
"What are we celebrating?" I ask.
"What aren't we celebrating? Do you see the sky out there? Pairee, below? All I see is peace. Peace and drink and beautiful women. What else is there to celebrate?"
He wasn't wrong, so he called some "friends" and he gave us MDMA and Haylee put mine on my tongue for me and I put hers on her tongue for her and she put both palms on my knees and whispered in my ear,
"Hey. I had a lot of fun today."
In the background, Isla screeches,
"Oh my god, Nina, seriously, shut the eff up girl!"
I whisper back in Haylee's ear,
"Thanks for the tour."
She says,
"Can we be weird tonight?"
"What do you mean?"
In the background Iraheta says,
"On Augur, you can create scalar markets that provide similar price exposure to an asset. With some engineering, you can make pegged tokens that use Augur markets under the hood. That's what we really bonded over, anyway."
And Nina says back,
"Never use 'yo, you crypto' as a pick up line again, though."
Haylee whispers back to me,
"I've never done anything crazy. I feel like yogurt."
"You feel like yogurt?"
"I feel like sponge cake."
"You feel like sponge cake?"
"We had a good day today, it was fun showing you around. I like you."
"You're young, you don't understand anything."
"I am smarter than you."
"But you've never seen a dead face."
"I like the way your jeans feel."
"These aren't technically jeans."
"I want to do things with you but I only met you earlier and I don't know know you people and I'm scared."
"I'm too depressed to be violent most of the time."
She kisses me and it feels like starlight.
Stu orders a round of Pastis for the table and we drink and his "friends" show up. There's like twenty people total and I don't remember any of their names or personalities or faces or demeanors except for Ichabod because he was a onelegged transvestite from Guernsey and you don't just forget onelegged transvestites from Guernsey without suffering spontaneous amnesia. Waldeck's a bit more awake now thanks to the MDMA and surprisingly he and Isla are all over each other, her chair smacked into his and she's pressed into him with her tit* and she's avianishly guffawing with some de Clichy prosts about Waldeck's receding hairline but he doesn't care and his hand's tucked in Isla's back pocket and he's squeezing, other hand lighting a joint bigger than his middle finger and I've seen Waldeck smoke pot maybe three times before this and yes, my love, I reel, I reel and I don't understand, par for the course.
Haylee interrupts the proceedings, definitely zonked, this kind of merriment above her experience and pay grade,
"Wait, so, hey, what do you guys actually do?"
Iraheta and Waldeck look at each other.
"We're dragoons, courtesy of Vermont's Grande Armée," Iraheta says, blinking blankly, turning his attention to me. "You didn't tell her?"
"Wait, that wasn't a joke?" Haylee swivels to me as she says this.
"No, it was not a joke," I clarify.
"Okay, so what does that mean exactly?" she asks, wiping her lip with her lapnapkin (lapkin?).
"We're contractors for the government of Vermont," Waldeck says plainly. "They say do this and we go do that."
"Do you like..."
"Hey, girlie," Iraheta says, "Maybe stop with the inquisition. We're nice dudes. Don't judge us for our jobs."
"I'm not judging," she says, straightening out. She takes off her cap and places it on the table, removing her scrunchie from her ponytail and letting her hair down. Waldeck smirks at me when she does this, dramatically sniffing the perfume on Isla's sunburned neck.
"What were you going to ask, then?" Iraheta asks with an accusatory pang.
"Can I get, uh, an absinthe?" Haylee asks one of the servers, indexpointing to the ceiling, shifting her weight back to Iraheta, palm rested on my thigh now gripping, nails digging. "I was just going to ask if you guys have ever objected to an order on ethical grounds."
"No," Iraheta says. "We're carte blanche."
"So you can do whatever you want? Unlimited power?"
"Haha," Iraheta says. He stares into the depths of his glass too long for anybody else's comfort. No one else speaks and everyone looks to him for a response. "We're shoestringers for the poorest state in America. Power? Who said anything about power?"
"Ugh, so what do you actually do?"
"All the bad stuff," Waldeck says through a cough, pounding his sternum with a balled fist. "You name it, we do it. Does this help you?"
Haylee's eyes double somehow and her nose twitches and instead of being disgusted, I could tell she for some reason likes that I am an objectively bad person, sincerely enjoys that I have no scruples when it comes to making a living. There's something in her look giving her away. She's giving up, she loses right now, one of these tough gruff older men is going to f*ck her into putty tonight and it's written in the books already, may as well be, she has made up her mind, there's something she finds appealing about dangerous, immoral, apeish men—there's something whacked and wicked in her, unrun gears, focusing her like the pinpointed sunlight of a magnifying glass to traits of victory at all costs, of winning and winning again and only stopping to lose once you are a pile of graveyard sot. Despite being raised in a suburban upper middle class quaint Canadian household, Haylee somehow received the 'wants to be ravished by violent American nationalists' gene.
Why has it happened like this?
There is nothing too sacred to avoid conquer.
Stu pulls Waldeck and I aside and we join him at the bar. He makes us Aviations—gin, maraschino liqueur, crème de violette, lemon juice. He offers us each a Serbian cigar and says it goes with the drink like 'tit* on tit*', but I smoke a cheap rolled cigarette instead like I always do and look back to Haylee dancing with Ichabod the one legged transvestite from Guernsey, screaming,
"Oh my God this is so much fuuuunnn!"
I smile at her and she smiles back, gives me a little wink. Stu rests his elbows on his bar. He huffs. Puffs. Blows his own heart down.
"Wall, do you remember Cousin Aoefowyn?"
"Of course I remember Aoefowyn."
"Do you remember his wife, Carolina?"
"I do remember his wife, Carolina—how could you forget a Carolina? How is she?"
Stu stands, swivels his werebear head, takes a proper inhale. His fingers tap on the bar. He blows the air out his circled mouth and shakes his head and every feature on his face falls.
"She died in childbirth."
"Stu..." Waldeck starts, arching his neck up.
"No one knows where Aoe went. He's gone. He..."
"I'm sorry, Stu."
"You are the only family I have left, Wall. Karen left. Aoe's gone wherever he's gone. My daughter married some broker in Beijing, so she's left, too, doesn't even ring on my birthdays. No one talks to me anymore. I'm the old man of Paris raving in his spotted tower."
"Seems like you have plenty of friends," Waldeck notes, gesturing to the party behind us.
"Oh, Wall," Stu says and he hangs his head, ashamed, trying super hard to hide his redfaced crying from us. He collects himself after five hard sobs. "These people like me, sure, but they don't care. Not like people used to care. Remember 2020? Hell, 2030? Remember how we could walk in anywhere and instantly be the baddest motherf*ckers in the room? Don't you miss it? You still look fine but I'm too old. More like Santa than a man. I'm not what they want anymore, Wall, I have lost it enf*ckingtirely."
"We all lose it all," Waldeck says calmly. "And we were never the baddest motherf*ckers, we just felt like we were. You're too soft and romantic, always have been. You should have known this was coming. It always comes, Stu. I don't want it to but it does."
No answer. I go back to sit with Haylee and I ask her if she would eat an alive newly born (like, within the hour) fawn for ten million dollars. She says,
"I don't really want to think about that question right now."
Stu raises a glass behind the bar and clinks it with a literal silver spoon. The party hushes up to accommodate him.
"Speeches are boring, I'm sorry," he says and everyone laughs. "Lets party."
Stu downs his shot of whatever and starts jiving with the prosts, such an old guy cliche dance, too, humping the air in front of him and jostling his shoulders side to side and firing fake pistolas into the crowd. Nina, now drunker than anyone else, goes along to join them, grinding up on Stu. He's in heaven, the sad old bastard. Iraheta slurs and claps from the sidelines. Waldeck throws Nina a twenty and she stuffs it into her bra.
Haylee's in the corner of the place now, chatting up some vaguely attractive Hemsworthian asshole in a maroon suit jacket. He reads her palms and while she's playing along, I can tell she's not buying it.
"Your Virgo is rising..."
She notices me watching, excuses herself and sits next to me.
"Oh thank god," she says.
"Oh thank god?"
"Dude wouldn't leave me alone."
"He's cute," I say.
"He's the Shah of Iran's personal astrologer."
"Oh my goodness, there is so much packed into what you just said."
"Hey, can we go make out and smoke on the balcony for a bit?
"Yes."
Before we can get up, Stu and Nina's "friendgrinding" takes an unfortunate turn when Stu gropes where he shouldn't grope like a lonely horny dumbass and Nina recoils when he does this, swerving away from him, swinging an arm but failing to connect.
"What the f*ck? What the f*ck?"
Nina stumbles five steps back.
Iraheta grabs Stu by the collar, open palm smacks him hard across the cheek. Iraheta's only 5'10" but he's got the fresh young blood of a thirty year old because he is one and he's built like a steel square. Stu knows he can't win and knows he's wrong. He deflates, slouches, gives up, PlayDoh spine.
"Why the f*ck would you do that?" Iraheta spits, forces Stu to his knees to level out the awkward height advantage.
"I don't know what came over me, it..." Stu whimpers, bows to Iraheta.
Iraheta boots him in the face. Stu's ear bleeds and he holds both hands to his temples, trembling. Waldeck and Isla enter from the cigar room.
"What the hell is this?" Waldeck asks. "Stu?"
"He just basically raped Nina," Iraheta says.
"Well, I mean, not raped," Nina corrects.
"Okay, molested, is that better, princess?" Iraheta asks, throwing his hands in the air.
"Had to boot an old man in the face 'cause he touched some girl's tit* at an MDMA party?" Waldeck asks. "Really?"
"He groped me, dude," Nina says.
"Yeah, Waldeck, dude," Iraheta starts, explaining with his hands, "You're only defending him 'cause he's an old friend, I get it, I get it."
"You get it?" Nina asks. She crosses her arms and shifts her weight to one leg.
"I'm not defending what he did," Waldeck says. "I'm saying you didn't have to boot him for it. Does that help you understand better?"
"You are such a condescending piece of sh*t sometimes," Iraheta says.
Waldeck ignores Iraheta and helps Stu up. Stu jogcries behind the bar and cowers, knocks over an empty bottle of Mama Walker's Blueberry Pancake liqueur on the way. It pinballs to Waldeck's feet. Most of the party has left by this point, it's just the girls we came with and us. I shake my head hard to myself and Haylee mouths oh my god to me, now likely regretting the sh*t she has stepped into.
"Yeah, so, Stu, what was up with that?" Iraheta asks, prodding.
"Leave it. Better yet, leave," Waldeck says.
"No, I want him arrested for sexual assault," Nina says.
Waldeck leans on the bar, bored, rolling his eyes, rolling the stolen tequila sunrise from the seat next to him in its glass.
"What do you do for a living, Nina?"
"Why does it matter?"
"Well, Nina, do you make good money?"
"Why does it matter?"
"'Cause Stu's got lots of money and better lawyers than you and no one gives one or two or even three sh*ts about some skan* getting groped high on molly."
"What the hell, man?" Iraheta says. "This seems dumbly hostile."
"Think I'll go down as easy as Stu, buddy?"
"She should be able to press charges."
"She is able to press charges, I am telling her what will happen once she does."
"I'm fine with a settlement," Nina says, now far calmer and sitting on one of the tables.
"How much?" Stu whimpers from behind the bar. Waldeck slaps both palms to his own cheeks and blubbers his lips.
"Come up with a good enough number and I'll send you the account details," Nina says. "I'm leaving, it was terrible meeting you, you're all disgusting creeps and this was one of the worst nights of my life. Thanks, bye."
Nina slams the door on her way out, makes a real show of it. Iraheta throws a fist at the air, 360's himself, says god damn f*ckin' asshole piece of sh*t I had it there and he f*cking ruined it the stupid obese fa*ggot I can't believe it I can't believe it how the f*ck did it turn out this way?
Haylee tugs at my shirt,
"Can we leave now?"
We stealthily sneak out, say goodbye to no one, dash down the stairs because the elevator takes too long. We smoke and hit the cobble.
"Still think crazy's good?" I ask.
"Depends on the crazy," she says. "But you're a pack you don't want to see coming."
"What's that mean?"
"Nothing. It's nothing."
Come time for bed, Hayley rejects my offer of going back to my hotel and takes a cab home and kisses me goodnight and I never see her again.
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When we get back to Vermont still nothing has happened or happens. I have no take on days, dates or calendars—I move through the motions with no real foresight or planning. I find outlets to fuel my misery (girls, drugs, reading, wine, you know, same sh*t) and beg the Assembly to find me a stompable set of teeth but they politely decline and tell me my veracity for justice will be 'useful at a later date'.
After they reject me I stomp off in a fit and determine myself to f*ck Haxo's daughter Nanette but when I find her at the Taphouse later in the day she rejects me too and calls me a pathetic try hard and tells me 'I'm the worst kind of man.' I see her playing pool a few hours later with a gym obsessed 6'6" Nicaraguan, skull tattooed on his throat, triad of black tears engraved under both eyes. I accidentally peep over to them as I'm about to leave and they point at me and hyena cackle to themselves and I can hear them a foot out the door.
Waldeck gets a call (not me, of course) so we meet the higher ups in the Montpelier High basketball gymnasium, the lowbrow bunch of sh*teating mouthbreathers. It's Haxo and nine other delegates seated in best light I've seen them in, seen Haxo in, as usually he's shrouded by the dark of the chamber but here he's slouched on the bleachers chewing a Salsa Verde shrimp burrito like a baby with no teeth, Zachary Taylor tie flipped behind his neck, fiberglass shuttered windows on every side casting sunbeams on his fake hair and faded Rosaceae cheeks.
He still wears powder and wigs.
Thinks it's funny.
He's not wrong.
"Gentlemen," he says. He stands, extends his arms burrito wielding.
"What can we do for you today, boys and girls?" Waldeck asks, crossing his arms.
"Mmm. We believe it's time for some commendations. We can't do anything official, but we want to reward you for your continued efforts of preserving the ideals of Vermont and the nation as is."
"What do you want us to do, Haxo?" Waldecks asks. This question contains bite, unflattering inflection.
Haxo snigg*rs, picks a helix'd piece of shrimp painted in guacinfused green sour cream (sour gream?) from his burrito and swallows without chewing.
"It appears history repeats itself with minor adjustments," he says. He hands Waldeck the dossier of one Dylan St. Just.
"High time, wouldn't you say?"
"So, what, totally done?" Waldeck mimes shooting himself.
"Praise be," Haxo says. He and his cronies start the long walk back to the entrance.
"Might need some help," Waldeck says.
"All right my boy," Haxo says, spinning on one foot maybe too adeptly for a man his age. "You are not alone."
When the steel doors of the gymnasium slam behind them they ring subtle metal wah's until we leave.
We stay at Waldeck's suite at Cap Plaza and plan for nearly 72 hours, awake for the majority of those, wigged out on Choisy's amphetamine prescription. It reminds me of old times that will never be again, but this is like one of those times, so soon enough it also will never be again, become an old time itself—Choisy who deserves no praise but is praiseworthy anyway, Waldeck the Papa of all Alphas, and me with no business being there, planning a kidnapping and raid defenses and it renders so saccharine to me, so grand, so full.
During this 72 hours you text me and tell me to meet you in Atlantic City on my birthday, the first of May. I am suspicious of the timing (for no good reason) and purchase a flight for three days earlier.
We kidnap St. Just's girlfriend Brooklyn from the same house my friends (might've) raped her friends and we tie her up and put a tarpaulin bag over her head and drive her to a cabin we rented in the woods fortified by an incline at its back and nothing but dense forest in its front, two natural ravines babbling on either side. Choisy rigs up a tripwire bag, a leaf pit, proximity mines, translucent strips of electric fencing, within a half hour.
The cabin's two rooms with bunkbeds and a living room/kitchen/dining room combo, no panache, panacheless, everything's Christmas colored and mothballed and Appalachian old people kitsch. We sit wormy kicky Brooklyn on the couch, Waldeck and I lazed on the recliners at her sides, coffee table covered in old people magazines. I flip through a peculiarly not terrible issue of Sports Digest on the history of sports, giggle to myself at illustrations of Ottomans wrestling camels and Elizabeth I overlooking a bear getting prodded at by like sixteen armored assholes with spears.
Waldeck and Choisy set up floodlights on the porch. I point the Smith at Brooklyn and she bleats into the bag, black striations rolling down her throat, tendrils, she does not understand the game her dumb boyfriend has played and now she is paying the price and I do not agree she has to.
We watch Jeopardy for the next hour.
"Chateau Gaillard overlooks the Seine, but it was built by this leonine ruler who lost it to the French in 1204."
Waldeck and Choisy both text during this lull.
I receive 0.0 texts, play sideline Jeopardy like a good boy.
"In the early 19th century philhellenic groups sprang up across the world to aid this country's independence."
Come dusk's end Waldeck hits the floodlights at the front and calls St. Just from Brooklyn's phone. Choisy unmasks her. Waldeck presses the Mateba to her head and holds up some, ahem, prepared material. He puts the phone to her ear, removes her gag. Her eyes vibrate up at Waldeck and he glares to her and now she knows, she knows for sure what she is in for.
Two rings, pickup.
"Yo shawtee, where you at?"
Waldeck shakes the script in front of her face.
"Hey... baby, I got invited to Lucio's cabin, remember the one I was telling you about?"
"Oh, uh, yeah, yeah, that's chill. Cool. What you doin', then?"
"You wanna' come over? He's having a party. I'll text you the address."
"Lets do it. Peace."
He hangs up. Waldeck texts the address. We wait.
I fear if I see everything with you it will not be enough.
Tundra? Dams? The Great Grecian Tour? A sailboat in the Caribbean? For what?
We will create the moments we can together and you will let them smolder away for a few fleeting meccas of disparate feeling, longed for newness.
You trounce about for the novelty. I once did too but no longer have it in me.
Connie texts me a picture of her with a fake mustache and a monocle and the caption reads,
"I see you loser xoxoxoxoxo"
"Lets roll," Waldeck says, signaling me to the front door.
I grab a Kalashnikov of my own and head to the front porch hallway. Through the sliver of window I see a beat to sh*t Kia Bongo approaching from the woods, brights on, cabin bouncing, copperaluminum wires suspended from the undercoat wiggling like filaments of yarn. Waldeck turns everything off except the porch lights. We sit in the dimmed living room listening to our own breaths, the spinning of worndown axles treading crackled Spring briars.
St. Just and three others exit the truck, chat among themselves, hock loogeys and chortle. They knock on the door. Two polypierced beanie'd hipsters try to peek in through the windows, hands cupped around eyebrow studs. Choisy controls the door with a wire fastened to the knob and slowly cracks it open, AK pointed forward.
Cricket wings everywhere.
Hushed crossdirectional breezes swoosh as they boot in, clomp, patter, step.
Striking, lights up, St. Just still not wearing shoes for some reason, callous flipflops, thorns sticking out of his Achilles, vermilion leaves mottled between his toes, blended and solidified. His two plump cheeked confidants drop their Garands and put their hands up instinctively like they're used to surrendering and they quiver and gnash their teethies and the stupid amount of sparkly bracelets on their wrists slide down their forearms.
St. Just bleeds jaundice thumbing at a belt clamp of rye tied to a lariat of bootleg fireworks. He doesn't drop his 1918. Chews a meter of straw. Waldeck smooshes the Mateba's barrel into Brooklyn's temple, grins at St. Just so sincere and reserved I think it belongs somewhere on the Lifetime Channel.
"So we meet again, mon amour," Waldeck says. "I have missed you."
St. Just chortles, chin pushed in his chest.
"You think you're such hot sh*t don't you, sir?" he asks.
Waldeck's lips squiggle and he shrugs and he brushes Brooklyn's hair out of her face, puts it behind her ears, kisses her tenderly on the eyebrow.
"Man, this is gonna' feel so good," St. Just says.
"What's gonna' feel good, babe?" Waldeck asks.
"Oh, well..." St. Just says, shifting, reshaping, brushing an awful four day old soul patch with his top row of teeth.
From outside, an acute and freezing shriek stamped on the void, no real words, dumb syllables, lazy patters of nothing gunfire, braaat braaat, whizbang, more unintelligible moans, vowels galore, aaahhh, uhhhh, oooohhh.
"Did you bring friends without asking, Dylan?" Waldeck asks, monotone.
St. Just gulps.
"You can't get all of us, trust me. Let me leave with Brooke and it's over."
"What's over?"
"Whatever this is."
"What is this?"
"I don't know, sir, you tell me."
Waldeck gets up, stretchyawns, uses Brooklyn to lean. St. Just shivers in place like a windswept corn husk.
"Relax, I’m not actually allowed to kill you. It’s probably morally wrong to keep you toads alive but hey I don’t get paid to have good judgement. She’ll be just fine gettin’ bull-dyked in the pen. Or swallowing some foot. Ah, whatever.”
Waldeck unloads his clip into the ceiling, the windows, the carpet, the television. He gently pushes a sobbing Brooklyn over, who teeters headfirst to the carpet like a top-heavy chihuahua.
“We were just leaving, I think, huh?” Waldeck trails out the door and me and Choisy follow anxiously, spasming our guns in their direction, greeted outside to a procession of MPM med jeepies and gooncarts. Haxo, smoking a Virginia Slim, shakes hands with Waldeck and Choisy and tosses each of us a suitcase. Choisy and Waldeck sit with me and smoke and we stay there mutely until sunrise overlooking the firing squads, droves of men ragdolling down hills, some arrested, some carted out of the main house in wheelbarrows and thrown in the gooncart screaming.
A bubbly hyperpleasant mid 40's blonde lady who looks like she's been on Safari for the last six months, khaki vest, beige cargo pants, DSLR camera suspended from her neck, steps up to us and extends a hand.
"Hi guys, Melanie Bonner, I'm with the Post. Have time for a few questions?"
Waldeck slumps in the folding chair, spitting, heel of his boots digging tracks in the mud.
"What kind of questions?" Waldeck asks.
"Haxo told me you're top brass."
"We're rubes, ma'm. Parasites, or whatever," Choisy says, not paying attention, fanning away flies like a Southern maiden, tracing the current cabin scene clusterf*ck using a thin wedge of charcoal.
"Parasites sounds kinda' bad, don't you think?"
"Parasites are respectable animals," Choisy explains. "Live within their means."
"That's right," Waldeck confirms. "Ordinary sansculottes. Parasites."
Melanie scrunches her nose. The wrinkles on her forehead blossom in arcs when she squints at us, an interesting sign of aging, a permanent fleur-de-lis right between the eyes, but she's way cute so it's appealing and difficult to look away from.
"You're being humble," she says.
"What do you want to know, Miss Bonner?"
"Who were these people to you?" She swerves 180 degrees, thumb pointing behind her.
"These people?" Waldeck asks.
"Yeah, um..." Melanie plucks a black book from one of her vest pockets (there's about eight thousand) and fingers through it lickless. "You know, Dylan St. Just, Brooklyn Swisher, Ryu Moshimoto?"
Waldeck spits again and puts his elbows on his knees.
"Now why is a lady from the Post inquiring about something like that?"
"Just want to know what's happening with New England's brave militia," she says, but she doesn't hide the disdain in her tone, lets it slip, or knowingly lets it slide.
"Want to get a drink?" Waldeck asks.
"Sure," she says back, so we go get a drink at the Taphouse.
Nanette Haxo's there with her shredded 6'6" Nicaraguan FWB but they don't point and laugh at me this time since I'm entering the bar with an AK and blood on my boots and my jacket is torn at the waist and with every step I'm heaving nuggets of dust and metal flakes and woolstatic, natural sanguine electricity.
Waldeck buys us a round of Malibu Sunsets, demands umbrella toothpicks in them. We settle down in the corner by the jukebox blaring 'Les Fluers'by Minnie Riperton, one of my favorite songs.
Inside every man lives the seed of a flower
If he looks within he finds beauty and power
Ring all the bells, sing,
tell the people that be everywhere that the flower has come
Light up the sky with your prayers of gladness
and rejoice for the darkness is gone
Throw off your fears let your heart beat freely at the sign that a new time is born
"Okay, so like, what do you guys actually do?" Melanie asks. She sits with a foot under ass, the majority of her upper body leaned in uncomfortably on the table.
"Whatever they say," Waldeck says.
"Whatever they say? Mindless drones?"
"Don't have to be mindless to follow instructions," Choisy adds.
"What if the instructions are bad? Morally questionable?"
"We are at war," Waldeck says. "We can't afford to pay mind to anything but the continuity of the state. Preservation, Mrs. Bonner."
"Miss Bonner, Mr. Waldeck. Ahem. So mindless drones, then?" she asks again, twirling her umbrella, eating the cherry skewered on it, twirling some more, palming her chin, ponytail drooping in step with her tilted, inquisitive, 40something sprayhead.
"Mel, write whatever you want," Waldeck says.
"Mel? Are we at abbreviations already?"
Waldeck grinds his teeth. I glance at Choisy's sketchbook and he's done with the cabin scene, moves on to creepily brushing Melanie's outline from his vantage point.
"You're not interesting," Waldeck says plainly. "You want to write an article about peace, about how the goodies can commit atrocities too, how we should stop 'cause it's so boohoo sad and utterly terrible, right? Well Mel, it ain't ever gonna' stop. Men like us, and I know you know this but are just naively deceiving yourself or something, but we're an ineradicable plague, an ingrained mechanism of human existence. We never go away and we never stop. Do you understand?"
Mel did understand.
She understood so hard she has a child with Waldeck the following Spring, who they name Antoinette.
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And so now, my love, we come to Atlantic City, events you remember well.
I convince Waldeck to bring Mel along.
Choisy refuses, says he'll gamble too much.
We go three days before my birthday. I text you and ask where you're staying and you tell me you booked room at the Borgata, so Waldeck gets the penthouse and tells me not to worry about it so I don't.
Oh look, it's like lame Vegas. Your lights are in vain, Atlantic City. You will never win my heart and I am only here to tritely attempt a conquering. I'm invading Russia, ignoring the winter, ignoring the scorched Earth, ignoring the five hundred mile treks and typhus outbreak and my advisors—let me be. Let me march and stammer, die if need be.
First night the three of us go to the Premier 'cause it's the only nightclub in the Borgata and we don't want to walk anywhere. Melanie complains about the price of drinks, the volume of the music and the quality of the upholstery. The place is sardine packed, DJ Flipf*ck on the back stage playing some electrohouse jams like 'Lets Turn Around Together' and 'I'll Enter You If You Enter Me, Too'and 'Verses Galore'. Mel and Waldeck drink and dance with people twenty years younger and flail their arms in the air and make out shamelessly on the dance floor and dry hump each other under an oval of rainbowing lights straight out of an epileptic's nightmares.
In under an hour they book a threesome with a chestnutheaded sidepony'd floozy in fencenet thigh highs, maybe 20, definitely wasted. She introduces herself as Kathleeeeeenhahaha and hiccups and titters too much and touches her own face every ten seconds, splotching perspired glitter and dark navy mascara. Her and Mel make out in front of us and Waldeck pats my shoulder, gives me the knowingest look out of all the knowing looks. He explains he has some important business to take care of, laughs too hard at his own (not)joke, and they leave me there alone in the nightclub scanning the crowd and never finding you and not a single person speaks to me or cares I exist or interacts with me at all, not even an incidental bump from the staff.
I go to the streets, like I do. I ride the beachside Ferris wheel alone and serial killer stare the couple parallel to me, somewhere around my age but they're in matching windbreakers. The couple's chubby but they're cute, boilerplate Midwestern brunettes. He swings his arm over her shoulder and they kiss and their unhate radiates to me, halts the fatalism for a second.
As much as there's geographies burning alive, there's sincere, candid embraces, too. Make outs on a Ferris Wheel after ten years of marriage. Meeting a new lover in a club. Working it out with someone you could not imagine gone. Hugging in a tent in the Blue Ridges, only two upright apes for miles. Eating spaghetti like Lady and the Trump 'cause you're impossibly lame together.
She wraps her arm in yours in a packed theater, some horror movie about demons. It's too loud when she chews popcorn but you don't care and she is too take-home-to-mom worthy to be upset, you are excited to introduce her to your friends, family, you are excited to build a life with her, you don't know why but you feel compelled to make sure she is as happy as possible, as healthy as possible, living as much of life as she can.
The breaching tummy—your child removed from your lover's body, the newborn you created with her, history and future scripted in its veins, who it will be, how it will be, where it has been before it existed, it is everything like and nothing like the billions of similar animals before it, newold, freshdead.
Think now, if you can. The well of ecstasy has never run dry. There has not been a day in the history of our species where at least some of us did not love mightily, or at least more than we vanquished. Because of this, I wonder if we only seek pleasure in futile attempts to escape the How It Is, stretched before you in reality's chalk lines.
We buzz and suck up our preferred nectars. We inherit wisdoms and jokes and recollections at the whim of others, no fault of our own collapsing omnishamble.
We press, shimmy. Jive, hustle.
We do everything we can to keep our minds off cold facts.
When you cut the maudlin and add it up layer by layer, you get continents of unconditional care, support for the sake of it, isles of dedication and sacrifice and catching your ethics before a falter. In most of our cores, cross culturally, we give up ourselves for others, excuse our own well being in exchanges and compromises and flights of empathy, challenge the world to granulate our loves, dare to duel time's sense of humor.
Flintlocks at dawn, motherf*cker.
I fall asleep outside the Penthouse suite after walking almost 20 circling miles, afraid to hear moans more exuberant than the ones I can procure.
I stalk the Borgata, watch for you for two days, let Mel and Waldeck prance about New Jersey together without a third wheel, receive snapshots of them feeding each other funnel cakes, poking themselves in their noses with powdered sugar and guzzling down those overpriced meterlong alcoholic slushies, already in love after only a couple weeks, a difficult fall for both of them, quick and dirty, tangibly entrenched in their depths.
Mel left her boyfriend of eight years for Waldeck. Dropped the dude like a sack of hitchiker's body parts.
Your attention and care are no match for the Waldeck's of the world. Men like him are a steering force. If Mel's a luxury sailboat, Waldeck is the guiding and strumplucked wind, the starlit waves, shimmery blue, the vague strings of chance whorled across the water, an influence without intent, who is, who we fall back to, who controls without control, makes without creation.
I shop around. Order nibbles everywhere I can. Eat $50 Pesto they probably cooked from a dust packet. Order prawns and imagine myself sailing alone, the tip of South America to the South pole, only me to carry me, a value I will never learn no matter how much I praise my solitudes, straits of loneliness. On the notboat I read Hemingway and Borges and Melville. Below deck I smoke from a pipe and my beard flows like silvery moss and I brew black coffee, overlook the vastness, feel big in the smallness, feel small at the horizon and the white birds cawing, telling me stories of flapping distances over an endless and monstrous sea.
They are only here to rest their wings.
In the mornings I cook stockpiled beans, try to fish, fail, gag at the rocking, curl myself in my cabin, dream of you in my fiction as I dream of you now.
Shop around. Chai as big as my head. Swig it down, balcony overlooking the Borgata's entrance hall, Spaghetti Monster goldred chandelier, yuppie sneakers squeaking on the polish, busy for a week day. I look as hard as I can, for anyone, not just you, Iraheta, Choisy, hell, I would even like to see Isla, anyone who has not abandoned me outright.
I ask the front hotel attendant if you've checked in and he tells me he can't give me that kind of info, so I search every ballroom and guest area five times over. On these days I pathetically, obsessively, walked the length of the hotel at least fifty times. The guys in the security room must be confused as f*ck, or more likely they're drowning in pork rinds and stale smoke.
There's a hacker/tech/cryptocurrency conference in one of the ballrooms when I step in. A guy in sweats from Boston Dynamics takes the stage and fiddles the podium mic and discusses the next phase of development for mechanized autonomous units, Little Walkers, how they're the best shot we have for ridding the West of terrorists, how militarization rolls out in half a year. Everyone woops and cheers. The room's shadowy blue, projector light gleaming at the center up to the stage.
I scan the room. Not you. Lots of faces but not you. Somewhere near the stage, I notice a familiar Italian ridged nose, but the figure's too silhouetted, I squint, no f*cking way, is that...?
I forget about it, go get a few quiches I eat in three gobbles each. I wheeze on my room's balcony, pantless, smoke myself to sleep. The New Jersey humidity wakes me up wetted. I don't shower or shave or anything and leave again to search in vain.
Waldeck sends me a picture of him eating gelato on the beach, captioned:
"Miss you, buddy. Get some ice cream."
I text Connie and tell her to come to Atlantic City and she confirms she can in a week or so, so I book my room for a week and a half and my routine stays the same until I do see you, dear, where you weren't supposed to be, in a place you swore you wouldn't be until a few days from now (then).
You're alone when I see you first, ordering a coffee. Black. You look too stressed for comfort. I stay out of sight, hide behind banisters, peep, peek, see you there and squint.
You get two coffees.
Two coffees, huh?
You fast walk back to your room, fifth floor, 523. You swipe your card and use your hip to open the door. I rush down to the outdoor pool to see if your room's balcony is visible from the ground floor and it is, although a bit hidden and cubbied and too high up to properly see anything. But you do come out to have a smoke with your coffee and you put your feet up on the railing. Your toes wiggle. Inarticulate scribbles of smoke drift away to the firmament.
“Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.”
And then, another pair of feet join yours on the railing and they're touching and also wiggling. I grip my pool Pilsner with both hands.
I sweat, hyperventilate.
Everything spins.
The squalls of preteens at the pool ring to me like the death throes of a nation, or the warcries of a charging throng of Huns.
I go back to my room and unpack my Smith and W, checking the chamber thrice, stampeding out. I remember everything on the walk there. The crowds stop but not really and even if they're moving they're not. The clockwork warps. There's wind outside but no swaying, no leaves to calm me down, only gust, the noise of it but no motion.
Sometimes there's changes so abstract you'll never really know what exactly changed but you'll perceive a change anyway, some evanescent scamp simpering in the atmosphere, rubbing its mawkish claws together gleefully at your empty headedness.
What should move doesn't, what shouldn't does—obelisks spinning like barber poles, pillars grinding themselves to chalk, they can no longer hold the weight of the hotel, there's chipped flakes of paint swirling underneath them and in corners and gluing to my boot's threads. A wedding party passes me. At least four of the groomsmen bump into me, none of them apologize or anything, I try to swerve past them but they keep coming, tuxes and salaried dresses sparkling limelight and surging and there's static and electricity, the shine of their Dockson's flutters in my eyes, lingering soft caresses of champagne hither between them, they're the only things moving and there's too many so I stop and sit on a slot chair and breath as much as I am able. My lungs crackle.
Back to normalish after they finally disperse. Stone gamblers, slots stealing mint, a binary of tech nerds filing into one of the ballrooms juggling casks of wires and CPU's and motherboards, tangled demonstrations, digitized life's works.
I move to the closest bar, an unnamed strip of stools flooded in twinkling magenta, shiny—I order a cucumber beer to calm my nerves and eat a week's supply of Maraschino cherries and later when I vomit them up it looks like blood and I scare myself and admit I'm finally dying—finally, here it is, the big sign, why not add a terrible incurable bloodpuke disease to the pallet too?
I text Waldeck about my probably blooming cancer and he doesn't respond.
The bartender's jowls extend far past her face, a whale's comb enamel smile. She's 5'3" and cute enough and fakely, boredly flirts with me to procure a better tip but I give her pocket change and spit covertly on the end of the bar to punish her greedy deception. She sarcastically thanks me for the quarters so I tell her that bad systems I didn't invent aren't my f*cking problem and I leave her rolling her eyes and shaking her lopsided head at me.
I text you and ask where you are.
You tell me, "home."
But can't anywhere be home, dear, when you really think on it?
You say you're excited to see me. You say you have missed me so, so much.
I don't respond. Tickle the long barrel of the pistol in my pants.
Too many pretty girls. Why slaughter pleasant genes?
You couldn't keep her around. You weren't Waldeck. Someone else won. Someone else incites pleasures in her you couldn't accomplish if you read Kama Sutra for the next two decades and grew vibrating dild*s out of your forearms. She moans like this with him and not you because she values the time she spends with him more than your time.
In other words, if you want them: She likes him more because he is better than you.
Most of us do this. We place timelines above others. Probabilistically this means you are not the top timeline in most people's lives. The moments you had together are no more precious to her than getting double teamed by two strangers she met at ACL. She likely thinks more about her favorite ex buying her a cherry slushie than she does about you spending thousands on a carnival cruise to the Caribbean. The weights aren't fair, based on nothing.
So you rise above. Let it wash over you.
Too much to be remembered. Too much to be precious. Not enough space to store the abstract.
Look back a thousand years sometime. Men who changed the course of civilizations are sometimes footnotes, reduced to five page biographies on Wikipedia. And so what will you be?
Ephemera, likely.
Saxled muzak trumpeting through the speakers.
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Waldeck announced the birth of his first child by flying me to Greece and bragging to me about his new (then) hot as f*ck (back then she was) wife, told me she's the only woman he knows heightened enough to carry his seed. We sat under his gazebo, a ten person concrete octagon next to fields of grapevine so long you can't see past their reach in daylight.
He said he can finally see the finish line.
He was 31.
He said it feels good to find this kind of importance early in life. Good to find someone you can stick with until death.
They had been together six months at the time.
We eat duck Waldeck shot himself glazed in maple aioli. He asks if I want to be the Godfather to the first one and I say yes and we hug like brothers on a battlefield, no one there to witness the sap, and I am not sure I have ever felt more loved.
Needless to say, his kids and wife both turned out a tad sh*t.
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I doubleback to the bar and order another cucumber beer and tip the bartender double the cost of the drinks and apologize for my behavior earlier, blame it on work stress. She understands and forgives me in an instant.
An obese guy in a detective's overcoat scarfs cheesesticks two stools down, licks the breading off his fingers, chews with his mouth open. Three distinct folding chins jiggle. He chats up the bartender, no pause between queries and bites, pries her about her life as a 'pretty thing in a big city.'
She says,
"It's great at the moment. Besides the creeps."
She winks at me and Obese McObeserson orders a round of chicken fingers and light beer to go with his fried cheese. A fly lands on his plate. It picks at a hazel crumb he hasn't gotten to yet, inspects it with its disheartening disjointed shudderinducing feethands.
I put an earbud in.
Brian Eno's 'Thursday Afternoon'.
A fly on an obese man's plate.
Cromwell breathing a sigh of relief, which he must have done at least a handful of times.
A Paraguayan mother to Suleman octuplets receives a sizable Christmas bonus from her upscale white masters and sobthanks them at their feet like they earned that money themselves or something and the couple feels super awesome about themselves for being so generous to the women taking care of their children while being forced to neglect her own.
Amber dries a salamander in its clutches.
Condors circle the corpse of a teenager shot in the occipital outside Juárez —he doesn't make his deliveries quickly enough, became too much of a liability, wasn't impressing his overbosses despite them enjoying him on a personal level due to his quick wit and jovial nature, Sancho Reija, 17, died with a 3DS in his pocket and Pokemon on his socks.
Out at sea on the Atlantic, a slooping Choisy and his then wife make love above deck, try to match the rhythmic bobbing of the waves, climax together under constellations of lyrelight and when they finish they lay back and breath synchronous sighs of relief and the stars drench them in faraway silk.
The bartender applies salt to the rim of a Martini glass, bites down on her tongue during separate sections of concentration.
Dragged behind a truck, tied to the bumper, dies halfway to his own lynching, praise be, and at home his daughter wails for her papa to come back and his widow has to tell her,
"We don't come back."
An eighteen year old Frenchmen who impregnated his Protestant lover gets a longbowman's arrow in his heart at Tours, calls out EVANGELINE as he dies and stretches his fingers to heaven.
Dial tone for centuries.
You scratch their backs, indent them. You seek pleasure in every box, every corner, without prejudice. You tell them you love them. You mean it. Moments on moments, you remember them and they are to you what you are to me.
I selfishly f*ck Connie on a lawn chair and finish on her face and leave straight away to smoke and hear the leaves swaying. The wedding party invades the bar. I can't hack the influx of sensory so I finish my beer and make way for the elevators. I ride up to your floor alone and get out alone and no noise enters or escapes the hallway.
I listen through your door. Nothing.
More nothing. Then, the rustling of a sheet.
Knock, knock. You yell from inside,
"Do not disturb sign!"
Knock, knock again. You don't answer. Rustling sheets. A low toned grumble. Bottles knocking over, papers shuffled through, groaning and sighs.
Knock knock again.
You open the door.
I'm here, you're here, face to face. Boy oh boy.
Uh oh.
That's right.
Your mouth opens but makes no sound and your eyes widen and I've never seen you petrified—the blood rushes away from your complexion straight to your pallid, lying guts. You're in knots. f*cking finally. For once.
"Who is it?" a familiar, distant, can't quite place it voice asks from inside.
And as he asks this, I see Anton Villatoire rise from the bed shirtless, the Grecian ideal.
You say,
"Can we talk?"
I push into the room, not sure what I'm doing. Villatoire greets me with a sweating hug.
"Hey, it's... you! I remember you! What're you doin' in NJ, my man?"
I don't respond. You don't respond, palm in your cute redcheeked lying face, trying to barricade yourself from actuality as usual. The cold steel barrel presses against my tailbone. I want to kill you both so badly.
Why? Why this?
My thoughts void themselves, the only lights the sputters of my gun—I want to, but can I? Villatoire's ultrawhite teeth crumbling to the carpet with him, bright blood splashing on my coat and I can feel deep in myself the victory his death would bring me, and I think of turning to you and we stare at each other and I point the gun at you and shake and cry and want more than my own continuity to squeeze the trigger at you until you're unrecognizable, unload both clips, so by the end you'd just be some faceless slag f*cking Anton Villatoire and not the girl I've been in love with for far too long now.
I kill you both in every way. There's not a design I don't imagine. Nothing looked over.
All it takes is one and then he's like all the others.
The hole in his skull will be one of many, a notch in the pantheon, sinew and pink mess, pulsing white, splintered bone, an entry of history.
Anton tries to approach me. I pull the Smith and aim it at his chest. His arms reflexively shoot to the sky.
"Sit on the bed, hands on your ass."
He does and in the corner you sob into your hands, realizing what I've come for and what its all come to, finding out you've been found out. You and Anton sit on the bed next to one another with your hands under your asses and it's shaming to say but you're a damn cute couple.
There's three condom wrappers on the bedside table next to a Gideon bible next to a finished six pack of Peanut Butter Stout. Outside, street level, blaring (perhaps divinely) from a passing Escalade:
First off, f*ck your bitch and the clique you claim
Westside when we ride come equipped with game
You claim to be a player but I f*cked your wife
We bust on Bad Boy nigg*s f*cked for life
Left ear, something clicks, Brian Eno's 'Lux'.
"Listen, buddy, please don't do anything rash," Anton pleads, caterpillar eyebrows jostling polydirectional.
If I shoot him just right his brain will splatter all over you. You'll be covered in him. You'll be covered in him like you want to be or are already. I will say something cool like,
"Careful what you wish for."
Fresh coats of paint. Seaside harbor town north of San Fran, somewhere, anywhere, corrals of fairweather vessels seesawing in the dock, morningcaught crab steaming in passed out pots, meat as sweet as cider.
Remember the days melded with free salt air.
I once asked if you would keep seeing me if I had my face tragically burned off in some chemical accident or perhaps an IED finally catches me and scorches the Jew right out—you told me, 'No way dude, I need a face, I definitely need a face for there to be anything there, I'm sorry, I love you, but no no way.'
Anton tries to get up and his movements spook me so I pump a single round above his head. It zips through the drywall and smacks into the neighbor's television, glass crashes, a woman of indistinct age shrieks, doors slam. Anton puts his hands in his face.
"Please stop," you say, choking, choking, you are such a good little choker aren't you? Good little everything. So adept at the skills of your choosing. Golden star partner, golden star cheater, golden star choking on your own wordser, golden star do whatever the f*ck you wanter. You have maximized the amount of freedom in your life by eschewing the wires of other people.
Should I clap for your freedom or despair at the cost of it?
Try to think on the variance. I could slit his throat. Grab him by his genetically unfair Italian face and grip the Bowie at my boot and slice once and he'll grapple at his neck and bleed out on the Borgata carpet but not before fumbling through the rest of the room and spreading his maroon gush on the upholstery, the drapes, the wall mounted flatscreen, a fading embarrassment.
Would you sob at his death? Or for your own incompetence, maybe? At letting this happen? Or would the sight of him retching finally make you feel the shred I've wanted you to feel over the years? Can only a tragedy move you? A real man?
I could stab until he's muck. Just f*cking muck and tarred insides. I could drink his blood, eat his heart, take his head as a trophy, as has been done for centuries, keeping up with the pastime of my ancestors, who surely lived their fair shake of blood. They taught us their want for slaughter without instruction. Epigenetics, or whatever. Flashpan kicks of something we did but didn't really do.
The drapes flutter when the AC kicks on. Our eyes dart to it. I imagine stringing him up in the drapes, knotting them around his neck, breaking my leading front knuckles on his teeth and collecting them and feeding them back to him, keep the cycle going, "digest the insides of your own mouth you life ruining mother f*cker, I'm only doing this because you're better than me and I cannot admit to myself that I am not singularly enough for her, that you are a conqueror of merit and I am an infantry with none."
I could shoot out the window and hold him from it and ask him what his life is worth. Without trying, without asking, he'll beg me to save him, admit he's a fraud and a deceiver and a moral shrimp, and once confessed I'll drop him and watch him fall pissing his pants until impacting with the concrete, triangular, spine shattered, bones floating in Sicilian blood soup. I'll turn to you and like how in the Actually Is, the hand holding the Smith at your sternum, your heart, will falter, erratic baby, a reaction to the bustle in my chest.
Hm, I think on drawing a bath for us. I know you carry Eucalyptus Mint bubbles on your person. I'll put them in. You two can disrobe together. I'll tell you two to step in and you will and I'll encourage you to sit and bathe and half halfheartedly you would, he'd scrub your perfidious scrum and you'll tug him off cleaning his co*ck, knowing it's the last time, and he'll org*sm into the water, sperm congealed EucaMint bubbles, gunpowder, American Spirits, this must be what the beginning of time smelled like, soaking together in the sputum of his make and you will secretly fantasize of it crawling up into your Creation Kit, f*cking stupid gashbox, whatever, overriding your birth control and spontaneously summoning forth from your womb the Napoleonic WarriorPoet he has always wanted, pure product, the diamond birth of a child who will raise up continents as vassals for a worldspread Empire.
And once I figure you're done with this daydream, I will hold Villatoire's head down into the water and you will watch him flop and drown before you and when he finally goes, his head will be pressed between your legs like mine have been so many times before and your tears will only add to the water.
If I had the energy I could wedge his head in the mini fridge door and close it on his ears until his brains pour out. I could, almost assuredly. We're squishy. Too squishy. However we were made, or however we popped in, I really wish we popped in with built in armor and swords and submachine guns. But instead of the cool stuff, we get a feather skull protecting jelly.
There's banging on the front door. With one hand I grab the recliner behind me and pull it under the handle.
"Security!"
"We're fine, thank you," I yell back.
"Security! Open the door!"
Police lights whip streaks off the window.
"Let us go," Villatoire says. "We'll drop it."
"You're going to die today," I tell him. "This, this right here, this is it. Okay? You need to be ready."
He responds by not responding. No terror, no sadness, stoic reality, acceptance, dry eyes, lips straight across and immobile. You keep crying into your palms. You hiccup sadness. Small squeals. Pampered breath.
Security tries their first kick at the door but the chair holds.
"Just..." You start, not intelligible in a way I'm happy with, "...get it over with."
"You get to live on, babe," I say. "It's the privilege of remembering."
Second kick, less force than the first. There's some muted conversation and grumbles and a high pitched Sarah Silvermanesque male voice requesting the police. Crumpled on the floor right of the bed, I notice a used condom (at least you're being safe when you're being unsafe) and about three days worth of takeout boxes, strewn chopsticks and black plastic cutlery. My head shakes for me. That ever happen to you, babe? Your body ever move your weight inputless? You ever do something not knowing?
I light a cigarette, blow smoke in both your faces, pace.
"Open up! Security! Open the door!"
Street level, poolside, a lifeguard wearing a triceratops visor sits sentinel atop a volcanic perch and shouts at two toddlers waterboarding a smaller third underneath a decorative waterfall. There's swarming and loops and college freshmen in bikinis rubbing cream on their thighs and middle aged dadbods in mock Stetsons, chalk nosed, ogling them, remembering their university days when they were fit and subjectively interesting enough to bag anyone they wanted, now resented by their Midwestern conservative wives who had to stay home and raise prides of children and fulfill a slew of traditional "duties" they had no interest in, tasks they performed for a dream of an easy, relatively carefree life. But the wives' eyes wander, too, make no mistake, the lot of us are prisoners to sexual novelty. The thousandth time getting pumped by ShortBread Jack doesn't feel quite the same as the first couple dozen times getting stuffed by ThickNeck Steven. The routine gnaws at you. Tickles your cells on a level so deep you may hardly realize what's wrong.
I sweep back to the cute couple on the bed, Villatoire's brows soaked, pickled, dotted. He's not used to this kind of loss, losing the buck of his life at the flash of a madman's draw. I saw then what you saw in him—his anxiety made him attractive to me, or human, or maybe it was the vulnerable pattering, knowing I could bend him over and f*ck him and there's nothing anyone else could do. His biceps twitch and burst. One foot taps. Sweat glares. He swipes a frazzled postsex greying swoop from his eyebrows.
And then it happens, the itest it of all.
Citywide civil defense sirens ring, one broad violent mass of them, they swell in the boardwalk, continual rising, a drowning pitch, poor apes down there scrambling out the pool and hustling in every direction, stampeding themselves. Some look up and spin in circles and they too see nothing but partial clouds and light blue.
"Remember Tokyo?" I ask you.
You don't respond. Fiddle with your hands.
Third kick, steel toed boot goes through the door so I fire wildly at it and after the smoke subsides there's only silence, vacillations of American tint lights. Subdued, small voices come through the hole in the door and there's three visible ducking security personnel, balding fat dudes with cop mustaches in their forties, formulating, huddled.
"What do you say, Anton?" I ask.
He hesitates, crosses his legs twice and shifts one ass space away from you.
"I didn't know, man," he says and I can tell he's telling the truth.
"Nice," I say. "No checking?"
"I don't blame you," he says.
I trust him. Some part of me wants to get this over with for his sake.
I put the Smith in his cheek.
"Anything else? Think hard."
"I love her just like you do. Please, just... please."
He trails off and you both sob and at the moment I'm about to pull the trigger, hair’s breadth, a smidgen longer and he's a footnote, a Mech zooms past the window and unloads a barrage of something very explosive around the pool area—the fire plumes to our window and I step back to the door instinctively, blindly gripping for a handle. When I reach it, another Mech, watermark gold, platinum, the talons of feminine justice, sweeps past with its arm extended, blowing out the windows, glass spraying back at us and the smoke from the pool smothers everything, reduced to static, color erased from the continuum.
Detonations, sirens, shots—where did you go?—the chattering of farflung teeth, girlish squeals, hollers of blood n' guts. At once, the anointed neon glowing of a rocket's sacred breath, wishwash shifts of motion, teetertotter, patterns ruminating forefront and collapsing, immediate vision a mosaic of thrumming kaleidoscopic greyscale.
I fall to my knees and put the Smith in my mouth but it's slapped out and I feel myself slung on a strong shoulder, gladly accepting my lack of responsibility, limp straight away.
The way down to floor level—M16's rattling and spreading seeds of nitrate, lead, zipping ghosts on the harbor, riot gear'd militiamen plucked in two revealing the deepest parts of themselves for those who dare brave the silly—slumped infant in a carmine stroller, there exists no thing too sacred to escape conquer, abandoned, done with tears, swaddled early with the milk of death. I reach for my knife to slit my wrists as quickly as possible but my arms lack the courage so I close my eyes as hard as I can instead.
We stop at the front entrance, crouch down. Who has rescued me so?
Absecon's awash in flame, The Water Club's punctured at the center and falling inwardly and sputtering ashen tablets. Along Marina Blvd the NJ militia push aside traffic and roll over sedans with their tanks and fumble helplessly with bazookas and Skysweepers and 50 cals they don't know how to use, easy martyrs for the impending brigades of ingotstrung Valkyries soldering steel dragees into the troposphere, styphnates and insignia, orefeathers gushing hymnals from long dead Eddas, echosong, the choosers of perish, the hardfought lovers who carry us like dribbling newborns to the blushdusk gloaming shores of Valhalla.
So here now they speckle the ocean view flinging corkscrewed twines of fire, pale like death, bequeath to us so graciously alms of their inexhaustible and (ordinarily) petty dreads, glide like wise old jaegers through waxfleece spates, seabrewed sheepwhite lightning.
I try to cry but don't.
I see your shoes, rosepearl sneakers, you hate them but wear them for pure comfort value, PCV, upright, copper laces tied and pristine, and there's your sweater with a Dachshund in a chef's hat cutting sashimi, I'm so glad you're alive, I can't feel anything, there's a redness around my lungs I can't explain. Picked up again—it can't be, oh God, this is the final and most absolute mortification—and we're off, sprinting down Marina toward a senior citizen center called Sellamy's Peace on the Waterfront, which just so happens to be a 2in1 air raid shelter, as luck would have it.
Not five feet away two NJ privates in their late teens standing on top of a cherryred cargo van jostle a Stinger between themselves and shoot once and the missile curves in the air and they actually manage to bring down one of the cawing bitches, she bricks herself into the aquarium, descends uncontrollably, tessellation on impact, a vibrating checkerboard of autumn exhaust and jetmist and the sad coincidental commencement of rain, fat sludgey drops, heaven's ordinance impending.
I'm there, in and out, I don't want to be asleep any more than I want to be awake. Who is carrying me and why? Why did I let my Smith slip away from me?
Thoughtdreams, subsidies packed away, dockets for later when there's too much upfront—here's Waldeck teaching me how to shoot a gun, Haxo's backyard apple orchard, five in the morning, a crispness inexplicable sewed into the texture, cold addled sawbreaths at dawn. We shoot mainly Glocks and AK's until I can shoot straight, which takes me about three weeks much to Haxo's chagrin. By the end of it I was a fine enough shot so he was mainly happy he had another convert cadaver to send puppyishly into the fray at any halfbaked barked order. Waldeck showed me how to turn a corner properly, how to throw a grenade, how to patch up scuffs and deep cuts, how to carry someone when they're dying in your arms. We shot at cardboard women, the hottest ones we could find, every actress imaginable, every pop sensation tore to papery dross, disseminated and left to meld with the northeastern winterstuffs ferrying the hillside. He told me we could not be afraid to kill pretty women. He said it is now a necessary function of civilization to eliminate our own biases toward innately beautiful structures of any make and shape. On Haxo's porch, end of the sixth day, my first series of consistent headshots with a 9MM, rumfused horchata, Waldeck and I sat dangly kneed on two separate porchswings and he told me of the blood incoming, Haxo outback his tiny whitebrick estate, surely listening, changing the sugarwater out in one of his (Sixteen. Sixteen!) hummingbird feeders dressed in greased longjohns and canary suspenders and a doublepadded wool coat. Waldeck did not budge. He spoke sternly, without the usual panache. He told me something unimportant and American told him to stay and tumble. Didn't matter what it was, some fleeting intangible. But he listened to it and couldn't stop listening to it. He said he could go back to Greece indefinitely and live out a semiblissful existence in relative paradise but decided to stay at the chance of it, to risk his own life and legacy on an ideal he couldn't articulate if questioned, 'felt right but he couldn't prove it'. He didn't laugh or positively grimace once during his tellings, no joviality in his tenor. Leaning in on his own knees, gulping two thirds of his horchata rum, he told me principle matters to him more than his wife and children, that abstractions of justice we cannot dissect are more important than current lives, that doing anything to set course a world built on rightnesses cosmic and fabricwoven are the only beautiful actionable justifiable things, no matter the burning paths you leave behind, no matter how complete your peeling may be.
He tells me he lost his virginity at seventeen to a generous and (supremely) understanding Thai masseuse fifteen years his senior. She climbed on the table wordlessly once the massage (paid for by his uncle Kevin) ended and rode him til he came, which took eight seconds, then cleaned him up with a hot towel and kissed him once on the lips, which also took eight seconds, whispering centimeters from his face, saliva still attached,
"Come back any time."
And he did. He f*cked her for years until she died of cervical cancer at 43. He went to her funeral and shook her husband's hand, a sort of 'boxily oblong' bookish CPA named Brad and told him nothing and left and he admits to me he thinks of her sometimes when he's f*cking other women, even much prettier ones, much better ones in every category. He does not know why. He doesn't even want to guess. He says he'd slaughter her in a heartbeat if it meant better ideas on the table.
Haxo inspects a hummingbird attacking one of the feeders closest to the porch. His hands wrap around his back, slight impish smile, childish, new, bouncing. And in the reflection of his spectacles there's an unblinking concentration devoted now in time to the bird, a hopping squint-to-see dapple of viridian and indigo.
Waldeck yells out,
"Never asked, Haxo—what's with the birds?"
Haxo turns to us on a single foot, way too dramatic, scuffing a buoyant spot of farmfresh soildust which ascends to his leggings and adds a dotted lode of flax to his shins.
"Get some color in your life. You forget the easy, sweet things. The birds don't."
Oh god they're starting with the dogs, co*cker Spaniel gutted in the air ahead of us and its intestines spill to your shoes, jello nothing carcass smacking fluidishly into an Abram's treads a bit nearer the hotel. The tank operator must have gotten spooked by the liquefied dog cause he unleashes a shell at nothing and it plummets into the side of the Borgata, not far from the initial impact site, crumbles away a few dozen extra useless glass panels.
Waldeck staples high res blown up photos of you, Emma Roberts, Alison Brie and Lauren Tsai to a group of dummies set a mile out from Haxo's orchard. He tells me to look you in the eyes and shoot until the clip is emptied and I do and when your face is no more he just puts up another one, a better one, one he knows I can't resist, your hair is short like I like it and cut perfectly above the neck and you're wearing silver hoops in your ears and a silver hoop in a single nostril (like I like it) and you're smirking so devilishly it hurts and arouses me simultaneously and even with paper eyes I can not look at you and think of anything but war driven love, shattering continents for you like brittle timeworn plates, eventually settling after my lust for perpetual coup d'états and subduals simmers down so we can trek off together into some idyllic boyfantasy pastoral sunset to find our Annwn, and once we do, obsessing over a way of safely preserving your essence, your way of being in its entirety, so as to have a record of a human woman as good as any other, for when time forgets our time, as loving and devious and disastrously intelligent, who lived out most every important way, who tried things to try them, who suffered and loved and felt every agony and mirth available to us, who was weighed down by her own sadnesses and built up by her own strengths. In every future spring, I want the masses of men who have not yet experienced a sieged heart to think on girls like you, girls who make the world feel like a perennial cool f*ckin' breeze. Once they have you, they won't think so much on shooty shooty stabby stabby, but defending their own borders, if they are sensible. This mimicking holographic likeness can show generations the kind of women they have missed and how dumbly fortunate we were to have them. In you, everything you've done, you hold the accumulated lot of failures distinct to our species, betrayal, violence, ineptitude, deception, fraud, cowardice, fear, and hold still just as many triumphs and beauties, courage, drive, ambition, brilliance, love, friendship, empathy, generosity. From you they can learn to build love like arks, blueprints for the flood.
"Shoot the dummy," Waldeck says.
I do not shoot the dummy.
I drop the gun and sit on a bail of hay and weep into my palms.
Waldeck pats my back, you know, friendishly. He puts his thumbs through his belt loops and squares his chest and hocks a limely quadcolored loogie.
"It's all right, buddy," he says. "I couldn't do it to Isla the first time either."
The double steel doors at Sellamy's swing open, behind them a disorganized mob of army personnel and citizen soldiers with six shooters taking one eyed potshots at objects moving faster than their perceptions. My chest felt warm in response to their futile trying. It should make one want to shed a tear.
Before we enter a dozen chicks in patchwork shoulderpads swinging machetes and nailbats and f*cking laserglaives (who uses glaives for f*ck sake?) stampede us southside, a cute warcrying facepainted blonde (horizontal black stripes under a set of Chiclet eyeballs) in a Kevlar vest and a SECURITY hat chucks a pocket incendiary at us and when it lands it swelters my limited vision, burns the right side of my face and scorches completely the arm meant to protect my head.
I'm dropped. I roll to extinguish myself and smoke like I never have before. A boot collides with my sternum, another squishes my ribs and leaps off and tears the skin under my shirt. I moan. I reflexively check my pockets for a cigarette. A tourist's turquoise flower shirt burns next to me and on it I can still smell residual skin.
On the ground, helpless, suckling, I see who has rescued me because he is rescuing everyone, it's as expected—Villatoire stands in the doorway of Sellamy's Peace on the Waterfront Senior Center with an M16, sweater burned off cinematically at his chest revealing an (unsurprisingly) remarkable physique for a man his age, yes his pectorals ripple or glisten or whatever, a true American Champion, it's a shame a bald eagle didn't soar through the background, and with every squeeze he's dropping the marauding harpies in warble brown spritz and they're celestially featherfalling to the concrete next to me as if rehearsed, spray painted slogans of Absolute Male Death, AMD, layered over polyethylene chest plates and CPUrigged scrumcaps, I fall in love with each of them as they die, I fictionalize their tapestries, I think, "Who did she go to prom with? What color was her corsage? His boutonniטre? When did she first feel love? When did she first notice justice? Who but men must have broken her so totally enough as to infest her mind with sagas of hate and murder? Does she not remember when she was only a girl, chasing butterflies by the shoal, tossing stones to sink the lily pads?"
Villatoire unloads the clip for good measure, dropping the rifle and kicking up a dropped Magpul FMG-9, a slick as heck folding submachine gun. He takes a few steps towards me and extends an arm. A cut at his nape drips on the undereye cheek of the girl corpse closest to me, a pigtailed brunette in Norse threads, the rags of Vikings—Villatoire's blood provides for a morbidly natural mascara and in my head I shout for her to wake up and stop the feigning and to open her eyes so she can see how beautiful everything is sometimes even when it's not and can't be.
The sun momentarily breaks through the storm and spotlights us and Villatoire seems too messianic for me to bear, a literal golden idol, offering me my life when I was minutes prior so willing and able and excited to take his.
He wiggles his fingers.
Carefully, solemnly, he smiles.
I grab his hand and he pulls me in.
I drop once I'm in and there's voices, a choir I can only half hear, they're gossiping but I can only make out grumbly mumbles and an unremitting, pointed soprano note. I want to sleep. Let me sleep. You slap my cheek, bend to your knees, arch over me. You say,
"Don't sleep. Hey, don't sleep."
Waldeck's wearing a peach polo and khaki knee high shorts and the whistle in his mouth rusts from spittled overuse. I'm always doing something wrong. In the foxholes I WHISTLE 'crawled like a shamed hom*osexual slinking out of a Grindr hookup' and over the wall I WHISTLE 'climbed like a dandy rising to his forbidden lover's stoop' and my pushups apparently reminded him of how WHISTLE 'every limpwristed skinnyfat loser does pushups'. He pushed me because he insisted I would have to be a killer to survive, to rescue you, and he was right, but I never have been that and cannot be, not in the way him and Choisy and Iraheta are. Their blood contains something different.
A horizontally split in two black and white Border Collie crashes into the hallway in front of us bypassing the barred door in a single depressing metallic woof, shot from a potato cannon or mini ballista or something, inkgarnet innards like a tar soaked mophead spreading sloppily about the room, corpse lingering taciturn, chasing its own tail ad infinitum. It settles, surrounded by vomit fresh Adidas and gore highlighted (latest fashion, dark red has always been cool) Plimsolls, toeless gangrene stumps, virginal Reebok tacticals donated to the NJ militia by none other than our very own Mr. Nice Guy Possible Kid Toucher, Lord Mulberry of Mulberry.
Some kind of f*cked up Yin Yang cosmic symbology emanates spookily from the remains.
Lowly emitting from a pocket radio outside,
With all the X-rated dreamin' (Ah, ah, ah)
Back on the coast to coast life (Ah, ah, ah)
You know I live for the hustle (Ah, ah, ah)
But damn, I miss you tonight (Ah, ah, mmm)
This single event, somehow sovereign from the numerous horrible others, unconsciously (without my input or consent) triggers my brain, and subsequently my unfortunate body, to action.
The dog's spitshined silver collar reads: Miss Silly Boots the Third.
I don't sleep like you want me to. I stand, not thinking. My side leaks. I feel around and the wound's long down my ribs but superficial, glass nip, and when I pull back my hand's red—red red—and it doesn't bother me a bit. I inhale. I breathe. Real breath, inside level. I find a broken cigarette in my pocket and light it and inhale and there is nothing wrong.
On the ground next to me, a forgotten Heckler & Koch HK P9. I think on the dummies at the State House. Did they deserve it? Who did? Of the runts, who deserved our dim furies? And what do we deserve but the rope? No less than what Mulberry did to his dogs. No less than what the Waves can do to us during any given impromptu afternoon mיnage א trois. I pick up the gun and check the clip and it's full, fifteen shimmering devils, and I turn toward the open door.
Villatoire grinds his teeth, looks me up and down. His eyes end on mine. Our eyebrows curl upward in unison, the same shape and motion, both of us sadboy eyed, gloomyhappy, fond of the humanity recently spaded from the other, a disturbing and inexplicable Hominid one moment only psychic bond. Villatoire subtly nods at me, the nod accentuated by a careful, approving smile, one I am sucked into and understand and I smile back for once and outside conspicuously seems a stalemate, inert, no mechs, no bombs or rounds or hollering or girls who want to kill me or dead dogs, there's only the numbing wintry beachwind sestinas funneling scrapice through the open door, stormsqualling gulls yawping in triplicate, bewildering fathomless yawps, maybe to warn neighboring kin, maybe to let out their last soupcon of entropy, maybe desperate avian pleas for a posthaste procreation orgy before the lamentable (likely agonyraddled) final act.
Pause to breathe in.
Out sometime in an unnamed sea glistering tanzanite and tourmaline glaciers headbutt for centuries, kiss, suck polar face, thousands of standards, nations, flags, songs, Kings, Ways, lapse away like fading ink before the sallow masses fully embrace, feverishly, sliding into themselves, and so finally in an annal omitted to us due to sheer distance, these two lovebirding hunks of frozen but not stationary ice hemorrhage together during a detached and empty twilight, no one to observe their crumbling save the ribbon seals scuttling the waters nibbling Greenland halibuts, constructing eclectic free form dances on their own accord, no instruction, parsimonious carte blanche anarchical seadogs, sea hedonists (seadonists?), audienceless tumblers screwballing and berserking and spitting low torpid barks at the shedding floe traipsing toward them.
Does this scene remind you of the life you have lived?
And yet still, the antiquity you've missed?
What else are we when you consider all the sh*t?
You know, all the sh*t, all the sh*t and minuscule essences that can be extracted (maybe one day) from every lived moment imaginable no matter how mundane or prosaic or commensurately uncomplicated it may seem at the time (my tapestry is different than yours but the resemblance and ease of correlations ought to stir you), talking to mom, not talking to her enough, getting the paper, watching your own breath, doing the dishes, dreading work on Monday, feeding the fish, cleaning up after the kids, brushing your teeth, Frisbee with the Shiba, petting stray cats, picnic at the park, mowing the lawn, getting arrested for public intoxication, banana whiffs of cerebrospinal fluid, radiation flipping bits, accidentally kissing your lover's teeth, the way she feels beneath you, reading til sleep, not being able to sleep, not being able to sleep on airplanes or boats especially, you know, the mundane stuff, realizing metal is latticed atoms of crystal and grain, taxes, taxes, taxes, realizing the average brain today is pretty much the same as the average brain of people who believed Zeus threw thunderbolts, realizing reality isn't here for you to understand on any level besides your own faulty perceptions, sinusoidal waves within dimensionless points, Leibnizian monads, so now you're having a palpitation, having a fake aneurysm listening to gossipy slu*ts harp on about something you know must be minutia 'cause if you don't know the girl you know the message by the look of her, like they're breaking conservation of energy by literally retaining negative value, zerosumming paradox suckholes eating the space that contains them, they somehow expand it by cutting it down, tighten it by opening it up, and again now you're having a panic attack and thinking it's a heart attack though you know it totally isn't and we've been through this before, haven't we, so why don't we know even when we know?, scarfing quail eggs with super old wine, eyes bulging from their sockets at the hilarious (to the point of pain) enormity of the bill, paychecks and kites, gummy vitamins and stretch racks, the way she feels above you, music so good you forget about life's structure and dimensions and everything else and subsist only within it, dinners with old friends, brunches with new ones, getting too drunk at both and making a fool of yourself and thinking everyone hates you when really they're not thinking of you at all, not even in your dreams, the Emain Ablach of your dreams, the f*cking Shangri La of your dreams, drenched with honeycrisp trees and yews and crystalline swans and a shifting, facechanging set of tireless lovers who never grow bored, whose eyes never wander—here's Euler reciting the Aeneid from memory, ice cream barges sailing the Pacific, Quebec the Land of Eternal whor*s, Mescaline on an irradiated glowing Friday afternoon near the border of New Hampshire, every species of Orchid being a fruit bearing Orchid because they're angiosperms, 'dumb f*ck', putting on freshly dried socks, Robespierre lapping jaw blood into his palms as he tramples away from the Hotel de Ville, a Bronze Age Sanhedrin sentencing a doubleraped polytheist streetwalker to a stoning she'll not forget or have a mind to, firing arrows at a Welshman encroaching the Severn, candied currents toting leftover hints of wild honeysuckle, lantanas out west seeding acres, veinpainted ambrosial legacies, sugarstreams, protesters blocking highways, sportsball stadiums berserking and drunk, MANPAD price negotiations, misallocated funds, puer aeternus ruling the world at large, like Dahomey did and Tang and Sang and big puffy mustache men, Chinese dudes who thought they were Jesus’s brother, Portuguese dudes who thought they could teach Japanese dudes some crap about the sky without knowing sh*t about the sky, man, so odd how a few dumdums can codify a half historical half mystic triviality into dogma and everyone will chant praise at them for it, man, can’t get over how dumb religious headwear looks crossculturally, man, can’t stop thinking about superpositions, existing where you exist or don't or both or neither, comparing your piddling miseries to child soldiers and sex trafficked Asian brides, explaining how your bruised clavicle is in many ways equivalent to the tortured teenager abducted from her parent's cabana and forced into a jungle of men and monsters, men and monsters selfsame, indistinguishable swill and musk, phrases oft whispered, and now yet again you're noticing a thrown cigarette extinguish on a highway line under a Corvette's wheel, cherry hearth gone, smoldering to sequence, runty embers, cascades, a dousing not unlike your own thinning vigor, saltsweat pouring from your forehead, rubbing the fabric of your frock between your index finger and thumb, making out probably too veraciously outside Stacy's the Gayest Bar, horseflies fingering podgecrumb and notjot in the this and the then—
The owner of the pocket radio appears,
I get a little lonely
Get a little more close to me
You're the only one who knows me, babe
So hot you're hurting my feelings (Woo)
Can't deal
This periwinkle fauxhawked chick appears in the door frame bazooka armed and aiming at us so I do the only good thing I've done today and I barely do it truth be told, so much as it's done for me by hibernating precursors, fear from long ago.
Before anyone else, before the NJ militia or the geezers with peashooters or you or Villatoire or anyone, I raise the H&K once at the fauxhawk girl and pull the trigger once at the fauxhawk girl and it hits her in the upper lip and exits out her topmost vertebrae, her Atlas, I think, though my anatomy has never been any good. Everyone in the room gapes at me, nice gapes, surprised ones, grateful ogles for the first time in my life. The fauxhawk girl pratfalls backward, bazooka clinking to the street, commandeered and deconstructed in seconds by a blithely natured NJ militia corporal in his late 30's lookin' a lot like a sandbearded Spencer Tracy.
The corporal peeks his head in, simpering at the rueful lot of us.
"How you folks doin'? We alright in here?" he asks, coy and dry, like a good gin.
"Oh we're just fine, sir," a (bleeding from every hole in her face) tungsten haired old lady tells him, antique shotgun pressed to an unbuttoned lace bosom.
"Good to hear. Might wanna' turn on a tube somewhere if you can."
"Why's that, sir?" shotgun lady asks.
"Oh, I think you'll wanna' hear the news for yourself, secondhand stuff isn't nearly as toothsome in my experience. You folks be safe now."
The corporal leaves whistling gobbledygook, too flippant a bastard for my taste. There's commotion in the hall, a search party for the AWOL television remote forms and another splinter group searches for a way to reconnect the basem*nt generator.
I catch you brazenly making f*ck me eyes at Villatoire.
It doesn't matter. The dead collie stinks. Plump brown flies halo the carcass, periodically anchor to facesuck the jellied arcane shards of charred fur and yumyum definitely edible flamethrowered dog blood. Should I shoot myself?
And then a song so wistful and nostalgic approaches Sellamy's right side I feel like bawling again, wailing forever until the water in me has run out and I am just a series of drained nodules and skin flaps and sapless bald bones.
Toughen up. Help your friends.
These green hills and silver waters
are my home, they belong to me
And to all of her sons and daughters
May they be strong and forever free
Let us live to protect her beauty
And look with pride on the golden dome
They say home is where the heart is
These green mountains are my home
The song repeats twice, advancing, intensifying, remixed by itinerant cannon salvos rambling stalwart in the gaps, meshwork RobotChicks exploding in great acrid globs of flash (flashglobs?) and mechanical allsound, echoes propped up by reverberations, screams of horrid once in a lifetime death punctuated by loose sparklers and singsonging jingoist trumpets reiterating eastbound, and after one particularly large boom there's an auspicious familiar crooning addressing Old Lady Liberty, Our Astray Hallowed Love,
"The nation in its current state is a kind of collective Orpheus, scheming to unearth his heart adrift. And I believe we can, as a synergized unit, America's very own Phalanx of the Dead and Damned, escort Eurydice back to the tillages we keep, back to our suburbs and townships and world class vineyards and summer lodges of iced cream, good ol' comfortable steak and potatoes, salt and sweat, of mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, teachers and guardians, of breadwinning peoples who toil and play in equal measure, who live as candidly as they are able, who build schools and parking lots and raise families and barbecue and get married and make mistakes and do good and tell stories to their children and their children's children of the Old Country over molten s'mores and crisp, light, American brewed beer. Am I the only one enamored with this dream? Should we not bring her back? Do you think these virtues exist solely in Vermont, or are they canticles pining to be shared?"
As he's shouting this into a megaphone Haxo slowly passes Sellamy's entrance waving his court wig at the halfdead halfdying New Jersey populace rushing to greet him and his fascistic groupies ("We are all the militia's nurslings, tadpoles for a cause"), sitting squat and fat calfed on the howizter of a steamrolling M109 Paladin. Behind him he carries the full force of the Montpelier Provisional Militia, mobilized, called to the front, some ten thousand men and women arriving in jeepies and jetpacking M2 exoskeletons and LMG decked Humvees and spontaneous fromnowhere motorcades, Suzukis and Kawasakis, swifts of asphalt singed smog, Independence themed fireworks thundering tresswebbed sparks, inspiring in us a sense of slack jawed elation, callow and misplaced hope.
You and me and Villatoire step outside to the parade, assaulted by daylight, as many dead girls as there are smokestacks on the horizon.
Praise be.
A fly on a collie's kidney, slurping like hell.
The bodies start. The stretchers. Dead on dead. NJ, VT, NY, MA militia wheel in, drag in, carry in, throw in hundreds, their own, civilians, some Fems in a bad way, tarnish limb'd and convex hearted, telling us now how they got it wrong, how we should save them and rehabilitate instead of punish. A colonel with a combover and a Dutch accent shouts for us to move to the back so we do, the room's volume growing a hundredfold in five minutes.
In the crowd somewhere near the entrance, Waldeck and Mel appear, a waify black girl hanging over Waldeck's shoulder, neonpink lipsticked, Sex Pistols jean jacket, torn fishnets, and oh yeah, bleeding way too much, soaking Waldeck's ridiculous (and ridiculously overpriced) rhinestone Dolce Gabbana getup. We make our way toward him. Push the dead and dying, gesticulate our intentions to wandering infantrymen who nod or do nothing or spread out a line for us, say things like MAKE WAY and OKAY OKAY SURE THING BUDDY.
Waldeck spreads the girl out on the floor, takes a knee. Mel sits a foot away holding her hair in her hands, mascara flaking, teardabbled, journalists are useless, a splotch of pinkgloss lipstick pronounced on her neck. Sly devils. Can't help themselves.
The girl on the ground reminds me of the girl Waldeck (maybe) raped back in Montpelier. Same color skin. Same length hair. Same lipstick. Waldeck notices Villatoire and I but does not smile or greet us or do anything for a few seconds and there's ash on his chest, ash and blood, and his lips are cracked and limestoned and finished. He pushes on the spouting bullet wound planted in the girl's shoulder.
"Anton, help me with this."
Villatoire kneels with Waldeck. They switch spots, Villatoire pressing down, Waldeck taking out his bootknife to dislodge the bullet, which he does after a few agonizing tries. Villatoire and Waldeck switch spots again, Waldeck pressing now, Villatoire cutting off a length of the remaining threadhusks of his jacket, tourniqueting over the wound and under her armpit. Waldeck checks her pulse.
Relief drafts from his nose.
"Thank you," he tells Anton. They hug, hunching over the girl. Waldeck looks to me, stands and we hug for a long time and he tells me he is so, so glad I am okay. I say nothing back. You stand there twirling your hair. Waldeck hustles away in search of a medical tech, possibly an IV for a transfusion. As he does so the televisions overhead, ten of them throughout the room, kick on.
And who do we see but our radiant Iraheta shouting down Congress, veins in his cute round halfAsian face gibbous and distorted, hyperbolic almost. They show slides of him fuming, run reels of him presenting Mech blueprints to senior military officers, screaming at Congress again, a state of rage I've never personally seen him in, so frustrated he's shredding documents over the chamber floor, he's spinning in circles he's so mad, he's Chatterbruckishly slamming his open palm on desks and sh*t.
"If you don't do this, we'll all die," he's saying. "I am right. I am right, right now, I am right. If you do not listen like you haven't been, we will all die. Your babies will die, your wives will die, your dogs will die, our EFBLEEP grandmas will die, don't you EFBLEEP get it? What don't you EFBLEEP understand? How EFBLEEP stupid can you SEEBLEEP possibly be?"
I get a call from Choisy.
"Choisy?"
"Are you f*cking alive man?"
"Yeah, I'm f*cking alive, man."
"Where's Waldeck?"
"We're at Sellamy's."
"Sellamy's?"
"It's an old folks home. And uh, an air raid shelter, I think."
"You see the news?"
"I'm seeing the news."
"You get a call?"
"A call?"
"From Iraheta."
"What? No, no, I haven't gotten a call. Where's Iraheta?""
Silence on the other end. Ten seconds of breathing.
"Choisy?"
"Hey, you two take care of yourselves. You're like brothers, you know?"
"Choisy?"
Click.
The anchor on the tube, pixie cut strawberry blonde, royal blue pantsuit, remorsefully blinks at the camera. She tells us Iraheta's bills were denied. She tells us the weapons he planned to build technically fell under 18 U.S. Code §832, participation in nuclear threats to the United States. She tells us he has been missing since his arraignment and that he is now a wanted fugitive in the remaining Free United States. Without a thought, undaunted, scarily professional, the anchor switches on her Happy Face face and gleefully announces the overwhelming victory at Atlantic City, presents panels of multi-state militias laboring in unison, all the manpower from all the everywheres left in the nation, digging ditches and shooting flares and fixing up booboos and saving picturesque buxom housewives from collapsing buildings, guzzling pina coladas over mounds of carrion, flags of the remainders propped up in every crevice and carapace statewide, mechs ebbing to the ocean, concrete, dirt paths, down the interstate, vacant lots, splintering colonial houses, regiments of mouthfoaming terrorist girls captured by the hundreds and cuffed and led away to a nowhere two or three decades of life won't prepare you for in the slightest. Once the slides finish, the anchor says,
"Onto other news—Can eating too much mackerel actually turn you trans, nonbinary even? The answers may shock you. More after these messages."
And then there's a commercial of a CGI polar bear wandering the tundra and he stops for a moment, exhausted, seeing only snow and flurries and he continues to sit while the sun sets around him. In the distance, four rectangular headlights blow out the frame and an extremely impractical doubledecker Jeep driven by a holographic Phillip Seymour Hoffman and a very real Carey Mulligan pick up the polar bear and throw him on the second deck. Both wink at the camera, then Phillip Seymour Hoffman shouts WOO really loud and they take off. Over panning shots of the Jeep busting ass on sheets of ice, a tonally rich Texan narrator chimes in,
"Yeah, it can even hold your polar bear."
Farm Waldeck chews tobacco. Spits chocolate worms. After a month of training he tells me I'm finally ready, a halfway decent Protector of People. Warns me not to get co*cky. Warns me a month ain't too long. Warns me I don't know sh*t. Warns me I'm still as soft as a goosefeather pillow. Still he tells me we ought to celebrate my meager accomplishments, so we go out on the town and do as we do and lay it on too thick and there's only like three places in Montpelier to legitimately meet women you want to be sleeping with. As usual, we take out a couple (it's sad to say, and maybe too mean, but unremarkable—they were just not noteworthy in any way, okay?) girls from The Tap to the bridge at Otter Creek and feed them Molly and hug them from behind overlooking the waterfall and public f*ck them in some nearby shrubbery and I don't remember her name or what she looked like, some kind of Southern American blend, or maybe Portuguese or something. We take them back to Haxo's and Haxo's still awake and flirts with the girls and shows them his hummingbird feeders and antique chessboards and powder and wigs and his octagonal basem*nt library of autobiographies and history textbooks and spy novels. We sit for hours by his upstairs fireplace, drinking eggnog, shots of Finlandia, playing board games, talking sh*t, telling stories no one remembers or remembers telling or why they were told in the first place. Waldeck spitballs and curves, goes in and out of the pocket like a seasoned boxer. He playfully grills the girls on their innocent political affiliations ("Born from geopolitical ignorance") and a steady torrent of information they don't know how to appropriately decipher, tells them they're too young to understand why they're so stupid, smoothly transitioning to having them expound on their philosophical beliefs, Das Kapital and Friedman helicopter money, free will, moral and cultural relativism, yaddiyaddah, then going right to the How does baby like to get f*cked? queries, which they answer without inhibition since Haxo's been laying the shots on thick. Once Haxo's had enough (8) he waltzes to his bedroom and transpires drunkenly next to his doting, waiting, not sleeping, not happy wife. We laugh in one another's laps when he receives a few verbal wollops through the drywall.
We stay up for a few more hours, nocturnally assembled fogs canvasing Haxo's orchard, warblers and waterthrushes caroling delicately among the topiary. The girls get tired so we get them an Uber home and stay on the porch for a while longer. Men and fields of fruit and cigarettes and alcohol and guns on our belts and knives in our boots and women on our mind and noon fast approaching. Waldeck's fingers twist together, Medusa themselves. He wreaks of dominion. Although he broke long before in this moment I notice the real break, from human man to untiring conquistador, it's in his unwavered gait, the twinging muscles and tendons and whatever else near his chest, hair windswept and fitted as if recently cut and styled. Nature instilled in him grandeurs so few receive it feels unfair. But I didn't and don't care about the fairness. The fairness tells no tales. What tell the tales, what keep the stories going, are men and women like Waldeck, Villatoire, too, and Choisy, Francine. You so immaculately capture the root spirit of what there is to us, marrowstuff, substrata metaphysical hokey pokey nonsense, I can't help but be in love and in awe, can admit to myself I will never be able to understand you, like two twenty year old community college students who we fed Molly and f*cked in a bush will never be able to understand why cruelties can be mercies if you stretch them out long enough.
Waldeck rushes back with a transfusion bag for the downed girl, injecting her in a hurry but not really sweating it. He checks her pulse again and she's fine and everything in him relaxes, slumps, he squats right on his ass and manspreads unapologetically, profusely. Mel kisses him and hugs his head, bends over. He gets up and she shakes her head into his chest, tries to stop herself from sobbing. Waldeck sways with her and rubs her back.
The much too jolly corporal from before stumbles near us.
"Well, gee folks, real touching stuff, but this is a military hospital now, do ya' understand?"
"It's been a rough day," Mel says. She's stern about it, deadeven tone.
"A rough day, huh? Sorry to hear, ma'm, but it's probably not as rough as this fella who get his ears chopped off. What do you think?"
"We'll go," Waldeck says, nodding and smiling, smiling and nodding, fake, no heart in the gestures, miming for a pass.
We walk back out to the parade still in full force. An emblem'd New York chopper circles overhead, launches bottle rockets and salutes from its open doors. Mothers kiss their children and lovers kiss their lovers and there's corpses everywhere and moviered blood draining to the gutters and smeared brains and severed younameits and sundered irretrievable fingers, wedding rings, diaphragms and f*cking aortas and poor dead kids, f*cking c*nts, just kids, it's not right to think on and I hardly have the stomach for it. Seems no one does, really. Go out one day with your friends, or when there's a party and you're midconvo and everything is going great, and go ahead and mention dead kids. How many there are, why they're starving and dying and getting blown up by IEDs, eating sand, how relativistically achievable of a goal actually feeding them would be but asking administration to be anything other than lackadaisical noodles and greedy lapdogging circlejerkers would be like asking a sail to sail itself, or begging providence to change its course.
But now I'm faced with a bunch of dead everyones and I'm not sure, I'm not sure, that's what I am, not sure how I'm supposed to be feeling at the hindrance of advantage. I am alive and do not deserve to be and they are dead and do not deserve to be and if you try to make sense of the senseless you'll only end up madder than a March hare, as Haxo always says. So you can shut the f*ck up, help or leave.
I do all three. You leave, off to whatever gossamerish promiscuity circle you frequent, as is your right and inclination. Villatoire leaves, probably with you. Me, Waldeck and Mel stay behind and join an MPG cleanup crew and haul scraps of iron and rubber and bone off to trash heaps and wear plastic masks and fall asleep in seconds when we hit the mattress.
We donate blood and money. Time.
Waldeck asks me to come to Greece with him, live in the guest house for a while, it would 'stop him from going crazy living with Isla and the kids'. I accept and go to Greece again, blurry, dreamish, I am not quite there or anywhere at any present moment, or maybe at any moment present.
I never stop thinking about the Yin Yang collie.
I text you an invitation to Greece and joke about not holding you at gunpoint again haha.
You never write back.
૮ ´• ﻌ ´• ა ૮ ´• ﻌ ´• ა ૮ ´• ﻌ ´• ა ૮ ´• ﻌ ´• ა ૮ ´• ﻌ ´• ა
I meet Connie at Athens International, hair dyed again, orangeblonde this time like a creamsicle, yoga pants and baggie zebraprint hoodie clad. She hugs me and we make out obnoxiously and she tells me how good I look and that she's so glad she decided to come and how she 'surprisingly' really missed me. We have a quick catch up date at a seafood joint named Balthazar. She gets the tuna, I get the snapper. We try each other's food. Share nibbles and nostalgias. Hold hands under the table. She tells me she started a job as a teaching assistant at NYU, French History and Art History. She tells me she's still an alcoholic and addicted to amphetamines and about how she can't find love and how she's really super seriously trying but the guys are apparently boring her to death and she's too busy for dating anyway, which I doubt. She tells me she thinks about killing her students every day, and f*cking some of them.
We take a taxi to Porto Rafti and I show her the sidehouse gifted to me by my wealthy, much better friend. It's a tiny sh*t rectangle from the outside, old brick n' shingles, most of the essentials inside, though, stainless steel fridge, super adorable kitchenette, hardwedge velvet sectional and matching ottoman, king sized bed and a corner bathroom with two toilets, two sinks and two showers, washer and drier out back. Connie and I f*ck immediately upon arrival and she tells me to slap her so I do and she tells me to choke her harder so I do and she tells me she's a good little slu*t and I say all right, sure, whatever, and soon enough it's over and we're eating Isla's risotto in their dining hall and Isla's telling Connie how difficult it was to be a single mother while Waldeck was away and Waldeck says SORRY HUN and Connie's a bit awkwarded out, grinding her teeth, latching onto the underside of the table with the tippytops of her fingers. Isla compliments Connie while insulting me, saying something about how someone as young and hot as her shouldn't be gallivanting around with rapidly deteriorating misanthropic Jews. I note I don't technically disagree with Isla on this point and have already told Connie as much and Isla still doesn't understand, says,
"But you've got all these options! Young studs everywhere and you pick this schlub?"
"I'm a schlub now?"
"Oh come on, Mr. Sensitive," Isla says, slurring, six Rum and Diet co*kes stewing down the hatch. "You know what I mean. You were always cute, back in the day too, but you're like uglyhot, not realhot."
"Gee, thanks Isla."
Connie internally cackles at me, I can see it in her stupid pernicious smirk.
"So what gives?" Isla can't drop it.
Connie folds her hands together on the table, elbows up there too, and leans in real close.
"Maybe, and this might be nuts, but maybe I'm attracted to him and there doesn't have to be more to it?"
"But isn't there more to it? The age gap is considerable."
I mentally skip fast forward, listen to nothing said. It doesn't matter. I don't want to know what anyone thinks of me. It's never what you want it to be. Always worse. Always sodden with deficiencies we're unable to recognize in ourselves, only picked apart by other people. Hurts too much. Hurts like time passing, running like a river, being no more important than a moving river, or seals raving at glaciers, or Yin Yang dogs or Tryke martyring himself for a cause no one remembers or cares to.
Looking back will be a collage of ambiguous Delphic swirls.
Looking back I will only remember dollops of what came.
Off to Corfu, St. Spyridon, beaches of gemstone'd linen, palms placed by committee. I slabber at the specimens out of reach, toned, ecamsule'd, hourglasses and pears and spoons and rails. Connie and I barter pecks under a parasol dredged in the sand and when we stop to catch our breaths I'm struck dumb by the clouds jamming the foreground, rosegrey, bristling. The sky portends something, gambols and doesn't, I don't know what, tries to spell out its message with scintillas of sun, attenuated castings, a language of light I do not speak, cannot read, but it's there, one raylantern emerging at a time, tranquil threads, thinning stomas, sea varnished in pallid henna.
Waldeck and Isla frolic together. They've both soothed considerably for now. Haven't seen Isla flirt with anyone in days. When we arrived on the beach after a pleasant morning hatchback ride, windows down, winded faces, I noticed her ignore (tugs her Slogger over her eyes) the barely legal Adonis's in boardshorts, co*ck broadcasting (co*ckcasting?) jammers, playing volleyball on the eastend beach, bubblepop university cuties who belong on reality television tapping each other's bums after a nice play, huddling together, waterlogged and sunbitten. Instead of making friends like she'd usually do, introducing herself and touching her puss* ten seconds into the interaction, she caroused with her husband in the water, skipped and dallied, cavorted, squished his cheeks and licked his neck and pinched his bellyfat and she felt wholesale the pith of his abdomen, the sinew of his arms, his gist and meat and medulla. They sit together with the water up to their stomachs and Waldeck wraps his arm around her shoulders and pulls her in close and they kiss for a long time, one solid one, one marriagable one. When they venture back to our campsite, I see Waldeck ignore a call from Mel and smooch Isla's right tit as he presses 'Ignore'.
Puckish swallows ladle bayberries in their beaks.
A veteran buzzard circuits a spot of beach a mile down, patchfeathered blimpy deathbird, black throated, 'The Commander on the Cay', depressed circumduction, fitful tailspins, slants and swoops, there's no death yet but the beady freak sees it coming, knows all places one day are rafterpressed in perish.
The bones will nourish his babies, the tendons will enchant his nest.
Back at Waldeck's pad a sunburnt Connie rubs talcum on her neck's backside, her tummy and lumbar and thighs, moans in coinciding displeasure and alleviation. We lay together in Waldeck's backyard on a quilted Pikachu blanket we found in the shed and drink SpikedSeltzer, magic hour, no locomotion in sight, fluxlack.
Her lips register as overworked, tousled, like they're made of canyons of sheetrock, but she keeps on. Loyal trooper. Proud patriot. Lets me press on her burns, which she grunts at but does not phonetically complain. Lets me use up the undestroyed molecules of wet still left sponged in her lips, works her tongue more to compensate. Lets me graze her cl*t with the tips of my finger without trying to get her off. Lets me choke her and pull at her scalp. Lets me bury my face in her ass and pretend to die there forever and onward.
And soon enough, the sweetness sours. When Connie falls asleep, main house couch living room, I tiptoe to the edge of Waldeck's bedroom, hear him whispering to Isla a conversation I had no business hearing. Pitchless. Hallway vacuum. No adjusting vision, no moonlight to savor. Black in full.
"I know it's difficult," Waldeck murmurs. "But you can't say it's only me."
"How could you do this?" Isla asks. She's holding back tears. "Who is she?"
"She's a reporter."
"Why would you invite her to stay here?"
"She's pregnant."
Connie snores from the other room. Isla lowly cries to herself.
"You have to listen to me, Isla," Waldeck pleads. "It has nothing to do with you."
"How could you do this?"
"I love you both with all my heart," he says and he does not say anymore and Isla does not say anymore and they go to sleep, Isla sobbing, Waldeck painfully silent and discreet.
So yeah, next day's breakfast is pretty f*cking odd. Waldeck chews his eggs and toast too slowly. Isla watches the coffee cream twist in her World's Okayest Mom mug like it's going to augur in a solution to her Gordian Knot clusterf*ck of marital problems. To counteract the awkward Connie tries to make conversation about checking out a new cafe in town, Byron's Beanery, but Isla excuses herself after three bites of her (frankly delicious) scrambled eggs and beelines somewhere, deflated as an air mattress in an abandoned storage locker. I ask Waldeck what's up and he says he's leaving for a couple nights and slams the door on his way out. He texts me later in the day and apologizes and tells me to meet him and Mel in Athens, where he's secured her a suite indefinitely at the Grande Bretagne.
On the train ride to Athens I glance over at Connie reading Thomas Paine's 'An Occasional Letter on the Female Sex' on her phone, a woman truly after my heart, and I wonder if she was reading it because she knew it would make me want her more (it did).
"Alas! while your ambitious vanity is unceasingly laboring to cover the earth with statues, with monuments, and with inscriptions to eternize, if possible, your names, and give yourselves an existence, when this body is no more, why must we be condemned to live and to die unknown? Would that the grave and eternal forgetfulness should be our lot. Be not our tyrants in all: Permit our names to be sometimes pronounced beyond the narrow circle in which we live. Permit friendship, or at least love, to inscribe its emblem on the tomb where our ashes repose; and deny us not that public esteem which, after the esteem of one's self, is the sweetest reward of well doing."
Since being in Greece, Connie's felt different. She's always been too cool for school with me, discrete and composed, hasn't hinted at real longevity or 'officiating' the relationship. But on this trip all she's done is compliment me and allow me to treat her whatever which way and she sways with me, settles and sinks, latches onto every boorish unlearned phrase. I've no idea what's gotten into her.
Truth is I'm afraid of you, of Connie. Too damn afraid, but it feels right. I want to love her and I want her to love me but I know loves expire like month's old milk and there is no running away and they will be like you, not the same but parallels, analogies, concepts in the same genus, chromosomally uniform. Think for me.
Who will Connie love when I stop being enough?
In what new ways will she begin to resent me for what I am?
So yeah, we do the things we ought to, Acropolis, Erechtheion, temples galore, Plaka, vaguely contemplate buying something ceramic or plastermold, end up buying a porcelain Border Collie figurine and two gyros from street vendors and Connie doesn't judge me when I eat both in less than a dozen bites. We see a punk band later playing at Filopappou Hill called Die Capitalists Please Die—I only remember the lead vocalist, this scrawny fifty year old toooldtobedoingthis studded asshole, two mohawks somehow lining a mostly bald head, screamsinging, uh, quite poorly, although I suppose that's the point, 'cause when you're rallying against the system, in order to stay internally consistent, you have to rally against all and every system, including musical systems, so like who cares if you can sing and actually play an instrument?
'That's so systematic, you traditionalist scoundrel. It's better if we sound like souls withering in hell.'
Waldeck, Mel, Connie and I hit up a quaint seafood place, Salt and Battery. We're seated in a private room, Japanese seating, Chinese lanterns, we take off our shoes and sit with our feet under our asses, table three or so feet off the ground. Connie and Mel get along right away—trade stories of NYU, find out they both appreciate the directorial stylings of Sophia Coppola, Margaret Atwood novels, and both happen to love Chris Brown despite the controversies and his apparent sh*ttiness as a human being.
Waldeck and I don't talk. He orders clam chowder and no entree. Drinks five Lagers in an hour, folds his hands over his stomach, tries to act nonchalant and typical.
We part ways after dinner, Waldeck entrusting me with a hotel key to a suite I could never afford myself. Connie and I book it to a club down the street, Lohan, where she's besieged by an influx of suitors of every make and model, wouldbe courtesans querying her for liner, mlems in North Face jackets trying to get her to do a line of co*ke in the bathroom 'real quick', Valencian gigolos buying her Vespers and Gibsons and Batidas unprompted, grinding aggressively at every opportunity, anodized eaglehead belts and gelled spiky hair and those tootight abhorrent embarrassing douchebro vnecks with the abstruse and nearly blinding sparkly patterns. My love, why the f*ck does anybody wear those?
She sticks with me and about an hour in the night we meet a couple named Zoe and Kal at the edge of the bar, hiding away like we were. Zoe's petite but buxom, mid twenties, nickel hoop eyebrow ring, Blackwork sleeve tattoos, ravenheaded, alabaster dress. Kal's more reserved, wavy shoulderlength fairhair, light blue button up, skinny black slacks, gaunt as a street dog. Connie got Zoe's attention by asking her for a light. Zoe in turn not only provided a lighter but complimented Connie's pashmina scarf and asked to touch it and soon enough we were at their table, trading stories, you know, proper socializing like normal people can get up to but I've not really been capable of it except in slivers.
Kal's an architect, details for us the difference between a gazebo and a rotunda.
Zoe's an ocularist, details for us how to fit a prosthetic eye.
They tell us (well, Zoe does mostly) they're into hallucinogens, empathogens, drugs in general really, experimental people, open, lustful for new experiences, house music, folk, The National, Animal Collective, French Bulldogs, Maine Coons, DIY sh*t, ASMR sometimes, Burgess, Waugh, Plath, they tell us they're from Washington State and just visiting and maybe we could come visit them sometime?
Connie says,
"We're here now, aren't we?"
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Faster than you can say I don't understand like reality dude, we're f*cking in a sauna. We f*ck each other mute. Asthmatic. I see every inside and outside available. Both girls like him better. Connie draws blood on his back with her fingernails when she comes. Kal and I both finish in Zoe's mouth and she shares it with Connie and I sit on the floor and press my knees into my chin and my periphery distorts like a corrupted reel of film. Connie swallows, kisses Kal. Kal kisses back, nibbles Zoe's bellybutton. Sidelines frayed. Connie and Zoe kiss again. I bite the sides of my cheeks.
Squirm alone.
For the next week we stay at Waldeck's paid for suite, run and tandem bike to higher ground, to pinnacles, whimsied toybox overlooks, we return to the suite to f*ck each other like a neuronally gorked pack of wild dogs, sup the Kettle One minis in the minifridge, go back out and speed through avenues and talk too loud in expensive restaurants and prove to the locals Americans are the most obnoxious c*nts the world over and we charge wherever we go, wildebeests, order our olive baskets and souvlaki at decibels loud enough to puncture a toddler's eardrums, toast to nonevents every ninety seconds, to mine and Kal's new hybridized spermGodlings floating in our communal lover's wombs, uterus kicks and bellybutton punches, to finally figuring out resurrection, teaching dolphins to talk, 3D printing exoskeletons for our genespliced computerdogs who will live with us through old age and the Communistic cybernated consciousness beyond.
Eighties night at the disco, This Must Be the Place, Connie, Kal and Zoe threeway dancing, rolling omnitinsel, crescents, macrocosms, the jagged worrying countours of a heart monitor, frantic aquamarine lineaments, cookiecutter Club trapezoids and rhombus flickers. They hook and yaw, boot and twirl, flail unabashedly, youthful idiots in the midst of junctures they'll forget in a day's time even if the slices are worth remembering, like Connie and Zoe sharing a lustlocked looksee of lucid understanding in the middle of a mock ballroom twostep, plenary and supercompassion'd affection, requited yearning, or Kal spilling a Manhattan on his chambray buttonup, the girls mocking him for his fifteen euro botching, call him dumbhead and stupid idiot and ClumsyArchitectDreamBoat, slurp the alcohol from the fibers in his shirt, use it as an excuse to fondle his twenty eight year old not yet subject to timely deterioration abdomen.
We fall into a kind of love that's easy to fall out of. We fall into a seasonal kind of daydreamy love, signed by an unspoken pact of consummation, "when it's time it's time" -- but when will it be time? Why is no one honest about when it's time? Why do we instead have them trysting about our heads all day after all is said and done and you are afterthoughts to each other?
I think, maybe, it's because we're functionally illiterate to the snapshot, on the spot, made up memorandas of each other's heads. We can scarcely enunciate our own thoughts let alone decode and disentangle the qualia of others. So we stay with people who we've outgrown or who've outgrown us due to lexical pothers, phrasal dithering. The lot of us cannot discern or willingly steer or (truthfully, on an empirical level) fathom our own emotions. The moment we're inseminated by a trigger for anger we are thereafter angry. The moment we are given an eyecatching input for lust we are lustful. This selfevident pattern continues for all the machinery herein.
But, listen, love, I have tried to give this some thought and you must tell me what you think. I do not want to spew. Spewing is as bad as baseball. But okay.
Some lives are revolutions just by having been lived.
You, like many revolutions, do not consist of doing parts but rather parts already done, the same way thought becomes violence, the same way heads roll like dice at the beckoning of nearstrangers. Words imbibed years past manifest into order, into sequence, reality dancing to script. Insurrections bleed in. Movements contort passages later or not, some missed, hiccups of concept, some so important they implode feeble stock and can't be mentioned until we're nebulously prepared to meet them. Remember, dear: perception is a constant rebellion against itself, you against you, you against yous that aren't really you, overlays of hypocrisies, obscurantists, counter revolutionaries gleeing at the squelch of their own, their own gleeing at the eventual inverse squelch of them. Our shared and unavoidable artificiality, our selfdeceits and bad faith posturings (in theory, to avoid obliterating our fragile egos), create voids of sophism in others, glue to them due to their ease of understanding, how good it sounds and feels to be an heir of truth without substantiation, epidemically spreads when they soothe into a narrative, especially now that nuance is a grave, now that scrutiny, despite its name, warrants no further attention.
You are bloodthirsty and wise. You consist of madmen and dandies and uncontained genius and attitudes not of your making. Don't misunderstand me. This is not about the duality of man or some such rubbish. Man (and maybe especially woman haha) is more fractal than binary, more Apollonian gasket than coin. No. What I think we witness now in our lovely Americas is the final war on gradation due to an influx of selfrevolutions, conviction overturned for shapeless indeterminates. Soon enough our lullabies will be alarm clocks. We'll shoot paper hearts instead of shells or heroin. Viciousness will be replaced with a love so akin to torture the residents of Heck will pity us from ten ditches below. Nothing will make sense and it already doesn't and I understand it so well, as it is designed to be induced.
The Great Agnosticism is upon us and it is right and it is wrong and it has always been upon us except when it hasn't and we know we know only in skeins of indecision.
Like I told Brooklyn Switcher, I think the Waves are right sometimes.
We live out an entire relationship in a week. I do, anyway. They're too modern and NeoKitsch to cherish like someone my age does. And note I write cherish and not idolize or worship or enshrine or revere, since those words connote respect, while cherish, as I read it, implies a no strings attached appreciation. I am fully aware of what they are and what they're capable of and am not particularly envious or fawning of any of them. My feelings of positivity toward them are born solely from fun factor, making me feel young again, reciprocated sexual allure, and for this I could not be more grateful. Relatively attractive twenty somethings including me in their EuropeanSexGameEscapades and granting me equal status f*ckRights is a luck I'll keep close and a kindness they didn't have to show.
As I was saying, we live out cohabitation and jealousy and pettiness and thoughtless lust for a week, cooking together and partying recklessly and waking up to smoker's lungs snoring and eating liquidy egg'd breakfasts together ('cause Kal can build giganticgyrating multilimbed multipanel kiosks but he can't follow a Youtube video on how to make scrambled eggs) and showering together and watching movies and reading and drawing and singing—a week and three days, summer storms half, clear skies half. When I try to think of what's missing, there's nothing there. They brought with and in them illustrated history.
Zoe's restrained with me at first, docile, Connie and Kal shower together quietly in the hotel bathroom, my feet hang off the pleather couch, way too short for me, Zoe summer dress clad whispers something about being shy before grabbing my dick through my jeans, so, you know, our rapport grows through both of us loving Gaspar Noe films obviously (who Kal considers a 'pretentious arthouse douchebag' but then goes on to elucidate his 'taste' in all things film and music, the kind of guy who thinks Puddle of Mudd isn't any different than Vivaldi, who says stuff like, "Scorsese movies are so boring, man. If I wanted to watch three hours of middle aged men sitting around tables gossiping about nothing I'd go home for Thanksgiving every year, but I don't do that, you know? Now those Star Wars movies, those are fun") and through our (perhaps shamefully) specific mutual hobby of smoking way too many cigarettes on long scenic hikes and the fact that we're both Taurus's (which I scold her for caring about) and drink our coffees with one cream and one sugar and she tells me I'm not the best kisser (that's Kal, duh) but I'm her '2nd or 3rd favorite' and she likes it 'when I bite her lips for her' so she 'doesn't have to do it herself'.
Honestly I've never seen so much love and resentment in one place. I suppose it can't get any easier by adding more people, and in the long run if you qualitatively increase the pleasure, you qualitatively increase the pain, potentially double or triple your losses. Who knew the dynamics of our quadruped coupling (if a threeway relationship is a thrupple, is a four way one a quaplle?) could be so charmingly explained by basic economics?
I came to love Kal, too, in his own way. No doubt a practical genius and a social troglodyte, he can detail, outline and ultimately construct any cathedral or citadel or spire or steeple or CGI monstrosity you desire and he's the type to never shut the f*ck up about it either. On our first evening together he showed Connie sketchbooks upon sketchbooks upon tinier, harder to see sketchbooks of his designs, years of work, big dreams, parks in Berlin, bridges in Antwerp, dome churches in Moscow, a tucked away romance alcove garden in Santorini. Intrigued at first, after the seventh glass chateau I had enough of his jabbering and wouldn't you, too? He brought nothing else to the table. If the topic wasn't about his expertise he was either silent or snide and despite being as cute, skinny and petite as his girlfriend, he never rung attractive to me cause of his hunching uneven glower, the snobbish ascension to his nose (Mulberryesque), snoot permeating every foramen and rimple.
To be fair there's instances where I saw why Zoe fell in love with him—third day, stop by his workshop minutes away from Metsovio Polytechnic, a tattered steel box accommodating families of drawing pads and tubular blueprints, saws and hex keys, lathes and sanders and routers and state of the art laser drills, large enough to house a couple 'pet projects' -- lifesized pinkneon crucifix, miniature replica of Liechtenstein, Kal's country of birth and 'first true love'. He goes to work on the crucifix, shirtlessly soldering, Zoe and I spectating the accompanying concerto of sparks, the sinew in his arms. He femininely bats his eyes at us, boyish good looks, torch drawing in artful bows and squiggles. I rarely feel anything romantic or sexual for men, but in these moments I could see what Connie and Zoe saw in him, at least, the cuteness, mischievousness, the ingenuity, the stubbornly iconoclastic nature.
The four of us lay together on the hotel bed halfnaked. We smoke but we're not supposed to. We nuzzle, pet, put weight on joints, give each other fake halfhearted massages. We kiss dryly, quick. Kal turns on one of the J.J. Abrams Star Trek movies, "which are pretty good, too" he says. I don't watch. I read the outlines of Zoe's legs instead, memorize the frills on her underwear, heliotrope lycra amid pasteskin, gluepelt, get lost and pull away to unreality. There's a diskshaped mole on Connie's thigh directly beneath her left asscheek. It's dark and frosted at the same time and I nervously tell her to see a dermatologist, which she agrees to and slaps Zoe's ass and chuckles and rests her head on Kal's boxer'd lap.
One day we hike round Kaisariani forest, screw each other against trees, remark at the natural beauty of the country like tourists do, go 'ooohh' and 'aahhh'.
Another day we bike the main square and grocery shop and cook for ourselves in the hotel, make a 'veritable bucket' (Zoe's words) of pho with crisp skinned duck, water chestnuts, carrots, caramelized onions, shallots. Zoe and Kal prepare most of the meal. I'm useless and chop the onions and carrots and nothing else. Connie provides entertainment by playing bad 1990's hits on a ukulele she picked up at Plaka. She's not stellar at singing but she's surprisingly tenured at the uke—never once loses rhythm and her plucks ring clean.
In unison, the four of us sardonically sing that one song, you know,
I'm all out of faith
This is how I feel
I'm cold and I am shamed
Lying naked on the floor
Illusion never changed
Into something real
I'm wide awake and I can see
The perfect sky is torn
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On the sixth day (out of ten), Kal and I girlfriend swap. He takes Connie sailing. Zoe takes me to a house party in Glyfada, an upscale suburb of Athens proper. We hail a cab and walk some of the way to watch the coast at dusk. She forces me to buy her a boysenberry danish, saying she 'doesn't remember what boysenberry tastes like' and cites my status as 'temporary vacation boyfriend', which means I owe her 'at least a hundred bucks.' She scarfs the danish and I poke at her for being a lardass in disguise and she puts her arms around my waist and buries her head in my chest. We lean over the pier, quasilaminate asphalt combers wealing curlicue'd seafoam, chitins, cowries, whelks, bream schools wading tirelessly against the dark, typhlotic mobs, anxious confluence, ending up where they started despite their best effort to the contrary (sound familiar?). Should I tell you now how we are a school of fish on a nocturnal Grecian pier, blind to the world in the same way, struggling against it the same way, wave after bullsh*t shellshackled wave?
Zoe's eyes take up half her face. Not really, but close, they're wonderfully and starletly huge. She tells me she's always been obsessed with eyes. Doesn't know why. She 'just knows that's where everything is' when she looks at someone, likes that they're 'weird and watery, have chambers and lenses, like little cameras for brains!'
Down the pier some way a John Goodmanesque sailor plays an accordion, sings a song I don't recognize in Italian. We make our way to him and drop him a few euros in his 'begging for money' box and sit on a bench at the edge of the pier, where Zoe reveals to me the tiny Captain Morgan bottles she appropriated from not her hotel room, technically. I take one and down it. She downs two.
"Uh, so, who do you know at this party?"
"Ugh, ex, long story," she says. Zoe rolls her eyes, i.e. rolls almost half her face.
"Still friends?"
"No, but I want my boyfriend to f*ck her boyfriend."
"Oh, uh, okay."
The party house is calcium carbonate, slick white, a lonesome onestory blueroofed wigwam situated far along the coast, open front and back yards, a dozen lengthy sunshades poled into squarish cherry tables. Thirty or so affluently dressed dumbsh*ts in halfsuits and Söhnes dancestrut to the electro dubstep noisegarbage blaring from the house's surround sound, trying their hardest to impress the ten remaining women gawking at them abashed and blushing. Inside there's a tenseater Zshaped couch and fully stocked bar, a couple wallblending fridges, and of course to signify her patronage and appreciation, paintings wadding the walls, Rajputs and cubist flowerlabias, spraypainted local prints, Warholish tampon collages, Gouache nightmare smudges of elongated spectral rabbits sickly gnawing at carrots that look conspicuously like a child's tibias. Someone hands me a White Claw and I shudder and shrug and drink it.
Zoe leads me to a backroom where we make out for a couple of minutes. She pulls out a baggy of cocaine—okay, where do people get all this co*ke?—and we both snort a couple lines off the floor (seriously) and make our way back to the nonsense, where we're greeted by Zoe's exgirlfriend, Petra Sokolov, overbuilt beach volleyball frame, manhands, permed strawberry RussianJew ponytail, nose like a Roman legionary. Petra and Zoe greet with a much too long hug, Petra's royal blue tackon's scraping Zoe's exposed back.
"So, where's Arnold?" Zoe asks, brushing herself off.
"Psh, dumped him. Met this new guy and his girlfriend, super cool. Way cooler than freakin' Arnold, that's for sure."
"Oh yeah? Who are they?" Zoe asks.
"They'll be here any minute," Petra says gleefully.
Zoe and I leave Petra to her own horrorshow devices, mosey to the far end of the party beachside, (holding hands, knuckle scratches, marking the narrowness of her waist as she breaks from me and kittenishly toddles ahead, the latitudes of backside verging on detection, I'm fiendish, fixated, she's bumping into people and laughing, she's an unthinking biological spotlessness, what all men want, a modelish but motherly stereotype who acts and dresses down, textbook ratio of tit* and waist and ass, Northwestern Oregon Trail face unfolding sluices of meadowy goodwill and how it feels to study a sea of wheat and in her notpocks she positively oozes Americana, trailblazing west and shunning the stifles of megalopolis after megalopolis with their tacky Mickey Mouse advertisem*nts bedazzling scores of hydroslu*ts and spasmodic deadeyed f*ckwits and unjaded middle class families who spend more on convenience than they do love, in her timber she is sleeping with a saddle for a pillow, shooting people who look at her sidewise, moonlit and adumbral there's a blink of Manifest Destiny about her profile, starting your own venture and telling everyone you know and God and the government to kiss your asshole) the veritable haulout, where the thawed cradle of paleolithic harems desists unlike the polygamous cliques inside Petra's Palace retched in affluent stallions, connected, educated, jackhammering beefcakes, wastrels fro and to, yet on the outskirts where we holed up drinking passed White Claws we find men without women convening, luckless praters occupied largely in I.T., web devs and network architects and database administrators, rotund 5'7" forty somethings clutching for a youth they know is irrevocable in the forms of tailored leather jackets and unseemly trillby's and kneeripped whitewashed jeans and trendy newage sneakers bought for them by their ex wives when they were not ex wives and just trying to renovate their crappy husband investments (husbvestments?). When a woman does happen to show up or incidentally move into their involuntary celibacy circle, they flock to her like sharks chasing milesoff blood.
Zoe unsheathes a handmirror and we sniff bumps of cocaine, turn away from the techmob, hood ourselves. She (without stopping to breathe) tells me she is in love with Kal in a way she wouldn't think possible unless she experienced it herself, true fairy tale lifemate pair bond stuff, and she tells me although she's hooked on Kal like a methadone addiction, set for life, she still cannot totally imagine only stuffing herself with him and only him until she dies. Her and I make out probably too much and this lardy Bulgarian urethra in a cashmere Seersucker (wearing his sunglasses at night) tells us to Get a room. I say,
"Find a girl of your own and you wouldn't even notice."
He doesn't respond and the sadsads nearby tilt their heads and shuffle their feet in false misdrawn hexagrams and chatter weakly among themselves and let us get back to business, a business they long for so badly they'll actively try to stop the people who have it.
A midget in a Canadian maple leaf track suit vomits on the beach, knees and palms sandburied, wife or girlfriend or mistress or sister or friend (matching track suit, though) rubbing his back, plopped on her ankles. Nearer the main house, a posse screaming BONFIRE forms and like twenty douchebros flock and spread out on the beach to gather driftwood and anything else burnable, some volunteer their own clothes and strip to their Versace Barocco Animalier Briefs (I only know the full name cause some guy who looked like Clark Gable with down syndrome kept repeating that he couldn't just burn his Versace Barocco Animalier Briefs and now it's kinda stuck in my head forever, to my great dismay) that cost like a hundred dollars a pair or something outrageous like that, chanting cultishly for glow and everflame, thermal embrace. Petra joins them by surrendering some of the larger paintings in the house and an unused meerschaum cabinet, the bonfire pile closer than I expected, probably not a safe distance, but who am I to tell them it's dangerous? They're having so much fun! Haul after haul the miscellany builds up, denatured into a kind of awry, slabpeg Hecatoncheires, the monstrous triheaded son(s) of Uranus and Gaia, standing by for his(their) martyrdom, his(their) fate at the hands of a bunch of screaking drunk effervescent apes.
Everyone gathers around as it's prepared to be lit. There's calls for silence, a prayer, they go unanswered, five shirtless dudes in backwards velcro'd Fox Racing caps add the final touches of tampered dock lines and olive branches and dustmarinated suitcases and an American flag draped over everything. Petra throws in a duffel bag of potpourri.
Where are you?
No matter, you now have a man who can keep you safe and secure and you can guzzle him down quintweekly without guilt, 'cause who in their right mind wouldn't want to?
Do you look at a clock, or a watch, or any face of time, and think whether I am reading the same face, registering the same information?
11:11.
12:12.
Or now that I'm gone, now that we've both proven what we mean to each other, do you not think on me? Do you see me as a transitory phase, a stepping stone to the better man and the dreamed upon prosperous future?
A tunnel with no light inside but light at the end?
It's up! The Astral Flame Arises! Blessed be those caught in its sunmimic, its supernal lobs of tinder and seared air. Catches wind, sails on the mistral, whipsnake rills gangling and spluttering fire and undulating strobelike redorange.
Everyone, including Zoe, cheers.
I do not cheer.
Halifax explosion, Chicago, London, Kuwaiti oil fields, Gunashli Platform No. 10 spilling into the Caspian and on and on.
Prince Frederick drowned in the Rhine, accidentally.
Virginia Woolf drowned in the River Ouse, on purpose, stone lined pockets.
And so many others still drowned at Nantes, The National Bathtub, on order of Carrier, executed a year after his atrocities and beheaded and the relatives and friends and leftovers of those he killed watched him die and we do not know what they felt within them.
Bonfires. Bonfires splotching the world.
A tinted black SUV approaches the involuntary celibate habitat scudding along the beach, encrusted wheels, egregiously speeding or not allowed to be driving on a publicish beach at all, smokey furrows jetting out the exhaust and issuing to the water. The SUV hard brakes, a keep of sand ejecting from the spokes. A wristclapping Petra joggles to the SUV, eyes in 'U's' like a Japanese cartoon character, humming a sequence of discordant yet somehow upbeat kneejerk neuronal purrs.
About half the party waits for the brewing scene and our mystery rider to reveal themselves.
Pause for brief suspense.
Pause to appreciate the mother midnights and the sickrels we can't save, the Steppony sundrink, raisins and lemons seeped in conduitwater.
One door opens.
Brown pant leg, hemmed. Offwhite Nike Zooms.
Undertone hushes, muttered sass.
Pause to breath in.
Reveal themselves they do, 'cause it's Waldeck taking off his Clubmasters at night, confusing hiplength Nehru jacket, Mel right behind him, bodycon dress brazed on a figure no women her age should have. Waldeck and Mel both smooch Petra so passionately a roost of drunken doxies in the crowd almost faint from internal heat and external hotness and allconsuming rageful envy.
"Whoa, who do you think these two are?" Zoe asks.
"That's, uh, that's my best friend."
Grabbing Zoe's hand, yanking her, I slog to Waldeck and his newly acquired draggletails. For the first time in a long time he looks excited to see me, eyebrows high on his forehead, arms spread to a T. We hug and clutch each other's backs and he pats mine nigh a dozen times. He tells me it's been a doozy, processions of textual curtain lectures, bedtime bouts, Isla threatening to garrote their daughter at the Temple of Artemis, to hack and hue her son into the pool, he whispers,
"I said, 'You would never cut off her head with a wire, you f*cking idiot.'"
"Yeah, there's no way."
"There's no way."
"You two know each other?" Petra asks, abruptly interested now that I own an iota of social clout. She caresses my shoulder, you know, friendishly.
Waldeck introduces Petra and I 'properly'. Her fake nails chafe the sides of my foreknuckles and I pull back whenever she tries to touch me again on the stroll back to her bedroom, which I was only kindly invited into by windfall and fluky association and honestly it's a sh*t thing, cramped, humid despite the five foot pedestal fan oscillating in the corner, illuminated by a shinheight passel of redbulbed torchטres glimmering waffled and irregular pigments of samlet tinct, russet dandling along the ceiling and popwalls.
Her bed: tripleking heart, organic bamboo duvet, complimentary bedding.
"So how do you two know each other?" Mel asks Zoe. She sits on the bed next to Petra, legs crossed, her dress is so short, ecru thighs dewy and leading, opening a bottle of Patrón conveniently placed on the rivened bedside table, spoolish chivs springing from the greenchipped midsection, pulsing at causeless air like uncut guitar strings.
Zoe shuffles to a chair by the fan, palms folded together. I sit on the floor with my legs crossed and light a cigarette without asking, ash on the horsehide rug, sigh too much, rub my face.
"Haha, she's my ex," Zoe says. "We're friends still, though."
Mel and Petra down two shots each, lick the tequila from each other's lips. Waldeck lays on the opposite side of the bed, underelbow placed over his forehead and eyes. He exhales nose first, resting one heel on his other foot's toes, scratching.
"It's good you guys can be mature enough for that," Mel says. "People aren't good at other people, you know?"
"Yeah, I know," Zoe says resolutely, zero bullsh*t in her intonation, and it honestly felt a bit catty, undebonair, an attitude of hers not yet revealed to me.
Petra leans over Mel's lap and shimmies out a hodgepodge of pills and the moment she folds them out on her lap they look too familiar to accurately recall, I've seen them assembled in the same disorderly melange but I can't for the life of me remember where. She gives each of us two coral capsules and we take them with tequila, or red velvet soda, or Bubly.
"What are these?" I ask.
"I don't know, really," Petra says. "Empathogens of some kind."
The bonfire rakes embery talons across what Haxo sometimes called the welkin, the sky, the dome which is not a dome, the air that rises to stratums of wholesome wrathlike fire. He said welkin came from Shakespeare, from King John, repeated it sometimes during his filibusters and ecumenical talkathons at Hildene Lincoln, by now a safe bet method of corralling the jinglebrains presiding (disastrously, naively, poorly, etc.) over the higher echelons of the crumbling Montpelier Assembly.
The sun of heaven, methought, was loath to set,
But stayed and made the western welkin blush,
When English measured backward their own ground
In faint retire. O, bravely came we off,
When with a volley of our needless shot,
After such bloody toil, we bid good night
And wound our tott’ring colors clearly up,
Last in the field and almost lords of it.
I don't want to be here.
I want to be here.
Mel and Petra pick at each other's nipples. Petra bites Mels' through her dress. Waldeck plays around with Mel's ass lazily, still laying down, trifingered fondling, tapping his middle finger against the wet spot permeating her grey boyshorts. Zoe scoots her chair closer to me, legs grating every inch of the way, a squeal so fantastical and unrealistic it almost makes me flaccid but she helps this silly feeling, of course, you know, by shoving my face in her crotch and telling me what to do ("Suck it more") and she comes in under three minutes since I am not a natural but can follow instructions as well as you want me to, at least usually.
Zoe spasms daintily to herself on the chair, holding a wrist and the length of her pointer finger along her labia. She underbreath teehees me and kisses me and joins Mel, Petra and Waldeck on the heart bed. I do not join them. I settle away clamlipped and ladydazed and my forehead perspires without my consent and nothing motivates me to join them, they horde Waldeck and claw him and he reciprocates in kind if not in kinder, splaying them, moving them about as if molding them from casks of clay, models and figurines for his exclusive use only, playthings, scarecrow slatterns, chatelaines and maybewives and bona fide lovers, he slaps Petra on the backside tongueing Zoe, Mel underneath Petra grasping his crotch through his pants and moaning ungodly sweet. I have no apparatus to digest (or appreciate on any significant level) this kind of rapture, this oneness in fourness, the improvised offcuff rhapsody their zeal composes.
They become Krakenlimbed and flailing, lustfuss, cephalopodic Godhead, (they grovel for the right spots and pokes) a felled Aspen horizontally sprawling its oneday tabernacle branches, asking the wind to carry its wilting arms wherever it sets course.
Petra's phone blows up. Roughly a thousand texts a second. Vibrates violently on the dresser and she saves it from jiggling off the edge. Outside, the majority of the bonfire watchers blitz inside, shouting something about turning on the televisions, all the televisions, all the phones and computers, all the news stations, do it right now. Waldeck and Zoe's phone blow up, too. Connie texts me:
"News. Now."
Petra turns on the bigscreen parallel her bed. I hug a heart shaped pillow and cradle myself. Whengzhirp, static flickery jazzrot, a honeycomb headed reporter flagging irreverently, no sound, mouthing, there's slides of rubble like there always are, there's slides of smoke clouds bigger than Newark, there's slides of parading troops in Virginia, Deleware, Vermont, the fisherman brigades of Maine keelhauling Fem P.O.W.'s with fleets of scooners, the citizenry of D.C. who dance about the steps of the capital and rejoice and feed each other Wonkaesque chocolate bars and swap hibiscus garlands, white oleanders, daisy chains, waving American flags by the tens of thousands, an alluvion of redwhite&blue.
"Does this have sound?" Waldeck asks impatiently.
Petra gets up and smacks the side of the television twice, hard, and yes it fixes it in a jiff. The reporter says,
"What you see next may shock you. Viewer discretion is advised."
It's Iraheta and Choisy and a silverwinged squadron of four others, garage crafted prototype mechsuits, metalworked gasmasks, buckypaper chestplates, soaring through the revelational California over capsized superstructures and eclipses of glass, eddies of sheen and pinesage, pyres newfangled and oldhat ascending the inksoots of their kindling, plasma and fat, thewsteam and ligaments and bundled cords.
I don't know why, but they chose to livestream it, a dude flying behind filming them 'bravely' entering enemy territory. Iraheta stops midair and faces the camera.
"My name is Corporal Iraheta with the Montpelier Provisional Militia, if you know me you know me, if you don't you don't. What you should know is that I love my country and hate what has to be done to save it. I love all free people and expression and lives lived in bliss. I've done things I can't repeat to myself let alone an audience so instead of repentance I can only hope my next actions on the planet on which we now sadly revolve will better the lives of those still left. That's all and praise be."
They spread out, each swoop in a different direction.
Six flashes in total.
Six holocausts.
But not just flashes.
Choisy's one of those flashes, could paint a goddamned anything for you as well as you wanted, could lie his guts off about knowing Russel Crowe or whatever, could keep his parents alive and f*ck his exwife and play in his stupid chair. And Iraheta? 30 something? Handsome? Super rich already, successful, perfect shot, black belt, computer genius? That Iraheta? What kind of waste were these flashes and how do I not understand where they have gone?
They run the flashes two more times to ensure we get the picture.
Los Angeles converted to fiery steppes. San Francisco a sloughpit.
Back to honeycomb lady,
"Our most recent reports indicate that Iraheta's plan to wipe out major centers of VW activity along the Pacific coastline has succeeded, although at great cost. As of one hour ago, U.S. Press Secretary Bris Cutter issued Los Angeles and San Francisco as LOST, only redeemable once the radiation has cleared. Unfortunately due to the perilous nature of rescue operations in a nuclear context, we have... no casualty estimates at this time..."
She trails off in my head.
They're puffs of smoke on the evening news. Friends.
They're going to be in textbooks and documentaries.
People will quarrel over whether they were right.
Friends.
Not right—people.
Wrong, but people.
Still love them—people.
Waldeck and I excuse ourselves, stroll on the beach, take turns hugging and crying, indignant, exasperatedly listing off excuses and couldhavebeens. At one point he stops and sits, cradles his knees to his chest rocking perpendicular to the waves. I tear up (prominent, weighty bowelstuff, yarnspun meatbelts) at the midnightblue delineation of his shape, his concave'd shoulders astir and beetling like an isolated Scottish promontory. He keeps saying,
"I did not want them to die I did not want them to die I did not want them to die..."
In Greece you and I would take twilight beachwalks, too, listen to the hooting and the abstracted backwood footfalls, make out chaotically, fiddle dug earth out of one another's hair, comment on stars we can't name. You lie and tell me you are so, so happy with me. Your lips camber, horseshoe. Your eyes reflect back the catenary moon.
When you leave me, when I know I won't see you again, I die daily afterward, screech alone and tabular and upright and sometimes veer my elbows into my stomach, wail to the deaf void.
I take others to fill your space.
And some fill it better than others, and some fill it all the way.
And when with them I wonder if I actually loved you or if I swindled myself because of time spent, because I kept remembering what you looked like awash the mad phosphorescence of Shinjuku, (or the lavendervanilla perfume you wore in Brussels you bought at the airport giftshop against your own wishes, or how when in Tripoli you jacked me off in the back of a taxi and wiped my finish on your underwear, bit your lip and winked at me, or when in Los Angeles at The Local Peasant you kept telling me of all the boys you love more than me and wish you still had and how I stopped being relevant to you in a big way and could easily again) and I wonder if you were worth the salt, or the thew I had to relinquish to keep you.
Connie and I f*ck around Coney Island, seven PM—she's in a formfit plum co*cktail dress and clacky black flats, the only time I've dressed up with her, took her to the Gramercy Tavern and spent like a thousand dollars or something. I ask the most banal questions I can think of, our first Real capital R date, Do you think there's certain color combinations that influence our neural pathways, or do you think we're predisposed to certain mixtures, or some meld of both? Hey, you know what—I don't actually know that much about makeup. It's interesting. Dudes don't wear makeup usually, haha. What's on your face right now, Con? She replies in voodoo chemistry. Granactive squalene what? Copper peptides why? You're cute, but I bet the average dude thinks glycolic acid is something the cartel uses to dissolve bodies. We cab to Coney boardwalk, chug from a Latin engraved rum flask ("Quid quid latine dictum sit, altum viditur") concealed in her bra, find a sequestered underpier spot where she rolls joints so professionally, fluently, hell, horticulturally, I wonder to myself if she has ever cultivated marijuana on a large scale. Smoking (grey balloons like wizard's breath) she shows me the replica of Judith Beheading Holofernes she's currently painting, a skillful fascimilie except for the veinriddled, hyperrealistic co*ck added above Holofernes' gaping (nearly sawed off) head. She explains she feels justified lampooning Caravaggio's work given he 'was probably a pedo, so f*ck him.' I grope her through her dress and she tells me she is so, so wet and she masturbat*s and tells me to kiss her neck and I do and on her phone I see the notifications: Jack. Arnold. Steven. Ryan. Tyler. Scott. I see words like Baby and As long as we f*ck again lol! and Hey, long time no talk...
I feel like I'm going crazy and sane at the same time.
Can I watch this happen in front of me and continue?
She tells me to leave marks wherever I please.
You told me to never make marks.
Haylee, here she is dancing with a onelegged transvestite from Guernsey, I'd marry her if I could based on the day she existed with me, (how I didn't deserve the attention let alone the affection) and here's Connie, faking an org*sm to get it over with and taking a shower after we finish, spiritless, plebeian, she rinses off (tiny purple towel, dries her hair humming Once in a Lifetime) and gradations of scartissue'd stretch marks contract and expand across her abdomen.
I wonder if she told her boyfriend about me or if she allowed him to continue on in a reality he would not approve of and would not want to participate in.
I am in love with you. Connie. Haylee. Therese. It only takes a night for men like me. The moment you and I kissed on the porch swing I was in love with you. The moment Connie and I made out in the back of her car I fell in love with her. The moment Therese finished herself off on top of me to the reverberations of Waldeck and Francine in the other room I fell in love with her and never stopped. I'd trade her for Haylee and trade them right back.
I wish I could tell you love is what does it, what makes continuity worth it, but in my experience love (on average) makes you die more cruelly and makes the suffering more pronounced, you know, turns you into an illogical so n' so, a wimp—kind of mushy, kind of jejune and wonkily inert and ineffective. Personally I've never been anything but a manic idiot when I'm in love and unfortunately this insight can only be gained when I'm out of it.
Our loves, when vanished and irrecoverable, murder us more than our enmity.
And our lovers (when detained to reminiscence, when the slews of moments you lived together [with each other] become condensed to anecdotes and campfire stories) steal away more parts of ourselves than any thief would dare to take.
"Why them? How could they?" Waldeck screamasks no one. He slams the ground ballfisted like seventy times, pinkyside of his hand, turning himself over to his belly to repeat the knucklebloodying motion with his other hand. He's an inch away from the waves, barkweeping and more tizzied than I've ever seen. Sandcrystals scud into his mouth and onto his tongue after every vocalization, the air from his syllables spattering oceanfront scoria back up. His lower half perks in the air, face entombed in his forearms.
Mel and Zoe, both in Petra's Egyptian cotton bathrobes (they both say PETRA on the lefthand pec in bold royal purple letters), approach us southside and do not disturb Waldeck or me and they sit together some fifteen feet away. I tilt back to them occasionally and they wave timidly at me. Waldeck continues the fisthole he made for himself.
An unaccompanied sash of lightning disgorges overhead, lightens cobalt a quadrant of sea, splitsecond manifesting a coterie of petrels divebombing burbled and sloeish water.
Adam's bathhunt in Adam's ale.
It rained the whole time we stayed in Cortina d'Ampezzo but we made the most of it, threw on our rented pissyellow parkas and slackly trekked Pomagagnon, chamois scaling the cliffs, fatcheeked marmots foraging lichens and Icelandic moss and rhizomes, and we devoured what must have been buckets of hot cider at the Faloria blizzardtrapped with a troupe of human resources personnel, ages ranging twenty three to fifty five, each of them trying their damndest to sleep with you despite my being, you know, alive and present at the time, but as far as I know you stayed faithful for once, although you could have snuck out while I was asleep with that one dude with the neck tattoo of a stalk of amaranth, he was a pretty (like, feminine pretty, long eyelashes) Moordominant Italian boy and you commented on how funny and nice he was multiple times, how he's 'the right type of person we should make friends with'. Oh god, now I'm kind of sure of it—you f*cked the amaranth neck tattoo guy, didn't you?
What's there, dots on the seaview?
Askew yokes of spindlecut lightning, ancillary thunder, azure sheets wick the headlips of leaping herrings and anchovies the size and tint of American nickels race nowhere and die for no reason and sharks carry onward and my mother tells me confidently thunder has no color.
I fish with Choisy and Iraheta on Lake Carmi, rented Bowrider. Iraheta drives us deep into the lake half lost in the Augur markets on his phone. We make a small campfire from hemlock when we get back to land, keep it alive 'til sunup with bundles of old newspapers Choisy sometimes reads the headlines to ('Motor Industry Doubts Value of Safety Belts, Negro President in 40 Years?, Women Benefit from Moderate Use of Tobacco!, Husband Jumped on Bonnet of Wife's Car, Moon Scare as Astronaut Tumbles, White Clad Workers Cleaning Up Chernobyl, Senate Repeals Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Liquid Crystal Display by Hofmann-La Roche, Lithium Approved Federally for Treatment of Manic Depression,'). Iraheta and Choisy each catch a walleye and we grill them with no seasoning. We eat from the pan with our fingers.
Choisy's hair matches the fire.
When he laughs it sounds like the remaining childish goodwill left in him pouring out.
Waldeck's frenzy stops. He sits up, hands folded in his lap, tremoring opiodishly and shatterhanded. Mel and Zoe join us now, Mel tapping Waldeck's back with her fingers in succession, index middle ring and pinky, pinky ring middle index, his chin tucked into his chest and she kisses his earlobe and rests her head on his shoulder. Zoe takes my hand and puts it in her lap, warmer than it ought to be, and folds her other hand over it. She squeezes my hand and wrist, nudges me with her forehead, her nose.
"Would you f*ck a relatively attractive octogenarian for one thousand dollars?" she whispers in my ear.
"Did Connie teach you that?"
"Yeah," Zoe murmurs, kneading the inbetweens of my fingers. "She really likes you, you know. Just saying. So would you?"
Zoe kisses my neck.
"I'd...uh... I'd..." I choke and cannot finish.
There's floating somethings out there. Specks now, how people look from an airplane, but closer they're real somethings, contain some lifeblood, some ֹÉlan vital. Jaegars or seahawks, whatever, squiggles kicksoaring and spryly declining in brisk elliptical ribbons.
The dudes in Fox racing caps and their girlfriends (white trash analogues of their men, you know the type, ugly leg tattoos usually pointing to abuse or addiction or Jesus or lost loves, the works, every available hole and some unavailable ones, pierced, stringy mousetrap hair, motocross or UFC longsleeves, bulky [sometimes studded or otherwise bejeweled] boots) tread back outside and reignite the bonfire by lobbing a flaming ream of potpourri at it and three of the girls line up to funnel Budweisers out of a suckhat, which they manage disturbingly well, two beers in each hat imbibed (see: throated) in under a minute and the girls woop for their perceived 'victory', ass tap and tit tap each other. Their boyfriends congratulate them by showing them up and drinking three beers each out of the hat. I am positively wrecked with envy.
Zoe turns away for a mere second before noticing Petra coolly striding the beach, lonesome Russian dove open bathrobe clad, polka dot bikini underneath.
"I'll be right back," Zoe says.
She jogs away.
She jogs away to someone else.
Rightfully, of course.
I notice Waldeck squinting at the skyline. He stands brushing the adhesive sand off his pants and shirt and ass and he puts his hands in his pockets trying to read the tumult of raven motes plucky and haphazardly flitting. I stand with him, mime his movements, pocket my hands. Mel rises too, linking an arm with Waldeck, and she examines with us, glossbugs, charcoal'd sailshoots circumnavigating globes we can't see, and evernearer the birds fill out and amplify and their aerial congas shift mechanistic, the loops no longer natural, play out as if controlled by wires, arcswings snaggletoothed and unsmooth.
"Are those birds?" Mel asks. She raises a palm to her forehead to shield her eyes (even though it's nighttime), really tries to look, to see.
Waldeck doesn't respond. I don't respond.
Zoe and Petra finger each other ankledeep in the Aegean.
A Labrador bolts down the beach, collarless, gnarling and woofwoofing at the littoral, deepspent guarddog barks. It stops ten or so feet away from us and doesn't back down from its invisible enemy, barks at the foefree air, bites and paws at the tide coming in.
Closer to the bonfire a guy in fishnets (scratch that, a stupid f*ckface in fishnets) and an aviator's cap (nothing else) lights an entire box of tricolore girandolas and dragon eggs and peonys and diadems and they erupt seconds after leaving their casings, defective, defective sh*tter, an incandescence branded on the stratosphere, a physically unseeable (without permanent retinal damage) whiterthanwhite blob, and it blinds everyone in like a mile radius, champagnespark monsooning the better half of the beach.
There's almost as much smoke as Atlantic City or St. Just Day.
I cough blood and there's nothing discernible where I want to be looking except Mel and Waldeck and the Labrador playing antagonist to something, snarling, retreating back to land whenever the water rises too high, poor guy displaying his foamed teeth and redrooted gums, his best attempts at former Wolfdom, but his tail's tucked between his legs and he's too frightened to be vicious and he's throwing up salt water now cause he's a dumbass and keeps ladling it into his silly (but very cute) mouth.
A Hellenic Police squadcar shows up at the far end of Petra's property, which prompts her and Zoe to stop diddling each other publicly, Petra org*sm'd out and tottery kneed, pulling up her panties and sprinting toward her property barefoot, shoes and megasleek concealed lipstick vibrator in hand. Zoe, meanwhile, dawdles to us slower than a glacier breaking apart. She wraps her arms around my neck, kisses me on the lips and I taste all of her and Petra simultaneously.
Are they birds?
What birds stay in formation, and when not formed, dash so erratic and somber?
Lioncoated Pomeranian. Bowhead Maltese. Two Dobermans, Cyclopean Chow, three legged Mastiff with a plateplatinum robot leg stippled in ruby and lapis lazuli (not a joke), a Pekingese smeared in sewage and sh*t, evidently a difficult sojourn here, now in unison raving with the Labrador at nothing, dots not big enough to identify, approaching and retreating equally, there and back again.
One of the Dobermans gets snippy with the fishnet idiot and snaps at his hand. Fishnet idiot kicks the poor thing in its snout, eliciting a sorrowful doggish (duh) wimper, the other Doberman and the eyepatch Chow jumping in to rescue their compadre and taking down Fishnet idiot in a matter of seconds, practically tearing out his throat and eating his stomach. But since dogs are dogs and humans are humans, a couple of the Fox racing hat bros grab driftwood and charge the dogs and shout shoo and swing at them hastily and bat the ground ahead of them and mockbark back at them, so now we have like ten guys fighting ten dogs, and there's more dogs streaming in from the city, there's a Chihuahua with a sombrero strapped to its chin and a red bowtie and there's a pair of beagles sniffing round the outskirts vainly searching for foxes or varmints to instinctively murder or whatever and soon four bluegrey spotted collies show up and corral the rest of the dogs together 'cause they're smarter than human toddlers pretty much, so readily enough the mutts unionize somehow, inborn pack dynamics, and since the humans are too drugged and disorganized to put up a good fight they don't put up a good fight, they hardly do anything except run around and swing at shadows and call their loved ones to frantically tell them they're getting mauled to death by a legion of fox terriers and there's programmers getting their testicl*s ripped off by huskies, a Belgian Shepherd effortlessly ripping out Achilles' tendons, anklelevel lowdown blitzkriegs, a lynxeared Papillion masticating an eyeball and yipping Lord of the Fliesishly at the terror that is not yet a terror, a triumvirate of patchfurred skinonly bull terriers gobbling alive a broomstick skirted Persian millennial c*ntfirst, (purpleblue mascara furrowing iridescently overlain malars, she's passed out from the blood loss luckily), genitals gobbled and canine slivered, they're pushed away by a skinnyripped 5'5" South Korean security guy using a flagpole as a polearm and he impales one of the dogs on it, ribcage skewered, plants his trophy in the beachsand only to remove the pole and threesixty swing like he's in a junior batting cage.
"Uh, should we go?" Zoe asks.
"Go?" Waldeck asks back. "When the hell we gonna' see something like this again?"
More cops. More dogs. A riot control team swabs through and tear gasses the main house, the majority of the dogs, jaundiced smoke whirling from the canisters, so we shimmy to the other end of the beach to observe and rest and smoke one of Zoe's impeccably rolled joints.
The cops overwhelm the guests at first, tear gas, bean bags, dazzlers and stun belts, but the dogs keep piling on, confuse everybody, there's no real target, everyone's fighting everyone, Airdales against cops, cops against partiers, partiers against themselves and their loved ones, accidentally bashing their girlfriend's foreheads against hardoak tables, 'accidentally' smashing a Miscato bottle over a cop's skull and 'accidentally' procuring aforementioned concussed officer's firearm and 'accidentally' shooting like ten dogs and four people before being taken out by a brave agate collared Elkhound named Tupac Doggur, who hurdles to the douchey and latches steadfast to his throat like a good boy, swinging douchey's neck around enough to paralyze him and leave him dumbfounded waiting to be trampled by a myriad of flipflops and standard issue combat boots.
After about fifteen minutes of quarrel, the partiers and cops give up. The partiers get in their ubers and Lexus's and drive home drunk or on, like, a lot of stuff and the cops kind of inspect around but don't actually do anything 'cause they know this will be the Everest of paperwork, so they leave except for the shortstraw choosing windbreaker'd obese Arab guy taking notes in a Lisa Frankish rainbowneon notebook. Petra sobs at the stoop of her ramshackle beachhut, guzzling the leftover droplets of a (forehead crushed) can of White Claw.
But the dogs don't go.
They form a semicoherent line on the beach, snouts pointed toward the sea. They sniff and wait. They bark sometimes, bicker among themselves, but not one of them budges or loses position. Waldeck's eyebrows push themselves together. He takes out his cellphone and clicks around a few times. He contemplates something for maybe thirty seconds, holds his phone to the sky and tilts it ovularly, a dozen revolutions of the wrist.
"What are you doing?" Mel asks.
Waldeck shows me, Mel and Zoe the results of his phone and I gulp when I see the frequency wavering.
Citywide dog whistle, relayed from a mobile ocean platform.
He puts his phone away and we all stand and watch the mites, killsplotches, deathly monads, dance their dance upon the welkin. Waldeck grabs my traps and squeezes hard and shakes me. He snickers and says,
"Voilà le soleil d'Austerlitz."
The dogs don't stop except one, a permheaded saffron mutt jangling lanyards of turbid fur, its barks petering off long before the others. It limps to my feet, front knee devoid of skin, visible bone, a gash beneath its snout fermenting, trickling blood to the sand, and it pules a suite of violaish scales at us, curling serpentishly at my boots and rubbernecking me with a pair of ponderous tanapple eyes. Waldeck continues the sky watch, hands in his pockets, Mel undaunted right there along with him. Zoe and I kneel down to pet the mutt and it meeps at us, pleads for us to fix its hurt. I pat the dog's head, its ears, under its neck, untie a strand of dreadlock'd fur around its eyebrow. It seems grateful but not abated. I ask the dog what I can do for it and it does not respond and Zoe tries her hardest to fingercomb out the imperfections in its coat, surgeonishly unweaving clumps of everwebbing, glum and vagrant neglect, but she gives up once she realizes the feeble mutt is one big entangled nexus of braids and coils, gravity knots and sleepmade links. It is too much to assess in one go.
The horizon smudges do not draw nearer and they do not sail back to the cloudburst or shield themselves, persist in pivots and ballets.
The dog will die in this condition.
Zoe's eyes sparkle glacially blue.
A body of something, something once, bounces and lolls on the blackened shore.
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