Where Did You Sleep Last Night

by Lynn Crosbie

  The police found an ashtray, at his Carnation cottage, filled with two different types of cigarettes. One brand had lipstick-smudged ends. On the wall, above a sleeping bag, someone had written CHEER UP over a drawing of a smiling sun with rounded spokes.

  His widow swept into the station with a list of personal items that had gone missing, her eyes shattered: “Who was he with?” she said.

  It is a mystery I did not want to solve. Because she could have saved him. Because fuck her.

  MY ROOM — a single bed with a black metal frame: my clothes fit into two suitcases at its foot. Books and magazines stacked everywhere with paper tongues panting from each.

  I was failing English because I hated the assignments, and the books. My term paper on Animal Farm was about the toga party in the barn, written entirely in Mandarin: Zhu Xingxing!

  I wrote a make-up paper, a short play about Willy Lohan, the transgender protagonist of Death of a Salesman, who iterates her res gestae to the hairdresser — as the polyester extensions are being baste-stitched to her scalp, she laments, “A lady is not a bird, to come and go with the springtime!”

  This scored me another F.

  Miss Weir’s plaintive request to “stop doing this to me” gave me pause.

  I told her that I fell on my head a lot as a baby, and showed her the scars.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, handing over her Thermos of sherry.

  We sat together, watching the sun go down, our hearts racing like greyhounds, all anxious and doomed.

  PRESIDING OVER MY bed was the Kurt Cobain poster.

  He is wearing a moss-green sweater; his blond hair is lit up. He looks just past me, at nothing at all; his eyes are empty, harrowing.

  I drew a wreath over his head of sacred hearts pierced with tiny stingrays.

  Pinned to his heart and torn from a book, the words “big foxy thief.”

  His sad eyes blaze in his pale face like an imprecation: “I love you,” I would say, each time I looked at him.

  Then I would press my face against his: “And pretty soon, I’ll be coming for you.”

  WHEN I PLAYED Nirvana records, I saw Jesus handing him his voice on a purple velvet pillow.

  Then I heard the same voice gasp, and crackle.

  Burned to nothing: something in the way.

  I will hear it: he will sing for me one day.

  I FELL TO the pillows and dreamed of girls being painted by Van Gogh, nude against green pillows.

  “La tristesse durera toujours,” he said.

  I dreamed of Christ, the little mother, making golden pies that are too sweet and never enough.

  PAGE MARLOWE WAS represented in my room by a flowering cactus, potted in earth from the back of the school where he liked to get high.

  His girlfriend was Sophie Birkin, a tiny brunette with one-inch bangs, whose arms were illustrated with monstrous flowers.

  They were part of a popular group I sat near, but never with.

  Britney and I usually got high at lunch and drew the tattoos that we wanted to get.

  Her full name was Britney Abdel-Fattah-el-Sissi; she wore a fishnet veil and a burka she modified into a Dracula cape.

  She was in love with Jim Carroll, and was certain that he would appear to her, imminently.

  “Life and death: it’s just a series of circles,” she said, underlining the illustrations she liked the most. “And he and I are going to intersect.

  “It’s basic math,” she said, drawing a Venn diagram of her name, his name, and his Biddy League number, 69.

  I continued making kcs, believing and not believing her.

  “Do you think Page is okay?” I asked her, nervously. She despised almost everyone.

  She looked over.

  “He probably looks pretty good in the torture videos he shoots in his panel van,” she said, eating a kale and mayo sandwich.

  IT’S TRUE THAT Page wasn’t very nice. But I loved to look at him. At his salmon-coloured hair falling to his shoulders; his dark, shrewd eyes, and wide mouth that was usually turned down at the corners.

  He drew cities made of metal hives, and also sat, near me, in the back of the class, but he never noticed me until that terrible night.

  The night that would lead, like an army of ants filing towards a sugar cube, to a single, delectable question.

  What is the easiest way to die?

  I would have asked Britney, but she had just spent the night in her father’s car, parked in the garage with the windows shut.

  I GOT HER email the next day: “I’m with him now. P.S. He says to tell you there is a threshold back to beauty’s arms.”

  Her parents wrote as well, asking that I not try to contact the family, and adding a postscript, in Farsi: “Hey, glad girls!” it said. “I only want to get you high.”

  WITHOUT HER, I was an easier target.

  Sophie had always hated me, since we were kids and I kissed her when we were playing house.

  She kissed me back, and was pulling down my jeans when her mother caught us, slapped my face, and sent me home.

  She and her friends started to close in.

  I NEVER CRIED. Not about Britney or the infected cuts, or the girl who had started to scream in my face while windmill-smacking me.

  “You busted cunts don’t get it,” I said, spitting blood in their faces. “I’m going to be a fucking rock star, and you’ll tell your ugly kids that you used to know me.”

  They thought this was hilarious, who cares.

  “FLIP,” I SAID, “I’m getting out of here. I’d bring you with me, but I’d have to kill you.”

  His fur stood on end: white mice floated through the room on a harp cadenza:

  MY MOTHER STARTED seeing a longshoreman named Wing, who liked her old stories.

  She told him about hanging out with Pearl Jam after they played at the Off-Ramp, and shopping with Courtney Love for tattered tea gowns, with bustles and satin bows.

  “Did you ever meet Nirvana?” he said.

  I couldn’t hear what she said: the wind blew in cold and ruffled the poster.

  I lay in bed, watching Flip batting a shank of moonlight.

  Wing left her, soon enough.

  A few days later, she yelled at me about it.

  “Do you think I wanted to look like this, to be nothing? That I wanted a huge parasite to lap the life out of me!?”

  Her hair in snakes, her eyes swollen.

  “Well?”

  I was the parasite.

  “No,” I said. I held my breath: she looked like Calypso, her hands filled with small dolphins, not jagged pieces of glass.

  HER MOODS PASSED quickly. Soon enough she was laughing with her friends about “el Chilito,” her new name for Wing.

  The night she screamed at me, the poster flew off the wall, scaring her into dropping the glass.

  I slept beside it and, as I slept, I fell deeper in love.

  “I’m waiting for you,” he says in my dream.

  He passes his hand over his head, erasing the shattered bone and gore, and I kiss him, tasting blood, then berries.

  MY MOTHER, AMUSED, called my love affair a “schoolgirl crush.”

  She lent me all of her books about him: I read them all, and became tormented by a groupie’s account, in Let’s Spend the Night Together, of him being an “excellent, tender lover.”

  When his widow gave an interview saying he was “well fucking hung,” I spent days with my legs crossed, in anguish.

  At dinner, my mother tried to talk to me about my classes; about any friends I might have had.

  She didn’t notice that I had developed a tic; that my cellphone’s face was broken from a hammer blow, after a bad night of calls and texts.

  That I was criss-crossed with cuts, and had written “DIE GIRL”
on my fat gut.

  I told her I loved geometry the most, and that my best friend was a girl named Ashlee World Without End who lent me her protractor, the one I absolutely wanted for my birthday.

  “Oh, sweet pea,” she said, drunk on spiked Snapple, but still.

  When she passed out, I tossed her purse for pills, extracting an amber-coloured vial with lots of good danger warnings typed across its belly.

  “VICODIN: FOR PAIN,” it said. “TAKE 1 TO 2 TABLETS A DAY WHEN REQUIRED.”

  “I JUST WANT someone to love me,” I said to the poster I had hung up again, and it shimmered.

  “And to love them back. I want us to die from it.”

  My flaxen-haired beauty gazed forward, at the sparkling edges of planets, at spangled meteor showers and bald asteroids.

  I pulled the poster down and, making cautious folds, slipped it into a freezer bag.

  One eye visible, one strand of hair, atomic number 79.

  I wanted him with me all the time.

  I HAD A World Religions test the next day.

  Leafing through the one notebook I used for all of my classes, I focused on a single entry: a drawing of Kali, juggling the words Time and Death, and a list of names for the mother of God, including the BVM, the Star of the Sea, the Cause of Our Joy, the Queen of the Angels, Ms. Pacman, and —

  The list trailed off into another drawing, of the Blessed Virgin, transforming from a blue pickup truck into a ravenous robot.

  In class, I took out the plastic bag and nervously pleated his hair.

  “When I can’t stand it anymore, I will ask you to come find me,” I said, out loud.

  My teacher, Mr. Robinson, said, “Evelyn Gray! You know that I’m married!”

  I was sent to the principal’s office, but I took a detour, stepped out the back door, and kneeled in the grass.

  I prayed there for a while, then I heard yelling and banging: the whole class had gathered at the window to watch me.

  I bowed, deeply, and raised my head: the clouds were, typically, stammering around, zipping up grey hoodies, and speaking brokenly about cold water and the swelling sky.

  My prayers alerted a baby crow: he captured it between his long, jagged primaries.

  “O sad little, sensitive, unappreciative, Pisces, Jesus man,” he squawked, and started when the sun punched the sky and he saw the wet earth roil with “Like, a million worms!”

  I HUNG FLY strips like wallpaper, and rescued each bug.

  “I free you in the name of love,” I sermonized, stroking their bottle-green wings; their drooping antennae.

  Some got a bit mutilated.

  “Oh, that’s life, kids,” I said.

  “Fly through the pain,” I said as the others bumbled away, many falling, many riding high and free.

  I DREAMED OF the Star of the Sea, powdering her face with crushed pearls.

  With long hair like a white tang’s fins, and tremendous plankton-coloured eyes.

  She is zipped into a skin-tight shagreen dress, smoking, and raking her long, emerald-painted nails through her ratted hair.

  “You can save him,” she said. “If you stop him from doing it again, if he makes it to twenty-eight.”

  “I tried so hard,” she said. Her voice is sad and cold at the same time. “And you’re just some kid.”

  I didn’t know what she was talking about, and when my mother yelled, “I smell something burning!” I was afraid.

  She got up, and lightly touched my cheek.

  “Save the fucker,” she said.

  Then she tore her dress away, revealing her sleek forked tail, and swam away, her claret-coloured mouth gaping, on a current of smoke and black belladonna.

  I REPLACED THE Vicodins with Flintstones chewable vitamins, which my mother would be too drunk to notice.

  I planned to check out imminently, which made me impervious to everything. The day I bought the dope, one of Sophie’s friends hit me with a nail-studded bat in the hallway, and I laughed.

  “A pink deadly weapon?”

  The blood dripped on my pop quiz, “Drawing from the food rations on the Beagle and the Pinta, compose a single-pot recipe not using or mentioning raisons,” as I wrote an urgent sympathy letter to the old man teaching us.

  SOMEONE HIT ME with their car that day on the way home from school.

  I struggled to my feet, and got hit again.

  I went upstairs, wrote and shredded a new letter, sat on a pillow, and used a razor to make a big clean line with what was left of the smack.

  When it hit me, I was making a collect call with a tin can tethered to string.

  When he said, “Yes, I accept the charges,” I decided to leave.

  I crammed the bagged poster in my pocket, where it lit up the keys and change and tiny T. Rex rolling around in there.

  LATER, HE WOULD tell me about how Jim Carroll, towards the end of his life, left his young girlfriend, explaining, “You could do better.”

  I knew that, from Britney. And loved the thought of such agonized gallantry.

  “No offence,” I told my books and pictures; my few, radiant things, and my banged-up, beautiful cat.

  “But I can do better. And I’ll be back.

  “Come find me,” I said, then balled the Vicodins in tissue and stuffed them into the sombrero of Señor Loco, my old stuffed rat.

  He has a handlebar moustache and pinwheel eyes.

  “Buen viaje!” he says, waving a checked kerchief.

  FOUR

  GOOFBALLS

  There is a door that leads to a dark corridor, lit up at its end with a white fireball.

  You want to walk towards it so badly, discarding yourself like wet, dirty clothes you wore to a dance.

  A dance that climaxed in someone pouring a bucket of pig’s blood all over you.

  I COULD SEE and hear everything, even though I was called “the coma girl in 786.”

  Eventually, I realized that with some people I didn’t need to open my eyes to see; that I could talk with my mouth closed.

  Mrs. Milton, the volunteer, heard me tell her to leave whoever was leaving finger bruises on her wrists, and Sian, the orderly, backed away when I told him I’d cut it off if he ever showed it to me again.

  AND WHEN THE nurse pulled the curtains, I could see the pale, bark-brown-haired man in the bed beside me, who someone had dressed in a Celine Dion T-shirt and plaid pyjama pants.

  He smiled conspiratorially at me, then spoke in small sighs about music and art and carving lines into his arm from his wrist to his elbow.

  “It’s my birthday,” he said.

  Snow appeared over his bed, and fell in little gusts.

  I noticed his roots were yellow; that underneath his murky greenish eyes there were flashes of bright blue, like leaping dart frogs.

  I called him Sadness, and he called me Mercy.

  “I want to wake up,” he said. “But I keep seeing this place. I know I have to go there.”

  I told him about the door, and that I was going too.

  My mother grabbed an orderly and told him to listen: “I don’t hear nothing,” he said.

  When she adjusted the blinds, the room was filled with sparkling bits of dust that had been there the whole time.

  SADNESS SAID HE had no idea where he was, before he came to this place.

  “I remember cooking a shot,” he said. “And then I heard the room explode.”

  His hair was stuffed into a knit hat and he wore huge white oval glasses.

  I wanted to say how much he looked like Kurt Cobain. Instead, I read, ostentatiously, the copy of Heavier Than Heaven that I had asked my mother to bring me.

  I caught him frowning at the cover.

  “Shut up,” he said, then turned on his side and played “Bone Machine” on his blue Mustang
.

  “DO YOU STILL want to die?”

  “Um,” I said, looking at the planes of his face and the graceful length of his light, luminous skin.

  “No,” I said. He didn’t seem to know I intended to chase him around like a hornet.

  “Good,” he said, rubbing the raised bites on his neck.

  OUR ILLNESS WAS the vector that carried our thoughts back and forth.

  “I just wanted to play music,” he would think, and see a million people with locust heads, swarming.

  I remembered the day someone threw an apple at my head in the cafeteria, and how I pretended not to notice, as I burned with embarrassment and pain.

  He sent back an image of a head bending backwards, then flying apart.

  WE TALKED FOR days that stretched into weeks.

  He told me that he had lived under a bridge once. That he was pretty sure he was a fish, and could remember this one lopsided rock he liked to swim around, passing dirty water through his gills.

  I told him about the day my father left, but only the part where I skipped school, hitchhiked to Camlann Medieval Village, and watched a puppet show about Saint Michael and all of the angels.

  Right in the middle of the performance, this one angel said, “It’s glorious here and everything, but I wish I hadn’t done so much fucking zoom.”

  The little velvet curtain was quickly drawn and loud lute music was piped across the village.

  “I know how he feels,” he said.

  “My cat ate a goldfish once,” I said, and he didn’t talk for a while.

  “You really are young,” he said finally, and disappeared inside himself.

  I had wanted to tell him that it was the same day.

  That my dad left the fish in a plastic bag on my bureau; that he wrote “I love you,” on the bag that Flip tore up and dragged under the bed.

  That the fired puppeteer, an ex-con, gave me a lift home in his old Dodge Dart and that he played “Radar Love” while drumming on the dashboard.

  He heard me playing the song in my head, and smiled.

  I knew he was teasing me, but I smiled back, and I smiled that fall day too, with Rory the criminal tapping out the melody with his big broken hand.