Where Did You Sleep Last Night

by Lynn Crosbie

  HE OCCASIONALLY THOUGHT about sex and I tried to kiss him, but he swatted me away.

  “I feel like you have braces,” he said out loud.

  “I’m eighteen!” I said, and he smirked.

  “I am whatever I want to be,” I thought.

  NURSE MANSFIELD WAS tall and slender. She wore her hair in a sharp flip and smartened her uniform with a vivid Pucci scarf.

  She carried a copy of Valley of the Dolls, her Holy Bible — a black leather-bound book embossed with oblong capsules — with her and read to us: “Sometimes She spent day after day in bed . . . lost in soft anonymity, so terrible was Her sorrow, so savoury the cold vodka and burnt-sugary pills.”

  One night she saw us fumbling, helplessly, at unresponsive push-buttons, and refilled the bags, then changed the titration to rapid.

  She continued to alter the amount of drugs we took until the day she was fired, having two blue bodies to account for.

  Our thoughts became balloon animals, swollen and jumpy with everything we wanted to say.

  And what we could never talk about: this is how we were wired to detonate from the start.

  I WAS TELLING him how mean people were to me, and he didn’t understand.

  “I get away with murder,” he said. He looked at me and said, “But I —”

  “But I’m not ugly,” I thought to myself, finishing his sentence.

  “But I never cared what people thought,” he said, and it was a good save, but his first thought drifted through me.

  It coursed through my blood and remained there: a little song about a plot of earth in Rome where Caesar got sliced up; where feral cats still gather, cramming grass and dirt in their mouths as if it were Meow Mix.

  BETWEEN EXTREME ROUNDS of morphine-roulette, on the days Nurse Mansfield was called away, we would watch a soap opera about an obese lothario named Il Delicioso.

  The lead is always lying on his circular waterbed, its various animal-print sheets around his mammoth waist, with two to five beautiful girls in bright-coloured bras and long velveteen hair.

  They are always laughing and feeding each other delicate spoonfuls of ice cream.

  “I like the one depressed girl,” Sadness said, as Il Delicioso suddenly bucked and rolled on top of a blonde in pigtails, who frowned.

  “Look at her eyes,” he said, and I saw that they were staring somewhere past me.

  There was a loud squelching sound: they were rolling in pudding.

  “Las cosas no son lo que parecen,” he said.

  I STOPPED TRYING to kiss him. He kept blowing me off.

  I had to sweeten the offer.

  As requested, Nurse Mansfield brought in a bag of strategically cut-out pantyhose, lingerie, wigs, and baby-doll dresses.

  She left the bag on his bed, and he spent most of his time squirming, and trying not to think about what was inside.

  I caught one of his thoughts, a pale, determined moth. Him, combing his long hair and powdering his nose, in jeans and a silk camisole.

  Someone offered him a quilted bed jacket. I recognized my own hand.

  I baited the hook, and by the time he felt it, I had already caught him.

  MY MOTHER’S VISITS were infrequent.

  “She looks terrible,” she snapped at the day nurse, who was texting so intently that she said, “It’s creamed corn and mango Jell-O today.”

  When she finally took a good look at Sadness, she jumped.

  “What the fuck is going on?” she said as Milk, the muscle on the floor, walked in.

  Milk was okay. He would talk to me about the vines he wanted to buy, and rolling in his ’64 with his duchess.

  “Do you know who that is?” she said, and Milk said, “Just some half-dead crazy person.”

  I know that he meant my mother, who, in her mangy cords, plaid shirt, and trucker’s hat, seemed deranged enough without all the yelling.

  “Do I know her?” Sadness asked, and I said, “Yes and no.”

  Milk guided her away, and he and I travel to the hot-pink surface of Mars and drink from a vein of water running through an Alien’s manicured backyard.

  “Slake your thirst!” the green creature says, as he flips blue patties on a glowing hibachi and rocket ships collide in the cardinal sky.

  “SHOULD EVER I leave you, Principessa,” Il Delicioso says, to his true love, “I shall be waiting on the other side where there is still more joy and laughter.”

  He laughs and rubs his belly.

  “That’s what we need to do,” I said to Sadness. “If one of us goes too far, the other one has to go there too.”

  “I hate joy and laughter,” Sadness said.

  During my illness, my hair had darkened to blue-black, and streamed against the pillow in lustrous waves: I became thin and newly curvacious: my eyes mutated from blue to violet.

  Nurse Mansfield made me over. She shaped my eyebrows, painted my nails, and applied false lashes, one at a time.

  She then tied me into a standard-issue hospital gown she had cut a deep V into, and layered with silver rhinestones.

  He looked me over.

  “Hurry up and get older,” he said.

  Our nurse also worked on him every night with a comb and washcloth until I could see his hair, his eyes: until I could see everything he had willed to be hidden.

  Late one night, when he thought I was sleeping, he said, “It’s almost worth it,” and I felt him move the way a dog shakes off rain, and start to change.

  OUR NURSE GOT us so stoned, we saw another dimension entirely.

  We decided to meet there, and stay indefinitely.

  “Oh, chica sexy, you moisten my loins!” Il Delicioso grunted as we shook on it: before I knew it, he was convulsing.

  I watched him change colour. When he was azure, alarms started sounding and they rushed him out in a tent.

  “Do it,” I told Nurse Mansfield that night, and her white-gloved finger stayed pressed on the push button until I floated above the dying girl, and her flip-flopping dance.

  Before I left, I kissed her.

  FIVE

  HIGHER THAN HELL

  I didn’t turn back, even as my mother rushed into the room wailing as someone blasted “The Power of Love.”

  There was the door. The sensation of weightlessness, then pure joy.

  I opened it, and it clicked shut behind me and disappeared.

  There was no noise at all now, only light.

  Even the angels were just snow falling on more snow; blue-white bottles of milk.

  I walked through the whiteness, leaving no tracks. I found him by the bank of an ivory-white river, playing a guitar that released spores that drifted and turned into cherry trees in flower.

  His hair was sun-coloured; his blue eyes appeared to have broken off into the white subglacial lakes around them.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” he said.

  I mean that he opened his mouth and made a castle of ice.

  THE GOOD THING about where we were was that we could actually touch.

  The bad thing: as our bodies vegetated, terrible decisions were being made about them.

  “Plugs will be pulled!” Sadness said, smiling, but neither of us was sure where we wanted to be in the end.

  WE LAY IN a bed facing each other.

  I saw myself in his eyes, the same but different.

  It is hard to explain what he looked like: it is a bit like the movie Saw.

  I mean the violence seems necessary, but you still have to cover your eyes.

  He said, “You didn’t have to follow me,” and I made myself very small.

  He told me this in a low whisper in a bed made of stargazer lilies: I would have nightmares later.

  For a long time he just had to look at me and I would scream.

 
I loved it.

  HE LOOKED DIFFERENT, more vivid.

  “Yeah,” he said. “We are usually very pale, or missing a finger or a leg, sometimes a tooth.”

  “We?”

  “Um. Pisces,” he said, and clammed up.

  I looked down and saw that my appendectomy scar was gone.

  What else would I lose, if we went back?

  “THIS IS THE space between life and death,” he said, then wrote it on the paper from the clipboard at the foot of his bed.

  “This is the Underworld,” I wrote on mine, in ant tracks.

  He said he thought he would never go back.

  EARTH LOOKS LIKE this, when you are away: a big floating apartment building, where some of the drapes are drawn; others are open; where different things — eggs frying on a hot plate, a home perm, a cello’s sacred lowing — happen all the time.

  We called this building the Lady Grace, and watched it all the time.

  We looked at the window he liked, that was covered in tattered old lace.

  At another, with clean vertical blinds, and another, with the window open and a yellow bubble machine hooked to the curtain rod.

  Then at mine, the blinding, sterile room where a girl lay with her eyes shut and hands jerking. Her mother, in old jeans and a flannel shirt, placed her hand on the girl’s forehead.

  It felt cool, and good.

  “I think we should go,” I said one day, as we watched Flip on the ledge of another window, batting at a gingham mouse.

  “But everything has to change,” I said.

  “Everything already has,” he said, opening my shirt and biting his hand.

  WE TALKED AND read together, underlining lines we liked, or surrounding them with asterisks and tiny notes.

  We narrowed the books down to one favourite each — Eva’s Man and The Miracle of the Rose, but we kept changing our minds.

  I told him that my mother used to love reading but she turned her brain into a tuber.

  “She was always tired, and drunk. And worse, she took a writing class.”

  I told him about the time she had a really cool idea about a murder mystery about a demented killer who savaged men and women with hideous taste in fashion.

  “Brown shoes after 5 p.m.!” read one of the notes, written in the hapless victim’s own blood.

  “Capri pants, period,” read another.

  The teacher, who wrote self-help books he claimed were “in the style of Epictetus,” was ruthless. “Where is the joy?” he would ask, lightly stroking his hard, convex belly.

  After the group read a chapter about the killer’s deep admiration for “true style, which is a combination of grace and the preposterous,” the class ganged up on her, and asked that she be made to leave.

  “I’m just not okay with your violence,” one of them said, and the others joined in, chorally, “Just not okay.”

  My mother was mortified.

  I tried to convince her the book, Fashion Victims, was great, but she brushed me off. “Oh, what the hell do you know?”

  From then on, I would trudge through the great novels as she watched TV, laughing in short, square syllables, or crying.

  “That’s horrible,” he said.

  “I know. I’m still dying to read that book,” I said.

  We ended up writing it ourselves, and hoicking the finished copy into a dark room in the Lady Grace.

  My mother’s old office, denuded of books, the desk piled high with stacks of laundry.

  She sat cross-legged, with her back to us, and read it, finishing as the sun came up.

  And then she kissed it, she kissed every page.

  I thanked him by kissing, then blowing softly on, his fingers. He didn’t stop me.

  “Is my voodoo working?” I said, smiling like our killer does when he passes a very sharp suit or a sleek, well-turned ankle.

  WE CALLED WHERE we were the Plush Dumpster.

  Sometimes Coltrane. Or Camp Blood when we called each other Mr. and Mrs. Voorhees. Or Bliss.

  He gave me guitar lessons in a classroom we made with a lectern, a chalkboard, and one chair.

  The first song he assigned me was “Dirty Knife.”

  I mastered it for my final exam and he took me out for dinner in a swanky place in the desert just beyond us, and we had a candy soufflé and bourbon sours.

  Scorpions covered the ground, so we put our feet up, and watched them scramble around, snapping their pincers, in a black wave.

  “DO YOU KNOW my story?” he asked, when we were drowsing in bed.

  I didn’t want to tell him, so I talked about my mother.

  How she moved back to Seattle in 1988 from San Francisco, where she had been an exotic dancer. She looked so different then, with her long, waving red hair; lambent eyes and smooth mocha skin.

  Typically, she hid pictures of her or her and my dad in a Godiva chocolate box beneath the fancy underwear in her bureau.

  In one shot, he is carrying her, like a child, sleeping in his arms. She has picked his face off and replaced it with a circle of black nail polish.

  She met my father when she was working as a waitress.

  He was a hobby artist and CPA, who made tiny abstract expressionist paintings with an eyelash for a brush, and a bottle-cap palette.

  His painting for me, Love, O Careless Love, is a slash of red against a sea of wavy blue. It is painted over a postage stamp that he used to mail me the letter that says he isn’t coming back.

  HE MOVED TO a rooming house in Portland, and became a falling-down drunk who drew caricatures outside the liquor store for change.

  I found this out through my mother, who recoiled in disgust as she recounted his many late night, weepy calls.

  “What happened?” I asked my mother, and she told me that love dies, and that’s it.

  There is no fixing it when it happens, and it’s no one’s fault, she said.

  He moved to New Jersey and wound up in Ossining prison for stabbing a man over a hooker they were both in love with named Strawberry Quick.

  He died in the exercise yard, lifting weights with his companion, a slight Latin gangster who wore bandanas and short shorts. Among his belongings were a bundle of my letters, a picture of me and my mother, a red spangled garter, and a creased article about Miss Belvedere, a chestnut-coloured Exmoor show pony.

  “How did he fall so fast?” I wondered out loud, remembering how we used to take a walk every night, and how he talked about antimatter and quarks and the poetry of Robert Service.

  “You couldn’t just call him?” the pink-haired lady at the funeral said to my mother, and jabbed her in the chest with her finger.

  “Or let the kid call?” She spat on the floor of the church, and turned on her red-soled shoes, leaving in a rustle of crepe.

  Her heels left a plot of roses. I gathered a posy — “Give all your heart to Little Things.”

  “I LIKE HIS girlfriend,” he said. “So did your mother get upset?”

  “No, she just buried her face in her hands and everyone rushed her with sympathy.”

  “Did she even care?”

  “She did,” I said. I didn’t tell him about finding her lying flat on her face on his grave long after everyone had left.

  About putting her back together again.

  “She met you,” I told him instead. And never went a day without mentioning it.

  “She served you beer on the house,” I said. “She thought you would be famous.”

  He didn’t ask if he was or wasn’t.

  “You gave her a harmonica, after you played something on it,” I said.

  “What?” he asked lazily.

  “‘Maybellene,’” I said. “My dad read her diary about how talented you were and that she had wanted to sleep with you. Then he ripped up a bunch
of pages.”

  “That’s a drag,” he said.

  “Oh Maybellene. Why can’t you be true?” The song starts playing in one of the apartments, and my father, curled on his side on a futon, gets up and pulls the window shut.

  “There’s more. Something about you that she says she can never tell,” I said.

  “What could it be?” he asked indifferently, and set up a game of chess.

  We used My Little Ponies as knights and two pictures of Brian May as the queens.

  “Anyways, she can’t know too much about me. “No one does,” he said.

  I moved my seashell pawn forward and said, “Join the stupid club.”

  EVENTUALLY, I TOLD him that he died young.

  And that I knew all of his music, and a lot of personal things.

  He saw that I was miserable, knowing too much, and held up his hand.

  “This can’t be good for either of us,” he said.

  We were sharing a pearl-inlaid chair and looking down into a row of windows that were always closed and sealed with Mylar.

  “You have the saddest eyes I have ever seen,” I said.

  “Suckhole,” he said.

  I sulked and he said, “I remember that everyone was mad at me.” Then he let me rake his head with my acid-green fingernails. He let me kiss his eyelids, and when he fell asleep, I imagined his eyes under their red shutters.

  I thought of a horror movie where two monstrous sapphires on a bed of white velvet are offered to a lady who shrieks because she has gone blind.

  The girl in the bed sat straight up, then collapsed.

  “Shock,” the nurse called Potemkin informed my mother. The line on the screen made small hills and the occasional tree.

  WHEN HE SANG, I tried to act cool.

  Like it was nothing at all, hearing that voice not chugging through my cheap mini-speakers or being mauled by my mother, singing along.

  That voice, with its sweet twists and swallowed tears; its breaks and rasp and clear, urgent anger: Rain from heaven!

  HE COLLECTED FLASKS and beakers, calorimeters, microscopes, and spectrophotometers that he kept in black suitcases, with slotted inserts.

  “When we retire, I am going full-on scary laboratory,” he said.

  “With an army of hefty feline problem-solvers!”