Where Did You Sleep Last Night

by Lynn Crosbie

  I cleaned myself with the sheet, leaving a sticky, guava-coloured mess.

  My mouth was open, but I couldn’t speak.

  He skin-popped my hands and feet with Demerol and the ache receded as he wrapped himself around me like an anaconda and we slid into the slippery darkness.

  I DREAMED OF the girl whose eyes looked like his.

  She was tiny, and froggy-looking: a newborn. He was holding her, carefully, and then he was gone. All I could see was his shoe, as he lay somewhere unfamiliar; all I could hear was crying.

  Page woke me up by handing me a dish of smack, a needle, and a precooked spoon.

  “In case you feel as messed up as I do,” he said, pulling a shirt over his back, which was clawed apart.

  I assessed my own damage, which, after shooting up, didn’t look too bad.

  “Like Les Nymphéas,” I said, standing up and walking towards him.

  I walked down the hall, naked and bumping into other water lilies, towards my room.

  I was on a plane in an hour.

  When I saw all the texts, I took the phone apart with tweezers, and kept the tiny alphabet to spell “I’m sorry,” on the drink tray.

  “I’M NOT GOING to tell him anything,” I told the flight attendant, Sheree.

  “They never understand, do they?” she said, smoothing her perfectly arched eyebrows with her fingertip.

  NINE

  HERE IT IS

  BLEACH SET LIST: Here It Is, Where Did You Sleep Last Night, Black Branch, Vagismus, The Song You Made Us Play, The Field, Defect, Not What You Wanted, Chunk, Shoot, 102 Floors.

  NINE OF THESE songs appear on The Space Between, which was released like a sci-fi virus.

  It reached number one within a week and wouldn’t budge, and even though he kept the lowest-possible profile, his gelid blue eyes stared out at me, at everything, and everywhere.

  His management was careful to shut down all the conspiracy theory sites, and bald-faced comparisons to Kurt Cobain. They released only this biography: “Celine Gray was born in 1987, in Eugene, Oregon.”

  Back in Venice, he had found a copy of Cobain’s journals in my bag, and looked through it, ashen.

  He threw it at me and stormed out. I would never let him see anything again, if I could help it.

  I bailed him out of jail that night. One eye black and the other shining like a dare.

  “Little girl,” he said, and when I went to him, he pushed me away.

  MISTY REAPPEARED: HE had written him and asked him to be their roadie.

  He was tougher than he looked. When someone took a swing at him in a mosh pit at a roughneck bar in Austin, Misty pulled him out, then turned to his assailant and broke his arm.

  They were gathering an entourage, which included bodyguards, hangers-on, groupies, and dealers.

  One night, a girl called me from his phone and said, “He’s leaving you for me!”

  Then I heard Misty deal with her.

  He picked up the phone and said, “I am truly sorry you had to hear that, miss.”

  He said this over the sounds of an approaching ambulance.

  I knew it was wrong, but his loyalty made me happy and I told him he was like family and he started crying.

  “Misty’s an orphan,” he said, finally getting on the phone. “And don’t worry about these girls. They’re just dumb cunts.

  “What’s the square root of nine?” he asked someone, and a girl answered, “A threesome?”

  “Okay, she’s pretty smart,” he said. “But the others —”

  I pretended to be outraged and he said, “No matter who I look at, I only see you.”

  “It’s true,” I heard Misty say.

  I felt so warm, like I had a fever and was bundled up in bed and my dad was bringing me sugary tea and Fig Newtons.

  I fell asleep without breaking the connection.

  Hours later, I woke up to him playing his acoustic and singing “Only Love Can Break Your Heart.”

  He sang me back to sleep.

  HE STARTED LETTING Mercury do all the interviews, and declined any more photo shoots.

  Mercury was smooth. On the constant comparisons, he said, “We love Nirvana, but we’re over them. If anything, we’re like The Libertines on steroids.”

  Against the band’s wishes, he declined to do any appearances either.

  He told a talk show host that no one ever wants to talk about anything important, or even relevant.

  “Like what music we like, even. People just want to know what we’re wearing.”

  “What is it you’re wearing?” the host asked.

  He was dressed as a giant bumblebee.

  I MET HIM at the Sea-Tac Airport, holding a paper cone of daisies. I jumped on him, and wrapped my legs around his back.

  We had one night before we hit the road again. We sped to the motel and caved in the bed. On the way, he took my hand and stuck it in his pants. I pulled out a string of black pearls.

  I wore them to bed. If he noticed I was bruised, that I was still hurting, he was undeterred. We hung on to each other all night, making promises we couldn’t keep and covering each other’s bodies with hot, messy petitions and scars.

  I kept seeing Page’s hands, raised over his head victoriously as he fucked me.

  “I have to tell you something,” I said as the sun started wobbling towards us.

  He waited and I lost my nerve. I told him that daddy-long-legs contain enough venom to kill a person but their jaws are too tiny to bite one.

  “Do you think that our bodies ever betray our minds?” I asked him hesitantly, but he was sleeping.

  He was facing me, sherbet-pink and sweet. I went to the bathroom, cleaned myself with a wire brush, and forgot everything but this.

  I was fatally in love.

  WHEN HE AND I were together, we were inviolate.

  But when he left me, I would become convinced he was with someone else, and grow angry.

  I would brood over the girls who called and texted him; over one particular dealer — a lanky Asian girl with short, buttery blond hair — and the exploding fuck-me girl.

  He still wouldn’t use computers and cellphones, or he would send a bunch of texts then microwave the phone.

  When I got mad, he said, “I’m just scared of robots.”

  He went on a tour of the east coast, and I pined for him and seethed. I felt guilty, too: What had I done?

  I wasn’t sure. I was mainlining more frequently. Thoughts tried to stand up in my head and then slumped down; when I tried to recall most things, they exploded in slow Atari-motion.

  Because he called so infrequently, I acted cool, and called even less, although I know he found it hard being away from me, and harder to reach out.

  I wanted to tell him about that night with Page, but even that memory had dulled and what remained of it made no sense.

  When Page called, I blocked his number. I knew that I could never see him again.

  I started making lists again, and writing songs.

  I wrote about the spider, gallantly high-stepping towards its prey; about Godzilla-babies, stamping on post offices and boutique hotels and hurling massive blocks. About a girl bound up and busting nuts and the same girl in the hospital, foaling a kicking-mad mustang.

  I wanted to get my music together. It had been a year and two months since we left the hospital and everything was bursting into flower.

  It was spring.

  WHEN BLEACH, TO his shock, won the Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album, he was backstage, smoking Mexican mud with a former Solid Gold Dancer.

  James and Mercury were effusive; he just stood there.

  “Baby?” he said. “This is stupid, but it’s for you.”

  The girls in the back screamed like the frog I saw on YouTube
being pawed by a big white cat.

  I was in the audience, sound asleep.

  James’s stout mother elbowed me awake and I clapped at them as they were played off stage.

  Q TOLD ME that we were gathering more heat every day, and asked if I was sick of being Mrs. Black.

  I wasn’t, but I did want to shine out on my own.

  I called him on one of the hundred disposable cells I had delivered to Mexico City.

  “Dejanos en paz!” the woman who answered said, and hung up.

  I wrote him about a Spanish woman’s hands being bound with a white lace mantilla; I wrote, “I love you,” and for some reason it scared me.

  Q SET UP a two-week North American tour and an interview with a slick magazine, but just with me.

  I promised the girls that I would talk about all of us, and our master plan.

  “Which is?” Sasha said.

  “To make boys scream.”

  This never happened, not even when I stripped.

  The writer and photographer were supposed to come to our new place in Seattle in a few weeks.

  I had bought the little house myself and decorated it.

  I found a white iron bed and hooked crosses to its bars; I filled jars with star-gazer lilies. Then bought an immaculate white chenille blanket that spilled onto the plank floor.

  I hung up his corduroy coat and stacked his T-shirts, records, books, and toys in the cupboard.

  The place would look nice for three days, maybe less. I added jars of peonies and sunflowers, and took pictures.

  How is it that before he got here, he managed to leave a note on the pillow beside me one night that said, “You are breathing little buttercups.”

  HE FLEW HOME, and between long bouts in bed he drove me to rehearsals and came to our shows, wearing disguises. My favourite was the Edwardian lady, whose ruffled skirt dragged as he walked, demurely, to the stage to throw his handkerchief at me.

  HIS BAND JOINED him, and they opened for us, as a surprise, at the Showbox.

  He saw Misty, standing in the back of the crowd drinking bottled water, and waved him backstage.

  Misty smiled and stayed put. “I want to see you guys,” he said. At the top of his lungs.

  When Bleach appeared on the stage and dove into “Here It Is,” everyone went mental.

  Later, we all went to Mercury’s hotel room at the Sorrento, with Misty, their even-bigger entourage, and a street performer who sang Deep Purple songs and played a Pianosaurus.

  Word got out about the party: Lafayette were playing the Crocodile the next night, and Page showed up with Chantel Jeffries, a keg, and a candy store of drugs.

  I pulled Page aside and asked if he was following me.

  “You’re so conceited,” he said, as ten complete strangers barged in wearing foam hawk heads.

  I avoided Page and talked to Mercury — he looked like Brian Jones, but less posh. And he talked so eloquently about love, my hand flew to my throat.

  But when I asked why his girlfriend — who was across the room talking about spray tans — was so dumb, he got mad and started talking to one of the hawks about the Mariners’ chances that year.

  “Iwakuma’s got the cheese,” the kid said, and I wished, fleetingly, that Mercury was still telling me things like, “Being in love is like breathing underwater.”

  “That’s us. Two zippy little fish,” he said, leaning across the bar to kiss me as someone started shouting that Young Gunz song.

  Then he smiled and I remembered that he was all that I needed.

  WE STAYED AT Mercury’s demolished hotel room.

  Almost everyone had left.

  He sat in a chair, nodding — he had picked a fight with Page, who ended it by making a circle of dope, handing him a rolled-up bill, and taking off.

  I sat at his feet and took a bunch of Ambien: seeing Page again had brought back bits and pieces of Berlin, and I wanted to sleep and forget.

  Mercury sat across from us with James and Misty, saying nothing.

  I got up and went to the bathroom. The door opened.

  I woke up in the hospital.

  THE FOUR OF them were there when I opened my eyes. Mercury was apoplectic.

  “I heard the door slam and you were gone. We all went looking for you and my car was gone.

  “You fucking crashed it. It’s totalled.”

  He sat on the bed and held my hand. “My poor girl.”

  “You have third-degree burns, contusions, and broken ribs,” the stern Hindi doctor told me — “a reaction to the sleeping pills.”

  He had found the bottle and turned it over to the EMTs; he spent the night sleeping beside me, and I watched their rehearsals while I healed.

  The doctor said, “Lay off the rough sex,” and frowned at us both.

  “What did he mean?” he said.

  I wanted to tell him, but I was scared. So I lied.

  “I have a UTI,” I said. “From us going a bit too far sometimes.”

  I watched his eyes go blank; heard the syringe hit the floor.

  “I woke up and you were gone. Where did you sleep last night?” he said, and, staggering to my side, he introduced me to Mr. Vanderbilt, an invisible bon vivant who apparently was “gasping for some champers.”

  HE AND I both forgot everything.

  Except in dreams.

  He would toss and turn and clench his fists. He would say, “Leave her alone!” or “No, no, it can’t be true.”

  I would see him, opening the bathroom door; see his familiar-but-changed face.

  See the gun, hear him say, “I left the car out front. Run to it, and wait for me.”

  His voice got so low, he sounded underwater —

  I am slamming the door and running. I see the car and dart away from it, but he, racing out of the hotel, grabs and lifts me as low-hanging planets collide; as he pulls me by my hair into the front seat and elbows me unconscious.

  It is near dawn: the sky polishes the moon and sets it in a velvet box, stands and exposes the peach lining of its black dressing gown, and he is hitting me to show the retreat of the stars, and burning me so I can feel the power of the sun’s tumescence.

  He says appalling things to me, but they are the heart of “Nessun dorma” compared to what he does next.

  “But I know you,” I say, like an idiot, and before he loses himself completely, he says, “You do, and if you tell, I’ll kill you.”

  HE SAYS THIS and sodomizes me in the dirt behind a gas station as I stare at a rat in a trap, still crying; as I stare, the pills finally kick in and I pass out. When I woke up, every morning, the dream would be there, quivering and exposed.

  I would make instant coffee with hot water from the tap, cook my morning shot, and close my eyes.

  I would play Centipede with the dream, with what I knew.

  Centipede is an old video game I like, where you just roll a ball to move and fire, with a single button, at falling insects and mushrooms.

  The ammo is limitless.

  I was so good at it, I could clear every screen.

  One time, my screaming woke him up and, confused, I crawled away from him, pleading, “Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me.”

  He stared at me and I thought quickly.

  “I dreamed that I met Jigsaw. He made me play mahjong, and it made no sense!”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” he said as he arranged my body into his like we were side-by-side horseshoes, and lightly spurred me to sleep.

  WHILE HE TOURED the east coast and the UK, I read about trauma and Unit 731, sexual coercion and rape, and Flowers in the Attic.

  I made prussic acid and tried to figure out how to syringe it into my brain.

  The scientist I called at Seattle U was no help.

  He went days without calling.
And when he did call, all I did was cry.

  “Get some help,” he snapped, after I had room service bring him my phone number and the word PLEASE written with green beans on a platter.

  “Or tell me what the fuck happened.”

  I felt his mouth in my ear; heard the admonishment — “Don’t ever tell him” — as a knife cut a strand of blood across my neck.

  I put the phone down and stared at it, biting my nails to the beds.

  He had hung up at some point. I knew because it was morning, and birds were killing themselves by battering at the window; because the kind of ache I had felt better the second I did up a long line.

  Not my heart, though, I thought as I raked up stiff birds.

  Falling to my knees when I saw the black baby, kicking its mother to wake her, then falling over dead of heartbreak.

  FINALLY, JENNA AND Sasha came to town and coaxed me out.

  I had been sleeping for days, having such terrible dreams that I often woke up underneath the bed, paralyzed with fear.

  We got stoned, and decided to go to a fancy spa.

  Jenna went for a French manicure, while Sasha and I chose the massage-and-wax.

  We lay side by side as two white-gowned women with coiled braids placed hot rocks on our bodies.

  I was so loose, I wanted to tell her everything.

  But I couldn’t really remember.

  “I think I fucked Page,” I said. “And someone else —”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “Yes. No. I’m not sure,” I said, feeling tears pool inside my ears.

  “You know what? Whatever happened, happened. Just forget it,” she said, closing her eyes and drifting off.

  I already had. I was lost in the eyes of my masseuse, who had rolled me over and covered me in warm, drippy wax.

  “The full Hollywood hurts,” she said as she ripped off a strip and I whimpered.

  “That was the worst of it,” she said.

  She was right and she was wrong.

  DRUGS AND SHEER will eventually pummelled my memories into submission.

  Still, I would often wonder what Jenna would have said if I told her everything.

  What she would have done.

  Anyways, he beat her to it.