Where Did You Sleep Last Night

by Lynn Crosbie

  He couldn’t raise his head: his tears soaked the Eating for Life! pamphlet we collected at the door.

  “I know that feeling,” I said. “But with drugs, more.”

  He looked at me with naked contempt. “Drugs?”

  “Yeah, drugs. What fucking difference does it make, we’re all hooked on the same thing.”

  They all got up and started hopping around in an outrage.

  “I may be plump, but I’m not some junkie hog!” one woman, in a flowered romper, said.

  “Hog?”

  The group leader stepped in and said, “Charmelle, that is not appropriate.

  “And Evelyn, please remove your hands from her neck.”

  We all sat there, breathing heavily from all the excitement.

  “We just want to feel full,” I said. “Full of love, full of forgetting.

  “That’s what I want,” I said.

  “Oh, you’re that girl whose baby died!” one of them said, and I grabbed my stuff and left.

  Tomorrow, I would stop pushing the empty stroller with the swaddled doll in it, I swore.

  Singing as I walked the cold, dead streets: “We’ll be together soon, wait for me, wait for me.”

  “That’s precious,” an old lady said, and I wanted to knock her down and kneel on her and make her listen.

  Her. Anybody.

  MY MOTHER MOVED to Alaska with her new boyfriend, Mick.

  I had gotten an email, wantonly misspelled, about all of our stuff gone to the dump, and fresh starts, and Mick’s sexy ass, and P.S. The cat is dead, sorry.

  I called her and managed to catch her as she was getting on the plane.

  “Mom, why didn’t you save my stuff?”

  “Oh, that old crap, please! I’m finally happy, don’t ruin this for me, please.”

  She put Mick on the phone.

  “Talk to your mother with respect,” he said.

  I counted to ten, and asked to speak to her again.

  “What happened to Flip?”

  “He, ah, it’s hard to explain —”

  Mick grabbed the phone again: “We got to get off the phone. I kicked the fucking cat when it scratched me, and I guess I kicked it pretty hard. It didn’t get up.

  “Ever,” he said, and laughed

  I heard my mom laugh nervously and say, “Mick!” as I hung up.

  I flew home and took a taxi to the old house, which was trashed.

  I got to my room and all that was left was my stripped bed. I followed a thin line of dried blood to my poor cat’s body, and wrapped him in my sweater.

  I brushed a little cloud of fur from his mane, buried him in the yard, and asked him to forgive me.

  “I never should have left you,” I said, and kissed the ground, as I had kissed his battered face and broken bones; I kissed the shivery grass and walked away.

  Then burned the house to the ground.

  That night, I dreamed of an unusually cold winter; of raccoons standing at the door with small valises, removing their caps and asking if I might offer them lodging.

  HE FOUND OUT that I had come back and called.

  I told him what happened, and he said he was sorry.

  I put Flip’s fur in a locket that I had squeezed all night as I listened to Bambi Lee Savage and cried for the only true friend I had.

  I could barely hear him over some girl’s squealing.

  I didn’t ask who it was.

  Or why his voice sounded like melted cheese, or what “No, just look at it” meant.

  “Call me soon?” I said, and he promised that he would.

  “I’m really sorry about Farley,” he said, and the girl said, “Farley?” and he said, “Shh,” and the phone landed on the floor with a thump and I heard everything then nothing but a shrill series of beeps.

  MY TINY FRIEND was gone, my bedroom.

  I knew that there was a place where a desolate girl was sitting with her things, and crying.

  Burying her hands deep in soft black fur and pounding her head against a clean white space on the wall, percussing the eminent opening of “Be My Baby.”

  I STARTED WALKING in the mornings, and put myself on a strict diet of little sugar donuts, Red Bull, and cigarettes.

  I stopped sleeping. All night, I wrote lists of places he might be and tried to call him.

  “Hello?” he would say. And when I poured out his name he would say, “No one’s here.”

  “PLEASE SPEAK TO me,” I said, feeling my mascara spraying my face like squid ink.

  “I’ll send you something,” he said.

  I had dressed up to talk to him: makeup, updo; a long paisley dress.

  I stepped out of the dress and fitted slip, the support hosiery and shell, and tore the pins from my hair. They scattered on the floor as I shrugged on my balding pink chenille robe and grabbed my laptop, opening it across my knees as I lay back in bed.

  In the huge dent that its foam remembered.

  He had sent me a video.

  I am naked, except for a pink scarf and mules; my hair is combed and set into stiff helices.

  “He was stoned and he pushed me,” I am saying.

  “He was mad, but he didn’t mean to hurt me, to hurt us. Please don’t tell anyone, okay?”

  The camera pulls back: I am talking to a dark room, filled with hundreds of people, all of whom are gazing at me with love and concern.

  I stumble a bit — they can’t possibly know that I am stoned, or that I drank and chipped when I was pregnant, in moderation, of course.

  “‘In Moderation,’” I say, and stamp on the pedal. “This is for our son:

  Raspberry cordial and kosher salt, to taste

  My immoderate boy,

  Who brings the dead things back to life

  climbs the mountain and sharpens his knife,

  The blue-skinned baby in the sky:

  I never got to hear you cry, I never got to hear you cry.

  Someone yells, “You killed him,” and the girl in the movie looks up with feral eyes, then crouches.

  Before she leaps, you can see her mouth moving involuntarily, saying, “YES.”

  THE EMAIL SUBJECT heading was YOU NEVER TELL ON SOMEONE.

  In the body of the letter, he wrote that I had crushed him, once again. That he still loved me, and that he even understood I was probably just stoned when I blamed him.

  But he felt like moving forward, he said.

  “You’ll catch up to me, I’m sure of it.”

  THIRTY

  YOU ALWAYS KNEW JUST HOW TO MAKE ME CRY

  It was okay.

  I kept the mirrors covered, and the lights low. I was starting to fade.

  If I needed to see him, he was on TV, or in a magazine. There was a new single called “Rat Fink.”

  I piled his clothes in a shape like him and slept with them. On the bad nights, the baby clothes lay between us.

  One time, I called and Mercury answered. “He gave me this phone,” he said.

  I asked for his new number and he said, “There is none.”

  He hung up and I was frightened. What did he mean?

  I heard his voice in my sleep and woke up crying. I had dreamed of one of the good times, when he loved me. We were going to bed. He smelled like sleep and cigarettes. I kissed his neck rapaciously and he crawled in under the covers after me when I said, “Don’t leave.”

  “I’ll never leave you,” he said, and my heart, belted with thorns, burst into flame.

  “THE USUAL?” OPAL said.

  I had found one of our old dealers’ names in a change purse, after a day of tearing the place apart.

  “Triple it,” I said.

  He even agreed to bring cigarettes, saltines, and ginger beer.

  I turned the
lights low, and wore his hooded black robe, some makeup.

  “Oh fuck,” Opal said when he saw me. “Sorry.”

  “I have cancer,” I said, and he narrowed his eyes.

  Oh yeah, cancer people get really skinny.

  “Where’s Celine?” he said, looking around, excited. “Man is huge. I just got the new record, went out and bought that shit.”

  “He’s sleeping,” I said, and he lingered, hoping, I guess, that he’d wake up and sign the CD visible in the pocket of his grotesque satin baseball jacket.

  “I haven’t used in a while,” I said.

  He loaded a syringe for me, and warned me that it was strong.

  I teased out my blood and apologized, silently, for its obvious fright.

  Plunged and found myself with my elbows on the bar of a saloon, making time with a golden-haired man, who nods at the red, velvet-lined stairs.

  “Will you make love with me?” I said, and Opal pushed me, hard.

  He was watching Celine on TV, telling David Letterman that he was married.

  “But it’s complicated,” he said, to pandemonium.

  Letterman played a clip of Il Delicioso skipping rope under the tutelage of a smitten German trainer as they went to commercial.

  I knew that he was also high, and I tried to get into his thoughts.

  I couldn’t do it anymore.

  “And stay out,” he said, as he stared at the ceiling.

  Opal left in a hurry, and handed me a bunch of numbers. “These Asian kids, man. They’re like an armada out there.”

  “Thank you,” I say, from the saddle of my white filly. “I shall develop a formidable Rolodex.”

  My father had one of those. Old even then. I peeked at it once, and it was just filled with words, like Misery, Pain, and Emptiness.

  I searched for him on Twitter and there he was, wearing a sheriff’s badge and walking into Angel’s Share with a showgirl, a pop star, and the sexiest little person I have ever seen.

  The tweet said “OMFG Celine Black on the loose!”

  I looked at my own account.

  The things that people say!

  I recite my mantra, don’t cry don’t cry, and Sacagawea slaps the computer shut then leads me across roiling water and through treacherous woods until we reach the raft.

  “Will you stay?” I say, as the alligators start to circle.

  She shakes her head.

  “You’re on your own,” she says, at the instant that sleep appears and punches how stoned I am in the face.

  THIRTY-ONE

  WHEN IT’S GOOD FOR YOU, BABE

  I used to open the door and have to poke around to find his face among the white peonies, the blue hydrangeas, and the stargazer lilies, bound with straw, or yarn, or wide satin ribbon.

  He sent me lotus flowers in a goldfish bowl; tulips in every colour, in a wooden crate; orchids in a set of matching china bowls with raised gold hearts.

  I couldn’t think of a time he didn’t arrive without, at the very least, a small corsage — white roses with baby’s breath — in his pocket, or in a box filled with grass and baby snails.

  I couldn’t, once.

  I sent him flowers then.

  Misty broke down and thanked me, invited me to come see them at the cottage.

  “He’s touring,” he said.

  He had been, I knew. But now he was in Seattle, with three hit songs; The Lady Grace, Unplugged record was out and had been deemed, by a normally eloquent reviewer, “Animal print pants outta control.”

  Pictures of him appeared daily, walking in Puget Sound or under the iron pergola in Chinatown, looking miserable.

  But not for me.

  His PR witches had seen to it that I was regarded as a drunken, stumbling bitch who tried to ruin him.

  He never denied it.

  I poured fifteen OCs in a bowl, and had breakfast in bed. Xiang was coming by later. I would give her half of the money I had left.

  Something would come through.

  I pulled up my YouTube favourites and watched Neil and Barbra sing to each other, and held his clothes and said the words with them, “I remember when you used to hate to leave me.”

  Xiang tossed me a tinfoil chunk, and scooped up the cash and my ruby earrings.

  I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t because she had a gun pointed at my head.

  Her friends moved through the house, grabbing what they liked.

  She looked pretty in the earrings, I noticed, through a typhoon of tears.

  THIRTY-TWO

  GODDAMN BUT I LOVE HER ANYWAY / CELINE

  Mercury was one of my only real friends. He was torn up when he showed me that video.

  “She’s beneath you,” he said. “Everyone knows it.

  “Smoking hot, but beneath you.”

  Beneath me.

  She sang like a white-winged dove being fed to a lathe.

  Her words and mine played Mortal Kombat, and she usually handed me my spine at the end.

  I had seen some of the things she had written about me, where I came across like a chiselled Apollo, and the best of a hundred movie stars.

  But she was the beautiful one — she looked like Snow White but with bigger, shining violet eyes; with darker, honey-coloured skin; with longer, thicker hair: a cataract of blue-black that fluttered and hummed over her prolific curves.

  She was tall and slender, with a celestial nose and lips like swells rising from a roiling sea; her lashes were thick and jet-black, eyebrows arched and perfectly defined wings, and her body —

  I spent half my days pleading with her to wear a baggy sweater, or just some baggy pants, not because I was jealous, which I was, but because I was sick of walking around with my hands balled into fists as men just stood there screaming, like Francis Bacon’s vision of Pope Innocent X.

  Screaming like the destroyed creatures in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, screaming and crashing their cars and three times leaping from windows.

  Absurdly nearsighted, she would wear only contact lenses, if she remembered, never glasses after the evil Carnation girls — as part of their repertoire of cruelty — called her Arsenio.

  “Arsenio?” I said, incredulous. “That makes no sense.”

  “It does. It’s someone who wears glasses who they don’t like.”

  Those girls traumatized her so much, she barely knew that she had all this power; that she was so preposterously beautiful.

  And I never got to watch Living in America, Black Dynamite, or him as “Crying Man” in Harlem Nights.

  Bitches!

  THE NIGHT OUR band signed with Universal, I asked her to have dinner, to celebrate.

  She arrived late and hurried to me, whispering, “I tried to look pretty for you tonight.” She descended on me for a kiss in a flurry of white crepe de Chine, red rosebud georgette, and high, high shoes, hand-painted with the Venice Beach boardwalk.

  Arriving at the Oak Room amidst men catcalling, then bluntly yelling and blustering until the maitre d’ spun the windows open and the room filled with cool air, a helix of fireflies, a single white owl.

  SHE KNOCKED ME out the way she always did, with her farouche smile, and asked if we could split the crispy griddle cakes with strawberry syrup and whipped mascarpone, and some tomato and fennel soup.

  She looked cautiously all around her, at all of the men panting and deflecting pocketbook blows from their wives, which pinpricked their madness, and suddenly it was dead quiet and the pianist hurried to play our “Moonlight Serenade,” the song that was on the radio the first night, the night she cried with pain, then knowledge, and elation.

  Even when she was in ruins, even then, she was just the prettiest girl, and why she loved me was a mystery I never wanted to solve.

  When the waiter said, “And may I tell yo
u that you are looking especially lovely tonight, Mrs. Black?” I buried my head in my folded arms and cried.

  She took me home and undressed me; still in her fancy clothes, she washed my face and tucked me into bed and held me as I puled myself to sleep.

  ONE NIGHT, I dreamed of a luau that she and I were reluctantly attending. Someone was stuffing a crabapple into our baby’s mouth. We stopped them with arrows and feasted on their flesh, and Damian coughed up the poison apple and rode with us on the foamy backs of wild horses, his arms raised like a tiny Apache.

  I STOPPED SLEEPING.

  Early in the morning, I watched Higanjima: Escape from Vampire Island, and shook off the old memories like a bird ruffling its feathers.

  James was seeing a girl he liked in Seattle. I had him check in on Evelyn, and he, sounding cold, said, “She’s overweight and alone. She cries all the time.”

  I never cared about her weight: my anger made me push her away.

  He knocked on the door, but she wouldn’t let him in.

  “She told me through the keyhole that she didn’t want me to see her like this,” he said.

  “Anyways, keep having fun with all those sexy girls.”

  “Don’t make me feel fucking guilty. Did you see that video?”

  “Did you?” he said.

  I watched it again, focusing on her eyes — on how wet and cracked they were, how infinitely sad.

  My heart was beating so fast: I had not stopped running.

  I was chasing a little boy and I could not catch him.

  I just wanted him to call me his father, just once.

  Then I could let go.

  “Help me let go,” I said when I came home.

  She opened her arms and held and rocked me. I felt my cruelty start to erode into powder.

  I gathered it in my hands and blew it away.

  “I promise to change,” I said, and she said, “I will too.”

  “Why?” I said, solemnizing our love the way we liked: when we were sick or sad or starting again, we bathed each other, and this was the purest and the best we would ever feel, and the most innocent.