Where Did You Sleep Last Night

by Lynn Crosbie

  I took her soiled clothes off and took them to the trash; returning to pull her, gently, to the bathtub, which quickly filled with dirt and twigs and snails.

  I cleaned her face, the scales of tears, the red slap marks, her own.

  Everywhere I touched, I changed her.

  She saw herself in my eyes, tiny, and perfect, and afraid.

  “You’re not alive,” she said.

  “I’m not?” I said, squeezing her tight.

  I saw confusion and happiness duel in her face.

  Happiness won: she was all over me, and I was all over her, and some time later we ordered sandwiches and pop, and answered the door, in yellow, chick-fuzzy pyjamas, and tipped the guy with gold doubloons and dropped the bag and kissed and kissed against the jamb — the sun kissed its fists as we flew past and declaimed, “I’m the greatest thing that ever lived!”

  THIRTY-THREE

  THE WORLD IS YOURS

  I WAS BEAUTIFUL to him, but the crazy fat lady was all I could see.

  We lay in bed, and hid from the world.

  Misty came over to see us every night, but most of the time, we turned off the lights and pretended we were out, until we heard the dejected scuffle of his feet on the stairs.

  We were still a bit formal with each other. Then we shared a little bit of my supply, then his, and apologized to each other so quickly and in sync that we were jinxed.

  The relief was so good, like not getting the vinegar but pure, clear water and Jesus saying, “You are so going to Heaven!”

  He saw me, clinging to his clothes; he saw me, holding the baby’s clothes in the rain, asking that they be blessed.

  He heard me playing “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers,” and smiled, and squeezed me.

  All of my pain and loneliness: he felt it, and doubled over.

  We threw out my fat clothes, and called a cleaning service.

  When we got to the cottage, he had filled it with white flowers. My ruby earrings sat on a square of blue silk. “How did you get them back?”

  He closed his eyes. I saw a knife coming down twice.

  HE FOUND ME in the bathtub, wearing the earrings and playing the “Flowers” song.

  “My little schmaltz queen,” he said.

  I sank under the water, and closed my eyes.

  The music, more terrible than “Amor mio, si muero y tu no mueres,” kept bawling like cows in an abattoir.

  WE WERE WARY of sex, and not especially interested.

  We watched TV and cried when a father said, “My dear son,” and laughed when an angry boy said, “Who stole my prom dress?”

  He read me poems from a library book, and called Misty, who was sourcing plum-coloured marble and dragon-shaped chiffoniers, to read him what we liked, usually the envois.

  We were sleepy most of the time, and not so anxious.

  When he left the room, I pulled up the Neil and Barbra video and played it and cried.

  He caught me.

  I WAS DRYING my hair and he sat with me.

  He cleared his throat and read from a piece of lined paper.

  “Evelyn, I will sing you love songs. I will talk to you, every time you come through the door.

  “I can’t wait to love you.

  “I hate to leave you.”

  I discarded the prospect of gross embarrassment: we stood and faced each other.

  My curled hair swept the mandarin collar of my sequined lavender pantsuit.

  His deep blue suit fell away from his immaculate white shirt.

  “You don’t say you need me,” he sang, and I caressed his cheek.

  He kissed my hand. It wasn’t as though I could say he didn’t sing to me.

  “I need you,” I said, in the heat of the lights and bliss, and all of the flowers he brought me and over the petals’ satin faces, all the petals on the bed —

  We talked about forever this way, and it felt so natural.

  He was heating up a spoon, and I was tying us both off with my rose-appliquéd bra straps.

  “You’d think we would learn,” he murmured as the needle retracted, and suddenly we are in the belly of an Aztec temple, marvelling at the ruins of a holy site, made with terror and arrogance and blood.

  WHEN THE DRUGS are winning, it is so stylish.

  We would amble outside and drive around, take the stage at the Black Snake dressed in pillowcases and dish towels.

  Mike and Mindy were back.

  We harmonize in a holy manner as we fight on the front lines; as we drink, our stomachs crazed with pain, from Shiloh, a pond of blood.

  “WHAT IF I did a solo record?”

  “What if we both did?” he said. “And sold them side by side.”

  “I’m sure your band would be thrilled.”

  “Fuck them,” he said, reaching for a cigarette and smoothing his nude hose and mod dress.

  He was in drag most days. Deep into our addiction, our desire was waning somewhat, and this wasn’t helping: he was a fairly ugly woman.

  “Girlfriend, I just can’t get my drapes and carpet to match,” he said as I got up and moved to the sofa.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Girlfriend is tired,” I said, and fell asleep like, Timber!

  “WHAT IF I dressed however I liked, whenever I liked?” he said, waking me up.

  His hair was pulled back, and he wore jeans he was unbuttoning. I nodded, frightened and a little excited.

  He told me to go to our bed and lie on my back. “Fully extended!”

  I waited and waited.

  The first snow fell, and I saw us bent under its weight, moving forward, our tracks behind us.

  He came in, and suspended his lean, muscular body over me as I leaked like a defective oil reservoir, arching my back into a camel hump.

  His big musician’s hands spanned my waist; his hair, undone, caught in my mouth and dripped honey.

  And he called me his wife as he lowered his body, his life, as he pushed inside me and took all of the empty space away.

  I would think of this as the night we fell the last few feet into love, as the night I came so hard I broke the bed, and still we kept going, in the planks and splinters, in the new atmosphere we made —

  Loaded with oxygen, fluid, and snow-soft words broken into heart-halves, half notes, and the hard, yielding composition of Yes.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  BURNING LOVE

  During this wild time, we shed the last of our distrust and anger — everything ugly and weak. We got stoned and saw our old skins putrefying in the compost and remembered stepping out of them, like sticky white salamanders struck by sunbeams.

  We sent Misty to Portugal for tiles, then emailed him a ridiculous shopping list (macaron-shaped chairs from Paris, Greek yogurt bowls) to ensure he was gone awhile.

  He told his band and people that his migraines were back, and my outgoing message was just a brief suspiring sound.

  The days and nights were no longer divided; we were interrupted only by food deliveries that sat outside so long that deer started sleeping by our door.

  Some business called Party You Down brought cigarettes and, it turned out, anything we wanted.

  Avalon, the delivery guy who drove an orange Corvette and dressed in racer-back muscle tanks and gaucho pants, would be my last dope dealer.

  What beautiful smack it was — one numbing taste made us collapse like tenpins as Avalon said, “I don’t fuck around,” strutting around our house like a pimp.

  We were doing more, though, in correlation to our accelerated sex life.

  When he said, “I want you,” I slid to him and fell to my knees, and each nip at his inseam was followed by a line of sacred singing in my head,

  You been good to me, thank you Lord.

  “MAYBE YOU SHOUL
D mention my throbbing manhood,” he said.

  “Oh, give it back.”

  We were staying at the Seattle place, as the fall camel-walked into an unusually early, cold winter.

  Misty was happy with his renovations: he had a small crew sorting through all of his thrift store and Euro finds — he came home wearing a small moustache and saffron-coloured suit.

  We made plans to meet every Saturday, here or there, and were relieved to revert to being vibrant messes: in days, the house was cluttered with his particle chambers, metal gloves, and acid baths; with discarded clothes, leaky ashtrays, rolling glasses, and hundreds of books, cancerous with sticky papers.

  He wrote in the kitchen, and conducted experiments in the sunroom on a metal table with legs on castors.

  I worked in bed: I was always cold, and never wanted to be far from his smell.

  I tried to write a song about our sex marathon and crumpled it.

  He stood in the doorway, reading it, amused.

  “Do we really fuck this much?” he said, coming to me and pointing to the words constantly and aching and thrush.

  “We don’t do it enough,” I said, rolling towards him. I was wearing wrinkly yellow pyjamas; my hair was held up with a pencil.

  But he grabbed me anyways, and threw me on the bed face-first, and spit on his hand.

  “Does it hurt?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said, as he seemed on the verge of opening me like string cheese, as we fell off the bed.

  Pleasure, that leaves fissures, scars, and dark, chthonic blood.

  JAMES AND MERCURY got through.

  “It’s the Fillmore,” I heard them say peevishly.

  Their managers had arranged for them to do an acoustic show with the Bach Choir and Poison’s Bobby Dall.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing,” I said sullenly.

  “I thought we didn’t fight,” he said.

  “I’m not sure what’s wrong,” I said, “but I’m so mad.”

  I had been playing “Scream.” He put on a serrated shirt and danced with me.

  Danced with me.

  This is how far gone we were.

  We stormed through the spaceship with the gravity off, companionably breaking art and paddling each other.

  HE SAID HE would do the show, but we didn’t talk about it.

  We wrote our songs, and he got deeper into his experiments.

  I had hobbies of my own. Knife-throwing, billiards, cooking, and pornography.

  But the songs kept arriving: I felt like a woman I saw in an emergency room one night who said, “The fuck?” as a bloody baby rolled out of her pant leg.

  I was writing songs about us that he said were too much like his record.

  “Write what you know,” he said.

  “That’s all I know!”

  Wait, I know how to throw knives.

  “Run,” I said, extracting a dagger that really moved.

  HE STARTED EXPERIMENTING intensively. He was trying to turn memory into matter.

  He simplified the process by using electrodes, a computer, and a 3-D printer.

  When he was hooked up, he thought of me, and the printer churned out a kitten, then a broomstick.

  He abandoned the project, and on the occasion we would call the Empire, he joined me in bed in the afternoon, where we talked until the following day, taking only little breaks for Avalon’s visits; cans of sweet, flat pop; and the occasional sink bath.

  And we talked, connecting like a crude explosive.

  I told him about the time I made a bordello when I was six; about filling my bedroom with red light and charging boys a dollar to grope and kiss me as I reclined against the pillows in my mother’s old peignoir.

  “But never on the mouth.”

  He told me about working in a sweatshop in Bangladesh as a child, having sneaked onto a ship wearing an adhesive beard, a bowler hat, and black horn-rimmed glasses.

  “I made Pokémons for sixteen hours a day, and slept by the Padma river in a bed of jute. They thought I was a midget: the sexual harassment was outrageous.”

  Then he talked about his large, steel-haired, fifty-year-old girlfriend: at fifteen, he would visit her every night and let her feed and fuss over him, before sprawling on her bed while she ravened him in leather hot pants and spiked pasties.

  “I dated my mother’s boss,” I told him. “An old fat man, who felt me up over the shirt and took me to the track.”

  We felt a bit jealous, read parts of Beowulf to each other, and The Dream Songs.

  I pulled out the jade pony that he sent me, and he told me that Misty had given it to him the day he hired him.

  “But it’s from the Han Dynasty,” I told him. “I keep it in the safe.”

  He looked uneasy, then waved it off. “I’ll talk to him,” he said.

  When the dope stuns us, under a leafy tree on the Champs-Élysées, we are pelted with acorns by a scornful squirrel who says, “Regarde, les Américains.”

  There were some holes in the Empire.

  “It will fall and rise again,” he said.

  He said this as he twitched me on top of him. Then he moved his hips as I extended myself backwards to rest on his feet as he played a mechanistic sonata inside me.

  “Remember those old bombs that looked like black squashes?” he said as we ticked towards the squishy calamity.

  Later, we found two sticky feathers, one black and one white, bound into a cross, beneath us.

  “We made the memory,” he said, jumping into his lab coat and lifting the cross with surgical tweezers.

  I leaned over him as he labelled it, “Persistence,” and pressed it between two glass slides.

  We were infused with adrenaline-laced joy: we paced the ceiling until we collapsed, exhausted, and I asked how much further we could go.

  “I would have to kill and eat you,” he said.

  “Sweet-talker,” I said: sleep ran the light and T-boned us. We passed out, wrecked and injured, hand in hand.

  “WHAT ARE YOU doing here?”

  It had been a bad night: I had to stick him with Narcan, and he had to walk me in and out of an ice-cold shower.

  James stared at me, obviously dismayed.

  I was rail-thin, and dressed in police tape and an ostrich-feather turban, speaking through the chained door.

  “James!” He did a short, happy frug, and pushed me aside, unlocking the door.

  He was wearing jeans, multicoloured suction cups, and a tea cozy.

  “You guys look —” James couldn’t finish the sentence.

  I scratched my arms, and let my hair fall over my blotchy skin. “Like superstars?” I said.

  “No, not like that.”

  He insisted that we talk, and he went on and on about rehab and health and virtue. He was so boring that I left the room and cooked a shot.

  As I was tying off, I realized that he was listening, that he was leaning in.

  James had brought a friend, I noticed, named Brenda, with shiny hair and chipmunk cheeks.

  She went to him, kneeled, and gently peeled the cups from his chest. “You don’t have to hurt like this,” she said, and he repulsed me by bursting into loud baby tears.

  She occupied herself around me, making tea and phone calls.

  “He’s in,” she told James, who started cramming a grocery bag with his T-shirts, toothbrush, and underwear.

  They went to the door and he actually followed them.

  I coughed, and he looked at me, torn.

  James told me to call a friend, and I told him and the girl to get out, but they didn’t budge.

  He asked to speak to me alone, and I went to the bathroom and waited.

  “I’d die without her,” I heard him say. “We’re so happy.” Even
I raised an eyebrow, since he was choking on snot and tears as he talked.

  “You’re dying now,” Brenda said. I imagined her brown button eyes shining with sincerity; I imagined her, divested of her skirt, exposing a clean, sealed doll’s crotch.

  Once again, someone had narced on us. I threw up, as it occurred to me —

  He ambushed me, fucking me like Thor until I couldn’t speak.

  Then he made me stand in front of the mirror.

  I could practically hear cymbals of revelation crash, as if we were in a Lifetime movie called If Only Someone Had Known about the Hezza.

  I thought that we looked beautiful and told him so.

  “Let me go and straighten up a bit,” he said. “You do the same and we’ll go anywhere you want.”

  “Heroin Land. Can we go there?”

  “I’ll call you tonight,” he said, and I opened the medicine cabinet and started chucking bottles and tubes.

  “Call me after you screw that rodent,” I said, nailing him with a Mennen Speed Stick.

  “I’m sorry, Brenda,” I heard him say as I leaned against the wall, and the wall is in an alley by a club, and an old man is sucking my cock as I stare indifferently at the piss-glazed wall.

  “I’m sorry, Brenda,” I say to the old man, and he moans and milks me harder —

  This is the moment that the Empire fell, its streets filled with plague and vermin.

  “It was so beautiful,” I say, emitting a long, strong stream of cum into his throat.

  WHEN WE WERE last together: we made a single stone heart.

  I bagged it, and wrote “But only love —” on the date line.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  FEELING SMALL, VERY SMALL, ALL, ALL THE TIME

  “My name is Evelyn, and I’m an addict.”

  It was October the thirtieth, 2014.

  There were rubber spiders on the table, and cobwebs painted on the coffee mugs.

  A few of the addicts were wearing their clothes backwards; one had streaked his face with a black marker.

  “I’m dirty, I’m dressed as one of the shkutzim,” he said.

  I WAS STILL toxic: my eyes ran, and when I sneezed, it sounded like shouting.

  I told the group, gathered in a stinky church basement, a story about running a Ponzi scheme in Miami Beach during an Adderall binge, and they nodded their heads.