by Lynn Crosbie
We were packing, and clearing up our mysteries.
“I was straight until the other night,” I said, and saw the shadow of a lie pass over him. But he surprised me.
“I’ve been using the whole time,” he said.
We put on our coats and furry hats, and left to score.
“I’m not even sure you’re here,” he said, as he wrapped me in his coat and we fucked against a Dumpster, among so many people, rushing past.
He filled my pockets with blue boxes from Tiffany’s as a derelict Santa staggered by, smoking a crack pipe.
I hadn’t noticed. It was Christmas Day.
MERCURY WOULD WALK with a limp for the rest of his life, and had a white, dead eye, but when he came to see us off, he couldn’t stop giving me covert looks of horrified gratitude.
But there was still one piece of the puzzle missing.
We flew home, and I hired a jock-nurse to get him to lower his dose; to grapple with him when the army ants landed, targeted him, and planted flags in each of his pores.
MISTY INVITED US to a holiday dinner.
He had spent Christmas alone and had gifts for us.
We talked about how generous he was, and decided to shop at some block-long outlet, even if it took all day.
He called Misty and said we would love to come, and that we were sorry that we missed Christmas —
“It’s not like I matter,” he said. We had put him on speaker, and were shaking our heads.
“Did you know I spent the whole day, wrapping and unwrapping your presents? That I sat in the room until it got dark and drank until I passed out?”
He hung up.
We stared at each other. We had never heard him yell before.
Or slam a phone down.
“How did he manage to slam a cell?” I said.
“Oh, he’s had me sign off on all of these rococo gold telephones. Like in Scarface.”
He called right back and re-invited us to the “Christmas Do-Over,” apologizing so much that we felt terrible.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “You’re working so hard.”
“I am,” he said.
“So hard.”
TO MAKE IT worse, we were late getting there.
We had wrapped everything nicely, which took forever, and I had to coax him to wear the striped velvet suit I had given him earlier, with many other presents, including science equipment I didn’t understand, an antique, leather-bound atlas, and a Gibson Western Classic six-string guitar.
He gave me the exact same guitar, one of Joyce’s actual love letters, and a huge painting of Speck, grown up and roaming the wilds.
“Looking for us,” he said, and we hugged and he produced two syringes of green dope — he had used food colouring.
“Just a bit,” I said, and when I opened my eyes again, I was lying on top of him in my terry ho shorts and bra.
I slapped him until he woke up, but he liked the look of those shorts, so we played sex-and-stop until we were both dressed up: I glanced at the clock and squeezed him inside me like a snake.
He came in a huge rush as I glued on two pairs of eyelashes, and allowed myself a spiral of constricting Os.
When Misty answered the door, he could barely look at us. My neck had puncture wounds in it, his zipper was down, and we couldn’t stop smiling at each other.
“I’m sorry we’re late,” he said. “We tried to come sooner.”
AFTER WE WERE served spiked eggnog in silver cups, we exchanged gifts.
We bought Misty a bunch of extravagant stuff that was on his list, and he was thrilled with his silver suit and cape; his titanium gold clubs and emerald pinky ring.
I was uncomfortable with the risqué lingerie and sex toys he gave me, and he appeared to be taken aback by the book he was presented with, called Ghost Riders in the Sky.
It was covered in brocade and rhinestones, and filled with handwritten, perfect cursive accounts of the two of them adventuring, each accompanied by a rhyming poem and drawing of them, usually wearing tight, flared jeans and fringed cowboy shirts.
“You must have worked on this all year,” he said, and Misty was cunning enough to brush him off and say, “I just threw everything together this morning.”
And when I gave him the jade horse back, he was extremely gracious.
“A very nice girl gave this to me,” he told us.
“She would have given me everything, if I let her,” he said, then a geriatric waiter in a monkey suit came in, bowed at the waist, and told us that dinner was served.
DINNER WAS TENSE.
Misty kept snapping at the old waiter, who smelled like glue and sweet ketones.
We asked him to chill out and he left the room to compose himself.
We heard a huge crash and the old guy scurried out.
“Ain’t worth it,” he said, and “Crazy bastard.”
Misty told us that the guy had turned over the dim sum cart: he was in hysterics. We were able to mollify him by admiring the ice sculpture of the baby Jesus asleep on a bed of scampi.
“I feel like we’re walking on eggshells,” I said as Misty set a dessert on fire. “What are we missing?”
“Baked Alaska!” Misty announced, handing us bowls of ice cream with blackened matches floating in their centres.
WHEN I DECLINED to model the see-through nightie with neon handprints on the bust and butt, Misty said he was exhausted and saw us to the door.
“I forgot the weird book he gave me,” he said nervously.
“Honey, this is our house,” I told him, as, inside, the Pearl Fishers aria was turned up and we heard, more faintly, Misty singing along, She would have given me the world on a chain when she saw the hatchet —
He walked me to a part of the woods I hadn’t seen that was filled with pine trees, with giant ponderosas that had sloughed off beds of nettles.
“I want you to bury me here,” he said.
“How can I do that if I’m dead too?”
I saw that he had written his name and birthdate on a rock, and I started shaking.
“Here,” he said, handing me his jacket.
“I have to show you something.”
HE KICKED AT what turned out to be a leaf-covered tarp. There was an open grave underneath.
I leaned against one of the pines, scared for both of us.
He told me that he had been planning to kill himself when he found out about Page, and for a long time after.
That he dug this grave and marked it with the rock.
And he slept beside it one cold night I was away and he couldn’t find me.
“Everything was so much like the song,” he said. “I felt that my life was writing it.”
The Lead Belly song asking where I slept while he was shivering, wondering, and all alone.
He sang this part, “don’t lie to me,” like he was remembering, but I knew he was pleading with me; that he was asking a question.
I scratched “never again” onto my hand with my nails, and he kissed me, and all I could see were speedy vignettes from an old Disney movie, of chipmunks and birds dressing a princess, as I whirled through the woods, setting off explosions of pink for love and blue for joy.
“YOU KNOW THAT you are all I want, don’t you?”
“You can have it all,” he said.
I responded by unbuttoning my dress to show off my seamed silk stockings and frilly garter belt.
Matching, vertically slit bra.
He groaned, jerking his jeans over his scimitar-shaped hip bones.
Later, we watched the moon roll through the clouds like a hamster ball.
He pulled a folded space blanket from a knot in a tree and told me that the ancient Greeks believed that memories were ghosts.
They were more like vampires, I tho
ught. Starving, infectious.
We shared a thought where he was a paper ghost and I was a long shadow.
The shot we had split in the bathroom on the way out was strong, almost too strong.
I threw up into his cupped hands and he rinsed them in a black rill, then passed out.
I felt for vital signs. Nothing.
I am, thankfully, a trained surgeon: speaking through my mask, I snap orders at the bats who are nervously hovering at my elbows under ten slanted moons.
“Epinephrine!”
Then, “Stryker saw!” “Beach towels!” “Scalpel!”
I have to cut into his brain and excise the light that is luring him backwards.
As they stitch him up, I tweeze the glowing ray into a test tube and ask that it be sent to the lab.
“That goddamned report is confidential,” I say.
The bat looks frightened, but she does what she is told.
As he comes to, I think of her little wrinkled face and feel a pang.
Then I start ripping my dress into bandages, cover his head, and lead him to the car.
I pop a cherry on the roof.
He needs to be safe at home, and far away from the scar that remembers an illumination.
As the bats glide through the treetops, pollinating the wild hibiscus that grow there and, fiendishly, telling on me, through their high, excited echolocation.
WE RETURNED IN the morning to get the book Misty made, and he was gone.
The foyer was trashed: possums were boldly eating ears of corn and drinking good red wine on the gold dinette chairs.
When they saw us, they played dead, but it was pointless. One of them kept elbowing the others and laughing.
We couldn’t get out of the room: there were locked doors and pieces of plywood nailed over every other point of entry.
And we couldn’t bring ourselves to say what we were thinking, and suddenly were filled with unbearable fatigue.
We found a sleeping bag in the corner and zipped ourselves inside.
Smoked a few cigarettes and reassured each other. “There must be a reason.”
He said, “I’m so sad.”
I pulled out a pen from my purse and wrote “CHEER UP” over his head, and drew, like a halo, a fat, cheesy sun.
He did, and we polished the floor with that sleeping bag, struggled with the zipper, and got out.
“I’m getting drugs,” he said as we drove away.
“Hurry,” I said. I could feel my veins organizing themselves into wide open freeways; into a cloverleaf with a bull’s eye centre flanked by yield after yield sign.
“Honey?”
We are lying in our bed filled with Kaffir lily blossoms.
“Where were we, just now?”
“No idea,” he says.
“I think Misty was arranging flowers at the cottage?” I say, and he says we should try to reach him, as he eats the blossoms from my neck, my back.
WE HAD BEEN home for weeks when Cory showed up.
“How did you find us?” I said, self-consciously smearing my hair back.
“I’m talking at a huge meeting in Seattle. I asked a kid on the street where you guys lived.”
“Oh. Come in.”
“That’s okay,” he said, taking in the full splendour of my shrunken body, decked out in an off-the-shoulder paper-towel dress and combat boots; of the abscessed holes, the skulls in my eyes.
He was passed out behind me on the floor, surrounded, like a saint, by intersecting rows of needles.
“This is bad,” Cory said.
“It’s the only way I can have him,” I said.
“Then maybe you should think of not having him,” he said.
“Cory, I am tortured by love. If you ever understand what that is like, and leave your cult, you can come visit me then.”
“You’ll be gone,” he said, his voice cracking.
“I’ll be everywhere,” I said. “Like fucking confetti.”
The confetti that the capuchin monkeys are throwing at us both — “Hey,” I say when they get my eyes, but they just chitter, the way that little monkeys do.
CORY STAYED WITH us, and we agreed to taper off.
“Why bother?” he said privately. “How many times have we been through this?”
“Cory said the people who get clean are the ones who try the most.”
“Cory said,” he mocked me.
“Don’t,” I said. We were both wound pretty tightly: I was worried that we could hurt each other.
“Let’s tell Misty to finish by the end of the week,” he said. “I want to be in our cottage-palace; I want to swim in that indoor grotto.”
I texted Misty, who said he’d be done even sooner.
The three of us were playing chemmy when the phone rang.
IT WAS MARILYN.
She was an old former showgirl who lived down the road from the cottage. Her hair was still waist-length and platinum; she had long, spidery lashes, and her rouge and lipstick looked like abrasions on her bark-textured skin.
She obviously had binoculars, because she was always making sly remarks like, “Were you two fighting last night? Because I noticed that you both wore sensible pyjamas to bed!”
He loved her, though, and would put his arm around her dumpling body and say things like, “Mama, why didn’t you come over and save me?”
“She told me she was worried that we could have been robbed: she saw a big truck pull up, saw a few guys hauling stuff away.”
I called Misty, and he said, “What? Oh that nosy bitch, I was having stuff delivered.”
“Well, don’t worry,” he said, taking the phone.
“Just tell the cops that —
“Okay, I will. Alone, I promise.”
He got up and stood in the corner, and pulled something up on his phone.
“No,” he said.
I went to him.
It was a picture of me and Mercury, and it was bad. The Devil in Miss Jones bad.
“What is wrong with you? What is wrong with us?” He was heart-attack mad.
He dropped the phone and left the house the way that Mothra left little villages.
Cory was mortified. I knew that his parents beat each other for sport; that he was trying very hard not to run around, grabbing potatoes and building a still.
I stared at him pleadingly.
“One word,” he said. “Photoshop. Look closely.”
I enlarged the image, and saw that it was our bed.
There was the metal fleur-de-lys on the post; the dotted Swiss and flannel squares on the quilt from my going-away suit and Damian’s pyjama dress.
The stuffed Speck we slept with, our notebooks, our clothes kicked into a heap.
His body below mine; his hands half missing in my ass; his knees bent and open.
I was counting each proof, intently, when I noticed how quiet it was.
I ran into the yard calling him, waving the phone.
“It’s not true,” I kept saying.
The picture was from the first time he came to our house, when he showed up in a slashed suit he had pinned back together, with scissors in the breast pocket, and cut off the G-string he had given me one of in every colour.
He had picked up a scrap of it later, sniffed it, and put it in his wallet.
It was still in there, as far as I knew.
How could he think I could do this, after everything we’d been through?
“I’m mad at YOU,” I texted him, then realized I was using his phone.
“Same shit, different day,” I said, sinking into a chair. Exhausted, I wrote “Get that printed on a hat and T-shirt, wear it all the time” on the notepad in front of me, and underlined it until the pencil snapped.
“MISTY, PU
T HIM on the phone, I’m not doing this with you.”
I was standing outside the cottage in shorts, and my new stencilled hat and T-shirt.
I would have been inside, but my keys didn’t work anymore.
Misty stepped outside with two dazed-looking girls in torn dresses. His look was bananas.
He had a pony-mohawk, and sharp Vandyke; his black mohair suit was covered in gold peace signs; he was wearing matching gold chains, and black buckled red suede platforms.
“He’s not here and I’m telling the truth.”
“Who are they?”
“Don’t be hassling my ho-train,” he said, and part of me backed off, nervously, and another part flipped.
“You work for us, Shaft.”
“I work for him.”
“Well, since he’s lost his mind, I have power of attorney,” I said, rapidly confabulating.
“And you’re fucking fired.”
“What will I do?” he said tearfully, as the girls, sensing an opportunity, sneaked over to an idling Ranchero and peeled out.
“Give me the keys and tell me where my husband is.”
“But the unveiling is tomorrow night!”
“Who cares?”
His phone pinged and I opened the message.
It was another, similar picture. But more obscene, and astonishingly inept: my lips are now filled with deformed drawings of dick, and gay Cory, his head jammed on like a marshmallow on a stick, is giving me head.
It was so ludicrous, I laughed.
“What’s so funny?” Misty said, walking towards me.
I closed my eyes and the last piece of the puzzle fell into place.
I kicked off my shoes and ran like hell.
THIRTY-EIGHT
I’MA NEED TO SEE YOUR FUCKING HANDS / CELINE
I left her and drove towards the cottage.
I only had to stop a few times for catnaps and a bag of Domino sugar.
I needed to hear how Misty got the pictures, and how new they were.
I had left the phone behind, so when some car honked, I lowered the window.
“Hey, Celine Gray! Come party with us!”
“Can you look online for any news about me and my wife?”
“Celine fucking Gray, check it, I’m his secretary,” the little roughneck told his crab-bucket friends.