Where Did You Sleep Last Night

by Lynn Crosbie

  I call John K., a dealer I used to know, who comes over with some dope he calls Truth.

  I tell him not to come by again, but can’t seem to stop myself from shooting all of it.

  The floor shifts and I am standing by a picture window, holding a piece of paper that says “I can’t endure this.”

  And, “At least we did something right, in the end.”

  I shake my head and the rush fades out after shooting through my skull as a cry of remorse shoots through the trees and the darkening sky.

  I am flat on my back.

  It rains and rains.

  I AM LYING on our bed, smelling her perfume on the pillows, and writing to Lola from Pale Male.

  I think of unpinning the ceramic barrettes, the grosgrain ribbons, violet buds, and opium poppies from her hair; of watching it come undone and spill like the Choctaw’s sacred black drink.

  And then I lie on my side, cradling the twenty-gauge rifle I bought from some friend of a friend.

  I am so lonely for her, I feel there is a wild animal in my chest, biting and scratching, devouring my oxygen.

  I take some Valium from one of the tubs, and swallow a handful of the blue ones, one at a time.

  The animal lies down, still inconsolable.

  Little paws plink, “I lost my heart it seems.”

  Finally, her sultry child’s heart shines down on me, and I chase it like a lovesick moth, into sleep and deeper.

  I WRITE A bit more about what a weak and craven person I am.

  Open the chest she thinks I don’t know about.

  I find a book that I turn to its end.

  It says: “— learning that he was gone, she wandered from the hospital and, standing in the warm rain, fatally shot herself in the head.”

  I close the book gingerly, and tear my note apart.

  I fall asleep and pray to be strong.

  I see myself fighting tigers in a cage until they are nothing but streaks of orange and black.

  WHEN I WAKE up, the TV is on, rumbling an old movie called Dracula’s Dog. I glance at the red-eyed vampire-dog, who is fleeing the scene of a murder while his master hisses, “Zoltan, there’s still time!”

  But Zoltan takes off: the sun is rising like a fat urchin.

  I get up and put away the gun.

  There’s no more time.

  The drugs fall into the sound that I race by, moving as if I can catch up with her before the sun rises, and blots us out.

  I AM CLEAN.

  The malady left my body as a pitying of doves, as I slept.

  When I get to Evelyn’s room, I catch my reflection. I look the same as before, but harder, like a soldier.

  I look at her and see the same illness — as a crowned serpent — coiled beside her ear, then leaping to its death in flames.

  A nurse finishes tightening the restraints on her chair and stands back.

  My wife’s head lolls; her stained Mummy hands dangle beside her as she slumps over.

  I kneel beside her chair and ask her how she feels.

  “I told my mom I love you,” she says.

  “And she said, ‘Oh, the sad dreams of fat girls.’”

  “She’s wrong,” I say.

  I prove this by cutting the leather straps and hoisting her to the bed.

  And fucking her so gently, I feel like we are kids and this is our first time.

  WHEN SHE IS sleeping peacefully, I walk outside.

  My body is filled with light, as if I am a Glow Stick at a rave.

  A bunch of stoned kids pick me up and give me a lift to the woods.

  I ask them to wait, and they huddle in the car, playing “Nice to You.”

  “Your wife is my idol,” one girl says, and I see her hair is dyed black and tethered with baby barrettes; that she is holding a guitar case, and a shabby beaded purse.

  “I’ll tell her that,” I say, and, entering further, find the white stone among the ruins and crime tape.

  I toss my works into the grave, and pitch some dirt over the case, cross my name off the stone, and write above it, “A BRICK DONUT.”

  “What the fuck?” the driver says.

  He looks afraid.

  “It’s a joke,” I say, and we take off.

  Driving back, I feel a veil fall from me, unwind, and blow away.

  “You will get through this,” the sky roars, its stars making pinwheels.

  THE KIDS CATCH me up.

  Misty was Chase Ramirez, armed robber and rapist-murderer wanted in five states.

  A homeless kid who bounced from shelter to shelter, he is believed to have lived with, and killed, a number of elderly ladies. He took a priceless jade horse from the last one’s home, and all of her jewellery.

  I remember the big diamond earrings he would wear sometimes, that he said were fakes; the matching pendant necklace.

  Segments of his notebooks — “I hate to do this, but then again, I was going to kill him the day we met” — are reprinted, with the sickening images of his last stand, everywhere.

  Bleach has already regrouped with a new lead singer named Captain Terry.

  They are now called Beach, and they play surf songs: kids throw balls on the stage.

  Evelyn’s friends — Jenna, Q, Joe, and Cory, primarily — call every day.

  Speck is waiting to be picked up at the ASPCA.

  “Let’s get him,” I say, and we do.

  We break him out, and get him into the hospital in a duffle bag.

  He sleeps under her bed.

  I tell her how sorry I am about Misty.

  “He’s not real, you idiot,” she says.

  She means me.

  HOW DID I miss it?

  Misty must have wanted to be the person I thought he was.

  And when she and I got closer, he started to fall apart.

  I thought about taking long drives through the country with him and playing Hank Snow songs into the cool, clear air; about peeling carrots on the porch and him cleaning and feeding me when I was dope-sick.

  One night, I kissed him. It was Misty who pulled away.

  “We are bigger than this,” he said.

  “We are everything.”

  I took everything away.

  I am sad about him: he was real, in a way.

  In my hand: a tiny baby doll, covered in burns and bruises.

  It was lying on the ground where he died; it is what he remembered.

  I drop it in my pocket beside some others I keep meaning to put away — all the lucent flowers, swollen hearts, lariats, and fragrant, unmade beds.

  SO MERCURY GOT beat up because he disrespected Evelyn, in Joey’s opinion.

  Joey comes to visit, but I won’t let him see her.

  “You pissed?” he says.

  “No, he did fucking disrespect her,” I said.

  “She’s more talented than him, the brutto figlio di puttana bastardo.”

  He looks towards her room, whistles.

  “A body like a chorine, a face like the Madonna. Fix this,” he says, smoothing his fantastic velvet tie.

  I promise that I will, and that we’ll visit him soon.

  Then take his hand. It is soft and creamy.

  “Elizabeth Arden,” he says.

  I WATCH THE late show in Evelyn’s room.

  Scott, in a unitard, tights, and white coat, pulls up a chair.

  Rosemary’s Baby is on.

  Much of the plot makes me raise my eyebrows.

  Including “The name is an anagram,” and the devil cock.

  And, This is no dream this is really happening!

  “YOU THE SINGER guy?” Scott says during a commercial for sliced, packaged meat being promoted at a grocery store by a gay ghost.

  “I’m
now the guy who envies Satan’s sexual prowess,” I say, as the ghost starts slapping slices of pimento and olive loaf between the woolly legs of a shopper wearing a black Speedo and flip-flops.

  “What’s that all about?”

  “What, the ghost? I try not to judge.”

  “The writing on your T-shirt. ‘A Brick Donut,’” he says, but the movie’s back on: Rosemary is bringing a shaker of martinis to the guy down the hall who never stops playing “Für Elise.”

  He whispers, “It’s an anagram.”

  “Yes,” I say. “And an epitaph. Okay, be quiet, here’s where Ruth Gordon plays heavy metal and does calisthenics.”

  The other reason we raise our eyebrows is Evelyn.

  “This is not a dream,” she says, out of the blue, and her screams shatter glass.

  I AM ARRANGING tiger lilies when the photographer sneaks in, disguised as former Expos mascot Youppi!

  “Hot in hurr,” he says.

  I am confused and he explains the old team and does some exhortatory moves.

  “Expos, you’re like a tiger!” he chants, and I don’t kick his ass because Evelyn is sitting up, staring as if she can see him, and clapping her hands.

  He was taking pictures the whole time through his red beard, pictures that appeared online within the hour.

  Her bad eye is spinning like a top; the other, inert one looks crossed.

  Her mangled head, her skin-and-bones body, barely covered by a soiled gown, a pack of cigarettes and “drug paraphernalia” on the nightstand (a streak of talc and a spoon are circled) — over this, the headlines say things like TRAGIC DEFORMITY and THREE DAYS TO LIVE!

  I am in the background, composed and cool, with my platinum hair curving like a scythe over my shoulder and dark-shadowed, Freezie-blue eyes.

  My old management company calls.

  “There are literally a hundred sluts in our office. Sluts!”

  “WHY ARE YOU wearing this ring?” she asks, tracing its letters.

  Feeling its inscription, tl4e.

  “I love it. But I did take it off once.”

  “Why?”

  “I made a mistake.”

  “Was it because it’s so infantile?” she says.

  “It isn’t,” I say, twisting it, kissing her sorry sorry sorry.

  THE NEUROLOGIST SAYS that the bullets paved through her skull, grazing her occipital lobes.

  That her brain is swollen, but less so after they operated.

  Where was I when they were drilling into her head?

  Being washed and petted and loved by the nurses, who kissed my wound when they thought I was sleeping.

  I rehire the suits. Scott was good, but I want an armed bodyguard.

  And a contract for our bootleg record.

  “Remaster it and add some of the stuff we keep on sticks in the kitchen drawer in an M&M’s bag.”

  “What do you two call yourselves?” they ask during the conference call.

  “Oh, just say Heaven for now. Or Colombian Death Squad.”

  I GO HOME and start planting little fir trees. I incubate tulip bulbs and paint the walls a sort of Twinkie-coloured gold.

  Look at the broken plate and remember saying that to love someone is to love all of them.

  Evelyn is vain and selfish, imperious and cold. She is funny and smart, sweet and talented.

  She’s a bed-hog, a lousy cook, and a bad guitarist.

  A great fuck, a true artist, and my best friend.

  I think of the time she threw a heavy glass paperweight at my head, which glanced my cheek and shattered.

  “You could have killed me, you lunatic!”

  “But I didn’t,” she said cheerfully, as she took a broom and lazily pushed the mess around, before taking a call and walking away.

  She is the sharp and smooth pieces; the girl who came to me later and said, “I’m sorry,” while convulsing with tears.

  The girl I held, the girl who is the great, demonic

  woman I love.

  I VISIT HER all day, then return at night to tuck her in.

  Her bodyguard looks like Darth Vader. He helps me tuck her under the quilt she made, and hang up some pictures of us taken at carnivals and, once, on a little ship — we are peering through life preservers and holding huge stuffed seals.

  When she is asleep, I wait a while, in case she needs me.

  And write melodies for our songs that she will embellish; I write about her stapled head and tiny body, about never having really loved her until now.

  Towards the end, I drive to Viretta Park and find the bench covered in mash notes to me, mean stuff about her.

  I spray-paint black gusts all over it, and push it over.

  The sirens are coming closer as I walk away from the wreck.

  “YOU’RE A POSTER,” she says.

  “I pretend you love me. It’s pathetic.”

  I hear someone else’s voice in hers. She never told me about her mother’s sickness, about getting hit.

  Or if she did, I wasn’t listening.

  “She is pounding my head against the floor because I don’t listen!” she says.

  “It’s my fault; she works very hard,” she says sadly.

  “Sometimes she is so nice,” she says, and I hold her hand tighter.

  “She loves you,” I say, and Evelyn nods, falls asleep.

  “It’s normal to feel guilt,” Darth Vader says.

  “Right now you are remembering all the bad things you did to her, how you didn’t protect her.”

  “I’m not sure I cared about her. Not enough,” I say.

  When I cry, it sets off the old man in the next room, who is always alone.

  Then the lady two rooms over, with the garish brooch and scarf on her gown; then the daughter of the man who won’t wake up.

  Then, like dominoes, everyone cries.

  We cry for who we love and why it is we have to hurt them worse than anyone.

  We cry in wonder because they are perfect; we cry because we are lonely.

  Because out the window, in the light snow, people are walking lightly by and smiling, their feet leaving tracks that scar the street this way: I’m going home.

  SHE OPENS HER eyes and I am certain that she can see me.

  “Baby?” I say.

  “Just go,” she says miserably.

  I see my name inked in her palm, something new she must have done herself.

  A heart gouged around it, livid with infection.

  I tell her what she always wants to hear.

  And I mean it: “I’m never leaving,” I say, and she covers her face, modest in her happiness, and that night I don’t move from her side, and I swear, this little field of white flowers appears on her head.

  Then their blossoms blow across her skin, and inside her mouth, and she is breathing green filaments.

  Rushing, living things.

  FORTY

  SHE’LL COME BACK AS FIRE

  When he falls asleep, I scrape at my notebook, and manage to tear out its pages. They catch a current of air, and someone yells, “It’s snowing.”

  I write “DAY ONE” with rattling hands. Light presses at the corners of my eyes.

  “You’ll never get better until you stop thinking about him. Do you think this is normal?”

  This is my mother, drunk, her anger taking the shape of a mallet.

  She had found me flattened against the poster, kissing his dry, generous lips.

  “You love him, fine. I get it. I used to have a crush on him too. But I knew him! He liked me, too.

  “Find yourself a living, breathing boy. Some desperate one or some nice ugly guy.

  “Because he’s dead.

  “And he’s still out of your league.”

  She looked
at my sorrowful face with disgust, shoved me aside, and savaged the poster.

  I knew that she would be nice in the morning.

  Sometimes she makes pancakes with smiling faces, or says, “Sorry about our fight.”

  Before that, and for so long, is her terrible wrath.

  Ugly is the word she used the most, like she couldn’t believe she could make such a thing.

  “Get your boyfriend off the fucking wall,” is all she said that night, as I carefully smoothed him.

  There was a guy waiting for her, the size of a lawn ornament.

  This was the night I decided to let things get just a little worse, then check out.

  I wanted to wait because I thought I would miss him.

  And the cat, the cat.

  Who was missing an eye, I’m not sure why, is what I liked to tell myself.

  YEARS GO BY, I think.

  I ask what time it is, what day.

  I think I ask too much, because they don’t answer unless he is standing there.

  “They are taking out the staples,” he says, and it hurts.

  “Why are there staples?”

  “You were in an accident, but you are getting better,” he says.

  He gets warm water and a cloth, and cleans the pigtails of dried blood from my head, the paint from my face.

  “We were scalping soldiers at Pea Ridge,” I say, remembering Little Carpenter’s admonishment.

  “What time is it?” I whisper.

  “It’s almost time to get you out of here,” he says.

  One of the nurses, who is always hovering around him, soaked in Hypnôse, says, “She is going to be here a long time, Celine.”

  He is nice to everyone here: he knows their names, he brings them little gifts, and once, he sang for them, at their insistence.

  “I want them to be nice to you,” he told me.

  But he’s getting mad, I can tell.

  “You don’t know me,” he says to the nurse. “And you don’t know her.

  “We’ll both be gone soon, and if one hair on her head is harmed, I will find you and I will destroy you.”

  I am scared, but that is because I am a child, and my mother is angry at me.

  I will just hide under the bed and think of ways to make her happy.

  The sounds she makes.

  “Help me,” I say, and make myself smaller, and he is there with me, he says soothing things like “dust bunnies,” and “safe,” and “fly away.”