All Roads Lead to Blood

by Chau, Bonnie;

  Jason looked taken aback only for a second, and then grinned. Lucy gathered he was not used to people paying attention to anything he said, to people taking him seriously. In the first session of class, he had told her, outside, during their bathroom break, that he didn’t think poetry should be about feelings. Lucy hadn’t even been sure quite what to make of that, had been chewing for way too long on a small misshapen hardened Clif bar, and merely said Huh, because she had suspected he was just looking for an argument, and she had had better things to do. He was too pale. His hair was too perfectly coiffed. His pants looked like they had been ironed. She hadn’t said she had better things to do, but she was pretty good at arranging mostly the muscles around her eyes into an expression which said this same thing.

  The Beginning Part

  After class one day, they had stood at opposite ends of the quad smoking, but had both converged at the trash can to throw out their butts at the same time. She knew this was coming. It had taken steps forward to get to the trash can, steps during which they both could see what was coming. What do you think about crushes? he had asked her. Oh man, she’d said. I could talk about that forever. He raised an eyebrow. Yeah? he said. We’re just going to get right into it, huh? She laughed and asked, what else is there to talk about? Sports? In fact, she was starved for conversation about love and hate and crushes. She’d had a surprising trail, in the past few years, of disastrous affairs with several French and French-American guys, in France, in L.A., and even here in New York. Stereotype-defying French guys who avoided all talk of love, even though she’d thought she made it clear she was interested only in talking about theoretical or past loves, not love in the present tense. In fact, the more she fought against the idea of love for herself, the more she felt compelled to talk about it from a distance, in the most general terms. Jason the Mason grinned, and invited her over for a drink.

  She showed up, he grabbed two beers, they sat on the couch. It got really out of hand. Out of their hands. She had no hand in it. She never even took any of her clothes off, she was wearing a woolly dress and woolly tights. He put his hand down her tights, but barely, under her underwear, but barely, never even let his fingers puncture inside. She was so wet. So swollen. A water balloon down there, a real juicy one. A couple times, she started to push her own hand down her tights, down her underwear, but she would just barely get to her pubic hair, barely brush it, and she would have to remove her hand, it was just too much. The slipperiness was not to be touched. It felt out of control. At each other’s throats. And then they would back away, look at each other, almost in shock. Breathing hard, panting. Audible sounds of swallowing. Fuck, he gritted out. Frustrated. Godddddamnit, he texted her, afterwards.

  The Middle Part

  In the fall, one night, after burgers, they had strolled around a little bit in the park, it was getting colder then, he led them to sit down on the side of a monument with a flag pole, tomb of unknowns, and piles of carnations left over from the Veteran’s Day wreath-laying ceremony. All is fair in love and war basically means that nothing is fair in love and war. It was only about ten or twenty minutes spent there, huddled in the cold, half-hidden in the darkness by the flowers and trees and bushes, they talked about holiday plans while he absently played with her hair. He leaned in and bit her ear, a bright and startling thing.

  She told him the sad news about how the tree outside her bedroom window had lost all its leaves. She told him the sad news about how she couldn’t find her corduroy pants.

  That’s what you get for taking your pants off all the time in front of strangers.

  I don’t do that!, she said, laughing. She continued leisurely rambling out small words into the cold air, talking about hoping to find them once she unpacked her winter things.

  But you wore them during the summer, right, so...

  I don’t wear pants at all during the summer!

  Didn’t you? I remember you wearing them.

  Um, no way. I would never wear corduroys in the summer. I think I would know.

  Really? I remember you wearing them, he said, laughing. Because I remember putting my hands in them.

  She laughed too, surprised, pleased, warmed, everything was open and easy and free that night. Oh really, she said.

  Yeah, I do.

  Well, maybe you put your hands in them last winter. Anyway, they’re pretty tight, you probably couldn’t even get your hands in there.

  Oh, I think I could probably manage to do it.

  The End Part

  I need to turn over a new leaf, new me, Lucy said to Jason. They were sitting up side by side in the strange-sized bed. She had thought it was a queen, but it turned out to be only full, and now, it seemed to be somewhere middling, between twin and full. They had been swallowing up secrets and sticklike difficult words for three months now. Three rounds down to zero. Three rounds up to trouble.

  Oh? Jason said, but it wasn’t a prompting-type of Oh. It sounded like a question, but ended with a period. He was closer to the window, and was looking out the window. There was a whole backside of apartment buildings, the ones that lined the south side of 8th Street, separated by two rows of backyards—like perfectly white lined up teeth—from the row of apartment buildings which lined the north side of 9th Street. All up and down these numbered streets, it was the same.

  It was cold this winter, and with no curtains or blinds, Lucy could feel the cold emanating from the window. There must be cracks, well, she could see one crack along the window sill for sure, and, or, maybe it was just the glass. The panes had been replaced by thin sheets of pure ice. Perhaps it was Jason who had replaced them. While she was sleeping, while he was unable to sleep. Lucy squinted hard at Jason, but his head was still turned, and she supposed this meant he had not felt the force of her squeezing lids. He wasn’t saying a thing.

  At some point, she could no longer tell what they were doing in her bed, she and Jason the Mason. Jason, the last guy she had sex with. Where they were going. They were trying to do something, in this bed, trying to get somewhere, get at something. But where? Where can you get? And on a bed, no less? How did they end up here, on an elevated platform of cushions, who was supposed to be worshipping at this altar, what were they doing that deserved being done on a dais?

  There was nothing sacred, that she could fathom. Fathoms below, fathoms below. But even below, there wasn’t anything, as far as she could tell. And at that point, she thought she could tell pretty far. There would be nothing to unearth: fine, dry, tasteless dirt, tasteless earth.

  Then they were wrapped around each other as tightly as possible. She couldn’t see him, but the room was dim anyway, but maybe her eyes were closed. He pushed himself into her, again and again, and her fingers were slipping on sweat, and at some point she could just tell. She could just tell him, I thought that we were going to turn into each other, one into the other, we were going to Freaky Friday it, and finally, she would get to be someone else.

  Forever, people ask her, What are you? Many people in the world get asked this question, but there are also many people in this world, who do not get asked this question.

  If enough men press their penises into her vagina, maybe she can turn into someone who does not get asked this question.

  What are you?

  A poet.

  No, no. What are you? Like...

  Oh. I’m American.

  No, you know what I mean. Where are you from?

  California.

  No, like, what are you? Like, Korean, Japanese, Chinese...

  Are those my only options?

  Why don’t you ask her something else? Ask her who she is. Hunger for a different kind of knowledge. Challenge her. Don’t make her play dumb.

  With the first guy she had sex with, she didn’t have the articulate thought, the death wish, to return someone else. She thought—assume
d—she would come out the other side the same person. She thought she had some things going. She was out of school, but not so naïve—it was her third year at a horrifying editing job surrounded by termites and ghosts. This was in 2004, and that fall, all of her coworkers came forward as staunch Republicans. One of her coworkers started blasting conservative talk radio. Another one was constantly forwarding her emails about Warring Against Terror. She didn’t come forward, she was a secret.

  She was warring against an uncapitalized terror, also known as her relationship with her first boyfriend. They lived in a large, old, shady one-bedroom place, on North Clark Drive, in West Hollywood, though how exactly the two of them ended up there is beyond her at this point, and at that point, well, she wasn’t in the business of analysis. She never had been. Less bridges crossing back and forth across her corpus callosum. No cause and effect. No meaningful patterns. No derived significance. She had eyed a place in Echo Park, and he had finally agreed to drive out to see it, and then had nixed it—too dangerous. It had pretty yellow stucco, and an open courtyard.

  She slept on the couch sometimes, those years in West Hollywood, as demonstration of how much she hated him. She slept in the car once or twice, to demonstrate the same thing, though she believes this, even for her, was on the brink of extreme. One street over was Robertson Drive, another two blocks was the Beverly Center, and sometimes she took pleasure in dressing as sloppily as possible, shapeless gray sweatpants, strange boots, an old hoodie, and going out late at night around the empty high-end retail streets, traipsing along Robertson, or San Vicente, sometimes she went to the Beverly Center, when the shops had closed but the mall was kept open, because there was a movie theatre on the top floor, atrium level, and sometimes she would go see a movie, but often she would just wander around the silent levels of the mall, sit momentarily in the lounging areas that during the daytime on weekends were occupied by weary men waiting on their ladies.

  In West Hollywood, they were also two blocks away from the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, which turned out to be quite convenient, because she ended up having to go to a gynecologist a bunch that year, yeast infection, urinary tract infection, vaginal random infection. Her boyfriend felt very down every time she couldn’t have sex with him, even though it was the sex they were having that was making it painful to pee, or making her feel like she constantly had to pee, or fucking up her flora, forcing her to down probiotics to neutralize her fauna.

  The Figuring Out What Type of Girl She Is Part

  As a girl, as a certain type of girl, maybe, you get used to guys saying Next time we’ll split one burger, or Hopefully someday I’ll get to try out your mom’s cooking, or When we go eat there I’ll tell you..., and feeling pleasure at this existence of a future, when you will continue to do things together, and then quickly reminding yourself not to feel this pleasure, reminding yourself it means nothing, don’t take it seriously, literally. Because, as this certain type of girl, you are consistently dealing with this type of guy, who turns into a ghost, and what can you do, because you have never prioritized niceness in a guy over everything, or indeed, anything, else.

  The Naked Ghost Man Part

  There is a naked ghost man in her room. Sometimes he wanders, barefoot, into the rest of the house. The kitchen is small, so it doesn’t take him long to walk through it. There is a long hallway, between the bedroom and the kitchen, though—that takes a while. The intricate parquet floors are glossy, but also prone to splinters, especially along the sides closer to the walls. She doesn’t worry about the naked ghost man, he treads softly, each step a quick light pat.

  Sometimes the naked ghost man reads in the living room, but he only ever sits in the right corner of the couch. Sometimes he fries up a couple of eggs for breakfast, eaten with toast cut diagonally, and salsa. When she’s run out of salsa, he’ll use marinara sauce from some old jar in the back of the refrigerator.

  Last night she came home from work, late, midnight, and the naked ghost man was sitting at the piano by the front window. He had his hands hovering over the keys, fingertips barely on the keys, his head slightly bent down and forward. She can’t ever really see him, the naked ghost man. The house is pretty shadowy, and she always misses it, the moment in which she might be able to see his face. Sometimes, she is close, she thinks. She sees it, peripherally, or senses the full-on frontal look, but when she turns, gone. She thinks she turns slowly, to give him a chance to turn away.

  She didn’t have to work today, so she made herself a ham and swiss and tomato sandwich, and sat down on the couch to watch the movie Lust, Caution. The naked ghost man gets up from the piano bench and sits down on the couch next to her, in his usual corner. The version of the movie she finds in a dusty case on the shelf doesn’t have the English subtitles. She can’t understand enough of the Mandarin—and it switches to Shanghainese and Cantonese, which makes it even more impossible. She does understand, when in the scene on the double-decker bus that one night, the guy moves up front to sit by the girl and says thank you, and she says why, and they both smile, but more to themselves, since they can’t see each other—they are both facing forward on the bus, and after thanking her, he has moved back to two rows behind her. She understands that the girl’s not asking why. Her why ends with a period. She understands that much.

  She doesn’t look as much, when she passes the Smith and 9th stop these days. She still listens to the announcement droning out the name. Smith and 9th Street. But it is smaller now, and shrinking still, a watery puddle evaporating to coin-sized, then a pinpoint. Not yet, but she can see it. If she doesn’t have to move too much, make too much of an effort, if she’s not distracted by a book she’s reading or her phone, she still looks out onto the platform. But only if she doesn’t have to twist around in her seat, or lean her head over way to one side. She still looks. Each person who glides by, who is not Jason the Mason, makes the sound of a thunk, a blip cutting up the panorama. Person, not him, empty space, person, not him, empty space, empty space, person, not him, empty space.

  Oh, he sees me, she had thought. Someone finally sees her. Before Jason the Mason, she had only ever experienced sight as emanating from undesirable French dudes whose soul-probing pupils seemed intent upon turning her into a swollen wedge of triple crème Saint-André cheese.

  On the Fourth of July, the last time she saw him, he had mentioned something about something being because she was a ghost. I’m not a ghost, she had said, laughing, because it was her habit to disagree with everything, and to laugh when confronted with something confusing.

  Now, she doesn’t see him, nor is she seen any longer. Now, there is just this naked ghost man, drinking a beer at her kitchen table, or sitting on the couch next to her watching a movie.

  The Sorry Part

  He apologized to her, in a text message. She knows she is not supposed to count this, because this is a text message, and also, because he has not said anything to her in eight months, during which he has moved to California, met some girl on a bus, and married her. But, but, that was what he was apologizing for.

  She can’t help it. She nods when Caroline says these supportive friend things, or, probably, they are not even supportive friend things, they are, like, decent human behavior reminders. She nods, but inside, she is very happy. This is a big deal, inside of her, away from Caroline, and conventional world decency. This is a big deal, because he exists again. This is a big deal, because it’s him they are talking about, and Caroline doesn’t know him. She admits that she herself doesn’t even really know him, know know him, because how can they, she, anyone, et cetera. BUT. She certainly knows him more than Caroline knows him. And, she has certainly known more men, loved and hated and felt ambivalence, toward more men, in her life, than Caroline has.

  Caroline was someone Lucy had really wanted to befriend, right when she met her. You could tell she had been a bold child. Lucy had not been a bold child. She had not w
anted to be, had not known to want that until much later. As a child, she had been pink, faint, a smudge. She had been like the person, or thing, you saw before you put on your glasses.

  The 38th Street Diner, situated as it is, in the middle of the block, on the south side of the street, is in perpetual shadow. It will never see the light of day, or at least not until or unless a majority of the surrounding high-rises disappear. The important thing about this is that she will never be able to sit in a window booth at the 38th Street Diner and be bathed in sunshine. She will never spend the morning of a 4th of July, with a guy in a green T- shirt and ironed pants, with whom she is in love, who broke her heart, later that day, about whom she would later think, I can’t believe this is the guy that has wreaked this, streaked such unavoidable red tape over so many future years, some guy, some pale average looking guy, in ironed pants, with whom she once had that 4th of July breakfast in that one diner in the sunlight when her heart felt as clean and bright and alive as the sun pouring in through the glass.

  Caroline picks at her cuticles, and then resumes saying words like “not cool” and “happy” and “but” and “else,” and so Lucy tunes out again. It is a very specific mode she has, and she thinks maybe everyone has it, when they talk to their mothers on the phone, basically a tuning-out, but she thinks some people might not have it as much, because then wouldn’t they recognize it when someone was tuning them out and stop talking on and on? Or maybe not? In any case, Lucy thinks she has it more, maybe because she is a water sign, and prone to watery zoning out, and escapism at all times.

  She thinks about how many people she has in her life, who basically say the things her mother would say, who basically say what she expects them to say, and then what use? Why say it, why meet up to listen to it? Not even actually listen to it, just sit across from it in a diner booth while tuning it out?