Had I ever looked at a man and said to myself, “I want to keep you?”
The impossibility of it made me unsure of what I wanted. His attention had left me confused. Edgy, wandering around playing the events in my head over and over and got panicky when they had already started fading away. The smells were gone, the colors getting flatter until the memory hung in front of me like a laundered sheet, stained with a bitter bleached cartoon of what had really happened.
Men who lived on the sidewalk washed in the ocean, at the edge of the septic tap water creek… Men on the sidewalk called out to me. All over town they followed me pessimistically with their eyes. I was never left uncovered by their eyes. I shoved my hands into my apron pocket and stepped carefully around their black and yellow boiled-egg eyes. My shoes swept the dust out from under their didactic signage and the sight of my bare legs sticking out from under my skirt thickened the straps of cured turkey breast hanging in their sweatpants. I wondered what happened to all their women, where did they go? Did these women ever see the sidewalk start to creep into the corner of those black and yellow eggs watering in the center of the men’s faces? Do they know where to find them now? On this band of concrete tethered between the living and the dead, the waking and the sleeping, the forest and the city — out there somewhere pumping their fists to music they’ve never heard before?
He is a small-g god, crouched hidden inside a host body, siphoning my breath through host lips, animated and full of borrowed electricity. He grabs at me, to hold me, but his hands are different and I can feel his spine through his shirt, which makes me think of death and mortal things and I am confused. Being combined with one that is not just “one” is disorienting and I try to find a way around coming to any conclusions because there aren’t any.
Grizzled men sang on the sidewalk. They clutched kittens on leashes to their chests and nuzzled the little things awkwardly. There were so many men out on the sidewalk today. Some wore their tanned hides like a badge of honor. They liked sleeping on the beach, but the post office lobby would do nicely too. The men teased me from the street, somewhat vague accusations about being a “kitten hater,” but the truth was I just didn’t want to linger there listening to their broken singing any longer. The men were gonna come for me, the main one bellowed. Where did you guys come from I asked, and why does everything in your life need to be on a leash? The men on the sidewalk said, Look girl, if only we could get up from our places on the sidewalk you’d see exactly what kind of leash we’d fasten on you… a short one! Ha ha ha. A thick one, ha. And then their cheeks got redder and their eyes got stare-y-er and their arms tanned at hyper speed and they leapt up from their places on the sidewalk and strained to lumber toward me, roiling around on the curb all tangled in a thicket of rag pants and pocketknives.
Surfaced in a strange man’s house. He painted the undersides of my body with hot soapy water where a sleeping bag was half-unzipped and spread over me like a big purple scar. Light seemed transformed, the irregular cloud of his strange funk like a man-tree sprawled over my body. I could hear the soles of his boots from far away. I licked at the last drifts of sleep, opened my eyes but couldn’t feel anything else below the neck. I looked down and saw myself sleeping but felt a lively burr of clear tiles clanking around in my chest. He dragged me out from under a midnight paradise and sat me up at the table for breakfast. The roads filled with rain; he shoveled gravel outside the door, piled rugs in front of the doorway. I set myself up in his beach lair and it was as if the floodgates had opened and he now had a reason to touch me with an urgency that before would have been blasphemous, abstract, and suspicious. I tore into him making a mess with ferociousness like eternal night.
Messages from the immobilized seared through the airwaves, piercing the membrane through a small radio playing quietly late at night. Their stale grey eyes were closed in hibernation; the swallowed voice caught like a ball of wax in the throats of the immobilized. The sleep of the dead — from which they do not wake easily — penetrated by the enlarged fang creeping into the flesh as it is given, coolly, in the dead hours of the morning. The smells taken in by the immobilized pasted together the lapse, the jump cuts, the forgetting. The wash of memory pierced by that fang and its smell like fat burning on the stove, like lust plastered on your burning body, black like the smoke that escapes your mind through your breath. Your mouth an oven of lust, love smoldering in the dark like a growling stove, black smoke leeching out from between your teeth. You seethe from between your teeth (you seethe from behind my eyes). Black smoke creeps along the skin of your burning body in a tangle of mists, secrets, whispers.
He’s the one who stoops in the corner and laps at the foot of your bed. He is unforgiving of the limits of mercy, such lapping only reveals that much more death, that which dashes the flash of life from your forehead in a burning smile. He laughs smoke clouds, he laughs and smoke clouds his eyes and he laughs. He reaches for your burning body and he falls deathly quiet, smoke laughing in the caustic shadow on the wall at his back. Jerking with every convulsive swoon of pity. Diseased shadows spill over the bed. Out spill black bones onto the table and black bones in patterns of a secret code for which the key is obscure — perhaps it is “white.” Out spill a tangle of black bones like shadows of bones. The table quakes, casting negative shadows in white up through its surface, mingling within the tangle of black bones, the dream lurking in the crevices in among the tangle of black bones that quivers as squirrel skulls pop out of negative spaces, some turning black themselves.
The tangle of black smoke stands between us, that cushion of lust as we lap away at the burning at our sides. The black of your eyes is a poison pond I fall into as it falls into me without a sound, the silent torrent that shapes fissures and aches like a pox on your blackened body. The sound of sand burning blacker. He’s something new. Desire in exile. Black smoke of desire. Burning bodies of cream, yellow tide foam echoing up through a skin of steam in the sky of fire.
This realm of no return is a prison. We’re locked to the bed… Vaults are everywhere. The walls of this room are pockmarked with vaults, accordion-like seams for shadows and gathering places for the smoke that prowls the room. Every surface is covered in graves. Steam gathers and catches under brass grave markers that chime through the room when they are full. The sound of metal warming and expanding echoes in creaks and snaps across my field of vision. The graves are full, bloated with black smoke. Heat bangs at the door with fists of fire mist.
The Warlock smelled of all the spent fires in blackened pits up and down the beach. Little spines of broken sea kelp were trapped in his hair. You really live on the beach? I asked, and I knew the answer already.
He bathed in the ocean and rolled up his various clothes, first light of morning. He wasn’t going to give me anything. Silence coming from his part of the beach. He stared a little at my fingernails, which were pink but not at all shiny and said nothing. His fists grew at his sides when he saw the way the gulls salivated over what little scraps of food he had gathered, piled on the shore while he waded in the break. He would pummel those things when he saw what they had looted.
I was unprepared for this. I saw flies repeatedly smash themselves against him. Dead flies piled up on the ground at his feet. He had pummeled them with his fists. Piles of beaten flies lay like black raindrops.
He lumbered toward me and I stepped back almost aware that I should be running, and fast. But I felt the same impulse to remain, feet planted within snorting range of the enormous black horse. He was so close that his mane blew in my face. Shadows of black birds pooled at his feet, flaking into the sand. Brown stumps of sea-beaten driftwood twisted into fence posts, caging me. I was aware of some event vaguely earthless that brought them here.
Bees fell out of the sky. The ocean waves beat quietly against the jetty as sea lions and bands of kelp echoed quietly through the waves. Birds beat their wings against the waves; sea gulls fluttered and opened their beaks noiselessly against the app
roach of noontime… All over, animals are seeing through things into what rests beyond. They see through you and they see through me. All over, stones and dried kelp stuck together; sand stuck to the sides of birds, to the sides of rocks at noon. Sand burnished with patches of shade; cracks in the sand steamed up with thoughts of this impossible drift caught at the bottom of the world, this panel of land between water and silt. Silt of sand paste at water’s edge. Snakes and crabs grab what they can from the quickening silt, extracting pieces of kelpskin with their tongues and scoop-like mouths. Moss gave way to sand; moss devouring, making the sand a part of its futuristic body. Twisted gnarls of knotty bull kelp, twisted pressurized fibers straining against the unreal sun; dirt and twigs caught under giant foaming leaves, curled over into small caves at the bases of trees, foaming at the mouth: The forest and the beach at once. The forest fell from the bluffs above, down to the beach and there kept growing. All the sand crabs, looting worms’ and seagulls’ entrails, maintained their world underneath this beach grove. The roots made their way into the saltwater waves and rot and molt a layer of bark and then turned out sea snakes. Bare roots bred sea snakes; they slept in the knotted roots. They shed and molt and took off with a single stroke; salty snakes matted into the sides of sea-moss-crusted rocks teeming with salty custard swimming with snakes. Hissing rocks sparkling with salty sea snake eyes, big black sacks of coins twinkling in the heat. Fallen trees made homes for sea crabs; tide pools hosted large dollops of flesh like the undersides of horse hooves. Only those gulls and crabs and stones buried under this miniature forest knew both above and below and gazed up from the underside of these trees, up through roots and trunks into the uppermost branches, x-ray sights cast upward from under ground… He dragged me to his place in the sand surrounded by this forest in exile, having fallen from the sky, picking up where it left off, taking root and growing in an alien grove on the beach. He carried me to his shed-against-nature built of wood that shouldn’t be there, filled with fibers woven from scraps of alien hides. Skinned animals not from this earth or this time. The shed was full of flies. They beat themselves against the walls, forgetting, or punishing themselves for the trees and the shed that came out of the sky. The shed was hot and muggy and all the unkempt spores fell out of the trees and clogged the powdered thicket of light inside with nowhere else to go.
I choked on the spores in my sleep and he arranged patches of weather-beaten calico around me. His dingy breath was all over me, trapped in the bits of cloth wrapping me up tight. I felt as if he had eaten me — he surrounded me so completely — as he rose and fell with my breath so close in this calico cave. There’s doom in my heart and love in my eyes, he said, tickling the spores clouding the baked air. They rattled on the floor as if electrocuted.
A gurgling popped and sputtered in the corner. He assured me that it was just the sound of the baby trees slowly and meticulously prying their way up through the floorboards. “Surely you’d let your babies in,” I said still sleeping. Surely you wouldn’t pummel your sapling friends through the floorboards of this shed-against-nature… There was not a lot to be trusted on this parcel of unnatural land. All the laws were screwy and if you looked away for a moment you’d turn back to find things were even screwier.
He felt like shoving me away, explaining that he was no good for me, “a psycho slob,” almost as if explaining that he contracted cholera for a living. He was horrified when I said I liked him anyway.
I liked the priest with the wire whip… Fire had driven him away from town to live at the edge of the world on the beach. He spent his days trying to reconnect with the spark that drove him here. Crouched in the sand, he lives terrified of the ocean. Here lay the biggest depths of burning fire crystal lava resting curried in the black void, spit thousands of miles away from the sun. The fever chill burned away in his chest. He spat out black tar firebreath. The Warlock felt the weight of his lives caving in on this black. Death prowled the ridge overlooking the beach by day. At night he felt around in the dark for his chest and felt himself being opened to all the things he would do. Millions of seeds sounded off in the depths at the base of the black bay outside. Soundless creatures squirmed in a pool of unfathomable weight outside his hovel.
He was sick with ghosts. He chewed pieces of sand that blew up into his face. He didn’t give a fuck. He thought he could get another dog, but the smell of blood that pervaded his campsite would set it off barking all night. His face was whipped with wires where sand had blown up in it. He needed a dog to come sit in front of his tent to keep the smell of blood at bay. Sand on the beach made a horrible noise.
The Warlock lay back, reclining on a lawn chair, his partially digested vagrant attitude shooting out of the black pool of his mind. I had the uncomfortable realization that he could hear everything I was thinking — then I realized my hands were just giving it away. He never spoke. Rather, he seemed to spit words out in a reverse chewing process I soon came to know well. I felt confined in close quarters with a massive, quietly stewing animal who had been chained within yearning distance from the door its whole life. The soles of his shoes ground into the floor of his hovel; it was paved with salvaged pine pallets. He looked like he wanted to build a fire with my bones, to stack them like lattice in a pit especially dug for the occasion. My bones would be made out of wood, you see. He’d thought of everything, including what he was going to do with the rest of my body — probably stuff it, reconstituting the form. Adding a little more here and a little less there. Not particularly surprising. His eyes seemed to be already sizing me up for the alterations, scanning and burning holes where they came to rest.
“I can read thoughts too, you know,” I said without really meaning to — at least not out loud.
He stopped stuffing dead leaves into the cracks in the floor, “If you’re trying to say that you think I’m reading your mind, then I’d really like to know why you haven’t run like a fucking wild animal out of this door and straight into the nearest, coziest sheriff station. Assuming you’re turning this particular situation over in your mind at all, I’d be the first to congratulate you if you did just that.” His voice was grizzled, wrung out, slapped around. It had spent its life stripping the sheen from silverware.
“You piece of shit. What other kinds of patronizing crap are you going to lay on me while you’ve got me confined in your piece of shit cardboard shed? I can’t run away, you’re blocking the door. And if I did you’d catch me, you’d skin me alive and use my bones for firewood.”
“What a delicate little angel you are — ”
“You’re kind of godlike yourself. Only way more pathetic,” I said, pausing to take in the full measure of the poisoned man-presence he’d set down in front of me, “Why did you bring me here? Why did you trick me into coming here? What do you want with me?”
He held me down on a pile of garbage and rags lining the bottom of his place. Everything was running counter to the rules of nature that I thought I knew, even though I always tried to ignore them.
Outside the wind whipped large stems up into bundles that swept the dirt into vague patterns on the floorboards. I felt the animals — the most secretive ones — coming out of the woodwork.
I could feel them waking up all around me.
My mouth gaped open at the pounding shadow inside me as it released shadows of blackbirds, my stomach filled and I held my head back and wandered into the dreams of an enormous black horse, who understood the violence lurking in my shadows. The tips of his tail pricked at my arm and I fell in so close, so doomed in the proximity of what I could hardly manage to suppress in one massive scream; striving to tear myself from this big black horse from which I derived so much, I knew I had to throw it all at the wind, throw it all away. I clawed at the chest of the man I could not resist. When he went for my reed-like neck I tore at him and tore at him. I wallowed in my rape by the Warlock because in my dreams it was not rape in that he never sought to limit my orgasm. His mane whipped at my face, I didn’t try to
sweep it away. My hair swirled in the supreme emulsion of dreams dipped in shadows, and the dream stopped — the shadows stopped — and the sky ceased to be at all. And I was alone with the viscera, alone with the escape I had devoured at the root of the flower; I spat myself into the sea.
I was still awake. I hadn’t slept yet even though it was morning.
Blood poured over my exposed throat as pale as water. Dried and stiffened into a new, dull skin. A phantom burst touched his lips and the blood was pale as water. Microscopic beads of torment blazed through my veins and burst in his mouth. Tears gathered in the corners of the eyes of a carcass ripped open, sighing, crying. Exhaling deafening shadows of flies…
He lives as an animal, a plunderer on the beach, making a nest out of the fractured cast-offs of dead alien trees. I was a crumb upon which his eye fastened, he prepared to pounce and devour. He gorged himself and the dust caught in his mouth.
His tongue fastened to my body like a sucker. His thoughts, his eyes inched over my body like a lead weight. Contesting every surface. Pushing it deeper. The core sizzled and ached with pieces of metal — little lead weights — rattling around in the center. An unbearable stain ached like a lead weight, fusing with my body, oozing juice. The vibration jogged my memory. Memories of past migraines flood back into view. I was afraid that if I thought about them, remembered them, that the headaches would come back as if they were no more than extra strength remembrances, a way my body made me mark a memory for future indexing. I tasted every single one’s sharp nasal saltiness. I received on my lips the kiss of suffering that blinded all feeling but its own. I labored to tend to it, cultivate and nourish it, so it would grow up and move away.
The Orange Eats Creeps Page 16