Breakneck

by Nelly Arcan

  Renald had met Rosine in high school in Chicoutimi, and produced his children one after another, mixing in a few encounters with men, always secret, underground, exhilarating. In the last years of his life, Rose found the courage to ask him questions, and the answers were a slap in the face and a door slammed shut: why had he married a woman, and how could he have had children with her?

  “When you’re like me, you have to have children young. Because after a certain age, it just doesn’t work with women anymore. You’ve got to have them when a stiff breeze is enough to get you hard.”

  From deep in her bed, Rose recalled her father’s words that must have had consequences for her, maybe even devastating, who knows, but she preferred to slip into sleep, far from him and the rest of the family.

  A BLUE SKY above them. Rose watching Julie sitting in front of her at the neon orange picnic table, slut orange, Rose thought, slut like a bitch, a bitch like Julie. Out of the corner of her eye, she was itemizing Julie who was looking at her glass, seemingly discouraged, as if it was giving her reason to worry, as if it was a chalice before which she had to weigh the pros and cons, liquid torment on a summer’s day.

  They were on the roof of the building, affected by the heat, already slightly drunk on the white wine they’d just opened. The sky was blue and immense, a field open to change and transformation, from clouds forming at breakneck speed, accidents of the weather that could drown you in torrential rain at a moment’s notice and, why not, another bolt of lightning, a coup de grâce, on the disembowelled guardrail, that visible injury that reminded Rose and Julie they were enemies and not friends, God saw them together on the roof and it was an outrage to His eyes.

  The movement of the world is kneading, tearing apart. Life as lived from within is fated to be twisted under its own weight and bleed, Rose told herself, her head still full of that image of the lightning on the guardrail, and the shoes flying down below, expensive slippers she’d found the next day in the middle of Colonial Avenue, crushed by car wheels.

  Rose had to find a way to return to her theory of the overabundance of women, her demographic theory of unhappiness that she’d always kept to herself, knowing deep down that she was exaggerating to impress. At one point, she reached into her handbag and took out a pack of cigarettes she’d bought for Julie an hour before, cigarettes for girls, baby girls, she’d mocked as she paid the Vietnamese corner store owner who never gave you a receipt for anything—fake cigarettes, long and ultralight, golden, with so little taste they were nothing at all, an impression of cigarettes, an empty movement of the hand toward the lips. Julie was shaken by that golden pack on the orange table, Rose noticed and relished it. But Julie’s green eyes were magnets that she couldn’t tear herself away from, and that changed things because she could see trouble brewing in those eyes, trouble only deepened that green, a vertigo green, eyes like an abyss. Rose hated her so much she had difficulty breathing, but at the same time she wanted to conquer her, stow her in her pocket to make sure she could keep Charles through the pact of friendship, but screw it, bullshit, Rose decided, screw the pact, screw this whole fucking story.

  Rose woke up that morning to lips that weren’t swollen at all, a new speed record, she’d worried about Charles being disappointed, how he’d lose his passion and might not want to touch her anymore. She’d undergone this operation a number of times always with the same results, but this time it was different, done with even greater skill than usual. Her lips were as spectacular as Julie’s eyes. If her lips and those eyes existed on the same face, the world would be lost, forced to its knees. No mouth in the world could be more perfect, more inviting, in that morning light her lips were as she’d always wanted them, but she knew this state wouldn’t last, her mouth would change like Dr. Gagnon always warned her when she asked about their life span. She knew she would atrophy, her mouth would move toward the thin line she’d first had as a mouth, if you could call it that, a gash forced on her by her mother Rosine, the opposite of carnal, an abhorrence.

  Rose watched Julie. Julie smoked, her face dark with torment in front of her glass of white wine. Julie and her magnetic eyes, a redhead’s green, her hair short and platinum, silvery reflections, Julie and her firm body, the four inches she had on her, Julie and her words, her turns of phrase, her manner above everyone else, her armour. This woman is fighting against something, alcohol maybe, Rose understood, remembering Bertrand’s story about her, weeks before, on the Plan B patio. A woman fighting the desire to destroy herself, she’d thought, to lead her body to its death, where her soul lay already.

  “Who fixed your lips?”

  Rose wasn’t expecting the question. She felt betrayed, outplayed. What she was hoping would be sublime had led to her fall; she’d been unmasked. The perfection seen in the mirror was revealed to be no more than the place of her origins, the zero degree of past time, Rosine’s gash, her father’s wrong gender, her lips, freshly emerged from their swelling, now disclosed what was underneath them, her beauty was a finger pointed at the disgrace she had attempted to correct. Then Julie moved onto her breasts, arrogance over arrogance, cutting, sadistic.

  “I don’t know who did your breasts, but I’m sure it’s the same person who did your lips. Your body has a signature, the work comes from the same hand. It shows.”

  Of course, everything could be seen, that was the great paradox of female vanity, the disguise, always the same, mass-marketed and purchased by women who then sold themselves to men, to buy new bodies that made men get harder. What else could she expect?

  Up on the roof, what occurred next was hazy. She had the vague sensation of the sky moving, its threat above her, it accompanied her theory about women and a dramatic aggregation of clouds, growing with the same intensity as her speech, painting the sky with fury. For the rest of her life she would remember her tirade as something that swept her away as she dropped the pieces she wanted to keep, to have mastered the situation with statistics that didn’t seem to interest Julie, but that revealed instead another scar entirely, the sickness of being one too many among others, her pussy that inspired no passion, rejected by her father and avoided by Charles who preferred the rest.

  They left for Plan B, falling headfirst into Rose’s world, splayed out before them, populated with women. The vision of the patio and the inside of the bar threw Julie into a trance, as if she were opening her eyes for the first time, harassing the women in the bar with questions: where were they from, where were they going, what should we do now? They ate, talked, and confided in alcohol. Julie revealed everything, or so it seemed to her, about Steve, and the inconsolable grief that had killed her. At one point Julie took Rose by the hand and kissed her, a warm new sensation for Rose who was kissing a woman for the first time in her life. It was a sexless kiss, sisters of the mouth, a symbol of two tongues touching to show the people around them that sisterhood wasn’t just some vain wish, it wasn’t an urban legend, it existed, true enough, through sexual exhibition in bars to get folks talking. Rose felt seduced by Julie who was seduced herself, and for a few hours her predictions seemed ridiculous and over-the-top, at least until Charles showed up at the Tap Room, where Rose’s restlessness—exacerbated by cocaine—forced her back to the predictions that were materializing faster and faster as the night wore on. Bertrand felt her disintegrating and tried to piece her back together with reassurance. Bertrand and his scraggly body, his wiry hair, his extravagant shirts covered in colours, Hawaiian flowers. Bertrand unsuccessfully tried to woo Julie, so he hated her too.

  “It’s just the drugs, Rose,” he said. “Coke makes you talk and forget the world. Nothing exists except what you have to say. Anybody will do as a listener.”

  “I know, but it’s more than that. It’s stronger than that. It was there before tonight. I’ve felt it for a long time. From the start.”

  Bertrand lit a cigarette then lit one Rose had been holding for some time now, letting Charles and Julie move off, walking fast, talking, on Mount Royal A
venue, toward their building.

  “Real feelings can’t resist cocaine,” he went on. “The drug eats them. When you’re high they fade away, but they come back the next day, and stronger than before because you’d lost them. You get attached to what disappeared, because it isn’t normal, that feelings disappear like that. The next day you’re scared. It’s the drugs, Rose.”

  But Rose was pulling away from the world, far from the couple, Charles and Julie, who were talking to forget her as she retreated, the witness to other couples, as she’d always been.

  Making a scandal was beyond Rose. When she contemplated other people’s pleasure, she could be at best reverent, like during the photo shoots, and at worst petrified, like that night. She and Bertrand didn’t want to follow Charles to Julie’s loft, knowing how much the two had to say to each other.

  “Don’t worry, Rose. You can’t fuck on cocaine, not when you don’t know the other person. Getting a hard-on is too much work, especially when you throw in alcohol. It takes way too much time. Let’s leave them alone and have our own little party, just you and me, at your place.”

  They went to Rose’s place, and Bertrand had started reminiscing about their time together, their trip to Mexico and their trip to Las Vegas where they almost married. A few hours went by, and Rose couldn’t think of anything but what might be happening on the other side of the hall. She imagined them talking, smoking, and drinking, but from between their words she could see Charles’ cock, the tip of it pointing at Julie’s breasts with their hard nipples, his tongue. Through Bertrand’s monologue she contemplated pornographic images of the contained attraction between two people, an attraction made of the stuff of destiny that finally gave way to flesh. Once Bertrand left, Rose understood she wouldn’t be able to sleep. She knew she would see these images, she pictured them already, it was her duty to see them.

  Rose walked out the door and spent several minutes in the hall between the two apartments, standing in front of the unlocked door. Even before she went inside, she knew they weren’t talking, they were already in bed. Charles and the noises he made guided her toward them, a ghost slipping into their intimacy, hugging the walls, making herself as small as possible, she who was too small as it was. Julie was giving herself, her eyes closed, on her back, her T-shirt above her breasts, as if absent, beautiful in her unconsciousness, while Charles masturbated with an intensity Rose hadn’t witnessed since their early days together, he took his hand from his cock for a moment to touch Julie’s breasts, then he grabbed it again and went at himself more furiously, making sounds that froze her to the spot, and that she would remember the rest of her life: Charles making sounds with his mouth but not for her, his hand coming and going over his cock but not for her, Charles and his panting noises like chains that bound her to Julie’s bed without her being invited into it, chains that bound her to what was happening between them that made them forget her, Julie unconscious and offering her body as she lay on her back and Charles keeping himself on the threshold of himself, about to explode, postponing ejaculation out of the pleasure of Julie’s breasts.

  Then at some point, Charles saw Rose and hesitated, his cock at the max, electric. He’d gone too far to consider her but not to consider her made it impossible for him to continue, at least not with any peace of mind. They made eye contact and it lasted painfully long, as if he was waiting for her consent to keep going, and Rose had to flee, knowing Julie had seen her, since she sat up in bed because she must have felt that Charles had stopped, she wore an expression of innocence, at a loss.

  Back home, Rose dialled Dr. Gagnon’s emergency number in a panic, it was his home number, it was the middle of the night, she didn’t know if he had a wife, or anything else about him, praying to God for him to answer and come and take her away, far from here, far from this place where she was disappearing from the world.

  VI

  * * *

  ALL CATS ARE GREY

  JULIE O’BRIEN WAS running on the treadmill at Nautilus. She was Nelly Furtado. She was feeling good, finally, she could hurt herself without shrinking, and listen to pop music at full volume, she was the Star, the woman who bewitches every man, a crowd of men who dream of nothing else but sticking their cocks in her. Her desire for sex was gone, but she retained the idea of attraction, she understood that sex was at the centre of all beings, the heart of all ambition. The women who faced the stage all dreamed of being her, with her pussy desired by all, a black hole, singing and dancing and doing everything effortlessly. The greatest pleasure of existence is to be idolized, sucking up people’s attention as you keep them at a distance, filling yourself with people without choosing them, taking their love and not giving anything back.

  The sweat that covered her body like a shroud exhaled the poisons, she thought, it breathed out the shit she’d been wallowing in for five days, it had been her life for years, shit that was a nest for vermin, the vermin of her cheap period, she thought, looking around, a period of screens, Botox, self-love, and invincibility, the Madonna period.

  Facing Julie who was Nelly Furtado were ten television screens, five of which showed people training with a smile and without a drop of sweat. They were tanned orange and ran as they made comments, with painted smiles, you could buy the machine that was making them run, so said the banner, in ten easy payments, and Julie imagined that machine in her loft, impossible to resist, in her mind she moved it to see if there was enough room. Some thirty members of the gym were running in front of those ten screens, five of which displayed information about physical exercise, which was all about how you felt inside, the soul, the screens claimed, wellness, self-esteem, orderly and healthy thoughts, welcome and positive like fridge magnets. On the other screens MuchMusic played, young naked women dancing without a care for each other, one next to the other, showing off their asses jiggling to the beat, hostile solitudes surrounding one man, the Leader of the Horde, the hip-hop singer, covered in gold, surrounded by undulating hips that opened up to pussy, holes that had never had children. Then Oprah, obese women, the tears of women who would never dance around a hip-hop artist, never be invited to faceoff against each other with their pussies, women who offered themselves up, but in vain. Then the ads, skin and bodies before and after, acne be gone, lines on faces now unlined, inverted countdowns to smaller waist sizes, skinnier than teenagers. Then CNN, the rumble of war, counting up the dead, the anonymous tide of veiled women, neither friend nor foe, neither submissive nor revolutionary, just veiled, CNN and CBC, the major news networks, were the other side of the story, the opposite and inverse face of the exercise rooms built for the viability and impermeability of bodies, machines designed to prevent the spillage of vital organs in trenches, the leaking of the self out of the self, in battle.

  Julie wasn’t watching the screens, she was a Star, she was watching herself on a stage around which she imagined a crowd, screaming and begging for her, see me, see me so I might love myself. She felt pathetic, she knew she was ridiculous. Tics of satisfaction flashed over her face, other gym members saw them and took them as signs of insanity, the proof that something wasn’t right, bats in her belfry about to take flight, haze in her mind that blurred her. But once again it was stronger than she was, the omniscient existence of God was just out of her grasp. It was like Marilyn Monroe’s desire to die that she’d read about in a book, that had her crying over passages where she was described as halfway dead already, a zombie. To be nothing and the fear that comes from that possibility—that was unbearable beyond not being fuckable anymore—the book about Marilyn revealed a truth: to be nothing is worse than being dead. Julie had understood through Marilyn.

  She kept running in front of the screens that made people run. She wondered if religion’s first function was to make sin the building block of men so they might attempt to turn their ego into a holy thing, and finally release it, abandon their ego so great, so overbearing, a face hungry for attention, devourer of others, a giant despot. These days everyone was their own
star and there was no more audience. God had died and kept his creatures from loving anything else but themselves, his creatures were forced to find truth in mental and physical health, and structure their lives around hygiene. The empty space where God had been was replaced by a billion trinkets, and now people were running on machines toward control, stability, and the celebration of their bodies, toward their eternity, perpetual brilliance.

  Julie was still Nelly Furtado. But there was something different in her usual thoughts, always the same, about the ways existence found to perpetuate itself. The crowd that was watching her sing “Maneater” had a new onlooker: Charles. He was part of the crowd, watching her too, at first an invader, he’d become the Eye whose gaze embodied all others, he was the Eye through which she was beheld. Julie felt herself in love, as close to happiness as a woman like her could be. Charles alone was reason enough to make her run on her machine, toward his eyes, and he was her neighbour in real life. She asked herself that question that only women about to fall in love ask themselves: what if he isn’t into me? And then: what if I was naturally vulgar, and my vulgarity like a howl among wolves? Yet this morning, under her door, she’d found a note written on a lined sheet of white paper, folded in half:

  Julie,

  I really enjoyed our evening. Even if it was weird, it was good. We should see each other again to talk about the documentary and, why not, life. Rose and I have separated. Not because of you, it’s just life. I think she’s doing well. She went to live somewhere else but she comes and goes, she has the keys. We have to be discreet, so write me a note and put it behind the newspaper rack, in the entrance.