by Jesse Miller
In a secret semaphore, they all raised shiny cellular phones synchronistically to their small, delicate features. From the tornado-green glow of the screen, all of the color was chased away from their faces, and at once Thom was in a room filled with ghosts. He stood immediately and quietly counted out the paces to the bathroom.
*
He could feel where sweat had collected on his undershirt and in hanging pools under his arms. Soon, the collection of noise, the heaping of noise—the sound of everyone talking over everyone talking over everyone over the sound of the singer singing over the instruments over the rustle of flesh against nylon over the sound of digestion over the inescapable operating noise of life—began to wobble until Thom felt it would topple, pouring all of the detached noises, the amputated limbs of various conversations, on top of him.
But the music broke into a soft polite lip, and he followed. He lit another cigarette off a twitching hospitality candle and pitched in a smoke-covered bar or two privately to help along the leaning chorus.
Please don’t be long. Please don’t you be very long.
Thom tipped his glass backward but just let the wine splash against his lips without swallowing a drop. Through the doorway he saw Heather’s outline. The drinks were in the kitchen—they were all in the kitchen, and it would be a hassle to get another. How much is enough?
He lifted his eyes to the ceiling. They were there. He lowered them to the floor. There they were. Every direction he went. How much should be allotted for any one part? Heather had tits like the Venus of Willendorf. Even from across the room, there they were, like insomnia for the eyes. They seemed to have gravity about them, a kind of nutrition, he thought, as he counted six people, Samantha included, clustered around her.
He suddenly began to feel horribly small. Not that he was shrinking, and not that anything was getting larger, but that it had been that way since he arrived, yet he hadn’t noticed until now. Thom could sense it. He knew it was coming. The climate was perfect. October is a lung you fill and hope it holds until April. The last round before it really gets messy. It’s just a matter of time.
Thom walked into the kitchen as Samantha, ruddy with wine, pulled a glass from her lips.
–Get my head around it? I couldn’t even get my mouth around it!
Heather locked eyes with Thom. The room was as still as a Sears and Roebuck catalogue.
Into the frozen collection in the kitchen, Thom reached through an opening, retrieved a bottle of red, and poured into the silence. The wine surged to the lip of the glass and overflowed onto the counter. He brought the glass slowly to his jaw.
–Pardon me ladies, I’ll leave you be.
Thom watched Samantha, looking on as the wine ran in small purple rills from the counter and slipped onto the floor. She cupped her hand to collect the remaining drops, as Thom slid out of the room. Heather reached for paper towel and called after him.
–Thom, c’mon, stay. It’s just getting interesting! I’ll tell you about Tom and Jerry and how they used to drink their own…seed. Right down the gullet.
He opened his mouth to demur, but nothing came out. He waited until after his first footstep into the adjoining room before pouring the entire glass down his throat. He knew what would follow.
* * *
Section II
French Inhailing
3:00AM- On the origin of young Thomas Evans’ first encounter with both cigarette smoking and skinhunger. god, Kelly Branson was a piece. also, an illuminating discovery in the sky.
He kept trying to walk straight, but could only weave back and forth. A dull ache stirred up from his balls. Two apples being twisted off a tree. A broken egg clung to the center of his chest. He was, at the very least, drunk.
The street was bare. Light hollowed out all it could from the darkness but not a drop more. Leaking off metal tubes, bubbles of white light laced the empty path before him. An alignment of planets. It seemed a mistake to be outside, that at any moment the cool clip of steel handcuffs would lock his body into place. A child’s fear.
He fumbled a pack of cigarettes from his coat pocket, dropping it twice, but eventually brought one to his lips and a flaring match to the other end. He crumpled the pack and watched as it fell to the ground.
Kurplunk.
That should be the sound everything makes.
As he dragged, as tobacco became smoke, something became nothing, he unwittingly pulled open the wrappings of a tiny memory…
He didn’t know how to hold it the first time. The paper tube felt like a pencil but shorter. He couldn’t figure out the fingering on it. But Kelly could coax two pale strands of smoke out of her lips and ring them through her mouth. When the smoke ran up her nose, it looked like she was being rewound. She called it: French inhaling.
She could launch ten smoke rings, one after the other, constructing a tunnel that hung in the still air of the car before it twitched and fell apart, ring by dissolving ring. Thom gagged but forced his first one down.
Inside, the car grew foggier and foggier, as though they were building a cloud. He rubbed his hand that was down her shirt and couldn’t help caressing the palm, where Kelly’s nipple had been moments before. For some stupid reason he remembered a lynch and conflagration sermon from some Sunday school years ago and recalled the teacher drawing a circle in his palm in permanent magic marker at the beginning of class, and he kept showing it to the saucer-eyed flock scattered around a small wooden table.
Thom leaned in, slowly, trying to catch his lips on her breath like a fishhook, but the car was turning into a blue lung that throbbed slowly in an abandoned parking lot.
Thom reached for her chest and Kelly pulled away.
–I’d probably fuck an older guy. If he loved me.
Who knows why she said it. She says a million things. Thom touched his palm and imagined his hand was empty, a tiny circle at the center. Later that night, with the taste of smoke still lingering on his lips, he dreamed of them, cigarettes, but in dreams, the cigarette tips and nipples—hundreds of nipples—were one and the same. Hundreds of packs pirouetting in the air. Blond filters. Transparent paper dresses. He craved them all and wanted to eat them like food. Little salty fish sticks. He wanted to eat the cigarettes and the nipples and to put an end to the hunger and be satisfied, but there didn’t seem to be enough in the dream to kill the craving. He wanted to put it all in his mouth, Kelly and her unseen breasts, and the block they lived on, and Kelly’s older sister with strawberry curls, and her boyfriend with the lazy eye like a lure, and the ribbiting leather couch they used to roll around on when he was younger and under the rule of being babysat, and the couch itself, put the whole goddamn slippery enormous plum of the world in his mouth and chew. It was all so fucking crazy…
Thom continued to walk along the empty street, away from his apartment. When he turned the corner, one hundred thousand flash bulbs dinted at once. His eyes were steeped in thick moonlight. The hanging ball above leaked an ocean of milk.
It was so near. It was a fly ball from the diamond. A diamond itself. He wanted to wrap his hand around it and pluck the jewel from the sky. Study it. Learn by feeling the hollow places and the rocky imperfections. Put it on a mantle. Show his kids. And then crush it like an egg in his hand.
Like it was nothing.
Like it was hollow.
A used up pack of smokes.
He wove and wove, passing house after silent house. Step after step he walked, straddled between the lines of faded paint on the street. He noticed how lights left on at night for comfort or protection broke through, making a softly glowing aisle. The light was for him.
He walked on down the aisle, and his shoes clacked against the asphalt with a developing cadence. Kurplunk. Kurplunkurplunk. The lights blurred. He tried to adjust his eyes but couldn’t.
A hush broke over the street after every step. A sound and then nothing. A stress and then silence. Hushed were the houses vibrating with soft light. Hushed were the cats an
d the dogs coiled in contentment. Hushed were the homeowners tucked between two velvety sheets underneath a dream.
The whole of the nightworld blurred. Light became shadows, stretching off of objects, whispering to each other. Connecting things. Each step he clapped on the cool street became involuntary, less noticeable than breathing. He was being pulled. Lulled down a sandy river toward the light that rattled against the sky.
The light was for him. He bathed in it, uncovering wings. There was no silence now. Kurplunkurplunkurplunk. He closed his eyes, spreading his arms as wide as he could. He saw blue and red dots, the light of ruined worlds pinned between his mind and eyelids. The dots joined, fingers interweaving, and smashed white.
The light was for him.
His feet pulled faster at the street. The silent houses opened and then began to scream by. His heart pitched his blood forward. He was rising. Off of the earth. Above the street. Above the house lights. Above the twiggy autumn trees. Above the air. Rising moonward. Thom’s mouth fell open, and the noises in his head leaked into the night.
–Don’t you see, these are your lights. Those stars, those are for you!
Kurplunkurplunkurplunk.
–This is your vigil. These are for you!
Kurplunkitybunkity.
–Are you hanging behind the moon?
Kurplusscaprice.
–It’s all for you!
Curious city.
–All of it, all!
Curiosity.
The mumbling of a motor grew louder and louder. His feet were stiff on the street, inches from the curb. The aisle was no longer soft or glowing like rows of sweet candles. The leaves had left the trees, but the branches were thick and long, hanging like hands that cover eyes at a slasher flick. He froze. A torrent of nausea cut his stomach and toppled his body. His palms ran aground and two berserk twitches rippled through his torso. He vomited.
The snarl of metal approached. His neck shivered into a crisis as his stomach broke open again. He must have French inhaled the last one.
Chapter Four
Section I
B. J. WAY
9:00PM- A continuation of the occurrences at the masquerade party, including the revelation of a certain prior suitor, and an encounter with a butterscotch blonde who looked exactly like Kelly Branson.
1) Well, he didn’t actually know for sure what would follow, but he had a pretty damn good idea.
2) He had never actually touched on the subject. It was like avoiding confirmed kills with a vet.
3)He couldn’t, really. It was not for him.
4) A word portrait of sexual congress involving Samantha and another seedy monster. Well, it didn’t make sense to know anything about it, really.
5) He knew she wasn’t wearing a keyhole bed sheet when they met.
6) To know more would be ghastly, like watching the cow be slaughtered before its half-cooked flesh sweats and fills the dinner plate, then cools and tightens up all the blood.
He poured a cupful of punch. A poorly sliced pineapple fell from the ladle and washed through the cup’s current. It surfaced, uncovering layers of fruit flesh that rocked at the mercy of the red tide.
But from what he had overheard and pieced together, cut loose from the tangles of many conversations, it went down like this:
7) She was seventeen; he, the deeder, was someone named Jonah, Oh, Jonah, was older, twenty-four, twenty-five, thirty-five, fifty-five, something like that.
8) The condom broke on Jonah ah ah ah yes, which seemed like a myth or something in Thom’s mind, given his anatomy, though Thom was well within the standard fitting index of the nearly universally serviceable Stud Rubber.
9) Samantha grew a small spool, knew as it coiled like a fiddlehead in her stomach for a few months until she sold her bike or Jonah’s, Oh Jesus yes, Jonah right there, bike or the television set or Grandma’s broach or something to pay to have her first-time shucked from her body.
Thom stirred the punch with his finger, panning the room. Human cityscape. Blocks. One block was glowing, moving. The angles bent into curves. He had seen her before. Some other party? The last time it was summer, he seemed to remember, when he noticed the small webbed fringe of her pink brassier set against her white tank top—the border of a little tongue swimming in an ocean of teeth.
Or was she wearing a blouse, some business blazer thing? Or a cheerleading…no? He couldn’t remember. His hands twitched slightly, and he steadied the cup of punch he held against his lips. Or? His eyes fluttered. He slipped in and out of a memory he wanted back but couldn’t find. Her image and where she was arranged in the conveyer belt of his existence rolled across his big grey dream reel and seemed utterly vital, though regrettable, if not confoundingly inaccessible. Her face, the rise and shine of her countenance, the slopes of her back and chest were all so agonizing. She was a sealed, precisely initialed, wax-dripped letter of recommendation you could never ever open.
He spun the cup in his hand and watched the contents curl tighter and tighter. She was across the room now, flanked not by one but two Elvises! An early and a later one. And though, of course, it could seem daunting, these two similar figures, these two interlocking but antithetical versions present at once, it was nice to see an equal representation, as so few have the august constitution and genes to wear the jeans of the former. The Hunkahunka had real meatgreasy muttonchops that curled backward and twinkled like sealskin. A gold cross swung drowsily from his neck.
Thom glanced at her every few seconds but reeled in his gaze before it could be received. Return to sender. His eyes fluttered, but he couldn’t unfrown his face. As the man in the thousand-eyed rhinestone suit stood still inside the tornado’s winking eye of his own mesmeric outfit, Thom watched the younger one jabber and toy with her, sliding his hand down her shoulder to the small of her back. Thom felt at once sickened and censorial; all so very, very white knuckle Ed Sullivan deep down inside.
He looked over to Sam and felt a seed of guilt bloom deep in his stomach and slowly rise on a long, prickly stem of nausea that climbed and climbed through the contracting vase of his throat. He pretended to admire the decor of the floral kitchen and not the blonde, but he immediately felt the nibbling of loneliness when he pulled his eyes off of her skin.
And then the two Elvises…Elvi parted, and a kind of sloppy Europop piped up and rolled over the room, almost physically forcing the crowd asunder. She emerged holding an empty cup, wrapped in a soundtrack, approaching Thom: Caretaker of the Punch.
There, alone, she was waterlogged. Her pink lips glistened as if she spoke only in a language of water. He imagined sweeping his hands down her freckled shoulders, his eyes frozen on hers out of respect and fear, transfixed, and then inward, brushing just the slightest underbelly of her breasts. And then his tongue out around her naval. Completing a circle. And then the delicious treat of finding the firmness of her hipbones without a spray of fat. The spine of the ocean. The aroma of her inner body, held like a thought inside, was about to babble out of her.
–Nice hat.
Her voice was rougher than he imagined, like it hadn’t been used in a while and was trying to rasp its way into a fluid operation.
–Ah, thanks.
He tried to resist the urge, but his retention barrier immediately gave out. They can see through walls.
–It’s, ah, life size.
–Eeeeeeeyeah.
She nodded her head, but her eyes looked past Thom, tethered to the adipose Elvis now standing near the window, alone.
–Ah, what’s your…what’s your costume?
–I’m a…
The music swelled. Thom leaned in closer to her. He could smell the perfume dripping off her tanned flesh, her freckles creeping together like miniature clusters of cornflakes, and his desire turned to desperation. He craved more than air, more than booze and nicotine, more than heaven in that moment, to slide along the glistening tracks of perspiration that covered her skin.
–I’m sorry, w
hat are you supposed to be?
He leaned closer and tried to impregnate her with his breath, stretching the S sounds into aural lassoes. She withdrew immediately and began rubbing her ear.
–I’m going as your wet dream.
Thom watched as she turned and walked across the room back to the bigger E. She leaned into the Later King, then turned and slowly mouthed two words from across the room at Thom:
–F O L L O W—USSSSS…
Thom placed the punch on the table. Across the room, nothing had changed. Samantha was still surrounded by Heather and company and more. Samantha’s head was snapped back in a massive guffaw that pierced through the room. It was all an enormous tailpipe of an evening. He looked back at the Elvis group and noticed them waving him over. What did that mean?
In Saturday morning cartoons, when the freshly baked pie has been left to cool on the Donna Reed windowsill, the rakish wolf will float over the air on a thread of aroma. In that moment, Thom was that wolf. He followed the rift they left between bodies as they passed through the crowd.
Another Elvis wearing gold colored plastic sunglasses bopped around outside in front of the adjoining building, and the man tightened a fist around a roll of $20s as Thom approached.
–They’ve already started, but it’s still twenty bucks. And don’t pull her hair.
Thom froze and stared at this new, less authentic version of Elvis. Curly hairs sagged out through the opening of his jumpsuit, which was a size too small. He opened his wallet thoughtlessly and surrendered two languid tens. Elvis pulled open the door. Thom couldn’t see the King’s eyes.
He stepped into a blacklit hallway and sedulously followed the sounds of the crowd down a hall, toward the back of the building. A few costumed men leaned against the hallway, looking for cigarettes. The music came from behind a yellowed sheet stretched across a doorframe. Thom pushed inside.