Lullaby for the Rain Girl

by Christopher Conlon

  He’d resolved to save her. He made her eat well, exercise. They went for long walks together, mostly far from the main streets where people would turn and stare at the girl with the scars. Instead they strolled in woods, near lakes. They ate at roadside restaurants. He told jokes, which brightened her. They had good days.

  But always—always—her sorrow returned. The weeping. The screaming into her pillow. The ever-darkening scars.

  He no longer believed that he could save her.

  # # #

  Watching her day after day, night upon night, he found his mind wandering into strange, crepuscular places, toward shadow-haunted memories he’d not thought of in decades, old pains and sadnesses and humiliations. He was helpless, he knew. Trapped. No, he could not save her.

  # # #

  “Robert?”

  “How—how do you feel?”

  A pause. “I’m so hot.”

  The smell was overwhelming in the room now. As he looked at her it seemed as if she must literally burst into flames at any moment, the burning odor was so powerful. He could see few of her features now; she was covered over almost completely with the awful blue-black scars.

  “Robert?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will—will you make love to me?”

  “Robin...you’re not...you can’t...”

  “I want you to.”

  “I’m afraid to touch you.”

  “Don’t be. It’s all right. Please.”

  “I’ll hurt you.”

  “You won’t.”

  He lay beside her, studying her charred, leathery face. He reached to place a hand on her shoulder but drew back. He realized suddenly that he was crying, that he had been crying for a very long time.

  # # #

  He had a dream: flame-spark, smoke-swirl, long screams reverberating through caverns of hollow darkness. His mother was there, drunk, accusing, eyes huge and glowering and spiraling wildly like kaleidoscopes. His father, teeth big and gleaming and sharp as a saber-toothed tiger’s, reaching to him, ripping at his hair, pulling him, shaking him. No-good shit-eater! Useless punk! He woke: but the waking was not different from the dreaming, not now: he was everything they’d said, he knew. There was the incontrovertible evidence, there before him: the girl, the burning girl, motionless now.

  Was she dead? he wondered. He couldn’t be sure. Perhaps she was breathing, very shallowly. Perhaps there was movement in her eyelids. He leaned to her chest and thought he sensed a heartbeat. But it could be his own heart that he was hearing. Perhaps there was no difference between them now, their two hearts together, beating, not-beating.

  Sweat-drenched, he turned onto his back and stared at the fan spinning overhead. He was very hot. Then he glanced toward her once more. She looked no different. The odor of burning was sickeningly strong.

  The moving air felt strange on his skin, somehow. He wondered about it. After a time he raised his hands and looked at them, the blades of the fan behind appearing to slice at them again and again, endlessly.

  His hands were covered with scars.

  9

  Much of it is a blank to me now. The middle of the night, darkness. Weeping. A great deal of weeping. She was fired from the restaurant.

  # # #

  “Alice?”

  “Hey, little bro. How’s it going?”

  “I—fine. I just thought I’d call...”

  “So how’s life?”

  “Life’s life’s good.”

  “How’s the roommate working out?”

  “Good...good.”

  “Keeping the rent paid?”

  “Sure.”

  “You okay? You sound kind of...”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  # # #

  Frozen, helpless, I carried out my tasks at school and at the restaurant like an automaton. I couldn’t bring myself to try to take her to a hospital, though I knew that was what she needed. I searched every day for signs that she was recovering: a better-than-average appetite for breakfast, her laughter at a TV sitcom, her managing to get dressed and going out to the store. I clung to such things because there were few of them by that point. Mostly she stayed in bed, or else she sluffed about the apartment naked or in a ratty old bathrobe of mine. She smoked a lot, cigarettes and weed. So did I.

  I never showed her “The Burning Girl.”

  But she seemed quite vividly present when we were in bed together. She’d stopped writing—so had I—but at night we still fucked as physically as before, especially if we turned on the video camera. I never hit her, as she asked for again and again. Nonetheless our sex had a violent quality to it that was as disturbing as it was addictive. She begged me to do things which couldn’t possibly bring her any pleasure, things that could only cause pain. I did them—at least some of them. I found myself growing angry during sex, feeling all my rage and frustration—at Rachel, at Sherry, at my own life—pouring itself out, and I would grab her bodily, hurl her onto the bed, fuck her fast and hard and dirty, practically rape her. But she encouraged me all the way. I would be satiated by the end, and disgusted. Later she would watch the tape, the glow from the television screen illuminating her smiling face.

  # # #

  A bright late-summer day, early September, the light broken and splintered by the sycamores and tanbark oaks all around us. We’ve taken a drive into the foothills, a few miles from home, then left the car just off a side road and tromped a couple of hundred yards into a densely-wooded area covered with old leaves and faded blossoms. Sugar bush, snow drops. We find a tiny trickle of a river, the sunlight flashing off it and dazzling our eyes. We can no longer see the car; it feels as if we’ve trundled into deep wilderness. Rachel has been unresponsive much of the day, managing only monosyllabic answers to my questions: Should we go out for lunch? Do you want to go downtown? Would you like to go for a drive? She hasn’t bathed in two days, and looks slightly odd without her various piercings—she doesn’t bother with them now, instead leaving them in a little pile on the table by the bed. She can hardly be bothered to get out of bed at all except to go to the refrigerator or drop down in front of the TV for a while. I used a payphone the day before to call some mental health facilities, to try to get some idea of what to do; they all told me to “bring her in,” but I have no idea how to broach the subject to her. I’m afraid of her exploding, running out the door, leaving me: I can’t imagine the apartment empty, without her, myself alone, perhaps forever.

  I manage to get her into the car, though she evinces no particular enthusiasm for driving anywhere. She perks up, though, as we enter the foothills, which are heartbreakingly gorgeous this time of year.

  “Want to walk a bit?” I ask.

  She shrugs. It’s better than a “no,” so I find a place to pull off the road and we go exploring. It’s easy, in the Santa Barbara foothills, to step only a few yards from the road and feel you’ve arrived in some unspoiled Eden: it feels that way now, the two of us crunching the leaves and twigs under our feet. Rachel scowls intensely, her eyes on her feet as she walks. It’s cool under the trees and then warm again when we come out into the sunlight. I hold her hand for a time; it rests listlessly within my own. Finally we stop at the tiny ribbon of river, or creek—it’s only a few inches wide, hardly there at all.

  Rachel sits, staring at the water. Her hair is askew, her face greasy. But she’s moving, at least, looking around, noticing things. It’s better than the zombie-like girl who occupies the apartment now.

  “Pretty,” I say at last, lamely.

  “Mm-hm.”

  After a while she sighs. She reaches to the water, cups some in her palms, and splashes it on her face.

  “Cold,” she says. “Feels good.” She takes another handful and drinks it. “Tastes good, too.”

  I try some myself. I’m surprised at how cold it is. The water is delicious. It seems to both relax and invigorate her: she sighs, stretches, drops down onto her bac
k and stares up at the branch-broken sky.

  “Thanks for bringing me here,” she says. “It’s nice. It’s great.”

  “Good.”

  “I think I’m sort of missing...nature, you know? I never thought I would. I never thought I’d want to see dirt again. I had eighteen years of dirt.”

  “Nothing wrong with dirt,” I say, smiling, and dropping a few bits of it into her open palm.

  “I know. This is obviously totally different from North Dakota, but still, it’s the earth, you know? Dirt. Sky. Water. I don’t know, Benja-me-me. I feel lost.”

  She shakes the soil from her hand and takes mine, grasps it firmly. We both stare at the sky for a while. It’s lovely, being there with her, yet I feel myself overcome with sadness. Something feels fleeting about all of this. Too soon we will head back down the road, too soon we will return to the apartment and the darkness which seems to be enveloping her, us.

  She turns toward me then, propping her head on her hand. She reaches to my pants, unzips my fly.

  “Here?” I say.

  “Shut up.”

  She strokes me for a while. My body is slow to respond. Finally she stops and takes off her shirt. My hands roam. More clothes come off. Finally we’re naked atop the soft soil and leaves next to the creek. She gets on her hands and knees and I mount her from behind. It’s intoxicating, there in the middle of nature, under the fractured blue sky. But as we do it I realize that she has begun to cry. Sobs wrack the body before me.

  “What is it?”

  She doesn’t respond. Neither does she stop crying. Finally I pull away, all desire gone. I stand and move in front of her. She remains there, on all fours, weeping quietly.

  “Rachel?”

  She looks up, tears staining her face, her hair in her eyes. She grabs at me and pulls me to her, into her mouth.

  “Rachel...I don’t think I can...not with you like this.”

  She stops then and looks up at me. She doesn’t take her hand away. She has a firm hold on me.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I say. “It’s okay. We’ll put on our clothes and...”

  “Piss on me,” she says.

  “What?”

  “Piss on me.”

  “Rachel, I’m not going to piss on you. Come on.”

  “I want you to.”

  “No.”

  “Please?”

  “No.”

  Her grip tightens on me. “I won’t let you go,” she says.

  “Cut it out,” I say, trying to push her hand away. But her grip is strong. I look down at her. Her eyes are strange. She looks somehow different, wild, off. “Rachel, stop it. I mean it.”

  “So do I.”

  I pull again, but this time she brings her other hand up and grabs my testicles.

  “Rachel, this isn’t funny.”

  “Piss on me. Piss on me and I’ll let you go.”

  “Rachel, goddamn it...”

  Her grip tightens on my balls. “I’m not kidding,” she says.

  “Rachel...”

  “That’s all you have to do.” She grins then, oddly, crookedly. Her grip on me tightens a little.

  I consider shoving her or kicking at her, but abruptly I find myself with an overwhelming need to urinate. It hits very quickly. No doubt Rachel’s grip has something to do with it.

  “Rachel, let me go.”

  “No.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “So am I. Just do it.”

  “Why? Why do you want me to?”

  “Because I’ve never done it.”

  “Rachel...”

  “Do it.”

  And then, God help me, the urge becomes impossible. A few drops of urine come painfully out, dribble in the space between us. She tightens her grip on my balls but loosens it on my penis. The flow rushes from me then. I watch appalled as she aims it into her face. She closes her eyes and it splashes into her hair, onto her forehead, down her cheeks. She grins weirdly. Then she looks up at me. She opens her mouth. The flow runs over her tongue, over her teeth. She swallows once, twice. At last, after what seems a dismal eternity, the flow ebbs and stops.

  She lets me go.

  I stagger away, disgusted with her, disgusted with myself. After a moment I look back at her again. She still hasn’t moved. Our eyes meet. She keeps grinning at me. Finally her expression changes, grows dark, and her head jerks. She vomits then. Once, twice, three times. Awful retching sounds. I just stare at her, hopelessly adrift, without the slightest idea of what to do or why.

  Eventually she looks up again, the mad gleam in her eyes and the grin again on her face. Strings of translucent vomit hang from the corners of her mouth, slowly stretching to the ground.

  Then she says, in a hoarse and raspy voice: “Let’s do it again.”

  10

  “Let’s fuck,” she whispered into my ear, some days or weeks later.

  “I don’t want to. Not the—the ways we’ve been doing it, Rachel. Not those ways. It’s—”

  “It’s okay. C’mere. I understand. We’ll make love.”

  “Like we used to?”

  “Like we used to.”

  “Promise?”

  “Uh-huh.” She looked at me, her naked face thoughtful and affectionate. “Turn on the camera. We always do it better when the camera’s on.”

  I put in the tape and turned on the camera. She sat up, stroked me gently for a few minutes.

  “I love you, Benja-me-me,” she said quietly. “I swear to God I do.”

  Finally I got into bed with her. It was slow, it was sweet. It was gentler than we’d ever done it, as if we were two broken vessels only just held together with glue and masking tape, threatening at any moment to crack, to shatter. We were careful with each other. There was no anger, no aggression, no need to hurt or be hurt. The touches were tentative. The kisses were soft. She came quietly, sighing, and then I did.

  I switched off the camera and we lay in each other’s arms for a long time. I couldn’t have known, then, that it would be the last time we would ever do this, the last time forever.

  # # #

  A few days later it rained.

  The bed sheets had shit stains, piss stains, blood stains, come splatters, bits of stale food all over them. I didn’t care. I’d missed shifts at work again and again. I missed classes. I didn’t know what day it was. Every day was like every other: darkness, light, darkness, Rachel next to me, above me, below, weeping, moaning, screaming in her sleep and when she was awake. Knocks came at the door: the rent was overdue. Mail was shoved under the door: the light bill, overdue.

  “Fuck ’em,” she would mumble, burying her face against me. “Fuck them.”

  I remained just functional enough to keep things together. My workplace attendance, like my classroom attendance, was erratic. But I got there most of the time, waited on tables in a bleary daze, did enough homework to not fail classes. We were behind on bills but never so far behind that we were threatened with eviction, never so far that they shut off the electricity. That was autumn: lurching from one place to another, unaware of what I was doing and indifferent to it if I wasn’t with Rachel, if we weren’t together in bed, sleeping, dreaming, fucking. The days seemed to back into one another in a hazy, indeterminate jumble.

  But the day it rained I woke up and knew I had to do something.

  It never rains in Santa Barbara, at least in memory: of course it does. But never for very long, and it’s not a cold rain, so I didn’t own a raincoat or even an umbrella. Neither did most of the people I knew. It was a shock to realize that it was not just raining, but pouring torrentially. The sky was gray and half-dark. The sound of the rain hitting the window filled the bedroom.

  On the day it rained I woke up and realized that it was winter.

  The thought frightened me. I tried to remember the fall: there was almost nothing there in my mind, as if my synapses had all burned out.

  What was happening to me? To us?

  I sat up in bed
, looking down at her. Something about the unexpected sound of the rain had jolted me, allowed me to see things objectively for the first time in months. Rachel was on her stomach, her face toward me. I was shocked by at her appearance. She had lost weight, a lot of it: her spine seemed ready to push through her skin. Her hands seemed thin and spindly. The cheek that was upturned in sleep was sallow and sunken.

  The thought horrified me, but I couldn’t stop it from entering my brain. She looked like a Holocaust victim.

  “Oh my God,” I said aloud. “Oh my God.”

  I stood, suddenly scared of this place, this girl. Breathing quickly, I stepped to the bathroom and showered and brushed my teeth. That helped. Then I went to the kitchen and ate an orange.

  “You up?” I heard from the bedroom, a weak croak.

  “I’m up.”

  “Come back to bed.”

  I stepped back into the bedroom and surveyed the filth of the bed we’d been sharing. I sat next to her and touched her shoulder.

  “Rachel?”

  “Hm.”

  “Listen.”

  “To what?”

  “Listen, we...I think we need to do something here.”

  She turned her face to me. “What?”

  “This.” I gestured to the bed. “All this.”

  “You want to wash the sheets?”

  “Yes, but...more than that.”

  She turned over then, looked at me. Her eyes were half-closed and the edges were crusted with yellow matter.

  “What do you mean, Benja-me-me?” Her voice was low, weak.

  “We need to get out of this bedroom. When was the last time you went out?”

  “I dunno. Couple days ago?”

  “I think it’s been over a week.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “We have to do...something. We can’t continue like this.”

  “Why not?”

  “The rent’s barely getting paid. We’ve got nothing in the bank.”

  “So, I’ll get a job.”

  I looked at her. “You? Have you seen the shape you’re in?”

  “You’re not such a prize yourself, hippie boy.”

  “I know it. That’s what I’m saying.”

  “What are you suggesting, then?”

  “Just that...” And suddenly I realized that I didn’t know what I was suggesting. “I don’t—we just need to get up, Rachel.”