Spider on My Tongue

by Wright, T. M.

  She played Yahtzee like a champion.

  "What do you think, Abner? Another roll?"

  "Sure," I said.

  I didn't know her from Eve. I found her in the apartment I was renting from my good friend, Art DeGraff, while, he had told me, he was vacationing in Europe. The apartment was supposed to be empty.

  I was a bit unnerved that she was in it and that she knew my name

  "What are you doing here?" I said.

  She was sitting half-on and half-off the apartment's only bed; she wore white shorts and a pink tank top which fit her beautifully. She was throwing the five dice Yahtzee requires when I came into the bedroom.

  "Good," she said, her gaze on the dice, "a full house," and gave me a smile I couldn't resist.

  "The apartment's supposed to be empty," I said.

  "It was empty," she said, gave me another smile, a different sort of smile—a smile I couldn't read—and added, "Until you showed up."

  "Uh-huh," I said, "empty except for you."

  She gave me another enigmatic smile.

  “Want to play, Abner?"

  I didn't know about Yahtzee, then. I said, "You mean that?" and nodded to indicate the dice and the score card. "What is it?"

  "It's Yahtzee. A game for everyone." Another smile. "You like games, don't you?"

  Her cleavage above her pink tank top was ample and delicious.

  She caught me staring at it and said, "Some things never die."

  I didn't understand what she meant.

  She picked up the dice, threw them again, looked annoyed. "Shit, another full house. What do I need with that?"

  I said again, my eyes on hers, now, "What are you doing here?" It was something I needed to say. After all, she was, as far as I was concerned, a trespasser in the little apartment.

  She said, "I'm here because you're here."

  "I don't know what the hell that means," I said. Despite her cleavage, her brief tank top, her even briefer white shorts, her perfect brown skin, her gorgeous and wonderfully expressive brown eyes, I knew I was becoming a bit churlish: "Sorry," I said.

  She rolled the dice again. Her breasts moved invitingly with the movement of her arm. I think I grinned.

  She saw me looking (again), saw me grin: "Like I said, Abner, some things"...

  I held my hand up, palm out: "I know," I said. "Some things never die."

  "You got it, sucker," she said.

  I took a deep breath, forced myself to look uninterested in her cleavage, her white shorts, her perfect brown skin: "What are you doing here?" I repeated.

  "I'm here because you're here, Abner," she said again, and cocked her head fetchingly. "I'm here because you're here. If you weren't here, I wouldn't be here. And if I weren't here, you wouldn't be here. If this apartment weren't here, hell, we might be somewhere else, and you'd be asking me the same lame-ass questions."

  And so it went.

  ~ * ~

  8:30 AM

  She's here, too. She and Sam Feary. They're both here, in my little house in the dim woods. Both playing their little cosmic games.

  All these beings, things, wraiths, ghosts, spooks —holding me hostage to their little cosmic games.

  Yahtzee, hah!

  "A full house," Phyllis said so long ago (yesterday, this morning, tomorrow evening, even as I write). It had nothing to do with the dice. She was seeing my future. Her future. Everyone's future.

  And, my God, now you're here!

  ~ * ~

  8:46 AM

  Phyllis and I were walking east on 50th Street in Manhattan on a rainy night in August, late, and the sidewalk was all-but empty, though the lighted shop windows cast reflections on the black street—our side and the other side—and an occasional yellow cab zipped past.

  We were holding hands. I wore jeans and a gray T-shirt with the words "Love Ain't No Trouble" emblazoned across it in yellow. Phyllis looked exceptional. She wore a bright green dress that covered her a bit less than well-enough and I felt ecstatic she was beside me and that I was holding her hand.

  I held a large red umbrella over us which, because there was no wind, and the rain fell straight down, protected us.

  I said to her, for the very first time, "Do you know that I love you, Phyllis?"

  "My guess would be," she said, "that you love me a lot," and glanced my way with a small, open-mouthed smile.

  "Quite a lot, indeed," I said.

  "Indeed," she said.

  A yellow cab zipped past and its driver laid on the horn for a couple of seconds, clearly for Phyllis's sake. "Asshole!" I yelled.

  "He likes me," she said, as if in admonishment. "Everybody likes me. They like the way I look. They like the way I walk. They have nasty fantasies about me in the moment after they've seen me. They want me." She was very matter of fact about it, as if she were talking about her pies or shoes. "Abner, they want to get me down on my back and pump me up with their stuff."

  I wanted to say, "Phyllis, why are you talking like this? I've just told you I love you, for God's sake!" but, instead, I said, "Yes, I understand."

  She glanced at me again, with a wider smile, clearly amused. "No you don't. You can't."

  "You're right," I said. "I don't understand."

  "Yes, Abner, I know," she said.

  ~ * ~

  Let me tell you about you!

  First of all, you want only to survive. You'll do anything to survive. You'll even slit your wrists or gargle with Drano or play Russian roulette with all the chambers loaded (because "survival" means more, at last, than simply drawing breath, feeling hungry or being able to take a piss). You'll even withdraw into the small and corrupt universe that exists somewhere between your spleen and kidneys, or concoct fantastic and comforting otherlife out of ancient insinuation, fable and stories told by the very imaginative and intellectually suspect.

  You want to see in color, have a full tummy, engage often in incredible sex, enjoy your bowel movements, live without pain.

  You see your face only rarely (compared to those around you, who see it quite a lot), and that's okay because faces reveal too many secrets.

  After all, you have secrets you're very afraid will outlive your gray matter, your cartilage, your mortal appetites.

  ~ * ~

  July 28, 12:03 PM

  I have many items in my little house whose origins escape me. For instance, a large gray herringbone couch with stains on the arms: I have no idea how it came to be here. When I arrived (I'm not sure how long ago) the house boasted only a bright red club chair, a 50's-era blue-linoleum-top dining table and chairs, and a copper alarm clock. But I arrived home one day from the little village where I buy my food and found the gray herringbone couch in the living room. It has to be some kind of gift, I told myself, but there was no note attached ("Happy Birthday, Abner," for instance, because it was my birthday, or, "Thought you could use this, Abner," or, "It looked like something you'd like," which it was, and is).

  And the framed photographs in the hallway. Eight of them, four on each wall. They arrived anonymously and mysteriously about a year after I got here (which would be perhaps three years ago; perhaps more, though not less). Each is a portrait of someone I don't know. Three men, five women, all in their thirties and forties, all their poses different. One man is in front of what appears to be a theatre—I can see the bottom of what looks like a marquee above him as he stands before a set of wide double doors, each with a circular window: he wears a black tuxedo; his hands are on his hips and his legs are slightly apart. He wears a small moustache and he's grinning. His hair is dark and cut short. It's an exquisite photograph because the man, who appears to be no more than five and a half feet tall (judging by the double doors) looks strong, attractive and masculine. The crisp dark shadows—cast by his body—reveal that the sun was a bit past its apex when the picture was taken. I have named the man "Allway." I don't know why.

  When I've eaten, and walked a bit in the dim woods (which gives me some blessed time away
from the crowd of strangers with whom I share my house), I may show you the other photographs.

  ~ * ~

  3:48 PM

  I do not reread this narrative. Perhaps I should. It would allow me to correct mistakes, but I'm not at all sure that what I might see, in my rereading, as mistakes aren't simply mis-directions, or re-directions, or rethinking. Mistakes aren't important. We dwell on them, regret them, get maudlin about them, write long, overwrought letters to former lovers about them.

  And, as I think about it, now, I'd say there are no mistakes, really, only facts that no longer fit what passes, in any given new moment, for reality, memories that have become obtuse, fuzzy, or uninteresting, dramas and melodramas that have run their course.

  Her eyes popped open and rolled upward in their sockets.

  I heard a long low rasping noise come from her, like air escaping.

  But I loved her, you see. The truth is, I loved her as I have loved no one else.

  And that's why I came forward again, put my hands around her waist—she was cold now—and held her close for what might have been hours, until I felt her skin begin to warm again and her muscles loosen. And I heard a low, ragged humming noise coming from her, which, over the space of a minute or so, became speech:

  "You won't like it out there, Abner."

  —“A Manhattan Ghost Story"

  SIX

  Otherlife

  August 5, 8:00 AM

  Wondrous Phyllis of the Otherlife always ate with nasty enthusiasm, as if she would never eat again. I said to her, once, over dinner at a restaurant in Soho called Tiny Thai, "Phyllis, I think you've got rice all over your face."

  She grinned at me through a forkful of Moo Shu pork ("Chopsticks," she said once, "are for socialites and assholes!"): "Rice?" she said. "Abner, I can eat more than you." She cocked her head fetchingly. "Want to give me a try?"

  Her milk-chocolate skin was without blemish (during our first months together), and it dressed an incredible body she displayed and used as well as any dancer, so she attracted stares from both men and women.

  She enjoyed these stares.

  "Look at them, Abner," she said more than once. "The fools want what they can't have." Then she laughed a little and added, "But we're all fools. You and me and the man in the moon—the living and the dead and everyone in between." I had little idea what she was talking about; I thought she was merely being poetic.

  She also said, on more than one occasion, "Wouldn't he be fucking surprised if I jumped on his head and swallowed him whole?" which I thought was funny, though I didn't understand it, at the time, in those first unforgettable few months.

  May, June, July, a little bit of August. So long ago. Decades ago, I think, though I'm not sure if I'd be right or wrong.

  "I'd swallow him whole and he wouldn't even know it," she said. "What a life this is!" which I didn't understand, either. I understood so damned little, then, and she knew it.

  Perhaps I understand even less, now, in this little house in the dim woods. But maybe that's stupid. How could I understand less after so long? I'd have to be a damned fool.

  Maybe I am a damned fool. Of course I am. Phyllis said so, and she was never wrong (in those first few unforgettable months).

  And this dense fog of departed humanity that surrounds me in this little house in the dim woods is made up of fools, too, because they tell themselves their stuck here, but they aren't, and they know it (I believe), and they won't do anything about it because, shit, they're in a place they recognize—not my little house in the dim woods (How could they recognize that?), but the Earth itself, where they spilled from their mothers, grew into confused adults, then had lives of pain and joy and disappointment, enjoyed too little sex, or not enough, growled at the neighborhood kids, pet their little dogs, made chicken soup when influenza struck.

  Sometimes, in my little house, I scream at them, "You're not stuck here, Goddammit! So go away!" And they grumble and groan and moan and make their bizarre noises, burp, and devise non-sequiturs (“My knee is bleeding! Look at my knee!” and, "Maxwell has a silver hammer," and, "Get thee behind me, sputum!” and, "My asshole has legs in it!”) but mostly they seem, in their oddly intrusive way, to ignore me, as if I am not much more to them than elevator music.

  ~ * ~

  August 6

  Another portrait shows only the face—which hugs the frame—of a woman with wild red hair who's looking seductively at the camera, even though she's sticking her tongue out. The woman's cheeks are very thin and a thick blue vein is prominent in her forehead. Her tight skin is as lacking in color as the belly of a fish and her nose is straight and very narrow. I've named this woman Irene Chutter, which sounds, I know, like the name of a fat woman. I've named her Irene Chutter after a woman I knew in Bangor, when I was quite young—barely into my teens—who always looked out her window at me as I walked home from school. Sometimes she smiled, or smiled and waved, and I always smiled and waved back, because I'd been taught to be polite. Late in my thirteenth year, she appeared at her front door and invited me in, said she had pies; "I have good pies, young man. You like pies, don't you?"

  "Yes, Ma'am, I do," I said.

  And I went in.

  ~ * ~

  6:07 PM

  Not long ago, I said to the shadow I assumed to be Sam Feary, "Sam, do I have a face?" and I got no answer after a few moments, so I repeated the question; "Sam, do I have a face?" I waited a moment, and added, "I mean, to you. Do you see my face, or am I as nondescript to you as you are to me?" and still I got no answer, so I took a step forward, toward the shadow I assumed to be Sam Feary (which stood at the window it had stood at for days; beyond that window, the late afternoon sun cast shards of bright yellow light onto the forest floor), and I reached out for him, for the shadow I supposed was Sam Feary, and felt, from behind, a strong hand on my shoulder: I froze. A voice no more substantial than air said, "Be careful, my friend. That is not what you think it is."

  I inhaled deeply, held it.

  The voice said, "Breathe, you fool."

  I breathed.

  The strong hand tightened its grip. I winced.

  The voice said, "I don't have a lot of time, so listen. Not long ago, you believed in something you called love. It's possible you still believe in it, more's the pity. And you believed in passion, too. You believed it was a part of love." I heard a quick, hollow chuckle, then: "What a wonderful thing--passion. So full of heat! And that's something we don't have much of over here, my friend. Heat, I mean. Just remember, though—remember this; it only requires a change in temperature to make steam into ice."

  The strong hand lifted from my shoulder.

  I wheeled about, screamed something stupid, saw ragged, bare arms reaching desperately for me.

  And I stumbled backward, toward the window, toward the shadow there, stopped myself.

  Dappled sunlight had flooded the room in those few moments, and a crowd of brightly lit faces stared at me from above the ragged, bare arms. A few mouths moved, as if to speak. A few eyes blinked, though as slowly as a toad.

  Then the sunlight faded all at once and the faces were gone.

  ~ * ~

  10:12 PM

  But, dammit, goddamnit, that's not the way things happen here! It's not at all the way things happen here—sunlight on spectral faces, ragged bare arms reaching. That doesn't happen here—it can't happen here.

  It didn't happen here.

  It did happen here.

  ~ * ~

  Past Midnight

  I want so desperately to believe only in shadows.

  ~ * ~

  1:00 AM

  They, the shadows that exist here, have told me such things as this:

  There are people who wear stripes with polka dots, but I am not one of them. And there are people who chew their thin soup and let their noses drip in public places—restaurants and barrooms, fields and wicker hammocks, but I am not one of them. And there are people who dream of the prefect lover and
have orgasms on hand daily. But Jesus, lovely Jesus of the glowing hole, I am not one of them. And listen, listen--there are people, too, who count themselves unique because of deformation or impediment. But, shit, Dude and Dudess, I am not one of them. And people, as well, everywhere—like flies on a summer window--who whine interminably about the heat and proclaim that it's the humidity, really, and not the heat so much, that makes them fucking uncomfortable. (They should live here and wear my shoes.).

  And:

  I come and go daily, hourly through my nostrils and make a cozy red home in my scrotum and vagina, which I have several of; no, you may not borrow.

  And:

  Picnics and ants fill up my pants and oh the joys of joyful summers and mooing sarsaparilla and the dead white white legs that spread the rivers wide, like Moses, oh these hands, these hands, and these large hands!

  And:

  I yearn only for the yarning, which has gone, which is gone—I yarn to see the breasts, the pubes, the round firm ass and be, thus, moved, moved, moved to move.

  And:

  He is staring at my moist staff his open pants, his lips and eyes aglitter, and he takes, then, his stiff organ out to give me his food in one bitter mouthful and goes off slowly as a life—and I see, then, the shoes, his shoes, and I smell his smell, and then I smell nothing, and I see no shoes, and his big laugh is in some place that is other.

  ~ * ~

  2:30 AM

  I had so much more, dammit, with Phyllis long ago, in Manhattan, during those first few months, and I hardly knew it. I had a nasty and unpredictable and sometimes beautiful reality (or non-reality), with her—with whatever she was, then. When we walked together in the West Village, or made loud and untidy love in the little apartment I'd borrowed from my friend, Art DeGraff (who was also her murderer, which I did not know), or sat down to a meal, I had her unique odor, and her presence, too, her formidable sexuality, her eyes (everywhere), and I had my love for her, which I knew, then, would exist through all time, through any change or transition either of us would endure. But now, in my dim house in the dim woods, I have the suffocating claustrophobia of shadows that do not fade but which speak to me, and speak among themselves, and to themselves, as if they're a rare species of bird mouthing the desperate and short, meaningless sentences and atonal music of the dead, and there's nothing of reality or non-reality in any of it, nothing beautiful or challenging or fascinating (anymore). Only air without warmth, earth without substance.