Chicken

by Lynn Crosbie

  I place the cold necklace on her shoulders and she wakes and holds me: such innocence. “You are free,” I tell her, and she smiles, stands, and admires her new piece of jewelry.

  She looks so good. I will stay on this bed forever somehow, watching her, my privy gerle wythouten spotte, fastening the ornate clasp and turning back toward me for a kiss. This leads somewhere, time passes, and I am content she is in my arms. But still, we are moving forward with the dumb velocity of a discharged shell, and when it stops, what iniquitous damage will be done.

  “What are you afraid of?” I often want to ask Annabel. She, the girl who was completely sexually impaired when we met; who still shivers when I take charge, and routinely starts rifling through the end-table drawer for handcuffs and ligatures.

  We never speak of the poisoning. I’m scared, I think, that she is becoming too much like me.

  “Like you’re so bad,” she would say to me. But I am, I am.

  I speak at Kray’s funeral after I am let off the hook for having been interviewed while violently ill, and tell the solemn gathering stories about his intractable nature, the force of his genius, and the magnitude of his legacy.

  Later, I embrace Vivienne, who discreetly hands me Annabel’s screenplay.

  JUNK, Kray has written across the title page and several others. Vivienne apologizes.

  “He was not himself near the end,” she says as tears run a train on her pancake makeup.

  But he was. And he wasn’t entirely wrong.

  My own ex-wife, Allegra, appears in a mourning veil, crying as though Kray were her husband.

  “I loved him, I always will,” she says, as I step as far away from her as I can: he fucked her, I know it.

  We each leave a rose in the newly made grave. When it is my turn, I drop the red bloom and make the sign of the cross.

  My thoughts assemble with daisies in their hands as other thoughts approach like the National Guard, with rifles pumped.

  * * *

  I get a call on our way home.

  It is Kray’s lawyer: I have been named in his will and he wants to meet with me.

  I tell him I’ll come by shortly.

  “Did Vivienne mention the screenplay?” Annabel says, demure in her black pillbox hat and Chanel suit.

  “At her husband’s funeral?” I say.

  “Sorry,” she says, lighting one of my cigarettes. “I’m sure he thought it was junk anyways.”

  * * *

  At home, I watch a short documentary about Kray as I change out of my rumpled John Phillips suit.

  No one is sure where he grew up, or who his family is. He is believed to have been the expatriate son of a Brooklyn widower who worked in a smelting factory and parlously neglected his small, quiet son.

  Kray left home and became a painter, working in a slaughterhouse during the day.

  He never spoke of the work, except to say it was “just another job, but louder, with more mess.”

  His paintings are large acrylics that depict crime-scene pictures of dead girls and boys: always street kids, and always savage.

  Private collectors ate the work up and he parlayed his fortune into short films: dark stories he wrote himself, billets-doux to crime.

  Ultraviolence is his sixth and most successful major motion picture. Written and produced by him alone, it bit off the first half of A Clockwork Orange and spat out the rest.

  “Entirely too moral,” was his terse review of Kubrick’s film.

  Annabel’s book, which I am still struggling through in page proofs, says that “A Clockwork Orange uses Paradise Lost for a model: Alex-Hero, like the grandiose Lucifer, is slowly taken apart and, ultimately, reduced to a broken captive of the Pandemonium of his own devising.”

  Kray’s work, on the other hand, “enlarges Satan, and adores him as the BBQ apron–wearing killer of the paschal lamb.”

  I think that I understand what she means, but I have never read the Milton book she pressed on me along with so many others.

  Or I have, depending on who it is I am talking to, and why.

  As I give my shoes a fast shine, I learn that Kray never had children, that he was a chess grandmaster and a fine horseman, and that he asked to be buried in a T-shirt that says “I’D RATHER BE GOLFING,” the fucking maniac.

  * * *

  Kray’s lawyer is located on South Hope Street, in a hundred-storey green-glass building carpeted with plush dollar signs.

  I wait for Mr. Lamprey in his Olympian reception area and watch, with more than a little bit of lust, his two secretaries, who are conjoined canary-blonde twins with pocket-Venus figures and lovely chiselled faces.

  “Mr. Wilde,” says the skeletal black man in a spotless white suit. “Please,” he says, gesturing to his impossibly big office, to the aircraft carrier–sized oak desk where his throne and my toadstool await.

  Lamprey begins by staring me down. He loses, blinks, and busies himself with a sealed envelope.

  “Mr. Kray was suffering from Alzheimer’s for the last few years,” he says. “He wished to keep his condition secret and I hope that you will respect this wish.”

  “Doubt it,” I say, striking a match and lifting it to the unlit Lucky Strike I have jammed between my lips.

  The lawyer sighs. There is so obviously no smoking permitted that he cannot bring himself to mention it.

  I call loudly to the girls for an ice-cold glass of vodka, admire their ample bottoms as they walk away, and wait.

  “Well, my client said you would be difficult. And he retained me for two reasons. He asked me to apologize for hurting you. He does not say what he did to warrant the apology.”

  “And?” I say, expressionless.

  “He has left you the rights to Ultraviolence and the sequel. It is up to you now who directs and stars in the new one, and all past and future revenues shall be paid to you from this day forth.”

  “Why?” I say at last, having turned all of my attention to an amazing pigeon fight on the windowsill.

  “He states, and I quote,” says Lamprey, reading from the document: “ ‘Parnell is like a son to me. A prodigal son, who will either safeguard or ruin my legacy. I am curious, dead or alive, to see what he shall do. He will likely crash and burn, which is unfortunate, but darkly comic.’ ”

  He has the decency to blanch as he reads this to me.

  As I advance, with flames in my eyes, he throws up his hands.

  “He could be wrong,” I say, grabbing the papers and what is, essentially, the key to the kingdom: more money and power than I can imagine.

  “He could be right,” I say, as I see myself roasting thousand-dollar bills on weenie sticks, surrounded by thieves and avarice.

  “Good luck,” Lamprey says, and I know, suddenly, that Kray has told him everything.

  I want to crawl out of the office, but then I shake my head.

  Why am I intimidated — and by who? Kray’s mouthpiece?

  My lit cigarette glances his face: he yelps and the freaks rush in as I walk away in slow motion as a private tribute to Kray, my very own, disgusting, Magwitch.

  Great Expectations: there’s one book that Annabel pressed on me that I tore through, to her inordinate delight.

  I read it because I once harbored such feelings; because she rewarded me at the end of each chapter with a happy ending.

  * * *

  I am living like a prize pig in our new and still costlier home, but never have I been more miserable.

  The nightmares resume, are more lurid; insufferable, even.

  I dream one night that Annabel hands me all of her teeth. They sit in a little pool of blood in my palm as she starts strangling chickens.

  I wake up, gasping. Annabel is out somewhere. She left a note with alphabet fridge magnets that said C U LTR ALLIGTR, and has not called or texted me since.

&nb
sp; I am afraid to fall asleep again. The next dream will be about Kray, it always is.

  Of him dead and kissing me or rotting in the bed beside me; of him, a man I once thought of as my father, flaying my skin in long, spiralling strips.

  * * *

  I grew up without a father, something my drunken mother never tired of mentioning, so great were her hardships.

  I never told anyone, not even Annabel, about the nightly attacks: about her stripping and scalding me with the hot iron, the TV antenna, and worse.

  Occasionally, she was in love with me.

  She would bring me into her bed and brush my hair, kiss me flush on the lips and call me her dearest boy. At twelve, with my face often mashed into her large, naked breasts, this was confusing and loathsome.

  Annabel told me that her mother, though cold, was “as good to me as she could be: I think she had a broken heart.”

  This was enviably normal to me. I didn’t want to admit another nauseating aspect of my past.

  It was Allegra who knew, and Allegra who said, “Some kids are targets because there’s something not right about them and it shows.”

  I am a convicted felon, by the way. That was the night I caved in her face, then sat by the front door, waiting for the cops I called myself.

  * * *

  “I’ll tell you what I’m afraid of,” Annabel says.

  I have her on speaker as I drink from my tumbler of Glenfiddich and cycle through the channels on my jumbotron.

  I can barely hear her.

  “I’m at a Kraut show,” she says, and hangs up.

  I heard Alexander’s band was playing at the Palladium, but I have no idea what she’s doing there.

  Looking for a younger me? No, impossible. Alexander is grotesque.

  I don’t know when she got tickets; I didn’t know she liked his band. Although she has been uncommunicative and moody lately, we fooled around earlier today. I hold the pillow I slipped under her ass to my face reverently.

  Drop it. I am angry she took off — and to Alexander’s show, of all places.

  I understand her less and less these days.

  I resume looking at the TV and drop the remote when I see Ultraviolence is on. I am so drunk, I wish to watch it for the first time since its release.

  It begins with Cézanne apples filling a bowl.

  A young man and woman walk through snow, their hair dense and white, their long black coats dappled with it.

  They turn a corner and their footprints slowly disappear, and the street and horizon join like interlocking crystals, intricate and smooth as clockwork.

  I cry, the scene is so beautiful.

  Cry, as the anguish starts up around the dead corner and the film cuts to the man that is me, slashing the woman to pieces with a dagger and spraying the snow, the screen itself, with her dark, wanton blood.

  * * *

  “It’s right down the hall,” says a satisfied yellow canary of a girl as my Sid walks out of her bedroom to a wall-mounted telephone, wearing only his jeans and a rattlesnake belt.

  “Bring Baby and Bint,” he says, naming two of his gang members. “And more rounds too,” he adds, inspecting the gun he removes from the small of his back.

  Kray used dark makeup to make me look older. He added hollows under my eyes and liner to make them pop.

  “I’m so young, I’m so young,” I say involuntarily as I look at myself noticing a slender black girl powdering herself with a big white puff.

  “Hello, sweet thing,” Sid says, moving, terribly, closer.

  “Leave her alone!” I yell, and when I throw the remote at the TV, it disgorges its batteries and the channel switches to one with a live feed of a fish tank.

  I am tailing a shy jewel fish hiding at the base of a pirate’s chest when Annabel calls.

  She is crying and I stand and do a few quick wind sprints to sober up.

  “I need to see you,” she says.

  She tells me she is a few blocks from the Palladium, underneath a bright green Ferrari.

  I call the car company and ask that someone fetch her.

  I push her out of my mind and go back inside to inspect my face.

  Not bad: my last round of injectables has left my face smooth and embonpoint.

  I comb my hair back and change into the white chambray shirt and black jeans she likes, Harford’s boots.

  I want her home safe, but I am afraid of hurting her.

  “Leave her alone!” I hear myself saying, and see Annabel being led to me in a torn dress and a black eye.

  * * *

  “When I won the essay contest,” says Annabel, “they flew me to New York. I pretended my parents were chaperoning, but I went alone.”

  She is cross-legged in a suspended ball chair, a brancher in a nest of black chenille.

  “I wore my medal and walked all over the city. I walked until it was night: I wasn’t hungry or tired, I felt high.

  These boys stopped me in Central Park.”

  She has told me this story. I understand that she must tell me again, while I am wide awake to be certain I understand everything.

  And to take over.

  “This is my story. My life,” she says, her voice rising.

  She lights a cigarette, accepts a glass of beer, and continues.

  “The good-looking boy was dressed like you were in Ultraviolence, and I thought he was an angel.

  But he wasn’t an angel. He raped me and he kicked me in the stomach when he heard someone coming.

  Two women.

  They walked right by me, like it was nothing to someone like me.”

  She starts to cry, and I hand her a stack of linen handkerchiefs; carefully hide what I am feeling.

  “I put my ripped clothes on and ran like a deer all the way to my hotel, and cleaned myself with a metal brush. But not the boot print. Look,” she says, and I understand what ne obliviscaris has meant all along.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, ashen.

  “I’m sorry too,” she says. “For tracking you down. I did like you. But when I came looking, it was to find him.”

  I remember her tossing my apartment and flinch.

  “But I ended up falling for you,” she says. “You know that.”

  And when I look into her eyes and see us being led out of Eden, still hand in hand, her defiant words strafe the accursed fruit trees.

  All places thou.

  She sees me understanding, and resumes.

  “I went to see Kraut tonight with a model I know. She’s dating the bass player, and we went backstage. The lead singer is your son.”

  And then, “He is the guy who raped me.”

  I am walking in tight circles, like a wretched lion I once beheld in a Paris zoo, living in a prison barely larger than him.

  “Je vous connais, vous êtes moi,” I said and the old lion wept, what will I do for blood —

  “I attacked him and he fought back,” she says. “But he won. Again.”

  She bursts into fresh tears.

  “I thought I would avenge myself one day, but look at me.”

  I look at her.

  She is so small, and frangible.

  I think of my son.

  About the trips he took to New York, to visit colleges, he said.

  About finding my film costume and makeup in his room, and his easy response, that he was writing an essay about me for class.

  About telling him he was too young to watch that movie, and how he laughed, then checked himself.

  “I closed my eyes during the sex and violence parts,” he said.

  I close my eyes and calculate the distance to the Palladium.

  “No,” she says. “Please.”

  Walk out and leave Annabel suspended, rocking as she sleeps and cries.

  I see
her understanding, and resume.

  * * *

  I bash on the backstage door, and just as security is about to slam it shut, I see Alexander and raise my second finger, whirling it in the hurry-up sign I taught him when he was a child.

  “Oh shit,” says Alexander. “I know this guy. Come in!”

  The guards open their ranks and let me through the door into Satyricon. Alexander is undressed to his torn jeans and black Converse sneakers; three girls crawl over him and a dozen more stand in an orderly line beside him. His bandmates are being serviced along with the roadies. One naked young girl is demanding the entire band fuck her and then set her on fire.

  He pushes the girls off and stands up.

  Hugs me and says, “So you caved, after all.”

  I say nothing, and he starts to twitch.

  “Did you like the show?” he says, still keeping one track-marked arm around me.

  He obviously likes me better as a success. The memo line of his last check, sent to Elsinore, guilelessly read, “Enjoy the twenty bucks, you scabrous failure.”

  I cashed it.

  “Yes,” I say. “I like the show you put on at twenty-one about visiting prospective colleges.”

  Not to mention all the other lies, and the depraved behaviour I ignored because I wanted to love you, because —

  “I was afraid of you,” I say, surprising myself.

  I unpeel his arm from mine and face him. Sad, but not afraid anymore. Of him, or anyone.

  He looks at me intently: he is sizing me up.

  When his crew advances, he signals them away.

  “What do you want?” he says like ice.

  I say, “I want you not to have raped my girlfriend when she was a kid.” And push him.

  The room freezes.

  “Which one is your girlfriend? Not the cunt who attacked me tonight?” he says, pointing to three deep scratch marks on his face.

  “That would be her,” I say pleasantly, and punch him so hard he spits blood and falls down.