Chicken

by Lynn Crosbie

  The gun keeps everyone else where they are. It is a contraband TEC-9, and I look like I want to use it, badly.

  I knock my son down, kick him, and hear a snap.

  “I hate your band, by the way,” I say.

  But I am kneeling on the ground, cradling his neck and holding him. He cannot support his head (his peach fuzz–soft head in its blue bunting

  Daddy’s gone a-hunting I sing I swear he smiles and)

  “And I hate you.”

  I cannot remember the tears, the bubble of blood and saliva like a snow globe we are inside of, and I am carrying my child on my shoulders.

  “But I love you,” he says. I do not hear him: I let him go.

  Holding the weapon with two hands, I maneuver my way backwards, through the door and down the hall.

  It is snowing outside: I walk down the street and into an alley.

  My driver, Larry, is waiting, waiting by the building that is sending out feelers of smoke. It is on fire, and the snow is ash, descending from the top floor as the inferno musters its strength.

  As we drive away, an armada of fire trucks appears, black-suited madmen listing from its sides.

  * * *

  Annabel remains in the round chair, a constituent of Melvin Sokolsky’s creation Bulle: a photo series of models in haute couture locked in Plexiglas balls and suspended above the streets of Paris.

  She will write in her diary:

  Love is clockwork, with its cold steel.

  RAPE is surgery performed with a rusty saw and staple sutures; what is removed is vermin, plucked with dull pliers and flicked into a bin of amputations and red gauze.

  The wings are dissevered and cooked in smashed Corn Flakes and lard: she will never fly again, tant pis.

  Her mechanical wings exist only for exhibition purposes, for the filthy men, the lechers and scum.

  Not long ago I found a bird — mi alma — mauled and chittering beneath our persimmon tree, and I lay beside her as her heart slowed to a stop.

  My friend, I said, and her tiny eyes found mine and blinked in assent, blood leaving her in filigree, the blood that beat in me when he fucked me slow enough to make me feel it.

  Do you feel me, feel how hard I am? he said as I became uglier, until I became putrid.

  I worked hard on my false beauty after he changed me, avoiding the mirrors that revealed the chirality. My rape lives in glass and shows me, my face opened up like a shotgun wound, leaking venom.

  Parnell sees my mutilation and loves it, loves me. Does he share it?

  He loves the devil inside me, who is a fallen angel. Rebarbative, beautiful.

  I tell my story to the ugly ones with every photograph; many send back pictures of their gorgeousness cut from stem to stern and brewing poison.

  Yes, I tell them, I too am a bird.

  Sí, mis hermanos y hermanas, los veo.

  * * *

  When I get home, I scoop Annabel from the hanging chair, deposit her into a hot bath, and join her.

  “He will never bother you again,” I say, and she sighs, that’s all, just sighs and holds me tighter.

  “We are sleeping beauties,” she says, and smiles. “And princes.”

  Annabel lies against my chest as the bath bombs detonate and color the water pink, then blue.

  “What happened?” she says.

  This scares me. I am losing the memory. My mind has discovered a tremendous way to contend with trauma: selective amnesia.

  But I love you

  “I saw him, and saw red,” I say, tightening my hold on her.

  “Red advances, blue recedes,” she says dreamily. “In one of my Clockwork Orange chapters, I talk about the title cards, about how Kubrick uses them like Rothko.”

  “Kray copied that outright. But he got the order wrong, didn’t you tell me?”

  “He did,” she says happily. I so rarely mention her work.

  “But that was calculated. He — ”

  She turns and notices my hair is a shock-white shampoo bubble.

  Pissed off, she dunks my head underwater. I emerge sputtering, which makes her laugh, and vainly I straighten my plastered hair with my fingers.

  It is a beautiful night. We see Andromeda through the skylight, see its milky white haze, and I feel like Perseus, having saved the most beautiful of all creatures from the monster who lives deep below the surface.

  “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  I don’t answer.

  The bath simmers like a cauldron. I squeeze her harder, and she laughs like Poppin’ Fresh.

  “I love you,” she says, and I nod, get up, and dry off.

  “I know.”

  “What kind of an answer is that?” she says, standing up and shaking off the colored sludge. “I just told you that I love you.”

  Breakfast at Tiffany’s is on in the bedroom: we are both distracted by the lost cat and swelling score.

  “You know what your problem is, lassie?” George Peppard says woodenly to an indifferent Audrey Hepburn.

  “You’re chicken!”

  On and on he goes. He is incomprehensible.

  I look at Annabel, who is repeating the words soundlessly, tears falling down her pretty cheeks.

  “I hope you’re crying for that cat,” I say. “It’s soaked to the bone.”

  “Baby, you’re already eating suet,” she whispers as Hepburn steps onto a golden perch and sings of love; as Annabel shows me, in faint scratches and joyous chirps, what I mean to her.

  “All night long,” I boast later to an appalled Rabi.

  “She can’t live without her heart much longer,” he says, and spits, as that very organ leaks through the lace handkerchief she has wrapped it in, spraying my pocket like a frightened little skunk.

  * * *

  Later, as she sleeps, the buttery moon alights on her back, which has been freshly inked.

  The words are from Zora Neale Hurston — the end of her strange tautology about women’s memory.

  The dream is the truth, reads Annabel’s cinnamon-script. It is barely distinguishable from her flesh, so I trace it, and remember how I forgot about killing Kray, and forget that I remembered.

  The dream is the girl who tried to take him out for me; the woman who keeps giving me her strength until she is wasted, each vertebra on her lustrous back visible, her neck limp against her stem-thin arm.

  I give her something so small in return, I think as I roughly finger her, rolling her over so she can face and lacerate me, crying, “It hurts so much.”

  Shining with blood that pours from new gashes and old scars, I tell her, “Yes,” and, “Never stop.”

  * * *

  “When I first met you, I acted pretty cool, didn’t I?” says Annabel.

  It is almost dawn, and we are airing ourselves on top of the stained, glutinous covers.

  “But when I was thirteen, I had a big crush on you. I laminated those shots of you with the daisy. I carried them everywhere, like Tubby — hey, where is he?”

  “You have him,” I say nervously.

  “I do,” she says, reaching for her bag and pulling him out. He is dressed like a fire marshal, damn it.

  I click on the TV and we watch the chaos on CNN.

  “At least one dead,” the crawl says. “Dozens injured.”

  The Palladium is pictured, blackened but still standing: dazed, hairless people wander around a tier of ambulances.

  “You?” she says, covering her face.

  “What? No, my God.”

  She is staring at a covered stretcher, at girls howling as the name Alexander Wild — he dropped the e years ago — fills the screen.

  The phone rings and rings.

  My son is dead, I think, as I turn the ringer off, plump the pillows, and emit a what have I done into the almost viscou
s air before falling into a long, vacant sleep.

  * * *

  Annabel wakes me and hands me my phone.

  “It’s your wife,” she mouths anxiously.

  All I hear is rattling snot and wet huffs.

  “I’m at the police station,” she says. ‘They want to talk to you.”

  * * *

  Allegra had grabbed the telephone from the detective’s hand as he dialed me, it turns out.

  I sit with him in a glass-walled room as Allegra talks to an officer at his desk.

  “I was there,” I say.

  “We know, several witnesses saw you.”

  “Several?” I say, arching an eyebrow.

  “All right, they’re almost all dead. But someone saw you.”

  “Was it the roadie I saw raping a groupie?” I ask. “Or the insentient junkie?”

  “Where’s the gun?”

  “At home in a strongbox with its carry permit. Why?”

  “Why did you bring it to a concert?” asks Detective Alberto. He is a handsome young Dominican man with huge, barbellate forearms.

  “To show Alexander. He loves — he loved — guns,” I say, and cough.

  “Did he like getting beat up?”

  I tell the detective about Annabel, about what I learned, and he nods grimly.

  He has my son’s record spread out before him.

  “I have to arrest you,” he says.

  “For what?”

  He’s a fan. Bernstein has already been dispatched.

  I am led to a relatively nice cell, where I nap until my lawyer springs me.

  “They have nothing,” says Bernstein, leading me out.

  The cop who booked me says, “Call me if you remember seeing anyone running away or anything about that fire,” and hands me his card.

  I do remember. I remember a girl begging to be burned alive —

  “And, ah, would you mind — ”

  I sign the Ultraviolence poster he has run to his office to tear from the wall: “To Joey. Make the bad bleed.” It is a line from the movie and he repeats it, slowly tracing my signature with huge, reverent fingers.

  Annabel laughs when I call and tell her where I have been.

  “I thought it was another woman,” she says.

  “No, we are both habitués of the same jail, that’s all, taking togetherness to new and daring heights.”

  “Get back here, sweet Daddy,” she says. Which is all she ever needs to say, and I’m gone.

  * * *

  “Funny, isn’t it?”

  “What?” says Allegra creamily.

  She has invited me to dinner at Musso & Frank the following night: she wishes to celebrate my release from jail and to commiserate about Alexander.

  I arrive late and she is perched stiffly at the bar, primping her obvious wig and assaulting her compact with a filthy sponge.

  We are escorted to one of the snugs by a black giantess with natural and pure orange tiger’s eyes.

  She orders an onion tartlet and rare steak, which sickens me.

  I order a large salad and a baked potato, and marvel at my vegetarian girlfriend-slash-sorceress.

  I go on about how while Alexander looked something like me, Pudge bears no resemblance whatsoever.

  “She kind of has my eyes,” I say. “And that’s it.”

  Allegra tries to change the subject by admiring the many flans on the menu.

  I say, “Pudge has a prominent nose. And Kray, Kray had quite the beak, didn’t he?”

  Allegra starts yelling. “Stop torturing me! All right, all right, the kids are probably his. He seduced me, the devil, and then he wouldn’t leave his wife.”

  She buries her face in a napkin.

  “Why?” I say, standing to my full height and towering over her. People are staring. I squeeze her shoulder, and she quiets down immediately.

  “You never loved me!” she says as I return to my seat. “He made me feel attractive again. You hadn’t touched me in a year.”

  I look at her, and she could be anyone. I have no love for her, which is what, I realize, I felt throughout our marriage.

  “Okay,” I say. “Enough crying.”

  She stares at me, tears pooling in the reptilian folds around her eyes.

  “What is she like?” she asks quietly.

  “She’s exceptionally smart.”

  Then, more sharply, “What is she like in bed?”

  I prevaricate, then fold under her death stare. “Like a perverse archangel,” I say, and my ex-wife holds herself up stiffly, stands, and walks away.

  She smooths her heart-littered red dress over her stout rear and large paunch and exits the restaurant, leaving me to feel a nauseous combination of distaste and pity.

  When we first met, she embroidered my name on a set of vintage handkerchiefs.

  “I’ll never need these,” I said as I lifted her in my arms. She was so small I called her my bag of feathers.

  I never did need them. I lost them all, though I do have a vague memory of cleaning a shoe with the last one, soiling it irreparably.

  Oh, you rotten prick, I think as I salt my salad with my remorse and her steak rebukes me from its estuary of blood.

  * * *

  Annabel has been sleeping on and off since the night of the show.

  When I get home, I stand in the bedroom doorway and watch her.

  She is naked, angelic.

  “I have questions,” she murmurs, and I tell her to go back to sleep.

  “Look at the list,” she says, and I do.

  DID YOU KILL WILL?

  DID YOU KILL YOUR SON?

  DID YOU SLEEP WITH THAT WOMAN?

  “There’s more,” she says, “but I forget.”

  “I have questions too,” I say, lying beside her and pulling her close.

  “Why are you so pretty?” I say, and she frowns. “And, have you ever cheated on me?”

  She shakes her head. “There is no one like you,” she says.

  “All right,” I say, preening. “Here are your answers. No. Almost. Who?”

  “The hooker,” she says. “I have eyes everywhere.”

  “All right,” I say, flustered. “No. Never.”

  Among Kray’s papers, also bequeathed to me, is a scribbled note with Harford’s flight number crossed out and the comment “Does he think I’ll shoot the fucking plane out of the sky?” followed by a row of happy-face emojis with tears of mirth in their eyes.

  It was just good timing, it turns out.

  Alexander was Kray’s son, I’m certain of it. So was he, and he left both kids some money, which I am supposed to disperse, and Allegra a few hundred dollars and a valentine heart that says “Slippery When Wet.”

  I have already forwarded the money to Pudge, who spent it instantly on a handsome fancy man and an interest in his art-therapy business, which is located in Folsom State Prison.

  Alex’s share goes to the fan who sends the most sincere card: “When he sang,” Rachel writes, “I put down the razor for good and let his voice pull my pain away.”

  A cutter.

  She is, or was, another trail of blood that leads right to me.

  Of my odiousness and anemic dreams of truth, I sing: My soule, poore soule thou talkes of things. Thou knowest not what, my soule hath sliver wings.

  “My poor baby,” Annabel murmurs, and we sleep on the flight feathers of argent pinions that speak of moments, dazzling moments, of release.

  * * *

  I tear up Allegra’s card and cringe on her behalf: hand the money to the first indigent person I see, a topless old woman pushing a stuffed monkey in a stroller on Mulholland.

  “Did he leave me anything?” my ex-wife calls and asks me at dawn, sounding like a whipped dog.

  “Yes,” I sa
y. “There is money in an envelope that reads, ‘Forgive me.’”

  “Thank you,” she whispers, and I make a note to get this fabrication to her quickly.

  I thought I had more questions, but I forget them because so aromatic is my girl asleep beside me, emanating Mitsouko, vanilla soap, and amber shampoo — and, better, her raw, velvety gash: part seaweed, part honey.

  My mouth catches on “I love you” and swallows the phrase whole.

  “I know,” she says in her dream, the one where I am decent and valiant and we live forever.

  * * *

  The following night, at Annabel’s apartment, I dream of Alexander.

  He is five, pulling feathers off an injured bird he has found on the street.

  “Stop it,” I say, and toss the bird into a hedge.

  “That was mine,” he says, and kicks me in the shin as hard as he can.

  “I’ll tear off that foot,” I say, and hop after him.

  Annabel shakes me awake. “I want to talk,” she says.

  “No,” I plead. “It’s four in the morning, I want to sleep.”

  She gets up and boils water for tea. Reluctantly, I lift myself and join her, splashing cold water on my creased, burning face.

  The summer is now full-blown. Her useless ceiling fan churns the hot air around; she and I sleep in underwear that she has kept in the freezer all day.

  “Look,” she says. “I know that the screenplay is no good. I find those old forms inhibiting and boring. That’s why my book has no bibliography or notes, just a disclaimer that says, ‘My memory will have to do.’ But I could do something with Kray’s screenplay, which is very good, but backwards. All of the intimations of the epicene, the context of female radicalism, are gone. Which is why my short films, the ones about you, are so much better.”

  “They are,” I say, remembering one devoted to a particularly faded area of my jeans.

  “So you’ll think about it,” she says as I kiss a beeline down her belly and into the damp recesses of her bird-covered bikini briefs.

  “Yes,” I say, though to what I am not sure. “Yes, yes,” as she snaps my shorts off and fists my slick cock.