Chicken

by Lynn Crosbie

  I feel different; I have changed.

  I am sad and only sad for how my son’s illness attached itself to her virtue like a metastatic cancer cultivated on an animal in a cage. On almost every animal is the mark of our gross indecency, signifying its innocence and, occasionally, ours.

  Occasionally, prostrate and injured, I called her the Venus in Furs.

  As though she, who wears vegan moto jackets and biker suits, would touch a fur; or that her position, as the dominatrix, was anything but a gift given to a girl — truly, yet selfishly — too scared to feel safe inside her own skin.

  As if she had actual power over this malignant animal, or its disease.

  * * *

  The diary, once opened, walks me into memory and leaves me there.

  We are in Berlin, at the Hotel Adlon Kempinski, drinking glasses of kirschwasser in clementine club chairs and watching elegant couples walk along the Unter den Linden boulevard at nightfall.

  Annabel is exhausted: our haphazard tour involves a lot of missed sleep and time changes. She is also the kind of traveller who wants to take everything in, to stare and touch and absorb her surroundings, then photograph and film them.

  She begins Jewel at the Tussaud Museum after shooting Marilyn Monroe’s wax likeness, which is frightening to her.

  Edits and shoots more, conscripting local actors and finding costumes, sets. This night she shows me what she has done before our vegetable wursts arrive.

  It is horrifying. She has slowed down “Your Body’s Callin’” and it blasts over the wax figure that is Monroe, planted over the infernal subway grate, her hands adamantly holding her dress down.

  Another image assembles itself: it is Monroe naked, in a dishevelled blonde wig, lying on a shabby, rumpled bed.

  Suitors approach, each carrying a single rose.

  Her eyes roll up, revealing white shells.

  “Rape me,” she says as her windup teeth chatter, and they oblige her.

  “Wait for Sugar,” she says, but she has swallowed her teeth and, anyways, no one is listening.

  She sprouts yellow feathers and a slender orange beak.

  A man appears beside her, who looks like me, who has my old busted-out tattoo that says BOY ALFRED, which was my name for Lola’s and my son.

  He is wearing a dirty poem that I sent Annabel as a codpiece. As he stands with her, the bed fills with blood that spills to the floor, soaking Jewel, Monroe’s small white poodle.

  The song catches on the lyric “Here I come baby” as the camera closes in on her mouth, a rictus, on my bare, bloody feet leaving the room, leaving her.

  On Jewel’s gummy eyes, as an indifferent cop leads the dog to certain death.

  Before expiring, Marilyn has managed to write FEAR on the wall with damp rose petals.

  * * *

  We watch the film and say nothing.

  Someone below us is singing, “Halt dich an deiner lieber fest.”

  Annabel rushes to the washroom and returns, pale and naked in a stiff platinum wig, and falls to my feet. “I’m so ugly, I’m so ugly,” she cries. “Why won’t you help me?”

  I don’t know what to do. She gets up and starts to run, out the door and through the halls, and I cannot move, I am so consumed by incomprehensible guilt.

  I hear catcalls and murmurs of admiration and drag myself to the hall, where a kind bellman has wrapped her in his coat and is speaking to her as if she were a child.

  “You’re a good girl,” he says, and she smiles beatifically.

  “Who did this to you?” I say as I hold her snake-tight in bed.

  “What do you mean?” she says, smiling savagely, and then, “Do you love my movie?”

  She rips the covers off and ravishes me. All I can manage is “yes” and “but it scared me,” when she uses her teeth.

  Who whispers, “You’re done for,” right into my ear later as we lie sleeping?

  I hold her closer.

  Germany is filled with ghosts and fury. We leave first thing, spreading euro notes like a tarot cross on the bureau for the maid with the yellow eyes and vertical irises.

  Soon it will all seem like a bad dream.

  To her.

  In Amsterdam, we eat kif brownies and we fuck until we both bleed, which thrills her, and sends me to sleep clutching my passport.

  She takes pictures: of me asleep, and soaking wet; of the blood Rorschachs on the sheets; of the dirty pigeons she has welcomed as friends, who walk my back all night until I announce I am feverish with homesickness.

  We keep travelling, though, through scene after scene of her self-hatred.

  “Cut me, cut the putridity away!” she cries, and I retreat, at last, into cruelty, my old friend.

  “Pack up, Ugly,” I announce one morning in Athens.

  She cries so much on two planes that we have to tell people her child died in a car accident.

  “My one and only,” she says to the flight attendants, who place and replace hot towels on her face and serve her large brandies while squatting beside her with open, caring faces.

  “He has never told me he loves me,” she says, and we are bumped again, to two seats in the first row, and fed what I am certain is Vicodin-laced cheese and red wine until she falls away.

  She never shows anyone our holiday shots and films.

  Simply posts them without comment and the fans get in line. “Shock and awe, gorgeous,” the responses begin.

  I stop reading but I know something: that the power I offered Annabel was a sham.

  That I am destroying this girl.

  * * *

  I continue reading her diary.

  It resumes more prosaically. I skim through small worries about my ennui, doubts about her talent, and unknown, untold loneliness:

  My book has been sitting on the coffee table for two weeks. He has no interest in it.

  I will probably have to go to my launch alone.

  I dedicated it to him.

  This is one of the last entries.

  I have an hour-long scrub, some broth, and tea, and keep reading. I am medicated but, worried about shocks to my system, avoid most of the disclosures preceding this dolorous entry.

  She must have gone to the launch alone. I get the book and return to bed, trace my name with my finger, and kiss hers.

  “I’m sorry, honey,” I say to the side of the bed I leave untouched, as though she is about to climb in with me.

  I bash her pillow so it looks like she has just stepped out to get some warm milk or the crackers she gnashes on, leaving crumbs everywhere.

  The bed is clean and crumb-free now. I consider messing it up and must stop myself.

  I crack open her book and read — reluctantly at first, but then with genuine interest.

  And pride: she is just twenty-two, and so bright.

  I fall asleep holding the book and wake up to find myself stroking and caressing it.

  I still don’t let go.

  Miserable, I fall back asleep, and there she is, waiting for me, as a fan dancer this time, angelically spotlit and demure.

  * * *

  I read the chapter titled “Optics,” which features an altered photograph of Alex DeLarge’s eye being slit with a straight razor. I skip the parts about perspective, which I already know, and read

  Both Kubrick and Kray are indebted to Milton, the most famously blind writer (surpassing Homer), for if Alex and Sid seem strong in their respective films’ ends, they are merely pale shadows of their exuberant selves.

  The shootout in the alley in Ultraviolence is clearly a feverish hospital dream: as he fires, Sid sees himself in his victims’ eyes as small and yellow, then long, white, and masked like a swan. Similar is Alex’s Pygmalion vision in A Clockwork Orange: note that he is pupating in the final scene, moving toward some kind of transformation,
which is germane to his lurid vampirism, his parasitic or insect eyes, and the proboscis referenced early on by his perverse post-correctional advisor. Other texts bitten off here include Gulliver’s Travels, bound as the in-traction Alex is to his illness and moral deformity, and imprisoned within his (Nadsat-for-brain) “gulliver.”

  I put the book down after tracing these words on the first page: “This is dedicated to the one I love, Parnell Wilde,” an inscription she has embellished with a showy pink kiss, then admire her hybrid author shot: a self-portrait of her dressed like Sid, executing a faceless Alex, who kneels before her as if praying.

  In strictest truth, I think of Homer as a bottomless bore and have shredded the Milton, a pâpier maché project from the bad days, and refashioned it as the Holy Spirit, a cyclone of red and black I keep underneath the bed.

  Additionally, I understand but do not agree with what she says.

  I was there.

  I am Sid.

  I open the book and scratch out the line about the ending of the film being a dream, and write in the margin, “Sid was victorious. He vanquished his enemies and rejoiced in his revenge.”

  * * *

  Pudge and Charles continue to live in the guest house together, and I like to see them. Still, with or without them, I am on my own.

  Only Annabel ever stepped inside the orbit of my isolation and changed it.

  I think of all the men who have lost their children, and of having been a father, briefly.

  I will die alone.

  Dear Annabel,

  I lied.

  I once told my mother I loved her.

  * * *

  Pudge comes inside at dusk and makes sure I have eaten the healthy vegetable stew she has made me and that I have taken my medication.

  We sit in the darkening kitchen and I say, “Pudge, I don’t deserve this. You should go. I will buy you and Charles a home.”

  “Would you please call me Christine, Dad?” she says. I nod and she moves beside me.

  “I was never nice to you either,” she says. “I was so sure you didn’t love me, I put up walls, never let you in.”

  “Love,” she says, rubbing her belly, “has annihilated my pride.”

  “And love,” she says, taking my hand, “just grows and grows if you let it.”

  “I love you,” she says, and I squeeze her hand and say, “I know” and, “You are such a good girl.”

  “Do you want me to leave?” she asks, and I shake my head.

  “Then let us take care of you,” she says.

  She makes my bed and I am secretly distraught: Annabel’s smell is completely gone, as are her little remnants and the bear.

  “Tubby,” I say sadly, as she sees that I am tucked in and comfortable.

  “That’s not nice,” she says, and laughs. “I prefer pleasingly plump.” Then, hearing Charles’s call, she leaves me to my cheerless room.

  Try to get through this, I think; then of a rainwear-clad bear in the steel mouth of a garbage truck, being chewed up and deposited among all the other remains of what was once regarded with avarice, nonchalantly, with love.

  * * *

  My mother is raging drunk.

  Pulling me from my sleep, from my bed, and demanding that I leave.

  “You wrecked my life, you wrecked me!”

  Her robe is gaping open: I see her rufescent Caesarean scar; the argent lines on her deflated breasts.

  I stand and tie her robe, tightly. Tell her, firmly, “You are not wrecked.”

  “No one loves me,” she says.

  “I love you,” I say.

  “Well, don’t,” she says. “Because I hate you.”

  She slaps me so hard I hit the wall and black out.

  I wake up and she is sleeping on the daybed.

  I collect a sponge, some Fairy soap, and a bucket of hot water, and clean my blood from the wall. Tidy my cot, then myself, using her concealer on the deep, cardinal gash on my forehead.

  Make her a big cup of tea and bring it to her with some ginger biscuits and a fresh ashtray.

  “What happened to your face, love?” she says, exhaling a spray of smoke and holding the hot cup in both hands.

  “Mum,” I say, kneeling beside her. “Don’t you remember?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” she says, her eyes narrowing dangerously.

  She looks pretty again after some reparations with her compact, lipstick, and kohl. Her hair billows down her back, and she has changed into a black robe with embroidered red frog closures.

  “I fell,” I say, and she laughs.

  “Spastic,” she says cheerfully. She waves me away and begins making telephone calls filled with purrs and throaty denials: “O I never!”

  I am five years old.

  I return to the closet that serves as my room and imagine my insides.

  I see the cage bars, my ribs, holding my starved heart, which, beneath my gaze, bursts, revealing a much smaller, chromium-plated, steel organ.

  Never say that again, I think, and when I open my eyes, I see everything so clearly and sharply, I feel dizzy.

  “Pat!” my mother calls — my real name, my old name, is Patrick Hurst. “Give us some more tea?”

  “Make it yourself,” I say, walking toward her, holding a hammer I will not hesitate to use if she touches me.

  She does not.

  * * *

  Annabel, this is why I don’t say it, why I can’t —

  I say this to the silent, pitch-black room, silent but for one strange bird that always stays up very late, chirping in a fractious way — about what, I cannot imagine.

  * * *

  I start to drink again. Not much, as Christine and her husband watch me closely, but enough to make me drunk-dial Annabel, who promptly changes her number; to have SkyMall gifts sent to her express — a Celtic dragon wall clock, a hand reflexology massager, an Illumicube — all immediately returned; and to send her actual letters, as she appears to have blocked me all over social media and flagged my email address as well.

  She does not return my letters.

  Charles is kind enough to drive me to LACMA, where I spend all my time in front of Pieter Soutman’s The Raising of Lazarus.

  I buy a hundred postcards of the image: she is the refulgent Christ and I am the dead man, born again in Her.

  On the first ten, I write her name in different colors, marvelling at its beauty.

  On the next ten, I draw lopsided hearts and fill them with clouds of pink crayon.

  Then I start writing short phrases, like “Miss you” and “What can I — ?”

  Then outright apologies, long, teeny-lettered sorrowings.

  Finally, my last poem:

  I found you little bird and kept you

  In a golden box with a jeweled perch

  You lay on your side retching

  Seeds and nectar, until the day you flew

  Away, your russet wing mended,

  Singing as wild things do,

  That to be captive is worse than death;

  That death was everything I knew.

  I sign it with a drawing of Annabel, pendent in the sky, and this one is returned to me with DEAR PARIS REVIEW scrawled over my crummy poem.

  I send her an eight-slice toaster and a windup chipmunk with genuine emerald eyes, and cry so much that my daughter comes to sit with me, promising me things will get better.

  Finally, I look at her, directly.

  “You are beautiful,” I say, and am violently ashamed when she lights up, then breaks down, my never having praised or loved her, this innocent child.

  * * *

  Annabel appears in the middle of the night.

  How, I do not know.

  Grimly, she removes her clothes and I see she is pregnant, but smaller than Ch
ristine.

  Pulling my bedding aside, she climbs on my naked body and fucks me, hard. I am too anxious to cum. She is not.

  She dresses and says, “No matter what, you are the love of my life,” before padding out the door and down the stairs.

  I follow her but she’s not there.

  I go back to my room and the bed is crisp and clean.

  Could I have dreamed her?

  THIS NEVER HAPPENED is scrawled in the mist on the closed window.

  I pray that it has, and as I pray my eyes pop open and I am wide awake, painfully alone, and pathetic and dry.

  Please, Annabel, I love —

  The bed is a raft, the room is a sea of tears, and my adored Annabel is the pole star obscured by the storm that has taken so many lives, another will not matter.

  * * *

  I do not drown, or die.

  I shake it off like Tay Tay. I’ll never get my girl back like this.

  It is time to hit the gym with a vengeance, stick to my diet of kale smoothies and pails of supplements, and make the rounds: hairstylist, aesthetician, cosmetic surgeon, all of the high-end department stores for a brand-new wardrobe.

  And some cool shops as well. I like American Rag for sheer, intricately constructed blouses, distressed jeans, and boots. I find a three-quarter-length immaculate white pile coat with a pink satin lining at Lemon Frog, and a black ankle-length military jacket with epaulets and gold buttons.

  I will be fifty-eight soon. There is some talk of a birthday party, but all I want is Annabel.

  Crispin has finished the first draft, “And it’s perfect, ese.”

  I read it in one sitting and am very impressed. It is unmistakably Kray’s, but polished, and somehow rougher.

  The theme of brutal vengeance is perfectly articulated with gestures to the essential plays and films (from Death Wish to Unforgiven to Pretty in Pink).

  Still, something is missing.

  I wonder what it is, when it should be obvious.

  I look around online and see that Annabel has put up a film, her first since we broke up.