by Karen Runge
A watercolour of a flat field, a path for one cutting through. Crushed by two. That empty landscape filled with thorns, grass glowing wheat-yellow under a toxic summer sun. Two blades of grass painted red. Shining wet. This I saw without remembering. This I remembered without the need for sight.
I’d spent hours on these pieces. With each one, no matter the subject, I was sketching myself. I knew that, and I did it anyway. Recreating pieces of me. Disassembled. Broken. Fragments that cut into me as I handled them. Sharp shards. I examined them anyway. Because long ago I’d developed this habit, the one where I practice taking myself apart.
“You don’t have to keep revisiting these things,” Daniel told me.
Daniel. Still strange to me then. So crisp and clean against the muddled culture I’d once called mine. So different to the men I’d been with before, in all the places I’d travelled to. He stalked my new apartment, a cat sniffing at the corners. A man in a smart jacket, impeccably shaved, cologned, stiff under his skin. Red-eyed from all that beer, the smell of smoke still trapped in his clothes. He surveyed the canvases it had cost the last of my savings to ensure I could bring with me. They were lined up around my bedroom, leant against radiators, propped against the walls. An inchoate, stuttering series of images. Each of them an aspect of me. I stood fully clothed. I stood just behind him. I stood and trembled as if I was naked. As though I was cold.
The room smelled of me. Sweat, perfume. The prince bed was conspicuous behind us. That afternoon, before I went to meet him, I’d taken a shower and then tried to sleep. The pillows were still damp from my hair. There may or may not have been a circle of moisture on the mattress, because before I’d given up on sleep, I’d wrenched an orgasm out of myself. A rabid hunger, barely fed. I worried that he knew, somehow.
Now I know he knew, of course. Daniel always had a nose for sex.
Remember this, before you panic: he came to me.
Or, I let him come to me.
“There’s history here, isn’t there?” He said that on his knees, bending to inspect the art I’d created in the life I’d left behind. A life that just a few months before had been my reality, and now was already only memory, remote, surreal. A different version of myself. He was staring at a yellow field. Raising a hand and pointing a finger to touch a blade of grass I’d dabbed red.
“Isn’t there?” he asked.
I folded my arms, glaring down at him. “It’s just a field,” I said. My voice low to keep it steady. My shoulders were shaking. I locked my muscles and prayed he wouldn’t notice.
He looked up at me. His smile hard, blood lit. His eyes, soft. “Don’t play,” he told me. “This isn’t a game.”
He stood. He stared down at me until I looked away. Then he took my face in his hands, his index fingers pressing into the hollow past my jaw, below my ears. The barest hint of a threat, with those hard digits not quite digging into the soft flesh that sheathed my salivary glands. I tasted kidneys, hearts. I tasted blood. He made me look up.
“No, I don’t want to play with you,” he said. “Not you, I don’t think.”
And he did at last what I’d been waiting for him to try for weeks. He kissed me.
That first time, he was gentle. I was the one who wanted to bite.
– TWENTY-NINE –
The day was blustery, dark. The sky was clouded with thick fumes that plumed from the smokestacks. Coal burning all across the city, choking the air. They walked through it anyway, Neven and Ada, side by side. Not touching. Their hands passing inches apart as they stepped.
“We should really buy gas masks,” she said. “This stuff is probably killing us. All of us. An entire city wiped out by toxic air. And everybody knows about it. And nobody gives a shit.”
“When did you last see a full week of blue sky?”
“Here?” She snorted, shook her head. “Never, I don’t think.”
Never.
The word was so final that Neven felt a sinking in his gut, a dizzy terror at what he’d handed himself over to. I’ve moved here now. I’m stuck here now. Could I leave as easily as I came? And right behind this, he thought, What the fuck have I done?
“Daniel wants to have a baby.”
Ada spoke so quietly, so simply, that for a moment Neven didn’t respond, piecing the sounds together in his mind until they formed themselves into a kind of sense. “What?”
“Daniel. He wants—”
Neven reeled. “What?”
Ada stopped, waited for him to turn and look at her. When he did she held her arms out in a helpless gesture. Her smile saying, What can I do?
His hands hovered at her shoulders. To push her? To grab onto her?
“Well, tell him no. Tell him you can’t do that. It’s your choice too, you know.”
She folded her arms and lifted her shoulders in a small shrug. “I know. But see, he saw this woman and her baby on the subway the other day—”
“Some woman? He saw some woman and his whole world got turned around? His entire fucking—”
“No, no, listen. The way he described her to me, you have no idea. It was so beautiful. He says she was—”
“So he told you some fucking fairy story about some babe neither of you know, some woman and her whelp, and now you want to be a mommy? You? With him? You and him?”
“I’d be a good mother.”
“Like hell. Like hell, Ada. Christ. What are you thinking?”
Like hell. Words like cannonballs exploding the ground under her feet. Words licked with sulphur and suffused with arsenic. Sweat burst on the back of Ada’s neck. Her hands fisted. “You don’t have to be such an asshole you know,” she said. “You don’t have to treat me like—”
“I’ll treat you however the fuck I want. You ask for that. No?”
“No,” she moaned and closed her eyes, her brow furrowed against an emotion that might, maybe, have been rage. “No, I don’t ask for that. Nobody asks for that.”
“You know what, Ada? You deserve exactly what you get.” Sneering against the pain in his eyes. “Exactly what you fucking get. I hope he kills someone one day. I hope you kill someone one day. Fuck it, I hope he kills you. Both of you.”
“He’d never do that,” she said quietly. “He married me. And our child—”
“Your child?”
“Yes, Neven. You don’t understand. Daniel and me, no matter what, see, he and I are partners—”
“Yeah, well, keep it.” He spat on the ground at her feet. He didn’t look at her again.
Watching him walk away, Ada closed her hands over her stomach, her fingers interlocked, pressing. Her breaths so tight that dizziness caught her, and she wasn’t sure what it was that made the world spin so suddenly: his glare, his saliva, the tearing inside of her. Or maybe it was the sky—just that—a hard grey wall locked over her head, blocking out the light.
– THIRTY –
But how could we stay away? With so many bridges forged, so many lines crossed?
It sounds stupid. Trite. Cliché. That we crossed lines together. That we made bonds between the breaks. But it’s true. It’s true. It is.
Even after you walked away, Daniel fucked me and I dreamed of you. Understanding the irreparable difference between us as I did, I thought about it anyway. Biting his shoulder, reimagining his dimensions. Him like a needle, you like a punch. I sought satisfaction in the dream and not the truth.
I dreamed of you.
That insincere platitude: “let’s just be friends.” Poisonous. Trite. A line they say in movies, on TV shows. A line all the liars say.
So we made ourselves liars. We turned ourselves inside out and hid behind the insincere. Proximity biting. Anything to keep seeing you.
Anything to—
– THIRTY-ONE –
When the next sighting came, it didn’t go unnoticed. When the next sighting came, they laughed.
Neven was at the front door getting ready to leave. He was wrapping his scarf around his neck in slow stro
kes, his boots still unlaced, his jacket hanging open. He took his time getting ready, fiddling with wool and trying to think of things to say. A bitter taste tainted the back of his mouth. His eyes smarted as though singed with smoke.
It was violent, this tension.
Ada and Daniel watched, standing close together, waiting. Avoiding Neven’s eyes. Ada’s jaws were clenched behind her smile, and every nerve in her body rang tight as piano wire. Daniel posed beside her with his hand pressed to the small of his wife’s back. Instead of smiling, he kept his eyes on Neven’s bootlaces. Long and brown to match the leather, still damp with melted snow.
Dirty, Daniel thought.
Then Neven stopped, his eyes brightening like a light had just gone on, his hands frozen at his collar where he was still arranging his scarf. “By the way,” he said to Ada, “sorry for nearly running you over yesterday.”
She raised an eyebrow at him. “Running me over?”
“It was you, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “Yesterday? I don’t think I went out yesterday.” She glanced at Daniel and folded her arms under her breasts. She held her shoulders high, drawn in. “Did I?”
“No. I went out in the afternoon, but Ada was home all day.” Daniel’s face relaxed into his easy smile, and he clapped his friend on the shoulder. “Who is this girl that looks like my wife, and why are you trying to kill her?”
They laughed, or tried to—deferential, awful.
And Neven thought, Breathe.
It was evening’s end. The food had been eaten, the wine drunk, the music stopped. They’d listened to Daniel’s old Dead Can Dance LPs during the meal, the silence between tracks broken by chewing sounds, swallowing sounds—gulping sounds when Neven drank too fast, hoping it would encourage his hosts to produce more wine. Ada’s laughter subdued to a sharp titter, the sound oddly stiff, like starched sheets snapping in a high wind. When the wine was gone and no more offered, they drank coffee and talked about movies they wanted to see, records they wanted to buy. Safe topics. Polite. Surreal when he compared the safe and the polite to what the three of them had been. In that other life.
Just three months ago, there would be none of this raw silence. The dining room table would be strewn with rolled up paper money and a few bloody tissues along with the crumpled napkins and splashes of spilled sauce. They would be drunk by now, drunk and high and insensible. Blissful. Music growling in low, smoky tones, and never anything as pseudo-soulful as Dead Can Dance, which he’d never exactly swooned over.
Didn’t I nearly run you over yesterday, Ada? Didn’t I almost ride right over you?
At this hour Daniel would be taking out the stash, cracking black jokes as Ada cracked open another bottle of wine. They’d be snorting white powder until Ada’s nose started to bleed. They’d stretch her out on the couch, her eyes softening to slits as the room spun around her. Daniel going to her from time to time to brush the hair from her face, to kiss her forehead.
Smiling back at Neven. How’s our girl tonight, huh?
And she’d reach her arms out to him, to them.
Now Ada’s eyes were wide and wary above that stiff smile. And Daniel hid behind his role of host—host as tolerator, guest as invader.
Guest, Neven thought. That’s what I am now to him. To them. How did this happen? Or really…why?
He thought friendships were always safe, once they became real and raw and rooted in the quick, nesting in the fibres of the soul. As his friendship with Daniel and Ada used to be. Now he stood stuck in their hallway, strangling himself with musty fabric, all the hungers above and below his belly left unfed. Nauseous on Ada’s cream sauce, always too rich. His dick pressed hard against his zip, throbbing so it hurt.
“I could swear it was you,” he said to Ada. “You were wearing that red leather coat of yours. I went by on my Vespa and had to swerve—I nearly knocked you over.”
She glanced up at Daniel, then back to him. “I must have a doppelganger,” she said, and laughed—a wild sound, too loud, too explosive. It made both men flinch. Ada’s laughter stopped in her throat. Something twisted and burned in the new silence.
This is gone, Neven thought, hating their tight hallway, their awkward faces, the nest of laces tangled round his feet. I guess this is dead.
Right now leaving would be a relief, but he knew it would hurt later, once he arrived home sober and alone, half-desperate with arousal, confused and displaced.
Neven laced his boots, closed his jacket. He kissed them both goodbye in a series of awkward pecks. Ballast fire on flinching skin.
The moment his back was turned, the door shut and the lock clicked home behind him.
* * *
Outside, Neven walked the strip of chill darkness back to his own apartment, just a few buildings down from theirs. A proximity they’d once treasured; one they were sure to dread in time. Fresh snow squeaked under his boots, a feather fall that numbed his cheeks and clung to his eyelashes, blurring everything to a soft white sparkle. He trudged through it without seeing it or feeling it. He was replaying that moment on the bike. The flash of light in his eyes as he rounded the corner—sunshine glancing off a shop window, a blade slashing his vision. The feel of the back wheel sliding out from under him. The swerve to correct it—just a sway, very slight—his shoulder and arm muscles tensing as he bullied the machine back under control. And then there was the girl—Ada! Her name had flashed through his head like a scream in song—stumbling back, snapping round to look at him. Her eyes wide and startled and very blue in that crystal light. Her eyebrows swept high in surprise, the edge of her coat swirling as she stumble-stepped clear of his path.
He’d lifted the fingers of his left hand to her as he whipped by. He’d wanted to shout something to her over his shoulder, but he passed too quickly and his heart was still shudder-thudding from the brush, a burst of adrenaline wild in his blood. Then she was behind him, and he was at the end of the street. And he was turning the bike into traffic. And it was past.
I’ll send her a message later, he’d thought. Maybe even make a joke of it.
It was an excuse to get back in touch, to contact her personally, to share something with her, even if it was a near-accident. But somehow he’d forgotten about it until that last moment at the end of the night. Dinner with Daniel and Ada. Dinner at Daniel and Ada’s. With and at now worlds apart. There was no with anymore in their dark little apartment where so much was the same, and everything had changed.
“I must have a doppelganger.” Ada had laughed. Her sudden, sharp smile a knife edge that almost hurt him. The eyes above the smile watchful, wondering.
That girl on the street, she looked just like her. Like she did before. But of course it was her. Whatever she says. It was.
When he reached his own door the snow had stopped and the wind had stilled. Heading up the stairs, the echo of his footsteps followed close behind him.
* * *
As Neven brushed his teeth and stared at his face in the mirror—eyes less bloodshot, no less hollow—Ada lay on her belly while Daniel traced his fingers across her back.
“It’ll look like shit eventually,” Daniel said, outlining the swan’s neck, the starburst flower patterns that flew from its wings and scattered at her shoulders. Touching the scars he’d made. “When you’re older, you know, and your skin starts to loosen.”
“It’s easy to hide at least,” she said.
“Not if we go swimming.”
She sighed, a frustrated hiss of breath. “I’ll swim in a T-shirt then, okay?”
He bent to kiss the space between her shoulder blades, the scars he had not made, the places where the needle had dug too deep. An amateur tattoo artist. A fantasy tattoo. The kind you think will last forever when you’re young and cannot imagine yourself aged. The touch of his lips tickled. She twitched, teeth clenched.
“Just relax,” he said, sliding a hand down her spine and over her buttocks, his hand disappearing in the hollow b
etween her legs. His fingers teased at the warm, moist slit that travelled there. “You want this, don’t you?”
I want this, she told herself.
“Don’t you?”
She shifted, propped herself up on her elbows, put her head in her hands. “Yes,” she said into her open palms. Her voice was muffled. “I do.”
I do.
– THIRTY-TWO –
Ada. Listen. What did you ever know about me?
Everything I needed to know I learned in the house where I grew up. I learned it before you. I learned it differently from you. I think I learned it better, too. You and Daniel, so smug and secure in your sick little world. You did it safely, do you know that? Of course not. You married that pretentious fuck. He made you pretentious, too. You wouldn’t know true brutality if I tied you to a chair and cut your tits off, gouged your eyes out. Rammed a poker up your cunt. Fucked you with it until I punctured both your lungs. Kissed the blood as you choked it past your lips. I thought about doing that, you know. Toward the end, when you made me mad. And later, again, when you broke my heart. If for no other reason than to watch the surprise twist past the agony in your face. Even at the beginning, I sometimes fantasised about doing that to you because you were suffocating me with your assumptions, your impressions. All the things you were so sure you knew about me. And later I wanted to do it because I knew you felt sorry for me.
Fuck you.
And while you’re at it, ask yourself this: what did I ever really talk to you about? What did I ever tell you in plain words? About myself. About what I thought of you.
Nothing.
But I did always like your inconsistencies. Your contradictions. The one thing that I’ll admit truly intrigued me about you.
It was a reason to keep meeting with you, at least.
Even monsters can love. I told you that. I also told you that you were safe with me.