by Chris Dennis
Fuck you. What do you know? Everyone wants to siphon the grief out. They can’t suck hard enough. It never rises to the surface.
I just stare at their made-up faces, balancing the empty beer bottle on my fingers before I fling it, stunningly, really, into a garbage can a few yards away. I squint at the boys. The coils of the portable heaters glow like little burning fences, corralling everyone.
Someone says, “My brother has a Yamaha, dude. Shit sounds like Phil Collins giving anal-birth to Celine Dion!” Their laughter is thin and sharp as a pocketknife.
“What’s wrong with Collins?” I ask. I’ve interrupted the joke. They’re trying to refigure their taste now.
I should leave. I should catch a ride back into town, head into the snow and wait for this pill to kick in. Tonight the world is an icy eyehole. I want to crawl inside it, I want to burrow in it, to be so cold it burns. But, I see Gordon here too. Damn, and he’s climbing onto the speaker box with the Marishi sisters. He wedges himself between them. Or creases? Or has grown there, all of a sudden, in that infinitesimal fucking space between their bodies. It’s like Gordon owns them. He’s grinning a big ol’ clown grin, because he thinks girls love to get owned. He gives them both a leg so they can ride him—two kids mounting a seesaw. The Marishis are trying to climb Gordon like a little ladder.
All three of them flicker like an evil robot before the strobe—a single human engine on the verge of total fucking transformation—turning more and more monstrous between the stabbing segments of light.
Something is happening with the pill.
Over the throb of the bass beat, one of the girlie boys, the one with rhinestones glued to his face, yells, “Who’s your ride? You drive out here?”
Shut up.
“I came in a van, but the van kids are doing horse in the stables,” I say.
Again, the girlie boys laugh. “Ride the dark horse!” they say. Together, they make a sick sound. The music keeps changing. The lasers scan the barn like they’re searching for a clue. I’m scanning too. No way I’m riding with them.
What is Gordon now? A memory? A missing older stepuncle? My grandmother’s boyfriend’s brother? I never know how to say it. People put us together. We were a team, even when I didn’t want to be. He was a hand down the front of my jogging pants in the bedroom of an abandoned house last summer.
“I see them,” I say. In a corner stable, with hay stuck to their faces and arms, the van kids are fucking. It looks as if everyone, somehow, is penetrating everyone else.
Was it August yet? In that abandoned farm house in Pope County? A man becomes a skeleton, gets divided into mismatched parts. He’s all wrapped up in the world, and then ripped from it. His skin slips, or is torn off his bones by the jagged chassis of his buddy’s vintage El Camino. He gets done in—a hot blade into the fat heart of his small, stupid life.
Someone has flung open the top half of the barn doors. In spirals, in giant breaths, in wide sparkly crests the snow comes, stinging, and suddenly all the people are turning toward it and yelling and covering their eyes and dancing. Now it’s like the DJ is playing for the snow, toggling his synthesizer as the gusts fold into the barn. I’m chilled, instantly—a burnt-out filament.
“I’ll be outside,” I yell to the van kids, who are far off, still penetrating one another, not listening.
Outside people are gathering, trudging like pioneers through the drifts, passing before the electrified snowflakes in the headlights. Is it after midnight? Is it morning? There’s someone I know—Gordon, again?—dressed like a girl, slamming the car door on a silver Benz, a black feather boa surging between his throat and the wind. “Hello, hello, friend!” he calls. It’s not his voice, but it’s Gordon’s body doddering forward like a bitch, in green high heels. His hands are full. He’s holding several glass vials? Test tubes with something living, something fleshy crammed inside each one?
Finally I find the van and stand behind it and let myself throw up.
It was right before he disappeared, I punched Gordon, all awkward, in the neck. I’d aimed for his mouth but missed. “What the hell?” Gordon said to me. “Don’t be such a girl. Stand the fuck still.” It was sweltering. The sweat stung my scratched mosquito bites. Gordon moved his hand around inside my jogging pants until something happened. “If I have it, you have it too. That’s how it works. What’s the point of getting tested?” What? Probably nothing. Total anarchy. It was not sexy—that’s the last thing—not relief or satisfaction from his greasy hand tugging at me, trying to draw it out and use it to flood the fucking room around us. What else? Like he was trying to drown in it? Like I deserve to be left with this, the audacity of a haunting. I get closer to the trees, with the parked cars at my back, and cup some good, clean snow, pack my mouth full and let it melt. I’ve been thirsty. There’s nothing like it. First I was just the sticky clog. That was right after. Now I don’t know. My one reasonable desire: thirsty. I’d break-dance all night if I thought I could sweat it out. But then, like, out of nowhere—damn, he’s so fast. He always was. He’s off in the trees. He’s running. What is that shit? A giant fucking buck? A ten-pointer? Its antlers all dripping with velvet. He’s running after it in his neon heels. “Gordon, dude,” I yell to him. “What do you think? I’m going to follow you?”
I pull my hood up. Hot and cold. Freezing. Burning. What are they? Opposite thresholds that intersect somewhere in our brains? Two extremes that ultimately cross back into each other? Gordon’s like way back in there. He’s bending to get some snow too. His hands disappear, up to the elbows. His skirt is so short, showing off his muscular legs. What the fuck is he doing? He’s like drilling into the snow. He’s making a hole. He’s making a place to bury something. A used condom? A wadded-up piece of paper?
All his boring secrets, and mine. Go figure.
I just stand there and watch and try to make out what’s happening. It’s bad though. It’s really bad. How can he stand the cold like this? Finally, it’s so loud, the deafening burrowing he’s doing, and I want to make it stop so I just go to him, dragging my feet through the snow. When I get to him, he shows me what’s in the hole and it’s hard to see but I’m like, “Holy shit, dude, we really do have to bury this.” We dig. We dig until we hit bottom but even then he says it’s still not deep enough. I tell him to follow me. We start walking, farther into the frozen woods, searching for a better place. He takes my hand and I let him because it’s cold and he seems confused. He has a look on his face, under the fake eyelashes and lipstick, like he’s forgotten what he’s doing or where he was headed.
“I don’t have any friends,” I say. “I’ve never been good at it. I got tested, bro,” I lie to him. “I don’t have it. Why do you think you’re still here, following me?”
“That’s a dumb question,” he says, lifting up my hand to kiss my cold knuckles. “Does it matter why I’m here, man? I just am.” He kisses my hand and wrist several times before letting my arm drop.
Maybe he loves me. It’s hard to say. My breath rolls out like exhaust fumes in the freezing air. I spot the buck again, raking his antlers against a small tree. “There it is,” I say, hoping to jog Gordon’s memory.
“Yes! It’s the wrong season for that,” Gordon says. “We have to do something.” He’s upset. He’s shaking his head, like maybe it’s his fault this is happening.
“Some things just get mixed up,” I say. “It’s been happening to me a lot. It’s not your fault.”
“Hell, I know that, dude. If anyone’s to blame, it’s you. My mother called you. You need to talk to her. She knows. You should just accept that.”
Quickly the wind kicks up, dumping snow from the branches. He lets go of my hand and then he’s gone. I don’t see him anywhere. The buck raises his head up, smelling the air around us. He treads softly into the woods and then he’s gone too. I’m alone out here. I don’t know where I’m at. There’s only the s
ound of the snow, an infinite amount of crystal particles forming and falling apart for miles in every dark direction.
I’ve never had to miss anyone I was afraid of. Some days all I wanted to know was where he’d went to. And others . . . I was so fucking cold—all the way down to my bones—expecting him to show back up, to be standing in the kitchen when I got home or walk up behind me in the gas station. But I was also hoping, I can say it now, that he never actually would.
Dioramas
She was washing a dish when she saw the crack. A good plate, one from her mother’s black Depression set, like a lightning strike—a fine bolt with tines that randomly forked. Her life was like this, a blunt mistake followed by a series of driftless decisions. Every day, on a faint loop beneath her habits, was the soft dream of a sudden escape.
She enjoyed walking through bean fields and often wandered through the fields beyond the house with her hair teased out like the nest of a large, neurotic bird. The wild construction encircled her petite skull and each time the wind blew, the bangs flapped like a battered wing over her heavily made-up eyes. She wore her stone-washed jeans so tight she could hardly fit a dollar in the pocket, and when she walked she played Cher’s nineteenth studio release, Heart of Stone, at maximum volume on her Sony Walkman. She’d recently purchased this album on sale at Walmart and found it touched a place so deep inside her it was beyond the grasp of most things in her life. She sang along to every track, and was fond of performing “If I Could Turn Back Time” a cappella, in the bathroom, so long as the house was empty, such as when the children were at school. It was 1989—The Year of the Snake according to a laminated place mat she’d stolen from China Palace. On her little walks alone she liked to observe: the gray cement of the heavy sky, the anemic farmhouses and the phallic coal silos, the giant grasshoppers that took useless attempts at flight from among the endless bean rows. Occasionally she’d remove her headphones to listen at the insects’ alien chatter. Their language struck her as murderous and aroused. She walked nearly every day, always until she came to the same place at the very edge of the woods where someone had abandoned an old, wooden raccoon trap. It was a weathered box with a fall-down trapdoor propped up by a petrified stick. When peering into the trap, Pam witnessed other realities: the silver-lit mouths of caves on unreachable mountainsides, sacred garments sewn from the feathers of prehistoric birds, men with manes of hair expertly braided into hammocks that hung down their mighty backs. Also mansions with glass elevators. Also long sterling earrings like the ones Cher wore on the album cover of Heart of Stone. There were even miniature replicas of rooms in the box that Pam had occupied as a young girl. Once she looked inside and saw the child-Pam on her hands and knees, rubbing her bottom against the leg of an antique Pembroke—she had a habit back then of rubbing herself against things, like a dog. She’d been a frail and horny child. Her mother had always made a joke of this to cousins over the phone, as if it proved something—that Pam was untamed? Or developmentally impaired?
How difficult the years had been for Pammy’s mommy. Poor Mommy! Often it was implied that Pam was the primary agent of Mommy’s fabulous misery. Even Mommy’s death, which may or may not have been a suicide, was inevitably pinned on Pam.
Deeper into the shadowy woods, beyond the spot occupied by the little wooden trap, everything remained motionless and quiet.
At home she vacuumed. Or else watched MTV. Or read articles in her women’s magazines: “What He Wishes You Were Doing in the Bedroom!” “Vaginas, How Does Yours Compare?” Wouldn’t it be nice, she thought, if her husband returned from work to find she had a more perfect vagina, or to surprise him one evening with a new oral skill. She kept her Walkman on while she bleached the toilets. Before mopping she flung a palmful of talcum powder into the air and let the cloud waft while she lip-synced “Just Like Jesse James” before the pristine face of the bathroom mirror.
The smell of bleach in the house gave her a reckless feeling. She turned the Walkman off when she heard someone calling her name from another room. Except no one was there. They were all still at work and school. She returned to the bathroom and raised the window in order to partake in one of the secret cigarettes she kept above the medicine chest. Outside, on the ledge, a wasp sat, furiously grooming itself.
It wasn’t youth, necessarily, that she coveted as she approached these middle years. She wasn’t interested in reentering her vapid, bloodthirsty teenage dreams. But it was something like youth—access, maybe, to a world where one’s identity remained fluid, and naturally lubricated? A place where the possibilities still burned like barn fires in every direction.
One was not tethered, as a teenager, Pam thought later while vacuuming out the closets. One was expected to transform, almost daily, as a teen.
The children rolled in after sundown, sweaty from their after-school activities, calling out for clean underwear and food items that weren’t in the house. The stench they carried with them was a musky, hormonal combination of perfumes that made Pam feel affectionate and repelled. She wanted to pay more attention to the children, really, she did. But instead she would yell, “Go build something! Go dream!” in a shrill, dead tone from the La-Z-Boy.
Motherhood was a mysterious hole in a wall she’d entered, wetly, on a stifling evening in 1973, drunk on orange schnapps and too hot to say no to unprotected sex. Of course she had no idea she was saying yes to anything except the darting nightbirds, to the beads of sweat gliding down the inverted arch of her spine as her head hung out the car’s rear window, to her own hair wrapped around her throat as Richard’s massive prick filled her up like a bathtub.
She was just now beginning her exit from that mysterious hole, all these years later, to the sight of expensive furniture dramatically positioned around her living room. She was waking up and her children were growing armpit hair. The whole house, in fact, was growing hairier and hungrier and where had she been exactly? Some outer space? Another distant dimension tucked thin as skin beneath the obvious realm?
The house had become a giant puzzle in which the pieces continued to multiply. She watched TV and made sure all the bills were paid on time. She allowed Janice and Brock and Richard their daily orbits while the unoccupied space of the house diminished, filling with all the discounted items Richard brought home each week. “Very deep discounts,” he liked to say, punctuated by his smutty wink: Guess jeans by Marciano, seasonal wall art, compact stereos, monogrammed thermoses, crystal carafes, gimmicky exercise equipment, a programmable coffee maker, Calvin Klein underwear, lotions containing rare minerals, her Sony Walkman. Richard was the manager of a large department store and had full access to all items on clearance. Regularly he purchased discount designer suits that he had tailored to fit snugly at the inseam. No surprise most of his employees called him Dick.
And somehow. Just beneath the visible world—that twisted-up other domain into which she slipped so smoothly—may as well have been on the deserted beach of some hazy, subterranean lake, lounging like a drunk with her dead mother.
After the supper dishes were cleared, Pam stared through a breach in the drapes, observing the manner in which darkness obscured the textures of the lawn. Cher was everywhere—a flickering hologram. In the diseased rose hedge. In the even carpet of the grass. In the ditch by the road where the weeds grew high enough to hide a body. Behind her, even, in the living room, Cher lay spread-eagle on the sofa. Just as she began to feel herself flush at the thought, maybe even become a little turned-on, the porch light of the farmhouse across the road came on, illuminating two terra-cotta buffalo heads on each side of the huge front door. Each pot contained a single erotically shaped cactus. They had not been there the day before. The giant farmhouse had been on the market since 1985. No one came to view it anymore. The cross-eyed widow that owned it did her giddy disclosure too many times, saying, “There’s a dozen underground rivers beneath here. Old coal land! All the mine shafts flood every time it rains! What the c
oal company ought to do is buy up the place, pay me a bucket of money and let the mutated fish take it over.” The coal company had actually made an offer to Richard and Pam. They’d turned it down, holding out for more money, same as the widow. They were the last two remaining residents out this far.
Pam could see the front door was freshly painted: a creamy, pale shade of orange. It was a full-on renovation. The door’s three clear windows had been replaced with frosted blue panes. Obviously the new owners were trying to compensate for something.
Richard summoned Pam into the bathroom, requesting another can of beer be brought to him in the shower. She didn’t begrudge him. She smoked in there, using the drain as an ashtray.
In the morning, after the school bus pulled away, Richard brought out the vibrator. He liked to watch her use it on herself while he shoved his prick so aggressively down her throat it brought tears to her eyes. Why they did this after making the bed was anyone’s guess. The bedroom possessed a stagey neatness that contradicted their rough sex. Or brandished it? As was the case in the more tastefully produced pornos Richard brought back from Video Emporium. In these films women were typically splayed across pink satin bedspreads, bent over wicker ottomans in beachfront town houses void of all personal effects. Occasionally Richard would pull her hair while attempting to control the vibrator himself. He was not graceful. He longed to execute too many fantasies at once. His hands were impatient. She was never excited by the arrangement, but complied because, truly, it meant so much to him. She could see the gratitude twisting like a summer storm in his tired eyes. He badly wanted to be a manly aggressor. His hostility lacked hunger though. She knew what hunger looked like. And his was a bad reenactment of it. Afterward he pulled her gently to the edge of the bed and continued getting at her, softer now, with the blue toy, until she signaled she’d climaxed too. It was shaped like a dolphin, the toy, and her body lapped rhythmically against the deep diving while Richard whispered “You’re beautiful” and “I love you.”