“What’s that?”
“Guess.” I tossed a frozen pizza into the grocery cart.
“I’m not buying frozen pizza.”
“No, I am.” The bright lights and piped-in music of the grocery store made my head hurt.
“Fine, but not for tonight. I told you I’m cooking. You like ahi, don’t you?”
“Sure. I love ahi.”
“Help me pick out some stuff for salad.”
I picked a head of lettuce. You made a face, as though I’d fished it from a dumpster.
“You don’t cook, do you?”
That depends on what you mean.
In an aisle below a COUGH & COLD REMEDIES sign, boxes upon bottles of pills and syrups promised new cures for old ailments. Marketing experts and focus groups point to colors—orange for pain, yellow for breathing, blue for sleep. PR firms run damage control when somebody spikes a random bottle. The warning labels grow longer, the print smaller. The laws change while the human body stays the same. Colds and headaches remain colds and headaches, and 95 percent of every pill on the market is inert binders and dyes.
The experts rig that 5 percent sweet spot with molecular detonator switches. Your solvent is off purity by 1 percent, your temperature wrong by a single degree, and you lose everything. They count on amateur cooks being discouraged, but they don’t count on them being curious. For the curious, each failure shines another light onto the problem, which makes the slow diffusion of the chemical self-destruct mechanism so much sweeter when it’s achieved, and there wasn’t a pill on those shelves I couldn’t pick apart, atom by atom, and pluck out precisely the atoms I needed.
The Buddha found enlightenment with Anaïs Nin, perched at the cracked spine of Delta of Venus. The jade deity belly laughed at the cosmic jokes the rest of us couldn’t hear, turned luminous blue at the edges as I held my stare, unblinking, and the blue grew brighter, washing out your bookshelves, my bare feet propped on your couch, then the couch itself. The humming blue swallowed your curtains, your paintings and your twenty-six messages. It swallowed Pinstripe and his acid burns, the heated discussion with Manhattan White, my panic and the acetone stench wafting to the cops eight feet from me at the diner.
“Wash up,” you said. “Dinner’s ready.” You dropped the plates with the same cold protest Mom made with Dad. The silence took me back home to my parents, to navigating the air of muted rage in our two-bedroom, evangelical pressure cooker.
Anyone knowing who I was could have sent me to prison for the combined contents of our shopping cart. You’d asked for distilled water. I picked up a bottle of mineral water. You put it back. Coffee filters, Epsom salts. For the split moment it takes for a fly’s wings to beat, I thought you were on to me.
“Let’s go. Now.”
“I’m not finished. Just a minute.” Your urgency for a romantic dinner was nowhere to be seen.
Iodine, bleach, rubbing alcohol, drain opener. Years of learning became discipline, discipline became habit. Habit became reflex and reflex became normal, not a reaction but my perpetual state of seeing. To convince me otherwise would be describing color to a blind man, water to a fish.
Who sent you?
“I am finished. And tired. I drove all day and would have been perfectly happy with a frozen pizza.”
*
My hands smelled of sage and wildflowers from your soap. I dried them on a towel that smelled like your skin and hair, holding it to my face and breathing you in, amid the Mardi Gras beads, dried flowers, miniature framed photographs, eyebrow pencils and lipsticks in your bathroom. I folded the towel, felt the slightest feather touch against my eye and pulled one of your threads of fire from my face, a strand of sunlight.
You were washing the dishes.
“You need help with anything?”
You kept your back to me.
“Desiree?”
“Yes, Eric?”
“Do you need me to do anything?”
“No.”
You curled onto your couch after dinner, your feet tucked beneath a blanket pulled tightly around you. The television’s blue glow dulled your hair to a deep brown. I sat down beside you.
“Can I have some blanket, please?”
You relinquished a corner, without touching me. Your dog sat on a floor pillow, following our tense exchange and too timid to come too close to either of us.
You flipped channels, stopping on anything loud and full of laughter. You changed when feigning interest in a commercial exposed your cold shoulder for what it was. I knew this territory well. I could decorate cakes in a cancer ward if the circumstances warranted, but I didn’t want to exhume my ghosts in your house.
We fought on the way home.
“What’s wrong?”
“I just wanted to do something nice for you,” you said. “I haven’t seen you for days and you won’t talk to me.”
“I’ve been working, Dee. Nonstop. I don’t want to talk about work.”
“Then talk about something else.”
“I don’t have anything else.”
“Ask me how I’ve been. Has that occurred to you? Or you could thank me for dinner.”
“You haven’t made dinner yet.”
You pulled into a strip mall and parked next to a squad car.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m telling the cops about you,” you said.
“Telling them what?” God help me, Desiree. I grabbed you. I held your wrist and your key ring scraped my arm.
“Let go of me.”
“Telling them what?”
“Let go of me, you son of a bitch.”
I let go.
“I’m telling them what a bastard you are,” you said, and slammed the door.
The cop walked out of a liquor store, bench-press bulked and buzz cut. He set a deli sandwich onto his hood and popped open a bottle of orange juice. My first reaction was to reach for your keys but you’d taken them. You passed him without a word and entered an auto supply store. I stared at the floor of your car. You emerged three minutes later with two bottles of starter fluid.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Starter fluid, Mr. I Do My Own Engine Work.”
“What for?”
Diethyl ether.
“My starter. What do you care?”
“You work on your own car?”
Coffee filters removed undissolved impurities. Epsom salts were for washing lab gear, their crystal structures trapped maverick water molecules, which could sabotage a controlled reaction.
“No, I don’t,” you said. “I can’t do anything for myself. Except cook and clean. I need a big, strong man to take care of me. And I’m still looking for one.”
You didn’t protest when I turned off the television because you weren’t watching it. You stared at the dead screen, out of ways to ignore me.
“Desiree, I didn’t know you worked on your car.” I reached for you, but you pulled away. “I didn’t know because I didn’t ask. I didn’t ask how you’ve been and I didn’t thank you for dinner. I’m sorry.”
Choking back tears, your face twisted into a mangled mask. My forgotten phone calls and dodged questions added up to a signal I’d been oblivious to sending.
“You snapped at me in front of everyone at the grocery store. You yelled at me. You almost left a bruise.”
“I didn’t even realize I was doing it. I’m sorry. I really am.”
“Why did you act that way?” Tears and snot.
“I don’t have a reason. I was wrong. I was tired and didn’t have any patience and I took it out on you.”
“I just wanted to do something special for you. I just wanted you to call and talk to me. Just for a minute. That’s all. I know you have work to do.”
“Please stop it, Dee. You shouldn’t have to explain yourself to me. Desiree, I’m sorry. I really am. I’ve been looking forward to seeing you since the minute I left. I haven’t stopped thinking about you.”
You opened
your blanket to cover the two of us, your head resting in the crook of my neck so perfectly we could have been carved from the same block of marble. After a long silence, you asked for music and excused yourself. I put on Górecki’s Third Symphony, one of your favorites, shut out the lights and lit a candle. You came back, wearing your underwear and one of my T-shirts. You blew the candle out.
“You don’t like candles?”
“No.”
“You’re serious?”
“You can light it if you want. Just blow it out when we leave the room.”
You wrapped around me, and we sat beneath the blanket listening to the sad symphony in the dark.
Somewhere, there’s a part of me that knows right from wrong. That part of me, lying gagged and bound in my mental basement, still has enough breath to whisper through a spit-soaked gag that I should be protecting you, that if I fail every test of decency known to man, the fallout shouldn’t come to you, that you had nothing to do with any of it. If I’m half a man, I should make certain you never know otherwise. I wanted to protect you, and if that made you angry with me, if it meant your never knowing why, then so be it.
All I need to do is patiently, one after the next, move one molecule from one place to another, one compound at a time, one failure after the next until something hits. It’s a process of elimination. I used to work puzzles as a kid, and my mom taught me how to sort out the edge pieces first, assemble the frame, then apply that same process of elimination to all the remaining pieces. I could group them by color or pattern, whatever the picture was on the box. I learned to pick up each piece, one at a time, from my pile of potential matches and try to fit it from any angle into the socket, then discard it and move on. Each failure is meaningless. It’s not me, it’s the pieces, and I have to, absolutely must, try each and every piece every possible way until I find the one that fits. They aren’t failures, they’re steps, small bits of progress. I just needed to try moving one molecule at a time and I probably could have done it in your kitchen.
sixteen
I SLIP MY FINGERS BENEATH YOUR SHIRT TO THE SLICE OF FLESH ABOVE YOUR hips that feels so good in the dark but you hate so much. The places on you I love touching the most are the ones you like the least. Your touch fades. My dick feels like a prosthetic grafted onto me, devoid of sensation but heavy and rigid like a policeman’s sap. I switch on the lamp and I’m miles above the earth, floating in the center of the galaxy with stars on all sides of me. How did I get here and where did you go? Ten slow breaths and the pale patches of wall come into focus, the square ghosts of the old pictures linger like the afterburn of sunlight when stepping into a dark room.
The bottle of nail polish is a knot of burning yellow from the heart of the sun. One of the stars moves and my brain regains footing. Legions of bugs cover the walls, ceiling and floor, each marked with yellow nail paint and glowing from the black light screwed into the lamp. They tagged me, so I tagged them back. There’s nothing for them to report. I’m not doing anything but lying on my bed with my memories and my hard-on, but it looks like I’m floating in the middle of the universe. Shouting from the room next door, a crash against the wall startles the bugs and the constellations shift. Orion disbands, Scorpio dissolves, the galaxy crumbles.
I haven’t slept in days, since I awoke to my empty brain and, in a blink, those days are gone. The time flies. The time flies feed on rotting clocks. The time flies are in collusion with the rest of the bugs. Each wave of fatigue brings a riptide of memory pulling me back. I kick against the current, gasping and choking for sleep, drowning in being awake, struggling to break the surface but the memory is too strong.
Hysteria comes in waves. Three-second surveillance loops of black gangbangers knocking over liquor stores boost the signals to earsplitting, tumor-inducing levels. Suburban teenagers cleaning out jewelry boxes and medicine cabinets do not. The transmissions are everywhere, ambient noise I cannot tune out, hard as I try. The frequency peaks and plummets with news of celebrity arrests, kidnapped white children and middle-class overdoses. Homeless addicts and crack-addled prostitutes drop dead daily by the score without a nod from the signals. A politician’s son is arrested for possession and the signals go batshit. Everything on the street was birthed in the boardroom, patented and pumped into the public’s bloodstream, one cure-all after the next. Then the snake oils went rogue, pitching housewives off ledges when their search for More hit a brick wall and they followed suit with the sidewalk. The saviors of spin rewrote history, and the epidemic of middle-class More became an epidemic of color and crime. The story repeated itself year after year, and I could set my watch to the pulsing of a fresh signal.
This one was different. One theory said it was an Alzheimer’s treatment, another said it was for autism. They all said it was in the experimental stages and had somehow leaked to the streets and clubs. None of the reports could agree on what they didn’t know.
One girl clamped herself into a fetal ball and screamed for hours before she opened her wrists in the bathtub. The paper said she’d suffered repeat violations from her stepbrothers as a child. They muffled her screams with a dishrag pushed into her mouth with a wooden spoon. Young women and men endured similar hallucinations, depending on their memories and experiences. Another boy shattered the bones in his fist, fighting off a string of imagined assailants and taking a swing at a fire door. Users described the sensation of fingers, hands, arms and lips. They felt the warm embrace of their mothers, the womb, an old lover, every stripper who dry humped their crotch, the first time they had sex, or the last. Sometimes the fingers were cold, like the unyielding grip of the dead, sometimes the caressing and stroking wouldn’t stop.
They called it Skin, or Cradle. Derma was the fashionable variant, or “D.” It went by different women’s names in different circles, usually porn starlets. Some called it Pandora, some simply the Box. The slang hadn’t settled. New street terms were sprouting more quickly than emergency room reports. The name depended on your experience, and some people never took it more than once.
The underground’s new drug of choice gave concerned parents, waning politicians and preachers new fuel for their fury, opinion polls and collection baskets. The mob marching with their pitchforks and torches had no idea what they were marching against.
Hysteria drove demand and Hoyle would want a piece of it. If I knew what was good for me, I’d reverse engineer a sample before White came knocking. Staying out of a chicken wire blanket was good for me.
A kiss of sleep touches me on the eyes and my muscles go slack. Something bites me on the chest and I slap myself with the ferocity of a leather belt. Expecting to see a supernova splatter of bug entrails, smoking conductors and resistors in my palm, I only see dark. Even the constellations of starbugs and time flies are gone, the tickle of sleep frightened into a brain crevice like a feral cat. Another bite on the back of my neck. I stop midswing before I slap my bandages.
I climb from my bed and switch on the overhead light. My display of specimens grows, revealing everything and nothing, depending on how much nanowiring the bugs carry. Dark dots in the corners of my eyes bolt for the cracks and seams, but one freezes in place, trying to blend in, accustomed as he is to avoiding boot heels. I pick up the nail polish and move, keeping my vibrations to a minimum. It will dart for a crack once I’m too close, but I tag it with a quick brush to its back before it runs. I’m getting faster.
Red welts cover my chest, stomach and arms. I feel more on my back. God knows what bug spit is coagulating or eggs are incubating inside the bites, what kind of venom or infection is spreading or whether broken insect heads have lodged below the surface of my skin, feeding off me, growing a new bodies, shitting into my bloodstream as they mature before taking flight out of an open sore. My skin burns. I need to shower and douse myself with vodka and boric acid and burn my sheets.
Someone is listening to me. The waking world floods at light speed through millions of neural checkpoints and one speck out of a b
illion screams doom. The cracking twig beneath the hunter’s foot, the screaming child two floors below, the person outside my door.
My heart is like a small rabid rodent trying to claw through my lungs, an angry coke monkey locked in a cage, shrieking and climbing up and down my ribs because it keeps pressing the bell again and again and again but nothing’s happening. I move, quiet as the gathering dust, through the labyrinth of creaking planks and press my ear to the door. I hear everything, like listening to the ebb and flow of millions of signals droning through the paper walls of a hornet’s nest. The hissing of water pressure, the shuddering of faulty valves, footsteps above and below, the leaden clunk of soda cans falling from the vending machine, the coins tumbling through the slots, the twisting coils dropping peanuts or cigarettes. The television in the lobby and a hundred others throughout the Firebird, sitcom laugh tracks, car chase tire squeals, crowds going wild, which sound like big bang static from the dead screens the junkies left on before they passed out. I hear the fights, the phone calls, the electricity humming and shorting, voices and bugs clinging to the two-by-four studs, others chewing their way through and the rats shaving away at the foundation of the hotel, battling the ants for real estate. This is how the Firebird sounds to God.
A sting shoots up the nerves in my leg. I scratch through my pants, hoping to crush the bastard crawling up to my crotch. The dead leather rope tail of a rat slaps my bare foot, the little monster claws gripping my outer arch before it scurries away. I brush my foot against the calf of my jeans, wiping away the tingle from the rat’s tail, and look for the hole where that little bastard rodent comes and goes like it owns the place, when my doorknob moves. Hold very still. Pressing my ear to the door again and the noises come flooding back. This time, my whispered name brushes my ear like a feather. The voice smells me listening, I know it. The doorknob moves when I look away, then stops when I look back. He’s good, quiet as my own shadow. The cops would kick my door off the hinges, God style. The Firebird junkies would wait until I’d left to rip me off. Somebody planted the bugs in here and knows my every move. Somebody out there wants me when I’m in here.