I never did drift off. I didn’t even pretend it very well. And I felt her struggling, too. Unable to settle herself or her body until finally she got up and I heard her dressing. And even though it was clear she knew I was awake, she said nothing to me before she left.
Now, with her gone, all my tautness turned to heaviness. And with sleep dragging me this hard I felt afraid, not simply unwilling. I felt a tiredness so big, I feared I’d never wake up from it. I couldn’t fend it off, though. And when I went to it this time, I understood my fear. This time that black sleep was so endlessly empty it’d become the only place for me. The only place a person like me might want to stay.
Thirty
I did wake up. Woke up sore and feeling drugged and wishing I really was, but having no inclination to even find my liquor. I wanted to go back to that blackness where nothing ever happened or ever had. Wanted this the way a child wants death, or the way I had as a child. A want simply to stop it.
All this swimmed in my head and sent me swimming. Maybe that was the real trouble about what had happened last night. Maybe it’d brought me too close to something I’d always longed for. Opened me again to the idea of stopping it all instead of trying to outrun it. Or run around it. And always instead running into it again, running smack hard up against it. And each time, it hurting differently and more, leaving me running out of ways and things to deaden it, dull the blow.
Beth didn’t call, not that day and not the next and not the whole week. And so I went into the next one wondering if she walked around in the same blurred dream as me, though really I wasn’t doing much walking at all.
I wondered if she was. Then decided she was going through the motions of her life in a stunned sleep. I used this as a way to explain her not calling. Tried even to use this to keep her close to me, keep us someway together.
It didn’t work very well, or very long. Really, it didn’t work much at all. I kept at it, though. Kept it up another day or so even once I knew all the gaps and holes by heart.
What I did the day after that, in the early evening, was go to her. I couldn’t not and couldn’t think much about why, about what I intended. Not even once I got there.
I found her waiting on me as if the days, weeks really, hadn’t occurred. And it was curious to me, the idea of her waiting this way every evening. It put me off balance, but when I regained my footing I found myself angry, and then knew I had been all along.
She met me at the door to her office, not the outside one. And right away I went at her. Physically, until we were clear across the room and I had her against the wall – crunched there between the wall and her desk.
I pulled and pushed at her. Got her half sitting on the desk, and then got my hand into her. I fucked her and fucked with her. I kept this up a long time. All of me pressed against her and into her, my mouth so near hers, but not kissing her.
I could hear her cries, which weren’t the kind from pain. Her taking pleasure in this felt like failure and so I had to see I’d come here to hurt her in the way I’d always known hurt.
I finished her and then she slid down the wall, wound up slumped against it. I left her this way. Stumbled out her doors, craving that blackness, craving it physically.
A tingling tiredness pulled me forward, little clusters of needles in my thighs, behind my knees, pricking the soles of my feet. And there was this other tingling taking over my chest and growing beyond it. Hatred for loving her and for letting her love me. It pounded there, mingling with the want for blackness until I had to see these two things together – as part of each other.
With each step these blurred more, and when I got myself home and into my bed I couldn’t sleep right away for knowing the relation. For seeing that I’d needed her help in the most conventional of ways. That all the rest had been about covering this. A way to try to put her where I put everyone else.
If I’d been able to do this, I wouldn’t have had to see the very thing I wanted someone to take away. This specific hunger for nothingness. And when she’d shown me it instead? I’d wanted her to take it away, or replace it. Wanted her to be what made it all stop, but in a different way – one that’d let me be still, and still stay here.
And that she couldn’t? That she hadn’t been able and that nobody would’ve? And that she’d gone about it all wrong? That all of it between us had been terribly wrong from the first? None of this changed that she was first. I’d never be able to take that from her. Whether I spent the rest of my life loving or hating her, she’d always have me that way. Be the one who’d first had me. The closest I’d come.
Thirty-One
And maybe Beth had helped me because in the following days I found something killed my taste for it all. Not for that particular slumber, but for the little ways I’d tried to find it without admitting to it. I’d no pull to parking lots or bars, no interest it seemed.
I began living in a quiet way. I did this suddenly. But at the same time, I’d slipped so silently into it, I might never have noticed. Except, lately, this type of thing was all I did notice.
I’d like to say I used Ingrid’s money, which was still there, and moved far away. I’d like to say I started over in this very concrete way, but that’s not what happened.
I never did see Ingrid again. But I couldn’t stop seeing Beth. I couldn’t face losing her. Not when it seemed I was losing everything else.
We didn’t have sex anymore, though. We didn’t decide this or talk about it, we just simply stopped. And we didn’t talk about having done this, or anything else that’d come before, or between us.
Things with her became conventional. Not in the way I’d wanted, but banal. She began to help me in rudimentary ways. Helped me get another job.
My life began to take this ordinary shape. But I had to work hard to keep it that way. To keep myself from seeping over these outlines, bleeding through them.
I made some friends at work. The kind you go have a drink with, which we did one night some months later at another bar, not that one I’d formerly frequented.
We were sitting on stools, laughing and talking engrossed in this way when Jeremy came in. I stood up when he stopped next to me, when he ordered his drink first, and then said hello to me.
I said something I don’t remember, some kind of greeting and he put his hand on my ass in the most casual of ways, was telling me I looked good.
This probably all appeared pretty normal, and I could almost believe it was, except for the feeling I had, which was the same turned-on terror they’d left me with. That and the little vial he wore round his neck. It had a tight silver chain through the cap and this piece of me suspended there in sickly green fluid.
He took his drink and moved on. And the way he did this left me near to believing I wouldn’t have gone with him if he’d asked me to. But I was too aware of his not having asked. And aware, too, that I had my hand in my pocket, fingering that bullet, which I carried everywhere with me now.
And so when one of the girls from the office nudged me and said, “Who’s that?” in the way that means he’s so good-looking, I was slow to respond and they all took this as me mooning over him.
I stood there while they teased me. I played along and then waited out the rest of the evening because I didn’t want to leave the place alone.