“You need to see this.”
The office was high-ceilinged and expensive. He didn’t know what to expect. She raised her skirt. He pointed and nodded. The shoes had no soles. Local tax, the guide said and smiled. Faster.
“Hurt me.”
The look, those eyes, incalculable. He knew he’d shit violently. The sky rendered a new black every night. I’d shoot him. She shook her head, pointed up.
Just for appearances. The gasoline seeped out overnight, soaked his journal and the walkies. They couldn’t, really, but they would, they’d buy him another one. She got up in the middle of the night and he wondered if it was for show. She liked his eyelids. So rapidly.
“This will go away.”
He didn’t want to be hungry. The interior, trapped feeling didn’t die. She promised flowers. He ate. He ate. Nothing to do with it.
“Let’s try that again.”
It’s maybe the first time I’ve done that since I was five. The sun moving his skin, a tense sensation, the first pleasurable stride in the walk toward pain. She left her purse. He took a sip before her. He was surprised at their obsession with the weather.
“You have to find him.”
The pile of bricks gathered webs, brush, castoff weeds, bits of paper. He lifted the bat. He had to salvage the sex somehow, feign violence. Red bellies. Again, he didn’t want her to know how he knew that, who told him. The screen kept fuzzing out. He felt the old man’s tenets replaying, driving him further and further away from sleep, because yes, how could we deny the celestial on our skin?
He heard they wanted to find the prettiest worst case possible, and craft their story around her, which was typical, and successful.
“You have at least a month more of recovery.”
He skimmed the pages. She recognized the problem. They would never run out of gas.
“Will you fuck me?”
Insurance still felt alien.
“No lower.”
So maybe they’d die together. He understood. Whatever hurt the most left a severe deficit of information, a hole so deep it had its own gravity, and memory would build into its structure, filling the hole so rapidly as all the bricks and invitations fell toward it.
“It’s nature.”
He caught wider eyes.
He couldn’t do anything about the rust. He stopped talking and thought about what that meant, exhausted all the logical courses of the next few questions, demands, and he saw himself nodding. The last action figure in the drawer, one arm gone.
“Poetic.”
Don’t belittle me, she said. He asked if he could watch out for him next time. They required some money, some numbers, and a name. He stared at the needle in the center of the rug, would it meet his child’s foot, would it hurt or go unnoticed? The batteries were dead. Somehow, he could feel the sun’s color. Maybe he was being taken home.
“It’s about time.”
Years since he so intensely desired one part of her, the skin, the word pussy over and over again, he wanted to whisper it into her hair while she slept, saying it a little louder each time, hoping to finally wake her just enough for her to move her ass back against him.
“You should…”
He didn’t want to craft an exercise. It was important that he met them halfway. She kissed his right wrist. His first shot. No allergies yet.
“Can we talk about it?”
She was dying, though she couldn’t be, following a natural course that however many hundreds of millions had spent before, he smiled at her, she looked at him until they cried, smiling until they couldn’t.
Did she know he was above average height for his age? Something sinister in the construction of distraction. He felt his fingertips, touched them, feeling nothing. New skin, burned asleep.
“I’ve never heard that.”
He ran out. She planned dinner. He heard the bathtub draining. She had to set the slide for him, or whatever it was called. He numbered the colors and set out corresponding crayons. Welts, two running gashes, he heard lacerations. She called him into the house. Murder, she said. A change of light. They laughed.
“You don’t have to try.”
Pleasantries bored them both. A massive explosion would work.
“Goodnight.”
Onto the master list of gratitudes he should feel, he added the absence of land mines. That his god would contain the form and feeling of a joke and fail to build the entirety around the joke, as a guide, he laughed, it was funny. He slept.
“Can you do both?”
He blamed a central murkiness. Her hair was falling out, she showed him. Frost formed on each window, inside. He closed his eyes. She held up a finger. They woke at the same time, both speaking.
“Surprise.”
No authority to approve it. Water ran underneath them.
Can’t come fast enough, he typed. He ordered her flowers. He heard fruit being announced. How rarely he saw what he felt anymore. Pain is a negligible universe.
“You’re showing off.”
He knew that unplaceable fear was why he was talking. He could only hear himself in sections through her stare. We have to plug all the sockets.
“You’re the man for the job.”
Something shifted across the world. Of course he could never be sure.
“Too much.”
He felt it so strongly, like having out-of-town guests sleeping in your house, the smell of cousins. He never had problems finishing as a kid. She showed her palm.
He wanted to go through all his inboxes, any space with information, delete everything. She did. He did. Breaking them took twenty-two days.
“Focus.”
He hurt the tendons in his left wrist masturbating. Whoever plotted the first few screams during a public disaster and found the pattern, riches upon riches.
“Take your time.”
He asked for another drink. It was the best and worst advice he gave me. She grabbed his arm. Don’t be a salesmen.
“You weren’t supposed to know.”
After she told him, he tried, all day. How permanent description was, for the most part. Killing eternal essences. Good deeds had to lead to rewards. Assurances of quality. She spoke for them. He asked her if he described what heaven meant right.
“Okay, let go.”
Somedays he looked for style. Forgetting the gaze.
“You are very bad.”
The hot full cup of her panties, wet. First girlfriends and iced tea. He looked around. A thousand centuries of colonial rule.
Thinking about sacrifice, he felt the distance he was placing between him, his ideas about his son, and what he knew he could do, fantasy as a mock trial. It upset his stomach. Sun spiked his eyes. Three ants circling his leg. She said thank you.
“I want sugar.”
She argued for the death penalty. He wanted silence, nothing else. He grabbed his neck. Robins hopped, gorgeously pecked anything near their feet, each other. The bank could hold it until tomorrow. The lock kept its combination.
“This isn’t a puzzle.”