The metal folding chair sat in black without a light to justify its shine, without a stage to rest upon. A lifestyle. Dystopian utilitarianism. Newer is better than more beyond the wall. Within our needs. Superb rain. Superb rain. Is there any other sort?
“If you go in the bathroom, I’ll suck your cock.” Kim mewled around her hookah stem. My girlfriend, young and naïve, was lost in the dream of the wurrzle root and making a charcoal sketch. Kim’s middle breast seemed fully mature. Her doe eyes watched me stare, lips screwed, for twenty minutes before falling to my erection. “Like, I’d probably tell Anne. But I want to do it too and it’s wrong, so I really want to do it. And but it’s really that I want her hurt and fucking turned on.” She giggled. “Yes.I really am just a child and I want her for my mom my because I really wish I wanted to be her and not my mom who’s such a cunt.” She smiled. “It’s a lose/lose win/win.”
“Not for me,” I sputtered, sitting up. “Can you put on a shirt with buttons?” I saw everything grow distant and then Kim and I lay or stood in black and white silhouette and were dancing against a black and blue hand drawn background. It reminded me of a George Gershwin album but I’d never heard his work, so I was likely wrong. It was troubling that the silhouettes were drawn since neither I nor Kim existed.
“You never listen to me,” growled a collection of monochromatic geometric shapes in noises I’d never heard a human make.
“I like New York in June. How about you? I like a Gershwin tune. How about you?” I blathered, caught up in the dance.
Hands pressed me to the ceiling with the warped Gershwin album cover in a dome around me. “Mind if I get off?” Kim’s silhouette shifted as she disrobed. “Just like mom,” she groaned, rolling her shoulder.
It was such a wonderful world. “Whose mom?”
“Ours, I think. Probably, at least.”
I should have felt something other than like a copper bust of Pallas grown over with green rust because my slightly pudgy sister, whom I remembered as being white like me, if I remembered her at all, fucked me harder and faster than the drunken coked up virgin I’d been with the previous New Year’s Eve. I moved back and forth through the duration of our coupling, reality feeding me moments of her atop me in stroboscopic passion as my own libido dimmed and fueled and dimmed again. Sex continued long past my ejaculation, which was pleasureless yet dutiful, until her head fell to my chest. “You know, one of us probably isn’t here. Or this could be a dream no one’s having. I’ve never had a woman ask me, ‘Mind if I get off?’ as a way of initiating.”
“Don’t. I’m real.”
“Let’s get the wurrzle lit again.”
She fetched our stems and lay on my shoulder. “I would never dream of lying here when I’m alone but when I’m above recrimination, when my soul sits in saturation, when meaning follows my thoughts and tone but never glares at these words with more than shallow contempt or distain. You love me enough never to give way to the temptation to judge me for what you want.” She popped the stem between her lips and her head fell back. She was lost in the dream of metal folding chairs. My direction sense was running strong. I could point to Toledo, where the Mudhens of the international league crashed out the bums, but no other cities with AA teams. I estimated myself at latitude 41 degrees north and longitude 93 degrees west. Need roared in me like fire that did not warm nor chill but only hurt. Nursing from Kim’s middle breast was all that kept me from being drawn into a darker, more painful part of the abyss within me. I instinctively scissored a leg and helpless screwed it. Yes, Kim was my sister. I’d seen her before at any rate. But still this had to be okay because nothing could be okay within a smaller world that excluded it. Anne repositioned herself to draw us in profile, Kim’s breast engulfed by my mouth. Haziness overtook me, and a thought with a certain certainty quality to it that beyond the wall in the closet that held a standard full-sized spare was a coelacanth as well, but only reachable by taking a left while rapidly shrinking from toddler-sized to a lawn jockey or, as African Americans call them, yard niggers. I would know I had gone too far if I stopped existing. “Whole squad of fucking killers. I’m a killer too,” Kim sighed.
“Asshole!” Anne snapped and I opened my eyes. Her face was screwed in contempt. “You let Kim suck your dick?” My pants were down and three shades of lipstick were smeared about my penis.
“Hardly original,” I retorted. “Besides, Rose is a lesbian.”
Kim hummed excitedly and Anne’s head turned and I followed her eyes. She smiled devilishly before speaking.”우리는 이제 가족입니다.”
“I fucked her leg, dreaming of a better tomorrow. Like a dog.” My face screwed in thought. “No, I thought of nothing but the abyss inside me only she could fill while nursing at her triple nipple.”
“다른 어떤 것도 그에게 평화를 가져다주지 못한다”
“This is a joke.”
“Screwing her leg was honestly just reflex. But if she sucked me off, that came after that. I swear.”
“Like a dog?” Anne asked mockingly, eyebrow raised, hips swaying.
“Well, yes. That memory’s very clear. Like a dumb, helpless animal.”
“그게 그가 전부야.”
“You let her put your dick in her mouth!”
“I swear that was later.”
“너무 많은 후에.” She made excited noises and pointed to her crotch then began to roll on her side. Anne and I looked back at each other.
“How do you know this. You might be wrong, right?”
“I saved the sketches I made of it,” Anne sniffled. “All of it.” She dropped them on the floor about me and walked away.
“I fucked her in the ass?” I laughed. “My sister? Why?”
“엄마를 임신시키고 싶은지 모르기 때문에.”
I dropped the sketch I held and stared at her numbly. “I came inside you?”
“강간과 근친상간,” she laughed hysterically. “뜨겁게 기다리자.”
My eyelids fluttered amidst her laughter. I opened them again and before me was a nice, comfortable metal folding chair. I like metal. Unforgiving. Mailable at the same time. Reminds me of mom. “K-k-k-k-im c-c-c-cums ha–ha-ha-hard,” I stuttered. “Wh-w-w-w–w-w-what the fuc-c-c-k?” I smiled. “Th-th–th–th-at-t-t-t-t-t is so-so-so-so-o fucking sica-ca-ca-c” I fell over laughing. “Pet-ere-er-er Pi-p-p-p-p-p-p-per pic-c-c-c-c-ke-ed-ed-ed a p-p-p-p-p-p-peck of pickle-le-le-led pep-p-p-p-p-p-ers!” The enigmatic forces that had steered the path of my life beyond my control – I thought of them as powerful others – had put on a warped wood demonstration somewhere down the path of recurrent nightmares and I couldn’t understand why. The wood was very much wood and well-warped at that but there wasn’t an apparent use for it in the demonstration. But then I hadn’t followed the path. These were things I simply knew. I was keeping near the metal chair. “C-c-c-c-c-an T-t-t-t-oug-g-g-g-h Ac-c-c-c-ctin Tinacct-t-t-tin trea-ate-ate-at Cr-cr-cr-cr-cr-oth R-o-t-t-t-t-t?” I began to piss myself.
A man in spectacles emerged from the darkness. He removed something like a stick from his pocket and snipped the end off. “Only if it wants to.”
“What’s that?” Afraid the tyrant king of the lizard people had been deposed a left a dangerous power vacuum, I looked around with wild eyes.
An unassuming, elderly black man that belonged as a butler on a sitcom fifty years ago, only wearing a tuxedo answered, “Just a cigar. What do you want it to be?” It was a statement, not a question.
“I had thought it was age,” I lied.
“Nahh. It innit that. Do you feel that your father’s homophobia contributed to my Oedipal complex or only yours?”
“Fuck.” my head thumped backward on the black. “All sorts of crackers showing up at rap concerts these days. What do you think about that?” I sighed. “It’s been a while.”
“Time to come home, Skippy.” He lit his cigar. Smoke poured forth biliously. We couldn’t see each other seconds later.
“Hear ya, cuz.”
“You’re lucky I like you or I’d whip that ass of yours.” He paused then, when I didn’t respond he added, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
“You’re old enough to be my father, you sick fuck. And I love him more, whatever any of you think. I don’t need to prove that. It’s just that Anne’s sort of weird.”
“Fuck. You.”
“Do I have to go with you? I was kinda chillin with my lack of pompous pretense.”
“L’Etat c’est moi, Skippy.”
“I am legion for we are many. Save your French for people who think it’s cute when you butcher the pronunciations, dad.”
“Just because I fucked your ma, that don’t make me your pa,” he replied, doubling over in laughter. “You sick fuck.”
I shook my head. “That is so wrong. Can’t you just be some sort of counterpoint to who I think I am?”
“I don’t want to know you that well. Count backward from a hundred by sevens when you want it to be real again.”
I smiled when I felt the carpet fiber on my face. “One hundred. God, fuck. That was so everything right now.”
“Everything right now,” Kim laughed.” I like that.”
“It was the last of the everything right now,” Rose groaned, pushing herself off the floor. “I’ve got some shit that makes you feel like you’re upstairs to ease us down.”
“It hasn’t worn off completely.” I was checking the roof of my mouth for blood.
“No, it’s no shit. It makes you feel like you’re upstairs.”
“What does that even feel like?” Anne asked.
“Find out. I’ll do two if you do one.”
“Fuck you, pusher woman. Two.”
“My mom’s going to be home like a half hour ago, guys,” Kim chirped worriedly.
“Like calm down.” I said.
“So, we can be upstairs when we see her or we can really be upstairs if we see her but then we need to be cool because the coat rack smells secrets in dark souls.”
“Shut up,” Rose groaned. “That’s the wurrzle.” She plopped a two very small white pills on her tongue, adroitly wrapped Kim’s hair in her fist and tugged her head back, and then kissed her deeply.
“Put a fucking quarter in!” my girlfriend cried.
“It isn’t about that,” Kim squealed, struggling to get away.
“It’s about your tongue, you dirty bitch,” Rose laughed. “What have you been practicing on all these years?”
“Dirty bitch? Why? Cause you’re a giggler?”
“Come on, Mikey. Come upstairs with us.” Anne pinched my cheeks hard to part my lips and pressed what I hoped were only two tabs into my mouth then tousled my hair. “Who’s your cunt?”
“You my cunt. Am I your cunt?”
She shrugged.
“Your miscreant friends again,” A voice stated dryly in the doorway, coming from a rail-thin woman in her late fifties with copper hair that faded to blond at the ends and a dusting of sun damage visible through model makeup. Her forearms were draped in what appeared to be an afghan that trailed out behind her on the floor, covering the back of her miniskirt. She took a pull of her cigarette before swigging a longneck.
“Hi Ms. Spruce. If you ever want to knock back a couple of beers again, let me know.”
“Shut up, Michael.” Smoke played at her lips and her eyebrows rose and head lilted in a challenge. She smiled softly though and then blew out smoke through tightly pursed lips into my face.
“Did you really drink with her?” Anne asked.
“Yes, but this is before you started showing up here. But then I’ve never seen you before, so interpret that how you’d like. Now, Kim dear, would you do your poor worried mother a favor and take a drug screen for me?”
“Of course, Mommy,” Kim stammered.
“The twelve-year-old up the block should be able to provide a clean sample. I believe his name is Kevin. I’ll leave the jar on the white table in the kitchen. Now give Mommy a hug. Oh, one other thing. Kim, can you tell me where you are?”
“Upstairs, Mommy.”
“I could have made one hell of a parent.” She smiled at all of us, dipping her head at me. “The one I just met tonight? Could you come?” Ms. Spruce called as she descended the stairs.
“Don’t do it,” Kim said.
“What am I supposed to do then?”
“No, go talk to her, but whatever it is, don’t do it.”
“I don’t fucking trust either of you.”
“Stay upstairs,” Rose said.
“You know it,” Anne called from the hallway.
Rose laughed. “This is so fucking nuts, isn’t it? We’ll go downstairs later after Kim’s mom goes to bed and you’ll see. It’ll be exactly the fucking same. We are Up Stairs.”
“What about the front door?” I asked.
Kim spoke in a whisper. “Wouldn’t believing it could run round six cat legs with gopher clubs make a wise purse?”
“For the Ryder Cup?” I scratched my scalp vigerously. “What the fuck?”
“Yeah, you don’t want to smoke wurrzle more than once a week or you’re like that constantly. It’s not so bad. Cool when you start riffing off each other. Jazz, only retarded.”
“It means something. I know. It doesn’t. But I know it does.”
“Those words explain how you feel and what you want. English isn’t meant to do that. It’s meant to divide and conquer, not bring us together. If anything reeks of white male, it’s the English idiom.”
“Rose is a linguistics major.”
I nodded. “Thanks for the explanation, Butch.”
“You are so teasing me right now. You know that, right?”
“I’m just being who I am.”
She laughed. “Your mommy sees something in you. I need to smoke but I’m not about to go outside. The front door is scary enough. I’m going into the bathroom. Keep him entertained, love.”
Kim laughed. “She gave you two hundred dollars to leave for twenty-four hours? Let me try Mike again.”
“Let me,” Anne answered.
I watched, transfixed with terror as Anne took a pull of her cigarette and then her beer as Ms. Spruce had. She kissed me, the smoke passing between our mouths. When my mouth closed, it was on the cigarette. I had a headache. “I want to go home.”
Anne kicked me from across the floor. “We’ll find some time for that later. Go look out the window. We really are up-fucking-stairs.”
“There’s so much up there,” I sighed, sadly, looking at the sky instead. Can we get up there all the way?”
“If you have fifty dollars, you can try,” Rose answered. “You know what’s good to listen to when you’re upstairs? You wouldn’t believe. It’s called Hymn of the Cherubim. Just voices. It’s resonates with your consciousness to create some sort of semi-metrical anapestic message in your mind when you listen. It captures – like, literally, captures the experience of understanding. That very moment of realization.”
Kim coughed. “Anapestic?”
“Yeah. Four unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable. T’was the night before Christmas, and all through the house. Now fuck off, love.” She tapped her phone and speakers at two corners of the ceiling blared, “Play that funky music, white boy. Play that funky music right. Play that funky music, white boy. Lay down the boogie and play that funky music till you die.”
“I get it now,” Anne said in mystical tones.
“Yeah, I just knew you wouldn’t let me put on disco.” She was bobbing her head in time with the music, mouthing what was obviously, “You’d love it,” repeatedly catching my eye.
I tilted my head a turned my eyes to Rose. “Her sissy,” I groaned, getting through the music well enough for Anne to roll her eyes and bat her lashes, her face a mask of feigned sexual gratification.
Anne began to wrestle me to the carpet, pinning me by my wrists and then stood. “Keep still.”
Having an audience excited me and I silently complied.
“You’re good. Never, ever had I like had that kind of control with anyone.”
“Don’t hate the game.” Anne smiled, nudging my foot.
“Please, you cling to him like he has a bag of smack in his pocket.”
“You haven’t sampled the hot little piece of ass his mommy raised.” Anne reached into the backpack she’d brought and pulled out a ten inch dildo.
Rose failed to stifle hysterical laughter as she dove towards the door.
“No,” Kim hissed.
Rose opened the door instead of locking it, “Ms. Spruce, can Michael’s girlfriend screw his ass with a foot-long novelty item in Kim’s bed or do we have to go to the park?” Her chest heaved in hysterics.
“Very well, but she must leave afterward per our arrangement. I’ll finish my scotch and then the downstairs is yours. I doubt you’ll notice in your state. I don’t mind about noise. But listen to music if you want.”
Anne smiled down at me. “Who wants hair?”
Two hours later, Kim and Rose were projecting a game of Tetris to the television. “Can you fucking rub his fucking little girl clit already?” Kim hissed.
I woke to Ms. Spruce kissing me. I was nude and upright on the sofa. She grasped the hair at the back of my head when surprise erupted within me. Once I understood it had already begun, my reservations deflated and I began to return her kiss with instinctive peace. Time flooded away until I noticed her heavily lidded eyes and nodding head smiling with malicious joy. “I want you to know that you should not have had to suffer so,” she said afterward. “That life has dolloped more unhappiness upon you than you were meant to bear and though you’ve managed to find tragic beauty in your sorrow, there’s moments like gritted teeth when none of it is so. A lie. Do you really dream only torment yourself? Is the world shit because answers don’t grow on trees. What is this life? What is the journey form birth to death? The triumph is to never quit wishing to know. I wish so much to know so many things about you. To see if I’m right. It is fate, destiny. I can see the future, Michael. I can see you are bound to me.” She turned my chin with her fingers. “Are we two yoyos pulling at each other’s strings? Or are we melded into a crystal sculpture, completely together? One? Always? You are already mine only you’re too stubborn to accept that means little more than needing me to be yours, and by accepting yourself as mine. Remember how much you love me.” She had remained still as she spoke. Rising, she said, “I want to turn you on to something. Hootoo.” She disappeared upstairs and returned wearing a sheer, floor length gown, a ridiculous thing, but hot. Trimmed in black feathers, too. She held a large globe, twice the size of a basketball. It was plugged in and placed it on the hearth, and then the blinds were closed and the curtains drawn. They appeared decorative but muffled the light very well. “Here,” she said, and held out a dot of olive green powder at the end of a small spoon.
I felt a rush of playfulness and eyed Ms. Spruce appraisingly, sensing her to be different than before. Smaller, fragile, younger. She fed me another bump. “You are about the last woman I could ever imagine finding myself with.” And another. “And that’s exactly what’s happening, isn’t it? I’m finding myself, who I am. In your eyes. Who I am, beyond the lies and veils I’m too afraid to look through. I see me when I see you. I see me in your smile, in your pursed lips. I need to find myself, Ms. Spruce,” I stammered. But there was something about the way she held her head, a rigidity in her features. I turned to slink away and her hand shot out and grabbed my arm.
“You stay when I say stay. You leave when I say leave. You deprive yourself if you think it pleases me. You brood on things I would have you think about and from perspectives that turn you on because you know them correct. You always, will always be my perfect pet. I will love you like a God and own you like a Mistress. Mine, Michael. Mine. Look into my eyes and tell me who you are.”
Her eyes were cold, flat. They were locked on my wry smile but seemed not to notice me. It hurt to see, but it was so true. “You own me. I am simply yours.” We stood for long minutes before. “This stuff is fucking nuts.”
“I have a tale, a long tale to tell. It is the story of all things, all things but this. It is the story of all things that came to this and I want to tell it with my mouth.” The globe, which had dimmed to black, began to light the walls once again. Ms. Spruce kissed me. And so afternoon passed into evening.
Dusk found us lying awake in her bed, gently trading truths.
“I never knew.”
“It’s so real.”
“Only this. Only ever this.”
“Michael? You have to go home tomorrow, okay? There’s nothing but us.”
