The RZ Story

I

As it happened no one can be too sure, but looking back on it, there was a desert simplicity and my own expected flailing. White-skinned doppelganger thinking in paradox and anomaly, bone-chiseled knife in mouth like a wearied cannibal, brows arching into shock. Back then I would wake up every morning looking for my amphetamines and an anger unmatched and unknowable would erupt. It would turn eyes a dull blue like wrist veins; it would clench my hands anticipating the fresh layers of soil. Big fists in a small, barbwired ring. With much secrecy, the dream’s harrowing song cropped lilies and turned them in towards the earth. This was a time of being alone and but companioned through the system’s dense folds of machinery.

You on your back staring at the heart-shaped sky, poundings of clouds passing along, directly above your forehead and cheeks. The pond’s fountains bubbled up in seizure. We would play countless games upon the beds of unburied roots and cherried blossoms. I would open your legs with a pair of wooden tools and from you came frothing a suckling child whose mouth let utter screaming visions of morphed landscapes and previous coastal abortions. So this is what the volume knob would have been used for had there been one left. There were rotted remains now, the speaker system terrifying in its neglect. Battery juice broke down into the metal, magnet, and soft wood.

Sitting two feet away you strummed your guitar timidly, as though it were a new puppy, loose bag of skin hanging and soft. There would be no need for help this far into the wilderness, where you squatted like a chimp, grabbed your knees and rolled resembling a rocking chair. The absurdity of the cars passing down on the old passageway, where the ferryboats used to be towed, horns disrupting the oceanic shifts. There was terror amidst our minds as clouds passed in the additional throbs, we understanding nothing good though our voiceless creations. Though we did arm ourselves with each potion we quaffed.

With its sharpened talons of stone and shadow, the day slowly grasped dusk, its looming victim. The neck was wrung out, skin red and itching, eyes slowly shutting like opal bruises. Soon electricity pumped into each lit orifice, the day crouching but still reaching out. Around the looming buildings of the pond, several youths mused with their skateboards, flaring their nostrils and palming open-faced drugs. They peered over a pot of chamomile, their bare feet crooked and layered with dirt from the wooden paths out of sight. They sat in a halfmoon wondering halfheartedly. We hear their language of laughs and trickled in our own interpretations. How much pain could be caused, they wondered, by throwing the self to the train tracks right before the midday car’s arrival? Amidst the din you and I looked into each other’s smiles, cross-legged on the stony bank. We struggled for some change in the conversation.

II

In the aftermath of your endless stream of vomit, dripping orange like pureed pumpkin all over the bathroom’s cabinets and tiled floor, the subsequent scream-moans begging for your father to come help you, everything felt like an echo. I sat hopped up and afraid, the word smith down the hall creating lines of verse under the guise of booze and waiting for me to join. A destabilizing brew kept me from thoughts about my own old man. Other scenes, however, were set dangling from strings like marionettes at a staged theatre. I napped dreaming of violet light shattering your breasts and a bottle of Gallo Nero Chianti being emptied atop your stomach, my hands flickering above and amidst the dull shadows of the energy-efficient lighting, hands like a magician causing a rose blossom or volcanic hazard, bountiful prizes of imagery while you slept away the unfathomable hip sways and remarkably brackish makeup daubs of the earlier hours. You sleeping soundly in terror, eyes open and peering into the lamp where the swarms of moths lingered. You contemplated solace like children born of railroads, children who learn the feelings of caverns by staying perched on bridges, thoughts bouncing off the flattened ripples so many feet below, grooves from the ties of the tracks indenting their cheeks.

While you were down, paralytic and warm, my eyes emerged from their corner stares, caught in a net of moths. My vision seethed, eyes becoming metallic lighters, and with each blink a spark to every white insect in the room. Each spastic, spirited ghost snuffed to the buzz of ash and moisture. Then, you flipping over so that only the black cloth of your hoody could be trailed, my perspiring hands knives scraping up and down on the wooden floor beside the bed, fingers gathering a grave piled with the mass of hosts I had just burned alive with the destructive deadpanning vision. Their antennae and appendages still wavering and withering, my digits scrubbing against the floor, bug carcasses intertwining with cuticles, collecting corpses beneath nails like green, grade-school putty or the red mud of my childhood home’s riverbed. Back then I would chew my fingers, but at that moment I knew to keep them away from my mouth while I cleaned up the genocide I caused with such ease.

As my eyes blistered your eyes, sealed them within their soothing lids, you imagined many things. You were lost in a long, echoing tunnel. A cylindrical prison cell stretching for miles and miles but with no physical endcap. Heay lighting all around. The smell of fresh plastic hanging in a cloud over your ethereal head. An array of the overwhelming. The collapse of the deck of dimensions. You thought of the caustic completion, the great binding, the billowed dualism of the woman with the man. There was the penetration. The entrances and exits. The swirl of fluids between two bodies, two breathing hosts. The breaths moving back and forth misting the perplexities. There was the floral. The sweat running thick like honey or molasses, or rubber. The hair meant to be pulled, pondered, wailing in explosive, electric invasions.

In the darkness two shadows enraptured with their light. Moans breaking apart the silence like the death of a tree by a saw. Completing the situation a sea of blankets kept together in heaps, hiding the bed. The sprouting of life from the moist ground muffled under countless thin sheets, colored lavender and stained by rustles. Each climax led to break skin with pointed fingernails, jaws lined with teeth. The hands gripping the limbs, the ribs, the hips. The attempts to bring everything closer, in a single, dynamic form. The grasping pulling, pressing. The swirling unity under a cape of light, back to back or front to front, the moon forcing down light like concrete weights.

But beneath each aesthetic twist and ring, each unknotting of the pressure, was a system working its gears, flexing it machines. Eventually I looked from all of the white wings flecked against the floor, limbs scattered like borrowed dynamite, my eyes brought to what was happening on the ceiling. With a gasp you looked up at the ceiling of the room too, moving to cry out at what was there, your eyes now open and your conscience ignited, the aching from the pools of alcohol you had earlier dipped your body into evaporating now through the open window we had forgotten about. The lane of memory last pieced together in your dreamscape now barren and still, the plains open and entirely empty, an astounding new stretch of isolation. The plastic was burning and your nostrils begged for air though the sky was directly open to you. All I could think of was the lack of any more skin on skin. The mocha mixing with lemon was a rustic idea.

III

The morning decayed. Things were happier in the suffocation of confinement. The solitary of the nothing space. Life could exist as a coffin does below a surface. When you are clinging to your loved one for such pleasure all you know is the taste of skin and the tingle of a licked ear. You do not want to eat food.

As a pair of deaf savages rolling around in a bed of moss and sod, we stunk like the grease of animals, our oils commingling, our bodies hosts to bands of invisible pests. I couldn’t stare at your eyes, the glowing was too rough. I scratched the walls with my fingernails and you stayed asleep. We were not thinking very responsibly. Stay away from this den of sin, I would think. Stay well away.

There is an electric heater in my bedroom in this small town in Maine. The floor is carpeted in this bedroom, and the two windows do not afford much natural light. The room is positioned over the garage, a garage that has never been used. The silence is always horrifying and natural and absolute. The bed is meant for the static catatonia of angels, not valuable members of human societies. The e are no mirrors in the bedroom so it is easy to forget about existence. The door has a lock on it, and do the closets. People can be captured in this room. People can be locked away. People and their risqué cloths, their risqué habits, their risqué absence of clothes.

There are always the memories of being in the room alone, but these memories are superseded by the friends who would visit. We would smoke pot, drink cheap vodka, and take cough medication. We would wonder about women like we wondered about films, writers, and towns. There was the feeling of consumption and the feeling of producing parts to a greater whole. There was Sartre and Derrida. There was the vague odor of our big, timorous schemes that lacked charm, zest, sexy fluttering.

Now you lay on the bed and I stare at the ceiling, and I think about pounding myself into you as you lay there, taking you again and again. This was the land where you could press back, and scream as loud as you ever wanted. There was the house, and then there was the bedroom, and then there was you. You, silent woman among the silent facilities. Then there was my mother’s cry from the backyard—a terrible explosion.

IV

Your back was curved like a musical instrument. It was intimidating like music is intimidating and so that’s why my eyes bulged whenever my finger grazed the skin of your ribs, shoulders, or spine. Your dark skin was not hazelnut or coffee but candied cashew. I could not take another bite but I could gag about the thought of eating more, or just like the sugared glaze off the surface. Your mouth smelled like charcoal and every time I started thinking about your beauty I would imagine your mouth.

Your lips grew deeper and larger in Kabul, where random men would grab at your, where children all begged to be in your pictures, having no idea what they would turn into. Your skin grew thicker with each rocket blast and market cry and dead cafe patron. You would hide from the explosions across the street. Your mind would wither with each woman sprayed over the face with cupfuls of acid. Deformity of the land, deformity of the people.

I tasted the deformity you carried. Your mouth would lock on to mine and your dreams would be stunning, transferred to mine, the coil of the ash and tar of the tongue jamming down into my throat and leaving a permanent black stain tattooed into my own oral recesses. Your face triumphed for several seconds. To kiss and to gag. But still we kissed and I fell asleep with your breath of fumes circling my face. I imagined tracing circles on your back and discussing Mallarme and Breton, twin cities dangling in dance. They would dance to Indian synth-pop you were always like listening to. Calcutta drawing its shades. Mumbai disrobing. You would praise mangos as the juice dripped from your lips to your like a funnel, like a transportation. The endless fun of unconsciousness. How to escape the dirt and the impoverished? How to sweeten your mouth? How to better lock our gazes? I never did find out. I never did want to.