Never-Contented Things

by Sarah Porter

  I felt a small blurt of fresh panic at the thought of getting there, ever, but I didn’t want to say that. Maybe Josh was right, for all I knew. Maybe it would get easier. And I was relieved that he was taking it so well, the way I’d flipped out, but I couldn’t be sure he wasn’t secretly resenting me.

  “I’ll try,” I said. Maybe my voice sounded strained, because Josh’s hands stopped dead for a moment.

  “If we both know we want to make a life together, Kezz,” Josh argued softly, “then it’s not about trying. It’s just, like, about being patient, until what we have is bigger than everything that happened to us in the past. We have to create a whole new world, just for the two of us!”

  My face was squashed into Tuscan Wheat Ultrasuede and I couldn’t see much of the room, but I had a feeling that, even if I looked around and didn’t spot the Josh-imp, it would still be watching somehow. We were already in a new world, I thought then, but creating it—that wasn’t something I’d had any say in. I was hit by a wave of dizziness, even lying facedown.

  “We never smashed those sick flowers,” I said. That would eliminate one of the imp’s hiding places, anyway.

  Josh used my shoulders to lever himself up and sat on my bare ass, jiggling. “Yup. Clearly we need to go do that right now! We need a blast of destruction to start our new life right.” He surveyed the room, and I was glad he’d taken so readily to the change of subject. “Practically everything in here could use some destroying, actually, though I guess it’s too much to do it all tonight. Maybe we could set fire to that recliner, though? And, Kezz? I’ve decided we should paint this room purple. With lots of gold and silver stars everywhere? All this beige and tan is just barbaric. And then a big silver rocket ship, with you and me sailing up, up, and away!”

  “Sure,” I said, and rolled sideways so that Josh lost his perch and stood up. My head still swam with undulating shadows, stray lights. I managed to sit but at first I couldn’t really see the room. My clothes formed a dim blob on the coffee table. I reached out and felt the satin of my vest.

  Josh swatted me. He was being playful, but his lightness struck me as forced. Like he wanted us both to start pretending our night had gone differently. “Oh, Kezzer, you don’t need those! Remember, there’s hardly anybody here yet. We can run through the streets totally naked and not even think about it.”

  “I saw a few people,” I said—but then I realized it would be better if he didn’t ask who they’d been. I didn’t want to describe my meeting with White Jacket, and not just because Josh might not approve of what I’d said to him. “There were a couple of kids drawing on the sidewalk.”

  “Well, kids should be in bed by now,” Josh said primly. “If they aren’t, then it’s not our fault if they get a surprise. And anyway, we’re both so pretty that anybody who sees us like this should be extremely appreciative! Maybe just put on shoes, to make sure our feet don’t get cut? And I’ll get you your hat.”

  My hat. The vitreous green eye in it, staring at me through a pupil the size of a fist. “You really think it’s okay to wear that hat again?”

  “It’s fine now! And anyway you can’t give up that hat, Kezz. It’s the you-est thing in the world! I mean, the you-est except for me.” He smiled. His makeup had smeared into gooey glitter puddles with his eyes awash in their centers, and he was jamming his feet into laceless high-tops. “Just be careful to keep it upside-up. Okay? So if there is anything in there, it can’t get out.”

  Did he think I’d find that reassuring? I got up to fetch my black penny loafers—Josh had chucked them across the room earlier. The sparkle and confusion were clearing from my eyes now. Josh bounced out of the room and down the stairs, thumping for a few moments too long.

  It was a short flight down, just seven steps. But now Josh’s descent was echoing in my mind, and I felt certain I’d heard him thud down—too many times. Ten?

  I went to see. The wood banister attached to the wall was just the same, the bland botanical prints hanging there were the same. The worn cornsilk-colored carpet looked exactly the way it always had, but it folded over too many stairs now. I stood and counted. Eleven.

  Compared to everything else that had happened it was a trivial piece of weirdness, but I still didn’t like it. “Josh?”

  No answer. I went down the first step, then another. The air grazed my body too intimately, and I wished I’d put on my clothes. “Josh? Are you there?” I could see the open door of my room, lamplight spilling out like a welter of bright eyes. If he was in there he should absolutely hear me.

  My foot hovered in midair, toes skimming the next step down.

  And it giggled.

  The stair-step itself, that is. It giggled in a stifled way, like a fifth grader trying not to give away a prank call. I could see the carpet quivering with the effort to hold in laughter. I jumped back and up, catching my heel on the top step behind me so that I landed on my ass, just in time to watch four of those stairs pull themselves free. They bent and petaled into four identical Josh-imps, all shrieking with hilarity, and scattered down the hallway.

  The space they’d evacuated closed up behind them, either the top floor dropping or the bottom rising or both rearranged by some subtler tucking-in of the distance. Almost instantly there were only seven steps again. And then Josh came out of my room, naked except for black briefs and his high-tops and a silver sequined scarf he’d wound around his neck. I’d never seen it before. “I found it in Emma’s dresser. Do you like it, Kezz? And doesn’t it just blow your mind, to think that she was ever interesting enough to wear something like this?”

  “I was calling you,” I said. “You didn’t answer.” He didn’t seem to think it was strange that I was sprawled there hyperventilating. I pulled myself up and he tipped his head, perplexed.

  “Really? I didn’t hear anything.” He had my bowler hat in his hand and he made a show of shaking it out, then climbed the stairs to me, dropped the hat on my head, and slid his hands around my hips. “Are you ready to go on our destructive rampage? Oh my God, Kezz, we’re at the start of something so beautiful! I still can’t believe it’s happening.”

  I held him. Aggressively tight. His concealer had worn away enough that I could see his puffed mold-green bruises again. In all the vastness of the night he was the only warmth or reassurance I had left. He nuzzled in, squeezing me back, and I knew I couldn’t mention what I’d seen.

  “Josh? Are any of our friends here? Lexi, or anyone?”

  Lexi. I’d seen her cradling me in that vision, seen her crying over me, and it had left me with a deeper ache than I knew what to do with. I usually didn’t let myself miss people.

  Josh kissed my cheek, slow and soft. “Can’t I be enough for you? For a while, anyway? I already told you, it’s something I have to work on, and I don’t know how long it’s going to take. I’ll really try my hardest ever, though!”

  I thought about that. “So we can’t get to—wherever they are?”

  “Oh, Kezzer, you’re usually such an introvert! I knew you might get lonely but I thought it would take a lot longer than this. Like, this is our honeymoon, and it’s supposed to be just the two of us!”

  “Then—say, a month from now. We can’t get to them?”

  Josh hesitated. “You can’t. Not until they trust you a lot more, anyway. But I can. I don’t want to leave you alone more than I have to, though.”

  They. I knew it meant the sadists he’d told me to treat so politely. The white-jacket man I’d threatened to murder. Our hosts in this damned place.

  “Why would they trust you?” As soon as I said it, I knew it was a dangerous question.

  “Let it go for now, Kezz. Please? Let’s go wreak some havoc.”

  And in fact I wanted to. I wanted to smash whatever I could. I pulled away from him and walked to the wall unit, opened the cabinet door, and took down the blue vase with its twitching glass bouquet. Josh started shoving Emma’s beige chenille recliner across the room; it had wheels but they s
quealed and dragged through the dark-gold carpet. I held the front door open for him as that hairy lump of a chair came heaving toward me, step by step. It reared as Josh maneuvered it over the threshold, then went crashing down the cement stairs and spilled onto the walk.

  The stars tonight seemed impossibly bright, pink and pale green. They throbbed as if they were trying to communicate. Sending us waves of awkward conversation that never quite made sense. There were lights on in some of the houses up and down the block. I understood that it didn’t mean anyone was home. All the signals flashing in on me seemed incoherent, but I was still caught up in the dialogue. I stood there receiving light, receiving dark, glad to forget everything else, as Josh jumped down the steps and kicked the recliner with a triumphant whoop.

  We were really doing this. We were naked in the opal night, about to torch our foster mother’s favorite chair. I didn’t know what I was feeling; an alternating current of doubt and dizziness flowed in me. Still, I helped Josh shove the recliner as far as the street. It fell in a wide gap between two parked cars, dust sighing from its upholstery.

  He grinned at me. “May I please have a flower, Kezzer? Though really, you should go first.”

  I pulled out two flowers then set the vase on the curb. Handed one to Josh. He beamed and raised his flower in a toast, and we clinked bobbing glass petals. Yellow on red. The flowers looked spastic with worry, like they knew what was coming.

  “You’re not your mom, Ksenia Adderley,” Josh announced in ritual tones. “Oh no. Not even close!”

  And then I felt it: savagery, the longing to crush and wound, as if that was what the stars had been transmitting all along and I’d finally taken it in.

  I closed my eyes and swung my flower viciously against the nearest car. Just the way I should have swung that bottle of champagne earlier. I heard the tinkle and scatter of glass, and I heard my own shrill howl. I threw back my head and keened. Josh was laughing so hard he gagged a little, and his flower smashed down after mine. He bent for the rest of the bouquet and slipped another wire stem between my fingers. I whipped it down. My thoughts, my movements were glossed with delirium. Crunch, ring, and scatter, that was the refrain. That was Josh feeding stems into my blind hands while I screamed and danced around the parked cars, that was the cry of the flowers’ impact, that was the singing of the shards. I opened my eyes in time to see Josh hefting a decorative faux-stone turtle and winging it through the nearest windshield, just for good measure.

  I recognized the car; it was a steel-blue Toyota that belonged to old Mrs. Hixson next door. Josh had always been so sweet to her, helping her with errands and small repairs. She’d beam when she saw him and leave bags of homemade cookies on our doorstep—never suspecting that Josh wouldn’t eat them because she’d used real butter. But if she wasn’t here—if she was in some other where that only happened to resemble this one—then I guessed she didn’t need her car anymore.

  Still, I found myself missing him, the Josh who would have been furious at anyone who’d harmed anything of hers.

  And besides, I was out of flowers. I was out of screams and breath and darkness to hold inside my closed eyes. All around me was the glint of shattered glass in flat preschool colors, the dark hatching of wire stems I’d cast aside. Now I felt way too sober for what we were doing.

  But Josh obviously wasn’t. He was still shrieking at the night, gasping with laughter. “Oh, we forgot to bring a lighter! Wait, wait, wait, Kezzer, I’ll go get one!” He turned and sprinted back toward the house.

  And then I was alone, naked and pale in the darkness. The fractured windshield held a cat’s cradle of light. It was so silent that the electric whine of the streetlamps grew loud and tinny and rhythmic in my ears, like some kind of lifeless incantation.

  So much quiet and emptiness had the effect of making me doubt I was alone. I scanned the street, the mica gleam in its asphalt so bright it looked like tiny perforations seeping sun. The breeze stirred my skin. There was an instability that might have been just in me, or might have been in the scene: a sense that the bland, low houses had been pasted on the night, not quite perfectly, or that they were slipping on glue not yet dried.

  And then Josh was running back, and once again I felt his warmth and nearness as a huge relief. I needed him too much, now. I knew that but I wasn’t sure what I could do about it.

  He flicked the lighter in his hand. “Destructive rampage, part two. That chair is an abomination. It should be wiped off the face of the earth!”

  Off the face of the what, Josh? But I didn’t say that. Really, is that where we are?

  “Let’s get it away from the cars,” I said. And Josh gave me one of his searching looks. He knew, maybe, that I wasn’t with him in the madness anymore. Just along for the ride. Still, we got hold of that chenille lump and shoved it farther out, right into the center of the street. Set it upright again. Josh held the flame to its skirt until it started first to smolder, then to run with amber light. Soon its polyester stuffing was shriveling into hollows of tangerine flame and we had to step away from the chemical stench. Josh wasn’t crowing anymore either. Instead he held my hand, watched the fire in silence. It cracked like a shotgun. Spat up plumes of poisonous black smoke.

  This frenzied dependency that you and Josh feel for each other—that doesn’t look like love to me, Kezz. Mitch had said that to me just two weeks ago, when Josh was out of earshot, naturally. Real love isn’t based on mutual desperation.

  That’s easy to say when you’ve never been desperate. I’d actually said that to him. Really, what other kind of love did Mitch imagine would be possible, ever, for either of us? If he was right, then Josh and I were both damned to permanent loneliness. Desperation was what we had to work with. It was what we had to give.

  But when you’ve always been as smug and safe as Mitch, that’s not something you can understand. That’s what I was thinking as I watched Emma’s chair transformed into leaping heat. The flames peeled back the darkness, revealed what had been burning inside it all along.

  I thought I’d try to explain it to Josh: that was us. That was the way we loved each other. That was why I could never blame him for anything he did, no matter what it was. “Baby?” I tried. “I’ve been thinking about something Mitch said. Don’t take this the wrong way, okay?”

  But then I didn’t get to finish, because they were around us: those beautiful creeps from the gorge, the ones who didn’t trust me, the ones who did trust Josh. White Jacket and Peacock Leather, Pink Dreads and Mink Head, and others I recalled, or didn’t. Just the way I remembered them, except with a jagged distortion that canceled their beauty. More of them now, maybe thirty or so. And they were taller than last time too. I’m nearly six feet and the shortest of them was half a head above me.

  Josh pulled me closer, wrapped an arm around my waist. I checked his face. He had his chin up, but I saw a flash of apprehension. Josh tipped his head at White Jacket, looming very near us now, and smiled with deliberate charm. “Hi, Prince.”

  “Good evening, Joshua. And of course the lovely Ksenia. How delightful to see you again so soon.”

  Prince smiled at me from his overhang of a head. We both knew: I’d let him kiss me. I’d done nothing to stop him. The humiliation of that kiss sizzled in my cheeks, leaked down my throat. I couldn’t even spit. Everyone was staring at Josh and me, at our bared skin, though they didn’t seem to think it was worth mentioning.

  “So soon?” Josh asked. He cocked his head at me. “Kezzer, you didn’t say—”

  “I met Ksenia in town today,” Prince said. “We discussed my murder. How bright the roses would bloom, that fed on my blood. Your sister is adorably brutal, Joshua.”

  “Kezzer!” Josh said, and then froze. Because the man he’d called Prince was reaching out for me, both hands sliding along my jaw and into my hair. Behind him Emma’s chair was a mass of tumbling flames.

  do tell

  At first I stiffened, and then I moved. All I knew was that my ski
n rejected Prince’s touch, spewed it back. Without even understanding what I was doing, I lunged at him. I registered the blazing chair behind him, but a plan to shove him into it—I don’t think I had one. Instead I had his kiss still coiled and flexing in my cheek, and I had Owen’s seventeen-year-old bulk pinning me down. Owen’s voice whispering that, if his parents knew, they’d send me away again. He’d been right, it turned out; he was their bio child, after all, and I was just a stray dog. And I had what I couldn’t name, whatever was happening to Josh. Some kind of unbalancing in who he was, like the rage in him was getting the best of his gentleness. All the times I’d been too shocked, too scared to react at all—it turned out now that those moments were still with me, and they were tensile, and ready for violence.

  My hands shot up and forward, catching him at the base of his throat, and my legs sprang. I was screaming again, yowling, like I had when I’d smashed those flowers, but more loudly. And Prince gave way. Even if he was nearly seven feet tall, tonight, he was light, airy. Decayed inside. One naked, skinny banshee of a girl was enough to send him flying.

  Into Emma’s fiery chair. And I was airborne too, winging after him. I’d shot myself into nothingness, that was how it seemed, until I landed on my knees on the asphalt. My head, horribly, fell on Prince’s thigh. I reared back and saw him, in his shiny leather tights and white bubble of a jacket, sitting enthroned in flames. His stance was lazy, comfortable, both arms spread on the armrests.

  His followers stood silent, but Josh didn’t. He cried out and came after me, wrapping me in a soft embrace. Pulling me back and away, and the whole time the terrible thing was that Prince didn’t scream, although he must have been burning. He’d seemed as dry as tinder. He didn’t respond at all, just lounged in the blazing recliner, his head tipped slightly to one side. The brilliance around him singed my vision, and it was hard to make out the look on his face—but at a guess I would have said he was bemused. Toxic whorls of smoke caught in my throat and sent me stumbling back, still tangled in Josh’s arms. Prince didn’t seem to care.