by Gemma Files
“Want me to get you anything?”
Oh, just the last five years to do over. And another whole life before that, while you’re at it.
“I’m tired, Ren. All I want is to sleep.”
“Sure,” he said, like he understood. Adding: “Man, you know I know the feeling.”
* * *
I slept through most of Friday, part of Saturday. I needed it. Something had run out in me without warning, like an emptied engine, leaving nothing but fumes; as far as I could see, there wasn’t much worth waking up for. I heard Rennie moving around, flipping channels, snickering to himself as he mimicked the cast of Law & Order. Once, somebody knocked at the door—maybe Leo, maybe our legendary landlord. But neither of us answered, so they went away again.
Later on, when the credits of Neon Rider were just starting to blare, Rennie called: “Hey, speak of the devil—Leo catch you, at the Laundromat?”
“I saw him.”
If you’ve been in really bad pain for a long time, its absence becomes almost good enough to qualify as pleasure. That’s where I was now, caught in languorous inertia, barely listening while Rennie rattled on.
“That guy’s a serious perv. I mean it, Ro—he wants your body.”
“Uh huh.”
I could feel his tension mounting. I knew what I had to do, but I couldn’t get myself awake enough to care. Maybe I just wanted to see what would happen, the longer I let it slide.
And would it have killed him to do it himself, just this once?
3:00 AM. Global went out in a whine of test-pattern, and Rennie slipped back into bed.
“I’m cold,” he complained.
I turned on my side, fetus-curled away from his desperation. “You’re always cold,” I muttered.
“Rohise, I’m cold. I’m hungry.”
“I’ll get you something.”
“When?”
“Soon.”
With no TV, the apartment seemed twice as empty as it actually was—like some semi-permanent party had all just decided to go out for pizza. Rennie touched my shoulder, his hands chill with need. Asked, hesitantly:
“Hold me, Ro?”
“’Kay,” I said, rolled back the other way, and drew him to me.
* * *
There’s something about a sibling, either having one or being one—less intimate than twindom, less escapable than marriage, so much more chancy than any other relationship. Jos saw Rennie like a bad Xerox of me, unfuckable and uninteresting. Our Dad saw us like owned things, principalities in the familial city-state. Mom saw us so rarely, between trips to the Clarke, it was kind of like she never saw us at all.
I looked at Rennie and saw myself, echoed but not reproduced, hero-worshiped into a flesh reflection at least twice my natural size. An addictive image.
But just like anything else addictive, it’s hard to go cold turkey.
* * *
I slept, I dreamed. Warm, pulling threads of sexual abandonment, hooking deep and cracking me apart. Sticky heat on my thighs. A mouth on either breast, wet and insistent, sucking hard on nipples gone tender as rudimentary clitori. Fragrance rising like incense smoke. A mouth between my legs, lips on lips, latched into me like a leech. Digging for buried treasure.
I woke up on the blind edge of climax, riding somebody’s face, my feet already starting to cramp. My hands in their hair, on their working jaw. That big, familiar head, slick from chin to moustache with dark, sweet menstrual mess.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to tear his tongue out by the roots.
I wanted to come, so bad I wanted to vomit.
Aroused and revolted in the extreme, I snarled, breathless:
“Loren Gault, get the fuck away from me!”
I kicked, pushed, slapped. He wouldn’t let go. Moaning curdled nonsense syllables. I felt them vibrate up inside me. I slugged him across the face, hard—and he snapped at me, little son of a bitch, with those sharp red teeth. Panting, hands spanning my hips, bruising me. Sweating blood. Holding me down—‘til I kneed him in the nose, scrabbled back, and fell ass-first against the floor, already twisting up onto my feet.
From whence I fled to the john and slammed the door behind me, barely making the sink in time.
Jos always used to keep his second-best gun wrapped in a plastic bag, taped up under the toilet-tank lid. After he got arrested, I took it with me, and did the same; in such matters, I never saw much point in not following Jos’ example.
Out in the room, I heard the TV snap back on.
I caught my breath, spat bile. Rinsed out my mouth.
Stepped back out of the bathroom, carefully—gun trained, at a classic gangsta angle, on that sheeted blur slumped in front of The 700 Club.
“You ever do that again,” I said. “Ever. And I swear to Christ I’ll kill you in your fucking sleep.”
Rennie, lost in the redemptive power of the cathode image. Not turning. Even to ask:
“Do what?”
And him still licking his pussy moustache for the very last of my blood.
I nodded, slightly.
“Fuck you, Rennie,” I said. And shot out the screen.
* * *
Dressing on the fly, jacket and jeans, barely time for underwear—just a wadded-up pair of panties in the crotch of my jeans, to staunch the flow. I got my boots on, toed up one of the floorboards and grabbed the last dead junkie’s roll from our designated “escape stash,” with Rennie all the while keeping step, gesturing and pleading—at a safe distance, after I’d showed him the gun again.
“Ro, hold up, calm down. I mean, Jeez, Ro—seriously, I don’t even know what you’re talking about. How could I, man? I was asleep.”
“Yeah, you were asleep, you were dreamin’. You didn’t know what you were doing, right? Fuck you, Rennie, I’ve had enough of your crap.”
“Fuck me? Fuck you, man. I was asleep. I mean, I’m sorry for whatever you think I did—”
I snorted, zipping up. “Yeah, you sound it.”
“—but whatever it was, I did not do it on purpose. I’m sick. You know that.”
“You’re sick, all right.”
That stopped him right in his tracks, amazed. Staring at me with those I just can’t believe what I’m hearing eyes—all insulted and kind of hurt, like I’d accused him of cheating on the big test, or something. Mr. Teen Angst Dracula himself.
If I stayed there a minute longer, I’d end up as nutsoid as he was.
“I need not to see you for a while, Rennie,” I said. Calmly. Clearly. “I need to be alone. I need to be the fuck away from you.”
“Ro,” he said, as I opened the apartment door. Then: “Ro, wait up!”
But I didn’t.
Didn’t look back, either.
* * *
I never figured it out, not until they told me. Twelve years old and six months gone, and I thought I was just getting fat. I actually used to worry about shit like that—back before I discovered how easy it was to lose weight, as long as you kept yourself too high to have an appetite.
Oh, Rennie, my baby. My big baby boy. Too self-obsessed ever to ask why they would’ve waited so long between kids, or how that second kid could even have been conceived, seeing how Mom was doing a month for contempt of court at the time.
You were the one thing our Dad ever gave me that I wanted to keep. And if you were still above ground, maybe I could tell you how it felt when they pulled you out of me—that mind-numbing full-body spasm, that inadequate wishbone snap. How half of me wants to fold you deep inside my ribcage, to hold you tight and never let you go, but the other half of me wants a written guarantee you’ll never try to crawl back up in there again.
Love me, Ro?
Like a rock.
. . . me too.
I smiled to myself, mirthlessly, as the Bay St
reet crosswind drew tears that froze on contact.
Because that’s the way it’s always been between us, little brother mine. That I love you, more than I love my own heart, my eyes, my life. And you love me too, as much as you can love anybody—which is to say, almost as much as you love yourself.
* * *
I came back Sunday night, to find Leo had already been by sometime late Sunday afternoon. Was still there, in fact.
All over.
Rennie looked up as I came in, covering his mouth with blood-gloved hands.
“Oh, Ro, I fucked up.”
A definite understatement.
“You fucked up,” I repeated, tonelessly. “That’s right, Rennie. And I fucked up. By letting you fuck up.”
He crawled towards me, away from that thing on the bed. The big red thing that no amount of laundry was ever gonna get rid of, this time around.
I dropped to my knees, taking his face in both hands, aiming it up at mine. Looked into corpse-yellow eyes dim with tears of fear and self-pity. Heard him whine, plaintive:
“I’m sorry, Ro, I’m sorry, I’m so fuckin’ sorry.”
“I know.”
“You went away. I was upset. I . . . got excited.”
“I know, Rennie.”
He moaned and dug his head into my shoulder, leaving a stain. I just hugged him, letting the rest of his body print my clothes with streaky crimson.
“Just don’t leave me, okay?” he asked. “Don’t ever leave me again, okay?”
“Oh, Ren,” I told him. “Oh, baby. I’ll never leave you, baby, don’t you know that by now? I’ll always take care of you.”
Stroking his hair. Slipping Jos’ gun out of my waistband.
“I’ll take care of you,” I told him.
And then I shot him through the back of the head, twice, right where his topmost vertebra met the base of his skull.
* * *
I buried him upside down, so he’d dig himself deeper. Mud in his big mouth, mud on his traitor tongue. Two days now, and I can still hear him screaming. He’s getting weaker, maybe figuring out what I’ve done—but by now it’s just too late to turn around. He hasn’t got the strength to start over. Playing sick so convincingly, for all those weeks and months—all that year and a half, give or take a few days—maybe he even convinced himself he’d always been that way: The innocent victim, the helpless child.
I should’ve done it a long time ago; I guess I must have always known that, on some level. I sure as hell know it now.
When he’s quiet, I’ll go. I can’t do anything more. I’ll wait until he’s quiet and then I’ll go.
But I am Goddamned, I am God-damned, if I know where.
Rose-Sick
I wanted you. And I was looking for you. But I couldn’t find you.
—Laurie Anderson
O rose, thou art sick.
—William Blake
LOVE BLEEDS, LIKE ANY other wound. And though I believe it can be cauterized, I know I’ve yet to find anything hot enough to do the job.
Prolonged bleeding makes you weak. It tastes like sucking a quarter, but sweeter—the sour-sweetness of your own waste. A fermented-sugar high. Everything goes limp, languid. Dreams float through, breaking up just as they reach visibility: Static on an empty channel. Then the sweetness fades, and you start to ache—because, without either the sweetness or the dreams it spins to distract you, you’re finally awake enough to realize just how empty you’ve already become.
I want you, baby. I want your hands, your hot touch. I want you to lay them on. I want you to sear me clean again.
* * *
There’s a Laundromat of fairly recent mintage up on Yonge Street, the Spin Cycle, where a currently unemployed teacher of English (Romantic poets and Gothic novels a speciality) can load clothes and coin alike unhindered, then retire to the next room and sit comfortably back with the caffeinated beverage of his choice. You go there often, especially so since Lisa hit the highway; in fact, you’re there right now. The Spin Cycle is open all night, clean and quiet, free of memory or temptation. Few people to hit on, or hit back—and those who do turn up with their hands out (i.e., the bums who beg on the pavement just outside) rarely have sex on their minds.
She’s sitting by the window as you come out of the laundry section, having just separated and rebagged your clothing, and slide into place at the end of the bar for a final installment of liquid insomnia. A brief flash of downcast pupil as she notes—and measures—your proximity. Pale smudge of pale hair against the front window’s base-lit glass, indistinct shadow of full mouth under a short, straight hint of nose. Her skin is fair enough to show veins.
Under the lashes, her eyes catch the light: Cloudy blue. Arctic fathoms of lake water, glimpsed through ice. Matching neon rims her lips, bleaching them cyanose.
Cappuccino’s here. You pay, then sip, tensing against the jolt. Count off a shaky string of seconds before you risk a quick glance of your own.
Yes, she’s still looking.
You know you don’t know her. But she’s definitely acting like she knows you—like she knows you intimately, and your failure to acknowledge her is just a part of some kinky game you always play. A dominance thing. (People are into that, these days, or so you’ve heard.) Like she’s waiting for you to take control, to get up and go over, take her arm without a wasted word, and lead her off to some black leather Fantasy Island.
Padded cuffs. Paddles. Cigarettes pressed lightly to the fleshy underside of buttock or breast, right at the juncture, where the sweat’ll make it rub, and really start to smart.
These are freak closet thoughts, dumbed-down revenge fantasies—Lisa’s face hovering disembodied over an EveryCentrefold body, waiting for you to wipe away her sneer. Prospects you would never consider, if you didn’t have the very clear idea that this woman would like you to. That she’d want you.
And here’s the really pitiful part: They’re turning you on.
The foreshadowing of a smile hovers at the corner of that uneven, enticing mouth. She shifts her legs beneath the table, deliberately undeliberate: One smooth motion, pure skin on skin, no apparent panty chaser. Her eyes are lightless, inverse mirrors, archaic camera lenses; there’s someone caught in each of them, a negative reflection on the scrim of her cornea, doubled and reduced to his barest essence, filling her world entirely. And it’s not you, not yet—but for the simple price of a little white lie, it could be. All you have to do is let her recognize you, to be whoever she wants.
Secrecy and decay, Lisa’s voice tells you (giving you back your own words, the ones you once bewitched her with, back in your shared undergraduate days), the key elements of any good Gothic. Your life’s gone rotten, it literally stinks—so much so you spend all your off-time washing clothes, for Christ’s sake—so you want to trade up, identity-wise. Maybe even trade down. To see just how far you can get away from you, from your stupor of loss and hatred, your multi-foliated ache of thwarted desire.
But needs must, when the penis drives. So you snag your laundry and get up, unsteadily, cross towards her, brush by her. Open the door, hold it a half-breath longer than you need to. Waiting.
And she gets up—smile finally blooming, white-ripe; a fleshy desert flower—and follows.
* * *
Toronto, the fliptop city—grey and gelatinous as a mad scientist’s exposed brain, overlaid with a distant hum of thought. Faint memory fog erasing the horizon’s skyscrapers from Floor 13 up. And the two of you, drifting through.
More Ann Radcliffe influences: The rain has accentuated Chinatown’s usual crab season reek and moved it steadily northward; all up and down the road, the pavement is bracketed by crates of exposed underbellies and weakly waving claws. Her place turns out to be a shutter-heavy house just off of Nassau Street, incongruously squatting in the shadow of a hospital smokestack, its r
oof wreathed in a cannibal fog of incinerated body parts. You pause, glance up. The moon hangs caught between tree-branches—a lost balloon, half-wilted.
Then you’re inside, upstairs, in a room up under the eaves, barely bigger than your bachelor apartment’s closet, with a naked mattress on the floor, and a dusty, shrink-wrapped poster of a rose hanging on the far wall, a string of light bleeding from underneath to frame it with a square halo; placed over a small window, maybe, to block the room off from exterior distraction. Water-stains darken the ceiling. It smells stale, with a sickly hint of floral-scented moisturizer. Not exactly enticing.
When you turn around, however, you see she’s already unbuttoned the top of her dress and let it slip down around her hips, loosing a pair of snub-nosed breasts with areola-like cataracts. The light-thread slips along her side, taking the rest of her dress with it, writing hieroglyphs over her emergent stretch-marked hips. Old bruises gild her thighs.
“I found you,” she says, the first thing you’ve heard out of her so far. Her voice is scratchy. A twitch of guilt raises goosesweat; yeah, I guess you did. But it doesn’t seem to reach your face—not enough to stop her talking, at least.
“Want me,” she tells you.
And then she sucks your lips inside of hers and bites down, knocking you back as your clothes peel apart. On the poster above you, the rose yawns, faded and labial, like a cheesy Grade Twelve creative writing exercise metaphor. But your groin—which jumps and pulses against the smooth weight of her inner thighs, the loose and shaven flesh of her pubis—is no literary critic.
“I found you,” she repeats, coming up for air. Then again, with a weird little crack in the words’ sandpaper surface: “Want me?”
Yes, yes, yes.
Her blue-rimmed talons, her blue-toned mouth. Her hands scrabble down, points out—the date-rape rosary, reversed: Nipples, navel, pelvis, sac. Incongruous, the contrast; how selected parts of her strike you with such an exaggerated force of detail, while other aspects slide away on contact, impossible to describe. The nape of her bent neck, small-pored and finely furred with a blush of colorless hair—as she glides down along your torso, tongue out—versus the blur of her profile. Halogen skin, almost grotesquely lambent; a stained white radiance, like the kind that spills from lanterns made of human skin. You can count every link of her spine. One hand shelling you with a single twist, a grate of zipper teeth, and slipping to cup your testicles as the other grips you firmly, skins you back. Her breath touches the exposed tip of your penis with condensation.
