Stumbles over her dismantled bound.
She looked, moist words in each eye, down_at_her_feet. Set out (again) to. Travel with nerves she cannot outdistance. Carries her shoes. Terrain, feet bump into throw wine bottle. Night. Night in the particles of the eye. Terrain, feet bumping into things that ran out of talking. Trees. Grass and stone trees between them. She looked down at her feet. Through what night lets you see. Thought along the way. Wobbly. Dizzy. Uphill. Centipede path. Ten toes finding footing . . . Into—
Weary wave of gesture creates distance. Stroked in the weight of post-fortune. No subtle in the split. Has to lie down. Now.
Has to . . .
or fall . . .
Disowned by answers. Huddled in bushes. The slow pace of sleep
Disheveled hair, looks like something you’d see hanging from a scream . . .
Shoeless feet . . . Ten_toes_not_dancing_toward_the four walls of the open door . . .
Been in this room before? Sat here? Waiting? Sat with the light on and the TV on? Sat here with the decision and the demon waiting?
Weary.
Wobbly. No leap left in her, not one single hop she could assemble into a tool.
Sleep in a bed . . . Eat what’s in the cupboards . . . Hide . . . Remember -if -you -can -were -there -mouthfuls of light –and why it’s red –in there . . .
IN.
The other side of the door.
Hears the clock. How small its transmission, unbroken course—no sides—no other to another and another without going back to fro . . .
Closes the cupboard door. Eats some soup. Eats some bread.
In a corner. A bed. Big enough for—
Fell (take/off/through/cracks) into sleep again . . . Motionless yet kicking . . . choppy images of yesterday a battlefield of cannon shells.
Something flickers to life—
X.
The room at the end of the long red corridor.
X.
The blue room.
X.
The room with tears but no blushing.
X.
The room where the corners clutch the blackness.
X.
The room with the uncoiled bed that’s big enough for—
Shame but no girl. That model must have been limited. Murdered. By good? By evil? Slayed by truth? By sex? The girl with no immortality. The girl whose flesh, beyond its dream, spiraled on the bed.
And she sits alone. Weeping.
And the audience on the TV laughs.
Sits on the edge of the bed. Her tears make hurtful craters on her thighs.
Father Bunny, antenna ears poised to receive, enters: “What’s up?”
Mama Bunny, tired of trickling over the iron hour after hour: “Nothing out of the ordinary, Doc. TV . . . and conversation.”
Father Bunny: “Someone’s long secrets.”
Mama Bunny: “Oh? Something said before?”
Father Bunny: “It was Friday.”
Mama Bunny: “I had a mouthful of ironing. Nothing fancy, but it was piled high.” Looks at the red sofa. Wants to sit. Maybe unfurl quiet with the TV . . . Looks at her ironing. “All day.”
Father Bunny: “I can’t carry me anymore.”
The audience on the TV laughs. The daughter on the red sofa agrees. She’s had enough too.
Father Bunny: “I’m going to bed.”
Mama Bunny: “It’s warm enough.” Doesn’t add tomorrow is the only thing on the menu.
Father Bunny: “Lights out.”
Daughter Bunny, still a quiet furnace in front of the TV, still listening for the companion of circumstance, has not moved. Not even a wiggle of ear, not even to look at Father. Her tongue won’t even lift a finger. She’s waiting for The Face to arrive.
INTERMISSION
COFFEE
CIGARETTES
Coffee & Cigarettes
Coffee & Cigarettes are being served in the
lobby!
Mr. E: Fuck that bitch! This is still L’America. The Home of Me! The pussy’s mine, the money’s mine. Eden ain’t on the curriculum. Look at that shit; goddamn words smoking hopehead-bullshit, Ironside-sirens attacking the asylum, West Coast ghostjazz crying, hangover one-line punk intentions up and lost odyssey on the stained linoleum—You can’t conjure shit out of a needle and a spoon, gravel-voiced foghorns humping limp holidays of print from apocalypse-childhoods—City lights say, Fortune Don’t Surf! Welcome to The fucking L’America, fit yourself in an unbearable, close the Edward Hopper venetian blinds so your shrinking veins don’t choke on the loneliness contoured by loneliness . . . Fuck. That. Bitch. The fucking brave and the bold pluck the secrets off the Life Tree and get to live in the mansion. It’s MY fuckin’ pleasure, my narrative. My thoughts. My mind. I’m the fuckin’ director. They wear what I tell them to wear, fuck like I tell them to fuck. I told that bitch my zipper was the fuckin’ yellow brick road . . . How the fuck hard is that to understand? X marks the spot. Start here! If I say it’s crazy clown time and tell her to fuck like a rabbit, she fuckin’ better, or someone loses their life, use rope or push ’em off a tower.
Mr. Stitches: Love’s ghosts, like that, Boss?
Mr. E: Silencio.
Mr. Stitches nods yes sir.
Mr. E: Wait a fuckin’ minute, call Angelo. Tell him, mountains are falling . . . I’m the fuckin’ executioner. I push the red button. I tell them when to fire a bullet. Me. Me. How the fuck hard is that to understand?
Mr. Stitches shakes his no, Boss, it’s not.
Mr. E: You’re damn right it’s not! My fuckin’ dime. Make the fuckin’ call—
She comes out of her tangled slumber, doesn’t bring all the inland blind alleys and labyrinths of shadows, all the dream-slits, that hopped as specter-beasts of metaphor. Awake—conscious without the control-lamp identifying herself. Wobbly. Showers. Upside-down cubist of slow-haze does not come off. Explores the empty rooms.
One locked door to the hallway. One lamp, green, lit. One sofa, red. Walls, no art, no dreams to break the common maelstrom of mundane’s virus. Small table with a phone . . . The room’s corners clutch black shadows.
TV’s on, but she does not remember turning it on.
Another few steps in the act.
Sit.
Focus.
Get there first . . .
Arrival. Parking there, shaking a bit, knees damp with wordless tears, sits on the red sofa. Watches the images on the TV. A recycled episode of dirty challenges on. The Ways She Came To Tomorrow. TV announcer (flashing the BIG SMILE) in his ultra-smooth and spiffy you-know-this-is-it-folks voice says: “This is . . . L’America. Where the rabbit died.” She begins to cry as the audience laughs and claps.
Door opens. Father Bunny (not yelling) enters. Advances 6 steps. The shadows in the room lengthen. Turns left.
Father Bunny: “Rose-garden
dreamers. They’re all high. Pushing yesterdays to tomorrow.”
Mama Bunny: “They can’t return them for store credit.”
Father turns left. Faces South and the Great White Face on the dark green wall.
Father Bunny: “Like clouds, they can grow anywhere.”
Crying, crying feels like mountains are falling . . . Wipes her cheeks. She doesn’t remember what time it is, or her name, or the last episode. Her hands are joined in her lap.
She agrees with Father Bunny.
Father Bunny transfers his gaze on the TV screen.
She tries to move her hands, but they can’t speak in the new language.
Father Bunny: “They come here to watch. To take everything . . . They try to change all the signposts in the sky . . . All they leave is beer cans.”
She looks at the phone, wishes she could call
the past, ask a few questions . . . Maybe bring it on home . . . Crying crying in a flock of Who? Crying a frenzy of Who? Why? Crying. Crying.
What she can’t explodes.
She transfers her gaze to her purse.
Of course. “
I.D.”
Someone admitting to be Me. Someone who hung on to her name. Some Grace, or Suzi? A Nikki, or Laura perhaps? A perfume to light Stella’s swan?
“Diane. Lisa maybe?”
Doesn’t like Renee, or Sheila. Hopes not Alice.
“Naomi would be a nice . . . I could fit in that, be soft and lovely. I would try.”
I would.
She imagines holding dinner parties, attending pool parties, meeting a tall dark stranger . . .
“Camilla.”
Betty . . . Rita?
Meditates on each name. None want to fit. Not one grows the colors of peace.
Just
want to
be
Me.
“Be someone . . . Please.”
From hollow, desire, desire bows her head. Finger raised to open. Hoping, her sensation a wound, hoping.
A compact, a chome .22 (lighter than the Friday night it still had 6 rounds in it), and a wad of money, 100’s rubberbanded. Enough dark green currency to build dreams. Or hide in one. Opens the slim black, magnifying compact mirror. The mirror shaped like a key. And a note—
SEE ME?
Tongue trying to fade from the movement of lips: “I don’t want to look.”
Father points to the sofa. “Look.”
She is not recovering.
Her tears have no color, no another time another place, no moonlight billowing on a page . . .
Exile.
Maybe wrong.
Maybe suddenly punished without mercy by an affair, suffering as the moon just sat there.
Holds the thought, hoping flashback. But nothing comes here. No line of journey. No lie. No stay. Here. Safe.
Ripping applause from the audience. Scattered laughs.
Father Bunny: “Someone’s long secrets.”
Suzi Bunny weighed down by the TV’s solitude.
Mama Bunny: “It’s raining again.”
Father Bunny: “There have been times when the hours fell faster.”
Mama Bunny: “Will there be blue tomorrow?”
Father Bunny: “It was Friday. Alone in the emptiness she was wrinkled by the dream.”
The phone rings.
“I’ll be there Friday. After 7.”
He’ll hang his coat in the closet. Place his jacket over the peak of the chair by the bed in the blue room. Animated for his need she’ll (flinch before the kiss) let him do what he wants her to do.
Wild alchemic-fucking. Like bunnies (with the TV on). All furry gestures. Gestures deafened by his bulk (and the laughter on the TV) (and the sound of the rain outside). Juices eaten, disoriented. Leaping, no church bells. Up, undressed-meteor, Up, dim lights ACTION, down—carry NEXT, bend to suit, compress—glow to make him BURN, roar as directed. Her career as a travelogue, trying this bed, trying this room, trying this fit and its signal chained to ceaseless . . . Flame into fragment of shapeless—spaceless, anonymous underfoot, exposed, no ground of now to survive, no calm in continual apart . . . And she, in the abyss of coin, after his edits (and her fluttering with tears), does not know herself.
The TV flickers and the audience, temperature set to increase, laughs.
A round of applause.
Near breathless shock. Almost drops the mirror. Tongue working on a question, she stares at the moving lips in the key-shaped mirror. Hers are shut. Wearing the same shade of starlet-red as hers the lips reflected in the mirror look like hers, but they’re not frowning. The mouth in the mirror gleams, offers. “We opened that Darkness.”
“But . . . WE?”
Lips of the reflection speak: “Come back to me.”
. . . The blue room . . . High above the blue street . . . Above the windows and the girls toiling to the servant-tones of she and he—“Sir, I make beginnings from impossible. Come, let your spoonful of crave navigate. I have a camera in my hourglass and curves and hair and diameter that can make use of your gallantry. Come inside.” . . . Warm with fast eyes . . . The gentle snowflakes pacing the soft ripples of the white lace curtains . . .
He was only thinking about her legs and the power of outcome. The hours that Friday they looked good. In those stockings. When she asked if he was going to fuck her.
He was.
Came here to. That was the point. As he remembered when she walked across the room—“Not like that. Slower.”—and unzipped him, it was.
Her legs—Where we meet, deep-current seeds in the tangle bonded-alchemical. Waves he could follow—hour after after hour—love, his fingers did, seemed to. Head. Lips. Teeth. Lake. Lips and blood and fingers locked on saw. Eyes tell. Ask. Whisper.
“Go in.”
(the darkened bedroom/edited mouth—wanting mercy or something better—can’t bring up the begging/grainy black/grainy white/slightly out-of-focus/sound of an old Bell & Howell 245 on pillows and her bowed head/a single, unsavory fragment repeating/he made her watch—tied to the hop-leap-fuck like bunnies—one just MEAT/one of them, near the black mud of an odd-shaped panic, cries/one grunts, laughs, finishes his vivid, closes the door/this night and many that will follow, one will not sleep.)
Waiting. Waiting. Slopes, dunes, hand shift and shift, sigh to sigh/hands curved in the thick shadows/the cave where the sea of cold apparitions clings to eyes/he opened his mouth to speak . . . Silence transmitting what’s next . . .
Suzi Bunny sits on the red sofa . . . Has sat . . . Will sit . . . Cold. Still—won’t swallow any Go—won’t say would, won’t pry or erupt, won’t smoke, won’t drink coffee—won’t laugh when the TV laughs. Hands flat and folded in her lap . . . TV or no TV . . . won’t turn if she hears sounds in the hallway, won’t hear if Mama wants to say something to her—she’s heard them all said before, she’s heard it rain all day . . . Until the Great White Face returns. Then she will not ignore his sparks and flames . . .
The room is empty. Sometimes it looks blue. Sometimes it looks green. Sometimes it’s dim, even the light looks grainy. Sometimes dark. Dark when it’s night it feels silent and she, torn, singing her tears, weeps.
Not wanting to hear what they have to tell, sometimes she won’t take the call if someone calls. She already knows it’s dark and it’s raining . . .
She looks in the mirror again. “Before we met and burnt came between our memory.”
Looking in the chanting ripples for the farewell. Holding tight.
“We?”
“Your face and mine.”
“You are my face.”
“Oh?”
“I couldn’t misplace it. You. Me. Can’t lose you. Can’t lose your own—”
“If you slip you can lose anything . . .” The starlet-red lips in the mirror open, sigh. “Even me.”
Half of her face in shadows. “He cast a strange shadow in that black suit.”
Quick and wide open. “Then you remember?”
Pulling back. “I . . .”
Slow. Dripping so she can catch up. “Friday. He called. Said he’d be waiting . . . Was. Still. Waiting.”
“Then.”
“Yes.” Closer. “He said he’d send the car.”
“The black limo?”
“I heard it arrive.”
“Then?”
“You left.” Exhales cigarette smoke. “Walked right out of that door.”
Pulls back. She isn’t smoking. “Friday?”
“Yes. It was nearly 7 o’clock.”
Feeling the sensation of a web tingling with echoes. “7.”
“It was dark. In here. Out there.”
“There.”
“Yes. In the back of the car, the black car. On the way to there. Where he was waiting. Just like he said he would be.”
Then. The day when it was after 7 o’clock. . . . Shed robe. Shed panties. Airplane legs, knees wanting to follow, moving toward the mirror on the red ceiling . . . The face of madness—pushing the sky of its tiny at tomorrow—screams from her nipples. The left one, his favorite, the one she always offers his hunger, wants to just suffocate an
d find grave-quiet sleep as the fury of his strutting teeth hammer. . . Her face is a smear in the mirror . . . She lowers her hand . . . Adjusts to the fever of his instruction . . . She hands him propulsion. He sleeps . . .
She turns on the TV. Watches the sacrifice. Keeps the sound down.
The audience on the TV sparked, claps wildly.
Father Bunny: “It does not hurt them long enough.”
Mama Bunny: “You know where you are if you look where you have been.”
Father Bunny: “After sundown it’s all sand.”
Suzie Bunny wishes she had a book to feel until the clock moves and the Great White Face arrives. A book with hair and teeth and something going on. Trees with birds. Girls revealing their sides. Some whole her eyes can embrace.
She gets up off the bed. Puts on an old record. Spins . . . The Shadow-forest breathes girls full-speed ahead. They laugh. Clap wildly. Dance. As a chorus sing, “Everybody’s . . . doing it.”
She absorbs a face. Begins to return.
Hole. Mirror.
Dances around. Wiggling. Could leap . . .
But to where?
Tomorrow?
Her limbs are smoldering with the breath of Once.
“Once . . . Then . . .”
Turns into the barbed voice of a man. In the harbor of shadows he looks furry. He has long ears.
“Then.” When there was no moon and his ears were warm between her thighs . . .
“At the beginning, when it wasn’t so far.”
She looks down at her feet.
“Then. When he said . . . bright things. Promised good, nice and funny. When naked was soft and a melody.”
She remembers this song, how loaded it was. It still warms her. She likes the feel of warm naked air on naked skin. Likes the feel of naked truth.
Father Bunny, in his everyday suit (the suit he sits in, the suit he walks in, the suit that does not blow prayers and opinions no one will hear), walks 4 yards. Pauses before the door to the hallway.
Mama Bunny: “Testing the resonance again?”
In Heaven, Everything Is Fine: Fiction Inspired by David Lynch Page 22
