Love and lust. The thin line between the two is thicker than many would think. It’s also perforated. How could what just happened be anything but natural? Why should he control his animal instincts?
He looks at Salome’s cigarettes in the ashtray, her plastic hair clip next to the flower pot full of crayons, her sandals, blackened and tearing at the straps. That’s why. That’s why he should control his urges, for the woman he’s been dating for a year and a half, and this very thought feels like a crock of shit. He knows he’s not going to stop, knows he must escape soon, even if the sharks are the people closest to him.
Boy opens his front door to find his living room completely thrashed. The couch is overturned, the shelf has been push down, his X-Men action figures and Lego figurines are scattered across the hardwood floor. The table next to the door has been flipped on its side. Boy’s paints have been squeezed over everything. The toxic stench of paint is strong and heady.
It’s a huge mess, a huge colorful mess, and Boy is furious and worried as to who did it and if they got to his canvases. He steps over the paint dappled books and flicks the light on as he nears his makeshift studio. The room closes in and swells. He gets the sense that he’s been in his house longer than he has.
Boy hears a giggle coming from his bathroom and his heart smashes against the back of his teeth.
‘W-w-who’s there?’ he whispers. He looks down at his hands and noticed they’re covered in paint. How long have I been in here? He shelves the question.
A series of multi colored foot prints appear on the floor like Twombly scribbles. The prints are child-sized; they stop in front of his bathroom door. He hears the giggle as he reluctantly reaches for the door handle.
₪₪₪
A small girl covered in streaks of paint is standing in front of his sink. The parts of her body not plastered in paint are invisible. She’s wet, shiny and nubile. Her eyelids are closed and painted white. She laughs and squeezes a tube of grapefruit pink paint onto the floor.
‘Goddammit,’ Boy says, sighing audibly enough to shake the foundation. Another ghost.
The girl pushes past him and runs back into his bedroom. She skids to a halt and leaps onto Boy’s bed. The paint splatters as if it were tossed from a high rooftop. She’s gone, and his dresser and bed are now completely swathed with paint.
₪₪₪
Boy freezes, waiting to see if she’ll reappear. Paint Ghost. Where did I get so much paint anyway? There aren’t enough art supplies in his makeshift studio to create this kind of mess.
The kitchen. Boy opens the drawer below his sink. Three cans of spare wall paint are missing. Oregano, Tidewater, Prairie Sage. That would explain the colors that were poured over the girl’s head. He enters his bedroom again and sees the paint cans stacked neatly in the corner. Were they there before? He doesn’t remember seeing them when he first entered the room. He drops the thought and drowsiness sets in, roused by the alcohol, the sex and the long walk home. Moments later, Boy’s lying in the puddle of paint on his bed.
He doesn’t want to think about the mess in his home, he doesn’t want to think about how much of a pain in the ass it’s going to be to clean up; he wants to think only of Maeve, the way she came, how her head dropped back and her Elvis sunglasses fell onto his chest; he wants to think about looking at himself in the mirror after he they’d finished. Escape to the recent past to avoid the present.
They stood in the bathroom together, her body pressed into his. They’d walked there attached. Actually, he’d carried her, she was that small. Not a moment later, she sat down on the toilet as he leaned over with both arms on the sink, admiring his sweat-stained forehead and the way sweat warps the pinkness of his skin.
Mind if I pee? she asked.
No.
Maeve finished and stood in front of him, her little waist in his hands, his head resting on her shoulder. Portrait of an artist as a womanizer. His five-day scruff and his hair a mess, her green eyes and freckles, his hairless chest, her collar bone shaped like a clothes hanger, her small breasts the size of ripe oranges.
Be there not here. The smell of paint overwhelms him, but Boy stays in his bed until he falls asleep.
₪₪₪
Bird scratch night, Jasper Johns on fifteen hits of acid. A strange giggle earthquakes the dreamscape.
All the seats at the funeral are empty aside from Boy’s. The night sky is a hallucinatory borealis. The Warhol blow-up doll nearby is sticky and dripping over the confines of its seat, a rotting antimacassar if there ever was one.
The towering man’s face is visible now. He has Lucy’s slit-eyes, almost leonine, and a bib has been made out of her favorite dress. His mouth is Glass Wings – razor sharp teeth grate against his lips and black blood boils onto his bib.
The towering man shrinks until he is the size of a toddler. He crawls onto Boy’s lap, his hair shriveling into a Lisa Frank bouffant. He’s got Elvis glasses on now and Boy can see own reflection in the lenses. He’s a skeleton with hair and black olive eyes.
Behind him something moves.
Boy pulls the nubile man-doll closer to his face so he can watch the moving entity in the reflection of the man’s sunglasses. He stands before he confirms what it is. The chairs clatter forward and Boy leaps.
A glass wing swipes at him again from the dark. Boy tosses the towering man-doll into the darkness and dodges left. A giant knife from the sky splits the earth. Glass Wings twists his body like a door hinge that’s been broken at one of the bolts.
A strange giggle earthquakes the landscape.
₪₪₪
‘Are you okay?’ Salome is standing in the doorway of his bedroom holding a bag of breakfast tacos. With her other hand she’s pinching her nose, waving away the paint fumes.
‘Hi.’
‘What the hell happened last night?’ she asks. ‘I tried to call you. Why was your front door unlocked? And what’s with all the paint? It’s fucking toxic in here! I opened all the windows to air this place out. You okay?’
‘I’m fine,’ Boy says, waving his hand at the paint. He notices the bandage on his left hand has fallen off.
‘Why is there paint everywhere? More importantly, whose footprints are these? Did you paint these or something?’ she asks.
So she can see them!
‘Did I paint what?’
‘The footprints. They’re everywhere.’
‘Ummm…of course I did,’ he says, realizing the opportunity coupled with her observation.
‘Were you high or something? It looks like you used all your paint.’
‘I know.’
‘First the street sign, now this,’ Salome says, remaining under the door frame. She sniffs at him, but not as playfully as usual. ‘You okay?’
‘It’s not what it looks like. I’m just… experimenting…’
‘Ha! Experimenting is an understatement.’
‘Yeah.’ Boy rolls out of bed, his black jeans are covered in paint. ‘I’ll clean it up.’
‘Are you hungry?’
‘Sure.’
‘Okay, meet me on the front porch; at least change your shirt or something.’
₪₪₪
On his front porch things are less clear than they were in the comfort of his paint-soaked bed. Salome is talking about her writing, her sick little mind boiling over with new terms for sex organs. She’s come across a few new words, including, strumpet and doxy and Biggus Dickus. Boy hardly listens.
He’s thinking of Maeve, and how he needs to see her again. He’s thinking of Friend, that wild look in his eyes as he candy flipped acid and ecstasy at the Elvis party last night. He envies Friend’s ability to escape. Boy can’t do those kinds of things – he has seen too much already. He tried tripping with Friend once and it was disastrous.
No, Boy sticks to alcohol and the occasional joint. He never has to buy weed thanks to Friend, who is the type of drug user who shares his drugs to diminish the guilt he feels for taking them. Lots of
people like that. Some do it with money, some do it with food, others do it with knowledge. It’s the numbness everyone’s after, whether they care to admit it or not.
Numbness numbness numbness. It’s nice to feel that from time to time. Girl said she cut herself because it made her feel numb to the world. He can’t imagine how a sharp object to the skin can make one feel numb. She never did forgive him for saying something to Mom after he saw her covered in scars, but what else could he do? She was fourteen, Boy was nineteen and he’d never seen anything like that before.
The St. Louis Psychiatric Rehabilitation Center took Girl on as a charity case, something Mom was surely ashamed of, and while Boy was preparing to move to Austin, Girl was wasting away in what he assumed was a padded room, but was likely a small room with a plastic bed frame that was constantly monitored.
Girl later told Mom that they checked on her constantly for the first five days, turning the lights on at night, and calling out her name during the day in ten minute intervals. This eventually changed to once every fifteen minutes. Boy couldn’t imagine anything more maddening than that.
‘Are you even listening to me?’ Salome asks.
Nope. He feels bad for not caring about what she’s saying. She’s a great girlfriend, neurotic, but creative and hot when she wants to be, but the truth of the matter was that she had been replaced; as of less than twelve hours ago she was replaced.
And that thought goes through his mind, you’ve been replaced, and he feels absolutely horrible for thinking it. At the same time, he feels free from a burden, excited about something new. He feels like painting. He feels like painting a picture of Glass Wings and smashing it over his knee, driving a pair of shears into its heart, dousing it in lighter fluid and setting it aflame.
‘Of course I’m listening.’
She knows he isn’t, but Salome keeps on talking anyway as his mind skips to a book she gave him for his birthday last year, The Picture of Dorian Gray. That’s what Glass Wings would look like, wretched and deformed, except even more frightening. Since seeing him two nights ago, Boy can’t strip the fucked creature from the forefront of his thoughts or his dreams. Hopefully, he’s dead. But still, Boy would like to paint him for the hell of it.
Paint.
The urge to paint is as strong as the urge to urinate. The urge to create is overpowering and if he doesn’t answer when it calls…
Not now. He watches Salome’s mouth move up and down like she’s chewing a hunk of beef. He stands. It’s calling him.
‘Now’s not a good time,’ he says, interrupting her.
‘What do you mean?’
He knows by the way her brow is furrowed that she’s slightly agitated.
‘Do you remember when you told me you needed time to write?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I need time to paint.’
‘Right now?’
‘Yes, right now. Sorry.’
‘You’ve been acting strange these last few days, and I don’t like it,’ she says, blinking rapidly. ‘Something’s different.’
‘Nothing’s different,’ Boy says. Everything’s different. Paint. He realizes he doesn’t have any paint left. That goddamn ghost, plus he needs to clean.
Salome edges off the chair. She reaches into her purse for a cigarette. She sniffs and her glasses lift up and down on the bridge of her nose. Boy can tell that it’s torturing her.
‘Can I have a kiss?’ she asks, in a weak voice he hardly recognizes.
‘Sure, I mean, you don’t have to ask.’
He kisses her almost complacently and she kisses him in a way that says she’s sorry and confused. He realizes during this kiss that he has a new power over her, a power he doesn’t quite understand, but a power nonetheless. His phone buzzes. It can only be one of two people.
₪₪₪
Art supplies store and bare essentials. A basic six-color palette packaged together: Cadmium Yellow, Ivory Black, Titanium White, Cardinal Red, Cobalt Green, Cerulean Blue. If Paint Ghost kept up her bad habits, he’ll have to switch to water colors, a much more temporary medium, but at least his colors can’t be spoiled in that form.
The day is warming up, despite the fact that it’s winter. He thinks of the text he received from Maeve while he was kissing Salome: Nobody around? I want to see you.
NO END. He’s starting to hate that sign more than the original incarnation: DEAD END. He unlocks his door and steps over the mess in the living room. He needs to finish Untitled in Spanish.
Because of Paint Ghost, he really doesn’t have many paint options to work with. He looks down at her little footprints and is reminded of Lucy. Not many people can say they’ve had sex with a ghost. Sad when you have a bragging right that immediately casts doubt upon your sanity.
He wants to start on the Glass Wings piece, but knows it can wait. What would Girl think if she saw the painting? Would it affect her in anyway? He’s never heard a sound like that, as his bat shattered the horrible creature’s wings and the pieces spilled to the floor.
A noise in the living room.
‘Dammit,’ he says, growing instantly frustrated. He just wants to paint. He doesn’t want a girlfriend or a deranged little ghost bothering him. Is that too much to ask for?
A mechanical pencil lifts off the table and floats by. Paint Ghost. Boy picks up one of his Winsor brushes, quickly smears the end with white paint and follows the floating pencil.
The pencil enters into his kitchen and hovers in the air. Boy slowly reaches his hand out, making a long downward stroke. A white line now floats in thin air. The texture of the white line resembles a strip of flesh.
‘So I have to paint you now?’ he asks the floating white line.
The mechanical pencil drops to the floor and the white line scissors away. Boy follows, holding his paintbrush out like a rapier. The white line zigs past and he manages another half stroke.
The new white line is shorter than the line he originally painted on her. It moves faster, up and down almost in a pumping motion and Boy assumes the shorter white line is on her arm. He chases her into his bedroom and manages to strike her with his brush again as she makes her way out the door.
Paint Ghost – now in the form of three floating white lines – circles the couch. He tries to cut her off, but slips on a stray sock on the floor. The front door opens and for all he knows, she disappears outside. He pulls himself to his feet and hurries to the front porch.
Boy finds three white lines of varying length on the wall beneath the doorbell. She’s gone again.
₪₪₪
‘Hi,’ Boy says, opening the front door.
‘Damn, it smells like paint up in there!’
‘Sorry, we can just hang out here. I’m airing the place out as we speak.’
Friend’s sunglasses are on and his hair is a mess. He seems frazzled, deep-fried from last night’s Elvis party.
‘You all right?’ Boy asks. He wipes his hands on his jeans. He’s been painting and cutting out paper flowers all afternoon. It was a little difficult to paint with his bandaged palms from the NO END sign, but he got used to it.
‘Dude, last night. Oh my God.’
‘What happened? I never heard from you after I left.’
‘Did you and Maeve see those meditating Elvis chicks?’
‘Naked, right?’ he asks.
‘Yes. Well, last night, I ended up with both of them somehow.’
A grin spreads across Boy’s face. ‘Damn, and I thought I got lucky last night.’
‘It wasn’t like that, man.’ Friend ignores his last statement. ‘I was tripping so hard. I mean, when you left I was just coming up, I thought it was the peak, but I was fucking wrong.’
‘You looked like you were peaking,’ Boy says.
‘Nah man, after you left… I went into a bad place.’
Friend plops down onto the old sofa on Boy’s porch. He’s wearing the same clothes he wore last night and smells a little ripe. ‘Not going to lie,
I’m pretty sure my body went into apoplectic shock or some shit last night. You ever seen that penguin meme they use on Reddit? You know, the top half is going one way, the bottom half is going the other?’
‘Nope.’
‘Imagine being split in half and your torso is going left and your legs are going right—my body felt like that. And so I’m just watching these girls meditate, and I decide, fuck, I should meditate with them. So I sit down across from them and start meditating like an idiot. Well, the three of us sit like this for a good fifteen minutes. Then one of them looks to the other one and says something.’
‘What did she say?’
‘I don’t know. I can’t hear them. The music inside is too loud. Anyway, she stands and walks over to me and is all like, ‘Are you okay?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah… wait no,’ and then I’m crying.’
‘Crying?’
‘Dude, I was gone beyond.’
‘Damn,’ Boy says.
‘So she grabs my hand and the other girl stands and they lead me to like this little trailer or something.’
‘And they’re still topless and they still have their Elvis wigs on?’
‘Yeah, they’re still topless and they still have their Elvis wigs on.’
‘What…’
‘And so I’m thinking, this is it. I’ve died and these topless Elvis chicks are like Graceland angels or something. And I’m freaked out because I think, well shit, Elvis was a weirdo so maybe he went to hell and I’m probably going to hell with him. Then I think: wait-a-minute, these girls don’t look like demons. Then I think: I’m a fucking atheist, I don’t believe in hell. And so now I’m relieved, I’m feeling this crazy energy and I’m tripping balls. And they sit me down on the couch in this trailer and one of them starts rubbing my shoulders.’
‘Does this story end in a threesome?’
Friend looks at Boy over the rims of his sunglasses. ‘Not everything is about sex, you know.’
Boy versus Self: (A Psychological Thriller) Page 14
