Songs of the Maniacs

by Mickey J Corrigan

  He pulls my head around by jerking on the pantyhose. His mouth is as hot and hard as his flesh, like a sun-soaked stone. He pushes into me hard, hard and harder, like he wants to push through me to the far side of the world.

  I feel nothing at first, then I feel everything at once.

  He reaches across me to open my door and shoves me out onto the asphalt. I am up on my knees crawling across the gravel and sand when he climbs out after me. He laughs a little and kicks me lightly in the ribs, lifting me with the toe of his boot. The same way you would turn over a dead animal after you ran it over with your car. I spill onto my back and stare up at him. Around his head the stars form a crown of light.

  “Get up, Virginia,” he says in a low voice, then he crouches over me and lightly strokes my stomach with one index finger, until I quiver.

  It always ends up like this with me and men.

  My hair is in my mouth and blood from my nose is collecting in my throat. The pantyhose around my neck makes me feel like I am choking. I sputter and turn my head to spit. He runs his hands over my hips and down between my thighs with just enough force that it feels both good and bad at the same time.

  When he stands up and pulls me to my feet I let him. When he sweeps me up in his arms and carries me across the dunes I let him. But when I turn my face into his chest I inhale gasoline fumes and I start to cough again.

  He drops me in the sand and I lie back into the rhythm of the waves. The tide is out, but we are near enough to the tide line to catch some spray. I can feel the waves pounding toward us, crashing onto the shore. Then I can feel the pull as the waves drag themselves away from us again.

  When Joey stretches out on the crusty sand beside me I say, “Why do you smell like gas?”

  “Occupational hazard,” he explains. “I got a job at the garage on Eighth Street fixing cars. You know how good I am with my hands.” My nose has stopped bleeding, but there is a fat clot stuck in the back of my throat and whenever it tickles me, I start coughing. “The Mustang I’m driving tonight is one I’m working on now. Some rich dude owns it, runs a couple businesses in the city. Nice car. Classic lines and shit.”

  Is he looking for my approval? I give him nothing and he keeps talking. Maybe if I listen quietly he will go easy on me.

  I give good ear. I give the best ear I have ever given.

  “My job’s good. I make okay money, I fuck around on my nights off, all’s swell. I live okay without you and all our old shit, time passes and shit, you know. But your brother is a fucking pain up my ass, Virginia. Franny’s a bum, face it. He comes into the garage and yaks, he has so much nothing to do. My sister this, my sister that. He wants me to hear, see? He wants me to know you don’t give a shit about me anymore.”

  I stare straight up into the drizzling sky until the rain stings my eyes and I am forced to roll onto my side. I am freezing, but I will my teeth not to chatter so Joey will keep talking and not start on me.

  “The fucking guy got me curious. Was it true what Franny was saying? That Virginia’s now this pretty little coed with a dorm room full of books? The Virginia I knew was always crawling around on all fours, just waiting for me to let her out of her fucking cage.”

  The rain has stopped for a moment to catch its breath, but the waves keep on coming in and out in their endless pulsating rhythm. He pushes my shoulders back down onto the sand and rolls on top of me. His chest has filled out and the curly hairs tickle my sore nose. He slides down until his head is between my breasts.

  “I had to go and check things out for myself.” His voice is muffled. “I tracked old Virginia through campus housing. Simple enough. Then I sat on a bench in the quad and ate a cheeseburger, waiting for her to come out of her dorm. I waited and waited like some fucking loyal dog. And suddenly, there she was. It was Virginia all right, but she had a whole new look. All prim and proper in her long straight skirt and stiff white blouse, her fucking nylon stockings and flat shoes. Looked like somebody else, some uptight bitch I didn’t know.”

  He shifts his weight on me. His voice is a low growl. “I followed her around campus all afternoon, from building to building, waiting outside in the fucking sun and the fucking rain and the goddam boring dark. I followed her off campus too. All the way to the hot shit college scene downtown. Big fucking deal, right? Suddenly she ducked into some dive bar. So I stood outside that dumpy shithole and watched her run around behind the bar. I waited there while she let all the guys paw her for tips. For shitty tips! I stood out there for hours and I got more and more pissed. You know why?”

  He pauses, but I say nothing. I am nothing, I am nothing but a vessel into which he pours his sadness, his anger, his own nothingness.

  “Because it was true what that fuck Franny had been saying. This Virginia did not give a shit about me. My Virginia, the Virginia I knew and loved, was gone! She’d changed so fucking much she was someone else. She was like a different person. Looking at this woman, you’d never believe she’d ever have anything to do with me. You’d never believe the things I could make her do. The things she wanted me to do to her.”

  I can feel the beat of the tide coming closer to us, the sound of the surf a furious pounding inside my head, a ringing, an internal alarm. I try not to breathe too deeply so I will not start to cough and choke again.

  The wind splatters us with the ocean’s salty spray.

  “But I knew it was the same girl. The same Virginia,” he whispers. “People can’t change, not really. They can’t change themselves inside.”

  He pushes and pushes, hard, hard and harder, until he is so deep inside me we are the same person looking out his eyes. I am staring into my own sad green eyes and all I can see is the tiny reflection of Joey, and inside that is a tiny reflection of me. I am nothing in his eyes and he is less than nothing in mine.

  “So here we are, lying on the beach. Together. Like no time has passed. Like nothing has changed.” Joey laughs and says, “Everything starts and ends with me inside you, Virginia.”

  He pulls himself up, sliding himself over my chilled flesh, smearing himself on me like melted cheese on fries, until we lie face to face. His breath is hard and scratchy against my tender nose. When he wipes one hand across my swollen lips, it comes away covered in blood.

  He is done with his story and I have listened to every word.

  “Whatever you say, guy,” I mutter. “Whatever,” I say, and I mean it.

  He pushes and pushes, hard and harder, until I begin to cough. I care but I do not care about what he is doing to my body. My body is not me, after all. He thinks he knows who he has been fucking and hurting and loving in some warped version of a human emotion, but he does not. The woman he has slapped and sucked and stalked and aroused and abused in so many ways, the woman underneath him, she just looks like me. She is not me. Not at all.

  My indifference is total in this moment.

  My acceptance of this moment is total.

  It is raining hard now and the wind is howling and I am coughing when he puts his big hands around my throat and squeezes. The knot in the pantyhose, the clotted blood, the smell of gasoline and burgers and the night surf, the rain and wind. Everything becomes a weapon in certain situations.

  I open my eyes wide until they bulge and I stare like this until the stars over his head, the crown of stars he wears like some ancient sea god, the pinpoints of light in the black shroud of night, zoom away. All the stars zoom away to the vanishing point.

  And then they all blink out.

  ****

  All that is left is my throat and the need to let the night air inside and I am coughing and coughing. Something is blocking my windpipe, a cold lump lodged too tightly, and he is pressing against it with the pads of his meaty thumbs and I am gasping and flailing and trying to cough it out.

  The thing in my throat.

  “When your dreams are more real than your r
eality?” It is Victor who is talking to me now. He is speaking in a faraway whisper. Victor the man has taken the place of Joey the boy, my high school boyfriend, the first person who taught me how to care and not care about myself. How to be someone else, yet more myself. Much more. It is Victor who is speaking to me from some distant time, another moment. But it is Joey who has his hands around my throat and he will not let go. He will never let go.

  I look up and the sky is a mirror that is black with the night below. I look up and the sea and the stars and the blackness moves in to surround me. I am no longer coughing but there is something still lodged in my throat, something cold and hard.

  I open my eyes wider and I am pinned against the wall of Victor’s living room and his thick body presses against me and his hands are around my neck and his iron clasp is forcing the thing in my throat to edge up my windpipe or my esophagus , whatever.

  I am choking and, at the same time, the blockage in my throat is coming loose.

  The air in the room is ice cold and the black sky in my mind folds in on itself and becomes even blacker. Victor is saying in that faraway voice, “When your dreams are this real, so much more real than your reality? Then how do you know? How do you know which one is your real consciousness?”

  The snake patch on a leather jacket.

  The number one hundred and eleven.

  A mirror with someone else’s reflection.

  A certain kind of personality. Smart, not slick.

  When you really don’t care about anything.

  Interchangeable living beings. No different from the animals.

  SIPD, that is, when we are no longer who we think we are.

  I cough harder than I have ever coughed before and the thing, whatever it is, slides up past the back of my tongue. I close my eyes and gag. The thing feels huge in my mouth, round and smooth as a bullet, metallic tasting. The coughing stops and I try to spit it out.

  “The self you believe is yourself is not the real you,” Victor is saying. He lets go of my neck and my head sags forward until my chin rests on my chest. “If we can destroy the false self, that will be our salvation. Yours and mine.”

  I slide down the wall until I am sprawled across his polished wood floor. Victor kneels down by my head. When he reaches his finger into my mouth and clears out the air passage, I realize he has done this before.

  The object drops from my slack mouth and falls to my chest, tumbling forward and coming to rest on the cliff of my left breast. The object settles there on the edge of a black hole that has opened in the thin skin right above my heart.

  The hole is open and empty and full of blood and full of whatever it is inside me that remains intact. In spite of everything, in spite of the pain of remembering and the agony of forgetting, in spite of whatever comes up in the moments that make us who we are. The moments that make us alive.

  When I look down at the object on the hole in my chest, it is with eyes that are bulging and blind. But I can see that the object is not a bullet but a key.

  A key. A tiny metal key.

  The key to a cage or a prison cell or an office or a bar or a private room in a hotel for sick people, a luxury apartment in the best part of town. The key to a secret or a life or a love or a personality. The key to freedom. The key to everything and to nothing at all.

  Victor grabs me under the armpits and attempts to lift me into a sitting position, but my body is dead weight. When he lets go of me, I can feel myself falling. I fall a long, long way until at last I sink down into the floor like a six-foot hole in the hard-packed sand.

  He cups my left breast in his hand and whispers, “Virginia.”

  I open myself to him and the waves and the night and the wind and the animals inside us.

  23.

  I try to open my eyes until I realize they are already open. Victor lies beside me, his big hand on my still quivering thigh. The recessed lighting hurts so I shade my eyes as I look around at the apartment. It is bigger than I remember and well-appointed. The man has money and taste.

  Apartments, names, personalities, memories and everything else? Maybe all of it, all of us, are as interchangeable as the clouds in the sky.

  “What happened to the lawn guy?” I ask, ruining Victor’s moment.

  “You don’t remember?” he says in a bland monotone. “Why doesn’t this surprise me?” He rolls onto his side and moves his hand up the inside of my thigh in one grand sweeping motion. I shudder. “Let’s take a bath,” he says.

  He stands and reaches for my hands to pull me up. His face is in shadow and as far away as tonight’s moon.

  He is annoyed when I fail to remember things. Sometimes he gets angry and we fight, then have angry sex. Sometimes he sulks and withdraws. But I hate to remember. The past is over and has nothing to do with who I am now. And who I am now is all that interests me at the moment. That was then and this is now, I am thinking. This is me, living in the now.

  He walks me through a vast bedroom toward the master bath. The unmade bed is king size, silky sheets in a rumpled pile. A rattan fan circulates the air around scattered piles of magazines and books. A flat screen television takes up most of one white wall. There is a mirror on the ceiling and when I look up I can see who I am.

  I am Virginia, the woman behind the bar.

  I have a name now.

  I sit on the toilet while Victor (Vic?) runs the tap to fill the roman tub with hot water. He lights a dozen stubby candles that lean in crazy directions on the ledges around the tub, then flicks off the fluorescent light overhead. His shadow stretches and bounces around the room as he pulls his undershirt over his head and slides out of his jeans.

  The sound of rushing water fills my head. Warm steam swirls into my eyes and nose and ears. The candles ooze their gentle scents, vanilla and almond. Victor squats in front of me and rests his arms on my knees, waiting for the tub to fill.

  I am about to ruin this moment, too, when Victor covers my mouth with his hand and says, “Shut up, now. Not one fucking word, Virginia.”

  He gets in the tub. I step out of my clothes and, when Victor signals me with his index finger, I step in. While he softly soaps my shoulders and breasts, my arms and wrists and hands, Victor talks and I listen.

  I guess Virginia is a good listener. She is all ears.

  “You look around like this is a whole new world to you. It all seems new, doesn’t it? All fresh and new.” He laughs, his head thrown back. “Honey, you may not know where you are tonight, but let me tell you something. It doesn’t matter. Not really. Because the truth is, you’re in the same place everybody else is. It’s just a moment in time. We’re all in this moment together. Together. And that’s all any of us have.”

  He scoops up my hair and cradles my head in one wide palm, then he pours on the shampoo. When he massages my scalp I let out a little moan and he laughs again.

  “The present moment only lasts a few seconds,” he says. “The moment is like a dream. It may feel like it continues for minutes or hours or days, but really it only lasts a few seconds. And then we move on to the next moment. We live like this, we live from moment to moment, and all these moments are piling up inside our minds, forming our memories, forming a continuity, a coherent story of who we think we are.”

  “Victor,” I say, “please tell me what happened to the lawn guy.”

  He stops rinsing my hair and sighs. The bathtub faucet is drip, drip, dripping. It sounds like my office clock ticking over and over, faster and faster.

  Victor says, “One more time, woman. One more time. Every day you push me away, every night you fuck me like an animal. Every morning you do not remember, every night I must tell you again how it is here, what is real and what is not real, the story you are unable to tell yourself without me.” He pauses, his voice tender. “One more time, I will fill in the holes, all those empty spaces you seem unable to fill
in yourself.”

  His voice drifts by my ears, fainter now and wet, steamy. “There is no lawn guy. No Anders, no Joey, no Joe. No Celia, no Justin, no Sasha or Ben. No SIPD, no Malaise Group, no Diet-Water, no Francis in a barroom, no shots fired, no holes in anyone’s chest. Do you understand me, Virginia?”

  I open my eyes a crack and I am alone in the bathroom. Alone, alone, alone. Victor is gone, but his voice continues, a whisper now inside my head. “There is no Victor, no Vic, no god upstairs. I am part of the dream, the dream you need to wake up from. You need to wake up now so that you and I, together, can live wholly in this world. Do you understand, Virginia?”

  And then my eyes are wide open and I am sputtering and choking. I am swallowing water and coughing it back up and swallowing more. Victor or Anders or Joey, a man has his hands around my neck and he is squeezing the base of my throat and I am suffocating and drowning and my feet are blue and my eyes are bulging and the sound of the sea beats against my brain and I close my eyes and I let it all go.

  I let the moment go.