She wrote a story for him once, painted him to be some washed-out drug addict rolling fresh cigarettes from the butt-ends in the ashtray and at the time he wasn't sure whether he should feel flattered or insulted. He coughed deeply, painfully, and felt a solid chip of some piece of lung rattle backwards through his trachea into his mouth where it settled near the back of his tongue. He choked, cleared his throat, spat into an empty beer glass sitting on the floor by his bed. Some high volume shit his roommate could afford. Now, feeling the rasp in his chest, he felt that her portrait of him as pathetic, premature drunk and stagnant felt mostly accurate. He wondered if she ever wrote stories for her boyfriend.
The clock ticked. He received and sent some text messages, his cell phone shuddering mutely in the soft mountain of half-clean laundry piled at the foot of the bed. The passage of time. He scratched a thigh, that soft expanse of skin over thin snapping tendon where his leg met pelvis. He had a birthmark there, but had never seen it himself. He'd never felt all that connected with his body below the belt, left the exploration to women he was drunk enough to sleep with. He glanced at his phone.
It's sad when you can wait out the passing of a whole hour without having it bother you too much. Sitting there like mosquito larvae lapping at the edge of a shallow, tepid pond. An hour used to drag on forever, his eyes would be glued to the minute hand and his hand to the strap on his backpack, pens and calculator stuffed inside four minutes earlier. Tensing, there being weed to smoke and bikes to ride in all the brickwork pockets of this shit New England city, all adolescent heat and clumsy foreplay, a chainlink factory town with sagging concrete, trash heaps. Germs burns. He still slept in a Bruins jersey most nights; warm enough to keep him cozy in an unheated bedroom that could have been an ice rink anyway as far as he could tell. He'd hung up his skates ten years ago, they all had. Right around the time they'd all started drinking.
These days everyone his age was pretending to be a grown-up. They all had careers and crew cuts and shit, pleated pants. Wives. They came back to this dead town to bullshit and get drunk, wax nostalgia. But this whole catching up thing always seemed sad to him – unfulfilling for everyone involved. They were trains on different tracks, his prodigal friends on the express route to, I don't know, kids and life insurance policies by thirty? He was on the local track with his guitar and final two lurking semesters of school, school, rest, drunk, school. Wondering what the goddamned rush was. These twin paths, concentric circles, one just as fruitless and meaningless as the other. The germs burn.
He looked at his phone without checking the time. Double-checked. 1:47. Where the fuck was she? Checked his inbox, last text at noon-thirty, bus pulling in. Who knows. Who the fuck was she, even? He closed his eyes and tried to think of a face. Short hair, most likely. Always with the short hair. Did she smile or frown more? Witty and vibrant via the spotty email correspondence they'd kept up for four years now, he remembered her being a somewhat lost person, and sad. Last couple times they hung out they were laughing and fucking and laughing but mostly fucking and lighting cigarettes. Both times they were both in that fallout period after getting fucked over so there was usually this whole overtone of just deep, impenetrable sadness with the two of them seeking comfort in arms and legs with less strings attached. It was miserable sex, actually. But funny. And good. Really, really good.
But there were always strings, weren't there? And different kinds. Some that connected genitals to bloodstream and tear ducts, those were the most notorious. He'd rarely chanced upon those strings and usually snipped them immediately. He was a reckless person and a terrible boyfriend, so he preferred to cut women loose before they had time to figure that out.
But she had always known he was a lousy person but cared about him anyway. That's the difference between friends and girlfriends, he thought to himself, pity the two rarely coexist. Agape love and misery fucking, hate fucking, laughing. He remembered back to the person she was two years ago when he last saw her. Heartbroken, confused, self-destructive, uncharacteristically tenacious. He wondered if she knew how obvious her angst was. Who knows. She was one of those people who looked like she carried two separate batches of secrets at each corner of her mouth. One all hers and the other, much heavier, secrets of other people. Always smirking.
They lay sprawled across the bed. One of his arms was still bent backwards and partially encircled by the bathrobe tie she'd used to secure his wrists to the bass amp next to the window. A neat line of semen slicked the hairs around his belly button. She was flat on her back, smoking a cigarette, the clear outline of her rib cage rising and falling with her breathing. He could see her lungs expand, her flesh this even medium brown, their double dark Irish features. Cut from the same cloth – diaspora, punk rock and oppressive religious upbringings yielding sexual repression, self-loathing, and a sense of general discontent. Fucking winners.
She exhaled and the mid-morning sun, filtered by the slats in the screen, cast horizontal strips of light all along the length of her nut-brown body, peaks of her lips pulling smoke through a yellowed cotton filter.
“Did you know James Joyce had a shit fetish?” she said suddenly. “He wrote letters to his wife about it. He'd ask her to tell him all about her shits back in Galway or wherever the hell she fucked off to with the kids while he was in Trieste.”
“And Pee-Wee Herman was into little kids.”
“Nah dude, that was that guy from Beetlejuice. The dad. Pee-Wee just jacked off at a peep show.”
He twisted on his side to get a better look at her as she lay, both hands under her head and the lit cigarette balanced expertly at the edge of a sex-dried lip. The sun made her gold in places, sepia in others, her colors dustbowl and faded tattoo, the dark, curly forest of hair between her legs the only part of her not illuminated. That kind of thing usually annoyed him; even he, lazy piece of shit stoner that he was, could trim the hedges once in awhile. But on her it made sense; she moved between genders the way he dreamed of moving between the circles, transcending strings, having kids and a wife and his music and a job and being led around on a leash on the sly. But no, those things never coexisted, deviance and happiness. You can't have the American Dream without paying your student loans and girlfriends and friends were totally different entities.
He sat up, cracked open a beer. She pressed the end of her cigarette to the skin of her forearm and raised her eyes to his, dark blue ring circling light blue ring circling pupils that widened, smell of singed skin. Circles, one inside the other. One inside the other.
2087
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