As I Die Lying Read online

  Except for those other fucking runts scrabbling around back there with Richard. Like they’d ever get any action without me.

  "But I don't want you to be like everybody else, Richard."

  Crap. Now we're back to this sensitivity bit. This is getting me nowhere. Going in fucking circles. And the old heat-seeking missile's about ready for lift-off. "I'm your Poet. And you're my Negative Girl. But that doesn't mean you have to say 'no' to everything."

  "I'm not saying 'no,' I'm just saying 'not yet.'"

  Easy, now. Thin ice here. The old conundrum, that Mars and Venus thing. She’s talking “relationship” while I’m talking a few squirts between friends. She's about to get pissed off, and that will virtually guarantee no biscuit-making tonight. But she still hasn't pushed my hands away. Think, Loverboy. If you're really the world's greatest, then you can turn this little situation around. Wonder what that little fuckwit Richie would say to her? Hey, Rich, you back there? What are you doing, diddling yourself in the dark? Help me out here. I'm your pal.

  What? You serious?

  Damn, that's brilliant. You're a genius, Richie, even if you're a pathetic loser. Why didn't I think of that? Probably because my balls are the size of Mississippi watermelons. Hang in there, my hairy friends, relief may be in sight. Let me play the card I've got up my sleeve, the ace in the hole that may get the ace in the hole. "I love you, Virginia."

  Let it sink in, give it a chance to shiver through her body, down there to the inner workings. Down there where it matters. Ah, she just now sighed. Bingo, my man. Let's sauce the old noodle, let's do the doggie dance, let's wrap the Maypole, let's wax the tadpole, let's get ready to fucking rumble.

  "I'm not ready."

  What the fuck?

  "I know you probably think you mean it. But I have to be sure."

  Sure? I know the moonlight's pathetic, but damn, girl, you ought to be able to sense the bulge in my crotch. It's twitching like a caged weasel, and it's all because of you. Here, let me unzip, let the weasel go “pop,” cut to the fucking chase.

  "Richard? What are you doing?"

  What does it look like? Now you're putting on the virgin act? It's not like you've never seen one before. Go on, touch it, it won't bite you. Much.

  "Richard, stop it."

  Goddamn, she's trying to claw my fucking eyes out. Where'd those damned glasses go?

  "You son of a bitch."

  “I love you.” Hammer it home and maybe you’ll nail her yet.

  “You don’t do that to people you love.”

  Love. Christ in a crème brulee.

  Well, you blew this one big-time, Loverboy. You could probably go ahead and take her, but hell, getting there's half the fun. And you're a lover, not a fighter. Let her save it for a fucking rainy day. Probably wants to keep it all in the family anyway. And it's not like I won't have other chances. Hear that, Richie-fuck? I'll be back.

  Right now, I'm going back to my room, way back there away from this crazy bitch. What a waste. Well, let her have the Mini Meat if she's so worked up about him. I don't want to be around anyway when these blue balls start aching.

  She's all yours, Richie, my man.

  Thanks for sharing.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  We drove home in silence. Virginia had been nearly physically raped, I had been totally mentally raped. There was no speeding on the road back to Ottaqua, no joyous headlong rushing into the hot jaws of oblivion, none of the wild velocities of the ride out. Only the sullen moon, hanging like a dead maggot in the night sky, tracking our motion. The two people who had set out as wide-eyed children on a great adventure wer returning beaten and broken, made ancient with misery.

  I felt like a puppet with no hand inside. Spent, used, tossed aside. Somewhere in the complicated shadows, I was harboring Loverboy. And what was most horrible was the realization that I was responsible for him. That he had sprung full-blown from the demented crypts of my mind. That I had in some way fathered this monstrosity.

  But when he came out, I was helpless. I was pushed back, locked away in the Bone House, where I could only watch, repelled yet fascinated. I could never have been that self-confident, that arrogant. Such stores of aggressiveness had been tapped only once before, in the darkest moment of my past, when Little Hitler had worn my flesh and committed patricide. Even Mister Milktoast, my comforter and pacifier, had dissipated before Loverboy's all-consuming ardor.

  Worse, there was some part of me in Loverboy, some wedge of my own terrible salacity. I had shared his arousal, his desire to inflict his turgid sex upon Virginia. But I was sickened by his brutal disregard for her feelings. How could I comfort her after she had told so much, opened herself so completely, only, in her eyes, to have me turn into a cruel, venal beast?

  We entered the crumbling, dimly lit outskirts of Ottaqua. The streets were deserted, as if we had come upon a ghost town that even the dead had abandoned. A scattering of cold empty buildings greeted us, their black windows watching like suspicious eyes. I tried my voice, afraid that it was not yet fully mine. "Virginia, what happened back there...I'd just like to try and explain."

  "I thought everything was perfectly clear." Her voice was flat, tone-dead. Under the weak glare of the streetlights, I could see her blue eyes staring ahead, shimmering with tears she wouldn't let herself shed.

  "I wasn't myself." As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I wanted to grab them and shove them back inside, to swallow them and choke on their bitterness.

  "Yeah, sure. Let me guess. A little voice in your head made you do it. Now there's a real original idea." She was back behind her walls again, the walls of a complex castle that she must have built over the years to protect herself. She had opened the gate just a crack, on the slim hope that maybe the enemy outside the walls wasn't waiting to conquer her after all. And I had stormed inside, salted her courtyards, dismantled her turrets, put torch to the battlements of her trust.

  No, I hadn't. Loverboy was the invader. Always someone else to blame.

  "What I mean is...I'm sorry, Virginia."

  "Don't be. At least you were honest. Showed me right up front where I stood with you. I guess I ought to at least thank you for not stringing me along."

  She had risen to sarcasm. Maybe that was a sign of healing. A sole to heel, Mister Milktoast whispered. If you foot the bill.

  "I know you're mad at me and probably disappointed,” I said. “But I hope you don't give up on us.”

  "Us? It takes two to make an 'us,' and I thought there was only you. You and whatever you wanted."

  "Please try and understand. I never wanted to hurt you."

  "Understanding is just one of your little word games to get in my pants. I'll bet you were laughing on the inside the whole time. God, what a fool I was to even think somebody cared. And that word ‘love’..."

  Her tears broke loose, found fresh paths down her smooth round cheeks. She turned the car into the parking lot where I had left my Valiant. She stopped and we sat without speaking.

  A distant siren wailed, a punctuation mark on the desolate night. "I guess there's nothing else to say," she said, finally.

  There’s sackcloth in your closet, Mister Milktoast whispered. And ashes in your hearth.

  "I'll see you tomorrow,” I said, and The Poet groped for that one final stanza. “And, Virginia...I am sorry."

  If only I had known there was no tomorrow. Many times in the years after, I replayed that night, that parting, as if it were a decent Bogart film, and in my mind I tried a thousand different lines, a thousand different last chances. All films, like all memories, become scratched and worn, foggy with age. But the images fly past in the same sequence, over and over again, unchanged. In the end, there's only the words "The End."

  “The end is the chief thing of all,” Aristotle once wrote. And here I am, still in the middle. If heaven exists, and if I ever make it there, I’m going to find Aristotle, rip off his fucking robe, wrap it around his scrawny Greek neck, and squeeze
until his eyeballs pop.

  I got out and stood in the moist April air, watching her drive away. I walked numbly to my car. I stared at the lights over the football field, stared without blinking until my eyes burned, stared until my tears blurred the lights, making them into fat shiny stars.

  I wondered why we had to live in a world where everything was somebody's fault. Somebody had to be sorry. Somebody had to be wrong. And somebody had to pay. Virginia. Mother. Father. Sally Bakken. Loverboy. Mister Milktoast. Little Hitler. All the people who had touched my life. Who had squeezed at it, picked at it until it was an open sore, raw and gangrenescent.

  I burrowed under a pile of dirty clothes in the front seat of the Valiant, trying to worm myself into sleep. The soft velvet curtain of slumber teased me, gamboling around the edges of my consciousness. But when I reached for it to wrap myself in its black-fibered folds, it danced away, leaving me with the hot electric currents of my thoughts. Finally, the thoughts fractured into nonsense and scurried into the corners of my consciousness, and the curtains of the Bone House drew closed.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Surrounded by a mist backlit and imbued with fluorescent shades of lavender, aqua, and chromium yellow, the colors of madness shimmering in an obscene parody of a rainbow. Formless, weightless. A brighter but unwholesome radiance, flickering among the malchromatic ribbons, summoning. I must go there.

  Discordant music, a haunting melody turned inside out, the sound of shadows made merry, ominous droning bass at the threshold of reason underlying lilting notes played on impossible instruments, scherzo chaos in the wings, brazen bridges leaping unjustly to piercing heights of altissimo, invisible strings vibrating at random, all rising to an impotent crescendo.

  The radiance swells, hovers, absorbs, a bloated luminescence. Among its ethereal wisps, a shape. Monolithic, primitive matter. Changing. Weaving itself from amorphous threads. A chimera taking human form. Virginia.

  She comes to me, swathed only in elegant vapor, crossing the insubstantial landscape. Her arms upturned, yielding, inviting. Face glowing with rapture, eyes glittering specks, ashen hair fluttering in the directionless wind. Approaching without motion.

  Her skin is effervescent, writhing as if unseen creatures are wriggling underneath and animating her flesh. Her mouth opens, an impossible black cavern between the twitching arc of her lips. Inside, things darker than black flit and slither, entwining in a sinuous coalition that becomes her tongue.

  She is close now, leaning, and I cannot run. My legs are fused to the unseen landscape. I am both stage prop and star in the drama.

  Her hands reach for the side of my face, fingers splayed in mocking tenderness. Her fingers caress me, crawl lightly over my cheeks like lithesome snakes. Her touch is ice, frozen, dead. Her wrists are gaping like her mouth, a red slit in each, and grotesque creatures are fluttering in there as well.

  Her lips are on me, her breath putrid and foul, rich with decay. The elusive kiss is finally mine, given with feral and relentless passion. The black thing inside her mouth that is masquerading as her tongue enters me, probes me, squirms in violent intercourse. The tart acid of tomb dust violates my taste buds. I feel a small hot ember of desire in my soul, a desire beyond flesh, a yearning deeper than lust and earthly sin.

  Please, no, but oh, yes, don't...stop...don't...don't stop.

  Her trout-skin tongue ejaculates cold and vile fluids, darkness made substance, flooding me with glaciers, and I welcome the penetration, I shatter and become whole.

  I am aloof, blissful, as Virginia withdraws. The glitter of her eyes fades, their crazed illumination dying like sunken suns. Her flesh unwraps itself, and she is absorbed into the swirling iridescence. She is etherealizing, her limbs and then her torso merging with the mist. Last to dissolve is her eyes, which hover for a thick, fleeting eternity. The onyx dots of her pupils expand into the blue irises and then over into the milky white sclera. Her eyes become black orbs, dead stars, then nothing, only a coiling tendril of darkness that wends into the uncoordinated bands of rainbows and then disappears.

  I lunge into the mist, chasing her, I fight the colors that have become solid and play over my skin, embracing me, binding me, choking me...

  I awoke in a cold sweat. The old clothes that served as my blankets were tangled around my arms. My journey through a brief stream-of-pompousness interlude to denote a dream sequence was a little clumsy, but I crawled onto the shores of consciousness all the same.

  I opened my eyes, saw the incomplete darkness that was only night. I saw electrical light and stars through the windshield that were only radiant energy. I saw the fog of my breath that was only water vapor. I saw that I had flesh that was only flesh. My throat burned with infection. My head pounded as if my skulltop had lifted like a roof in a hurricane and had been nailed back into place by a hundred hammers.

  I closed my eyes again, searching for a place between sleep and dream, beyond the insane reach of either. Somehow the night passed.

  The next morning, I went to school. It was a mechanical act, as if I were too numb to make decisions. I was a robot, programmed to routine. The dream followed me like a bad case of Mexican-food gas.

  I searched the halls for Virginia, needing to talk to her before classes started. Perhaps the damage wasn't irreparable, and if I could explain myself in the light of day, my behavior wouldn't seem so horrible. I desperately looked for her face among the crowd, afraid she would be too ashamed or disgusted to come to school that morning. My classmates seemed to be evading me even more than usual, as if this were the day I might be packing a semiautomatic.

  Brickman stepped out of the gabbling masses, Brickman the peddler who sold oregano joints to the freshmen.

  "What's up, Coldiron?" he said, slapping me on the back so heartily it hurt. A few of his dull moronic friends gathered around, friends he had bought with stolen beer and porn magazines. "Surprised to see you here today."

  "What do you care?"

  "Hey, is that any way to talk to a friend?"

  "I don't have any money, so there's no use threatening to beat me up."

  The attention was unusual. I had a reputation for being a loner, for being so unpredictable and perhaps dangerous that I escaped harassment. There were easier pickings walking the gray and scuffed tiles of the school corridors. What could I have that Brickman and his gap-toothed disciples wanted?

  "I'm here to help you, man."

  "Fuck off."

  A silence fell as the gang waited to see how Brickman would respond to the challenge. He warmed to the spotlight and swelled his chest a little. "I was just offering my comfort in this time of sorrow."

  "Sorrow? What the hell are you talking about?"

  "Your hot lady friend. The one you been hangin' around with."

  "What?" Had she told him, confided in this monster somehow? Impossible.

  "Haven't you heard?" His pimply face broke into a black grin. I wanted to drive my fist into his vacuous mouth.

  "Heard what?" I said.

  "She killed herself last night."

  Time stopped as his words hung in the air, words that dripped with glee. My heart stopped as well, caught between beats.

  Brickman's voice came from somewhere far away. "Slashed her wrists, man. Painted the town red. Fucked herself up but good."

  Even through the veil that was dropping between me and the real world, a gray gauze that both swaddled and bound, I understood what Brickman wanted. Not money. Money was all around, money could be taken. Brickman wanted what he and his ilk treasured above all else. The currency of pain.

  I elbowed him in the stomach and broke through the crowd, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of my tears.

  He shouted after me as I ran down the hall. "Hey, man, I fucked her twice."

  His greasy pack of jackals howled with laughter as I burst through the doors, the sound swelling to a roar that filled my ears and compressed my skull, crushed me to charcoal.

  When awareness returne
d, I was in the Valiant, driving toward the horizon, racing into the sun. I glanced in the rear-view mirror and Ottaqua was shrinking, its decrepit and rundown buildings becoming golden stubble on the landscape. It had never looked so beautiful as it did while disappearing.

  I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, looked at the person that had lived my life. I looked behind my glasses into the dirt-brown weeping eyes that looked then beyond themselves into invisible faces. Faces that laughed and cried and mocked and smirked and stared back with black determination. The ones inside my head who had no intention of being left behind.

  The Bone House grew wheels and the Little People were along for the ride.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I thought only of Virginia as the states whirred past under my frantic tires. I had driven across the flat prairies of Illinois and Indiana, each mile of straight ribbon highway the same as the one before, with only the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers to mark my progress. I slid through the soft hills of Kentucky while the sun set like a fat orange dime dropping into the slot of a broken pay phone. In the darkness, the Appalachian Mountains guided me up and on, as if in on some cosmic joke and anxious to see the punch line. Shady Valley, North Carolina, opened its crusty eyes in the morning to find that I had perched on its shoulder like a weary nightbird.

  Under the new dawn, I drove through the narrow streets of Shady Valley, past the silent sleeping brick and the small dirt squares of garden. Tops of dormitories sparkled through the dewy oaks. I was too young to remember Westridge University from my first and only visit, but I had read of it. Old wooden houses with creekstone bases huddled near the road, their outbuildings camping under brown-blossomed apple trees. I wondered if one of those tired lonely houses had been Granddad's.