As I Die Lying Read online

  As I opened the door, the Bone House door also opened, and I was afraid.

  We stepped into my living room. Beth looked at the walls that were lined with bookshelves, and books were also stacked on the coffee table and on the floor beside the sofa and chairs. The lamp threw its cobwebbed light across the tan carpet. The room was made brown by the weight of its dull shadows. Beth didn't mention the absence of a television, something my infrequent visitors usually noticed instantly. I had all the channels I needed right inside my head.

  "Nice place," she said. Pleasant. Goddamned pleasant and nothing more.

  "Make yourself at home. There's the stereo, if you can get there through the mess."

  I started a pot of tea and Beth put on an R.E.M. CD. She sat on the couch and sang along in a pure, pleasant voice. I brought her a glass of the Red Zinfandel that I had bought and stored in a closet in hopes of one day sharing with someone. Or maybe some genetic disposition had planted the bottle there, knowing all Coldirons eventually sought some form of escape, liquid or otherwise.

  "Aren't you having any?" she asked.

  "I don't drink much. But don't worry, I'm not holier-than-thou."

  She has more holes than you, Mister Milktoast quipped.

  "Shut up," I whispered back.

  "What?"

  "Tea makes me sneeze." I sniffed. It sounded enough like "Shut up" to get me off the hook.

  "You’re quite a bookworm," she said, surveying the shelves.

  Did she know? The truth was sometimes the best possible cover story. "Yes, among other things."

  "So, Richard, tell me about those things."

  "What you see is what you get." Except for my Little People, the Bone House, memories, my favorite candy, and the fact that everything she said would one day end up in a book.

  "You told me you came from Iowa, but nothing about your parents or anything. You didn't walk full-grown out of the cornfields, did you? A sort of ‘Field of Nightmares’ or something?"

  Guitars chimed from the stereo speakers in repetitious riffs. Michael Stipe was mumbling enigmatic vocals over the college-rock backbeat. My past was like Stipe's lyrics, best left murky and unknown, unless I could sell the book, in which case it all was on the table. Except that thing with my mother. "Well, my past is no big deal. I try to live for the moment."

  "Don't get surly. I was just asking. Can't you at least tell me the good parts?"

  The good parts?

  "Parts is parts," said Loverboy, before I could stub him out like a cigarette.

  "Huh? Where did that come from? Don't tell me you're an amateur actor, too?"

  "Nope."

  "But the way your voice just changed...and your expression..."

  "My run-of-the-mill evil twin. But back to my past...the best part was moving up here and meeting you," I said, feeling Loverboy twitch in my brain like a frantic fetus kicking its mother's uterine walls.

  "Flattery will get you everywhere. But I'm not that easily put off the trail. There's a secret to you, Richard. I'm not a babe in the woods. And I'm not easily scared off."

  Babe, Loverboy said. See? They all know it. So, Booksquirt and Milk Dud, stop with all that 'respect' shit.

  "My biggest secret is that I get a strange feeling every time I'm around you," I said, a little uneasy at Loverboy's stirrings. Was he going to crash the party, complete with lampshade hat, clown shoes, and a toilet seat around his neck, ready for a gloveless stranglehold?

  "What sort of feeling? And don't say 'love,' because love is like God and UFOs, I'll believe it when I see it."

  "The feeling you get when you eat your favorite candy."

  Beth finished her wine. I reached out to take the glass, but she said, "I'll get it. Where's the bottle?"

  "On the counter. Help yourself."

  She stopped to look at my aquarium on her way to the kitchen. The yellow angelfish cut their mindless patterns through the water. "Peaceful in there," she said. "No worries."

  “None at all,” I said, voice trailing as I was dragged into the Bone House. My roommates were coming to life. The Little People were awakened by the storm of emotions rattling the eaves and they appeared to be rearranging the furniture.

  They sensed my helplessness. They all came out at once, tripping each other as they rushed for the door and fought for dominance of my face.

  "I like your woodwork," Beth called from the kitchen. It sounded as if she were across the universe.

  Please stay in there, I thought at her, before I was free of thought. Then I became an observer, an innocent bystander who wasn't truly innocent, helpless witness to the actions of my own flesh. A blameless victim. I sort of liked that.

  "I got some wood for you," Loverboy said.

  She laughed. And she was back on the couch, the half-empty bottle in front of her, and I was close to her, breathing her, kissing her, drawing in her warmth. It must have been Loverboy's silver tongue that had first drawn her lips near and then plumbed the soft mysteries of her mouth. Her body was pliant and yielding under my hands, vibrant and alive, like a small wren or else a mammal wrapped in synthetic down.

  But then it was me locked in this embrace. Then it was my passion swelling up in my chest and lower, driving blood through my veins in rapid gushes. Then it was my loneliness driving my hunger, my anguished years without human contact that now caused the ache in my trembling limbs. Then it was my taste buds relishing her wine-sweetened tongue.

  “My turn,” I whispered in her tender ear, and she had no idea what I was talking about.

  And I was feeding on her, sucking her affection like a vampire drew blood, cold and needy and vanished with the dawn. I was a monster, a zombie pulled from a deep grave.

  I should have stayed undead.

  Because Loverboy enjoyed the rigor mortis in our pants.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Let’s pretend I was Bookworm.

  Beth took my hand as I led her upstairs to my bedroom. The night hung around us in soft folds, dressing itself in darkness even as we shed each other's clothes. Our mouths joined, lost for words, lost for useless language, aching for real art. We shivered and incorporated.

  Her skin was satin, and as our bodies came together among the blankets, the bottom of everything autumned away. My fingers flowed over her fine hair and the warm mounds of her flesh, lifting her to the high, unseen clouds as smoke from this burnt offering.

  Our tongues danced like moist spirits, frolicked about the cemeteries of our lips, laughing without sound. A thick dew of passion rose on our skins and mingled. Our flesh gave and took and joined, softened like blistering wax and hardened like cold syrup. We leapt into pulsating oceans and climbed ashore clean with languid pleasure.

  I know, I know, you want the sex, the blow-by-blow, clits and cocks, not poetic coyness.

  You’re such a pervert. Though I’m laying my whole story out here, some things are none of your fucking business. Such as my fucking business.

  I held her in my arms afterward, leaning against the pillows with her sweet animal scent on me. The starlight peeked through the window at her face, at her pale pink smile and the shining pools of her eyes.

  "Thank you," I said.

  "My pleasure," she whispered, blowing her breath on the small part of my ear.

  "I've never felt anything like that before." Pleasant. Fucking pleasant.

  "You mean, you've never..."

  "Well, let's just say I'm new at this game." Mother didn’t count, if indeed that ever happened, and I wouldn’t dare write it if it had.

  She giggled, her chest vibrating under my embracing arm. "You acted like you knew what you were doing. Like it was part of a play or something. And you said you weren't an actor."

  "Sometimes, it's all in the script," I said. They were there, waiting in the wings, leering down from the cheap seats, understudies plotting revolution. But I felt strong, revived and vigilant, and I kept them off the stage. This spotlight was mine, goddamn it, and I was going to enjoy it
while it lasted.

  "And what role are you playing, you kissable weirdo?"

  "Othello without the guilt. Romeo without the fatalism. Hamlet without the paranoia."

  "Or maybe just a bad actor working with good material?"

  "You got it. Do you want me to feed you a line now?"

  "No. I want you to make me feel. I want you to do things to me."

  "Hey, that's what a bad actor does." Spiders skittered across my gut, bats flapped in the rafters of the Bone House. "Act badly."

  "Well, maybe you need a rewrite. Because you've got just about the worst pillow talk I've ever heard. How come it took you so long to make a move on me?"

  "I just wanted to be sure." Sure that you wouldn’t sell me down the river for a dollar’s worth of candy or make me cross my heart and hope to die.

  "Oh, a sensitive modern guy? Or just afraid of rejection?"

  "I've never been afraid of you."

  "Should I be afraid of you, Richard?"

  She snuggled her head onto my shoulder. Her hair spilled across my chest as soft as corn silks. I was reminded of the cornfields of Iowa, of my youth. I buried the memory like roadkill. Or maybe just kicked it in the ditch. "After that? I could never hurt you."

  "Mmm. Says the Big Bad Wolf. You forget that I still don't know much about you.

  Where you came from. Who you are."

  "Maybe later. Maybe someday I can tell you."

  I opened the coffin of my vampire heart, feeling something bright and broken and strange rising inside me. Then I realized what it was, and I shivered. It was hope, hope that life could be worth living after all, hope that there might actually be a someday. That maybe there was more to me than Little Hitler, Loverboy, Bookworm, and Mister Milktoast. That maybe Richard Allen Coldiron could have feelings after all.

  And hope was pleasant. Very fucking pleasant.

  I ran my hand over Beth's hair, over the curve of her ear, down the swell of her cheek. She squirmed a little, pressing closer against me. I wondered what she was thinking, what kinds of secrets she would never tell, what was hidden in her Bone House. From the briefly forgotten outside world came the sweet tang of fallen apples. A bit of moon had risen somewhere over the invisible horizon, making the room less gray.

  "Well, what does the critic have to say about my performance?" Beth asked, her face turned to mine, her eyebrows making dark merry arcs.

  I searched for and found her lips. "Thumbs definitely up." All ten of them.

  "And other things 'up' as well."

  I laughed, and the sound was swallowed by the walls. "Where do we go from here?"

  "You mean, what happens next? Like the future, with a capital F?"

  "Well, Act Two, anyway. Getting to know each other. Every story needs a middle."

  Her body tensed under me. "Richard, I feel really good. Don't think I'm easy or anything, I just happen to like sex. And with you, I really like it. And I like spending time with you. But as for other things, we'll just have to see."

  "But what if—"

  "Shhh. No 'what ifs,' remember?"

  "I can't help it, Beth. I think about you all the time. All day at the bookstore, I'm thinking of ways to see you, ways to be with you.”

  "Don't think the L word, Richard. I've been hurt too many times with that word as the justification. I'm not being cold—because I'm really an eternal optimist—but I've learned to be careful."

  "I told you I'd never do anything to hurt you, Beth."

  "Neither would those others. But some things are beyond our control."

  "Waiting doesn't always work. Sometimes, you don't get another chance."

  "I'll take my chances, then. Good things are worth waiting for."

  She was just like Virginia. Ready to give almost everything, wanting everything, taking it in her hands and holding it to her breast as if it were a hyperventilating dove. Then, just as it became tame and submissive and known, she would throw it into the sky to its unwanted freedom. She wanted everything just to give it all back.

  But what did I know of love? All I knew was what love wasn't. I learned from my father and his boots, from Mother's strange bleary affections, from Sally Bakken's manipulation, from Virginia’s madness, from Mister Milktoast and his self-interested protections. Love was for other people, those who weren't haunted by the ghosts in their own head.

  The hope that had fluttered in my chest wilted like black licorice on a sunroof. And the old doubts rose, tarry waves in a turbulent id. Then I was sinking, being pulled inside myself, into the place that had been a haven in my childhood but was now a stone prison. The house of the Little People. The house of hurt. The Bone House.

  I reluctantly yielded my flesh and embraced my victimhood. Oh, always the victim, a last-place loser in the Blame Game.

  "Absence makes the heart grow foundered," said Mister Milktoast.

  "What do you mean by that?" Beth asked.

  "I dig," said Loverboy. "Live for the moment and take it as it comes. Heh heh."

  I screamed at Loverboy to leave Beth alone, shouted uselessly from behind the steel bars in my head, yelled down the dead corridors at the people who were taking turns with my body and the one who wanted to take a turn with hers.

  I felt Beth kissing my neck, knowing it was Loverboy's kiss, his tingle under her salt saliva, his smirking satisfaction at my helpless distress, his hands that were cupping her perfect breasts. Not mine, never mine.

  "I'm glad you understand, Richard," Beth said.

  "Just don't say we can still be friends. Don’t put the honeypot on a shelf now that I’ve had a taste. Or some bread thing. Let’s see. Don’t plug your donut hole until I’ve licked off the powdered sugar."

  She giggled, and it made her body shake. "I won't say it if you don't. Let's just see what happens."

  "Whatever the bitch wants," whispered Little Hitler.

  Oh, God. Had he escaped? I thought his room was locked and double bolted from the outside. I tried to warn Beth, but I was buried too deeply inside my own head. Extreme home makeover with a nail gun and duct tape. And the worst part was feeling that I was not alone, that something new lurked in the corners, something darker than dead shadows and colder than graveyard snow.

  I watched Little Hitler lift the strands of her hair, golden under the starlight. He was imagining it a scalp.

  "So soft, so soft," Mister Milktoast said, stealing my words, eager to try on her brown hat. "A cornsilk of the heavens, a tassel for angels. Hair hassle."

  Beth laughed. "Where do you come up with this stuff?"

  "Inside story. You know. Still waters run deep like mixed metaphors in the night, as a friend of mine would say. They used to call him ‘The Poet.’"

  "You're a strange one, Mr. Coldiron. And maybe that's what I like about you."

  "Not so strange," said Bookworm, and I was relieved, because Bookworm might save her from the others. He alone might afford some tenderness and compassion, even though he’d learned those qualities from works of fiction. Bookworm caressed Beth's shoulders, and through him, I could feel the burning of her skin, her blood hot from pleasure. At least I had given a gift of pleasure, however fleeting.

  That's what you think, Loverboy called from the front porch. Those squeals were all Loverboy. While you were busy being pleasant, I was busy being busy.

  “That was me, you bastard,” I silently screamed.

  Who do you think runs this little flesh factory, you or us?

  No, I saw, I felt her, I tasted, smelled. I ran hands over her skin that was smooth as talcum. It was the drums of my heart that pounded across the jungle of night. It was my joy that rushed from my insides like an ice volcano. It was me, me, me.

  "Richard?" Beth asked, collecting her breath.

  "Hmm, Hostess Ho-Ho?" said Loverboy.

  "You're being awfully quiet. What are you thinking about?"

  "Just remembering."

  "Remembering what? Are you finally going to tell me the great Coldiron secret, now
that you've exposed me?"

  "No secret, Dollface. Like I told you, what you see is what you get," Loverboy said.

  "What about in the dark, when you can’t see anything?"

  "Then you get whatever I give you."

  Do her again, Little Hitler pleaded, anxious for proxy pleasure, hoping it would hurt.

  Shut your piehole, Loverboy grunted. I didn't ask for an audience. Having Richard along is plenty enough company. Don’t need nobody else playing paddycake in my bakery.

  "And what do you feel, Beth?" Loverboy said in his false husky voice.

  "I feel something." She laughed, her hands quick as hummingbirds.

  Little Hitler was ecstatic, brought to his fullest life by someone else's passion and the unhappy ending sure to follow. Mister Milktoast and Bookworm fluttered like trapped birds against the glass windows of the Bone House. I watched alone, absorbing sensations through the filter of my Little People. And I felt my shadow behind me, floating up the back of my brain like a manta ray, black wings wide, swimming from some forbidden and forgotten abyss.

  I knew instantly that it was somehow drawn by pain. My pain. Not Loverboy's tawdry diversions, not Little Hitler's sycophantic eavesdropping, not Mister Milktoast's polite but gossipy interest, not Bookworm's intellectual curiosity. Only my anguish and guilt from again being too weak to save the one I thought I loved.

  Guilt for food, a feast of failure, victuals of victimhood.

  And the shadow hungered.

  Even Mister Milktoast noticed it, turning his attention from Beth's soft wet places.

  Lo, what dark through yon window breaks? he asked me.

  More worries, old friend, I said.

  I'll protect us, Mister Milktoast said.

  No. This isn't like it used to be. You can't just send me away, inside, the way you did when the boots came. Because, you see, I’m already inside.

  And then Loverboy was inside, too, inside Beth, and the shadow dissolved, perhaps driven away by the bright wall of sensation. And silent bells rang through the night, invisible rockets cut their white arcs, velvet waterfalls ran their course, time swallowed its own ticking heart. But those things were not for me.