Black Iris (23 page)

OCTOBER, LAST YEAR

N
o matter how high I turned up my headphones I could still hear Blythe swearing. At first I’d found her seemingly endless conjugations of
fuck
amusing, but now it was after midnight and I’d written two hundred words of a two-thousand-word essay on feminism in Woolf and I wasn’t so enamored. A room of one’s fucking own indeed.

I found her in the kitchen. Jameson on the counter, Bacardi on the stove. Stacks of plates on the floor. What appeared to be smashed green grapes or ectoplasm on the table.

“What are you up to?” I said warily.

She looked at me as if I’d asked why kids did drugs. “Writing a poem.”

There was, in fact, a notebook lurking amid the chaos. The open page was so scratched out the paper had pulped. On the intact part, a disturbing red stain that was probably, hopefully, just wine.

“How’s it going?” I said.

“Bloody fucking fuck.”

I stifled a laugh. “Come here, you psycho.”

Her wildness mellowed, and she came with that jack-o’-lantern grin that so enchanted me. Both of us in tanks, skinny-boned and slight, her hair pinned in a messy chignon, mine loose. She
circled my waist and I traced the inkless apricot skin over her collarbone.

“You should get one here.”

“Of what?”

“Of me.”

She moved my hand lower, to her sternum, her beating heart.

“You’re already here.”

Now I laughed. “I bet your poem is great, full of cheesy platitudes like that.”

“Bite your tongue, you Philistine.”

“Why don’t you?”

She kissed me.

Weeks of this would not dull me to it. Nothing would. Each time we kissed, every atom in my body floated in dazed pause, every nerve fiber separating from the rooty tangle and firing in slow motion. I felt like a cross-section of a girl being kissed, an anatomical diagram. I’d grown familiar with her ways and still she surprised me, her canines digging into my lower lip, pain piercing the sweetness. The way she’d stop and hold her mouth millimeters from mine as we traded breath, peering through the gauze of our eyelashes. The way she’d complete it, lip running against lip, teeth on tongue. Always a little too intense, too rough, and always it made me want more, more intensity, more roughness. Every kiss felt as if we returned to it from a long, unwilling parting and were desperate not to be parted again but knew we would be. Every kiss was the first and the last one.

We stopped only to look at each other.

“I adore you,” she said. “ ‘I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul.’ ”

“Neruda is for Hallmark cards. What’s next, Rilke?”

Still, my heart betrayed me by going haywire. Even if she’d used another poet’s words, they’d come from her mouth. Those magic three.

Blythe merely laughed and kissed me again.

We got high together, got drunk, got off on saliva and skin, and still found no way to capture this feeling. It was so much bigger than us, so brutal. Even when we fucked as savagely as we could bear, it was only the shadow of this thing between us. Killing each other would hint at a fraction of it. I couldn’t fuck it out of her, couldn’t bleed it out of myself, couldn’t purge, drug, numb it away. Like the dark seed in me, this was a drive so deep it was embedded in my core. I had never loved a girl like this. I had never loved.

“I feel crazy,” she said, running fingertips down my cheeks like tears. “I need to get out of here.”

I thought she meant the apartment, into the night air, but part of me also thought she meant here, this body. This life.

Unease stirred in me.

On the roof Chicago sprawled around us in a billion blinking lights, but nothing was brighter than her. Any second she might run off over the treetops into the forest of steel and stone, hunt the moon, make arrows from animal bones and dip them in blood and shoot it out of the sky. She screamed at nothing and her voice echoed off the bricks.

“You
are
crazy,” I said, laughing, but my uneasiness grew.

Blythe climbed onto the roof’s edge.

“Hey.” I hovered near. “Be careful.”

She stood boldly, not looking down, unafraid.

“Blythe?”

“I’m so fucking alive.”

“You’re freaking me out. Come down.”

She closed her eyes, her face raised to invisible stars. “I wish you could feel this,” she whispered.

I had seen one too many suicides in my life. I was not going to watch another.

As I reached for her she tumbled. I screamed something
inchoate, not the brilliant last words I’d planned but more like
Oh fuck God no
, and her hands came down on stone, and with frightening grace she turned a cartwheel on the ledge, her all-too-breakable body balancing fifty feet above merciless asphalt.

I realized shutting up was my best chance at not getting her killed and watched her snap to a perfect landing. She crowed at the sky, palms upheld as if waiting for something to fall into them, then hopped down and grabbed me, flitting like a hummingbird. Even when I touched her skin it seemed more a dense vibration than something solid.

“This is amazing,” she said. “I feel like I’m on X. Everything’s so bright, so vivid, so beautiful. You’re so beautiful. Kiss me.”

I did, and her kiss was exhilarating and insane, but I stopped after a second. “Blythe.”

She pressed her cheek to mine and it was so hard not to lose myself in the bliss of her skin on my skin.

“You’re acting manic,” I said.

She laughed it off, but when I looked at her soberly the laughter faded.

“I’m in love.” She took my face in both hands. “It’s you. You’re like a drug.”

I wanted to believe it. I wanted to think I had this kind of effect on her. But there was a too-bright, too-sharp glint in those blue eyes, a knife’s edge twisting, honing itself.

“Come over here,” I said.

I led her to a wooden bench far from the ledge, piled with pillows and quilts. Shook out a blanket that smelled like weed and cloves. Beneath it, the two of us nestling together, all I smelled was her.

“I don’t want to sound like Armin,” I said, “but you’ve barely slept the past few days.”

“I’m trying to write a bloody poem.”

“You’ve written a dozen this week.”

“All rubbish.”

“Okay, I totally get that. But you’ve also been drinking like crazy tonight. And now you just did a cartwheel. On the edge. Of the fucking roof. Blythe, seriously.”

She wore her usual wry expression, but it dropped at that. “Christ.” Her brow furrowed. She looked off into the night for a while. “Did Armin put you up to this?”

I slinked an arm around her waist. So strange, to feel how slight she really was. “No. I’ve suspected since we met. There’s a spark of madness in you. Most people don’t have it, but you burn.”

Wisps of hair had come loose from her chignon as if some electricity in her pushed them out. “Maybe it’s just who I am.”

“It
is
who you are. Doctors talk about it like it’s this separate thing, like a cold or flu. Something that can be cured without curing your personality, your uniqueness, your spirit. They don’t understand. It shapes us so much that it’s more like a scar, a deformity, on the inside where they can’t see.” I twirled a loop of gold hair around my finger. “I’m not Armin. I don’t want you to change to fit someone else’s definition of normal. Besides, it’s part of what I love about you. ‘She’s mad but she’s magic. There’s no lie in her fire.’ ”

“I don’t know that one.”

“Bukowski.”

“No-name American,” she said airily.

I tugged her hair, and she smirked.

“Just don’t leave me.” My voice was small. “Not when I’ve finally found you after so long.”

All the humor went out of her face. She was so pretty like this, when the cockiness dissolved and something girlish and dreamy replaced it, a soft wonder. The way she’d look after I kissed her breathless, after I made her come. I wanted to say
something dramatic and meaningful but there was a strange intensity inside me, a fullness in my chest that made my lungs ache, so heavy it was paralyzing.

We both looked out at the city. Her shoulder peeked from the spill of her hair, the screaming mouth that was also a blossoming flower, open, yearning.

“Your mum had it, too,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Tell me what it was like.”

“By the time I was old enough to understand, it was full-blown rapid cycling. She was horrible to my dad. They always argued about money. She worked all the time, made tons of cash, but then she’d blow it on stuff she didn’t even want. Rented expensive hotel rooms, slept with random men. Drank constantly. My dad threatened to leave, so she went on heavy meds. But the person on drugs wasn’t my mom. It was a shell.”

“The person off drugs was a monster.”

“She said she was at war with herself, and no matter which side won, she’d lose.”

Blythe tensed in my arms and I held on gently, but inescapably.

“They had kids as a last resort. I guess according to some fucked-up adult logic, becoming a mother would stabilize her and save their marriage. Instead it screwed up four lives instead of two.”

Blythe frowned at something far off. “I’d never do that to you. I’d walk away first.”

“Don’t walk away. No matter what.”

“Your mum was terrible to you, Laney.”

“Sometimes we’re terrible to each other. It’s human nature.”

She looked down into my face. After a moment she pressed her forehead to mine, eyes half-shut.

“It’s not just mania,” she said, her breath warm on my skin.
“And it’s not some drug. This is how I feel about you, always. I’m in love with you.”

That pressure in my chest felt like it was going to burst. “You’re not in love with me.”

“Except when I’m in love with you.”

I was barely in control of myself, in possession of this body that climbed onto her lap, locked its knees around her waist. “Say it again.”

“I’m in—”

My head bent over hers and I kissed her. Again, and again, and again.

Soon it was too much and I had to stop, curl up around her, and simply hold on. The blanket had slipped off and when I shivered she pulled it back over us. Her voice seemed to come from somewhere distant.

“It’s cold here, Lane. This city is so cold.”

My arms tightened but I knew she meant something metaphysical, not physical.

“I miss the sun. I miss the ocean. I miss my dad.” Her last words were barely audible.

This was the truth of it. No matter how tightly I held, I couldn’t make her feel like she was home. Couldn’t make her stay. Girls touched with madness are like that, rare birds that alight in the hand, dazzle, depart.

“I’ll take you there someday.” A trace of her usual mischief returned. “To Melbourne. Get you tan on the beach. Get you drunk on real beer.”

“Get me eaten by wild animals in the outback.”

“I’m a wild animal from the outback.”

“Oh my god.” I shoved her away. “Go write horrible poetry.”

Blythe laughed, pulling me in again. “It’s all about you. You can suffer it.”

We giggled stupidly, uncaringly, then like in movies there was that sudden seriousness when I stopped, looking into her face.

“My wild girl.” I kissed her cool cheek. “My mad girl.” I kissed her temple, her brow, her closed eyes. “I don’t need anything in this world except you.” But no matter how many times I said it, no matter how many times I showed her with my hands and my mouth, it would never add up to what I felt inside. It would never be enough to hold her here with me.

FEBRUARY, THIS YEAR

I
t was late, the white arterial corridors running cold and silent through the hospital. Nothing human stirred. Only beeping machines and arcane whirrs, MRIs scanning for mutations, centrifuges spinning tubes to isolate diseases. A vast settling of fates by computers. When they’d brought Mom to the ER it was more human: hands prodding her flesh, stabbing with syringes, shocking with paddles, but even when they restarted her heart the faces remained grim. No brain activity. That’s the real death. The heart can stop and start again many times throughout a life—and it will, when you fall in love, when you fall out—but erase enough neurons and it’s over.

The quiet was unsettling, the well-wishers gone home. All that remained were the desperate and devoted. I guess I was one of each.

I ducked beneath the nurses’ station and into a private room, whipped the curtain across the glass.

He seemed asleep, but when my eyes adjusted I saw two faint whites amid a firefly scatter of LEDs.

“Hello, Laney,” he said hoarsely.

“Hello, Brandt.”

I rested my gifts on his lap. Too dark to see his face but the proportions seemed wrong, bloated. They’d done total reconstructive surgery on his jaw. Not handsome anymore.

“You look good,” I said.

Zoeller laughed. It sounded as if he were choking.

His right arm was encased in plaster. Bandages encircled his neck and chest. A catheter ran beneath the sheet. He watched my eyes notice each of these.

“ ‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,’ ” he said in that reedy voice. “ ‘Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair.’ ”

I slid the book off his lap and laid it on the bedside table. “I brought you some Plath. You’ll like her. She gets inside the ugly and mundane and makes it sound biblical.”

He might’ve smiled, but it was hard to tell with that new face.

“And I brought you a treat.”

I unwrapped the box. Chocolates, expensive. From Armin. I left it there, the weight of it on Z’s groin, and plucked one. His mouth opened obediently, his eyes locked on mine.

“Good boy.”

I let him kiss my fingertips with dry, cracked lips.

“Happy Valentine’s,” I whispered.

He sucked at the chocolate, moaning softly. I watched his bobbing throat with fascination.

“I figured it out.” My fingertip touched his abs and drew two circles through the bedsheet, one smaller, eating the other. “I know everything.”

Zoeller grinned, something shiny between his teeth. A candied cherry.

“Very mature.” I hopped onto his bed, my hands roving over the box, selecting another. He refused to swallow the cherry. “You going to eat that?”

“Only yours.”

I removed it from his mouth and replaced it with a fresh chocolate.

“I’ll talk. You listen.” I ate one, minty. “I’ve got the video,
too. All the dominoes are lined up, ready to be pushed. I can bring the whole thing down whenever I want.”

“So what are you waiting for?”

“I’m setting up the last domino. I want it to fall hard.”

“Cold feet.”

I considered slapping him, but I’d done enough damage to that pretty face. Plus I didn’t want the nurse to come check his racing vitals when he inevitably got a hard-on.

“I’m not the monster you thought, Brandt. I’m much worse.”

“Did you fuck her?”

I picked another chocolate. “Who?”

“Artemis.”

“Why, you want jerk-off material?”

He shrugged feebly. His weakness was entrancing. Even my small hands could have strangled him right now. “Can’t jerk off. Hurts too much.”

“How sad. Pity you can’t find anyone to help.” I leaned in, running a hand up his thigh. “Yeah, I fucked her. I fucked the hell out of her.”

“How was it? Heard she gives a killer blowjob.”

It’s a good thing I didn’t have a gun right then. Strangling is personal. You’ve got to feel it. A gun lets you make a mistake faster, before you can feel.

Besides, I enjoy visceral pleasures.

“This isn’t all I can do to you,” I said. “I can make things much worse.”

“I’m too interesting to get rid of.”

“Oh, we’re not done yet. We’ll meet again someday. When you’re whole, and strong. And I’ll tear you apart then, too.”

He seemed to relish this idea.

My hand tightened on his thigh. It was thin now, wasting. We both were. “You know the difference between us? Besides the fact that I can throw a football and you can’t anymore.”

“Tell me.”

“I’m hard.” I squeezed his flaccid dick, and his eyes brightened with pain. “I will take this as far as I can. I’ll hurt everyone who’s hurt me. I’ll make it as nasty and as awful as possible. But you—you’re soft, Brandt. At the last moment, you bitched out. You could have destroyed me but you didn’t. That was your biggest mistake.”

I felt the stirring of an erection and let him go.

“I miss you,” he said huskily.

“You miss getting beat up, you sadomasochistic creep.”

He laughed. “You’re the only girl who does it for me, Laney.”

“Let’s not get into our respective Stockholm syndromes. This is my game now.”

“So how did you get the video?”

“Please. That was easy.” I fed him the chocolate, let him lick the melt from my fingers. Like a dog. “I found someone as lonely as me.”