Bleed (9 page)

“How can a city with so many spirits be boring? I may have traveled around a bit, but I haven’t truly ever rooted, you know?”

“Is that what you want to do? Root?”

I have no idea what I’m saying, and I’m pretty sure she knows it, too. She giggles at my lame response, scoots herself in toward me, and rests her head on my shoulder. She smells like cheese danish topped with coffee and whipped cream. And I just want to do everything right, more than I’ve ever wanted to do anything right in my life.

Fifteen minutes later, we’re there. The abandoned hospital sits up on the hill, looking down at us. I pull around to the back so no one will see us, wondering where all the security guys are. But the place seems completely vacant today. As soon as the truck’s in PARK, Mearl jumps out and starts running toward the cluster of brick buildings.

“Come on!” she shouts.

I sit there a moment, just looking at it and taking it in. It looks so different in the daytime. An abandoned hospital that doesn’t quite know what it wants to be—an asylum, a gothic church, a school, someone’s estate.

I get out and run toward her, up to the rear entrance. But for some reason, none of this feels right. It’s different when you’re drunk and stupid, and it’s after two in the morning, and you can only see as far as your flashlight will let you. When your buddies tell you you’re gonna find some pretty cool shit. But now, in the daylight, the sun shines on everything, and I’m forced to take it all in. The broken windows from angry fists. The overgrown brush crawling up the side like an escape route out, and the rusted bars and screens that keep you in.

She yanks on a side door, but it’s locked. “How do we get in?”

I’m tempted to tell her I was too drunk at the time to remember, but before I can say anything, she takes my hands, kisses me on the mouth, and thanks me for bringing her here.

“Can’t you feel it?” she whispers. “The energy? There’s so much sadness here, but you and I … we can fix it.” She smiles at me and studies my face, then kisses me again and pulls me close.

The next thing I know, I’m climbing up that ladder of overgrowth on one of the smaller buildings.

“Be careful!” Mearl shouts up to me.

I peek inside one of the windows near the top. The floor is littered with broken beer bottles, cigarette butts, and snack trash from late-night parties. I hoist myself up on the roof, thinking how much harder it is this time without extra hands to help pull me up. The vent we need to enter from is over to the left. I lay the grille to the side and slide down the duct.

It’s dark inside, but light enough to see. I run through a connecting tunnel, toward the larger building. The stench of dank and dampness makes me want to hurl. When I finally make it to the other side, I take a wrong turn and end up in one of the patients’ rooms. The walls are stained with red paint, splotched on to look like blood. And there’s a graffiti sign over it all that says the room was painted with the blood of Mary Driscoll, some patient who lived here.

I kick through the debris. There are used condoms on the floor and pairs of dirty underwear, a whole heap. There’s a Ken doll hanging from a noose in the center of the room and naked baby doll parts strewn everywhere—some with needles poked into the eyes and scalp; others with their dirty, rubbery arms and legs all knotted and mangled.

I look across the hallway into another room. I remember carving my initials into a wooden support beam in there, how me and Tom splashed yellow and green paint on the walls to make it look like lobotomy juice, and how me and Tammy Come-do-me, some freshman-wannabe-senior, made it all the way to third base in the hallway closet, and then to home plate in the parking lot.

It makes me wonder how the place looked the next day, in the light. If it looked like this. If Tammy woke up feeling like a senior.

I make my way into the hallway, hurry down a staircase to unlock a back door, and let Mearl in.

“Thank you, Derik,” she says, looking around.

The main room is big and dirty, and there are torn pages strewn all over the place, but I don’t feel like reading them or seeing any more. Kevin, this kid from school, found an old patient’s notebook in here one time and actually took it. He brought it to school and passed it around. It had all this fucked-up shit in it. There was this one entry in there about this woman, sitting in the audience on amateur night at this place, smiling like it was her freakin’ birthday, but with blood pouring from her wrists, down the aisles. According to the notebook entry, one of the windows had broken and the orderlies hurried to pick up all the glass. They had put it together on a table like a puzzle, to make sure they got every piece. They didn’t.

“This isn’t right.” Mearl is sweeping her arms through the air, pushing away the empty space around her, like she can see something I can’t. “The spirits don’t want me here. I’m sorry, Derik, but I don’t feel right about this.”

No shit. I take her hand and we leave, and head back to the truck. But, before I can haul ass out of there, the cemetery catches her eye and she has to experience that space, too. She makes me pull over so that we can see the graves. They’re simply posts in the ground, marked with numbers.

“Do you see what happens when you have no roots, Derik?” she asks, thumbing over the point of her crystal pendant. “You have no identity. You become just a number. How can all these souls rest when they have no one to claim them?”

I put my arm around her and we walk back to the truck. I want to ask about her family and where she’s from, but I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t know about either, so I just stay silent.

“I’m sorry I made you come here,” she says. “I was just curious. I thought I might be able to do some good, you know? Help peel away the rust.” She locks her door and then scoots in close to me. “It’s so tragic—to be just a number.”

“You’re not just a number.” I stroke her cheek, just a little, and say, “I think you’re pretty great.” And I really mean it.

She kisses me and rests her cheek against mine. “I want to know what it feels like to be from someplace. Not just some number. Not some unrested spirit without identity.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I want to be with you. I want to experience it—your world of roots.”

I feel kind of good bringing her to my house, showing her how nice it is, at the tip of a cul-de-sac overlooking all of Witchcraft Heights. We go inside and I ask her if she wants a drink, but all she wants is to see the inside of my room. So I take her there and she kicks off her shoes and barefoot-skates across my rug, all around my room.

“Having fun?” I ask.

She takes my hands and we spin around. At first I feel totally stupid doing it—but somehow with her, it’s actually kind of cool.

“I think you’re truly wondrous,” she says. “And one day, when you put all that glitter out, and it’s just you and your porous thoughts and your smashing ideas, I hope I still know you—an intelligent and harvesting young man. But for now, you’re my karmic destiny.”

We stop spinning and she kisses both my hands. And I know it’s cheesy and totally unlike anything I’ve ever felt or thought before, but here, with this girl, after all this time, I just want to hold her and kiss her and never let her go.

“What’s wrong?” she asks, when I don’t say anything back.

And then I realize I can feel my face, stuck in some sort of confused knot. “It’s just that nobody’s ever said anything like that to me before,” I say. “Wow, that just sounded so lame.” What is the matter with me?

“It sounded honest, Derik.
Honest.”
She pats my hand. “Maybe you haven’t let anyone get close enough to say those things to you.”

“Not until now,” I say. And I look at her. Really look at her, hoping she sees what I mean without my having to say it. Wondering if she’d care if I kissed her right now. I want more than anything to kiss her again.

“I’m happy you feel that way, Derik,” she says. “Just think, if that Sean-guy hadn’t come into your diner, we might never have shared like this.”

“I’ll have to thank him,” I say, and she smiles at me, not breaking the hold I have on her eyes.

And I think she’s right about being my destiny or me being hers. We were definitely meant to meet.

She goes and sprawls herself out on my bed, starts flopping around, telling me how wonderfully yellow everything is in here—even though my room is blue and gray. Then she stops, walks on her knees to the foot of the bed, and looks up at me like she could cry at any second. “Drink me up, Derik, for even just a short spell, and make this mine. My roots in the soil. Will you do that for me?”

Soil?

She gets up and makes a beeline for me. She plasters her lips to mine, thrusts her tongue in my mouth, yanks me onto the bed, and I go toppling on her.

She lifts my shirt up with her teeth. Then pulls it up and off, and I’m hoping she notices my body—my chest, my abs—the result of working out at a gym ten hours a week, but she’s too busy unbuttoning my jeans, ripping them down with my boxers until they get stuck at my sneakers. She pulls off my shoes, and now it’s just me, completely exposed, and her, exploring every inch of my body with her lips and tongue. She actually sucks
my
nipples.

I decide I should try and take her clothes off as well, but she pulls away when I touch her lacy sleeve. Instead, she stands up on the bed and gives me a striptease. First those sticks from her hair, so that the bun comes undone and her hair just falls, long and thick and wavy, like a mermaid. Then she peels off her top, and she’s just got some bra-thing on underneath, and you can see right through it. She takes the straps down over her shoulders like they’re suspenders, and rolls the thing down her waist, over her hips, off her legs, and then kicks it in my face. And she just stares at me, watching me watch her, like she can tell what I’m thinking—that she’s the most unbelievable girl I’ve ever seen.

She blows me a kiss and then moves her fingers to the side of her skirt. She pulls at the ties, and the skirt just falls off her. Underneath she’s wearing these silky boxer shorts, with hearts all over them, that make me laugh out loud. There’s a pocket inside the hem. She reaches in, takes out a purple condom, and opens the wrapper with her teeth.

I lean back while she puts the thing on me, and it’s really weird, but all of a sudden I can’t help but think how I’ve never felt so close to a girl before, like she can read my mind and can be totally crazy, smart, and cool all at once.

She lays her naked body on mine, and already I’m holding back. “You’re luminous, Derik,” she whispers, leaning in to kiss my shoulder. But then I feel teeth—they sink into my skin, right beside my collarbone, completely catching me off guard, and so I let out a shriek. Lucky for me, I think my shrieking gets her going even more, because not two seconds later, she’s circling her hips and letting out these catlike cries, right on top of me. I can’t hold on much longer, so I try to distract myself and stare at the crystal stick around her neck, but it’s bopping up and down right between her Mary Janes, and so it’s no use. Before I know it, I’m all done.

She rolls off and snuggles into my side. And I’m thinking that she liked it, that she’s all set, because she’s smiling at me, fingering through the gel in my hair, like nothing’s wrong. Like she’s completely satisfied.

“You’re wonderfully crimson,” she says.

And I want to say something totally incredible back. Not a line or anything bogus like that, but something smart and different and special. I want to tell her how awesome I think she is; tell her how this is so different for me, how it’s crazy how it happened, the way we kept meeting, like it was meant to be; tell her that I’ve never felt this way about anybody before. But instead I say, “You’re the one who’s amazing.” And then I lean over and kiss her lips, slowly, concentrating the whole time, hoping that it’s full of the magical stuff they sing about in love songs, because it really feels that way for me.

When the kiss breaks, I lean into her ear and say, “Isn’t it weird the way we kept bumping into each other?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know, the way we kept seeing each other. The party, Starbucks, the newsstand …”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Derik.” She stops twirling her fingers through my hair. “We met
today
, at the diner.”

“No, before, all those times. Even earlier today, at the video store.”

“It must have been somebody else, Derik. I would have remembered if I’d seen you before.”

“Were you not in the video store today? Movie Mayhem? There was this old guy buggin’ you.”

“Yeah, I was there. But I didn’t see you there. That’s really unusual.” She continues to nuzzle into my chest, but then there’s this ringing from that enormous pocketbook of hers. “I should get that,” she says, rolling over to answer it.

“Hello?” she says. “Hi. How are you feeling?” She grips the phone and moves toward the edge of the bed, like suddenly I’m in the way. “Truly wondrous,” she continues into the phone. “No, nothing really. Just setting time with a friend. Sure. Yeah, I’d love to; that’d be crimson. I’ll place there in an hour.” She clicks her phone off and lies back down to give my nipple one final kiss. That’s when she notices.

“You’re bleeding,” she says.

I look at my shoulder, noticing her bite marks, the way she broke right through my skin.

She grabs for a handful of tissues and presses them into my shoulder. “I guess I got a little carried away. I hope this doesn’t change anything for you; it was a luminous time.”

I grab the napkins from her, maybe a little too quick; I think she senses that I’m pissed. “I’m fine,” I say.

Mearl responds by kissing my shoulder, then my chest. “Thank you, Derik,” she whispers. “For letting me plant here, even if it was just to be uprooted again.”

She sits on the edge of the bed with her back to me and slips on her bra-top thing and the lacy shirt. She pulls the heart boxers on, then wraps and ties her skirt, slides into her flip-flops, and swings the giant purse over her shoulder. Grabbing her hair sticks from the night table, she leans down next to me and whispers into my ear, just like she did with that perv at the video store. She tells me she’s glad we met and wishes me a spiritually enlightened life.