Crush (4 page)

swim like something sparkling underneath

the waves. Our bodies shivering, and the sound

of our breathing, and the shore so far away.

I’ll use my body like a ladder, climbing

to the thing behind it, saying farewell to flesh,

farewell to everything caught underfoot

and flattened. Names of poisons, names of

handguns, names of places we’ve been

together, names of people we’d be together,

Names of endurance, names of devotion,

street names and place names and all the names

of our dark heaven crackling in their pan.

It’s a bed of straw, darling. It sure as shit is.

If there was one thing I could save from the fire,

he said, the broken arms of the sycamore,

the eucalyptus still trying to climb out of the yard —

your breath on my neck like a music that holds

my hands down, kisses as they burn their way

along my spine — or rain, our bodies wet,

clothes clinging arm to elbow, clothes clinging

nipple to groin — I’ll be right here. I’m waiting.

Say hallelujah, say goodnight, say it over

the canned music and your feet won’t stumble,

his face getting larger, the rest blurring

on every side. And angels, about twelve angels,

angels knocking on your head right now, hello

hello, a flash in the sky, would you like to

meet him there, in Heaven? Imagine a room,

a sudden glow. Here is my hand, my heart,

my throat, my wrist. Here are the illuminated

cities at the center of me, and here is the center

of me, which is a lake, which is a well that we

can drink from, but I can’t go through with it.

I just don’t want to die anymore.

III

You're driving.

The sky's bright. You look great.

In a word, in a phrase, it's a movie,

you're the star.

so smile for the camera, it's your big scene,

you know your lines.

I'm the director. I'm in a helicopter.

I have a megaphone and you play along,

because you want to die for love,

you always have.

Imagine this:

You're pulling the car over. Somebody's waiting.

You're going to die

in your best friend's arms.

And you play along because it's funny, because it's written down,

you've memorized it,

it's all you know.

I say the phrases that keep it all going,

and everybody plays along.

Imagine:

Someone's pulling a gun, and you're jumping into the middle of it.

You didn't think you'd feel this way.

There's a gun in your hand.

It feels hot. It feels oily.

I'm the director

and i'm screaming at you,

I'm waving my arms in the sky,

and everyone's watching, everyone's

curious, everyone's

holding their breath.

You saved my life
he says.
I owe you everything.

You don’t, I say, you don’t owe me squat, let’s just get going, let’s just

get gone, but he’s relentless,

keeps saying
I owe you,
says
Your shoes are filling with your own

damn blood, you must want something, just tell me, and it’s yours.

But I can’t look at him, can hardly speak,

I took the bullet for all the wrong reasons, I’d just as soon kill you myself,

I say. You keep saying
I owe you, I owe…
but you say the same thing

every time. Let’s not talk about it, let’s just not talk.

Not because I don’t believe it, not because I want it any different, but I’m

always saving and you’re always owing and I’m tired of asking to settle

the debt. Don’t bother. You never mean it

anyway, not really, and it only makes me that much more ashamed.

There’s only one thing I want, don’t make me say it, just get me bandages,

I’m bleeding, I’m not just making conversation.

There’s smashed glass glittering everywhere like stars. It’s a Western,

Henry. It’s a downright shoot-em-up. We’ve made a graveyard

out of the bone white afternoon.

It’s another wrong-man-dies scenario and we keep doing it, Henry,

keep saying
until we get it right…
but we always win and we never quit.

See, we’ve won again,

here we are at the place where I get to beg for it where I get to say
Please
,

for just one night, will you lay down next to me, we can leave our clothes on,

we can stay all buttoned up?

But we both know how it goes–– I say
I want you inside me
and you hold

my head underwater, I say
I want you inside me
and you split me open

with a knife.

I’m battling monsters, I’m pulling you out of the burning buildings

and you say
I’ll give you anything
but you never come through.

Even when you’re standing up

you look like you’re lying down, but will you let me kiss your neck, baby?

Do I have to tie your arms down? Do I have to stick my tongue in your

mouth like the hand of a thief,

like a burglary, like it’s just another petty theft? It makes me tired,

Henry. Do you see what I mean? Do you see what I’m getting at?

I swear, I end up

feeling empty, like you’ve taken something out of me, and I have to search

my body for the scars, thinking
Did he find that one last tender place to

sink his teeth in?

I know you want me to say it, Henry, it’s in the script, you want me to say

Lie down on the bed, you’re all I ever wanted and worth dying for too...

but I think I’d rather keep the bullet.

It’s mine, see, I’m not giving it up. This way you still owe me, and that’s

as good as anything. You can’t get out of this one, Henry, you can’t get it

out of me, and with this bullet lodged in my chest,

covered with your name, I will turn myself into a gun, because I’m hungry

and hollow and just want something to call my own. I’ll be your

slaughterhouse, your killing floor, your morgue

and final resting, walking around with this bullet inside me like the bullet

was already there, like it’s been waiting inside me the whole time.

Do you want it? Do you want anything I have?

Will you throw me to the ground like you mean it, reach inside and wrestle

it out with your bare hands? If you love me, Henry, you don’t love me

in a way I understand.

Do you know how it ends? Do you feel lucky? Do you want to go home

now? There’s a bottle of whiskey in the trunk of the Chevy and a

dead man at our feet

staring up at us like we’re something interesting. This is where the evening

splits in half, Henry, love or death. Grab an end, pull hard,

and make a wish.

Driving, Not Washing

It starts with bloodshed, always bloodshed, always the same

running from something larger than yourself
story,

shoving money into the jaws of a suitcase, cutting your hair

with a steak knife at a rest stop,

and you're off, you're on the run, a fugitive driving away from

something shameful and half-remembered.

They're hurling their bodies down the freeway

to the smell of gasoline,

which is the sound of a voice saying I told you so.

Yes, you did dear.

Every story has its chapter in the desert, the long slide from kingdom

to kingdom through the wilderness,

where you learn things, where you're left to your own devices.

Henry's driving,

and Theodore's bleeding shotgun into the upholstery.

It's a road movie,

a double-feature, two boys striking out across America, while desire,

like a monster, crawls up out of the lake

with all of us watching, with all of us wondering if these two boys will

find a way to figure it out.

Here is the black box, the shut eye,

the bullet pearling in his living skin. This boy, half-destroyed,

screaming
Drive into that tree, drive off the embankment.

Henry, make something happen.

But angels are pouring out of the farmland, angels are swarming

over the grassland,

Angels rising from their little dens, arms swinging, wings aflutter,

dropping their white-hot bombs of love.

We are not dirty,
he keeps saying.
We are not dirty...

They want you to love the whole damn world but you won't,

you want it all narrowed down to one fleshy man in the bath,

who knows what to do with his body, with his hands.

It should follow,

you know this, like the panels of a comic strip,

we should be belted in, but you still can't get beyond your skin,

and they're trying to drive you into the ground, to see if anything

walks away.

The eye stretches to the horizon and then must continue up.

Anything past the horizon

is invisible, it can only be imagined. You want to see the future but

you only see the sky. Fluffy clouds.

Look—white fluffy clouds.

Looking back is easy for a while and then looking back gets

murky. There is the road, and there is the story of where the road goes,

and then more road,

the roar of the freeway, the roar of the city sheening across the city.

There should be a place.

At the rest stop, in the restaurant, the overpass, the water's edge . . .

2

He was not dead yet, not exactly—

parts of him were dead already, certainly other parts were still only waiting

for something to happen, something grand, but it isn't

always about me,

he keeps saying, though he's talking about the only heart he knows—

He could build a city. Has a certain capacity. There's a niche in his chest

where a heart would fit perfectly

and he thinks if he could just maneuver one into place—

well then, game over.

3

You wonder what he's thinking when he shivers like that.

What can you tell me, what could you possibly

tell me?
Sure, it's good to feel things, and if it hurts, we're doing it

to ourselves, or so the saying goes, but there should be

a different music here. There should be just one safe place

in the world, I mean

this world. People get hurt here. People fall down and stay down and I don't like

the way the song goes.

You, the moon. You, the road. You, the little flowers

by the side of the road. You keep singing along to that song I hate. Stop singing.

It was night for many miles and then the real stars in the purple sky,

like little boats rowed out too far,

begin to disappear.

And there, in the distance, not the promised land,

but a Holiday Inn,

with bougainvillea growing through the chain link by the pool.

The door swung wide: twin beds, twin lamps, twin plastic cups

wrapped up in cellophane

and he says
No Henry, let's not do this.

Can you see the plot like dotted lines across the room?

Here is the sink to wash away the blood,

here's the whiskey, the ripped-up shirt, the tile of the bathroom floor,

the disk of the drain

punched through with holes.

Here's the boy like a sack of meat, here are the engines, the little room

that is not a room,

the Henry that is not a Henry, the Henry with a needle and thread,

hovering over the hollow boy passed out

on the universal bedspread.

Here he is again, being sewn up.

So now we have come to a great battlefield, the warmth of the fire,

the fire still burning,

the heat escaping like a broken promise.

This is the part where you wake up in your clothes again,

this is the part where you're trying to stay inside the building.

Stay in the room for now,
he says.
Stay in the room

for now.

This is the place, you say to yourself, this is the place where everything

starts to begin,

the wounds reveal a thicker skin and suddenly there is no floor.

Meanwhile,

there is something underneath the building that is trying very hard

to get your attention---

a man with almond eyes and a zipper that runs the length

of his spine.

You can see the shadow that the man is throwing across

the linoleum,

how it resembles a boat, how it crosses the tiles just so,

the masts of his arms rasping against the windows.

He's pointing at you with a glass of milk

as if he's trying to tell you that there is

some sort of shining star now buried deep inside you and he has to

dig it out with a knife.

The bell rings, the dog growls,

and then the wind picking up, and the light falling, and his mouth

flickering, and the dog

howling, and the window closing tight against the dirty rain.

Here is the hallway and here are the doors and here is the fear of the

other thing, the relentless

thing, your body drowning in gravity.

This is the in-between, the waiting that happens in the

space between

one note and the next, the place where you confuse

his hands with the room, the dog

with the man, the blood

with the ripped-up sky.

He puts his hands all over you to keep you in the room.