Kissing Carrion (6 page)

“Ro, hold up, calm down. I mean, Jeez, Ro—seriously, I don't even know what you're talking about. How could I, man? I was asleep.”

“Yeah, you were asleep, you were dreamin'. You didn't know what you were doing, right? Fuck you, Rennie, I've had enough of your crap.”

“Fuck me? Fuck
you
, man. I was asleep. I mean, I'm sorry for whatever you think I did—”

I snorted, zipping up. “Yeah, you sound it.”

“—but whatever it was, I did
not
do it on purpose. I'm sick. You
know
that.”

“You're sick, all right.”

That stopped him right in his tracks, amazed. Staring at me with those
I just can't believe what I'm hearing
eyes—all insulted and kind of hurt, like I'd accused him of cheating on the big test, or something. Mr. Teen Angst Dracula himself.

If I stayed there a minute longer, I'd end up as nutsoid as he was.

“I need not to see you for a while, Rennie,” I said. Calmly. Clearly. “I need to be alone. I need to be the fuck away from you.”

“Ro,” he said, as I opened the apartment door. Then: “Ro, wait up!”

But I didn't.

Didn't look back, either.

* * *

I never figured it out, not until they told me. Twelve years old and six months gone, and I thought I was just getting fat. I actually used to worry about shit like that—back before I discovered how easy it was to lose weight, as long as you kept yourself too high to have an appetite.

Oh, Rennie, my baby. My big baby boy. Too self-obsessed ever to ask why they would've waited so long between kids, or how that second kid could even have been conceived, seeing how Mom was doing a month for contempt of court at the time.

You were the one thing our Dad ever gave me that I wanted to keep. And if you were still above ground, maybe I could tell you how it felt when they pulled you out of me—that mind-numbing full-body spasm, that inadequate wishbone snap. How half of me wants to fold you deep inside my ribcage, to hold you tight and never let you go, but the other half of me wants a written guarantee you'll never try to crawl back up in there again.

Love me, Ro?

Like a rock.

. . . me too.

I smiled to myself, mirthlessly, as the Bay Street crosswind drew tears that froze on contact.

Because that's the way it's always been between us, little brother mine. That I love you, more than I love my own heart, my eyes, my life. And you love me too, as much as you can love anybody—which is to say, almost as much as you love yourself.

* * *

I came back Sunday night, to find Leo had already been by sometime late Sunday afternoon. Was still there, in fact.

All over.

Rennie looked up as I came in, covering his mouth with blood-gloved hands.

“Oh, Ro, I fucked up.”

A definite understatement.

“You fucked up,” I repeated, tonelessly. “That's right, Rennie. And I fucked up. By letting you fuck up.”

He crawled towards me, away from that thing on the bed. The big red thing that no amount of laundry was ever gonna get rid of, this time around.

I dropped to my knees, taking his face in both hands, aiming it up at mine. Looked into corpse-yellow eyes dim with tears of fear and self-pity. Heard him whine, plaintive:

“I'm sorry, Ro, I'm sorry, I'm so fuckin'
sorry
.”

“I know.”

“You went away. I was upset. I . . . got excited.”

“I know, Rennie.”

He moaned and dug his head into my shoulder, leaving a stain. I just hugged him, letting the rest of his body print my clothes with streaky crimson.

“Just don't leave me, okay?” he asked. “Don't ever leave me again, okay?”

“Oh, Ren,” I told him. “Oh, baby. I'll never leave you, baby, don't you know that by now? I'll always take care of you.”

Stroking his hair. Slipping Jos' gun out of my waistband.

“I'll take care of you,” I told him.

And then I shot him through the back of the head, twice, right where his topmost vertebra met the base of his skull.

* * *

I buried him upside down, so he'd dig himself deeper. Mud in his big mouth, mud on his traitor tongue. Two days now, and I can still hear him screaming. He's getting weaker, maybe figuring out what I've done—but by now it's just too late to turn around. He hasn't got the strength to start over. Playing sick so convincingly, for all those weeks and months—all that year and a half, give or take a few days—maybe he even convinced himself he'd always been that way: The innocent victim, the helpless child.

I should've done it a long time ago; I guess I must have always known that, on some level. I sure as hell know it now.

When he's quiet, I'll go. I can't do anything more. I'll wait until he's quiet and then I'll go.

But I am Goddamned, I am God-damned, if I know where.

I wanted you. And I was looking for you.
But I couldn't find you.

—Laurie Anderson

O rose, thou art sick.

—William Blake

LOVE BLEEDS, LIKE ANY
other wound. And though I believe it can be cauterized, I know I've yet to find anything hot enough to do the job.

Prolonged bleeding makes you weak. It tastes like sucking a quarter, but sweeter—the sour-sweetness of your own waste. A fermented-sugar high. Everything goes limp, languid. Dreams float through, breaking up just as they reach visibility: Static on an empty channel. Then the sweetness fades, and you start to ache—because, without either the sweetness or the dreams it spins to distract you, you're finally awake enough to realize just how empty you've already become.

I want you, baby. I want your hands, your hot touch. I want you to lay them on. I want you to sear me clean again.

* * *

There's a Laundromat of fairly recent mintage up on Yonge Street, the Spin Cycle, where a currently unemployed teacher of English (Romantic poets and Gothic novels a speciality) can load clothes and coin alike unhindered, then retire to the next room and sit comfortably back with the caffeinated beverage of his choice. You go there often, especially so since Lisa hit the highway; in fact, you're there right now. The Spin Cycle is open all night, clean and quiet, free of memory or temptation. Few people to hit on, or hit back—and those who do turn up with their hands out (i.e., the bums who beg on the pavement just outside) rarely have sex on their minds.

She's sitting by the window as you come out of the laundry section, having just separated and rebagged your clothing, and slide into place at the end of the bar for a final installment of liquid insomnia. A brief flash of downcast pupil as she notes—and measures—your proximity. Pale smudge of pale hair against the front window's base-lit glass, indistinct shadow of full mouth under a short, straight hint of nose. Her skin is fair enough to show veins.

Under the lashes, her eyes catch the light: Cloudy blue. Arctic fathoms of lake water, glimpsed through ice. Matching neon rims her lips, bleaching them cyanose.

Cappuccino's here. You pay, then sip, tensing against the jolt. Count off a shaky string of seconds before you risk a quick glance of your own.

Yes, she's still looking.

You
know
you don't know her. But she's definitely acting like she knows you—like she knows you intimately, and your failure to acknowledge her is just a part of some kinky game you always play. A dominance thing. (People are into that, these days, or so you've heard.) Like she's waiting for you to take control, to get up and go over, take her arm without a wasted word, and lead her off to some black leather Fantasy Island.

Padded cuffs. Paddles. Cigarettes pressed lightly to the fleshy underside of buttock or breast, right at the juncture, where the sweat'll make it rub, and really start to smart.

These are freak closet thoughts, dumbed-down revenge fantasies—Lisa's face hovering disembodied over an EveryCentrefold body, waiting for you to wipe away her sneer. Prospects you would never consider, if you didn't have the very clear idea that this woman would like you to. That she'd
want
you.

And here's the really pitiful part: They're turning you on.

The foreshadowing of a smile hovers at the corner of that uneven, enticing mouth. She shifts her legs beneath the table, deliberately undeliberate: One smooth motion, pure skin on skin, no apparent panty chaser. Her eyes are lightless, inverse mirrors, archaic camera lenses; there's someone caught in each of them, a negative reflection on the scrim of her cornea, doubled and reduced to his barest essence, filling her world entirely. And it's not you, not yet—but for the simple price of a little white lie, it could be. All you have to do is let her recognize you, to be whoever she wants.

Secrecy and decay, Lisa's voice tells you (giving you back your own words, the ones you once bewitched her with, back in your shared undergraduate days), the key elements of any good Gothic. Your life's gone rotten, it literally stinks—so much so you spend all your off-time washing
clothes
, for Christ's sake—so you want to trade up, identity-wise. Maybe even trade down. To see just how far you can get away from you, from your stupor of loss and hatred, your multi-foliated ache of thwarted desire.

But needs must, when the penis drives. So you snag your laundry and get up, unsteadily, cross towards her, brush by her. Open the door, hold it a half-breath longer than you need to. Waiting.

And she gets up—smile finally blooming, white-ripe; a fleshy desert flower—and follows.

* * *

Toronto, the fliptop city—grey and gelatinous as a mad scientist's exposed brain, overlaid with a distant hum of thought. Faint memory fog erasing the horizon's skyscrapers from Floor 13 up. And the two of you, drifting through.

More Ann Radcliffe influences: The rain has accentuated Chinatown's usual crab season reek and moved it steadily northward; all up and down the road, the pavement is bracketed by crates of exposed underbellies and weakly waving claws. Her place turns out to be a shutter-heavy house just off of Nassau Street, incongruously squatting in the shadow of a hospital smokestack, its roof wreathed in a cannibal fog of incinerated body parts. You pause, glance up. The moon hangs caught between tree-branches—a lost balloon, half-wilted.

Then you're inside, upstairs, in a room up under the eaves, barely bigger than your bachelor apartment's closet, with a naked mattress on the floor, and a dusty, shrink-wrapped poster of a rose hanging on the far wall, a string of light bleeding from underneath to frame it with a square halo; placed over a small window, maybe, to block the room off from exterior distraction. Water-stains darken the ceiling. It smells stale, with a sickly hint of floral-scented moisturizer. Not exactly enticing.

When you turn around, however, you see she's already unbuttoned the top of her dress and let it slip down around her hips, loosing a pair of snub-nosed breasts with areola-like cataracts. The light-thread slips along her side, taking the rest of her dress with it, writing hieroglyphs over her emergent stretch-marked hips. Old bruises gild her thighs.

“I found you,” she says, the first thing you've heard out of her so far. Her voice is scratchy. A twitch of guilt raises goosesweat; yeah, I guess you did. But it doesn't seem to reach your face—not enough to stop her talking, at least.

“Want me,” she tells you.

And then she sucks your lips inside of hers and bites down, knocking you back as your clothes peel apart. On the poster above you, the rose yawns, faded and labial, like a cheesy Grade Twelve creative writing exercise metaphor. But your groin—which jumps and pulses against the smooth weight of her inner thighs, the loose and shaven flesh of her pubis—is no literary critic.

“I found you,” she repeats, coming up for air. Then again, with a weird little crack in the words' sandpaper surface: “Want me?”

Yes, yes, yes.

Her blue-rimmed talons, her blue-toned mouth. Her hands scrabble down, points out—the date-rape rosary, reversed: Nipples, navel, pelvis, sac. Incongruous, the contrast; how selected parts of her strike you with such an exaggerated force of detail, while other aspects slide away on contact, impossible to describe. The nape of her bent neck, small-pored and finely furred with a blush of colorless hair—as she glides down along your torso, tongue out—versus the blur of her profile. Halogen skin, almost grotesquely lambent; a stained white radiance, like the kind that spills from lanterns made of human skin. You can count every link of her spine. One hand shelling you with a single twist, a grate of zipper teeth, and slipping to cup your testicles as the other grips you firmly, skins you back. Her breath touches the exposed tip of your penis with condensation.

Then you arch, unable to control you own response, as she takes you to the hilt: A cold scrape of uneven bottom teeth along the underside, a liquid plunge. Back and forth, lips pulling like mist. Nothing to hold onto. And you're so hard now, your cock feels like it's gone numb.

Things are coming to a head, obviously; but it's too soon. You rear up, pull her up as well, arms hooked under hers. (She comes easily, light and frail, a sex-doll stuffed with milkweed down.) Kiss her breasts as they go by, sucking hard, but provoking no visible response, not even the barest stippling of arousal along the inside of her cleavage. Nothing blooms in this garden—stone roses only, petals turned forever inward.

Then you lie back, ready to return the favor.

For a beat, she gazes down at you from this weird Picasso angle, cut off at the knees, the wishbone triangle of legs and pelvis bound together by that pale pubic knot. Seashell furls, secretively overlapped: Put your ear down there, mister, and see what you can hear. Sunken bells? A blood-beat tide, raw and roaring?

Time to find out.

Gently, you pry her apart with both hands—spread her wide. She doesn't stop you.

(But what
would
she stop you doing?)

If her body has limits, she's posted no signs to indicate them. So you stare up into her mystery, put out a hesitant tongue. Taste it. She's waxy and redolent with some indefinite, interior scent: Liquorice, filtered through a watercress base. Narcotized. Her juices sting, slightly.

Again, no visible response. No blush of mere physical pleasure to dampen that detached glow of hers. So you bite deeper, determined to prove you can make her come. All things being equal rights-oriented, they give prizes for that, don't they? The Orgasm Cup. Best Multiple In A Given Session. It's a matter of pride now, because this is beginning to remind you of Lisa—her way of absenting herself, without a spoken word or visible sign: Sure, I'll play along, but this is your business, buddy, not mine. Just hurry up, finish up, shit or get off the pot.

Fuck you, baby.

Oh no, fuck
you
.

“That's enough,” she says. Sliding back. And screws herself down onto you with a swiftness that seems to surprise you both equally. You hiss, in unison. Because she's
tight
, hurtfully so. And dry, not slick—all friction, with a vague, talcum-powder stickiness. She churns her hips, frantically, digging around inside herself, trying to find the right button. At which point, part of you rebels.

(I mean, whose fantasy
is
this, anyways?)

So you heave yourself over, taking her with you, forcing yourself securely back in the saddle—sheet-wrapped, one of her knees jammed up against your ribcage. Deeper than you'd thought possible. She hums approval; you can feel it through your sternum, an interior caress. The sheets erase a different view of her face with every thrust. Grasping for her elusive wrists, you wind up just getting still more ells of fabric, looping yourself ever further inward: Bed of lies, bed of nails, bed of quicksand.

“Call me,” she says, with barely a catch, between the bellows-rush of your own panting. “Like you used to. Call me—”

“Honey—”

“Slut.”

A feather-touch at either palm, steering them inward. Another ripple of speech, intimate and infected, rising up your arms like an arthritic seizure.

“Now hold me like you used to, baby.”

As she makes a choker of your hands, centering your thumbs on her larynx.

“Hold me. Hard. Hold me. Tight.”

(That black-lettered yellow streak of plastic banner drooping, snapped, by one side of the front door. That front hall carpeted with dead insects. The distinct lack of footprints, other than your own, in the dust beneath you as you mounted the rickety stairs.)

And what's that term? Off of Oprah's newest rival, one afternoon when you cut class to surprise Lisa with a quickie. And she wasn't there, of course; it's not like she could read your
mind
, after all. Any more.

So you flip on the tube, and it's a panel of parents, crying, talking about walking in on their sons in various states of undress, belts and cords looped around their necks. Slumped. Slack. Porno mags nearby. Most do it alone, and die. Some do it like any other contact sport, using a spotter, somebody who loves them enough to let go once they black out. The high as your throat closes off, the luxuriant gasp of climax, as you come like your life depends on it.

Auto-erotic. I mean, erotic. Asphyxiation.

You stare down at her, with eyes abruptly narrow enough to be clear, and see—for the first time—how she waxes and wanes with the ebb of your urges. Her face, seen full-on, is a flicker; something meant to be intuited, meant to be glimpsed from the corner of an eye rather than studied closely. A white darkness in every line of her slumberous haze of toxic dreams. She arches against your grip like a domesticated animal, flexed and lithe, trained into desperation for human contact of any kind: Love, love me do. Kiss me, kick me.

Kill me.

You see her, suddenly, like a blow to the face, as wholly as one can see any ghost. And she, just as abruptly—

—sees you too.

Both speaking at once:

“You're not—”

“—not.
You
.”

Cloudy blue, Arctic depths, glaring upward. Crystallizing. As the shared delusion of her physicality, punctured by this double recognition, begins—slowly, steadily—to come apart under pressure.

(The moment of truth from that old Japanese movie you saw with Lisa one birthday, not too long back at all. The girl with the long black hair, the morning after; the willing skeleton bride.)

Oh, I'm going, I'm going
.

As she melts, becomes ether. Seeps inside you like a novocaine kiss,
penetrating
you to pool around the fluttering muscle between your lungs and squeeze it—tight. Hard. Hard, in absolute sorry fact, as your own dinosaur member, which—instead of wilting—just swells along with the flow, the sub-zero uprush, painfully full as a clogged artery, reaching for consummation. Blackout orgasm. Closed-heart surgery. Cooling it to a light sheen, to a frosty glow. Until it gives one last, convulsive clench, and cracks wide open.