Please Don't Go (45 page)

Nabokov, who was not visually depicted in the book jacket of
Lolita
, but still spoke up for himself without hesitance, replied, “Good lord, you Limey... I know that. They have enough sloppy sex to make
me
blush, and that’s an awfully ambitious feat, might I add. I haven’t blushed since I was a teenage boy, discovering my own lower erectness for the first time. I was in the back of my school house, my rotund Russian school marm was preaching to me the laurels of proper grammar. Little did I know that she hadn’t a clue about the power of words, for when she saw my engorged soldier poking out beneath my desk, she shouted, ‘PENIS!’ and ran from the room to alert the head master of my aggravations against decency. I may have used a word like ‘SERPENT’ or ‘JAVELIN’ in reference to my member, but never the
actual word
itself. An amateur. I digress... what I mean to say is that my school-time salute to the authorities may have been the last time I had ever felt the embarrassment that revisits me now when the walls start to shake, when I fear that I will topple from the very shelf I sit upon, like those dolts Bradbury and Shakespeare did during the boy’s and the demon’s last jousting match. It seems that every day we start to shimmy nearer the ledge and I cry out for him to quit his sexual meandering through her sand castle!”

Zephyr covered his eyes with his hands, his face growing rosy with his own unique form of embarrassment. “She is insatiable.”

“
To say the least,” piped up Dickens. He let loose a raspy cough, wiping the phlegm away from his black and white charcoal colored chin. “She’s going to leave the equipment in shambles, lad.”

Nabokov chuckled aloud. “He’s a sexual beast, just like her. He doesn’t possess human thoughts any longer, unless it involves the glory of ejaculation. You can see that vapidness in his writing in that infernal journal. So confused by his own hormones, revisiting his puberty like a childhood home. He is lost, Charles! Lost! I presume that is the price we pay for young love, in that it hinders our ripening education, pushing it on down the road like a kicked can. Once our urges become commonplace, only then can we grow into socio-mental beings, would you not agree?”

“
Indeed,” said Dickens.

“
It won’t last forever. She’s getting ready to pop,” Zephyr defended himself, referring to her bursting pregnancy. “She’s almost at full moon.”

“
Oh, write
that
in your journal,” Nabokov barbed. “Right next to that story about your mother’s skull, that you keep it under your bed because you can’t think of any better purpose. That is sickening, child. Keep her in your memories.
Her skull
is not a trinket! If that’s how you’ve treated her during her life, like a collector’s item, then maybe she is far better suited to her current state.”

Dickens shook his head from side to side. “So very rude. You’re oblivious to the boy’s emotional well-being. You’re no friend of his, Vlad. No friend to any of us, for that matter.”

“
I never said that I was his friend. The boy hasn’t a friend in the world.”

Throwing
Lolita
to the ground, Zephyr shouted at Vladimir, “Piece of shit!”

“
Please, my young master. Pick Vlad back up and dust his jacket off. That is no way to handle somebody, not even your most loathsome enemy.” Dickens had a point, and Zephyr rubbed his temple, wanting for the lot of them to shut the hell up, to quiet themselves for the remainder of eternity. They nagged him with regularity, often times jibing him that they would like to be read next. Dogs begging for scraps at the dinner table. Sometimes, they would all speak and rant in unison, dictating aloud some of Zephyr’s favorite lines from those tomes, preaching at him life advice and quotable nuggets of wisdom from their pages.

“
You realize that you’re losing your liquified mind?
Jah?
” Kafka (sitting atop the shelf where he rightfully belonged) queried his new owner and master, a touch of German intermingled with his words of concern. Kafka had often stayed quiet, but not as of late. Zephyr marked this change.

“
I have to declare this in a public forum, as a dear and loyal friend to you, that I too have felt that. It is not the typical leisurely activity of a well-adjusted young man to be speaking with dead writers,” noted Dickens, his gruff intonation peppered with a similar concern to Kafka.

“
He’s madness incarnate,” Kafka observed, clearing his throat for further notations.

Zephyr blasted at Kafka, “Shut it, Franz. Nobody was talking to you. This is between Vlad and Charles and myself. I’ll throw you in the fucking fireplace if you’re gonna commentate on my mental state.” He scowled at the book, hoping that Kafka was squirming in nervousness within the water-damaged pages.

“
You’re illustrating my point by berating me in this way,” Kafka added, careful not to anger the boy, but wanting him to understand the gravity of his mental imbalance at the same time.

He stormed towards the shelf, pulling Kafka’s
Amerika
free, striding towards the fireplace, drenching the literature with bottled butane and setting it afire, watching the flames and wanting to become a flame himself, so that he could better enjoy the Kraut writer’s demise. Kafka screamed for assistance from Charles and Vladimir, but they could do no such thing, for they were nothing more than a collection of bound pages in the realities outside of Zephyr’s sphere of consciousness. Kafka would live on via the copy of
The Metamorphosis
that Zephyr had forgotten all about. In time, that book and its author would pipe up again, perhaps when Zephyr’s unraveling mind was next in full decline.

As Franz Kafka begged for a second chance in the licking flames of the fireplace, Nabokov chose to remain quiet. He had damaging commentary that he kept bundled inside of his own head, and so he tried to think of nothing in particular, of pure whiteness, of a void within a void.

“
Oh dear, my good man. He’s really losing his previously fortuitous grip. Now he’s taken to burning books like we were in Nazi Germany. I would not dare to ever fathom such a thing happening, but I believe it just did, as I live and breathe,” Dickens said. “I fear for our lives, Vlad.” His tone was grim.

“
I see nothing. I hear nothing. I say nothing,” mumbled Nabokov, but Zephyr could no longer hear him for the furious tornado of madness swirling about his skull. Zephyr laughed and burned several other books, just to watch them burn, to transform into ash and residue.

7.

“
What would you like for dinner?” asked Zephyr of his queen, perched upon her throne with her belly bulging forth like a guilty snake who had swallowed a bird egg that was bigger than its own head. Lilith was listening to an antique record from Rattup’s limited musical collection. She seemed to enjoy the audible delights as much as the physical ones.

“
Whatever suits my vessel and my baby. I don’t taste a thing, so it matters not to me,” Lilith replied, closing Jackie’s eyes and tilting her head back, hands cupped along her waistline. She was listening to a piece by Scott Joplin called “Maple Leaf Rag.” Zephyr despised the song, for she was relentless with it. Over and over, it never got old for her.

“
I’ll make the macaroni and cheese, like last week. Is that okay?” Zephyr questioned. He sounded like a subservient lackey, and he was well aware of it.

“
Go away,
rapist.
” When Lilith used such words, it never felt easy upon Zephyr’s eggshell of an ego. In succumbing to her, he had not only lost his freedoms, but had fallen beneath the wheels of her chariot, crushed by hooves and cruel fiery words. He was well aware that he didn’t deserve such ugly treatment and so he continued to lie to himself, that Lilith was but a small piece of the pie that was Jackie, that in fact Jackie was the driver and Lilith was the passenger. Things would revert back to normal, in due time. He was sure of it. It was a waiting game.

Wait. And serve.

“
Yes, dear,” he replied. Zephyr turned to leave the room when she started laughing hysterically, gripping at her tummy.

“
My baby is kicking!” she reported. Lilith patted at Jackie’s stomach, whispering to the child while she stared at Zephyr, “Calm down in there, little one. Soon enough you can start kicking all the men you want, and I will gratefully encourage that behavior, but you best never kick your mother and myself. For we are the strong, and we will
certainly
kick back.”

***

While Zephyr boiled macaroni and chopped faux-cheddar processed cheese into cubes, he tried to steady his mind. He felt as if he was balancing on a wire, the unpredictability of his own gravity dictating every step, shimmying his hips and thrusting his arms about him in a desperate orbit. There were days that he would shift to one polar opposite, and then back to the next with the only difference being nothing discernible at all. He felt as if he was losing his grip on the things that had traditionally kept him in-tune with reality. In the four months he had spent at Lilith’s beck and call, he could not recall a single breath of true happiness and it seemed a distant cousin to his current emotional state. He was happy enough to be at peace with his situation, knowing full well that there was no other option, that Lilith was the queen of the castle. He was tethered to that structure, and he had no hope without her sanctifying his emotions with her wretched claws. But still, he felt a twisted love for her. With all hatred, there is always a seedling of love. Even Hitler had a sweet canine who would lick his face after a long day of exterminating Jews.

That analogy sickened Zephyr—for who was Hitler in their home? And who was the dog?

He was the dog.
Blondie
. That had been Hitler’s dog’s name, like the band from the eighties, who had named themselves after the long-dead German Shepard. Blondie had sung “Heart of Glass,” one of Zephyr’s mother’s favorite songs, that she would always hum when he was still a child. Daisy-chaining his thoughts together, Zephyr realized that the skull beneath his mattress had hummed the hit song by the band that was named after Hitler’s pup. The boy he had once been could have never predicted this sickness inside of his head.

“
Hurry up in there!” Lilith blasted from the other room. One moment, she had no interest in human food. And the next, she craved it, her swings as drastic as Zephyr’s own precarious psychological balancing act.

“
Five more minutes,” Blondie The Dog replied, staring into the rolling, boiling water in the silver pot. He shook salt into the water and scowled. When you dropped salt into water, it boiled quicker, coming to life with heated energy coursing through it. When you put salt on a snail, it died almost instantly. Life and death, always so close to each other. He wondered what kind of salt he could pour on Lilith—one that would not hurt the love of his life, buried inside of her like a cocooned butterfly.

“
She seems quite agitated, mate. You should see the terrible face she is making right now. Oh, dear, it is hideous indeed. You may be well-advised to hurry yourself,” Dickens coached from the other room. Perhaps, decided Zephyr, he would permanently forgo reading and burn every last motherfucking book in the house.

8.

On a brisk morning in early September, Jackie’s brain awoke and Jackie’s arms started to shake Zephyr with vigorous frenzy. “Wake up!” Jackie’s mouth begged.

Zephyr rolled over with expectations of an early-morning, violent sort of randy romp that Lilith so desired, but found himself staring into the unclouded retinas of his beloved woman. His heart exploded with gratitude and a happy panic exuded from every shadowy atom of his body. Shaking the sleep from his head, he leaned over and clutched Jackie close to his chest, whispering in his ear that he loved her, while she returned the gesture with short breaths. They started to sob, both loud and wet. “She’s gone. I don’t feel her anywhere, not inside of me at least. Just Tabitha... is this for real, Zephyr? Is this really happening?” she asked, pulling away from him, tears streaming down her face, a fervent grin decorating her soft features.

“
I don’t know,” Zephyr blubbered, knowing that all joys in their household were short-lived and ill-conceived, and always with ulterior motives. “Just enjoy it while we can. And who’s Tabitha?”

Jackie smiled as wide as a country mile, touching her belly. “
This
is Tabitha. She’s been my dearest friend in there. I couldn’t have made it through without her. She’ll take your breath away. Beautiful. And eloquent.” The grin that pervaded her face was unbreakable. She was already filled with pride at being a new mother.

Zephyr nodded, grinning as well. He had a daughter on the way. And her name was Tabitha. He didn’t like the name, right off the bat, as it rolled from Jackie’s tongue, but soon it felt warm and comforting to him, as if destiny itself had named her. “I think I like it. But what’s she been saying to you?”

“
She says wonderful things. That she loves us more than anything, that she can’t wait to meet us. It was hard to believe at first, but then she started telling me things. About myself, things I’ve never told anybody,” Jackie shared with a smile upon her face. “She’s my entire universe, Zephyr. You’ll see, soon enough. She’ll be your whole universe, too.”