Julianspy’s Blog

Notre Petit Appartement

By Julian Logan Spy

1

In our little apartment, the red brick multiplex mansion, playing the perfect host to a myriad of workers, families, bachelors, middle-class men and women, button-up white collars, hand-weary blue collars, clandestine pets and fetishes, I wake up next to her and those soft as velvet verdant eyes, my beloved’s calming aqua sea.  It is in her gaze that I find refuge from all that is haunting, from all the nocturnal evil that stalks unseen around the halls, burrowing into the carpeting and camouflaging itself within the bristles of placed doormats, biding its time for the front door to open just a crack, just enough to covertly rush in, to upset the balance of harmony and tranquility that wafts through the air, to send poison down the lungs of lovers, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, loners, businessmen, poets, painters, crackling and hissing like a fire spreading over damp and rotting kindling, extinguishing the flame we all carry, the fire burning within us all.

In those eyes, in that angelic face; graceful, slender cheekbones playing the gatekeepers to the most disarming of smiles, I find solace and meaning and definition in the words written across the air, in the multi-colored pages pressed in crisp autumn weather, hanging loosely to their oak and maple branch bindings.  I find purpose and understanding locked away in those eyes, in that face, in that body, in our bed, in our apartment, on our street.  She gave me the key and I keep it in close proximity to my chest, for my heart is her heart is our heart, is very the treasure of my existence.

It’s on this morning, September 23, 2008, that she turns to me and rubs those eyes awake.

“Good morning, sleepy head.”

There’s that smile, that simple little twist and spread of her lips, effortlessly captivating; a string of silver pearls cultivated from the most bountiful of fields found resting at the bottom of the rich, golden sands of an undisturbed lagoon.

“Bonjour, cheri.”

“Baby, it’s too early for French.”

“You always say that.”

“Much too early for French.”

When she laughs I imagine an orchestra of angels playing from their silver cloud-chairs fringed in gold-leaf trim.

We don’t have much money, which is not to say we are in a position of utter financial destitution.  My aspirations of a novelist take on life during the late hours of the night and the genesis of the early morning, while I piddle away the monotony of the day by working as a short-order cook at a chain restaurant, one of the more emotionally taxing and laborious forms of temporary jobs.  My little principessa is a college graduate, an aspiring writer who curbed that half-dream to take on a salary job at a telecommunications company two miles down the road.  Like I said, our collective monetary possession is minimal and we certainly experience our share of general setbacks, but there is something oddly romantic in sharing the same worries and a common sadness.  It’s as if we are bound together not only by the elation brought about by spending each night in one another’s arms, but also by the thread weaved of fear and uncertainty strung between us both.  It is just one strand in the fabric that is the definition of the two years we have spent together, the two years since the car accident.

“So, my darling, when do you work today?”

She takes my hands in hers, throwing one leg over mine under the warm floral-print covers.

“Five to close, I think.  I’ll call in to make sure.”

Those lips, the tiny vessels of a thousand “I love you’s,” the pink ships with diminutive carvings and ridges that have carried a thousand kisses to my forehead, the tip of my nose, my cheeks, arch downward into a playful pout.  It’s in this act, in this pretend and acute disappointment, that I feel whole, that I am needed, that I have a purpose in breathing other than furnishing my own dreams.  It is through her love that the pain and suffering in my heart is replaced by elation and promise, vitality and hope.

“Boo, bear.  I was hoping we’d be able to go apple picking out at Stow.  You should just call out.  Come on, come on, you know you want to.  It’s so beautiful out!”

I can’t help but laugh a little at her pressing the issue within minutes of her waking up, though I’m not surprised.  She’s the most vivacious person I’ve ever met, brimming with excitement and always slightly unrealistic about our finances, endless shopping and how time should be spent.  She’s my little optimistic philosopher, and I think that’s why I love her: for all my downtrodden perceptions of the world around me and my overall pessimistic outlook, she reminds me of all that is possible, of all that is good and gold and brilliant.  She not only shares my life, she adds a great deal to it.

“You haven’t even looked outside yet!”

There’s that little laugh again, her face beautifully shifting into smiles and her lips folding into one another, slightly sucked into her mouth between those ocean-pearls.  Her body wriggles and tightens around mine, a single symphony of her heavenly essence containing all the secrets to her happiness and excitement.

“I just know, bear!  It’s going to be all sunny out.  And you know what?  It’s going to be the perfect weather for apple picking.  Just you wait!”

“Ok, eager beaver, we’ll see.  How about some coffee first though?”

“Yes, please!  Light and sweet, just like me.”

“I know principessa, just like you.”

 

 

There I am in the kitchen, the little nook in our one bedroom apartment.  My hands are occupied with the boiling water, and the eggs and bacon cooking over the gas stove.  On the counter sits a daily planner,  some stacked bills, and the French-press coffee pot, it’s top pregnant with grounds we bought at the local supermarket, which isn’t so much local as it is just a convenient and looming megastore, towering over the landscape just down the road.

When the water begins to boil away and the eggs are cooked through and the bacon is crisp, I turn off the gas and wait for the ardent core of the grills to cool down.  Looking out the kitchen window of our arbor-laced street, I can tell she’ll be right.  Though the color of the day is still vapid and gray, I can see the sun hiding behind a thin layer of clouds.  It won’t be long until the air is sharp and warm while the painters in the sky cast down hues of soft yellow onto the streets, houses, cars and people; a golden canvas with touches of faded red and bright orange blowing high above the ground.

“Babe, breakfast is ready!”

I’m absolutely certain she’s still in bed, so it comes as a surprise when I feel her slender arms tighten around my waist, when I feel her chin rest itself on the spot where my neck and shoulders meet.

“You don’t have to shout, bear.  I’m up.  I’m up.”

I should probably explain why she calls me “bear”, as it may seem an odd moniker to assign a five foot eleven, one hundred and thirty-five pound adult in his mid twenties.  When I was born, my parents immediately went out and bought me a stuffed replica of a sun bear which they instantaneously named “Pooh Bear.”  This stuffed animal remained in my life until I was around eighteen, acting as a security blanket and a connection bridging my young adult self to my childhood.  When I went away to college a girl I was dating at the time stole him in the impending breakup, though she swore she didn’t, and I never saw him again.  When I told my principessa the story, she was called it “the cutest, saddest story I’ve ever heard” and immediately starting calling me “bear.”  Of course it stuck.  In fact, she even had a security blanket too, only in a much more literal sense.  The blanket her parent’s brought her home in after she was born was aptly called “the binkin.”  That torn, ripped, colorless fabric is still in her possession and she continues to sleep with it tucked under one arm.

“Jesus, you scared the hell out of me!  Always sneaking up and scaring the hell out of me!”

She’s laughing as she spins me around, pressing my body into the wall and fervently decorating my neck and chest with kisses she’d been storing as we slept.

My beautiful principessa is an angel without her wings.  Her sublime face of classic beauty is crafted out of perfect symmetry and she resembles a goddess of antiquity reincarnated; my Cleopatra, my Hepburn, my Helen.  She is my Guinevere and my Nefertiti and she is perfection built by the unseen hands of Heaven and virtue and class.  Even when our bodies are apart our spirit is one.  When I walk alone she is still there floating with the wind, dipping and weaving between the branches of trees, whispering her name and sending me her kisses tucked gently into the breeze.  Her love is like the most wonderful dream where I am looking up on lush rolling hills set against soothing diamond skies; there is no thirst, no hunger or desire other than the wish to cradle her within the sanctuary of my arms.

As she’s here with me, in my arms, in our kitchen, in our little apartment, on our little street, I feel her soft bare legs against the palms of my hands, my fingertips searching out unadulterated perfection along the length of her thighs.  She’s standing there, pressed up against me wearing an oversized button up blue and white flannel shirt that had once belonged to her father, a patriarchal relic hiding her stomach, her ribs, her breasts, hanging gently over the white underwear decorated with green polka dots hugging her hips.

“I’m very sneaky.  I like to sneak and speak and kiss your beak.”

She kisses the tip of my nose and stares right into my gaze, pouring the waters of her lagoon eyes over me, washing my soul clean of any negative thoughts and scrubbing away the ash that my bad dreams cast over my heart.  She’s always speaking in rhymes and couplets and cute little colloquialisms; always dancing in the bathroom in her underwear as she brushes her teeth and washes her face; always singing in the shower with the shampoo bottle as her microphone; always sneaking up behind me to cover my eyes and whisper in my ear: “Guess who?  It’s the girl who loves you!”

“Ok, miss sneaky.  Are you hungry?”

She’s bouncing up and down on her feet, waving her limp wrists around in circles like you see little kids do when they’re really excited about something.

“For anything you cook, of course I am, bear!”

I hand her the breakfast on one of the blue china plates we bought at the outlets a few weeks back.  As the plate transfers from my hand to hers and she leans in to kiss me I remember how she used to carve up her wrists before we met.  The lines travelling up the inside of her forearm serve as a reminder that even the most beautiful thing can be dropped and broken; can be scratched and dented and shattered.  She would take one of those tiny single edge razor blades and trace the invisible lines her eyes had drawn up her arm, trying to excavate the pain she held somewhere deep inside her body.  She told me she wanted all that hurt and pressure to pour out of her veins in fathoms, that she desired not pain but the power to control the pain she felt.  I guess she believed she couldn’t control much else.

“I’ll be right behind you, principessa.  I need to make a phone call if we’re still planning on going apple picking today.”

“You mean it, bear?!”

“I mean it, darling.”

 

2

“Logan, you’re overreacting.  You know I don’t ask for much, but the one thing I can’t stand, can’t deal with on any level, is a lack of trust.  Don’t you trust me?  I mean, seriously, it’s been over two years of us living together and spending almost every waking moment in each other’s company.”

There’s a pause hanging in the fabric of time as if my words haven’t reached him yet, as if they haven’t resonated against his body or processed through his thoughts.  He’s sitting there in the passenger seat leaning against the car’s window with his elbow propped up against the door, his right hand pressed against the right side of his face.   There’s that snicker, that half-smile, fake and mocking, ornamenting his visage; that bottom jaw slightly jutted out, his lips concealing his top row of teeth slightly sunken into his tongue.  He’s pretending he can’t make sense of what I’m saying as if my argument, my concerns, my communicative desires are invalid notes floating on an invisible bar of music, out of tune and synchronization; my voice plays the song of a player piano and it’s botched keys.

I continue on with my superfluous song.  I am the yellow bird in its spherical iron cage singing for no one other than the sodden air of an isolated room.

“I try and I try and I try.  I work all damn day to support us.  I buy the groceries and the toiletries.  I pay for every cent of the rent and every fucking bill your lazy hands pull from the mailbox.  I love you, Logan.  Why can’t you understand that?  Everything I do, I do it for us, and still you question my motives and my methods.  You keep pointless tabs on me, always questioning my love for you.  How do you think that makes me feel?  Don’t you realize the weight you’re putting on my shoulders?  I’m drowning, bear.  I feel like I’m drowning and you’re holding me under.  Why can’t you just trust me?”

My voice is trembling.  My vocal chords are quaking with the strain of bottled-up passion and the yearning for him to turn to me, for his calming, gray eyes to pull me into an unseen place of reassurance; a place where the only words he’ll speak are “I love you, I love you, I love you.”  I want that place, an unseen world where we’ll mirror each other.  I love you too.

“Daphne, watch out!”

His words pierce the silence with a hoarse, shrill shout synonymous to rusted metal grating against concrete along an abandoned stretch of highway.  Out of instinct I press the brake into the floor and with a single, powerful movement the car freezes, its body carrying forward for a split second before retracting backwards with vehement force.

Directly in front of us is a mechanical holocaust; two cars, their paint stripped from their sides like ancient corrugated ships and their hoods married in crumpled fate, lie dead across the yellow-streak divider line holding up both sides of traffic.  A portly policeman mantled in his official, city-issued regalia augmented with reflective yellow stripes stands in front of the mangled carnage of the dispatched machines.   His hands are moving back and forth with a certain lugubrious yet impatient grace, directing the tide of traffic carrying minds that conjure up incredulous disbelief and awe over the situation.

“Will you pay attention!?  I’d like to live through the night.  In fact, I think it would be in both our best interest to not end up like them!”

There’s a harshness in his voice like an approaching thunderstorm hurtling forward, littering the clear blue skies of the cool late summer to wash away the soft color of the day.  I know he’s forgotten.  I know he’s forgotten that it’s in scenes like the one before us where I am trapped; trapped in the revolving blue and white lights refracted through our windshield, scattered like diamond droplets precipitating onto the car’s interior.  I’m a piece of matter sedimented to the folded metal of the adjoining cars juxtaposed by their common disaster, and as I’m looking up at the floating faces lost in the sharp hue of the glowing streetlights I hear my father’s voice mumbling on incoherently about this and that, about nothing at all.

When I think about my father, I harp back to when I was a just a little girl with pigtails and white jumpers and corduroy overalls and plush, stuffed animals.  I remember looking up at him as I stood in front of his legs and thinking he was the tallest, strongest, bravest man in the entire world; he was unbreakable and invincible and I was his special treasure. 

I remember the nights he would pull me in close to his chest, one brawny arm wrapped around my shoulder, keeping me safe from all the unseen terror of the world that snaps at the heels of little innocent children everywhere.  We would lay sprawled out on his bed while he read to me fairytales and epic stories for hours; his soothing, baritone voice narrating scenes and characters that seemed to spring to life on the bedroom ceiling.  It was as if his voice carried a certain vitality and a whimsical destiny capable of animating the words he spoke as his color-changing eyes scrolled across the pages with great contemplation and attentiveness.

I remember the night of the accident too.  That’s how I met Logan, my little twist of fate.  I lost a man, I gained a man.  I lost myself, I found myself, and then I lost myself again.  Sometimes when I look in the mirror I still get that sickly feeling; that feeling that the person looking back at you isn’t actually you.  She’s a stranger.  She’s factitious.  She’s a sham.

There was that phone call in the early evening two years ago, late in the summer season.  It was that certain time of the year when the air carries both the waning August heat and a cooling wind freighting the slightest taste of fall; that time of year when the leaves begin their metamorphosis, filling in the city’s canvas with multifarious colors painted just above the brownstone apartments and boutiques and lining the suburban parkways with kaleidoscopic hardwood walls.

I don’t remember much other than a distant voice saying things like “Your father’s been in an accident” and “…in serious condition” and “Faulkner Hospital” and “Miss?  Are you there, Miss?”  That voice became incomprehensible as she recited her hospital aesthetic carols through the cold plastic of the phone.  I left the receiver on the kitchen table for that voice to murmur the arcane knowledge of an unraveling life into the air, and I walked into the bathroom to curl up into myself on the floor of the empty porcelain tub. I stayed there for what seemed like a perpetual amount of time before I was able to bring my body to its feet.  It was as if I had been weighed down by dreams of horror and trepidation which had become so real and tangible that I felt like I could have reached out and felt the waves of fear and consternation hanging in the air all around me.

On the drive to the hospital I felt lost even though I knew it was directly off of the Jamaicaway, and as I passed the pond carved out by an epoch long since departed it felt as if I wasn’t driving at all but like I was floating, the tires carried forth by the undercurrent of the blacktop.  When I reached the hospital I left my car running in the middle of the parking lot with the driver’s side door cast open.  I wasn’t thinking straight and the proper mechanics of society were comatose and palsied in my mind.  I was walking down the corridor and everything was shaking and my peripheral vision was defunct and shapeless.  I must have spoken to someone because the next thing I knew a tall, slender, black man dressed in hospital garb was leading me around corners to the emergency room waiting area whereupon our arrival he kept asking me my name.  I kept searching for my voice and my identity, and although I knew it was there somewhere caged up in my heart I couldn’t tell him who I was.  It was at that precise moment that I felt Logan’s hand gently come to rest on my shoulder from behind.  He was a stranger to me up until that point.  Later on I would come to learn he had pulled my father from the burning car and rode with him in the ambulance to the hospital.  That’s how they knew to call me.  In the ambulance my father turned to Logan and said only “my daughter, Daphne Johnson.”

In the hospital waiting room, that assuaging alcove providing alleviation from the white cotton gurneys and intravenous tubes hooked up to the arms of friends and loved ones, I turned and faced his easing gray eyes for the first time.  “Daphne Johnson?”

 

“Daphne?”

I feel as if I’m two places at once, like I exist on opposite ends of a timeline.

“Daphne.  Daphne.  Hello, hey, hello, Daphne Johnson. “

I’m back in the stream carrying me along the present and towards the choppy waters of an unexposed future.  Turning to my right there’s Logan wearing a mask of confusion and exasperation.  His cloudy oracle eyes are searching my atlas orbs for some sort of semblance of where I’ve just come from.

“Hey, the cop’s telling us to go.”

Sure enough there’s that reflective apparition directly in front of us, his hand waving our car on with eager movements of impatience.  As I tiptoe the accelerator and the car slowly crawls forward around the orange cones and filters through the abrasive police lights that minuet from building to building, I feel my throat constrict and my eyes begin to glass over with a thin layer of liquid.  I can feel my cracked jade slants start to leak out as the salty rivulets commence their passage to my blouse, tracing trails down my cheekbones.  My windpipe feels like it’s collapsing in on itself.  Without turning to face Logan, I know he’s staring at me in inquisitive fashion as our car rushes forward in the dark, leaving the orbiting and pulsating bulbs of the police cruisers in our wake.

“Princepessa, what’s wrong?”

His voice is kind now, his words laced with notes of compassion and a soft and steady rising intonation.  My crying is silent at first; a certain sadness without sound baptizing my countenance.  Within seconds the sobs begin to crawl from my throat, initially low-pitched and then beginning to scale steadily above the car’s lull and my own taciturnity.  In the dark, I feel his hand reach across and touch my shoulder just as he had done upon the night of the accident two years ago, that gentle, reassuring grip of his fingers marking the genesis of our relationship.

“Darling, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.  I’m so sorry.  Just pull over baby.  I didn’t mean to hurt you.  I’m so sorry, a thousand times over.  I love you more than anything on this earth.  You’re my little special treasure and I couldn’t live without my special treasure, could I?  Please pull over, Princepessa.”

I can feel my eyeshadow streaking down into my lenses and painting my visage in muddy earth tones and I can barely see.  My hands are white-knuckled and spasmodic and wrapped around the steering wheel, and my entire body is gripped by a tremor rocking me back and forth.  I pull over to the side of the curb just past a four-way intersection and push my face deep into the palms of my hands, letting out a single, lingering sob from between my quivering lips.

I feel Logan release his grip from my shoulder and unfasten my seatbelt, all the while whispering to me, “It’s ok, baby.  My darling little Princepessa.  Shhhh.  There, there, my special treasure.  I won’t let anything happen to you, I promise.”

He pulls my body across the space that separates the driver and passenger seats and presses the side of my face into his chest, letting his pursed lips sweep across my forehead as he’s stroking my exposed cheek with his cupped, slender fingers.

“It was the accident, wasn’t it?”

“It’s everything.”

There in our car, on a busy street, down the road from our little apartment, I find my voice as I’m lying cradled in his arms.  The blinking hazards and steady headlights light up the space all around us.

“I don’t know what to do anymore, Logan.  You remind me more and more of him every day.”

“Daphne, I’m nothing like your father…”

“Logan, stop.  That’s not what I mean.  It’s the way you were yelling at me earlier and how you were just mocking me, not to mention the accident we just passed back there.  I haven’t seen him in so long and…”

“I only tell you not to go because you always come back so upset, Daphne.”

“I come back so upset because he’s hurting and helpless and I love him!  He’s my father, Logan!”

“I know, I know.  I just don’t like to see you hurt is all.”

“If you don’t like to see me hurt then why do you say things with the intention of hurting me?”

“Everything I say that you might construe as negative or inflammatory isn’t a slight towards you.  I don’t mean to hurt you intentionally.  Sometimes I just speak before I think and all the ugliness I store up inside myself I push onto you.  It isn’t right, I agree.”

“You say the same thing every time, Logan.  You need help.  You need to talk to somebody because this isn’t fair.  Earlier today you got mad at me when I asked if you’d take a break from writing to lie in bed and watch some TV with me.  Between work and writing I hardly see you, and when I do see you Dave is over the apartment and you guys are drinking brandy or whiskey and getting drunk and staying up until 5 AM.  When I first met you it wasn’t like this.  You were so kind and romantic and always wanted to spend time with me.  Now the most romantic thing you do is you leave me a cup of coffee in the pot before you go off to work.”

“I still tuck you in every night.”

He seems hurt by what I’ve just said and it pains me to inflict any degree of pain upon him, but the words I speak are the truth and even though I love him I feel the single thread holding us together starting to wear and slowly twist apart.

“I know you do.  I know you love me, but I feel like you don’t love yourself.  How can you be with someone and treat them the right way if you can’t even do that for yourself?  You can’t, Logan.  You really need to show me you’re trying to change the path you’re following.  You need to show me you can get on track.”

“Ok, I promise that tomorrow I’ll call the doctor and have him set me up with a psychologist that falls under my Health Insurance.  I want to change, Daphne.  I don’t like acting like this.  I don’t wish to hurt you in even the slightest degree.”

“I know.”

“Is anything else wrong?  You seemed pretty upset after we drove past that accident back there.”

“Oh, I don’t know.  It’s that time of year when I first visited Dad in the ward.  The accident just reminded me of him and, I don’t know.  It’s been a weird and upsetting day.  I feel all fucked up.”

“Well, that’s completely understandable.”

The love of my live is being pulled apart by Mr. Hyde.

“When we go home I’ll make you some of that tea you like and we’ll climb into bed and watch some trashy television.  Does that sound good?”

I love him, but I don’t want to be anywhere near him right now.  I don’t want to think about him and our problems or about my father.  I don’t want chance accidents we pass on the street to remind me of the difficulties we’re going through, nor do I want his cloudy eyes to remind me of my dad strapped down to a psych-ward bed.

“In all honesty, Logan, I’d like to be alone when we get home.  I’ll go into the bedroom and watch TV.  You should probably just stay in the living room and read or write or something else.”

“Darling, I want to make this better.  I want to work on us.”

“I want you to work on yourself, Logan.  And if you don’t, I have to leave you.  I don’t want to, I love you, but it can’t keep going on like this.”

“Do you really mean that?  Are you really thinking about leaving?”

“If you do not change I have to go.  I promise, Logan.”

 

 

The Tenement

By Julian Logan Spy

 

1

She brushed her lips across his neck, traced the caps of her teeth up to his right ear.

“I’m in love with someone.”

“How in love?”

“Enough to tell you.”

In that sleazy apartment she kissed him. She swallowed the thoughts in the back of her mind, coaxed them into the pit of her stomach. She digested her love in acid and roses, both given and yet to be given. She kissed him hard, stamped her lips against his.
She imagined beaches she hadn’t seen yet and the jungles of Peru she had traversed years ago…the waterfalls she’d bathed in. The cityscape, a distant intangible shadow…out of focus and out of mind.

“He inspires me”

“You inspire me”

“Shut up and fuck me”

His hands glided along her naked body, tracing up her hipbones with his kiss…to her stomach, settling on her breasts.  She lay there placidly, and her body was still and at ease.  The only fight was in her mind, an argumentative and scrolling discourse between the voices whispering into each ear.

He didn’t whisper, just simply bit down on his lower lip and moaned as he entered her, pressed her shoulders into the shoddy mattress.  He closed his eyes as he moved to the sound of the passing traffic beneath them, tires rolling slowly over the upturned cobblestone streets littered with broken bottles.  Her eyes remained wide open.  They looked like beach glass that had just been tossed onto land from the cloudy and tempestuous sea, baking in the salty air under a glaring and radiating sun.

She clutched at his shoulders and squeezed her fingertips into his skin, pulling her face into his collar bone, where she would surreptitiously deposit her half-tears like little droplets of water you so often see on car windshields in early May.  He picked up pace now, pumping harder and harder, biting into the side of her neck…faster and faster, pantomime shadows built to crescendo, cast with reverent abandon across the scraped ceiling, the apparitions dancing and then dying as the streetlights poked in and out from between the plastic blinds.

Her mind left her body and her thoughts went stagnant, like a solitary and tepid pool of water left to fester in a dark and damp forest, as if breathing in his scent was a paralyzing anesthetic and she was pacified by this overwhelming feeling of helplessness.  She was calm, but she couldn’t breathe.  She was irreparably alone in the arms of a stranger who wasn’t so strange as he was a long-lost and purging catharsis. 

Everything in the room was speeding up now: the waltzing light, waxing and waning, bounced from peeling wall to wall, trying desperately to borough under the scraped paper, to find a place to hide from the dark attempting to swallow and digest it, to shut it out forever.  The ghosts of a thousand city-stalkers dispatched passed translucent through the cracked windowpanes and spider web drapes, their eyes glowing red-hue anger, their far-off voices bellowing guttural tunes of panic like a recent corpse who had fallen across the lower notes of a grand piano, playing a song that only silence could take in. 

With him on top of her, wrapping his legs around hers, pinning her into the mattress like a railroad spike latches a torture victim to the tracks, they came forth, ambling slowly, hands outstretched, palms turned outward, a horrible concoction of voodoo and familiarity stamped across the faces of men and women she’d seen sleeping in caskets at funeral parlors.  The white dresses were ripped and frayed, torn fabric dragging across the dusty floor, fossilizing the procession of lost souls.  The tuxedos and suits and collared shirts were faded, caked in mud and dirt and ash.  Electrical cord and Christmas light nooses were fashioned tightly around necks, and the group looked like a chain gang that could illuminate at any moment.

Her body began to fold into itself, muscles straining and drawing taught against her tiny bones.  She was becoming smaller and smaller, shrinking to nothing as he pressed his hands into her cheeks, his fingers crooked and firmly against her skin, as if he was trying to save her from sinking down through the bed and under the floorboards, from being ripped apart by ghostly vermin with yellow pupils and nails as teeth and snakes as long, snapping tails.  She felt an electric storm coming, moving quickly, cutting through the night and towards the bed, could see the arms drop down from the black clouds and hurl lightning towards them: him, her, the ghosts, the rats, at the spiders scuttling around the trash on the floor towards the safety of their corners.

The company of ghosts was leaning over them now, touching his arms and his back as he rhythmically moved on top of her.  She felt a wave of electricity surge through her veins.  She could feel her pulsating temple, could feel her eyes become static.  Lightning was bottled in the room, bringing the dead to life.  Their fingers were conductors; the bed frame was the lightning rod.  The most intense heat she had ever felt washed over her entire body and she pulled herself into him as much as she could.  She wanted to set him on fire, wanted to burn him alive; wanted to see smoke pour out of his ears and that mouth locked open in ecstasy; for his flesh to melt away and his skeleton to turn to dust. 

This isn’t real, this isn’t real.  I’m not here.  I never was.  I’m a million miles away locked in my bedroom, tied to my bed with straps and white linen sheets and the pressure is weighing me down from the ceiling.  It’s keeping me here.  I need to stay here.  I’m swallowing gallons of recycled air and the only song I hear is the low hum of my refrigerator softly singing out through its plastic-tubed throat, its Freon lullaby leading me to sleep.  I hope, I hope.  I dream.  I’m dreaming.  No, I’m seeing.  No, I’m dreaming.  They don’t exist.  He doesn’t exist.  I don’t fucking exist!

She’s back there now, her skin pouring off onto the smoldering bed.  The knives are in the drawer, they’re calling out to her in high-pitched sing-song voices, little girls with silver curls and metal eyes hopping up and down in an abandoned schoolyard where the swing sets hang like living chain-vines, looped-tentacles looking to pull youth away from the world.  They’re singing: “Goosie goosie gander where shall I wander,
Upstairs, downstairs and in my lady’s chamber
There I met an old man who wouldn’t say his prayers,
I took him by the left leg and threw him down the stairs.”

 

The little silver girls are staring at her, crawling inside her eyes to sleep in her mind.  They’re telling her all their secrets, how they desire to dance along her wrists, to fish out her capillaries tucked so snugly under her leather skin.  She’s a rag-doll, cheap material crafted from a needle and thread, left in a damp closet for decades.  Her eyes have adjusted to the dark and now she sees the things that are evil in this world.

The sanguine covers melt away and pour onto the floor, spreading out across the apartment.  Her limbs are separated from her body, but she is void of any pain.  The room keeps filling up as the walls transform into ice.  She takes in a deep, panicked breath and exhales outwards, coating the ceiling in a living red frost growing icicles so looming they look like the stalactites found in the deepest earthen burial chambers.  The rats bob out of the blood, gnashing their teeth at the bedpost and swimming in circles around her like sharks closing in on a diver left behind.  The blood keeps rising, or she keeps sinking, she can’t be sure which, can make no sound, can make no movements, until the tide of death reaches the top of the mattress and the rats climb on, dragging away her detached limbs as they venture off and sink back into the lake of blood, submerging themselves.  Her arms, her legs, her hands and feet float on top, moving erratically like puppets attached to clandestine strings, their masters hidden somewhere underneath a rouge-aqua stage before sinking out of sight.  A thousand bloody fingers move under the water towards her, lift her torso from underneath and vault her into the lake.  The current wraps its force around her, pulls her down the hall towards a wall of ice, cracking and hissing until it breaks away, revealing nothing but a curtain of utter darkness.

Thirty more feet. 

She swallows a mouthful of blood.

Twenty more feet.

The ghosts are hanging from the ceiling by their nooses.  They’re lit up like Christmas decorations.  They watch mournfully from paralyzed eyes as she thrashes against the current.

Ten more feet

Everything is extinguished, lights flicker on and off, lightning fires like the crack of a rifle and the walls explode into shards of glass.  The ceiling collapses and the corpses drop into the blood like stones thrown by children into the sea.  The only noise is a high pitched wail from the mouth of darkness about to swallow her whole.

Five

Four

Three

Two

One

Silence.

 

2

“Excuse me, Daphne.  The tape ran out.  Just give me a minute to switch it here.”

Her vision paralyzes me, leaves my body as cold as stone.  My hands are almost frozen in the air, delicate white doves hovering in place, waiting to be torn from the blue serenity by a hail of gunfire, waiting to flail and falter under failed wings, feathers falling back and forth like a newborn being gently rocked to sleep.  I feel like the bird injected with hot lead, its spirit slowly vacating its body at the bottom of a ditch in an open field.  I’m surrounded by endless space, but I’m trapped.  I could walk out that door, call it a day, end the session.  I won’t.  I can’t.  I can’t pull away.

 

I can’t even look at her.  Fuck, she knows.  She knows that she can control me even though she can’t control herself.  I’m about to look up at her, about to go to a place where I know I’ll sink into those ocean-eyes and be trapped forever, like a figurine trapped in an emerald-green snow globe.

A voice shatters the silence with a slightly-off key note, gradually transmuting into the cacophony of one thousand chanting voices, pleasant but omnipotent, like the crashing off the surf against the jagged rocks far below the precipice of a towering cliff.

“Now-I-lay-me-down-to-sleep-pray-the-Lord-my-soul-to-keep-if-I-die-before-I-wake-I-pray-the-Lord-my-soul-to-take.”

 

The man raises his head, his eyes nervously scanning the room for a possible way out until his eyes lock with hers and he’s stuck in place and time.  Her jet-black hair is tangled and matted against her forehead and her bangs look like snapped wires hanging around those eyes.

“Why the nursery rhyme, Daphne?  Are you afraid of death?  Are you thinking about it often, if at all?  This is a safe place, Daphne.  You can tell me.”

I know how she’ll respond to my question.  Those ocean eyes will narrow into little crevices sunken into those comet-crater sockets and her thin lips will twist and split apart like cracked marble, revealing that fake fucking smile ornamented with offset, coagulated teeth.

“I’m already dead, Dad.  Daddy?  Daddy?  Mr., where’s my daddy?  Do you know him?  Do you know where my daddy is?

She’s looking dead into my eyes, fishing for my soul, trying to pull it out just like an exorcist banishes a ghost from a small child rambling on in tongues.  I feel little pin pricks in the back of my neck and my feet lock to the floor, magnetic shoes and iron shackles around my waist as I cook alive under the overbearing wattage of the incandescent lights hanging above me, waiting to boil away and dissipate into the sterile air for all my patients to breathe in.  They eat, sleep, breathe revenge.

I’m still staring right at her, can’t look away.  She’s fishing in the breast pocket of her latrine-green scrubs for her cigarettes.  She smokes almost constantly, and when she smokes and sings, stumbling around the ward, she looks like a steam whistle chugging along invisible tracks.  I notice her wrists as she pulls that slender cigarette from its plastic-wrapped package, all carved up and raw from beating it against the ends of the mess hall tables, from cutting into it with the plastic forks and knives handed out along with their designated meals and cups of coffee.  We had to start checking her pockets to see if she was smuggling out the plastic silverware for her own detriment, sometimes even had to have a female aide frisk her down and check her underwear to see if she was trying to go around us with it.

Now I see the date etched into her wrist, a permanent scar from being violently embedded into her skin over and over and over again with those miniature plastic chisels.  8/15/1998.  The anniversary of her father’s death.

She’s watching me even more intently now as she slides the filter of the cigarette between those chapped, dry lips and sparks a lighter I didn’t know she had with the flick of her wrist, summoning a spark, then fire like a sideshow magician.  She breathes in and a plume of smoke pours out through her nose.  She’s a cross between Medusa with those live-wire bangs and an archaic dragon breathing fire and a little girl lost in the dark hallways of a funeral home.  She’s my patient, Daphne Rose Johnson, age twenty-two, paranoid schizophrenic, involuntarily admitted to this particular hospital on the twenty-third of April of this year.  She tried to hang herself from the coat-rack in her closet, her deceased father’s belt fastened around her neck.  Luckily for her sake, for her mother’s sake, the bar gave out before she was able to die of strangulation.

“Doctor.  Doctor Daddy.  Why do you let me hurt myself, Daddy?”

“Let’s talk about your father, Daphne.  What do you remember about him?”

Those lips move back together, sealing off that cavernous smile.  Her eyes open wide, trying to flood the room, trying to let out that angry ocean bottled up inside of her.

“He used to take me to the park, the one at Coney Island.  Would buy me popcorn and call me his little princess.  Do you think I’m a princess, daddy?  Do I still look like a princess?  I’m afraid I lost the crown from my birthday party.  Mom threw it out when I started wearing it all the time.  She didn’t like me to wear it outside of the house.  She said she didn’t know what happened to it, but I knew better, I knew she got rid of it. 

She’s looking from side to side, avoiding my gaze.  She sinks her head real low to the table and cups her hands around her mouth at me like she has a secret to tell.  I feel like she’s about to tell me why I’m afraid of her.

“So what I did, what I did was, I lit her bed on fire.  Poured the oil we used for the lawnmower all over the foot of her bed and threw a match on it.  I tried real hard, daddy, tried real hard to keep here there, but she got out.  Ran out of the house.”

“What did you do then, Daphne?”

She whispers to me, the decibel almost inaudible.

“I hid in the closet.”

“Do you think what you did was a bad thing, Daphne?  Do you realize you could have really hurt your mother?  Could have killed her?”

She throws her head back a little as if she’s trying to keep my words from burrowing into her skull.  She seems to almost wince as her ears take in what I’ve just said and I know I’ve hurt her.

“But I thought, I just thought, we’d all be together then.  We wouldn’t have to be apart anymore.  You aren’t proud of me, daddy?”

I don’t want to answer.  I feel like she’s baiting me, that she wants me to explain the obvious, wants me to give her an excuse to thrash about and burn her arms with that lighter.  I know how she’ll respond, but I can’t stop what I’m about to say.  Even though the outcome is almost a certainty, there’s only one thing I can say.

“Daphne, your father died eight years ago…”

Silence.  I can feel her grow larger and larger; can hear her scrubs start to rip apart at the seams as her body extends towards the ceiling, can hear her arms buckle and displace the walls.  I want to run.  I want to crawl under the laminated table bolted to the floor and press my dead dove hands into my ears, closing my eyes and folding up into my chest.  Count to ten: One, two, three, four, five, six, seven…shit, shit, shit!  She’s still here and I can’t move or speak or close my eyes or hide under the floor tiles.  I’m still cuffed to this chair and I know at any moment she’ll slam her wrists against the table, her arteries will turn into battery conductors and she’ll cook me alive like an innocent inmate strapped to the electric chair, my dead dove hands singing me my last rights, pressed up against my ears.

No, she’ll rip me from my straps with those giant, mutant arms, live-wire medusa hair sparking around her head like an electric halo, and she’ll hold me upside down by my feet high above the floor tiles breaking away, falling down, down, down and I won’t be able to hear them when they land.  She’ll take out one of those hidden plastic knives and cut my throat, my voice pouring out with my blood so I won’t be able to recite my last rights, my last words.

“He’s not dead!”

She’s screaming now, the fiberglass panels of the room shatter, little crystals falling towards the ground like razor-sharp bits of ice.

“He’s you!  He’s me!  He’s right here with us!  He’s listening to every fucking thing you’re saying and he’s MAD!  He’s mad at you, but he loves me!  He can hurt you!  I can tell him to hurt you or I can tell him to leave you the fuck alone!

I don’t think, I simply shout the first thing I can.  I want her to leave me alone.  I’m the one in charge here!  I’m the doctor!  She’s my goddamn patient and I’ll be damned if I let her overtake me, let her to devour me, digest me, spit me back out onto the floor.

 “No, Daphne, he’s dead!  He’s dead and in the ground!  He’s not here right now!  He’s not you and he certainly isn’t me!  He’s gone, Daphne!  Gone!  He’s been dead for years and there’s nothing you, your mother, or anyone can do about it.  He was sick, Daphne.  He killed himself because he was sick!  I’m sorry, but he’s gone!

She’s shrunk back down in size now, down to the little frail, sick-in-the-head girl who I first met when they brought her into the hospital in a jacket and shackles.  Those chapped lips are whimpering between the cigarette’s filter, and it folds slightly upward as she bites down on her tongue with her teeth, a slight stream of blood starting to trickle out of her mouth and down her chin.

I can only watch, frozen to my seat as she picks up those trembling hands and removes the cigarette from her mouth before pressing its hot-ember tip into the back of her left hand.  I can almost smell the smoldering skin and it reminds me of my days as a field medic in Vietnam, of the burned out villages my company would stumble across, a never-ending sea of charred bodies and oozed skin and scalded huts and skeletons the size of children.

Before I can react, before I can snap back into reality and stop her from what she’s about to do, she lets out a high-pitched scream and slams both her wrists against the edge of the table.  Then again.  Agan.  Again.  Again.  She keeps going as the skin splits open, painting the end of the table with splattered blood.  I know I should stop her, that I should page the nurse for the orderlies and then dive across the table and grab her, pull her arms behind her, stick her with the tranquilizer locked in my little black briefcase.

She rakes her fingernails across her face now, and it’s almost slow motion for me, watching the little red paths form behind each nail like a tractor tilling a field.

I reach for my briefcase, my security apparatus, my black box of pacification, my safety-net.  I know the three number combination by heart, and I turn those little silver knobs, feel the ridges of the numbers as they meet my fingers.

Seven.  Two.  Nine.

I unsnap the hinges and can feel a rush of air pour out from the briefcase like a tomb jarred open after centuries of isolation.  I grab the needle from its heavy-fabric sleeve and jam it into the female end of the little plastic bottle containing the Clopixol-Acuphase as she winds her neck back then snapping it forward, bringing her forehead crashing down against the table.  I can hear her skull reverberate against the walls in the room with a sickening thud.

Her eyes are rolling around in her head now and they remind me of marbles rattling around in a glass jar.  As I’m pulling back on the needle’s stopper, extracting the antipsychotic into the vessel of deliverance, of tranquil sleep and rolling hallucinations, I notice just how severe the laceration across her forehead is.  It will undoubtedly require stitches and will have her back in the disturbed ward after a brief stay at the trauma center.  She needs it.

“Ok, Daphne, just stay calm.  Just sit still.  That’s a good girl.  I’m going to come over there and give you something to calm down, ok?  Just be a good girl for me, Daphne.  That’s it.”

As I rise to my feet I notice how old I feel, like my brittle bones may give way and collapse in a pile on the floor.  The patients will roam the halls late at night when it’s pitch black, when every light has been extinguished, like nocturnal scavengers with their noses pressed to the floor searching out my scent.

I’m squeezing the needle in my hand so hard I feel as if it might snap, it’s remnants dripping across my clenched snow-white knuckles, her cure and recovery and hope left in little puddles on the floor.

I’m creeping slowly towards her, lifting one weighted foot after another and I feel like I’m trudging along the bottom of the ocean with my feet plastered in cement.  I’m reaching out towards her, about to lay a fragile hand on a bony shoulder when she rears back one more time and hammers her head against the table again, this time with such violent force that I’m positive she has to be knocked out, that there’s no way she hasn’t rendered herself unconscious.

“Daphne?”

She’s slumped over the table, one arm bent in front of her head and the other dangling by her side like a dead tree branch.  There’s a pool of blood spreading out like a waxing flood moving towards the opposite end of the table.  She’s not moving.  Fuck.

I unholster my walkie-talkie from my belt and bring it to my mouth.  I can guarantee myself and the nurse at the other end of the line that I’ll be speaking in broken syllables and fractured sentences.

“Susan, I need a team up here right away.  I need a gurney and…”

Searing pain.  I feel like I’m being stabbed.  I look down and the needle is sticking out of my stomach, just straight out like a perch for my dove hands to rest on.  She’s staring up at me, those ocean-emerald eyes looking straight into mine from behind their masquerade mask of her blood.  She’s tricked me, orchestrated her plan to impeccable perfection, the predator stalking its prey for miles.  Those lips split open again smiling painted-red pearls, and I can’t help but think she looks like a corpse reanimated. 

Everything starts going fuzzy.  The room is shaking and it feels like I’m bobbing my head back and forth.  I can feel the tranquilizer start to induce its handicap, can feel my legs start to buckle and fade from existence; can feel all support start to disappear.  I imagine myself as the last tree in the middle of a decapitated forest, can feel the machine push at me, pull at me, cut into my skin, can feel the roots of antiquity start to tear away.  I feel myself falling as the room spins around and around like a haunted carousel in an abandoned amusement park, the ghosts bareback on their paint-chipped stallions.

As I sink into the floor I stick my arms out and halt my fall with half my body across the table, laid out like a sacrificial offering to be torn limb from limb, innards strewn about the room, painting the walls with my organs to be carried away by the talons and pincer beaks of horrible myths kept sleeping in the back of a soothsayer’s throat under the protection of lock and key.

She stands up under the support of her insanity, a nefarious motor starting up inside that black cavity that is her chest, hissing with steam and groaning as the out-of-practice gears begin to turn, her telephone wire spine transmitting waves of kinetic electricity into her brain, lighting up her eyes like lanterns burning haunting green flames.  She leans forward towards me, almost crawling onto the table, coming face to face with me as I begin to wither away.  She brings her hands to my face and cups my cheeks with her palms and I begin to feel my entire body tremble within the grip of her seizure fingers.  It’s now that I notice her wrists have turned black and blue, reminding me of my outfit in Vietnam again, of the bloated bodies floating in the rice paddies with holes torn through the back of their heads, as if someone or something had drilled into their skulls and poured the life out of them to be sucked up by the leeches lurking at the bottom of the aqua-fields.

This is the end.  This is it.  If I die before I wake I pray the Lord my soul…

She opens her mouth wide, teeth dripping with foam saliva, rabid-animal poison fangs.  The lion and the lamb.  Cerberus devouring lost souls who didn’t see the end coming.  No silver coins for my still eyes.  No last rights.  She’ll swallow me whole.

I feel her inject her venom into my face, can feel the skin over the tip of my nose rip away.  No escape.  No escape.  No more.  No escape.  I can almost see it as she pulls away, zombie-hungered teeth pulling apart sinewy skin, strands of cartilage to be chewed and digested. 

Before I can realize it, I’m looking up at the ceiling at those bright yellow lights pulsing like a pumping heart.  My face feels ember hot and wet like someone has poured acid across my cheeks and I can feel my skin start to corrode away.  Her face comes into view, the evil, twisted grin of a serial killer surveying its work of art.  Her voice bellows like a thunderstorm echoing against the brownstone buildings of a city’s street.

“Can’t smell me out without your nose, can you fucker?  You shouldn’t have done that, daddy!  My daddy doesn’t like when you do that!”

I watch her lose herself entirely, see her hands come together to form one giant fist raised high above her head getting ready to seek her revenge.  This is it.  I pray the Lord my soul to take.

With one swift movement the axe comes down…

“Daddy?”

 

 

 

3

There is a place where those lost and tortured souls go, a place that no person can define with words or shapes or colors or dimensions.  It is a place free of numbers and names and classification of any sort, and if you could see into it, if you could experience it, taste its stale dead air or stare into its infinite void, you would be just as lost as those departed who roam the endless corridors of trapped-mind mazes and taxing time warps, flashing between childhood cribs and late-life deathbeds.

There he is, chained to the invisible walls and crying out for her, not able to make a sound.  He has no friends, no acolytes, no direction, no meaning. 

“Daphne”

Others stumble past him, ghostly shapes fading in and out of existence, paying him no attention, searching for their own answers which they’ll never find.  The floors are paved with broken bottles and empty hypodermic needles and crushed pills and broken straps and silver buckles and shell casings and dried ink wells.  The only sounds carried forth are those of gunshots and the grinding metal of horrific car crashes, of jumbled nonsense seraph-lexicon swearing revenge and reciting last rights, of bodies collapsing and breaking apart on the pavement like the flying limbs and exploding torsos of those who swan-dive downward from a towering, metal skyscraper.

“Daphne?”

This is a coffin buried deep beneath the ground and sealed with cement.  You’re not dead.  You’re still awake and the air is escaping ever so slowly.  The sand is pouring gently from the hourglass.  You are trapped inside yourself.

“Mr. Johnson?”

 

4

Hazy mist is steaming all around me, covering the few inches in front of my face, curtaining my sight.  Where am I?  The fog is so thick I can’t make out any shapes, can’t smell anything.  It’s as if I’m in a vacuumed-out room, left in solitude to wait out my eternity.  The last thing I saw, the last thing I remember, was Daphne Johnson’s twisted, smiling face as she brought her locked hands down towards my skull.

“Mr. Johnson?”

I hear that voice, can feel it cut through that fog and sink into me like shrapnel.  I feel as if I may be dead, that I could be stuck in hell or limbo or heaven or whatever nomenclature you want to give it.  Maybe her father did direct her.  Maybe he really was haunting her.  Am I here with him, in this place?

“Who’s there?  Mr. Johnson?  Where am I?

That voice starts up again.  I can hear each deep breath suck into a diaphragm no more than fifteen feet in front of me.  The fog slowly starts to dissipate as the voice sucks it in, bottles it within the safety of an iron ribcage.

“I’m sorry, he’s been like this for a couple of days.  It’s like he’s been travelling to different places and times in that mind of his.”

I keep looking straight ahead as the figure becomes more apparent, gains definition, that demigod in the distance who keeps sucking down the fog and the room is lighting up.  I look to my right and left and both my arms are strapped to the raised bed supported with padded binds.  My body is immobile and restricted by a white linen sheet.

“Get these off of me.  Let me go, now.  Now!  Now! Now!

I can tell my voice is trembling, can feel the words get caught in my throat as I try to swallow them back down.  I spew them out without thinking, without hesitation.  Everything is white: the walls, floor and lights.  The figure in front of me is an older woman, snow-white hair pulled back, thin face, almost emaciated features, glasses resting on the bridge of her nose.  She’s my aide, Sally Byrns, the woman I called right before Daphne Johnson stuck the needle into my abdomen.  There’s someone behind her though I can’t make out who.

“Sally, get me out of here now!  What am I doing here?!”

She gives me a quizzical look, seems to be searching for words, but can only shake her head at me.

“Now Mr. Johnson, we’ve talked about this before.  For your safety and the safety of other patients we currently have to keep you in isolation.”

“Isolation!  What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Dad!  Don’t speak to her like that!”

The voice pours out from behind Sally Byrns, wraps around her body and hurtles at me.

“It’s ok, dear.  He doesn’t understand what he’s doing.  Mr. Johnson, you have a visitor today, your daughter has come to see you.”

She turns around to face the person behind her.

“I’ll leave you two to yourselves.”

She steps to the side and there she is: my patient, the girl who stabbed me with a needle, who sunk her fangs into my face; the girl who tore my skin off and tried to kill me; the medusa girl with livewire hair and stormy ocean eyes.  Only now she’s different.  She’s all put together.  Her jet-black hair is lighter and straightened and rests gently on her shoulders.  Her bangs are pulled neatly to the side and her eyes look like the calmest waters you see in picturesque postcards.  She smiles at me.

“Hi, daddy.”

Holden Caulfield (Dakota)

The large part of me is him

Oh Holden, my Holden

There’s a small part of me

Where the devil sleeps

There’s a small part of me

He’s hiding behind my teeth

 

My life was:

Twenty-Six chapters

Voices that echoed

Of personal disasters

Thoughts of suicide

And failed endeavors

I tried

A cure in my car

An apparatus breathing exhaust

And carbon monoxide

 

Well, it should have killed me…

 

I walked across the street

Singing “Don’t let me disappear”

“If a body catch a body…”

Man, you gotta catch me

I was up in my hotel

Surrounded by sin and myself

Screaming “Help me, devil”

Help me help myself

 

So I woke up and wrote a note

Penned across the inside cover

In cryptic overtones:

“This is my statement”

And I signed it myself

I signed it for us

Holden and me

If a body catch a body, man…

Well, they better catch me

 

Oh John, your son’s quite the gentleman

He looked me dead in the eyes

Then shook my hand

 

And in front of the Dakota

You signed your life to me with a flick of the pen

I trembled

“Devil, please no”

I aimed

“Holden, please save me”

With the flash of the barrel

I took you away

You dead on the sidewalk

Your wife holding your blood in her hands

I wrote the twenty-seventh chapter

It was ugly

It was sin

The words of the reaper

The lines of a murderer

It was the devil’s plan by my hands

 

The Kid, The Judge, The Killer   

Obsidian floors decorated with candlepin limbs

My boy’s on his horse and he’s looking pretty grim

Women gather up your children and head for the forge

Men pick up your weapons and ride out to war

I swear there’s a meaning in it all

Skulls piled high to heaven

A chorus of songbirds

Sound the alarm from wailing walls

 

And his bones are your trophy, son

Don’t feel guilty

What’s done is done

And it’s what you’ve done

And he’s an empty casket now

Carrion cooking in the sun

Better him than you

Oh it’s true, it’s true

Better him than you

 NOT FINISHED OR IN ORDER AHHHHHHH

 

Sketches in sand, a newborn drawn still

He’s dead in my hands

And I feel like a ghost

Holding a memory I can’t stand

 

I swear there’s a meaning in it all

A body painted red in a shoddy bathroom stall

I’ve decided to move ahead and write my entry early today (to assure it gets completed).  I must say that I’ve felt amazing psychologically-speaking over the last two days.  My body has really adjusted to my medication and is responding wonderfully.  I’m upbeat, hopeful and committed to accomplishing all the tasks I’ve laid out for myself (both daily and over an extended tenure), and I feel as if these qualities now sedimented into my psyche are becoming totally indelible.  I’ve never described my persona as tenacious or claimed I possess a sinewy demeanor before, but I know that these traits are major elements of my complete make-up now.  Little set-backs and minor annoyances don’t leave me fevered anymore.  Therapy and treatment is gradually curtailing my disease and I couldn’t be happier.

So what’s new?  Nothing much…I’ve just been DESTROYING my to-do list today (I’m actually way ahead of schedule): knocked off a ton of job shit, finished every health form, learned some vocabulary, took a healthy look at my taxes, ate, guitar, etc.  Lots more to do, but it gets done quicker and with more efficiency every damn day.  WOOOOOOOO!

Oh, I’m going to Brooklyn for a few days soon!  Ironically, I’m going to see the person ”Brooklyn” who is my friend and future wife.  It’s been awhile since I was in NYC so I’m looking forward to it!

Okey-dokey, time for me to go get work don, son.  I’ll probably do some creative writing later on tonight which I will post here.

Until then,

Au revoir.

I know I promised I’d be writing daily, but I got a little lazy.  Be that as it may, here I am.  I had a relatively relaxing day today.  I met with my psychologist early in the AM, picked up my little sisters from school, read a bunch, played a TON of guitar.  I’ve noticed since I started taking my medication and began talking to my psychologist I’ve become a lot less ornery, more understanding and less stressed in general…essentially my negative and detrimental disposition has steadily started to wane.

One thing I want to work on is spending less time in front of the computer (ironic as I sit here typing this out, I realize).  It’s starting to hurt my eyes and the keyboard seems to take the hours and minutes out of my tired hands.  I’m going to start to limit myself to one hour a day (writing not included).  Also, I must stay on track with my to-do-lists.

Good news, however: I think I’m going to be working for the Boston Red Sox starting in April.  I’d be taking pictures at Fenway Park…so essentially I’d get to watch games for free and get paid for it (…and pretty decently as well).  How did I get said job?  My mom knows the director.  Mom, you rule with all your matriarchal power! 

I’m gonna cut this short for now because my eyes feel as if they are going to short-circuit and all the wires will pop, explode and rip through the lens, chords as snakes dripping down to my lips…

…or something like that.

Sweet dreams, kids.

Au revoir.

Here I am again, dutifully fulfilling my to-do list tasks and preparing for my first session tomorrow.  I actually got a fair amount accomplished today (and writing here crosses another task off the list): Filled out an application, picked up another application, called Roslindale Health, took meds, learned some guitar stuff.  I’m not done yet, but so far it’s been a productive six hours.  Baby steps, man.

What else is there left to do?  Fill out the application I picked up today, make headway into my health insurance forms, make a mix cd for someone, finish reading Kesey, and play a healthy amount of guitar.

I still haven’t had a drop of alcohol since Saturday, and I’m pretty proud of that.  Unfortunately I’ve had a cigarette here and there, but no more than four since Sunday, which when you factor in the statistic that I was smoking almost a pack a day, is pretty good.

I’ve been staying upbeat and positive for the most part, but I can’t shake the thought that I’ve lost Debbie entirely.  The girl is absolutely incredible, amazingly talented, and scary-smart (seriously, if you ever want to feel like a contestant on “Who’s Smarter than a Fifth Grader” watch Jeopardy with her).  Deb was incredibly kind to me and provided me with a healthy amount of insight into my own self for which I can’t thank her enough.  Not to mention, she pretty much housed me for a month and developed into one of my best friends.  I told this girl things I have never told another person, and I don’t know what prompted this degree of trust other than the inherent belief solidified into my consciousness that she was meant to be someone who would provide a life-altering experience for me…it was almost as if I had known her through multiple lifetimes and our paths were meant to cross.  I can’t begin to describe my relationship with Debbie, because I still haven’t been able to fully explain it to myself, though I never felt the need to make sense of it through all the time we spent together…we just existed, just were, and that was wonderful, insightful and inspiring.  I’ll never forget the days I spent waking up next to her and lying in bed for hours talking about philosophy, dreams, religion, and a myriad of other topics…nor will I forget waking up and going on a two week drinking binge with her…or seeing her off at the airport, or going to jury-duty with her, or the way she pouts (which, might I say, is the most disarming thing ever), or her ocean eyes, or cooking with her, watching game-shows, putting a puzzle together, the book she gave me, the valentines,  blah blah blah…like I said, the list is endless.  Maybe our paths will cross again…I certainly hope so, but in all honesty I don’t deserve that.  For now I will work on myself and wish her true happiness and for her to find that place she’s searching so desperately for.

Alright, I must be off to finish the remainder of my to-do list.  If anyone wants to hear some AWESOME bands, check out: The Paper Chase, Anathallo, Minus the Bear, and The Make Believe!

That’s all for now.

Au revoir,

Julian

I’ve decided to try and update this blog as thoroughly and as often as possible, as it is essential for me to write something every day (not to mention, it’s probably therapeutic in regards to my current situation).

Not much doing today, though I did craft a “to-do list” last night.  I must say I’m a bit proud of myself as I have knocked off about seventy-five percent of the tasks and errands I allotted to myself.  I went out and grabbed some job applications (just quit my other job), picked up my little sisters, took my medicine, played guitar for 2 hours, filled out some of my health insurance forms for the doctors, did the dishes, swept the kitchen, blah blah blah.  I actually quite like this sense of order, no matter how minuscule it may seem.

Friday is my first therapy session and I’m actually a little nervous.  Initially I’m supposed to speak one on one with my psychologist and then (this is the part that makes me a bit queasy) I’m to go into a group discussion with other patients participating in out-care.  Though it’s not necessary to participate I’m pretty sure I will.  Hopefully opening up to these strangers, all of whom are going through similar situations, will give me a sense of camaraderie and understanding.

Baseball season starts soon!  Band starts soon!

Until tomorrow…

Au revoir.

It’s difficult for me to approach this subject.  For as long as I can remember I have struggled with depression, some days more severe than others, but it’s always been there.  I have never come straight out to declare I have a problem, but today is that day.  I have a severe disease that affects fifteen million American adults, a disease which has hampered my ability to do the most menial of tasks, to finish pretty much all projects I have ever set out to do, and has essentially left me terrified to even leave my house.

It has reached the point where I don’t even know who I am, nor can I remember who I was before the onset of the disease.  I have lost friends and ruined relationships, lied about the most ridiculous and inconsequential things, and have remained mostly stagnant for the last six years of my life.  Well, I don’t want to lose another year.

Last Saturday I had a manic episode and assaulted my best friend who is essentially my brother.  I’m sure his feelings were hurt way more than any of the physical damage he experienced, but I think it’s important to note just how far I went.  He was attempting to fix a mess I made, and in response to his kindness and altruistic actions, I punched him a few times, split open his eye with my knee, head-butted him consecutively, and spit in his face.  The girl he was trying to talk to for me, well, I’ve probably lost her forever.  I blame only myself and am disgusted with my actions.  However, if there’s any silver lining to this ugly event, it’s that it prompted me to seek help and deal with my depression.

Today I went to McLean Hospital in Belmont, MA in an effort to commit myself.  Unfortunately, my health plan won’t cover in-patient therapy, but thankfully I have enlisted in their out-patient program.  I have already started medication and will be undergoing psycho-analysis and coping counseling beginning very shortly.

Up until this point, I had never admitted I had a problem despite the fact I have been hospitalized before, have attempted suicide twice, and have caused myself extensive physical and psychological damage.  I have put my family and friends through hell and you have all been nothing but incredibly supportive to me.  I thank you all very much and love you all unconditionally.

This is to my best friends, the ones who have stood by me despite all my irrationality when I was lost inside myself: To Vinny (my brother, my best friend, and the guy who probably saved my life), To my mother, father, and three beautiful sisters.  To Dave Redfern, Sully, Amy, Amanda, Drew, Chris V, Ali and Gigi.

This is to all those who have taken me into their homes, to those who have offered me their heart-felt advice: To Ryan Hannigan, Brendan Judd, Jess Lindegreen, Brianne Milder, Torie and countless others.

This is to all those who I have lost and thrown away…I swear, it was never my intention and I miss you all and love you all very much: To Annie Gleba, Debbie Fritter, Jes McCabe, Chris Trainor, Andrew Peshkur, Tony Spano, and Freddie Bachman.  Hopefully one day our paths will cross again, if you’ll have me.

And finally, this is to myself.  I promise you I will beat this.  I have decided to quit drinking entirely and to bring about a cessation to my smoking habit.  I will live each day to the best of my ability as to benefit myself and all those around me. 

Thank you for reading and understanding.  I hope to see you all very soon!  Stay safe!

Love,

Julian Spy

Inner-heat: Bonfire in the freezing cold, mushrooms, detached from all the insecurities that run through us like a multitude of conversations coursing through telephone lines; the viral-blood that runs through black, varicose veins of a dark and colorless metropolis. Debbie. Possessing the moxie, the courage to separate your soul from clouded thoughts of inconsequential fatalities that keep you down in a well, fingernails sedemented into tepid-water coated crumbling bricks. Inner-heat births aqua-lungs births life where there should be death births understanding, or at least the closest thing to it, if it does indeed exist. Cold is exterminated and your body blossoms like a flower radiating under spring heat, baptized by the eyes of God under sun-streaked tears.

Dream (Purgatory – Debbie): Eyes open to a dull, 6 by 9 room with whitewashed walls. The room is ornamented with a sanguine rug framed in gold-trim. There’s a door on the far side of the room and on the opposing wall hangs a large and looming mirror of perfectly polished glass. The door is juxtaposed by a mahogany desk, organized neatly and precisely. Sitting behind the desk is a woman of sixty with luminescent silver hair done-up to resemble a beehive. White, thin-rimmed glasses rest on the bridge of her nose, coinciding with the white blouse and white trousers that cover the rest of her body. Her eyes seem hollow, like you could fall through her just by catching her gaze. You would just keep falling.
“What is this? Where am I?”
“Sweetheart, your dead. The pills you took had an adverse reaction to your body and you died in your sleep.”
I kept pinching myself, slapping myself in the face…but I knew I wouldn’t wake up.
I waited for what seemed like hours until she said, “You can go now.”
I went to open the door and as I pulled the handle everything flashed a brilliant and radiant white.
I was awake.

12/20/2008
We spent the night drinking cheap beer, sitting on her bed, hunched over an end table putting together a one thousand piece puzzle resembling old downtown Philadelphia. She was wearing red flannel pajama bottoms and an old pink t-shirt handed down from her mother decorated with a witch in bold, black print. Her hair, short and beautiful was pushed back with one single, short ponytail sticking up, held in a black elastic. She was still wearing that black necklace with the silver medallion in the middle of the chord, dangling gently over her chest. The soundtrack of the night consisted of Mozart and his Moonlight Sonata, The Arcade Fire and Stella Blue by the Grateful Dead, along with countless others…her lips mouthing the lyrics in time and tune with the demigods of American society. Each time she surveyed the thousand pieces strewn across the table I could find the little girl I grew up with, went to school with… swimming somewhere under the surface of her ocean eyes. There she remained, gently traversing from child to woman, back and forth to the nodding of her head as the sound of music cascaded down the walls.

12/22/08
Made it up in my mind that I was going to go home for a bit yesterday, then decided against it after I realized the city had again been blanketed with snow; a sparkling white quilt covering the trees, the houses, sidewalks and asphalt. Debbie came back to her house with Mario and Fred and a copious amount of liquor. We started pretty much right away. Me, Mario, Debbie and Mick (who I’m not particularly sure if I care for yet) played “asshole” for a bit until we got too frustrated with it and the Celtics came on. Lots of little inconsequential things happened (ie; Debbie getting upset with Mick because of jealousy in accordance to her and I…not entirely sure) but there came a point early in the night where Debbie turned to me and told me she loved me. I was completely and utterly floored. Naturally I said it back and to be perfectly honest, I meant it.

12/27/2008
A lot has happened in the last few days. Obviously, Christmas just passed and it was pretty nice. Went home to eat with the family and to recuperate before heading back to Debbie’s to give her the present that I made for her. It was a keepsake box ornamented with a collage of meaningful pictures on the top of the box, while the poem “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock” ran around the four sides. She seemed absolutely floored when she opened it, and I think I may have caught a quick glimpse of a tear swelter up from those ocean eyes.
After that we were both drained and on edge. We just didn’t seem to have our usual connection for the rest of the night from which we both decided that it would be for the best if we took a couple days off from one another. Up until this point it just seemed like our dialogue was forced, like there was an ugly wall up between us and our words were reflected back at ourselves…or as if we were wearing matching nooses, drawn tight around our necks…keeping our thoughts swimming in a sea of fire down in the pit of our stomachs. Then, I told her that traumatic story from my childhood in vivid detail. Got choked up during it, but wouldn’t let her see me cry. I have to admit I was very thankful as she listened intently, and then had the courage to tell me of her sexual abuse in great detail. This sort of honesty smoothed things over a bit and I remained in a talkative mood as her eyes closed slowly and she drifted off to sleep. I couldn’t. I was uneasy and unsteady, tossing and turning on the collapsed side of the bed. I got up to get dressed and to walk home. It was 5 am when I was buttoning up my shirt when she woke up, turned to me and asked, “What are you doing?” I sat by her on the side of the bed and told her I was leaving. In the following moment I saw her at her weakest as she pulled my thigh into her stomach and closed her body into a ball around me. I could feel her telling me “Please don’t go, I need you here.” I explained I needed to leave, that I couldn’t sleep and it wasn’t meant as a slight towards her. She whispered, “It’s odd seeing somebody do the same things I usually do. It puts things in perspective” before turning over to go back to sleep. I finished getting dressed and moved to the kitchen, closing the door quietly behind me, creating an invisible trail of uncertainty and shaky nerves from the kitchen table to her bed, crawling under her door like a snake on it’s belly…searching for her, getting ready to wrap it’s scaly body around her chest, getting ready to take her away from me.
Drank a cup of coffee and decided I was going to leave her residence at 6am. Started considering writing her a note, about what I wasn’t entirely sure. Suddenly I started writing a poem for her, the first few lines at least. I remember most of it, I think:

The ocean-eyed girl stared at me
In her bed, framed by white-washed walls
Stalked me like a predator, limping down the psych-ward halls
And I thought she looked quite pretty
With her hair cut short and lips painted red
Like she was off to a dinner party
Where the conversations only existed in her head

The ocean-eyed girl set me free
Like a firefly from a little girl’s jar
Or like a widow casting her lover’s ashes out to sea
To let me drift far off

And the ocean-eyed girl kept me close
Like a fly wrapped in a spider’s web
She held me until I could give no more
And she was left to hold me dead

The ocean-eyed girl stayed by the door
Waiting for whatever came next
While the conductor waved his black baton
For the orchestra in her chest

And the ocean-eyed girl was left alone
To sit in her bluebird cage
And when the patrons came to hear her sing
This is what she’d say:

“I have danced with men both young and old
And I have been in love with many ghosts
But the tide came and washed them all away
Like the sand beneath my toes”

“And the women were quite beautiful
With their waltzing eyes and curtsey steps
But when they turned to speak with me
They found that I had left”

“And I do not apologize,
For I neither stay nor flee
For the road travels better alone
When there is only me”

I figure there’s one more closing stanza, but to be perfectly honest I haven’t written it yet. Long story short, after I wrote the first few lines I remembered Debbie telling me she was afraid of the dark and it made me miss her terribly without even having left yet. So what did I do? I climbed back into bed with her of course and continued writing the poem in my head as she slept soundly beside me. It took me roughly about an hour to finish, but as soon as I did I knew I had to wake her up and tell her the poem. I tossed a book to the ground, hoping it would serve as an alarm clock. Just as I had hoped, she turned over to face me. To my surprise as I came into her vision, her face lit up upon the realization that I had come back into her bed. She wrapped her limbs around mine and pulled her body all the way into me. She just starting kissing me and burying her face into my chest. A moment passed and she began falling asleep again. “I wrote you a poem,” I said. She woke back up as I recited the poem from memory. When I finished she looked up at me and I almost could feel her radiating a warm and comfortable glow. “That was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard,” she said. I could tell she wasn’t just buttering me up. She meant, every word, every syllable. I felt an overwhelming sense of comfort and shortly thereafter, I was asleep.

The next day we woke up at 2 PM, both exhausted. She seemed a lot happier and as a result, so was I. We decided to drink the bottle of wine on the bedside table. As we drank it down, we started talking a lot: about our childhood, our adolescence, and all the days in between and before and after. I told her I had been skeptical to ask her about her father because I believed it was something she didn’t like reminiscing about. She said, “I wish you would…because no one ever does.” A series of questions followed: Do you still remember what his voice sounded like, how he smiled, how his eyes lit up when he looked at you? “I remember it more clearly than anything,” she said. “I always wished my mom and relatives had been upfront with me (I believe this is what prompted the topic of conversation, actually).” “I wish they had sat me down and told me “Your father has passed away and he isn’t coming back, not ever. I was four and I wish they would have explained what death was to me. Instead I sat waiting by the door, waiting for him to walk through that door, waiting to hug him and kiss him and have him pick me up and for me to tell him how much I missed him. My relatives kept telling me “Your daddy isn’t coming back, he went away forever and he’s in paradise now.” I remember thinking that paradise was some beautiful, tropical place and that when he came through that door he’d be bronzed and healthy, born again and strong and eager to hold me.”

Jan 5th, 2009

“So this is the New Year”

Hooray for the typical Death Cab for Cutie reference.

Debbie is in Philadelphia.  She left on Friday, right after we got back to Boston from Vermont.  I haven’t been very good with keeping my journal updated so I’ll just try and start from the beginning, picking up with the conversation I had with Debbie in reference to her father.

Her happiest memory with him: “My dad and I would always go for walks around our neighborhood in Brooklyn…you know, walk up and down the blocks just for the sake of walking.  On this particular day we happened upon a street artist and Dad paid him so he could sketch my portrait.  I still have it, you’ve seen it…you know that pencil sketch of the little girl hanging in my living room?  Yeah, so after I get my portrait I’m all excited and we’re walking back to the apartment, hand in hand.  Well, I used to have this thing when I was really young where I just loved running.  Walking for the sake of walking, running for the sake of running, right?  So, with the potrait in my hand I let go of his grasp and just start booking it up our block.  I can remember the wind blowing my pigtails back and smiling real big, like nothing could come along and hurt me.  It was invincibility, the epitome of absolute safety.  Anyway, I kept running until I got to this big old tree stump in front our building.  In one graceful move I hopped up onto it and walked it like I was walking on a tightrope.  When I turned around to face my father I could see him just blown away by what had just happened.  He had let me go just to watch me run…to watch me stay young and grow up a little in the span of one city block.  He smiled real big and mouthed “I love you sweetheart.”

The last time she saw him/his death: “The last time I saw him was a few days before he died.  I was walking down a hospital corridor when I saw him come out of a door.  He looked so sick, frail and thin.  I ran at him and leapt into his waist.  That’s all I remember.

The day that he died my entire family was in the hospital waiting room…all my aunts and uncles, my little sister and my grandmother.  I was looking out the big picture window, just hopping up and down in time with the pitter and patter of the falling rain way down five stories below me.  I just remember really wanting a butter finger.  I turned to my grandmother
“Can I have a butterfinger, grandma?”

She was crying, very gently…faded streaks of tears augmented her face.  She spoke in broken syllables.

“No hunny, you can’t have a butterfinger.”

My mom came out of his hospital room with the doctor.  She seemed vacant, dispondent.  She turned to the doctor.

“Can’t his little girls say goodbye their father?”

He seemed genuinely sorry as he said, “No…I’m sorry…it’s too contagious.”

Back then they didn’t know much about aids…

Everyone in the room started crying.  I just kept hopping up and down.

“Can I have a butterfinger grandma..”

 

Random note insertion: Remember razor scars and burn marks.

she brushed her lips across his neck, traced the caps of her teeth up to his right ear.

“i’m in love with someone.”

“how in love?”

“enough to tell you.”

in that sleazy Philadelphia apartment she kissed him. she swallowed the thoughts in the back of her mind, coaxed them into the pit of her stomach. she digested her love in acid and roses, both given and yet to be given. she kissed him hard, stamped her lips against his. he was awkward but she didn’t care…she needed to feel something.
she imagined beaches she hadn’t seen yet and the jungles of Peru she had traversed years ago…the waterfalls she’d bathed in. the cityscape, a distant intangible shadow…out of focus and out of mind. out of sight but curiously within reach.

“he inspires me”

“you inspire me”

“shutup and fuck me”

his hands glided along her naked body, tracing up her hipbones with his kiss…to her stomach, settling on her breasts.  she lay there placidly, and her body was still and at ease.  the only fight was in her mind, an argumentative and scrolling discourse between the voices whispering into each ear.

he didn’t whisper, just simply bit down on his lower lip and moaned as he entered her, pressed her shoulders into the shoddy mattress.  he closed his eyes as he moved to the sound of the passing traffic beneath them, tires rolling slowly over the upturned cobblestone streets littered with broken bottles.  her eyes remained wide open.  they looked like beach glass that had just been tossed onto land from the cloudy and tempestous sea, baking in the salty air under a glaring and radiating sun.

she clutched at his shoulders and squeezed her fingertips into his skin, pulling her face into his collar bone, where she would surreptitiously deposit her half-tears like little droplets of water you so often see on car windshields in early May.  he picked up pace now, pumping harder and harder, biting into the side of her neck…faster and faster, pantomime shadows built to crescendo, cast with reverent abandon across the scraped ceiling, the apparitions dancing and then dying as the streetlights poked in and out from between the plastic blinds.

her mind left her body and her thoughts went stagnant, like a solitary and tepid pool of water left to fester in a dark and damp forest, as if breathing in his scent was a paralyzing anesthetic and she was pacified by this overwhelming feeling of helplessness.  she was calm, but she couldn’t breathe.  she was irreparably alone in the arms of a stranger who wasn’t so strange as he was a long-lost and purging catharsis. 

not part of story

there are ghosts, there are ghosts.  children dying in the third-world streets halfway across the world.  they look down the barrels of assault rifles as we look at ourselves in the mirror everyday, as we fuck in front of the mirror everyday.  they lie there, cradled in their mother’s arms and baptized in their tears, waiting for their white horse, their plankwood coffin as the western women wait for their white horse to bring them a saving grace, to bring them life, to baptize them in a white and brilliant light.  radiating grace, radiation leaks, hazmat suits, business suits, neck-tie nooses, cellophane dreams and bloody gauze.

the only color of the streets is an ugly red, mixing with the dirt around a freshly dispatched child-soldier.  his eyes play host to the flies as they dance around his exposed skull, as if waltzing across an ivory floor.  and this is why i feel weak, and this is why i’m out of breath.  when i look at someone else, i see a lottery number waiting to be called.  then their white horse will come.  will it sink into the ground, or ascend into the sky, or simply disperse into a million particles to be carried away by the wind like the petals of a dead dandelion.