Bet you didn’t know the room was quiet. Things were moving as slow as a coasting seagull’s wings. Gradual shifts in light, the solemn way it felt in there, diverse coatings of patterns like some treillage or pergola might make with shade, streaks of sun playing guessing games with mirrors. The better part of the afternoon we spent just lying there, parts of us spotted in dark shapes, making us look like some new species of leucistic beings, the oddness of our bodies in the dappled sunlight. Everything was comfortable and soft and nice.
I was dreaming in obsidian then. Sometimes I dreamed of her, but most of the time it was just swaths of runny color, oceans of melted tin sheets, corrugated cardboard angels, wire-thin cuts in the landscape’s skin, things like that. I would sneeze and the dust motes would go wild, spin and twirl like whirligigs, like comets gone off course, like tumbleweeds, like hairballs in the cylindrical rays of yellow-tinged flashlight-like beams.
The room would always be quiet though. A silence permeated everything, got into your hair and slipped between the blinks of your eyes and slid under your fingernails, made your mind kind of stop, go into a lull, strip the thoughts from the mountains of your head like some cathartic avalanche. It would be accurate to say that my head was clear. I was clear headed. I didn’t have any potato mash or mush or other stuffy errata clouding up my head. The mad have other motives. The sane have their own ways of going about this business of taking lives.
Best bet was to do it early. People talk of premeditation. Mea Culpa. Mens rea. All that garbage. It was more than being aware, being sentient, as aren’t we all anyway, even in dreams, even unconscious, it’s always nothing, and something too. Yes. That was the best bet. Do it early. Get it out of the way. There might not be world enough to hold it, and time will go by like a tea kettle left whistling on the stovetop.
Baby’s good to me you know, she’s happy as can be, you know, she said so, I’m in love with her and I feel fine. Baby says she’s mine you know, she tells me all the time you know, she said so, I’m in love with her and I feel fine. I’m so glad that she’s my little girl. She’s so glad that she’s telling all the world, that her baby buys her things, you know, he buys her diamond rings, you know, she said so, she’s in love with me and I feel fine.
That room, that particular bedroom with all of that light happening in it, it would get so quiet, it would be so quiet that you couldn’t hear. You lost the ability to listen. The telephone lines outside the window, I would watch them writhe and wiggle in the wind or under the bouncy weight of a pigeon, who, like a tightrope walker, would balance, alone, crooked, mischievous and apart, there on the wire, as I laid my head back and gazed up at it, upside-down, unattached, lost, and wordless. The telephone lines danced in the wind. The sun shone in the window. The drapes were tied like ponytails dangling around the edges of the sliding sash panels, on the outskirts of the narrow muntin bars, the loose fabric at the bottom bundled together and slightly trembling. We lay there, on the bed, not talking, not doing anything, just being something, or nothing. It didn’t make a difference.
I’m a loser. And I’m not what I appear to be. Of all the love I have won or have lost. There is one love I should never have crossed. She was a girl in a million my friend. I should have known she would win in the end. I’m a loser. And I lost somebody dear to me. I’m a loser. And I’m not what I appear to be. Although I laugh and I act like a clown, beneath this mask I am wearing a frown. My tears are falling like rain from the sky. Is it for her or myself that I cry?
Perpetrating distraught whimsical nightmares on the bed sheets with slits like razors and the mood was suddenly pop music from long ago from times before things we’d known or cared about even in the most abstract ways of obscure regretful nostalgic pillow talk and the creeping of claws was something and the mattress rips and shreds easily in places and the carmine stains form a most curious shape like some flying horse out of a Chagall and records get dusty and warped while the sun makes its rounds with the moon forever on its golden trail while we no longer lie together and I wonder if there is any difference between what was and what will be.
It is not morning. The light has gone. The peculiar odor of rotting flesh is overwhelming. We would always just lie there. The room is so quiet that I can’t hear anything. There is nothing left. Don’t let them knock over the vase of gardenias when they come breaking down my door. The water will spill all over the carpet. The petals will lose their luster and turn a sickly mottled brown in the pools of liquid. The stems will wither. The opaque chartreuse pieces of broken glass will scatter and litter the floor with their lusterless murk like slick pebbles.
No more rock’n’roll music.
Any old time you use it.
You will never dance with me again.
I think I’m going to be sad now. Leave me be.
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