One drink, she said.
Maybe two, she said, snapping the door against the car frame like the killbar of a mousetrap. The car still twitched as she stabbed up the block, spindly heels banging off the stretch of concrete like an endless series of dilemmas. She was already a block away.
From her purse she produced a headband with what looked like small antenna attached, and she twisted the headdress across her brow, centered now, with ease. With a few minor cranes and modifications, she could always turn into someone else. Thom imagined that inside her body there was a great column of blood, stannic and starched, like a roll of pennies filling the wrapper. Pennies in a wishing well. It was only a matter of time.
He watched from twenty paces behind as the door to Heather’s apartment flew open, as gobs of light and conversation and tinny pop song hooks tumbled down the stairs, out into the street. They can see through walls.
–Heeeeelllloooooo!
He watched as Heather wrapped her arms around her, watched a swirling clot of punch from her plastic party cup cough out and splash against the sunabandoned sidewalk.
–It’s so good to see you!
–I know! It’s been so long!
He watched as Samantha was ushered in and saw the door remain open only long enough for her red arrow-headed tail to curl inside.
*
Thom sat silently in a wooden chair, the costume condom tip resting on his head. The chair’s former occupant, a small fidgeting woman, had sat there curled up like a question mark. When she left, she took the cushion with her. Her shirt had read: SIT ON MY FACE. And at first glance, she had a nice angular face, plain and tan, sharp around the edges. But the thin-faced get away with murder, don’t they, if the fat is stored in the right places. He thought of his boss and sighed. After all, it’s a goddamn clamshell holding up the earth on fuzzy champagne bubbles.
As he’d looked at her seated there only moments ago, in the row and reel of the busy room, Thom couldn’t untangle his eyes from her. She had a face like a ransom note. It hung in colorful splatters the way you imagine old Las Vegas postcards cracked with prickling incandescence. She was sallow and salmon around the cheeks, with bright blazes of aquamarine eyeshade, and parallel etches of darkening cerise lipstick. But when you tried to read it, the details, disrupted now, began to crawl around like impatient neon spiders. There was something truly menacing hidden behind each letter. Before she left, Thom thought to get involved.
–Hey there, where you going with that cushion?
–You’ll find it in hell before you know it.
After she left, Thom drew a cigarette from the paper box and returned it to the pack. Chalk, like chalk for the outline, with an eraser. He took a seat on the hard, empty face of the chair without a cushion and pulled the shirt away from his stomach over and over again.
*
How much is too much? He pushed some of the wine from his mouth back, his fingerprints forming a foggy purple topography of curly lines above and below the horizon of the glass. And as the prolonged callithump went on, women like lollipop sticks came through; count the women who look like girls dressed as women as they come and go. Double Halloween, it was triple Halloween, rolling back and forth, squinting in order to look forty, hoisting up a chlorine-cleaned smile for pre-pubescence. In they came like right angles, like greyhounds, drowsy, wearing the sinister elegance of tan, wrinkleless faces.
All of the women entering the long railroad car room wore long white dresses, like bed sheets. In between drags on a cigarette, the collection seemed to unfold, crease by crease, with more and more white fabric that stretched out into the room. They kept splashing it, two at a time. There seemed to be hundreds of little sheets, white sails pressed together into one massive billow, all cupped and chested in the same direction; a strong enough breeze in the room could slide them across the earth, one way then the next, depending on which direction they all faced.
By the time Thom made his third lap of the party, inspecting Samantha and Heather and anyone who would listen in the kitchen, each sail was indistinguishable—something thin holding up blonde hair, something thin holding up brown hair—and it all just seemed like a kind of yellowing wall paper.
In a secret semaphore, they all raised shiny cellular phones synchronistically to their small, delicate features. From the tornado-green glow of the screen, all of the color was chased away from their faces, and at once Thom was in a room filled with ghosts. He stood immediately and quietly counted out the paces to the bathroom.
*
He could feel where sweat had collected on his undershirt and in hanging pools under his arms. Soon, the collection of noise, the heaping of noise—the sound of everyone talking over everyone talking over everyone over the sound of the singer singing over the instruments over the rustle of flesh against nylon over the sound of digestion over the inescapable operating noise of life—began to wobble until Thom felt it would topple, pouring all of the detached noises, the amputated limbs of various conversations, on top of him.
But the music broke into a soft polite lip, and he followed. He lit another cigarette off a twitching hospitality candle and pitched in a smoke-covered bar or two privately to help along the leaning chorus.
Please don’t be long. Please don’t you be very long.
Thom tipped his glass backward but just let the wine splash against his lips without swallowing a drop. Through the doorway he saw Heather’s outline. The drinks were in the kitchen—they were all in the kitchen, and it would be a hassle to get another. How much is enough?
He lifted his eyes to the ceiling. They were there. He lowered them to the floor. There they were. Every direction he went. How much should be allotted for any one part? Heather had tits like the Venus of Willendorf. Even from across the room, there they were, like insomnia for the eyes. They seemed to have gravity about them, a kind of nutrition, he thought, as he counted six people, Samantha included, clustered around her.
He suddenly began to feel horribly small. Not that he was shrinking, and not that anything was getting larger, but that it had been that way since he arrived, yet he hadn’t noticed until now. Thom could sense it. He knew it was coming. The climate was perfect. October is a lung you fill and hope it holds until April. The last round before it really gets messy. It’s just a matter of time.
Thom walked into the kitchen as Samantha, ruddy with wine, pulled a glass from her lips.
–Get my head around it? I couldn’t even get my mouth around it!
Heather locked eyes with Thom. The room was as still as a Sears and Roebuck catalogue.
Into the frozen collection in the kitchen, Thom reached through an opening, retrieved a bottle of red, and poured into the silence. The wine surged to the lip of the glass and overflowed onto the counter. He brought the glass slowly to his jaw.
–Pardon me ladies, I’ll leave you be.
Thom watched Samantha, looking on as the wine ran in small purple rills from the counter and slipped onto the floor. She cupped her hand to collect the remaining drops, as Thom slid out of the room. Heather reached for paper towel and called after him.
–Thom, c’mon, stay. It’s just getting interesting! I’ll tell you about Tom and Jerry and how they used to drink their own…seed. Right down the gullet.
He opened his mouth to demur, but nothing came out. He waited until after his first footstep into the adjoining room before pouring the entire glass down his throat. He knew what would follow.
He kept trying to walk straight, but could only weave back and forth. A dull ache stirred up from his balls. Two apples being twisted off a tree. A broken egg clung to the center of his chest. He was, at the very least, drunk.
The street was bare. Light hollowed out all it could from the darkness but not a drop more. Leaking off metal tubes, bubbles of white light laced the empty path before him. An alignment of planets. It seemed a mistake to be outside, that at any moment the cool clip of steel handcuffs would lock his body into place. A child’s fear.
He fumbled a pack of cigarettes from his coat pocket, dropping it twice, but eventually brought one to his lips and a flaring match to the other end. He crumpled the pack and watched as it fell to the ground.
Kurplunk.
That should be the sound everything makes.
As he dragged, as tobacco became smoke, something became nothing, he unwittingly pulled open the wrappings of a tiny memory…
He didn’t know how to hold it the first time. The paper tube felt like a pencil but shorter. He couldn’t figure out the fingering on it. But Kelly could coax two pale strands of smoke out of her lips and ring them through her mouth. When the smoke ran up her nose, it looked like she was being rewound. She called it: French inhaling.
She could launch ten smoke rings, one after the other, constructing a tunnel that hung in the still air of the car before it twitched and fell apart, ring by dissolving ring. Thom gagged but forced his first one down.
Inside, the car grew foggier and foggier, as though they were building a cloud. He rubbed his hand that was down her shirt and couldn’t help caressing the palm, where Kelly’s nipple had been moments before. For some stupid reason he remembered a lynch and conflagration sermon from some Sunday school years ago and recalled the teacher drawing a circle in his palm in permanent magic marker at the beginning of class, and he kept showing it to the saucer-eyed flock scattered around a small wooden table.
Thom leaned in, slowly, trying to catch his lips on her breath like a fishhook, but the car was turning into a blue lung that throbbed slowly in an abandoned parking lot.
Thom reached for her chest and Kelly pulled away.
–I’d probably fuck an older guy. If he loved me.
Who knows why she said it. She says a million things. Thom touched his palm and imagined his hand was empty, a tiny circle at the center. Later that night, with the taste of smoke still lingering on his lips, he dreamed of them, cigarettes, but in dreams, the cigarette tips and nipples—hundreds of nipples—were one and the same. Hundreds of packs pirouetting in the air. Blond filters. Transparent paper dresses. He craved them all and wanted to eat them like food. Little salty fish sticks. He wanted to eat the cigarettes and the nipples and to put an end to the hunger and be satisfied, but there didn’t seem to be enough in the dream to kill the craving. He wanted to put it all in his mouth, Kelly and her unseen breasts, and the block they lived on, and Kelly’s older sister with strawberry curls, and her boyfriend with the lazy eye like a lure, and the ribbiting leather couch they used to roll around on when he was younger and under the rule of being babysat, and the couch itself, put the whole goddamn slippery enormous plum of the world in his mouth and chew. It was all so fucking crazy…
Thom continued to walk along the empty street, away from his apartment. When he turned the corner, one hundred thousand flash bulbs dinted at once. His eyes were steeped in thick moonlight. The hanging ball above leaked an ocean of milk.
It was so near. It was a fly ball from the diamond. A diamond itself. He wanted to wrap his hand around it and pluck the jewel from the sky. Study it. Learn by feeling the hollow places and the rocky imperfections. Put it on a mantle. Show his kids. And then crush it like an egg in his hand.
Like it was nothing.
Like it was hollow.
A used up pack of smokes.
He wove and wove, passing house after silent house. Step after step he walked, straddled between the lines of faded paint on the street. He noticed how lights left on at night for comfort or protection broke through, making a softly glowing aisle. The light was for him.
He walked on down the aisle, and his shoes clacked against the asphalt with a developing cadence. Kurplunk. Kurplunkurplunk. The lights blurred. He tried to adjust his eyes but couldn’t.
A hush broke over the street after every step. A sound and then nothing. A stress and then silence. Hushed were the houses vibrating with soft light. Hushed were the cats and the dogs coiled in contentment. Hushed were the homeowners tucked between two velvety sheets underneath a dream.
The whole of the nightworld blurred. Light became shadows, stretching off of objects, whispering to each other. Connecting things. Each step he clapped on the cool street became involuntary, less noticeable than breathing. He was being pulled. Lulled down a sandy river toward the light that rattled against the sky.
The light was for him. He bathed in it, uncovering wings. There was no silence now. Kurplunkurplunkurplunk. He closed his eyes, spreading his arms as wide as he could. He saw blue and red dots, the light of ruined worlds pinned between his mind and eyelids. The dots joined, fingers interweaving, and smashed white.
The light was for him.
His feet pulled faster at the street. The silent houses opened and then began to scream by. His heart pitched his blood forward. He was rising. Off of the earth. Above the street. Above the house lights. Above the twiggy autumn trees. Above the air. Rising moonward. Thom’s mouth fell open, and the noises in his head leaked into the night.
–Don’t you see, these are your lights. Those stars, those are for you!
Kurplunkurplunkurplunk.
–This is your vigil. These are for you!
Kurplunkitybunkity.
–Are you hanging behind the moon?
Kurplusscaprice.
–It’s all for you!
Curious city.
–All of it, all!
Curiosity.
The mumbling of a motor grew louder and louder. His feet were stiff on the street, inches from the curb. The aisle was no longer soft or glowing like rows of sweet candles. The leaves had left the trees, but the branches were thick and long, hanging like hands that cover eyes at a slasher flick. He froze. A torrent of nausea cut his stomach and toppled his body. His palms ran aground and two berserk twitches rippled through his torso. He vomited.
The snarl of metal approached. His neck shivered into a crisis as his stomach broke open again. He must have French inhaled the last one.