White Noise

The brown cement buildings on my block stuck to their lots like sponges. Blotched from the rain which has made me quiet. In need of something acerbic. Cut open my eyes to a throat-filled fear.

“You know, darling, 27 is the deciding year. Whatcha gonna do with your life?” She asks the question like she’s allowed to smile about it. She drinks like she could any night. She talks like everything that means something was never meant to hurt you. Like she can lie the sound of night with her eyes. This is the sound of night. These are my eyes.

Her laugh. A month is nothing. Slipping your fingers into angels tired of slipping. Her walk to the bathroom. I consider the consequences of following, all these consequences a flat, imagined nothing under my heavy, stupid, arrogant fear. She chose her escape in a convenient moment. She doesn’t have to go. She’s playing with me.

Her laugh as she disappears, taking with her the last happy bite left in a minutes-old joke. How dare I fear anything? The closed door behind her.

The sidewalk fitted with small pools of murder, yellow radioactive soup gleaming up from a construction crack marks the spot some sub-dominant creature tried to rise to the surface but backed away to cower and plan, leaving its failure behind. A yellow, radioactive pain. Rust colored dusklit factory spew might have been a murder. Or at the very least, something organic. Something human. An industrial lust.

In this moment I am holding a beer in my hand and trying to find a new point of conversation. (She’s left us dry and uninterested in one another and with nothing in common besides a mutual fascination with the little glimpses of teeth and spark and unconcerned availability her flirtation offers.) I think at some point I must have placed the beer on the table next to me or on the head of the man I was left with or let it slip from my own to his own hand. Perhaps a hinge in the back of his neck opened and I dropped the can in like one does a trash can. Perhaps he was equipped with recycling or is actually a magical, bottomless well. He wrote for a trade publication. Had black hair. Wore tennis shoes. I wouldn’t have noticed. He may owe me a wish.

The room is full of mazes on my way to the frame of light at the end of the hallway. The maze of women forgetting themselves while remembering to always remember their faces. The maze of women interested in my intent. The clusters of men that secretly hate each other but love to appear interesting by association. A civilized murmur among the coffee shop art on the walls and the coffee shop talk of the party. Why would she dream of coming here alone unless she meant something by it? Why would she mean something by it? A month had been plenty of time for her to accumulate new things. The skirt, for one. The laugh tinted white and strong with violence. Little differences. Little men I knew nothing about. Bigger than me perhaps. Able to break my fingers or my face, but little men I knew nothing about.

I spent a month expecting her face at every door I sat behind. I’ve never wanted a stalker so badly. There was a “Fuck Off” when we parted. Now she stares at nothing on the wall with her eyes wide and deliberately intelligent. Now she’s composed and pretty, possibly two or three pounds thinner and too pristine to have ever uttered such a gross phrase.

Her position: second in line, behind some thin, jacketed fiend with a face that reads “I’m gonna piss all over the walls.” My position: I decide to banish all further small talk. I’m a wolf…maybe even a lone one. I need no one and nothing except to tear that huge white laugh from her throat with my big bad ass teeth.

I offer up a fond memory we shared.

“Member when you told me to fuck off?”

She’s struck.

“Brian?”

“Kate. Do you remember when you told me to fuck off?”

"Ok. Yes.”

“Well, now I’ve decided to fuck on.”

As soon as I say it I know I’ve made a ridiculous sound. Like a burping songbird. She stares at me. I’m momentarily grateful that I detect no suppression of laughter. Maybe a smirk? Nothing. Somehow worse.

She delivers a cheap shot in the form of a slow once-over and says “Have we really run out of things to discuss, dear? Is there only passion left?”

I want there to be a waver in her voice, but ultimately settle for the slight readjustment she makes to her purse on her arm, causing her to misstep for just a second. This glitch could possibly be construed as a stumble and I’d like to blame overwhelming emotion, but I’m afraid a single barrel scotch with two ice cubes and a splash of soda deserves the credit.

“Brian, do you remember how whenever I was annoyed at you, no matter how pissed I would get, that I still couldn’t keep a smile off my face. Just a little one? Like a smirk?”

She offers a smirk to demonstrate. It’s a fake one.

“Yeah.”

“Well, I got over that.”

I privately wonder what sort of contrived shit she’s been reading. There is malice in my thoughts, a mean-spirited sarcasm burning up my loneliness like ethanol. Crude oil. Dirty burn.

Door opens. Exit thin jacket in a dense cloud of piss-smell. The bastard succeeded. Light floods the hall. First time I notice the walls are purple. What sort of idiot, I wonder…I wonder how she got away so quickly, the door shut again.

I tap on the door with sadness and victory set firmly in my eyes. No. Too judicial. Perhaps a bit of understanding in my posture? Have no idea now to act. Who to be as soon as the sound of my hand on the door and the voice from inside makes waves through my ear and is real…really real, I lose sense…of how to be. Alone at the end of the hallway. The dead end of confrontation. I think I will be whatever she wants. Give way to aggression and hope she finds it sexy. Give way to sobbing and hope she forgets it’s real.

Too many new things she’s given herself. The new clothes. The new laugh. The new stories about things she’s done I haven’t heard about already. Her private injustices we haven’t interpreted together yet. I am even…perhaps a story she has told someone else and perhaps been advised on. I tap with my hand again, feeling louder, feeling my face fall with the weight of confusion and worry.

I prop it up by the time the door opens. Only a crack. Three fingers at the bottom of the door. A smell sick and wet. I wedge part of my face that has an eye into the opening. In seven months I never saw her vomit. Her high white laugh hacked into cackles. She defiantly vomits without me. Stories I haven’t heard yet. Laughing days I’ve missed. The joke never stopped. It just grew savage.

She turns up her eyes like the insides of wires. Her face is a wild chattering tree of exposed nerves waving and reaching for me. Thin, screaming fingers of red. When you imagine yourself having no expression at all on your face, it must appear distressed to others. Like when you boil a lobster or a fish. Its eyes blank? No. Boiled. Seeing her on the floor by the toilet in this new way…I have no thought in my head for a moment. I must look boiled. She tries to shut the door again with the same three fingers, grown weak from the loss of blood to the drinking greed of her face.

I examine the mush of piles and broken bits of the street. I imagine places things could live. The garbage cans surely fit castles for rats and roaches and all sorts of microorganisms we fear and most often forget about and occasionally fear forgetting. Attracting oxygen and the ability (with it) to become airborne. Garbage bags rising like bloated balloons from their grey, diseased underpinnings. The brightly colored oozes everywhere. The fear of always noticing. I never noticed when we walked together. I noticed a crack in her hand. I noticed when it healed. I thoroughly examined each eye and places I’d left untouched and the common unrequited moments of sleep we spent just sleeping. The brightly colored oozes everywhere. The mysteries of nature bled dry.

I want to be one of those young, Puerto Rican guys in a respectable, shiny car in the middle of summer and spend the first half of the day being cooked breakfast by a bright, cinched dress with short brown legs that is my mother. And the second half of the day sweating under the rough black guts of my car, tuning and sweetening the sounds it makes. A tuning fork. A wrench. Expensive wax and beaded water and the third half of the day smoking weed and cruising a zigzagged grid of streets with music as loud as the sun and friends popping and shouting like harmonic solar flares in the backseat. I want everything in my life to be washed.

I want the sky to be white like her laugh.

She is silent in the way a wilted, finished thing is silent. A clipped and bitten flower. A bloodless mouse. I push against the weight of her hip at the door. I get in and take off my shirt. She is a very small thing up against a very flat and high and unforgiving wall and needs to be lifted. It takes exactly as much strength as I knew I would need and I use exactly the muscles I expected to use. I breathe in my own comfortable, expected strain. I sit her on the closed toilet like a porcelain doll with a cloth body. Only her head is chipped. Her heaviest part. It sags to demonstrate its weight. I take off her shirt. Her stomach instantly stiffens for display.

I take off my pants and her skirt and each one of her difficultly thick leather boots and each one of her thin, pink socks like a second and softer layer of skin that her small feet somehow need in order to be feet. I let her think what I know she’s thinking. I let her not stop me. The hot and cold metal knobs are these two silver aliens alone on this terrible expanse of white marble planet plunging and rising beneath them. They stand so straight together. I wrench them both and the bathtub fills with hot and cold conversation which I appreciate, considering our silence and the noise of the small talk just outside the door. The writer for trade publications. Her lying, sour mouth. The tottering, murmuring girls lined down the hall, blunt with need for relief. Having to pee. Needing to tend to things. The stress of a jostled bouquet. I could imagine their groans of impatience, but I don’t need to. The tub fills itself and all necessary sound. We face each other on our feet on the tile. I am the only one standing.

The tub brims and fills, eating our feet, our clothes, the last dry island of tile sinks and retreats in quiet, bathed silence. The frame of light flooded. The carpet outside the door forms a soggy moat against the line of protest. I lift her again. Naked, we slip into nothing. I am cold she is hot. I am hot she is cold. We flash back and forth between each other like the timed ends of an experiment on the conductive properties of water. We flash back and forth with our silent nonsense. No laughter. No sky. Naked we slip into nothing. White noise.