An Open Letter to God

We lay blanketed with our joint agonies in an unkempt bed; the hum of the streets and the pull of sweat on skin quilted us, and the phantom movements of the passed night’s bodies swirled beneath our heads. My eyes blurred into focus to the four-four rise and fall of Stephen’s chest: inhale-two-three-four, exhale-two-three-four, inhale-two-three-four, exhale-two-three-four. He was asleep still, the blanket wound and pilling about his feet, his neck wrenched at an impossible angle away from me. The gentle sloping above his collar bones was glazed with what appeared to be ash, welded into place with perspiration tapped in equal volumes from both our bodies and dried in their unison heat. He had crucified himself at a diagonal along the mattress, legs braided together at the ankles and arms splayed at right angles to his main. A shock of dark hair obscured his face in a knotted, unwashed halo perfumed with burnt tobacco, and sleep had given his throat and jawline to grey. Inhale-two-three-four, exhale-two-three-four.

He was significantly taller than I was—he always had been—and by that good grace I had fallen asleep in the nook between his arm and rib cage, my nose pressed against a birthmark below his shoulder. I traced a finger through the valley between the protrusions of two ribs and smiled at the strange magnetism that made his skin, viscid from heat, cling to its tip. My lips cracked with the effort of the expression and the warmth of tiny rivulets of blood filled in the crevices. I ran my teeth and tongue across them and tasted their steeliness and the salt left behind by the night’s receding tides. My tongue, as dry as my lips, did little to soothe them, yet I continued to smile, and let my eyelids flutter.

My hand floated to the edge of his jaw unguided, with neither my conscious effort nor the assistance of my eyes, pulled only by some invisible thread and by the dull ache in my arm. A pulse, something more than a simple throb, beat through the muscle in perfect synchronization with the rhythm of his breathing and the beating of my own heart. Like sandpaper, the minute and dense hairs along his chin raked my fingertips, sending a barely perceptible shiver through them, down my arm, my back, and into the tips of my toes. And like a fly to the stick of fly-paper, my hand hung there for years in the relative time of half-sleep, tracing patterns and spirals across his roughened skin, turning pirouettes in the wind and warmth of his exhalations. Without lifting it from his chest, I craned my head upward to look into his face, the popping in my neck like the shifting of gears or the breaking joints of a ceramic doll.

His hair fell in an unwashed veil across his eyes, nose, and mouth and rustled with the air of his breath in spite of its weight. It was the color of unburnt incense, the resinous cones that bide with flowers and spice and stain the fingers a deep and purplish brown at the touch. It was the color of rot and of preservation, of fallen leaves ground to powder with the passage of a thousand feet and turned to paste in the mists of summer morning, of a merlot-capped mushroom slowly disintegrating shed wood, with all the strange beauty of the bruise that has begun to heal. Through the night it had crept glacial across his features, moving in a single ripple, an inseparable sheet impermeable to light and liquid, finally come to rest in complete eclipse of the aspect I knew so wholly. In want of his familiar face, I coaxed my hypnotized hand away from his jaw to push the swath behind his ear—it was almost wet to the touch, and the individual strands adhered to eachother with the same magnetism that had held my fingertips fast.

Numb to the pain of their cracking, my lips pulled further upward still at the sight of him, and my eyelids swung wide and admiring. His skin was nightshade and cream with the tenacity of the early morning light; it was lustrous with his exhaustion, ethereal with the diffuse light of a candle seen through mist. It was mist itself—I dreamt silhouettes into the eddying haze and grazed the length of my hand along his neck in hope of reaching down into the pallor, grasping for the phantom architecture beneath—the surface yielded to my touch, but it did not break. It pooled liquid in the hollows of his cheekbones and the recesses of his temples, in wait of a human touch to set it to rippling. It obscured his eyes beneath a turbid stillness, an opacity in which I myself had drifted some hours past. Like cream and seawater, it ran down the sides of his face until it became indistinguishable from the pillow on which he lay. Purple lattices of veins shot through the stream at its most shallow, beguiling those things from deep inside of him with the false promise of his surface, holding them back an instant from the taste of air. They were borne downward in the current, congregating at the ridge of his nose and at the corners of his mouth, atomizing into his breath, in turn becoming my own. I breathed him in, and regarded the gentle pulse of his lips parting and converging in harmony with the oscillations of his chest. They were pale now in the gathering light, but they had been flushed and luminous the night before, and their touch had tinted my arms and neck with red. I knew them well—their shaping of his voice, their subtle pressure against my face.

I had engraved myself into the sheets during the night; they had crept up around me in a landscape of textile hills and valleys, assuming a vague outline of my body and face. Shadows spindled out from their crests at the beckoning of the wan light, fleshing out my ghost in the linen. Featureless, it smiled up at me through the sallow air, silently miming the movements of the hours I had passed on the bed. Stephen was breathing life into a similar phantom as I watched him, one that would arch its flickering arm around the head of mine in a caricature of shelter and warmth. The scent of him would linger above the pair, and they would lie there together in bas-relief for long after both of us had risen. With the deliberateness of a smooth pendulum, I swung my legs over the side of the bed, taking innumerable pains to preserve the silence of the room.

My feet touched a carpet like a bed of pine needles after drought, and it whispered in plaintive excitement at the sudden pressure. My soles, with skin white from dryness, glided across the synthetic pile with an ease that made me tremble, repulsed upward by the burgeoning electricity between the fibers and themselves. The charge built up from my toes, propagating within the film of evaporated salt sweat that sealed my skin, humming its anticipation along my fingers and my lips.

I considered, for a brief and malicious moment, bending down to touch one or the other to his bare chest—I considered the arc of animal lightning that would spring to life between us, biting itself fast into my flesh and his. It would waver with the unsanctionable energy and heat of its toil; it would fissure the air with a sound half electric drone and half whip-crack. It would be an instant’s bridge across the immeasurable space between our bodies, carving out and stitching together banks of him and me where they would otherwise be long overgrown. In its excitement, it would twist in and over itself in a cat’s cradle of light, a bridge to turn around—then it would fail—invariably, inescapably fail. There would be silence in its wake, measured in the common time of our beating hearts. Then he would stir, his eyes would flick open, he would look up at me through his tangled web of hair, and he would smile, baring teeth that glinted mother-of-pearl in the day’s first shafts of sunlight. His back would arch in a yawn, the sheets that had fused so perfectly to his skin would fall away, and his hair would part like waves of grain before a great wind. His arm would sweep outward from where he laid, his fingernails raking across the small of my back, his careless gesture ironing out the imprint I had left on the sheets. I stifled a laugh and thought better of it.

Instead, I stretched, elbows pointing upward and hands coiling around my throat. Muscles darted like mice below my back, working themselves free from the knots left behind by a foreign shade of sleep. My ribs fanned out and ascended along my spine, each successive popping across the column accompanied by a renewed swell of relief. The dust of the room filled my lungs as I inhaled, and spiraled out again through my nose as discrete flecks of air caught fire in the early morning light—they tickled the back of my throat, and my adoration of Stephen deepened by the smothering of a cough. The dust had settled thick into the pleats of the bedskirts and curtains, paring out everglades from what had once been evergreens. It was quilted over the white of the bedposts, cinders over snow. The motes made a suspension of the air, clinging dearly to the sparse daylight that entered the room through the blinds drawn taut across the window at the far side of the bed. Through much of our cell, they coasted in peace and darkness—yet one solitary band blazed with energy in the lone pane of light that slashed through the gap where the lintel met the blinds. As I had lain with my ear pressed to his chest, the colors of the sunrise had titrated into that shaft like stain into sheet glass, bleeding through in purples, reds, and yellows, and it presently gouged out a ribbon of tiger lily orange across my shoulder blades.

I drilled my fingernails into the weathered mattress, bracing myself against it as I bent my knees and stood. For an instant, I too was dust, hanging in the parched air of the motel room, balancing myself at the foot of the bed as though I stood on the edge of some bottomless ravine, staring down into an arrestingly geometric carpet that held my gaze in its abyss. The blood swirled in my ears, roaring like wind over a salt desert, and it fell in an unceremonious clot from my head. My vision melted away into a blackness perforated by showers of phosphine sparks and, with the room spinning as if on an axis, I pitched forward. Sketches of Stephen evolved from the corners of my head in charcoal and sound as I fell—he would jolt awake to my hitting the ground, bolting upright as though someone had called his name; his hair would swing wild and intractable in front of his face as he looked down at me, crumpled in a naked heap on the floor, and he would laugh with the manic, childlike hysteria that even now startled me to hear; it would begin with an impish giggle and would crescendo into the sparkling burst he delivered always with his head thrown back to bare the curvature of his neck; he would choke out some syllables of concern through the paroxysms of his laughter and he would allow himself to fall as well from the bed, pulling the sheets along with him, until he lay next to me—bruising and flushing on the carpet. Its coarseness would make his forearms glow with the same red under which I would mask the irony of my graceless collapse. We would lay there as the light sifted into the room; hours would slip past us unnoticed, hushed by the warmth between his body and mine.

There, in that half-second of free fall, embedded in the blossoming images of him and me—the laugher, the shying away, the subtle interlocking of our fingerprints—all thoughts of self-preservation flew from me; the possibility of his face creasing in smile, eclipsing all else, stitched my hands to my sides, and blindly I lurched forward. The geometry of the carpet yawned up at me and bared its triangular teeth in a leer that pierced my skin and bore, red and smoking, into the wall behind me. Yet, as I leaned into the fall, the band of daylight and fiery dust that filtered down from the far side of the bed bit into my eyes and shook me back to groundedness. My arm shot outward and made desperate contact with a bedpost, chipping off flecks of paint which compacted against the beds of my nails. I steadied myself on fulcrum feet as my blood subdued its rushing and my vision settled back into focus.

The room precipitated in silver beads from the murk; I took them in and found it foreign to me, an illegible map of a country whose name and topography I could not know. It had lain muted beneath the rhythm and drone of the night, only now coalescing in the silence and cold light of the sunrise. An end table emerged from the corner nearest to me like the gnarled trunk of some long-forgotten sapling, legs banded white where the once-mahogany varnish had been stripped away. Its drawer was ajar, and the cresting illumination of the room was thrown back from the gilt cross impressed into the cover of a bible within. A vase of synthetic flowers rested fraying on its top—a cobalt columbine bowed gently upward and a purple-eyed narcissus winked through a circlet of wild fennel and baby’s breath; their leaves were unraveling with age at the edges, and stray green threads needled out into the open air. The vase itself, simple and sloping glass, was ringed with the browning residue of long-evaporated water decanted from eyes either squinting in laughter or welling with vain hope. In the corner opposite, an air-conditioning vent rattled inauspiciously below a pallid and denatured Monet, preserving the reprinted wraiths of water lilies with wheezing jets of cold air. Mounted lamps hung like Spanish moss from the walls, draped from ornately wrought iron that contorted itself into faces with hollowed eye sockets and gaping mouths. Lacing my fingers through the metal eyelets, I pulled myself further away from the bed and stared into the far side of the room.

Before the doorway, a mirror stretched from floor to ceiling, a monolith looking out over the rest of the room. Frameless, it jutted from the white stucco walls as if suspended under its own will, organic and sentient. It flung the room back into itself—though it was dim and claustrophobic, existing only in discrete nights that touched purely by chance along the paling lights of day, it was magnified one hundred times over in its own reflection. A shadowy intruder trespassed now in its midst, and though it aped my movements as I inched closer, it was not my own. It was a formless, black silhouette of a man; its features had been washed away in the nascent light that broke from the window behind me—it was wreathed in tongues of dawn, standing in a pillar of morning fire that burnt away every vestige of its humanity and ascended like wings along its shoulders. The light flowed around it as it stepped tentatively forward, running like mercury between its legs, cradling its fantastically elongated fingers, streaming down its arms and imbuing their minute hairs with an energy that burned white as tungsten. As the apparition and I drew nearer eachother, its face became like coal, overcome more and more completely by the corona that hung in abeyance around its head. We were a reach apart, with the light smoking in tendrils through the rifts between its arms and chest, and it filled the mirror completely, in perfect eclipse of the room—over its shoulder, Stephen lay infinitesimal on the bed, the rising and falling of his chest silenced with the distance. With the strain and agony of melting ice, I extended a hand toward the seraphic figure, and the light rippled through in a mercurial whirl as its own arm rose to meet mine. Our fingers toyed with the air for some immeasurable time, and after a moment that glinted with eternity, they locked together.

The glass sunk its teeth into my hand, and its indifferent cold was like bile rising in my throat; my head spun, and I reeled back toward the bed. Suppressing a retch, I crumpled next to Stephen, biting my knees enough to draw a trace of blood. I twisted and shuddered on the sheets, shaking my head as if to clear away the residue of a spiteful dream. He stirred in the bed, but for all my thrashing did not wake. There, in the half-light of the streetlamps hanging orange will-o’-the-wisps through the blinds, I reached through the veil of cigarette smoke and human sweat, touched the still slick memory of the previous night, and sedated myself into recognition.