Guernica
Nihilo.
“Frank—” she says, and I finally take a fucking step, wrenching open the sliding door to the apartment as she ducks down against me to avoid cracking her head against the metal frame. I’m staggering staggering staggering; we’re a two-headed, four-legged beast, crashing through the sweaty heat of the party like something out of a Roman myth. I’m not sure if people are staring or if no one actually notices; I’m oblivious, a drug-fucked movie star in aviator glasses. I’m a rotten beauty queen, take me home and take me hard. All I can feel is the heat from her skin; all I can hear is her voice in my ear like a hot anesthetic, feeding me lies and telling me how gorgeous she thinks those fucking Rothkos are.
Cut to Camera A.
It’s dark in the bedroom with the door locked shut; the only light is shining through the open blinds from the city outside, throwing neon bars and a harsh collection of hideous Cubist shapes across her face, the wall, the sheets as she sprawls out amid the pillows.
Pause.
Play. Fast-forward, I’m pulling off her skirt, top, nylons as her nails rake lipstick-red stripes down my back; ugly ugly ugly, I’m ruining her, I’m ruining her. I’m Lesch-Nyhan syndrome; I’m in your genes, making you chew off your own extremities. Self-cannibalism; autosarcophagy. I’m a mutilated child. You’ll see me crawling up the basement stairs. Trailing blood across the linoleum, eyes glowing in the darkness like a wounded cougar’s.
Shit.
God, oh, God, there’s a pain in my heart, rat poison melting sweet-and-sour on my tongue; I’m a nervous wreck, you’ll hear my chattering teeth from a mile away, I’m a first-time sex offender, I can’t do this to him, to her, to myself, and, sloppily, I kiss her knees, mouth like a wet bruise. “I’m not fucking you.”
“I know you’re not.” She laughs shortly, a slow-burning ache in her voice. “God, I know, Frank.” A pause; I can hear a distant airplane engine rattling the inky clouds, and “You’re so fucked up.”
When I nod, smirking so sharply that it almost splits my lips, her face twists into impossible Möbius strips of sympathy, empathy, sadness and I can feel her shaking fingers touch my face in the eerie semi-darkness, trailing lightly down my cheek and down my neck, giving me terror chills.
In minutes, she’s practically in my lap, finger-painted, messy and rawboned as an Egon Schiele harlot, snuggling close to my chest and trembling in a way that’s both openly sexual and stupidly, heartbreakingly innocent, like those pictures of little orphan girls clinging to soldiers’ necks.
“S-stop—”
“Come on,” she whispers, mouth hovering like the burning end of a cigarette beside my ear, dispelling my ridiculous delusions of purity. “Come on, Franky, it’ll feel good while it’s happening.”
“And after?”
“Ask me after.” Hot, sweet breath on my neck. The darkness is alive with purples and blacks and grey-green-blues, flashes of eyes, teeth, phosphorescent skin; the bone-cold ghost of my dead boyfriend buried between us in the rumpled bedclothes, and I’m considering screwing her just so she’ll stop holding me.
I can’t think I can’t think I can’t think; I’m a statue, a leering wax sculpture, trapped in the clutches of Madame Tussaud. Quinn’s face in the darkness, bloated and halogen-white… I’m repenting, I’m repenting; I’m a tortured Gideon, handing out Bibles on the street. Her heart beating against my palms, her hips under my hips. I’m a mortal sinner; you’ll find me on my knees before the altar, drowning in the baptismal font. I’m BTK, I’m Jack the Ripper, Charles Manson. Blood on the tile, corpses in the pews.
I’m not registering the words, but she’s whispering I know, Franky. I know I know I know; she’s whispering, I know how much you miss him.
This is pillow talk. This is sex.
I’m tangled up in myself, always wanting what I can’t have; I’m broken. I’m a ventriloquist’s stupid dummy, trapped without my own voice; I’m the guts of your fucking television, unfeeling and convoluted tangles of circuitry, plasticky rainbow wires connecting to feed subliminal messages directly into the pleasure sensors of your brain. Somebody wants me, Quinn. Somebody’s begging for my dick. Naked and delirious, I’m M.C. Escher, sketching impossible contortions and riddles, mind-numbing tessellations and stairs leading to nowhere.
I’m laughing, deep in the wet dark back of my throat; I’m hysterical, I’m so fucking funny you wouldn’t believe. Demented and warped, I’m Lesch-Nyhan syndrome; I’m in your genes I’m in your genes I’m in your jeans.
This is sex, this is gratification.
This is meaningless; nothing from nothing, nihilo ex nihilo.
Never and never again.
And when I wake up next to her, she’s wearing my shirt and her underwear bottoms and nothing else, so crumpled and pale that I almost lose her messy body amid the tangled sheets. Her dark hair is spread out like the spun copper tentacles of a mermaid over both pillowcases, lightly brushing my face as she squirms in her sleep.
My stomach is churning, churning, churning; I’m afraid she’ll stir and see me like this, wired so that the bones rattle feverishly beneath my waxen skin, cheeks burning, sore eyes dull and tarnished with salty mucus.
A guilty Oedipus with gouged-out sockets, viscous dark ruby streaking my chest, splattering onto the marble floor; now I know it’s all so wrong, it’s so, so wrong. A trembling puppet, a coma patient, metal pins swirling around in my brain. I’m a beaten hulk of driftwood smashed over and over against the rocks, porous and thirsty with salt, parched by the noon sun’s blinding white rinse. An outdoor sculpture, a fractured dancer. Stray dogs lick my blistered feet.
Minutes crack and fray like a deadly tightrope until she finally opens her eyes, forcing me to refocus my stare and sending a bolt of strychnine heat slicing sharply through my veins. With no light shining through the blinds from the cloudy sky, she has the ephemeral blue tincture of tide pools and dead water nymphs, curves and angles blurry with refracted light and glassy irises reflecting all the dark brilliance of tannin-saturated cesspits, groundwater at the bottom of a coalmine.
Every inch the victim of a drowning – a damp, twisted kitten at the bottom of some unused well.
“Franky…” she whispers hoarsely, shivering a little, “Come back to bed.”
I can feel flash aneurysms erupting in the soft grey matter under my skull, saturated capillaries hemorrhaging Rorschach blots and Paul Jenkins canvases, the wet dreams of a forensic blood-spatter expert. I’m a detonated landmine, a hand grenade clattering to a stop across a barrack’s wooden floor, the misfiring neurons in your brain. You’ll see me spark against the insides of your eyelids as your soul prepares to evacuate collapsing flesh.
“Please?”
Acrid mushroom clouds still billowing inside my chest cavity, I crawl numbly back onto the mattress until I’m pressing next to her body, both of us lost amid the crumpled bedclothes like fossil skeletons between folds of lead and sediment. Silently, her fingers find the small of my back, caressing the curve just above my tailbone with possessive sensuality that sends chills like silver bullets ripping into my torso— Why does she know how to touch me? Unlike her needy theatrics from the patio, it’s such a familiar sensation, as if he’s the one lying in bed beside me, as if we are still miles and miles from New York, two halves of a shell curled together in a hotel room by the ocean, sheets that smell like sex and saltwater.
I wish there was a picture of you like this.
Blood pulsing hot and fast beneath the surface, Quinn’s experienced hands making me moan out loud, the electric friction of lips touching skin gently coaxing the breath from my chest.
I wish there was a picture of you like this.
He filmed us fucking once, a battered videocassette tape which flickered white with scratches and cracks when he plugged the camera into the VCR. I watched it once after he died, alone on the ratty beige carpet of the living room, and eventually the screams built up so thick inside my chest that I puked them everywhere, blood and chunks of bile and staticky moans still crackling from the shitty TV speaker. My flooded, stinging eyes stayed locked on the moving image – our bodies tangled together on the mattress, my open mouth forming ugly caricatures of pleasure – even as my fingers, slick with bile, desperately searched for the off button. Memories of the first time we played it still bruise like dead weight: his cocky laughter, sitting behind me with legs around my waist, his gorgeous, shadowy face on the screen clicking like a kaleidoscope into beautiful arrangements of lust, the old wounds ripped open under my flesh at the sight of all my sick imperfections caught on tape.
He held me that night, my raw nerve endings snapping and crackling like downed power lines, telling me that there was nothing wrong with me, and I cried and cried because no matter what I said, I couldn’t convince him, and I’d never seen him so incredibly blind and stupid before.
He held me then like she’s holding me now, rubbing the cool skin of my forearms as if she’s trying to start a fire, incinerate me in black ashy pirouettes.
“Frank?” she whispers, and it takes all my strength to choke out a response.
“What?”
“Franky… You’re so cold.”
Cold like a body sunk beneath the river ice. Cold like a corpse on a morgue table. Cold like formaldehyde veins six feet underground. Cold like fucking a cadaver.
“Do you still feel him too?”
Cut to Camera A.
It’s dark in the bedroom with the door locked shut; the only light is shining through the open blinds from the city outside, throwing neon bars and a harsh collection of hideous Cubist shapes across her face, the wall, the sheets as she sprawls out amid the pillows.
Pause.
Play. Fast-forward, I’m pulling off her skirt, top, nylons as her nails rake lipstick-red stripes down my back; ugly ugly ugly, I’m ruining her, I’m ruining her. I’m Lesch-Nyhan syndrome; I’m in your genes, making you chew off your own extremities. Self-cannibalism; autosarcophagy. I’m a mutilated child. You’ll see me crawling up the basement stairs. Trailing blood across the linoleum, eyes glowing in the darkness like a wounded cougar’s.
Shit.
God, oh, God, there’s a pain in my heart, rat poison melting sweet-and-sour on my tongue; I’m a nervous wreck, you’ll hear my chattering teeth from a mile away, I’m a first-time sex offender, I can’t do this to him, to her, to myself, and, sloppily, I kiss her knees, mouth like a wet bruise. “I’m not fucking you.”
“I know you’re not.” She laughs shortly, a slow-burning ache in her voice. “God, I know, Frank.” A pause; I can hear a distant airplane engine rattling the inky clouds, and “You’re so fucked up.”
When I nod, smirking so sharply that it almost splits my lips, her face twists into impossible Möbius strips of sympathy, empathy, sadness and I can feel her shaking fingers touch my face in the eerie semi-darkness, trailing lightly down my cheek and down my neck, giving me terror chills.
In minutes, she’s practically in my lap, finger-painted, messy and rawboned as an Egon Schiele harlot, snuggling close to my chest and trembling in a way that’s both openly sexual and stupidly, heartbreakingly innocent, like those pictures of little orphan girls clinging to soldiers’ necks.
“S-stop—”
“Come on,” she whispers, mouth hovering like the burning end of a cigarette beside my ear, dispelling my ridiculous delusions of purity. “Come on, Franky, it’ll feel good while it’s happening.”
“And after?”
“Ask me after.” Hot, sweet breath on my neck. The darkness is alive with purples and blacks and grey-green-blues, flashes of eyes, teeth, phosphorescent skin; the bone-cold ghost of my dead boyfriend buried between us in the rumpled bedclothes, and I’m considering screwing her just so she’ll stop holding me.
I can’t think I can’t think I can’t think; I’m a statue, a leering wax sculpture, trapped in the clutches of Madame Tussaud. Quinn’s face in the darkness, bloated and halogen-white… I’m repenting, I’m repenting; I’m a tortured Gideon, handing out Bibles on the street. Her heart beating against my palms, her hips under my hips. I’m a mortal sinner; you’ll find me on my knees before the altar, drowning in the baptismal font. I’m BTK, I’m Jack the Ripper, Charles Manson. Blood on the tile, corpses in the pews.
I’m not registering the words, but she’s whispering I know, Franky. I know I know I know; she’s whispering, I know how much you miss him.
This is pillow talk. This is sex.
I’m tangled up in myself, always wanting what I can’t have; I’m broken. I’m a ventriloquist’s stupid dummy, trapped without my own voice; I’m the guts of your fucking television, unfeeling and convoluted tangles of circuitry, plasticky rainbow wires connecting to feed subliminal messages directly into the pleasure sensors of your brain. Somebody wants me, Quinn. Somebody’s begging for my dick. Naked and delirious, I’m M.C. Escher, sketching impossible contortions and riddles, mind-numbing tessellations and stairs leading to nowhere.
I’m laughing, deep in the wet dark back of my throat; I’m hysterical, I’m so fucking funny you wouldn’t believe. Demented and warped, I’m Lesch-Nyhan syndrome; I’m in your genes I’m in your genes I’m in your jeans.
This is sex, this is gratification.
This is meaningless; nothing from nothing, nihilo ex nihilo.
Never and never again.
And when I wake up next to her, she’s wearing my shirt and her underwear bottoms and nothing else, so crumpled and pale that I almost lose her messy body amid the tangled sheets. Her dark hair is spread out like the spun copper tentacles of a mermaid over both pillowcases, lightly brushing my face as she squirms in her sleep.
My stomach is churning, churning, churning; I’m afraid she’ll stir and see me like this, wired so that the bones rattle feverishly beneath my waxen skin, cheeks burning, sore eyes dull and tarnished with salty mucus.
A guilty Oedipus with gouged-out sockets, viscous dark ruby streaking my chest, splattering onto the marble floor; now I know it’s all so wrong, it’s so, so wrong. A trembling puppet, a coma patient, metal pins swirling around in my brain. I’m a beaten hulk of driftwood smashed over and over against the rocks, porous and thirsty with salt, parched by the noon sun’s blinding white rinse. An outdoor sculpture, a fractured dancer. Stray dogs lick my blistered feet.
Minutes crack and fray like a deadly tightrope until she finally opens her eyes, forcing me to refocus my stare and sending a bolt of strychnine heat slicing sharply through my veins. With no light shining through the blinds from the cloudy sky, she has the ephemeral blue tincture of tide pools and dead water nymphs, curves and angles blurry with refracted light and glassy irises reflecting all the dark brilliance of tannin-saturated cesspits, groundwater at the bottom of a coalmine.
Every inch the victim of a drowning – a damp, twisted kitten at the bottom of some unused well.
“Franky…” she whispers hoarsely, shivering a little, “Come back to bed.”
I can feel flash aneurysms erupting in the soft grey matter under my skull, saturated capillaries hemorrhaging Rorschach blots and Paul Jenkins canvases, the wet dreams of a forensic blood-spatter expert. I’m a detonated landmine, a hand grenade clattering to a stop across a barrack’s wooden floor, the misfiring neurons in your brain. You’ll see me spark against the insides of your eyelids as your soul prepares to evacuate collapsing flesh.
“Please?”
Acrid mushroom clouds still billowing inside my chest cavity, I crawl numbly back onto the mattress until I’m pressing next to her body, both of us lost amid the crumpled bedclothes like fossil skeletons between folds of lead and sediment. Silently, her fingers find the small of my back, caressing the curve just above my tailbone with possessive sensuality that sends chills like silver bullets ripping into my torso— Why does she know how to touch me? Unlike her needy theatrics from the patio, it’s such a familiar sensation, as if he’s the one lying in bed beside me, as if we are still miles and miles from New York, two halves of a shell curled together in a hotel room by the ocean, sheets that smell like sex and saltwater.
I wish there was a picture of you like this.
Blood pulsing hot and fast beneath the surface, Quinn’s experienced hands making me moan out loud, the electric friction of lips touching skin gently coaxing the breath from my chest.
I wish there was a picture of you like this.
He filmed us fucking once, a battered videocassette tape which flickered white with scratches and cracks when he plugged the camera into the VCR. I watched it once after he died, alone on the ratty beige carpet of the living room, and eventually the screams built up so thick inside my chest that I puked them everywhere, blood and chunks of bile and staticky moans still crackling from the shitty TV speaker. My flooded, stinging eyes stayed locked on the moving image – our bodies tangled together on the mattress, my open mouth forming ugly caricatures of pleasure – even as my fingers, slick with bile, desperately searched for the off button. Memories of the first time we played it still bruise like dead weight: his cocky laughter, sitting behind me with legs around my waist, his gorgeous, shadowy face on the screen clicking like a kaleidoscope into beautiful arrangements of lust, the old wounds ripped open under my flesh at the sight of all my sick imperfections caught on tape.
He held me that night, my raw nerve endings snapping and crackling like downed power lines, telling me that there was nothing wrong with me, and I cried and cried because no matter what I said, I couldn’t convince him, and I’d never seen him so incredibly blind and stupid before.
He held me then like she’s holding me now, rubbing the cool skin of my forearms as if she’s trying to start a fire, incinerate me in black ashy pirouettes.
“Frank?” she whispers, and it takes all my strength to choke out a response.
“What?”
“Franky… You’re so cold.”
Cold like a body sunk beneath the river ice. Cold like a corpse on a morgue table. Cold like formaldehyde veins six feet underground. Cold like fucking a cadaver.
“Do you still feel him too?”