[one_c_seven]

(1)

in the middle of the night when you turn off your phone and you can finally listen to the turbine whirr of the city at night reminding you, gently, that you do indeed exist

(2)

after a sweaty dream that leaves you sore and unsure and as you try to retrace how you ended up in that you recognize like your name shouted in a crowd the rhythm of their breaths

(3)

they way cycles work: from the inside out like luck: a metronome to memory like gods: even if you don't believe like mothers & trouble: to avoid is to invite

(4)

how easy it was the first time around & the color of their eyes

(5)

that others feel it too the death of summer it's the final rain that kills it not an anonymous rain, like the others but one you recognize in passing the rain that heals the charring

(6)

i've been bleeding all over stuff lately nothing hurts it's not my fault i have no wounds but i've bled red snakes on my bed and ruined all my shirts my doctor diagnosed me "you're fine. go see a priest." my priest diagnosed me "you have whatever the opposite of stigmata is. maybe you're a saint." real stigmata is pain, is what he meant

there was an ancient culture by a river near where I was born boat people their shamans worship a serpent that burrows from their and exits by openings in their palm like a worm through cane like Assisi and his seraphim: all angels are serpents

i don't understand the nightsky here in this place it's staticky violet and ash yellow even bright sometimes and i've heard in far away places it is transparent black and that you can see pinpricks piercing it to show the light that hides behind the dulled cloak

A pool of gold and silver beads magnetized into straight lines and cliffs The water-- blacker and deader than the sky. The world stops around the water's outline, heroic stains of nothing, advancing against the city, try to slowt its growth, before it engulfs us all but:

the city can always go higher, until sky and city are one. It has already started, too. You can see, if you look up for long enough, every few hundred million years a tiny pinprick of shimmering white gold and red will puncture the not-quite-black, the shy purple in the sky.

That is how it starts; dots into beads into drops into blidness.

The Bright Medusa

a searing coiled serpent bubbles, spits and struggles tying itself tighter with each push (bisecting the sky, scales of burning oil) until it untangles everyone.

I had not read Eugene in three years. Avoided him, left him estranger through no fault of his own. I just feared he'd grown different. Deadened.

I didn't introduce her to Eugene in the original she knew him as Yevgeni, not Eugene, not Onegin. They had met before.

She forced us to meet again, adept as any mortician she dug him up and through her voice made him pristine once more; a saint newlymade.

1

suckle on a pen like it's muse's tit practice your technique

2

kill your family you need to be free on Christmas eve(s)

3

keep yourself always about to die

4

do things reluctantly

5

miss your shot and lie about what could have been

6

"...and when the police saw the fire and the smoke, they called the national guard and our office, and when they told the security guards at the compound to see if our families were home they found the three of us sitting in my backyard, drinking whisky. They thought we were dead," the old man said and broke into a laugh, like a coughing hyena, that rippled across the table, everyone laughing once they understood that was the end of the story. I smiled. I wasn't listening.

There are a couple of tricks to working these kinds of card-room. First is, you act clueless. You avoid the stacked tables, and find a low-stakes game, just friends and family. Dress young and ask if you can play with them. You're waiting for a friend and want to play a bit until he gets here. The nice ones will let you join them and take their stacks while they try to explain the game to you.

In rural cardrooms like this you have a couple of types. The old men, who are probably loaded and horny-- not Rich Old Men loaded, like in the cities, but enough to make it worth your while-- the working guys in their twenties and early thirties, they think they're smart and have something to prove, easy pickings too, and one guy that you need to avoid, the local semi-pros (i.e the one asshole who can actually play). You can spot these tryhards because they can't dress for shit and don't talk while playing. Not talking while you play is suicide if all you want is a quick buck, you'll be made as 'that guy' and people will play carefully with you, if at all. People can only have fun at a game if everyone playing it is terrible at it. These types of sawdust joints are basically "the bar after work", and often you'll find several family members at the same table, the atmosphere being the equivalent of a barbecue. So you talk. Or listen and smile. Same thing. Just don't let them see you focusing on the game.

The table I found that night was this old guy, in his sixties probably, shaved bald, smoking a cigarillo. Two kids on either side, nephews or cousins, late twenties, all dressed in functional shirts and jeans, maybe they all worked at the family business. There was also a young woman who seemed relieved to see me. She looked like she was one of the kid's girlfriend.

They agreed to let me join and we exchanged the common pleasantries: Oh you're visiting your grandma! Where are you from? We don't have many tourists usually. No, no, you won, Beatrice, a straight beats three-of-a-kind. You're getting so lucky. A blind is something you always pay. You can't shuffle? That's okay, I'll do it.

Who says what gets lost in the foam of beer and, to be honest, there's nothing worth remembering about these kinds of interactions. Like sleeping, you go in and you come out and what happened in between wasn't actually real. When I was younger I actually made an effort to appear genuine, but between people's general desire to see the best in others and trying to out-drink everyone else at the table, it really doesn't make a difference as long as you can pull off the bare minimum of friendliness.

I'd been having these kinds of nights all summer. Every month a different city, every week a different cardroom, every night an intrusion on a different circle, the most memorable moment between all of them being some random finding their only out on the river after going in pre-flop with a stupid fucking hand. The idiocy of the play and the universe's unwillingness punish the sucker rubbed me the wrong way: is that what passed for cosmic justice in Alsace? The only place on Earth where the idiot at the table gets to keep their money? But that was variance. Variance being the technical term for "god fucking hates you."

That night, though, with the bald guy and his entourage of non-people, a kid came into the cardroom and he looked exactly like me. I cannot begin to explain how freaked out I was at this, it was uncanny enough to make me doubt whether I actually knew what I looked like. At first I just thought of that one song from that one movie, you know, 'well, that's what comes from too much pills and liquor,'-- obviously I was out of my mind-- but the more I looked the more similar he seemed. My sister looked nothing like me compared to this kid. Of course no one else noticed, on account of them being drunk, or unperceptive, or because of the gender disparity, or all three, but I was mesmerized. And I do realize how incredibly narcissistic that sounds, but there's something about seeing yourself out of your own body that is terrifying in a very primal way. In a good way, I mean.

As he came closer to our table, he ruined the effect by wearing this terrible suede jacket, obviously inherited from his father, from what must have been the eighties, the eighteen-eighties. No features, straight zip, loose sleeves, just the worst fucking jacket. The kid mumbled something to the old man, who introduced him to me as his son, Carlos, but the kid didn't seem to take notice of me at all. To this day he thinks we met at the bar.

"My phone ran out of charge. Can I have a beer or something?" He said. His voice wasn't like mine. He was trying to keep his voice low, as if he were interrupting a movie.

"I'm out of cash," his father told him in Portuguese. "I don't want to cash out yet, just wait a bit."

"Yeah, OK. Can I get the car keys, then? I'll listen to something on the radio."

"Actually, I'm going to cash out," I said in mangled Portuguese. "I'll get you a drink."

"Ah, don't go! Give us another couple of hands to get our money back!" One of the younger guys said, who had gotten way too drunk for how early it was.

"What do you have to bet? Your stack looks pretty small to me. I only like big stacks." I said, and his girlfriend giggled.

Then the old man gave me a surprised, "Você fala português?" to which I nodded and he laughed, "And we've been speaking French to you all night! Why didn't you say? It was so nice having you with us." He then smiled to his son and said, "See, there's your beer. Take care with this one, she already bankrupted me."

"Thanks," the kid said, faintly, and followed me silently as I made my way from the cage to the bar, and finally we ended up outside, sitting on the steps to the cardroom, where he struggled to light up a cigarette. I was struck with deja-vu by his incompetence at working the light. He didn't seem to notice our resemblance either.

"How old are you?" I asked.

"Seventeen," he said, finally managing to light it.

"Your dad know you smoke?"

"I think so. Probably." He nodded to himself and took a gulp of beer.

"Still in school?" I took the beer from him and sipped. "Ugh, jesus christ, this is disgusting. Beer." I shook my head. "I don't get this fucking continent."

"No. I just got out." He said. "It's not that lousy, that brand."

I looked him up and down. "Do you have to stay here to wait for your dad?" I gave him back the beer.

"Uhm," he didn't understand the question.

"OK, good." I stood up. "Come on, there's a bar at my hotel. We'll drink something real. Your dad's paying anyway."

At the hotel, I tried to play Never Have I Ever with the kid, but twenty minutes later neither of us had drunk much at all because we couldn't think of a single experience the other had not had (short of a few obvious ones), cementing my doppelganger theory. There was always the possibility that someone who looked just like me had lived a life that approximates to what mine is, only on a different continent, with none of the same cultural touchstones, but that sounded crazy. Doppelganger was a neater explanation. Before boredom set in, I asked him about whether the story his father was telling at the cardhouse was true, about the plane falling. He lit up and told me how the entire thing happened from his perspective.

"Yeah, I remember it perfectly. Me and my mother were having lunch, rice and porkchops. We were just eating, like, no talking, didn't have much to say to each other. Then, like she just remembered something amusing, she says, "by the way, your dad's plane fell." Uh, the worksite my dad was managing and the compound where he lived at the time were so far apart and the terrain in between so impenetrable the only way to get in and out was by this old shitty plane. So he made this trip every day. Anyway, she says the plane fell, and I immediately inhale a bone splinter that pierces the back of my throat," he mimed his reaction, and a recoil. "So I manage to wheeze out a 'what' before I take a sip of water, and in the span of the couple of seconds before she replies, while I'm drinking, little fourteen year old me,"

I just want to point out the seventeen year old referred to his fourteen year old self as 'little' with absolutely no self-awareness. "Little fourteen year old me starts thinking of all the ramifications. What am I gonna do? Do I have to start working? Is my brother gonna grow up poor? It's been ages in my head and by the time I put down the glass my mom looks up from her bullshit salad and she does a double take, I think I must have been about to cry or something, because she's just sort of stunned for a minute before she realizes what she said, and clarifies, "Oh, oh! No, he's fine. Don't worry." We both burst out laughing.

"So what'd you do?" I asked, after calming down.

"I yelled something like, "why didn't you start with that?" and stormed off," he said, smiling and sitting back in his chair. "Did that happen to you too?"

"No," I shook my head. "The way I found out was a phone call from my sister."

Shuffling is one of the few mechanical skills I've acquired. I can't play an instrument, cook, massage, caress either flesh or hair, type, crack my knuckles, fold clothes, roll cigarettes or choke people without leaving nail marks, but I can deal the same hand after you cut the deck sixteen times. My hands are basically autonomous, which is cause for some concern and the premise for a few horror movies. That is, unless they have a deck to shuffle, which placates their uneasiness. What people call "cheating" is what being good at shuffling means. Flashy shuffling tricks is for dealers and insecure barroom magicians. That said I can do those too.

I was practicing palming cards in the terrace behind Ill Bear Hostel, a sort of half-bar-half-cafeteria type of deal with iron chairs and tables and no roof. Just for reference, you understand, I would never try it in a real game, I prefer not getting stabbed, but it's useful if you're ever playing the american students that plague these kinds of hostels. There's not much to do during the day at Ill Bear, I mean there's a TV, but it's in German, and most of the kids took the bus at noon to Vienna every day. The only people left are the recluses, the junkies, and the old people. Those categories aren't mutually exclusive, by the way: junkies are often recluses, like the bitch in fifty-three, and old people usually take their 'medication' far too punctually for it to not be at least partly recreational. Still waiting to meet the old junkie recluse trifecta.

CC-- You know, Carlos. I'd renamed him once we left Alsace, out of a need for symmetry in our names (B & C.C.) and also because I felt like I could-- CC was still at work and it was still early enough for the chef to be around, so I couldn't go down to the kitchen yet to heckle his dishwashing and steal pastries, so I was rotting under the sun, wondering if you could get skin cancer if it was sunny but cold outside, when this old guy drinking coffee walked by, gave me a side eye and then comes back and motions to sit at my table. He looked as if he had been tall once. Droopy cheeks, slow-motion face, black sweater, jeans, slippers, old, you get the picture. I nodded and took off my sunglasses, because they made me look like an asshole.

"A card player. You must be the woman my nephew talks about," The old man said, smiling, in English, the lingua franca of the hotel. "Fraulein Gris. Or is it pronounced Gri?"

The deck spilled out of my hands and the cards flew all over the table at the mention of my last name, incorrectly pronounced as it might have been. Those of us who aren't famous aren't often approached by strangers who know who we are, in fact it's often the start of a troubling event. It had happened to me on a few occasions, none of which I liked to remember. These were memories of school personnel taking me away from recess without warning, of policemen showing up to my house uninvited, of lawyers phoning up about having to take care of shit I didn’t care about. This hadn’t happened in a few years, since I was extra anonymous in that continent, so, while I gathered the cards with a clumsy smile I figured it had to be about the fact that I was staying in the hotel without technically paying.

"Gri. I prefer B," I said, and put the deck in its sleeve and dropped it in the bag between my feet. "You're... Herr Hilbert?" His confusion over Gris and Gris confused me too, and I was about to say Monsieur Hilbert. I wondered how bad a faux pas that would be. If at all.

"Oh, no, no, no. Herr Hilbert passed away a long time ago," his accent was very hard to place. His vowels and cadence were German, but the sharp turn of his 'h's, 'l's and 'r's implied Southern Europe. "I took over after him, but we kept the name. I'm Sal. I'd been looking forward to meet you. I make it a point to introduce myself to all of our guests, but," he said, taking a sip, smirking. "I've yet to meet you. That does not happen very often. Stranger still is that you do not figure in the registry."

"Guess I am kind of sneaky. You here to kick me out?"

He shook his head. "Certainly not. I've been made aware you're staying with Little Carlos. I couldn't bear to deprive the boy of his... fri--"

"Roommate."

"Of course," he nodded. "Carlos, you should know, is my nephew. I hope he mentioned me, he certainly mentioned you. We've arranged for your bed to be written off for the following season. The boy didn’t seem to know how long you would be staying.” He said this in a way that made me think he was probing for more information, but I was in the same camp. I didn’t know, either. “If you do stay after spring, though, unfortunately you will have to pay, or join him in our staff. It is our busy season, you understand, but we will keep the bed reserved until you make up your mind."

"I'll pay if I'm still here. Sure.” I looked away. “Thanks.”

"Very good. I won't bore you with the inane pleasantries polite society dictates. But," he said, holding up his finger as as he struggled to stand up, "Vienna is not a good city for card players, I’m afraid. Vienna is a chess player's city."

"So I've heard, yeah,” it was in all the damn brochures they hand out to tourists. “But we're not really in Vienna."

"Of course," he smiled wide, but it collapsed quickly. His face didn't seem to be able to sustain an expression for long. "Very well. It's a nice day, but I fear it's too cold for me. Let me know if there’s anything you need, Fraulein."

"Wait. You play chess with guests?"

"Occassionally, yes. There's a young man, a very nice Dutch boy, who is very good and often plays with me. I haven’t seen him today. He usually takes his lunch here. Do you know him, Johanness?"

Johanness was a medical student from 41A who was at that moment in 53A, with the bitch I mentioned earlier. They were those sort of obnoxious 'intellectual' couples who enter codependent relationships to feed off each other's misery and read aloud to each other. I knew this for a fact because I had been hounded out of my own balcony by their chain-smoking and sexually-charged mean-spirited bickering not an hour earlier. Fucking Europe.

"Sure I do," I said, looking up at him. "You wanna play?"

"That would be a joy, Fraulein." It seems he misunderstood my distaste of titles as distaste of last names. Never once would he go on to refer to me as 'B.', despite repeated attempts to try to get him to do so.

"Stakes?"

"Oh," he clicked his tongue. "We better make it a friendly game. I wouldn't gamble during the day time if I were you. Like drinking, it creates a dangerous precedent." Later I would come to find out his morning coffees had whiskey in them, by the way.

"Doesn't have to be money. I'll take candy, gossip, your firstborn."

"Firstborn?" He shook his head, smiling. " No such luck. I have no children. But... no, no, that's not a bad idea. If you win..." he looked away for a minute. "I will give Carlos a day off, so that you may go and see the town together during the day. I know this wonderful restaurant the boy would so love to visit."

"What if you win?" I asked, finally excited.

"I'm content enough with finding a player, it’s not as easy as it used to be," I shook my head: it’s not really winning if you don’t get anything out of it. "Very well, I'm a little curious about your interest in my nephew. You could tell me about you, and him. You'll forgive my paternal outbreak, of course."

"Best of five?" I said, immediately.

"How do you mean?"

"We play five matches, three wins wins you the set."

He considered this for a second. "That would take a while without clocks. How fast can you play?"

"Fast."

"Excellent. I have an hour before I am forced to work. Shall we?"

This was a terrible idea. I hadn't played chess since grade school, where I competed in a few tournaments, but against other kids. The old bastard was legit good. Sweeped me. 0-3. The second game I lost in eight moves. I couldn't do anything, I was thinking three moves ahead but he had seen seven ahead of those. He didn’t even make a big deal about it, it would have been less maddening if he had laughed and called me a shit player. No, instead he just sat there with his kind face, making pleasant conversation about whether I was liking the hotel or about the differences in Viennese and French pastries while I was trying not to drown in the sea of possible plays I could take and their counters and the counters of those counters and so on, because beating me took absolutely no effort whatsoever from his side. The games felt like trying to speak a language you barely remember with someone who not only speaks it, but has taught it and is now working for a dictionary publisher. He had the grammar of opening and punishes and counters branded beneath his skin, he wasn’t even reacting to my plays, but rather to plays he had seen in the ninety-fucking-seventies and had just become second nature to respond to them the way he did.

I was sort of peeved that I lost. I told Sal I'd play him again the next day and went to tell C.C. of this calamity. I found him alone, in the back of the hotel's kitchen, all stainless steel and giant ceiling fans, overlit by fluorescent lights, sterile like an operating room. He was cleaning the dishes from the lunch service. I opened a few doors in search for tea or bottled water but he didn’t seem to notice me, so I took it as an opportunity to startle him.

"I've failed you, C.C!” I said as a greeting, after climbing on one of the gigantic steel tables behind him. “I suck. Might as well kill me now and feed me to the old man. Chess, pft. He was probably alive when they invented it, anyway, how is that fair?"

"What are you talking about?" C.C said, not startled. He probably heard me stomp into the room and chose not to acknowledge me instead of saying hello, like some savage.

"Your freedom! I played your uncle and he told me he'd give you the day off if I beat him. It was so hard. It felt like being asked to derive calculus from scratch on my first day of remedial math. Chess is such bullshit."

"I could just ask for a day off.”

"That's not the point! Are you listening to me here? He sweeped me! 3-0, man, 3-0! You know who goes 3-0?"

C.C. looked at me over his shoulder and threw me a little shrug.

"Ralph Nader! The Mongol Empire! Carthage! Fucking losers, the whole bunch of them. Jesus christ. I'm worthless. Ugh.”

"I thought the Mongol Empire was huge and successful," he said after a while, again missing the point.

"They failed to invade Vietnam three times in the 1200s. God, what kind of shit school did you go to?"

"Hey. My school was alright. And you're wearing their uniform, so don't talk shit about it."

That was true: due to an unfortunate incident of me not wanting to do laundry, I had been forced to wear some of C.C's clothes for the past few days. While most of what I had scavenged had been fairly inoffensive (ex: an incredibly inspired black t-shirt with a dad rock band logo on it, a blue-red plaid shirt, a surprisingly high-quality chambray henley that I’m positive was a woman’s model) but the polo I was wearing that day was part of his old high school uniform, which his entire class had covered with supportive messages about the future and cute drawings and sweet requests that he keep in touch and such things. I already held a deep disgust for polos, but this one was particularly repulsive due to all the saccharine crap scribbled on it. I can’t fathom why he kept it or more importantly, why he thought it would be a good idea to bring the abomination to Austria when there was limited space available in his suitcase.

"You should buy some chess theory books and play him again, maybe."

"I need a tutor, is what I need. Who do we know that's good at chess?"

"That might work too. I don't think anyone in our floor plays chess, I mean, they haven't said anything about it," he took off his plastic gloves and walked up to me. "You know we use this table to for fish prep, right."

Not sure why that's relevant here, but, yeah, I do remember the first time it happened. It was during a trip with my roommate, during my gap year, so like, seven, eight years ago? We had a couple of days to burn before taking the ferry back home, so we stayed at her grandma's farmhouse for the weekend.

I had to drive the whole six hours there, and two more on top because she insisted we turn around to retrieve both her fancy cigarettes and her (non-fancy) sunglasses. Bab's ability as a navigator was suspect, to say the least, since she had been under varying degrees of intoxication for the entire year.

What the locals don't tell you about the wetlands, though, is the sheer number of mosquitoes and worms and flying worms roaming around, they don't have the swollen bites or people being harassed by hordes of horrible flying crap in those pretty Monet paintings. We were pretending to be outside to witness the beauty of nature and/or the sunset, but we were actually hanging out inside our car, because nature is gross and doesn't have built-in cup holders or CD players.

"Would you close your door? I can't relax when I'm being bled out," I asked. We had barely gotten to the farmhouse, and my arms were already growing a small mountain range of bite marks.

"But I'm gonna smoke," she said, the implication being that it was my fault that the door was open since I would object to an ash-smelling car.

"Then why don't we just go inside? We could watch the sunset through the window."

"We can't."

"Oh my god, you forgot the keys." There was no immediate answer so I assumed that was the case. "You're shitting me!"

"I have the keys, god. We just can't do this inside."

I gave her a few seconds to continue explanaining, but after a few seconds of silent shuffling of the crap in the glovebox it became clear I would have to ask, "Why not?"

She looked sideways. "Because it's my grandma's house, man."

"How is that a reason?"

"It just feels wrong."

"Do you even remember your grandmother? Like, at all?" I asked.

"Yeah. I met her when I was a kid."

"What was she like?"

"Old. She cooked and cleaned all day, even when no one was there." Babs handed me a dripping-wet beer with sandy patches at the bottom. We'd forgotten to buy more ice while we were in the city. "I don't really get that. Seems like she just did it to keep busy."

"I don't know. I like cleaning."

"I know." She pushed her seat back and lit one of the oh-so-important cigarettes, and its smoke was just as acrid as any other, that's to say, not worth the extra hours I had to drive for them. I turned down all the windows as a form of passive protest, even though her door was open and the car was parked. "I remember we were on a roadtrip. We were all coming down here for a family gathering. Must have been Christmas or something. We had to come in three separate cars. They basically put all the old women and my mother and me in one car. Everyone had their own seats and I had the choice of sitting in the middle spot or the floor. I was small enough to roll around back there, I must have been like six, maybe? They forgot about me real quick, or at least they figured I wasn't paying attention, 'cause the conversation turned to sex like half an hour into the trip. They had a cutesy name for it, I can't remember what it was. Something to do with cutlery? Anyway, I'm on the floor of the backseat, resting my head on someone's feet and I was reading this dinosaur dictionary--"

"What the hell is a dinosaur dictionary?" I'd known Babs long enough to tell when she was beginning to trip. Symptoms: Longwindedness, forgetting nouns, an inappropriate desire to listen to Pink Floyd, and acute cases of "I'm feeling it, dude."

Babs frowned. "A book that lists all the kinds of dinosaur. What else would it be?"

"That's a dinosaur encyclopedia." I said, while flipping through our CD binder for sunset-and-beer music, an elusive genre. "A dinosaur dictionary would be like a dictionary of a dinosaur language."

"Yeah, yeah," she threw the butt of the cigarette out the window, and it landed on the dead grass in front of the hacienda, the can-ashtray on the dashboard having been demoted to a mere lit-cigarette-holder. "A dinosaur book. Not important. I wasn't really reading it. I mean, if they were trying to trick me, it meant it was important, right? So they talk about sex, about whose son is marrying whom, about the 'good old days in this country', etc. My great aunt is talking about soldiers and shit, which I'm pretty sure was bullshit, and my grandmother is going on about how back in this ranch they all used to go around barefoot and never got sick, that kinda thing. Now keep in mind, they thought I was just reading the dinosaur thing, and I'm not even supposed to be listening."

"Mm-hmm. I can't choose what to put on," I said, and processed her story for a second. "Are we just ignoring the fact that you knew about sex when you were six? That's pretty--"

"So! She starts talking about how when she was young, still living here, every week this guy with a truck would come up, a cousin or something, and she would help load and unload sometimes, you know? But this time she's unloading some sacks, and in the back in the truck there's this dead animal. It's like a dog, but like THIS big, like the whole width of the truck, and it has these wounds, these dry splotches of blood on its side, but that's not even the gross part. Its snout is like bulbous and swollen, like it was deformed, and it's fur turned blue like halfway from their roots, super gross. The creepy thing about it was its smell. She said it smelt like a tug on your spine. So she's out there, staring at this cancerous horse-dog and trying not to puke and the cousin comes back and catches her staring at the thing. He doesn't say anything, just glares at her and covers it up with a tarp, and leaves. OK, kinda rude, but she doesn't think much of it. That night she brings the dog-thing up during dinner and her parents just freak the fuck out! Her dad tells her to 'never speak of that again,'" She mimed the deep voice of her great-grandfather with a surprising vocal range. "And her mother just loses it and starts doing that bead thing Catholics do."

"Praying the rosary?"

"Irrelevant. The point is that it's just getting dark on the way here, and six year old me just heard a horrible story that wasn't even framed as a spooky story so it's probably true, so I'm scared shitless about blue monsters roaming around this fucking place," she says stepping out of the car, and gesturing towards the bog and kicking up some dirt, "All this dead shit you see right now? This how this is when it's nice. During rain season, the whole road up to here gets flooded to shit so it turns into like an actual swamp on the way up. I couldn't sleep for a week. Sometimes the cows would make some noise at night and I would just go hide in the attic. I mean I figured dog-things didn't know how to pull down the stair thingy."

"A safe assumption." I said, finally deciding to play some nocturnes.

"But now that I am no longer scared of hypothetical deformed dog, the really fucked up part was my great-grandpa and great-grandma. Who does that? Like they got mad at her for what? Finding out about some monster that everyone knew about but her?"

"Yeah, I mean, that's not really normal, but I think the dog thing is weirder."

"What? It was probably just like a wolf that got smashed into a recently painted wall or something. Or, what, are you gonna be my mom and guess it was a demon dog?"

"No, I mean, uh, they don't have wolves here. Maybe it was, I don't know, a jaguar or something?"

"I don't know, man."

I clicked my tongue. "You know, you always do this, you know. "You mind if I put on some nocturnes? I can't find any sunset-appropriate music."

"I always do what?"

"You get riled up about something weird when you drop acid and then you spend all night thinking about it and you freak out and it's a whole thing. Like when you found the dead cat at that party? Or when you watched The Shining? So, nocturnes? Yes, no?"

"What? I'm just telling you a story about my grandma, man. It's not even about the weird dog."

"Jaguar. Maybe."

A few hours later, I went out to find Babs before she got lost in the marsh and became a feral child. I found snoring, lying on the roof of the car, her limp arms falling on either side. I opened one door and used the inside of the car as a step to get me up to her height. Between the wind blowing her hair into my face and the absolute pitch black of rural nighttime, I couldn't see anything.

"I drew it, B," she said, woken by the movement of the car. The deep relaxation in her face made her look like an entirely different person from her usual high-strung, tic-prone self. Being the weird girl she was, she got prettier after waking up. "It was huge."

"See what? The jaguar-- the blue thing?"

"What? No, no, the moon," she motioned her head towards the half moon behind the clouds. "I drew it falling on Willemstaad. And you were there. And Rory, too, and I was there, and--"

I had gotten accustomed to Bab's rambling episodes by then, so I just nodded along and checked her pulse with two fingers on her carotid. She didn't register my touch at all. She felt cold and her skin was sticky from sweat. Her pulse over 100, a bit alarming, so I helped her come down and led her in the house while she continued to talk. When people are in this state, they don't really talk for conversational purposes; it's the lexical equivalent of a drunk guy projectile-vomiting.

She kept on talking in between rapid-fire breaths and swallowing nothing, so I sat her in the main bedroom and went off to find her some chocolate milk while the verbal torrent of nonsense thinned out into stream.

"I don't know why we're here, this place, this place is-- it's -- what are we doing? We need to go back. We shouldn't be here, this place--" She was saying, as I came back.

"It's OK. We'll go back tomorrow, if you want." I was lying, but she couldn't know that. I wanted to take the day off and watch a whole DVD case of the Twilight Zone the next day.

"Did you close the doors? All the doors? That one," she said pointing to the bedroom door, which was in fact closed. "And the front door and the sliding door and the windows, you should close the curtains, where are the cigs? Do we have any? Do we?" Her eyes were darting all over the place, and her hands groped every pocket she had trying to find the pack. She went over the pack several times but didn't notice.

"Yes, they're all closed. Nothings getting in, Babs, don't worry. This is a dead county," I said, helping her take off her jacket.

Her eyes widened and she turned to me, whispering "Don't say that." That was my bad. She was very suggestive in that state. A few weeks ago she freaked out because Schubert sounded "like oblivion."

"Sorry. Doors are closed." I pulled out her cigarettes from her front jacket pocket and put one on her lips. I took the lighter from her shaking hands and lit it, turning away from the smoke.

"I don't want you leaving while I'm asleep I don't want to wake up alone in this place," she was shaking ash all over the covers, but I didn't really mind, not as much as it would if it weren't for the smoke in my face. "Why did I even want to come here? What made me? Jesus christ."

"You want to watch a movie?" I asked, sitting next to her and pulling up her laptop. "It's about one idiot falling in love with another idiot, and then they break up and it's a whole thing."

"What?"

"It's just a movie I've been meaning to watch," I said, then remembered something that might entice her. "The coloring is like Amelie. You remember? You liked that last time you were tripping."

Too much pupil, jesus we need some iris, already we're sweating sugar our clothes caramelized hours ago we're nocturnes-soaked incoherent but

ache-paralyzed and overwhelmed colors are too bright stop fucking with the saturation douche fuck you sun morning groans like a bus horn before a crash 'Maybe we shouldn't sleep under waterfalls.'

Was that you or me? "I don't know," in unison.

Hangover for two, and ramen, to go. Please.

I think the original idea for the duet came from this thing I just found:

Wish You Were Cruel

B:

LL says she forgot how to sleep, and they're cheap so why am i making a big deal out of a few pills. I say, maybe we could just not watch House MD.

She gave me some once, then she got mad when I couldn't get high then she was sad, for the same reason

LL says she's a terrible person and pauses the x-files Then she says I am too slams the door on her way out two hours later she slams it again she's brought kebab

LL reads books, she knows dosages and interaction tables and ballet and Latin and how not to OD, even when I'm asleep and she wants a kick

she once said she's a narcissist i told her she was drunk then she said I was something else too but she didn't remember the word you're something pathological too she said then she stumbled and couldn't walk anymore so I carried her back home

a high-school friend got married B says we're dying alone next to each other i don't feel moribund but she probably knows best

spite is the best reason to get married she replies letting her empty bottle fall off the roof not like you have anything better to do

LL:

I hate being here I used to say that a lot when bored and restless, when the air is too hot, whenever we arrived somewhere, when B couldn't get his dick up, but i've come to realize that the "here" is misleading redundant i've yet to find a place in which i didn't hate being

i told B it must be exhausting being the only thing I care about it was a compliment he said he hadn't noticed he is not malicious he is thoughtless without thought, he does or doesn't somehow, i think this is worse he isn't alive not like you or me he happens

B says I must have missed class the day they taught how to bang I fail to see how that is a good thing but I am watching TV so I just say

thanks,

We finish the night before shipping. The sculpted glass is still warm, and the flakes of dancing smoke dot the tar water within. We are done.

A can of beer spits bubbly static, and my mind collapses, sandcastle-like.

A woman in the balcony lights up with restless hands, but steady eyes, it takes a few deaf clicks to fight the wind, but the cigarette burns and she smiles, defeated.

A man sits next to me, unfazed by insomnia and cheap vodka, vomits charming gibberish, run-on sentences of love and hope.

And those words, like the ash on the floor, are communal property, their perpetrators indistinguishable.

The motor mouths overheat and smoke-out midsentence, leaving us stranded in silence, and neither music nor drink nor sleep can keep our minds plugged so they begin to leak. All we can do is think the same thought:

This has happened before but--

A distant roar shakes the ground, the metro has awoken.

She walks back in, cigarette dropped, he shuts up, bottle half-gone, and we watch helpless as the colors of daylight seep in uninvited.

It wasn't enough to get lost in each other's thoughts, but as long as no one speaks, we say in bloodshot stares, the night will stay still. But the pretense wears off as clocks fire and life resumes.

Under the doorframe, we say coerced goodbyes and tie up the loose ends of looser talks, stalling until either the sun or all the cigarettes are gone. Five hours later, we tear each other off and they go to sleep over different oceans.

'We should clean up' a voice suggests, from behind a door I forgot was there, its sing-song tone and the morning yawns pierce my eardrum like a rusty needle.

'What's wrong?' saiys the nail gun.

Two years later, on that couch, during a deafening snowstorm, I complete the thought:

“Yes, it was that dumb fucking fight, about turning off the lights. Someone smashed a phone. Someone fled to Vietnam. It took us two months to finish Breaking Bad. Yes, you fuck, I’m still pissed about that.”

Hey, look at me are you ok?

Is that the shroud of Turin? Is that ancient blood? Are those Christian ticks on the folds? or is that what’s become of our bathrobe? If so, uhm you pull it off, martyr chic.

"I know I look like shit I know when you're lying 'for my sake'."

If it hurts to be a person, let me know I’ll get help, possibly an exorcist or a couple of jays, maybe a cake, i don't know, I'm just a cook, I can keep you fed, But maybe this can't be solved by dessert.

I have been a chainsmoking black hole too so I say this from experience you should not have “repeat all” on the goddamn Mountain Goats.

How about we try a play? Let's be someone else: You yourself said, "We’re more Macbeth than Romeo and Juliet." (Have I ever told you you’re pretentious when shitfaced?) What do you say?

"Hamlet."

I'm not trying to get you to kill yourself, despite what you might have heard, how about we do a movie instead? We could play-pretend Bogart and Bacall Or Cabaret, I'll be Sally Bowles, Since I don't suppose you'd wanna sing along, or Two for the Road if you insist on hating my guts.

"Bad Timing."

I'm not killing you either, nice try, I won't be tricked into homicide twice.

Fuck trying to cheer you up. You remember that time, you took offense to that poem I wrote? "I'm not an ancient horror," you sobbed "I'm only 24." This should have been one of those.

Were you trying to infect me with your will-eating pest? Now, neither of us are capable of getting up or giving a shit. Was this your plot all along? Does it get you off when we’re both miserable?

"That's a really great thing for you to say, you got it completely straight. this is really all about you, you piece of shit."

Good thing, we cleared that up at least the couch is soft and the blanket big enough for the two of us to rot I mean, it's not too bad we'll be comfy meanwhile

Maybe we're vampires, It seems we can't age, twentysomethings in a high school affair. Don’t you wanna try something else on? Besides the schoolgirl uniform. I know some find that hot but it's getting kinda old.

Even this poem has gone soft; I can't get the words up. It's your fault, this flaccid-- ugh, god Fuck this, fuck you, fuck me...

What's that look supposed to mean?

. .. ...