Kill Marguerite and Other Stories (15 page)

I would have gone home with the dyke I knew from Chicago, but for the expectorator being on my mind, and her mark on my upper lip, which hurt in addition to looking bad. Instead, I persuaded my first love, the filmmaker, to share his innermost thoughts. We were outside the club now, 4 or 5 a.m., leaning against the back of a doner kebab cart as the sun peeked into the sky. I told him about the expectorator, that I didn't know what was real and what was not; he took me by the shoulders and said, Make It Real.

His boyfriend, drunk, staggered out to swing a loose punch at my face. I dodged.

3.

I returned on the Fourth of July, the scab under my nose sloughed off to reveal delicate infant-pink skin. I sent the expectorator a swollen-hearted crossword puzzle explaining in cryptic fashion that I was still in love with her, what would we do? She responded with a poem. “Will not box,” it started, and ended with an image of a volcano.

I knew what the poem meant, and didn't know what the poem meant, equally and at the same time.

When next we met, she gave me a firecracker.

Now I have placed a firecracker in the story, and know I must do something with it later, like next page, or the page after that. Perhaps I shall keep my readers guessing. Perhaps the firecracker will not go off.

In response, I wrote her a swollen-hearted cryptogram and left it outside her apartment in the pages of a book I had borrowed from her and read on various trains in various German cities. “[Name withheld] = W O U N D” was the key to the cryptogram. She herself was an open wound, I thought, not realizing this equation would wound her.

She wheatpasted a drawing of bandaged wrists to a stop sign in an alley. It is still there. Someone has since scrawled “Asshole” across it.

The asshole is another open wound.

Several days later, we met up one last time, declared our still engorged and festering feelings for one another on the couch of a club called Berlin. She started leaking again. Then she said goodbye, she was tired. I went home with someone else.

4.

The next week, I got a shield tattooed on my arm and entered into a relationship with the woman with whom I'd gone home. She was a bike messenger. She had a body like a citadel and a port-wine stain that crept up her arm and around her back. I wanted to fetishize her birthmark but didn't know how without making it seem like I only wanted her for her birthmark, which wasn't true. So I never said anything about her birthmark, though I ogled it often.

One night the woman whose body was a citadel did not text me back. Then the woman whose body was a citadel texted me back. I write this to make it happen. She has not texted me back but I want her to. To make the story real.

And it worked. She has texted me back and I have texted her back and so on. We have met up and met up and met up. We have watched television and had sex, shy and respectful sex with no firecrackers involved. She has given me a butane lighter, with which I can more easily light cigarettes in the wind tunnels on campus, and she has cooked for me multiple times, good, hearty, alien food.

I am passing as well-adjusted. Trying and failing, anyway. The woman who is a citadel has no patience for other people's pathologies. She is dismissive of mental illness, unsympathetic towards maladjustment of any kind. For me, this is new and refreshing. Past romantic exchanges have involved the glamorization of all parties' neuroses, which disallowed any falling away or healing.

All of this makes the citadel loom large and impenetrable. I lean in to kiss her as if she were my height, am surprised that her body is smaller. I open my mouth to speak, and a higher-pitched voice comes out.

Naturally I have stopped writing, although I am supposed to trade my novel with my writer friend in Philadelphia next week.

It has turned out that the woman whose body is a citadel also has a girl with expectorating orifices in her recent sexual and romantic past, a girl she'd had an affair with while seeing someone else. We've run into her at a club; I understand the citadel's attraction. I do not know what to make of this. By now I am Over the girl with expectorating orifices, though she is still Special in my mind.

I'm lying. I would almost certainly be with her again if given the opportunity. I imagine the woman whose body is a citadel feels the same about her own expectorating girl, and so I wonder what we are doing with each other at all.

5.

Now it is over. The woman whose body is a citadel has been emotionally cheating on me with her agoraphobic friend, and dropped me in order to deal with the impossibility of her love for this person.

This came from left field. I am stunned. Never had I realized the depth of the citadel's emotions. She had always seemed like stone to me, unyielding and vacant of pain.

Her agoraphobic friend suffers panic attacks, wheezings, inability to breathe in the outside world.

I also suffer panic attacks. All the time, in her bed, while the citadel was preoccupied with the agoraphobic's texts, I coughed and wheezed, my lungs in full stop. Was I allergic to her dog? So I said. But these were panic attacks. They set in two months into our involvement and didn't stop until we were done.

Certainly, my panic attacks are not as interesting as the agoraphobic's panic attacks. Here, the agoraphobic wins.

Prior to the coughing, I experienced persistent and explosive bouts of diarrhea for more than a week. This occurred immediately after realizing I genuinely liked and cared for the woman whose body is a citadel, but that she almost certainly thought I was Weird.

6.

My writer friend in Philadelphia kept her part of the deal. Here is a segment of her novel, about a girl named Jane and her failed relationships, which means it's about my writer friend and her failed relationships, and so about narrativity and performance:

That night I got home early and I listened to the messages on the house phone and there was one from Lee. (Oh, hi, it's me. Sorry to call again. I can't reach you on your cell. I just thought I'd call because...I'm feeling...I'm...I'm kind of depressed, and I just thought maybe you could talk to me for a minute.) So the problem with this is not that Ben has a friend named Lee who still calls months
and months and months and months and months after they've broken up, nor is the problem that this is a girl whose naked picture remains locked in a secret box, nor is the problem all of the other problematic things that are obvious enough to forsake mentioning. The problem is that I know when he gets the message he is going to go running to her, and if I (his girlfriend) left that message he would say, everyone's depressed, Jane.

Jane, the narrator, is compelled by her boyfriend's ex-girlfriend's message to bludgeon the secret box open and set fire to the naked photos of Lee with rum and matches. The blaze gets out of hand. The fire department is called; there is a scene.

Ben comes home to this chaos, learns what has happened. Ben tells Jane she is crazy. Ben leaves Jane.

7.

I set fire to nothing. There are no photographs of the agoraphobic friend that the citadel has ever mentioned to me, which doesn't mean they don't exist. Still, I had every intention of lashing out. I planned to fuck the citadel's bike, take pictures and send them to her via cell phone, to slash her tires and so on. But I would give her one last chance first, to apologize for the way she had treated me, during the end of things. And she did. She apologized. Now I can't hate her. I can't fuck her bike. This, for me, is sad.

And so it has gone the other way. The desire that the citadel has developed for her agoraphobic friend makes me want her, miss her, more. All this time of not talking
openly, she had been experiencing real and valuable emotions that I was not privy to.

The vice versa is also true. I am a wealth of real and valuable emotions. I wonder, if the citadel had known this about me, had known all of the things that make me interesting that I do not, did not tell her, would she have dropped me so soon?

Why is the agoraphobic so interesting? Why? Why? Why?

My friends tell me I should try things again with the expectorator. They've seen us together, they say, they've seen how we work.

But they don't understand. Now I'm the expectorator. I am crying and wheezing and shitting and puking and there is no one around to absorb it.

8.

Tonight I attended a lecture given by a professor who has written a book called
Obsession
. From his book:

I am sure as I write these words that countless people all over the country are...engaged in obsessive-compulsive activities like cleaning and checking, fighting off intrusive thoughts, addictively thinking about sex, food, alcohol, drugs as well as acting on these addictions. ...Many folks are addicted to their nightly television shows, to collecting things, or to obsessing about that someone who is unattainable or lost forever.

Why is the citadel so interesting? Why? Why? Why?

In Latin
obsessio
and
possessio
were two aspects of besieging a city.... If you've obsessed a city, you've surrounded it, but the citadel remains intact; while if you possess the city, the walls have been breached and you've conquered the citadel and its citizens.

I could not conquer the citadel. I could not breach her walls.

But. Once. There was a night I almost did. I stayed inside her apartment when she went out to walk her dog. Intending to wait in her bed, I entered her room and found a journal spread on her pillow, its pages erupting in poetry: lines detailing calloused fingers, a woman's back. Coming upon this gave me a jolt. This person who can hang a joke on anything was writing poetry in earnest? I did not recognize her at all.

Oh. Yes. There was another time, earlier, worth mentioning. This was a week after she'd been in a terrible bike accident, only a few weeks after we'd met. It was early still, barely nine p.m., and she was so drunk I had to pick her up in a cab. Once at her apartment, we ordered pizza; she ripped off my clothes. In bed, after sex, I asked her about the accident again, expecting the usual Yeah, Glad I Was Wearing My Helmet. But this time she started crying, sobbing, expectorating. She sat up and hugged herself. She wailed: It Hurts. It Hurts.

I embraced her; I did my best. I wanted so much to shield her, then, to be the repository for her vulnerabilities. But she was already shielded, and who am I to protect someone? Anyway, that was the end of that. In the morning, she was embarrassed, and claimed to remember little. I kept these things to myself.

9.

She broke up with me in a text message. She had moved on; I was not worth a conversation. When finally I persuaded her to speak with me, to explain to me what had happened, she told me about the agoraphobic friend, and I told her about my plans to fuck her bike if she had bailed on our post-relationship chitchat. She laughed nervously, said I was crazy, and okay, she was glad she had shown.

Was I crazy? Don't we all do stupid things, just for the thrill of doing them? Don't we all play our parts as they unfold? Was the citadel so immune?

In my end-of-relationship conversation with N, my last cis male partner, the one who was passing as feminist, the one who chased me for a year before I agreed to be dragged into his open relationship, he called me “empirical,” “childish.” He already had a ragingly feminist girlfriend, he explained, so when I refused to let him burn me with cigarettes, I had lost my purpose in his life. He'd found another lover, I learned later, who would allow him to burn her with cigarettes.

Prior to breaking up with me, N had written a story in which I recognized him in the protagonist and myself in a secondary character. In the story, the protagonist is an alien who “jumps” bodies by having intercourse with them and then turning them (mostly women) inside out. My character, who was described with my features and mannerisms, my habit of rolling my eyes whenever he attempted to dominate me, was one of the ones turned inside out, her entrails and innards grotesquely exploding all over the place. Her death was the bloodiest and most violent of them all.

After N explained our new friends-only status to me in condescending detail, I excused myself to use his bathroom. There, I stole his Zoloft.

At a bar a few days later, N called his new lover a bitch, burned her wrist with his cigarette, and punched her in the face full on.

10.

The night I blew off sending a draft of my novel to my writer friend in Philadelphia, my novel, cut up and tacked to a bulletin board, fell off the wall. This happened while I was in bed with the woman whose body is a citadel.

The night I failed at working things out with the citadel, the butane lighter she had given me fizzled weakly to its death.

I have since thrown away the butane lighter, and returned to my novel. It is no longer falling off the wall.

That is a lie, above. I have not returned to my novel. Instead I have been writing this, and that, and some other things.

I have never set off the firecracker that was given to me by the girl with expectorating orifices. Perhaps the firecracker, muffled and contained in my bag all these months, has lost its potential to explode.

Fuck the firecracker. Notice all the carefully placed fists flying. It is as though the punch the expectorator invited, but did not receive, has traveled through this story to land on N's new lover's face. This punch is what glues things together.