Short Stories

It's the spaces between things.

The space between our legs under the table at the multitude of coffee shops, the space between her lips and the coffee cup, the space between words in our conversation (there is a lull in every conversation every seven minutes), the private space between her thighs ... It's these shining spaces, the emptiness beside the object, that are just as important, perhaps ultimately more important than the thing itself, for the nothing makes the something.

This evening Hailie and I are going to be lying on top of one another, on the living room couch. Talking about what we hate, so hardened to god, hardened to the world and it's unclean bedrooms. For the bond, the unspoken bond between us, myself and Hailie, lies in our hatred. Sad, really. It's why we've been together so long, this seething, bubbling hellfire that is under our skin. Maybe I am not as agitated while alone. Perhaps it is this phenomena: that it is only within her presence that I am this disturbed, this pessimistic, remembering all of the times I was jilted in life, rather than the times people smiled (the times my mother would climb out her window, knock on my window and sneak inside, making me nearly shit my pants mother what?, and she would smile and tell me it's all right, it's okay, I just felt like it). Together we are still teenagers, angry, horny, stupid.

It's the kind of thing that won't last. Like a bad temper, you throw a few beer bottles around and then go out to throw darts with your friends. One day Hailie will decide, well, that was fun while it lasted, good bye Benny Boy (she always calls me that, stop calling me that) and she'll pack up all of her things: her clothes, her DVDs, her hangers, her winter coats, her shoes, her forks, and spoons, and chopsticks, and then she'll forget her toothbrush. Her ice pink toothbrush will stay, frosted with paste, in the cup by the sink for months, just because I am too lazy to throw it out. And then the new significant other will move in and be like: what's this? And I will be like: oh, whatever. You can throw it out. It'll be tossed into that tiny garbage bin. And then I'll wonder, vaguely, in passing, if Hailie has found another true love. And: Did she buy herself a new toothbrush to put in his bathroom?

Tonight she'll run her fingers along the hair on my chest, my shirt open, and she'll ask me: what broke your heart? And I will tell her that it was when I was five. Five? Yes, five. When I realized that Santa Claus wasn't real. That's when I realised there was no magic in the world. And she will say you're ridiculous, Benny Boy. And I will tell her to stop calling me that. I hate that. But she'll just smile, and she'll blink in that lopsided way she does when she's tired. One eyelid sliding over her eye a little slower than the other. I tease her for it, just as she teases me for the way I sleep, with my hand curled up in front of my mouth as if afraid bugs will crawl in it. So cute, like a little boy. Shut up, shut up. And then we'll fall asleep like that, maybe the television will still be on, take-out strewn across the low table. Good night, good night.

Although it's cold out right now, although it's spring, I still go out and sit on the balcony and look out, and smoke a cigarette, and look look look all around. Hailie sometimes says that she's dating me for my apartment. For starters, it's the view from the balcony, amazing sunsets and sunrises, it's like hell coming in contact with heaven and a little fire going into the sky, and you can almost see sparks erupting into blue, soundless... And then the balcony is like a whole other world, very large, with hanging plants that make you think you are back in Babylon, and that make me sneeze when they fall down and tickle my nose. Everything is dead right now. Wide, wide sliding glass doors, into the actual apartment with its white tiles that freeze my feet, and artistic posters hanging on the walls: Look it me, I like Van Gogh. A twine of Christmas stars, the golden foil kind, is wrapped around one of the lamp posts like a vine, which makes me seem cheap and sentimental. I am not cheap and sentimental. Then there is the bedroom with its cloth on the walls, it came that way, and the over-the-top bathroom with it's many mirrors, with twelve, twenty Benjamins looking back at me while I take a piss. I don't want to look at my face in the mirror while I am peeing, thank you, I just feel strangely exhibitionist, even though nobody but my reflection is watching.

Even though it's cold out and the plant life is a contradiction, it's still nice to sit out there and ponder things like LIFE, DEATH, SPONTANEITY, NATURE, the WORLD. So I was leaning an the railing, pondering, thinking, BEYOND, when all of sudden there came a screaming noise from the patio below. The building is only two floors, and the apartment below belongs to a woman with silver locks, paisley dresses, and a freaky collection of dolls and mannequins. A thousand eyes stare at you wherever you go in that house; she asked me over for tea when I first moved in three years ago. Long lashes, and curls, and glass eyes, rolling, and the thing that unnerves you the most is the stillness, the absolute quiet, how their lips curl at the corners, as if they are about to speak, yet say nothing over and over. I asked her if she was at all aware at how horror-movie her house was, and she just served up some Earl Grey and smiled. So this was the woman I had dropped my lit cigarette upon from the balcony above, entirely by mistake. I was in a stupor of INTELLIGENCE, and let the cigarette slip, slide, out of my fingers, and down, just as she was passing below. It tumbled down, sparking. I ran into my apartment, laughing, breathless, even though, hell, I knew she would know it was me, unless a bird had grabbed a cigarette and somehow had flown it... no no, she would know. But yet I still run inside, like she can't possibly realise. I think I'll blame it on Hailie. So long as Hailie is not around, oh, what? A cigarette you say? That must have been Hailie. Since Hailie went to visit her elderly grandmother tonight, with her little basket and red riding hood, she won't be back until Tuesday. And if Miss Downstairs does not come over by then, I am pretty much home free, flying flying over.

Tonight I am feeling quite alone, I'm not used to it, although I probably should be. It would be a most exceptional time to do some writing. Right now I am writing about girl who is disillusioned by world, meets boy who is semi-insane, charismatic, wants to be a superstar for whatever, for everything, for just being famous, inspires disillusioned girl for a time, but then girl gets disillusioned by insane boy, and she begins to make her own decisions, and cuts insane boy out of life, insane boy dies tragically, disillusioned girl no longer disillusioned because she is BEYOND and is able to LIVE HAPPILY EVER AFTER. I know it sounds shit like that, but it's really something on paper. Honestly, with all of it's nuances. Although I haven't gotten very far so anything could happen by the end, writing comes naturally from me, flows like that and that, not the kind of writing you find in business letters, or essays, but the kind where you sit down and write a story, yeah. Always easy, makes me sound like a genius.

Hailie has taken over the bathroom. I would slip in there but she has these rituals ¾ she's very careful in how she prepares herself each day. And she locked the door. She develops make-up for a living. Her make-up bag is huge and padded, gray, with many pockets and she talks with her friends over coffee like in those Crest Whitestrips commercials, do you still wear make-up to bed? Oh you whore! You can't last a week. She guards herself very closely, and during the day won't let me chip away at her foundation, crack the wall of chemicals, chip away and find the REAL Hailie, she must be composed, colored, beautiful at all times, cannot allow herself anything less, asks the hostess where she can powder her nose. She is lovely in her finely applied lip stick, and the mascara fans out her lashes just so. She makes me tug down at her skirt as soon as she comes home from work, touch her sheer silk stockings, and say, "You are so fucking gorgeous".

Then I pull her away, strip her naked, and even though the lipstick has become smeared her smile still dazzles, and for a moment I know her, but the next day she puts her face on again, and I am left to pull a sweater on and walk down the street to the fry-smelling bathroom of the McDonald's to shave, brush my teeth, and have a piss. Meanwhile, the people who actually buy things look at me and don't look at me at the same time, careful to slide their eyes away oh this tile is so interesting! from me because I look like I am homeless, like I am the kind of people that you should avoid having conversations with, because they are like that because they can't help themselves, because they drink all day, so my father once said, when really: I just have a girlfriend who likes to take over the bathroom for an hour and instead of dancing around my living room 'cause my bladder is so full I'd rather walk down here, okay? So that's where I've been just now, although my shaving job is a bit off today, knicked myself a few times.

I am vastly disappointed by people, I give them a chance to show themselves. I ask them questions, and respond when they give me the wrong answers. They then jump down my throat and ask me hissing if you hate me so much, why are you talking to me? And really, how could I possibly hate you when I am a perfect stranger who is giving his opinion? I am greatly disappointed at the uncreative responses I receive, and I worry about the fate of this wretched world. The fact that they are so defensive of themselves brings me to think that they feel they have something to feel defensive over, and I wonder about their mental health. They all seem so very serious about themselves. Everyone needs to lighten up. Just like my girlfriend and her make-up rituals, you all are pretending to be composed and calm when inside you are just like everyone else; wild, passionate, wet, crackling. Which is why when she comes out of the bathroom, I am going to smear her lipstick with my lips again and touch her electricity.

Things begin to look odd when you have not slept for something like 74 hours. It's like looking through the reflection on a door knob, brass and contorted, muted and smooth, twisting. I'm looking at the door knob of the computer room right now and I think I can, sort of, see myself in it. See the white of my shirt, and my green pants stretching out under the table, looking like snakes, zigzags, zebra stripes. As I look in it I see myself lean forward and press my face against the computer screen, so hard with my head so soft, will it leave an indent? And when I am walking somewhere, walking down the street, waking home from the office, and the sun has traded places with the moon, and the street lights are necklaces around the dark necks of the horizon, walking and cars approach and their headlights look like copper wires spreading out in coils, my shuffling footsteps become my heartbeat, and they move together ¾ I am home. But I cannot sleep. I am so tired, but I cannot sleep. I feel warm, my bones creak, and things have slowed down.

I've always had trouble sleeping, always always, ever since I was a little boy. I remember being put to bed, dreading the bed, hating the blue curtains across my windows, despising how the blanket felt against me, loathing the gaping endless Dark the existed between me and the door. I didn't try to avoid going to bed, that would be pointless, and being downstairs could be infinitely worse, so I didn't complain. I would toss and turn, toss and turn for hours and hours, and the clock would laugh at me, mock me. Sometimes it felt like I had slept but I really hadn't, and I began wishing that someone would smack my head so I would go unconscious. I was trying the upside down, on my stomach, the oh-my-god-I-am-going-to-throw-up position, and nothing worked. Then I found out if I climbed off my bed and lay on the floor, taking my pillow and blanket with me, that I could sleep. That worked for about a month or so, and then I was back to huffing and shuffling, and being woken up for school only moments before I had fallen asleep. To become like a zombie, wading through a sea of faces, of places, and voices, garbled. It's a wintry frost.

It drove my mother crazy, my inability to sleep, in high school especially. So she would cart me to the doctor's office to try and fix me, and they would give me techniques, what to avoid consuming, and sleeping pills, and eventually the influence those things had over me faded, was grown too used to.

It doesn't matter to Hailie, she likes being awake at night with me, and we go for walks at four in the morning when no one else seems to be alive, even their breath has stopped. It's especially peaceful after it has rained and the light hitting the street makes it look like silver shards have been pressed into the pavement.

It's funny what things in life you can get used to, and what you cannot. What you can get used to is probably more shocking than what you cannot. A human being is surprisingly adaptable, and erases things it does not want to see, even though they see it, it does not register. Not being able to sleep I think is one of those things that I can honestly say I'll never get used to. I won't be able to sit back and say oh here I go again. It's just as painful every time, draining, mentally, clasping at my neck with its teeth. Funny how all beds feel the same when you can't sleep.

And funny, how I can just not get used to the strange dreams I have about my mother when I do, in fact, sleep. I am beginning to wonder if I am going to go and kill my father in a bloody rage, much like our friend Oedipus. Although for it to be mythologically correct, he would already be dead. Every phone ring makes me jump, makes me think something bad has happened, because I certainly cannot have had this dream for no reason whatsoever. I woke up in the dark, it was so dark, it felt like I should be panicking, should be screaming for my life, certainly something is attacking me? But my calmness surprised me as I realized I had fallen asleep over my work, drooling on ancient yellow-fingered papers, and the light that had shone over my head had burnt out, and I reached around in the dark and finally found my way to the fridge, which I then opened, spilling light across the tiles of the kitchen. Then the memory of that vile dream came back to me, the shock hard nipple, so cold it was shades of purple and blue, staring like an eye.

Freud would have a field day. Fuck, inspecting my skull from every direction, he would add me to his great study, if he were alive to make new editions to his work. At the library where I work, in the courtyard, every day during what I assume is his lunch hour, a man comes to the library and he looks exactly like Freud, he has the pipe, he has the beard, the hair, the jacket, and then he reads something impossibly dull-witted, such as a nickel dime mystery novel you can get at convenience stores. As a writer, I enjoy watching people, but most often I do not enjoy having them talk to me. The people where I work are incredibly talkative, and have their own little quirks of speech, for instance Professor Juliana King says, uh, hello! at the beginning of every sentence. And her compatriot with whom she banters with all day long, Professor Ian Edwards, in response to anyone who badgers him will simply repeat what they say, but slower, as if mulling over the meaning of the words, such as when I told him to shut up the fuck up, and he replied with: Shut. The Fuck. Up. Yes, indeed, humans are incredible, complex beings each with their own way of doing things, but I could not tell you how many of them have had dreams about some kind of romantic liaisons with their mothers.

I must express, right now, that this is not the mother as she is today. Today mother is older, on the run from numerous broken promises, to put it as politely as I can, and is probably somewhere in South America, I never know she is visiting until she is throwing things onto my balcony, and shouting with all over her might, BENJAMIN IT'S YOUR MOTHER OPEN THE DAMN DOOR waking up the creepy woman downstairs, and causing all the neighborhood dogs to bark. Although present mother is exciting enough as she is, this is mother that I see in old photographs. The one who held me when I was a child, the one who locked me in the basement by mistake and couldn't unlock the door and so had to get Mr. Harker next door to battering ram it down, by which time I had already peed on myself, the mother who smiled at father under the suburban sun, because everything was always perfect, perfect, perfect. I lived in a suburb, where boredom drives you to do weird things that no one other than a suburbanized slob can understand. With the stereotypical neat little lawns only a cover up for the true wickedness that is humanity, enforcing order on something that wants chaos, and because of the strict laces of course things eventually turn to shit and the lawns begin to look patchy.

This is mother young without the lines on her face, with her hair kept tidy, and her skin was moist and giving. Not that it makes it any better. It seemed I was in some kind of fantasy combination of a Shakespearean tragedy and an Arthurian legend, with maidens in dresses that need no ornamentation as they were the jewels themselves, and castles and overgrown swamplands. I was in such a swamp, as was my mother, who seemed to be trying to drown herself, or save herself from drowning, I can't really tell which, for when she picked herself out onto more solid ground, if there was any to find in a swamp, with its tall reeds, and spongy plant-life, her dress clung to her body, it was a brilliant red and orange dress so that it resembled fire, a fire dripping wet, and the dress was slipping under the weight of the water to reveal a nipple, so cold it was bright with blue, she looked at me with such spite and suspicion, and yet at the same time there was a hint.

It wasn't her toothbrush she left behind, but her hairbrush, tangled with some shiny slivers of her white-blonde hair. See ¾ as I said, I told you this would happen, she would feel it was time to move on, go on, I won't know where, and she'll just remain a ghost of a memory in my bed. Once in a while I will lie there and go: Yes, once Hailie Walsh slept here, once she lived her, once she came her, breathed here, and now she's god knows where, but she was once here. For about six months this was her world. This apartment had that capacity. And then it's Mary, it's Angela, it's Jamie, it's Libby, it's Rachel... But Hailie stayed the longest. Coming out of the shower with her towel around her head, lying down and letting her robe slip down just so, getting up in the mornings, sucking on her thumbnail, smiling so wide.

I was caught off guard, I let my mouth step past itself, gave it too much authority, too much. Perhaps she was smiling when I said IT. Her lips opening, and her white shining teeth separating to show her tongue. It was at a moment of weakness, like a rubber band pulled too tight, and so of course I said IT because there was no where else to go. Except apart, as pieces of the rubber band fly about the room. (I imagine my brains pulled themselves out of my head and hung in the air while I said IT, for I cannot possibly have meant IT). But that's how things go. She said, you've grown too attached, Benny Boy, packed herself up (her make-up bag, her hangers, her clothes upon them still were heaped into her car, she was smiling the whole time, and I was too, just smiling), but she forgot her hairbrush.