Onwards from the brink

J.D. Harms
Sep 5, 2018 · 9 min read
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

THERE’S A CRUMBLING ICON in my fingers. If I move, if I shift my legs, I’m afraid it will start some kind of reincarnation, some kind of sickening movement that will make this all too real. Start the breaking of bodies all over again. Yeah, it might start the feeling of breaking away on my own, destiny sticking like the scent of blood at the back of my mouth.

They told me they packed up all of Kara’s pictures today; this is the only one left. It had fallen behind a pillow, and I managed to do the archeology of the room to find it. Not bad for a blind guy. I let the icon fall down, though. Breathing deep, I think I am looking for a way to grasp it without touching the thing. I’m looking for some grace. Perhaps if I’m wounded enough, if I scream enough, if I only live marrow outwards, if I embrace the world now as a raw thing. A piece of meat, all ready for redemption.

I have to piss but I just can’t walk by the smell of the soap right now. There’s nothing so dirty in this life as a will to stay filthy. But Kara didn’t know that. Maybe she does now. Maybe it would have gone differently if she had ceased her hunt for salvation. I was never going to be this — the messiah she was looking for. But I would stay broken here. I wished to just be able to stop the blade at the last moment, just to bring me as close to death as possible. I would have no fear, I wouldn’t see the pendulum swing overhead. I could lay as usual, just waiting for the end. I still need to go to the bathroom…I still don’t want to go. I guess I’m just welcoming death by UTI; sounds painful.

“Mortal coil, mortal coil, come again another day,” I mumble into the air.

A cool movement, wind from the door opening. I lay still, just as if I couldn’t be seen from the front door sprawled out of the armchair, one leg heavily fallen on an Ottoman. I heard, and felt, the heavy sigh, the slow steps from beside me somewhere, off in the distance. J’ador cascades over my olfactory nerves. Maybe she’ll think I’m a mirage and go sniffing elsewhere. For some inexplicable reason I feel that it’d make things better if I played sentry to my real life.

“Who goes there?!” I shout, jumping up. “I’m armed!” I windmill my arms wildly, turning this way and that, the icon falling so heavily to the floor I feel its loss instantly. Maybe this’ll make her so uncomfortable, she’ll have to leave.

“Jesus, Francis. Sit down before you hurt yourself.”

“Oh…it’s you.” I didn’t think I could make my way back to my chair, so I sat down where I stood. After a moment, I just let the rest of me fall against the floor. “Whaddya want?” I knew it sounded petty, lazy; I couldn’t be bothered to separate the air flowing out of my mouth. I couldn’t take a knife to all those spaces I couldn’t see. Why should anyone be graced by spaces? Kara wasn’t granting me spaces. Not with me anyway. That couldn’t, wouldn’t get me off the floor. I’m not posing for dignity.

A Tea Party song from somewhere deep in the past grazes my left ear. My right ear was trying to figure out how far away Melissa was. I could hear her thinking that it might just be a waste of time to try to get me in a sitting position.

“I don’t give a shit what it looks like,” I said. Into this darkness, into this darkness, and…this one.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were gonna.”

“Pace, brother.” There were steps very close to my head. How’d they get there? “I’d ask how you’re doing, but that’d be a waste of breath at this point.” She waited a second. “And how am I? Thanks for asking. Better than you, I’d guess.” Parsimony has nothing on Miss.

I don’t know why that was the moment I started wondering about the picture I had fallen on top of. Almost without thought, my arm writhed away underneath me in a futile search for it. “Whaddyawan’?” I repeat.

“Lazy asshole,” the wind brought to me, brought it to my ears.

“I could have told you that. Why are you here?” I said the words, but I didn’t care one way or the other what had brought my sister by; but it gave me a chance to reflect on the day…in her presence.

I knew I didn’t have a lousy leg to stand on to get Kara back. I knew she’d be going at some point. Probably I should have tried…something. But I wanted the place to smell like juniper and black spruce. I wanted to have Courtney Love’s rasp scream out at me when I got home from work. I wanted beer before talk. I wanted…and then it was too late to go on wanting. Kara, and all her pictures, were gone, packed up and moved. It wasn’t mature. But I was rutting. I had a nice rut all made up for me. It was comfortably uncomfortable. Oh, hatred can demolish most anything.

Maybe I was just ticked that she’d beaten me to the punch.

“Know what’s trouble for ya?”

“At least she was nice enough to clean the place,” Melissa ignored me. “I wouldn’t have.”

“Damn right you wouldn’t have,” I said. “I would’ve hoped I taught you better than that.”

“Ahh. Well,” Melissa said, “what next, Fran? What’ll it take for you to pull yourself together? Dear gods, if Mom was around to see this…”

I was in the dark. I didn’t even know why Miss had come but I was wishing… I didn’t want her there. I was busy surrounding myself in self-comforting self-hate. I began to work my way back out of myself, and then enjoy in agony the thrill of pulling a twisted fate back in. Yes. Inexorably back inwards, inwards, inwards. Sartre’s ghost: the “reflection-reflecting”. That would’ve been me on that floor, adjusting some period, holding onto a past that I hadn’t been ready to say goodbye to yet. There was the wanting, too. The panic. The self-recriminations. The false representations of the object of my hatred. The bitch that she’d become. Maybe she always had been, and I wasn’t hearing any of it. Couldn’t say how I’d missed it.

“Yeah, don’t go scooping around the dark there too long,” Melissa sneered. I could hear the sneer, the venomous dripping between teeth causing the echoes of a water-bound hiss. “You were probably the little shit you always were, raining down your self-pity havoc on poor Kara’s head.” She got up from the chair. “Too bad. Even I liked her.”

I sit up. “Well…that’s — that’s nice, Miss.” I feel foolish, now, but I can’t quite lay my finger on why. Normally Missy doesn’t care how she sees me; she’s never told me anything in particular about my appearance. I thought it was immaterial to her, the way I couldn’t see her, so I didn’t bother with acclamations like “cute” or “beautiful”. I never paid attention when Ma had doled out words like that.

“I don’t know, Miss. I messed it up. I let her go, I let her go, I let her…go. She let me be part of her world, part of her vision for the world. I didn’t even give her work the time of day. Or I did but they were meaningless shells of a world that I don’t exist in; or, if I do, then it’s a world that carries on irrespective of my desire to see anything in it. There’s the smell of Obsession. It lingers. It’s here, here, and even here,” I point to various spots on the carpet, like it’s a testimony of love. How bizarre, but I’m too far gone into my own commentary to let up about shit like this. “Here.” I put my hand on my heart. “She left obsession here, too, I suppose.”

Missy breathes in and out. I can hear the sound of her nails on denim, scratching her leg. I wait to see if she’s inhaled any of the self-hatred I’m selling out here. I’m taking it on, sort of. I’m not letting go, but I don’t think I should have to. Kara left at 8‘o’clock this morning.

Melissa stands up. “Well,” she says. “Do ya need help cleaning this place up?”

“Gods help you if you move a fucking thing.”

She laughs. It’s good to hear that sound. It reminds me of the comfort you get from a heavy piggy bank that rattles, that weighs a nice amount.

“Then I’m getting a beer if I’m hanging around any longer.”

“One for me, too,” I grin after her, but I don’t think she noticed.

Seconds later the fridge door opens and closes. I can’t hear Melissa take off the caps, but soon footsteps reshuffling. Slowly, deliberately I get up and sit on the chair.

Like a grown man I stretch my broken body over the skin of my life. I don’t know how to get it all in to Melissa. I don’t know that I want to even burden her with the life I couldn’t have, the views of Kara I was never privy to. Those to which I was. But I can’t deny, I can’t deny I KILLED this thing. I pulled up so short by my bootstraps, feeling my way through this dark, feeling my way through the landscapes of touch I made maps for: here was Navel, the main tequila port on her body; here, one splayed hand up from Navel, there was the Valley Sternum pulsing under direction; one hand over hand, went over the nation’s highest hill and all round was the field of the Heart. Roll my head to the right and I would be lost in the ruin that had once been the Right Breast: it was now rubbed off the map, scorning balance, shuffling the deck. The site of a civil war.

But it was her eyes, forever hidden from me, forever open before the rest of the world, forever hanging where it should, crumbling icons notwithstanding. I made sure she heard of my cult of The Senses. She knew there were feelings she couldn’t access. She knew there was a whole life to be unearthed, something, some experience that I had kept even from Melissa, since so long ago her hand slipped from mine, stopped guiding me anywhere. It’s perfect, now, that she’s here to help me pick up the pieces: the 8 a.m. fight, the 8:10 a.m. leavetaking, the 9 a.m. crying…The reports of the battle have been destroyed.

I should tell that to Melissa.

I’ve been so safe, so sure. I was withholding. I know it, I know it, I know it, Kara. Here’s me playing a devil; witness my skewed passing in the sound of the world’s turning. This is how I love to hate. This is me hanging out my dirty laundry. This is me talking back. Talking back. I didn’t really think I did things right, that I wasn’t an asshole; I want to be less wounded. I want to be immune to this failure. I want it to be something more like death, something more like the first time you feel the touch of satin when the clothes come off, the real smell of the woman beneath her blouse, all those cells holding her together, making skin and blood and its own Braille come together like so many moments gathered around just for you. Just for the fight I couldn’t win, didn’t try to win, a fight I left in the cold. But I can’t make Kara feel this, smell this. I smell like desperation. Gods know that’s pretty powerful stuff. But this is me trying to talk back, trying to keep going.

Something cold reaches my hand. I hold the bore just under my wharf, inhale hops and feeling the sparkling splashes of carbonated bubbles. I lift my beer in thanks. Mel says nothing. I lean my head back, sighing.

“Too bad, too bad, too bad,” I breathe. “Too bad I can’t take it back.”

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committed to the aesthetic voice, forever charmed by the endurance of myth, aiming for synthesis

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