X, page 21
“Well,” she said, red-eyed. She picked up another sock. “It’s almost time to go.”
####
When I get home from the bar, the apartment is quiet. Keys: thrown. Coat: hanging from one arm, dragging behind me on the hardwood.
“Camille?”
Nothing. Silence, except for the fridge and its noises. I sit down on the couch. It doesn’t smell great. I plug in my phone and wait for it to turn on again. I keep my eyes glued to the screen. A few minutes of zen as my head swims. When it glows, it glows empty: no messages or calls. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I don’t get many of those these days.
I take a picture of the address on my forearm and look at it for a while, trying to commit it to memory, because like what if something happens to my phone. Stick my finger in my mouth and smear the eyeliner with spit. Now it looks like a demon incantation. But I don’t need to conjure a demon all the way from hell—the address is right here in Brooklyn. I could go right now. Go find her, after almost a month of waiting. Fuck Camille.
But I can’t move. Don’t know why. Maybe Camille and I can have our fight and then I can get her to come find X with me. Maybe we’ll work everything out, and then I’ll at least have someplace to come back to.
I ponder the likelihood of booze in the kitchen, something to keep my buzz going until Camille gets here. No groceries because I’ve overdrafted and I’m saving my last line of credit for a real emergency (like getting wasted and fucking some twink at a fake gay bar), so if there is something to drink, it’s probably Camille’s, and I have to consider the Optics of the Situation: her coming home to find me slurping her last FATBURNER ACAI COCKTAIL is not going to put her in a generous mood. As of tomorrow, I’m three months behind on rent. Gonna need all the goodwill I can get.
Fine. I won’t drink any more, I decide. I look in the corners and under the couch cushions for green instead. Fingers crossed she doesn’t come home while I’m smoking, or I’ll have to explain that, too. But maybe she won’t even come, I think, as I pull the couch away from the wall. There’s one. I reach for it. Maybe she’ll find someone to go home with tonight, or go find that couple she’s been seeing.
I clean a little bit—see, I’m helping—dump the ashtray in the garbage, shove some mail and ancient Juul cartridges in my backpack to get them off the coffee table, swipe the table for crumbs. I pincer a pair of socks back to the laundry basket in Camille’s bedroom. When everything is looking a little tidier, I tear the weed up with my fingernails and pack a bowl. I’m deep in my third inhale when I hear a pair of size 8 platforms outside the door.
Keys: hooked. Purse: dropped. Coat: hung. But Camille isn’t going for her first highball. She just stands there, looking at the living room. I turn to look at it with her. It’s clear that my tidying has only made things worse. Just moved the crap around, exposing lines of dust and gum wrappers.
I look back at Camille, trying to read her face. Bongsmoke clouds the rhinestones woven through her hair and stuck on the tips of her lashes. In this light, and from where I’m sitting on the couch, she still looks pretty, dewy, sparkly, hard as a rock, even after a double. Do I look pretty? The black of the broken flat-screen confirms that I am still ugly. My eyes used to sit up high in my cheeks, and my cheeks were once less sunken, and the bruises were on the people I fucked, not me. I watch as one of my hands appears in the flat-screen to slide over the scab under my eye. It hurts. When was the last time I washed my face? When was the last time I took a shower? The smell again, even worse now that I’m floating in the depths of a deep, dank high.
I would kick me out. Who wouldn’t. I brace myself for yelling. But Camille’s voice is normal.
“I ran into someone tonight. Mads. At the club. I hadn’t seen her in forever.”
Mads. When I open my mouth to say her name, smoke burns my throat. I cough, sinuses burning with tears. I try again and cough more. The hand with the lighter in it is on my heart. I can feel the plastic through my shirt.
Camille’s not looking at me. “She told me what happened to Petra,” she says.
More coughing, though it doesn’t appear to bother her, which is good, because I can’t stop. “I don’t—” I begin. The itch tears up the roof of my mouth. Belly hurts.
“Do you remember that time you came and stayed here when you and Petra got in that big fight?” says Camille. It’s like she’s talking to herself. “And then you and I got in a fight, too? When I got back here later on and you were gone, I almost called her to warn her. But I didn’t. I was like, ‘Don’t be stupid, Camille.’” Delicately, she touches the heel of her hand to her forehead, then pulls it away, rolling her eyes. “Because I believed you.” Now she’s looking at me again. “But now I think that that was stupid.” She laughs.
I think about Ariana. I want to tell Camille about what happened on that table, right over there, the same one where she and I sat and drank coffee and smoked analogs when she said, Are we gonna talk about all this or what? and I said No, and about how it was me that texted Ariana, not the other way around, that I invited her over and kept her drink full. I think about the dog noises she made when I was inside her. How she turned away from me after to belt her pants again.
Camille just keeps on talking. In the moment, it’s hard to believe. I push the edge of the lighter into the crack between my nails and their beds, driving the blood away, whitening my fingers.
“But I was thinking about it on my way home. Like I was really trying to be real with myself. And I think I thought I believed you before.”
Her hands are on her hips, toes angled in slightly, knees touching. I see the version of Camille from twenty years ago, a little person who was too young for 9/11 and still had her original nose. She didn’t know that she was going to grow up to have me living on her couch.
“But after what Mads told me,” she said, “I realized that maybe I was lying to myself. Lying for you. And you know why?”
When Camille walks toward me, I want to lean away, but I can’t go any deeper into the couch. Nowhere to go. Her eyes come tired out of her perfect face. Her eyes remind me of the blood under her skin, working away.
“Because I was worried you might hurt yourself if she left you.” She shakes her head. “I protected you. I let her stay with you.”
She sits down on the couch. Sweatshirt says WE RECRUIT. Bong twinkles. From this angle, she looks kind of like Mom.
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me what happened with her,” says Camille, and for just a moment, I think she means Ariana.
No. Not Ariana. Petra. My throat burns. “I didn’t,” I begin, but I start coughing again. It’s true that I didn’t tell her, but that’s because I don’t know what happened to Petra after I moved in with Camille. I made sure not to know. I am going to keep talking, I think, but then I don’t, even when the coughing stops.
“No one told you?” The shock softens her eyes. “Nobody told you what she did after you left?”
It’s unbelievable, but I think Camille believes me. I shake my head. She looks like she feels sorry for me, but it doesn’t feel good.
####
“I can’t believe you can listen to that,” Aisha said.
She happened to see the murder podcast on my phone. She was actually disdainful, which was unlike her. It made me hate her a little less. Aisha couldn’t be all that stupid if she hated true crime. Only perpetrators and victims like it, and most people think they’re victims, even though most people are perpetrators. Like SM, true crime is just the fantasy of victimhood, and it’s a fantasy because it can’t be real. It isn’t true. We’re all bad. No one is good.
If Aisha is smart enough to get that, I don’t know why more people aren’t. And really, it’s a lot more reassuring than the alternative.
####
I take my backpack and my duffel. I leave the books, the stuff in the fridge. When I get downstairs, I plug the address into my phone and start walking. It’s wet and cold. More wet than cold, really. It’s dark. The duffel isn’t heavy, but my elbow hurts, so I can only carry it on one side. I won’t be going back. I’ll have to figure out something else.
For a long time, I walk. When I reach the water, I get as close as I can without falling in and head south, keeping it on my right. As I walk, it gets colder and less wet. I don’t see hardly anybody. The water looks like nothing. At some point, I notice that I’m sober again. The cold helps.
I’m not far from my destination when the sky starts to turn colors. Since the murder podcast no longer exists, I’ve been listening to old episodes. They still have the archive up. Downloads have skyrocketed since the hosts died. Brandwise, they couldn’t have made a better move than getting slaughtered.
The host’s voices, reanimated in more than one way, are almost too quiet to hear, but I don’t turn up the volume. It’s not like they’re telling me anything I haven’t heard before.
####
You see the graffiti everywhere: BE STUBBORN WITH ME. STAY ALIVE. Stuff like that. HARD TO KILL. Wouldn’t it be nice to be easy, though?
I don’t know why I didn’t I kill myself after Petra. I thought about it. Who doesn’t? But there are always reasons to stay, aren’t there. There are people here that I care about, or there were back then.
I’ll admit that knowing that some people want me dead is energizing in a way, and while defiance isn’t the worst reason to stay alive, it’s not mine. If I had any single reason, it was probably Mom. I used to hate the idea of her at my funeral, bored and waiting to drink.
She couldn’t do that now, of course. I decided not to have a funeral for her, but not in a bitchy way. I just don’t think she would have wanted one.
####
Petra was a good girl. She was so good that she bruised better than anyone I’d ever met. I rarely touched her face, saving it for special occasions. It wasn’t smart for her to be seen at work that way.
The night we got kicked out of Fist was a special occasion. I knew Petra wouldn’t like it in the moment, but she would like staying home from work with me the next day, stroking my hair in bed. The sooner we fought, the sooner we could get back to loving each other again.
I watched Petra watch Mary go back into the bar, then caught her by surprise. By the time our driver pulled up, I was holding her, and she was quiet again. He didn’t say anything. I don’t even think he noticed her face. Five stars.
The apartment was as we left it. There was the sheet on the couch with a cotton pad for the needle stuff we had been doing earlier. There was the red sharps container on the coffee table. Next to it was the plastic jack-o’-lantern where we kept our stash of sterile needles and scalpels and razor blades. The drawn blinds clicked when I threw her against the wall. Hand squeezing her throat. Hot and wet and hard. I hadn’t wanted to fuck her this bad in forever.
Her inside felt so good. When was the last time it had been this good? When I spit in her face, she caught me on her tongue. Her lips shaped thank you, like I trained her. Squeezing harder. Our favorite: me fucking her standing, her hands around my wrist, my other hand inside her. When was the last time?
If her feet hadn’t come out from under her at the angle she was at, I don’t think I would have known. Her weight pulled her out from me, and then I fell, too.
I had hurt her. I could have really hurt her. She was crying loudly now, and wouldn’t stop. That was when I started crying, too. Mouth open, realizing how drunk I was. Apologizing. I kissed the socks on her feet, the ground under her socks. Never again, I told her. Never again.
She went to Mads’s house for what was left of the night. I stayed at our place. I was lying on the couch, still crying, thinking about Petra’s tears, and then I was touching myself, thinking about her in her sleep, the way she looked when she looked dead. About what people look like when they look dead.
Eyes closed for a while and then eyes wide open. A moment between me and the ceiling, a long one. Beach, bed, lungs. Petra was never going to tell me to leave, and she was never going to leave herself. No matter what I did.
So I will keep her safe, I thought. I bagged up my stuff and called Camille.
That was the last time I saw Petra.
####
The app tells me that where I’m headed is around the corner. If I had something on me, one of Camille’s pills or powders, I’d take it, but I don’t. The moisture deadens noises, numbs distant traffic. There’s an apartment building and black SUV idling out front, exhaust curling over the curb and into the trees above. Everything is wet.
She’s not. She’s under an umbrella, a suitcase by her boots. I’m just a few feet from her. She’s slouching, toe out, head turned away from me. Something lit flutters to the ground. Skin in the dimness catches light.
Does she know I’m behind her? When she sees me, will she recognize me? I consider making a noise, then decide not to. Seconds, seconds. A loud singsong blinking from the SUV—open door. With a click, the trunk pops open. In the headlights, the street address, the same as the one scribbled on my arm, beams brass across the brick. My arteries roar in rhythm with the blinking. I feel like I’m being emptied, eviscerate bailing from my body in great, sweeping movements.
Now she’s walking toward the SUV. Now it’s time! The trunk has opened wide, and she’s lifting her suitcase. I open my mouth to say her name, but another voice, one coming from the apartment, beats me to it. She turns toward me, and then I can see her, and now I’m silent. It isn’t X. She has hair and other eyes and different fingers. My throat catches. Tricked again, a trick of the light.
The other voice again—a name that isn’t hers—and she says something in response. Someone is coming out of the apartment, holding another bag, and she takes it, and they talk for a moment and then they hug. The other person notices me from over her shoulder. The woman I thought was X does not.
She gets in the SUV and it goes away. Another ghost. Ghosted again. Maybe she’s exporting, too. Just like X.
Everything is wet. It’s a new day and a new month. I could stay here outside this building all day, but I don’t want to wait anymore. There’s a bench by the bus post. I set down my bags and sit. There’s enough light around the horizon that I can tell it looks like rain.
####
My coat isn’t waterproof. The rain wasn’t heavy, but it stayed long enough to drench me. Now I’m colder and cleaner. It’s for the best. I have to go to work soon, if only because there’s nowhere else for me to go. I wonder if I’m going to get fired today. I wonder what I’ll do if I am.
My backpack isn’t waterproof, either, so I open it to check my things. On top is the mail I stuck inside when I was cleaning Camille’s living room, still dry. A bill, a Shen Yun coupon, a reminder that meat is murder. Last is a spammy-looking envelope with tiny black print. I’m about to shove it back down into my bag when I see, above the P.O. Box, that the return address says FLECC. The coupon glides to the pavement and darkens there.
There’s no need to open the envelope, so I just sit with it in my hand. The light changes. My forehead warms. The clouds are breaking. When I look up, it’s all red.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my agent, Julia Kardon, for understanding, and to my editor, Alicia Kroell, whose patient insight found the good in this manuscript.
Thank you to Charlotte Shane, whose artistic integrity inspires optimism. To Morgan M Page, Torrey Peters, and Gretchen Felker-Martin, among the first to read this book, whose support and example have meant everything. To Tyler Ford, for championing me.
Thank you to Amanda Whip, for taking care.
Thank you to Elizabeth Harvey and Marie Sefton, who gave me a safe place to think. To Sophia Hoffman, Julia Race, and Jack, who gave me a safe place to work.
Thank you to Kitty Davies, for being my friend. To Dahlia Snow and Bambi Katsura, for being my family.
And thank you to Jade, for being mine. It’s a damn slippery planet, but heaven hurries.
© Elle Pérez
DAVEY DAVIS’s first book, the earthquake room, was released by TigerBee Press in 2017. They live in Brooklyn.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2022 by Davey Davis
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-1-64622-093-9
Cover design by Nicole Caputo
Book design by Laura Berry
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021947154
Catapult
New York, NY
books.catapult.co
Davey Davis, X
