Any Other City, page 2
For me, it’s a city forever stuffed with sadness. It’s a city where I have to share space with obsolete versions of myself. It’s a city of gunpowder and hand grenades.
I’ve never lived anywhere else. I needed to get away for a spell.
Why couldn’t I tell you this before I left? I have no idea.
If I understood myself, I’d be a different person.
—
The older woman who floats in the small swimming pool came into the bakery today. She ordered an espresso and a croissant. After my co-worker Effie delivered the order to her table, the woman gently tore off one end of her croissant and slowly poured the espresso from its tiny cup into the soft, airy centre. It was like watching a magician pour a jug of milk into a newspaper funnel. The croissant absorbed the entire double shot of espresso. Then, she slowly nibbled on her espresso-infused croissant while reading a mystery novel. I’ve never understood why people are fascinated and comforted by reading about other people being murdered. Without her goggles on, I could see that the floating woman has the most brilliant blue-green eyes.
—
It took a long time for me to let you unbuckle my jeans. I’d only had sex once before, and it was not good. I couldn’t come. Not even after nearly an hour of fucking. I’d thought maybe it was the condom or the lack of friction. But now I think my body just didn’t want to. And I didn’t know how to pretend, so I just stopped and told her my tummy was upset and awkwardly left her house and walked to the mall and bought a candy bar and grape soda and wolfed down the candy bar and took the bus home and gulped down the grape soda and jerked off and sobbed into my pillow and felt more ashamed and broken than I’d ever felt before.
When I finally let you take off my jeans in the abandoned van in your backyard, I was so nervous that I felt lightheaded. You told me to lie down on the small bed. Then, you asked me what I wanted. I covered my face with my hands and said, I don’t know. You kissed my forehead and my cheeks and my throat and my shoulders. You put your ear to my chest and listened to my heart beating. You’ve got a good heart, you said. It makes a nice thump. You moved your fingernails across my inner thighs. You dotted my torso with kisses. You paused, looked up at me, your hair falling in your face. Is this okay? you asked. Yes, I said. Very okay. You smiled. Somehow you knew I needed slowness.
—
One day while walking through Glass Alley, I followed a faint hum that grew louder and more shimmery as I travelled to its source. Finally, I poked my head into a doorway and saw a dozen or so musicians creating a sound unlike anything I’d heard before. It was so soft and airy that it barely qualified as music. It was the prettiest drone. No melody. Pure atmosphere. Their instruments reminded me of a documentary on an avant-garde composer who created dozens of unique instruments to play his experimental songs on. But these instruments were less ornate, largely consisting of warped metal bowls and hubcaps played with felt mallets, wire-strung wooden planks played with violin bows, and a few distressed woodwinds.
Besides the musicians, there were a dozen or so people sitting on folding chairs, their heads lowered. It looked like they were listening intently or meditating, but they could have been unconscious. I listened at the doorway until I noticed a man watching me from the other side of the room. I blanched and hastened back into the alley.
Before long, I felt a hand at my elbow. I turned, alarmed and defensive. It was the man who had spotted me. I made a gesture of apology. He said something that I couldn’t understand, something that might have included the word for “please” a couple of times. After a baffling back and forth, I understood that he seemed to be inviting me into the room. I shook my head, said no a few times. He kept insisting, almost pleading. Eventually, I nodded my head and followed him into the room. The musicians were still filling the space with their pretty, shimmery drone. It felt like entering a church.
The man poured me a cup of tea. Then, he poured one for himself. He raised his glass and smiled, and I did the same. The tea was sugary and warm. The music also felt sugary and warm. Somehow, it was comforting to be drinking tea with a stranger, listening to a soft, ethereal wash of music made by strange instruments.
—
The first time I fucked you and was inside of you, the first time I fucked you without my fingers or a toy, that first time, I kept thinking of waves, of a dolphin undulating in the ocean. Maybe that helped me to feel okay about being inside of you. And the way your eyes kept looking into mine also made it feel okay, made it feel good, so gushingly good. Your eyes, my eyes. An ocean, a dolphin. And, oh fuck. Fuck. My body crashing again and again against the waves of your body. Staring into your eyes as I came. Your arms wrapped around me, pulling me down while you ground against me, as I shuddered and collapsed into you, poured myself into you. And then. A calmness. An okayness. A smoothness, soothing and liquidy. Then, you cradled me and kissed my cheeks, my throat, my lips. You broke the stillness, saying, That was so fucking hot. Just. I don’t even know. Fuck. That was the best thing ever. And you were right. It was.
The next time we fucked, I couldn’t get to that place again. For some reason, I felt awful and started crying. Somehow, you got it, got that sometimes sex wouldn’t work for me, and you folded me into your arms.
—
I haven’t seen the older woman at the swimming pool lately. Watching her floating on her back, smiling and open to the world, was so soothing. I tried floating in the pool today. It’s hard for me to calm down, lie back, and trust that my body will float. Sometimes I start to panic and worry I’ll suddenly sink and my lungs will fill with water. To help me relax and make myself buoyant, I often think of you holding my hand, whispering, Everything is okay, over and over. When I picture you holding my hand, we’re sitting on a train, scenery whipping by us. In the water, I let my arms and legs turn to driftwood. Everything is okay. We’re still on the train, passing through a forest. Your hand is holding my hand. Now I’m a bright starfish floating in a bed of water. Everything is okay.
—
The first time I came in your mouth, you told me I tasted oceany.
—
I’ve finally finished mapping Alley of Branches. It’s an incomplete map, but even the best maps are incomplete. I have a stack of sketches. In this one, I tried to capture the texture of the cobblestones. In that one, I tried to show the chockablockness of the print shop. In a few of them, I tried to put to paper the tangles of bicycles and motorcycles. And there are more sketches of the small swimming pool than seem necessary, but its gravitational pull kept bringing me back. When I moved on to making watercolours, I started with small studies of the older woman in her purple-and-yellow swimsuit and tinted goggles floating calmly in the blue-green pool.
I’ve been thinking about painting individual watercolours that can be assembled into a massive kaleidoscopic painting, a painting that will show the meandering contours of the alley, its spiral staircases, its dwellings, its businesses, its juxtaposed and jumbled glory. While you live in a watery city, I’m dipping my paintbrush to drag watery colours across cold-pressed paper.
I can’t stop doing watercolours of you, even though they make me miss you terribly. Your face. Your breasts. The nest of your pubic hair.
A few years ago, I read an article about a legendary art school located in this city. I mentioned to you more than a few times that I wanted more than anything to go to that school. You said, You’re already an artist. You’re my artist. I didn’t know what to say. I don’t want to be a Sunday painter. I don’t want to be a disgruntled dishwasher at a greasy spoon diner who also happens to be an artist. I want to be swimming in art, to be surrounded by other artists, to make things that are unwieldy and weird and learn from my mistakes, to devote myself to creativity. In my vision, you’re there with me, sharing coffee and fresh pastries each morning in our small apartment, holding my hand in a gallery, reading aloud to me while I make dinner, knitting a pair of fingerless gloves while I sketch you, exploring the alleys alongside me, urgently kissing me against a brick wall.
After months of hesitation, procrastination, and self-doubt, I finally applied to the art school in this city. It’s notoriously difficult to get in, and I didn’t. I tried again. I got rejected again. You suggested that I study art somewhere nearby, but I’d been dreaming of this art school for too long to let it go. So, I told you that even though its art school didn’t want me, I still wanted to move to this city and make art, and I asked you to come with me. But everything you wanted was already in the sleepy city where we lived. You wanted to be near your family and friends; you liked your job and loved living surrounded by water and mountains and weren’t enamoured by the thought of leaving everything behind to live in a city of strangers and serpentine alleys.
One time we walked past an empty car with its motor running and the keys in the ignition. I told you I was tempted to jump inside, drive off, and start an entirely new life in a new town with a new name. You looked horrified, like I’d just broken up with you. Why, you asked, why would you want to do that? You had no idea why someone would want to shrug off their past and reinvent themselves.
—
After being away for two or three weeks, I returned to the small swimming pool. In that short span, it had somehow been transformed into a coffee shop. I walked down the pool’s concrete steps with their gleaming silver handrail into a cozy sunken café. It felt odd being in the drained swimming pool. I was so used to feeling the resistance of water against me in that space. My combat boots clacked on the blue-green tiles. I hung the bag that contained my swimsuit and a towel on the back of a chair and sat down. All the tables and chairs were bright yellow. There were far more people in the coffee shop than I’d ever seen in the pool. I looked around for the older woman with the purple-and-yellow swimsuit, but I didn’t see her. I wondered if she went somewhere else to float now or if she’d simply phased that out of her daily routine and moved on to something else, like tai chi. For the first time, I noticed that the concrete sides of the pool had faint illustrations of birds and fish. Some faint birds were swooping down with their faint talons extended toward faint fish under faint waves, while other faint birds were carrying faint fish into the air. I glanced at the menu and saw that the price for a coffee was similar to what I used to pay to swim in the quaint, uncrowded pool. According to my language dictionary, the coffee shop was named Mr. Swim. I had a watery cup of coffee and a disappointing Danish and left.
—
My first crush was on a girl named Tracy in kindergarten, and I’ve been crushing on girls ever since. I’ve always told you that my crush on you started when we were about fifteen, taking Earth Science together. But that’s not true. I first had a crush on you when I was about ten. That was the year we had the teacher who used to sing opera over the PA system in the morning, the teacher who seemed clueless about why he was standing at the front of the room, the one who would digress during a lesson on grammar to bemoan the dinky dessert portions in TV dinners. I started hovering near you, eavesdropping on what movies and music and snacks you liked. One time, I took a few things from your desk during recess. I don’t even recall what I took—probably small things you wouldn’t miss. I might have taken one of your scrunchies. My crush on you lasted until you relocated your desk to the back of the room to sit beside Lisa. As soon as that happened, I knew Lisa would convince you that I was a loser. So, I drifted away from you and let my crush wither.
Several years later, you were friends with my friend Aaron, who I sat beside in Earth Science, so we started chatting. And then, just like that, my crush on you was revived, and I couldn’t stop thinking about you. I’ve always told you that I knew I loved you from the first time we kissed. It was a fantastic kiss, but I think I fell for you deeply the first time you came over to Aaron’s place to watch us jam.
For some reason, I trusted you right away and was willing to be silly in front of you. And then, while I was tuning my guitar and Aaron was saying his usual Fuck, one two, one two, fuck you, into the mic to adjust the levels, you suggested a weird and wonderful name for our band: Lubricated Sagan. You laughed. Aaron laughed. I laughed. I kept flashing on the countless videos we’d watched in Earth Science with Carl Sagan reeling off facts about the universe in a never-changing monotone and an ever-changing turtleneck. Our laughter would subside, then one of us would say, Lubricated Sagan, and we’d all burst into laughter again. I remember you laughing at your own joke until you had to wipe tears from your eyes with your jean jacket sleeve.
I wanted you to keep laughing, so I broke out my shaky Carl Sagan impression. At present, I intoned, an enormous wang appears to be thrusting forcefully into my lubricated rectum.
Through tears, you added in your best monotone, I must admit the sensation is not entirely unpleasant.
We collapsed into laughter, and Aaron’s mom yelled down from upstairs to see if everything was okay. Aaron yelled back that everything was fine, and we tried to stifle ourselves. You probably don’t remember, but our eyes connected right then. A shiver ran down my spine. I wanted to spend the rest of the night with you, the rest of the week with you, lying in bed, staring into each other’s eyes until one of us got peckish or had to pee. That’s when I first felt a pinch of love for you.
Until you suggested Lubricated Sagan, we’d been oscillating between a name Aaron liked (Osiris) and a name I liked (Cubistic Barbeque).
I remember when our Earth Science teacher, Mr. Roseblatt, introduced mnemonics to help us memorize the order of the planets. After giving us a few options, he said the mnemonic he found most memorable was Many Very Eager Men Jumped Sally Under Neil’s Porch. He chuckled and segued into another topic.
Excuse me, Mr. Roseblatt, you said. Are you saying rape is okay?
Visibly uncomfortable, he adjusted his custard-stained sweater vest and stammered something along the lines of, Well, no, no, I didn’t, um, that’s not. He had a doe-eyed science-teacher-with-a-tobacco-stained-moustache-in-headlights expression.
But, Mr. Roseblatt, you said firmly, “many very eager men jumped Sally under Neil’s porch” sounds like rape. It sounds like you’re saying it’s okay for these men to rape Sally.
Mr. Roseblatt tried to make what he’d said go away, but you wouldn’t let it go. He got more and more flustered. I’d never seen a student make a teacher yield like that. Finally, he realized that he was stuck, like a mouse squirming on a glue trap, and the only way he could get unstuck was to apologize. And, to his credit, he did. Looking back now, I suspect he was probably worried you would report him to the principal. Once he’d apologized, you just let it go. A few girls came up to thank you after and you just brushed it off, like it was no big deal.
Your bedroom walls were covered with posters of metal bands and bats. I remember being transfixed by one massive poster filled with dozens of bat species. Some of them looked like they were smiling. You tried to unpack for me the wonder of bats. I kept cutting you off with kisses. I asked if you had a favourite bat on the poster, and you couldn’t choose a single species, so you talked about a few of your favourites. I remember you pointed to a bat with a long, slender tongue and said, I bet he’d be fun to date.
I asked you to put on some music. You rooted around in a milk crate filled with cassettes, found the one you wanted, and popped it in your boom box. It was a local influential industrial band that had recently covered every song on Meat Loaf ’s Bat Out of Hell album. You asked if it was okay, and I said it wasn’t my favourite. You slipped one of your hands into your jeans, took it out, and slid a finger into my mouth. I tasted your tanginess. A faucet twisted inside me. You asked again, Is this okay? Yeah, I said, it’s perfect.
The first time you kissed me wasn’t when I fell for you, but that first kiss was when I knew I was so deeply into you that I didn’t know if I could ever dig my way out. You were the quintessential rocker babe with your feathered hair, tight jeans, doom metal shirt, and jean jacket, smoking in the smoke pit with all the other rocker babes. You kept offering me a drag, but I kept saying no, even though I was so tempted every time I glanced at the lipstick-stained cigarette between your fingers.
Follow me, you said. Then, you started walking somewhere. I followed. I remember being nervous that you were setting me up, because I wasn’t like the cooler-than-thou rockers I’d seen you flirting with in the halls. I was one of the weird queer kids who got teased for wearing eyeliner and mostly hung out in an alcove with my weird queer friends.
I followed you to a dumpster at the back of the parking lot. Look, you said, I like you. Do you wanna kiss me? I felt woozy. I had that top-of-the-roller-coaster-oh-fuck-oh-fuck feeling in my tummy. Yeah, I said, I do. But I couldn’t move. I was a statue. I watched you close your eyes, lean in, and open your mouth. You tasted like spearmint and smoke. It’s hard to know how long our first kiss lasted. Was it just the tender moment of your soft lips against mine, your tongue sliding tentatively into my mouth before retreating? Or did it also include when you kissed me more deeply and pushed your jeans against my jeans, your denim softness against my denim hardness. I was overwhelmed, couldn’t think, could barely breathe. A bulb in my brain burst.
After we kissed, you lit another smoke and inhaled. You offered me a drag, and this time I took it. I felt dizzy, coughed, and handed it back to you. We stood there behind the dumpster, pressed against each other, sharing a lipstick-stained cigarette.
—
Last night, I made a handful of drawings based on scenes from Already Yesterday, the time travel movie we saw on our second date. But in my drawings, you and I starred in the story instead of River Phoenix and Lisa Bonet. In my revised version, you travelled back in time to prevent a devastating pandemic and fell in love with me. First, I drew from my memory of the film. Then, I watched a VHS tape of it that I rented from a video store tucked in a corner of Alley of Gems. (The store is so small that my guidebook says to find a jewellery store with a neon sign of a glowing emerald and then to turn around. Even with those directions, it was hard to spot. But it was teeming with tapes, and the woman working there knew exactly where to pluck out Already Yesterday from the stacks of tapes around her.)
