And One Day We Will Die, page 4
Yes, she was dead. It was unfortunate that she had died. He looked at her body, quiet underneath the hot key lights; a still life. He wondered vaguely if he should turn the lights off, but didn’t move. He kept looking at her. She had been alive a few minutes ago – her body still smelled like the cigarette she’d smoked out on the balcony.
Alex pinched sweat out of the fuzz of his moustache. He made a decision.
She’s not the only one I’ve ever loved; my heart has room for everyone. I have loved the unlovable, pulling even the cruelest people on this earth to my bosom. Murderers and sadists alike have succumbed to my seduction. To my smile. The eternally unforgiven have pressed their lips to the cold surface of my exposed teeth. To the zygomatic bone he referred to once as my “cheek.”
Yes, even you will know my love one day.
Acrylics are unforgiving—their polymer hearts yearn for firmness the minute they’re exposed to air—but oils are lush with patience. They wait for the tempo of inspiration, as slow or quick as it might come. Alex studied the oils creaming on his palette. The afternoon glowed ochre. On the other side of the horizontal blinds an ice cream truck played “Turkey in the Straw.” Racist shit, but inextricably entangled with nostalgia for city kids. Alex salivated at the memory of freezer burn on his tongue. He picked up a dull-edged palette knife and blended a mound of alizarin crimson and titanium white together.
He reasoned that it wasn’t like he’d murdered her. Surely people would understand; he was an artist. He’d merely seized upon the opportunity that reality had presented him with. He stared at the ruddy pink he’d made. No one would expect him to deny himself access to a paint color. Olivia was a distinct hue, an experience.
There was a faint smell of shit in the studio; her bowels had loosened. The fabric she was draped in wasn’t stained, but he left the area on the canvas between her legs shadowy, ready for the addition of a stain. He was already thinking about the story he would tell.
You’re the one that buried her alive. In declaring her rebirth you undid her sacrifice, casually. Unruddered from history he floats, adrift in me. He is just another collection of verbs and nouns, his context forgotten.
He mourns the fact that he was not allowed to tell his own story. That his optic nerves are forever intertwined with thorns.
People loved a romance.
Alex hadn’t known Olivia well enough to love her, but that didn’t matter now that she was dead. Her corpse was easier to love than her living body anyway; no unpleasant emotions or demands to negotiate. No threats of rejection to his advances. He placed a lone finger against her forearm and pressed down; first lightly, then with more force. Her flesh was pliant now, soft and quicker to bend to Alex’s directions than it had ever been in life. He found himself aroused by the vulnerable position that death had placed her in and blushed. He adjusted one of her hands, gently, and was surprised that she wasn’t very cold. Then he remembered the lights and felt foolish. Everything was hot underneath the lights.
Romance had always seemed implausible, an abstract concept lurking in the back of Alex’s mind. He understood the basics: dates and sex and poetry, maybe, if you could tumble the locks of a person’s defenses. He’d largely avoided the venture. Stuck to things he could grasp concretely like color, form, and texture. Constructing a love story now between him and Olivia was, perhaps, an ill-suited task for Alex, but people were in love with love; you didn’t need to say much for someone to fill in their own details. Happily ever after was different for everyone. Joy the elusive punctuation mark ending the sentence of every romance.
Alex squeezed out a turd of lemon yellow to rest alongside his pink blob.
Olivia was sort of famous already—not internationally known or anything, but she had a healthy social media presence—with plenty of followers online. Fans who drew anime-eyed pictures of her and DM’d her dicks or heart-dotted poetry. The kind of person who generated interest. Not just pretty, but charismatic.
Even now Alex couldn’t deny her charisma: he was trying to paint her likeness. To fix in place the elusive thing already slipping away. Alex pressed his brush into the paint he’d mixed. Slack-lipped, her facial muscles slowly lapsed into the calm walls of her maxilla. A fly was in the room somewhere. Periodically Alex heard a buzz and saw a scribble of black in his peripheral vision. He was taking too long. He would have to work faster to capture her.
Transformations gave her hope like lighthouse lanterns in the fog, but your shiny bulbs were all long-burned away. The lamps she thought she’d seen were really moonlight on the quartz-skimmed cliffs: rocks for her to break upon. You gave her a gift and called her boyfriend. You gave him a gift and called him girlfriend.
Things she could have given himself.
You gave nothing. You took everything.
He wanted to paint the ambiguity of her. The fact of her death and the persistence of her continued presence: she was still Olivia. She was no longer Olivia. At least she was no longer Olivia enough to get in the way of Alex.
He dabbed more crimson onto a smear of pink. The oils yielded beneath his pressure; smooth, eager to bend. He thought about the word remains, and wondered how much of Olivia he could eliminate while still communicating her essence. What needed to remain? How much could he take away? What was he permitted to take?
He stared at her body, trying to determine which details were critical to an individual’s humanity. It was all questions, all puzzles. Was a human being their hair color? The shape of their nose? Alex had always felt it was something about a person’s eyes. Now he was beginning to believe that the tension of their muscles had something to do with it; the slackening body in front of him was already so different from the Olivia he’d known. This corpse was not tersely scrolling on her phone and ignoring Alex’s jokes about the pronunciation of Sepulveda Boulevard. She could not ignore him anymore. She had to witness. She had to understand his vision.
In inertia I love her the same way that I will love you. The way a winding sheet loves a corpse, I love him. Tightly, completely; I hold him close and hope he forgets everything that made him hurt. It’s funny that she still remembers you.
Yes, it was unfortunate that she had died, truly a tragedy; but wasn’t Alex transforming this tragedy into something bigger than both of them? Writing them both into art history forever? Wasn’t this mutually beneficial, even without Olivia’s consent?
Wouldn’t she want this? Who wouldn’t want this?
He shivered, a thrill of cold sneezing up his spine even though the lights were too hot for that. It was odd that she’d died so suddenly. He suspected a heart condition from malnourishment or something like that; it wasn’t like death was infectious. Being in her presence wouldn’t hurt him, even if the smell in the studio was progressively growing stronger, richer with her bodily waste and the musk of other more exotic biological processes.
Alex got up and turned off one of the lights. Deep blue shadows immediately puddled in the dimples of Olivia’s softly decaying flesh, changing everything. He frowned and turned the light back on again. Rummaged around and lit a candle that his last ex had left behind years ago. A label on it read, optimistically: New Love. Dust and a cobweb ringing the old wick crackled as the flame connected. A chemically-sweetened vanilla odor began to perfume the atmosphere, the fragrance so heavy he could almost feel its weight on his tongue.
Alex knew that the story of their love had to be part of the composition itself. How he depicted Olivia would be the thing the romantics clung to, it was crucial to the piece. For a long time he couldn’t decide what to do. The potential variables overwhelmed him. Then, inspiration struck: he would paint her as reborn, already inhabiting her reincarnated form.
And he would always love her; even when she became a boy.
Enticing, so enticing to hearts hungry for trans icons (secretly and irresponsibly they are truly hungry for trans iconography, but some hearts are willing to settle), but changing a person’s gender after death is so much easier than transitioning while alive.
The gift of your love was truly a burden after all.
Alex was excited as he painted. His paint brush moved with an energy that he hadn’t felt in months. Cis, white, and het, he was not trans or queer, perhaps, but he could add to the cultural lexicon. Alex could addendum. Anyone could, really—they just had to be loud enough about it. Why not Alex? Why not, indeed? His skill with a paintbrush was undeniable, a kind of alchemy with paint and light and the human condition. His instructors all commended him on his expressiveness, his ability to capture something very real on the canvas.
The trick was to hide the real thing inside of something else: Olivia’s death lay at the core of the romance Alex wrote with every brushstroke. Her corpse was a fact, immovable and serene. If he reached out a hand he could touch her, still warm and dead beneath the artificial lights.
I have heard so many stories, whispered or screamed or merely thought; I hear every story. I collect them. I am, in some ways, a kind of librarian. But remember that my skull is empty: I have so much capacity to listen, but nothing is retained. All that flows into me, flows out again. Within me, I offer the joy of forgetting. Of undoing. All beginnings are muddled into endings, all endings a fresh start.
How will you be forgotten? Quickly, or will her body keep you going a little longer? Will he be your kindling or the flame? Just remember, all fires burn out.
Alex’s brush moved faster and faster. His hands became muddles of color. His heart rate sped like a rat across a floor.
I’m usually willing to wait, but you were so enticing, your palette knife scraped away layers to reveal surprising streaks of cadmium red.
You were so surprised.
He trembled, trying to focus on the story, the
The paintbrush fell from his hand.
The mask you put on for fun was made of nails and rusty iron. Why are you shocked that you’re bleeding? Why didn’t you expect the pain?
Alex gouged his fevered forehead with his fingertips. Every muscle in his body ached. Shadows converged on his vision. He thought he saw a hand reach out of the darkness, fleshless but somehow tender.
They tell stories about me, too:
Death is a slut—he comes for everyone.
Death is a plagiarist—he steals everyone’s life story.
Yes, even yours, my love.
Twins
INSPIRED BY “A BABY FOR PREE”
CAMILA HAMEL
They were walking away, fast. The same height and the same gait. Their hair bobbing in the same way. I could not be certain it was really them. After all, this did not fit the green legend of their unbirth. That was the story we had always accepted. They were supposed to be not dead, not born, not undead—unborn. Cancelled out from the start. We had to drive across three states, but they were supposed to have been nothing more than a blastocyst, and then a thick stripe of dark crimson against the white, white porcelain. They were the right age, and I had a feeling. Twenty years later, error upon error, what could have saved them from not existing? It was my worst nightmare come back to me, to rival what waking anxiety can manufacture in the middle of the night with only slanting venetian stripes against the wall for company.
Twins were unheard of now. It could not be them, but I could never trust the things I had been told. The unborn twins. The dead zygotes. The twin blastocysts. But what if it were them? Taken out of the bio-waste bin and successfully grown in vitro? I was famous then. I had miraculously conceived twins. It was beyond unreasonable, and my greatest hope.
Had to get closer. I ran to catch up, to know if I had actually committed the worst sin imaginable, on purpose or by accident. Discard my babies. Like marine creatures who vomit eggs and assume no more responsibility towards them.
I was just behind these two girls—not my twins, or maybe my twins. They were tall, almost freakishly so, and wore matching raincoats under their bobbed hair. They had long necks and fingers. Their shoes were old against the old cobblestones, not worn, just no longer worn. Buster Browns or something like that. They wore trousers that were a bit too short, so their socks and ankles were visible. They looked confident. I could not hear their voices yet, so I tried to keep up with their long strides. They were so fast and young, and I, so old and broken down. I was the scruffy mutt compared to sleek colts. My almost-born twins, or maybe not mine. Never before seen. I had a feeling, as when blood calls to blood. I don’t know if this is a real thing. There are few babies born now.
They turned a corner, and I almost lost them, but they had stopped to look at something in a window. They were pointing and discussing. One of them laughed. It was music. So beautiful. A laugh of pure mirth, without a hint of irony or sarcasm. Without spite or malice. The laugh I would have hoped my children would have, if I had not asked for them to be sluiced down the drain, flushed—or not. I still don’t know.
I walked on briskly, and now I was close behind them, listening to their conversation. They spoke in tandem.
“Goldalynne, my dear, no one is coming to see us.”
“Oh, yes, I know. We’ve been stood up, it seems.”
“But we have each other, as we always have, ever since we lived in someone’s belly and then in the brown box.”
“Yes, it’s of no consequence, is it?”
“We know who likes us, don’t we?”
There was winking and sniggering and looks of pure mischief.
“He wants to come in your mouth.”
“Both our mouths, we are the comely twins.”
They laughed until they were crying.
“He is a gristly brute.”
“And fat.”
“There is no need to torment him.”
“He will give us what we want.”
“With little effort on our part, but we don’t feel any remorse, do we?”
“I should say not.”
“Come on, comely, we’ve come to the spot!”
“Where now?”
“For a spot of lunch, silly!”
They went in and sat down.
“Oh yes, whiskey for me.”
“And some bubbly for me, if you please.”
Their waiter looked down his long nose and said, “Anything to eat?”
One twin looked at the other, and they both got teary-eyed.
“Hey there, are you alright?”
The waiter was flustered and rather put out that he should have to sound empathetic so early on; his shift was just beginning, and he was expecting to get slammed within the hour.
“I’ll have the special,” said one twin.
“But bring two forks,” said the other.
The waiter took the menus and went away.
“You were going to cry. Why?”
“I don’t know. Why were you crying?”
“I don’t know, because you were. I don’t like to see you sad.”
“I was thinking of Dad. That’s what did it.”
“But he’s been dead for years, and anyway, he was a bad dad.”
“I know, I know. It’s so silly. Oh, you kill me. You’re so grown up.”
“No more or less than you, my dear.”
The food arrived, and I watched them eat. They changed the subject and were back to their carefree banter. I was back to admiring their charm. Now that they had settled and were calm, I would approach them. I would see if I was their mom. The pigeons were eating the crumbs below their table, which was hinky-unstable. One twin was wadding up a napkin to put under the shorter table leg. With large palms on the tabletop, she tested its solidity and smiled with satisfaction.
“There.”
I stood before them, and they looked up at me, blinking simultaneously.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hello,” they said in unison.
“I hope you won’t mind the intrusion, but I wanted to see your faces.”
“Why? Are you a photographer?”
“Or a painter? We model at the art academy.”
“We charge twenty-five dollars an hour for one, or forty-six for both.”
“We have plenty of experience.”
“No, nothing like that. You see, I think I’m your mother.”
Taken aback, the twins registered shock with an identical micro-expression, and then turned to look at each other as if the movement had been choreographed. Then, they burst out laughing.
“Well, if you’re our mother, you’ve come twenty years too late!”
“We were raised by our friend Mrs. Holloway, the harpist and neighborhood piano lady.”
“She found us wrapped in bubble plastic in a plain brown box. This is what we know.”
“It wasn’t plain. It had a logo on the side, “Tide.” We were abandoned in front of a K-mart where Mrs. Holloway had gone to buy sweatpants, or so she remembers.”
“She adopted us, saying we were lucky to be born in the early summer. The winter winds would have done us in.”
“We have always lived in her big house on Farley Street, the one up on the hill.”
“Not to be cruel, but if you are our true mother, we have no need of you.”
“But since you’re here, would you like to stay and have coffee? They have very good pie. You can sit and tell us why you abandoned us.”
“And what you’ve been up to all these years. But don’t expect us to call you Mother; that honor goes to Mrs. Holloway. She is the smartest, kindest woman we know.”
