Transubstantiation

Transubstantiation

         I am sitting in my chair, outside.  Camille is next to me.  We sip the coffees that I have made.  I ground the beans with the handle of a knife because my grinder was broken.  The smell has seeped into my hands, so rich and brown.  The moon is half-full tonight, and it is cold.  I have given Camille my jacket.  The air feels good when I inhale.  I wish suddenly, with a great surge of wanting, that I could take a breath so great and deep that another would be unnecessary.  Rose Levine is dead so Camille and I will sit here tonight.
         The three of us were and are seventeen.  My parents are somewhere for the night and so Camille is here, and we are drinking coffee and smoking; shortly we will be drinking wine. 
         Camille speaks.  Her voice is scratched.  Her face shows little.  She does not show much emotion.  Her eyebrows are sharp and long and her mouth is thin and expressive. “I like this.  It seems appropriate.  It is better than the funeral.”
         The funeral had been a shock to us both.  We had both been in love with Rose at one point.  Or something, certainly.  She had many relatives and a mother and a father there.  We knew that she did not love them, or did not think that she loved them.
         As an example Rose had told us that she spent most of her thirteenth year in a deep depression.  She had flirted with killing herself.  One night she took an overdose of what she thought from the labeling were sleeping pills.  They were antihistamines.  She woke up with nothing worse than a headache.  Her parents were unaware that anything had taken place.
         They sat in the funeral though, and both of them cried.  Her father, a big man with pale blue eyes, no neck, and an effeminate little goatee, had cried silently.  His nose was dripping a little.  He looked at the urn that sat on the pedestal in front of all of our fold-up chairs and let his nose run.  There was a horrible little fake handkerchief in the pocket of my rented suit, three crisp white triangles of cloth stapled to a piece of cardboard.  I took it out of my jacket and gave it to him.  He blew his nose on it as best he could, considered handing it back to me, thought better of it, then awkwardly put it in his pocket.  He nodded to me briefly, an embarrassed shake.  I don’t know why I gave him that little piece of cloth.  I could see he was in pain.  I hated Rose’s parents at that funeral.  I think I loved them too.  In Rose’s death they were capable of the kind of love they could not achieve before it. 
         Camille’s reaction was hard to figure out.  She sat dry-eyed next to me at the funeral but she shivered and gripped my hand very tightly in her nail-bitten one.  So much of what I am is wrapped up in her, though more was in Rose.  Camille was not comprehensible there.  She looked at the flowers and at the urn and she was expressionless, all skinny shoulders and long arms, hunched up against the cold.
         After the funeral we came here and I made coffee.  We both smoked our cigarettes on the porch outside my house.  It is November and it is cold, and everything seems dead outside except for us.  I agree aloud with Camille; this is better than the funeral.
           “Christopher.”  Camille says.  She looks so fragile wrapped up in my wool coat, so small.  I want to hold her, but I know that the touch of my hands is contact enough for now.  “Christopher, could you make the mulled wine?  I need something warm.”
         “Yes.  Will you come in with me?” 
         “No.  I need to be out here for a while.  It’s very beautiful right now, and I can’t bear to be inside anything.”  I nod, accepting this, and begin to go inside.  “Christopher?”  I turn back to look at her.  I do not know what she is about to say.  This scares me.  Does she know?  Does she know that more of me died with Rose than would have with her?          “Could I have that pack of Camels?”  I toss it to her without saying anything.  She catches the pack.  Her movement is quick.  She taps the pack once, opens it.  She lights a cigarette, inhales and puffs out a thin feather of smoke.  “Thank you.  Christopher.  You don’t have to protect me from this.  I don’t want you to protect yourself by protecting me. Give me that much.”  I look at her for a moment.  She looks back, still closed to me.  Then I go inside. 
         I make the mulled wine.  It’s a difficult process.  It’s easy to ruin the taste or the wine.  I collect the ingredients.  I take out my jars of cardamom, clove and ground cinnamon.  I pour the wine into the pan, and a little fragrant steam rises up.  The wine is a cheap pinot noir, but it is still good.  Once the liquid is just below boiling I toss in the ground up spices.  I do not like to smell these spices now, though they are pleasant.  Rose made this for me once.
         I knew Rose because of my face.  I was cut up when I was a small child, and I have a scar.  It curves up from my jaw, up through my hair and bisects my left ear.  The top third is gone.  The scar scared my classmates.  When they saw me their eyes would pass over me, come back quickly then jump away.  Few would make eye contact with me.  That first meeting between Rose and me is still clear.
         She was sitting in the woods behind the school on the second day of our sophomore year, smoking.  I had snuck out to do the same.  She looked up when she heard me coming and she did not look away. 
         I do not think anyone who looks normal can appreciate how much that meant to me.  She smiled, and looked at me calmly.  “Cigarette?” she said, proffering a pack she had pulled out of her slim black canvas coat.  It was a cheap coat, and I remember thinking how out of place it looked in our school, and how elegant.
         “No.” I said. “I have my own.  But thank you.”
         She folded her legs beneath her in that way only women can manage.  “I’ve seen you around.  Who are you with?”
         “With?” 
         “Who do you run with?  Who are your friends?  Haven’t seen you with anyone.”
         “I’m not with anyone.  I don’t really talk to many people.”
         She leaned back on the rock she was sitting on and smiled without malice. “That’s sad.  But really it’s not.  I just came here.  I know no one.  Good to know there’s another.”  I smiled too and sat down on the rock next to her.  She looked at me for a moment.  “You’re quiet aren’t you.”
         “I say what’s necessary.  What’s your name?”  So Rose told me her name and we talked about the school and we talked about what we were and she invited me to dinner at her house. 
         When we finished our cigarettes and class was about to start, Rose said to me, “Christopher,  do you notice my wonderful thrift-store heels?”  I said I that I had.  They were black stilettos, made of scuffed and torn patent leather.  “They are very wonderful and they only cost me five dollars.  But they are not hiking shoes and we are in the woods.  Can you give me a lift back to the linoleum?”  So I picked her up on my back and carried her to the school.  I have never forgotten how her arms laced around my neck and her hands clasped together on my chest like a religious symbol, signifying all we were already.  And now Rose is dead and I make Camille the wine Rose made me. 
         The wine is ready.  I pour it steaming into two old, chipped mugs.  The steam rises up and wets my face with the smell of Rose.  My chest clenches.  I set my teeth and carry the mugs out into the moonlight.  Camille, who was Rose’s best friend, her lover and mine, is still sitting where I left her.  Camille’s cigarette has burnt to a stub of burnt plastic filter and she has not noticed.  The hand holding it hangs limp over the edge of her chair.  “Camille.  Do you want your wine?”
         She looks up.  “Yes, please.”  I sit down next to her and take her hand.  I do not say anything.  “Christopher?”  I look at her, and she lets me see her clearly for the first time since we heard.  “Christopher, I do love you.  I want you to know that.”  She looks down and huddles in her chair, limbs bent.  “And I want you to remember that I want to be burned like Rose if I go early.”  Her eyes are on mine.  “Don’t let them put me into the ground.” 
         I am scared now. “You’re not planning to leave are you?”
         A sigh, short and shaky.  “No.  But I wanted to make sure you knew that.”
         We sit back and drink the wine.  It is a sacrament, like the communion wafer.  I look out over my porch and drink it, and try to keep breathing steadily.  When we are done with the wine, Camille puts my hand in her lap and tells me to find a condom.  We go inside.  I kiss her thoroughly on the couch.  She tastes delicious, of spices and cigarettes and wine.  She tastes like Rose.  My hand is wrapped around her waist and for a moment I feel the bones beneath her skin, and they are all I can feel.  Her teeth and skull are all that are in the kiss.  Her lips and tongue are gone.  I get up quickly.  I stare at her for a moment, and it is just Camille again,  Camille, the woman I loved less.  I am ashamed.
         I say, “I’ll get the condoms.”  I go up to my room and take the condoms out of their hiding place in my bookshelves.  I go downstairs again.  A few minutes later I am inside her.  Camille is over me.  Her eyes are clenched shut and her lips are pressed together tightly.  She breathes in short snuffles through her nose.  I want to lose myself in this moment, erase the world and the shape of things.  I want to make Rose not dead for a few minutes, or just forget her, or do something far less pardonable.  She is inside me still as I am inside Camille, in an embrace more intimate.  I try to forget how Rose called this the beast with two backs.  I thrust my hips up, assuming the duty of movement. 
         I am moving and that is enough.  I try to put my mind in my body.  Sensation is the only refuge I will allow myself.  I have done this many times before with Camille, but never just with her.  Like a modernist painting titled untitled, I am all movement and color, contextless.
         I feel a drop, something small and wet hits my stomach.  I look at my stomach and there is a black blot there.  I look up and I see.  Camille has been crying; the mascara she wore to the funeral has smeared and run down her cheeks.  A drop of it landed on my stomach  She says “This is too much.  Christopher?  Christopher?  Do you hear me?  Everything is…”  And for the first time since I heard that Rose had crashed her car, my eyes prickle.  As I have been trying to depart, Camille has been arriving.  I am here again. I am on the couch and Rose is still dead. 
         “I know.” I say, panting a little.  We have stopped moving.  “It’s going to get worse Camille.  You know that.”  She nods.  “Stay with me Camille.  I wish I could fix this.  I’m sorry, you understand?  I’m sorry—” Camille takes me out of her, and puts her mouth next to my damaged ear, and calls me what Rose used to call me. 
         “You beautiful freak.”
         And I roll over on top of her, and all is light and shade. Rose is dead and Camille and I are here, and Camille and I do love one another, but Rose is still dead, Camille’s breath is faster now, and I am here and I, I would choose no other place even if I could, and I cry out and beneath me Camille is crying out too, and Rose is still dead, and this still matters, but she is also alive, and though I am making love to Camille on this threadbare couch, I am also making love to Rose.  Her body is dead, dead and burned, but what she was, the quick intelligence, the lust and beauty and terrible loneliness, that is all here, transubstantiated.  A moment from my childhood runs over and through my head.  Candles and the smell of incense hanging in dark air, and over everything, a great silver crucifix.  “This is my body, this is my blood.” And then I see nothing but white for a moment, and then my muscles spasm, and it is over.