Moments

Moments



Her hair is spilled out over the pillow, fissures of darkness against soft whiteness. The coconut scent of the shampoo she uses lingers in the air and I take a deep breath and my eyes close slightly. I love her so much.

Too much.

A shaft of watery, pale blue light from the half closed curtains plays on the soft skin of her arm and cheek. The livid purple bruise at her eye seems almost alive. I ignore it. The rapid, shifting movements of her eyes behind the veils of skin reminds me of creatures trapped and scurrying. But no creatures will escape those eyes only a dull light, once bright.

My hand moves closer to her throat.

My eyes trace the sharp line of her jaw, the curve of her neck, the firmness of her breasts until she’s lost beneath the ghost white sheets. She won’t leave me. Never. My hand moves again and I feel warm breath on my knuckles. I imagine my fingers on her throat and something creeping crawls up my spine and scratches at my brain. A howling sound bounces off the inside of my skull and my finger tips brush her neck and a thousand bolts of lightning rush through my hand and I shudder. I lean closer. I want to kiss her, devour her, to hear that tiny, beautiful sound she makes when we make love.

Why was she doing this? I was mean, I was angry, I was sorry. She knew this. I’m sorry. Sorry for everything. I love her. How can she leave me? And my hand tenses at her throat but doesn’t move, my whole being tenses and her long eyelashes flutter slightly and the scurrying of her eyes stills and the skin at her throat quivers. She’s awake. I can taste her fear like her sweat on my tongue. And I hate myself then. Hate what I’ve done to her. I never wanted to hurt her. I want her to be happy. But then at times when her big green eyes bore into me and know me for what I am, I want to crush her, want her to feel all the pain I’ve ever felt in one blackened moment. In those moments something erupts within me and spews out foul, putrid, rottenness. And I touch her and hurt her and soil her with that rottenness, my rottenness. But it’s in this abyss from which my foulness and rottenness spew that I revel. Lost in it I find power, joy, beauty. In that abyss I’m king. And realising this and knowing her fear as she lay there pretending to sleep; eyes shut as though a guard against me, something shatters inside me. My soul shrivels into a tiny point of light lost in the dark recesses of my self. I shift slightly. Her breath quickens a faint, distant echo. I lean heavily back onto my pillow, the scar tissue on my back pulls tight, and stare at the ceiling and all the breath seems to flee my body. She relaxes beside me. How close we are yet a million miles separate us; the road stretching between us shrouded in grey clouds, pitted with fear, desperation, obsession.

I remember, half dreamt, my time in Iraq, my pillow now a hard rock beneath my head, the covers heavy chains. I remember Stan and something he said to me once. The last thing he ever said to me. Stan was a quiet, skinny guy, always reading or just staring. A thoughtful guy I suppose with small, beady eyes that seemed to chew up the world and grow larger when he spoke. I had always liked Stan, a purposeful person, like everything mattered. We stood scared and melting in the sweltering heat of some nameless Iraqi town. A desolate place; the shot out windows of the derelict buildings like vacant eyes peering, telling you what you already knew: you’ll die here. The orange dust swirled up from the abandon streets forming half seen phantoms, watching, waiting, judging. Everything seemed to wobble in the heat haze as if trapped in some bizarre dancing ritual before it all finally collapses and falls, and a sticky, stinging feeling like a swarm of flies’ flutters inside my ACU and all over my skin. It was claustrophobic, oppressive. The whole experience just pushed down on you until you were miles and miles beneath the earth, stalking through hell not knowing how or why you got there.

‘You believe in God, pal?’ Stan said in that quiet, distant voice. He was religious but in a weird way. Not in a oh, there’s an old guy in the clouds watching, pulling all the strings sort of way or a paradise or virgins waiting when you finally kick the bucket sort of way but in his own way, a way I didn’t understand. Stan had come to hate the war, I knew that. He talked about the futility of it; death; destruction; hate; greed. Again I never really understood much of what he said and maybe I didn’t want too, I was protecting my country, my freedom. I didn’t really care about all the whys and why not’s, didn’t want to know. But the longer I was there even the things I once felt were clear and solid like freedom and terrorism became muddled and indistinct and the more acutely I felt the pointlessness of it all. The angrier I got. The easier killing became.

‘Yeah, I guess.’ I lied, don’t know why I didn’t just say so.

‘You think he’s here, God?’

I looked around, looked at my weapon, ‘No.’

‘Yeah, I think your right pal.’ And he smiled at me. ‘Remember when you first seen your girl? Or when you looked at her and thought shit I’m in love and you knew she loved you too? You ever have that?’

Angie was soaking wet the first time I saw her. Her swimsuit clung to the curves of her body; smiling, enthusiastic eyes looking out through strips of dark brown silk. One strip of hair had caught on her lip and she pushed at it with her tongue before eventually removing it with a delicate finger. She walked passed as I bobbed in the water and I stared at her, I couldn’t help it she was beautiful, and she threw me the faintest of smiles and a hot, hot fire burst to life in my chest.

The word stuck in my throat, I didn’t think it was going to come out, ‘Yeah’.

Stan looked at me and yellow teeth showed as his smile grew wider, a genuine smile, and his grey, beady eyes stared and he said, ‘Well pal, that’s where you’ll find God, in those moments, those beautiful fucking moments.’

And lying in my bed remembering the first time I saw Angie I think maybe Stan’s right. And then I think of those blackened moments. What about those?

I said to Stan, ‘I dunno. Think we got more need for Him here then when we’re eyeing up the missus.’

Before he could reply a football came bouncing our way and a little kid about eight or nine, wearing a torn pair of shorts, his feet and upper body bare, ribcage ready to burst out of his skin, appeared before us gesturing for his ball back. I picked it up and handed it to him. Dirty hands cut and grazed. His eyes though, his eyes were ink black and lifeless as though utterly and entirely defeated, eyes too old for one so young. This kid, I thought, has seen things with those eyes nobody should ever see. He put the ball under one skinny arm and pointed the other, stabbing the air with a tiny finger, toward a crumbling limestone building, the white plaster pitted and cracked, eroded by time and bullets. What glass remained in the windows was seared opaque by an angry sun. Little jagged broken teeth. The roof nothing but rotten wooden beams. And then he spoke, a strange, crackling whisper.

Stan died in that building sent to his death by a starving child. The third degree burns on my back and calves took months to heal.

After that sleep became difficult. Everything became difficult. Pain. Nightmares. I’d be in an old derelict house, dark, cold, rotten, and I’d have this terrible urge to get up into the attic like the whole place might collapse if I didn’t or maybe there’s something up there I had to discover, had to know. So I run upstairs and on the second floor see a light in the attic and a rickety stairway leading toward it. Running for the stairs, desperate, I reach the top and realise there’s a gap stretching between the stairs and the doorway into the attic. The top of the stairs is broken away. I feel like this is impossible like it just shouldn’t be this way and I leap toward the doorway and slip trying to grab the door frame on the other side and fall. And I look up and see Angie looking down from the attic doorway, staring at me. But she looks different somehow, I can’t explain it. She frightens me. I get up. Through the stained windows trees grow crazily up and up into dark, broiling clouds and people like little ants rush up their twisted trunks but the trees keep growing taller and taller. The people keep climbing. I can’t watch. And I run up the stairs and try the attic again. I always fall.

Some other nightmares are more real, more vivid. I’d wake in my bed frozen, not able to move a muscle, not able to make a sound, my face contorted into a silent scream like its being pulled apart. I’d feel a presence near me and at the foot of my bed there’s the shadow of a child, a boy. Just standing, watching. And I still can’t move or make a sound. Sometimes he points. Sometimes the boy-shadow is sitting on my chest, pressing down on me and I can’t breathe and I’m more scarred then I’ve ever been in my entire life.

Drink numbs the pain, most of it. The doctors use words like shock, trauma, disassociation, depression, P.T.S.D. Here, take these pills. There, have some more pills. Your friends look at you different. Your girlfriend looks at you different. You look at them different.

Suddenly I don’t feel like sleeping. I get out of bed the floorboards cold against my feet.

‘What is it?’ A faint whisper.

‘Go back asleep.’

The mirror in the bathroom shows me a face I struggle to recognise. I’ve come to loathe that face. The pink scar along my hairline reminds me of my father. I rarely think of him. I’m like him. And I think of my mother. I think of what he did to her. I’m like him. Angie’s leaving. And I punch the mirror smashing it. The broken visage remaining seems somehow more apt. Blood stains the sink. I want to scream. Destroy everything I’ve ever known.

‘Baby, what’s wrong?’ Her voice trembles.

I wrap a towel around my fist and walk to the doorway. I can’t speak.

‘You okay?’

I still can’t speak.

Silence.

‘You remember the first time you saw me?’

‘What’s wrong baby? You okay?’

‘At the pool where you worked?’

Silence.

‘Yeah, you looked good.’ Just for a moment something I haven’t heard in a long time has crept into her voice but the fear beats at it making it almost inaudible. ‘The armbands, that was good, cute.’ I imagine her smile through the darkness of the room.

I can’t bring myself to do the same. ‘Really wanted you to show me how to swim.’

‘Like you couldn’t already.’

‘So?’

‘You made me laugh. Your hand bleeding?’

‘It’s fine…’

‘Let me see it.’

She goes to get up. ‘Don’t. Go back to sleep.’ The words come out louder then I intend and she slowly lays her head back on the pillow. As I walk out I think I hear her crying and stop. And the sound stops. I turn my head back toward her, a curled form on the bed. Moonlight drips from the parting in the curtains dampening the chest of drawers and sheets. Her face is shadowed but her eyes scorch me. My fists clench. And I walk to the kitchen and clean up my hand and pour a whiskey.

Nearly a month’s passed since I had her followed. She’s seeing someone else, she wants to get away. I knew this, could feel it. Feel it in her touch, her kiss. Hear it in her voce. See it in her eyes and movements. All the little things. The way she’d hand me a shirt, ask me what movie we should go see, let her fingers run over the back of my hand. I suppose I didn’t want to believe it or accept it. There’s a guy I know, ex-military, who works in the city as a Private Investigator so I looked him up. Gunnar Larsson’s his name, a giant of a man, known for his temper and his love of guns; a love that borders fanaticism. ‘How can you be free if you can’t protect yourself? Because somebody’s always gonna try to get ya, to cage ya. You gotta fight for it.’ To Gunnar Larsson death and freedom are fast friends, cell mates in their own empty prison. His love of guns of coarse made his name sort of ironic but nobody called him Gunnar he was known as Lars. He served in Gulf War and although his parents are Scandinavian the man has star spangled blood. He sat straight backed and hard eyed across from me in a quiet diner booth, chewing noisily, his brow furling up into his bald pate, wiping greasy fingers on his already greasy t-shirt and finally after some convincing he agreed to follow her.

‘You aint gonna do nothin’ stupid?’ his face is carved granite.

‘Just have to know.’

After another drink I go back to bed. Maybe she’s sleeping. I’m tired too like I’ve been dragged across a desert, burnt by the sun and bitten by the sand. Sleep is dreamless.

The next morning she’s gone. How quietly she must of left. Most of her things left behind. Part of me still didn’t think she’d leave. I call her name. Nothing. But I know where she’s going, what she plans to do.

The car is parked outside the diner where I had met Lars weeks before. It fits the description Lars had given me, plates match. He told me they meet here more often then not, told me about the plane tickets. I park outside and wait. A heavy rain falls from a steel grey sky, little wet, metallic eruptions on the hood of the car. I can see them sitting by the window, hands touching across the table, food ignored. She smiles. I reach for the gun in the glove compartment. Angie throws her head back and laughs and then quickly looks down at her food as though embarrassed, not wanting to draw attention. And my hands begin to shake. Emotions rattle and smash through me in a violent tremor. A terrible longing. Tears burn my cheeks. A strangled sound escapes my throat. I beat at the steering wheel and dash board with my fists, stamp and kick out with my feet and knees. I’m trying to break free, no, trying to hide, cowering behind rage.

I grab the gun.

They leave their seats and walk from the diner hand in hand. I imagine if someone had seen me that day marching toward this couple, gun in hand, they’d also have seen a dark form walk beside me, my shadow, dislocated and out of sync yet part of me. She notices me first and the world shrinks and time slows. He looks confused. She’s terrified. I fire. The bullet hits him in the stomach. Angie screams and falls with him, holding him. On her knees she turns and looks at me and given all the words from all the languages I could never really explain what I saw in Angie’s eyes; a reflection of myself maybe, madness. No hate, just pity. Defeat. Acceptance. Then she turns away from me and cradles her dying lover. The rain splashing all around us. A crimson stream flowing toward my feet.

I hear Lars voice behind me.

But that moment when Angie had looked at me is seared on my brain. A tarnished effigy of her soaking wet and terrified, tentacles of dark hair clinging to her ashen skin like black scars. Seared on my brain because it takes me back to when I first saw her, that hesitant smile, her hair caught on her lips. Now all I can think of is a starving child in Iraq, of everything horrible in my self and in this world. How did we get here? I howl and crumble, my knees crunching the gravel, defeated also. My tears are washed away by the rain, stealing them as if they don’t deserve to fall. The gun falls. Staring at my hands as though they offer me something I can’t fathom, they flicker and begin to fade like a dream from memory. Everything fades, becomes translucent. Angie and her lover shimmer in the wetness before me and I can see through them into a blurry nothingness. The cars and buildings and signposts and trees are just black pencilled outlines against a grey canvass. Colour, sound, substance, energy, it all bleeds from the world. Life. And what’s left is a hollowed out world. A ghost of a world. Empty. Void. And I shut my eyes tight because I can’t bear to look at it.