As I Die Lying (12 page)

"Aren't you loved? You have a family."

"Sure.
Daddy
loved me, all right. So hard it
hurt. Since I was seven."

What was she telling me?

Not that. Not her? Inside my Bone House, I
was horrified, repulsed at the depravities that humans could
inflict on their own flesh and blood. Incestuous perversion, the
kind of thing that makes you clamp your hands over your eyes but
spread your fingers for just the tiniest peek.

But this Loverboy-thing, the fresh me, he was
juiced. He smelled pain the way a predator senses weakness in the
prey. He savored the aroma. "You mean..."

"Yeah." Her voice fell, the air made fragile.
"I didn't know what he was doing, not until later. But by then, I
couldn't stop him. But even the first time, I knew it was wrong
somehow. Maybe it was the way he kept calling it 'our little
secret.'"

Secrets. You’d think we’d all learn. Instead,
we keep trusting. We keep on crossing our hearts and hoping to
die.

Loverboy's comforting hands searched, found
her, held her in the dark.

"I thought it was the way all daddies loved
their little girls. The bastard."

"Did you ever tell anyone?" I hoped she
hadn’t.

"My mom, once. I told her Daddy was touching
me in ways that made me feel strange. She said Daddy was just
showing his love. She didn't want to know. She had garden clubs and
church bazaars, appointments at the hairdresser, hospital
fundraisers, local politics and stuff. She didn't want to be
bothered with family problems.

"At first, it was just once in a while, so
far apart that I almost forgot about it. I guess it probably
happened more than I remember, because sometimes I would come back
to myself, as if I had been away. I'd be hurting down there and
sticky, and I felt dizzy, like I'd been spinning too fast on a
merry-go-round. And I'd see Daddy later, and he wouldn't look me in
the eye. That's when I knew that we were doing a bad thing."

"
He
was doing a bad thing. You weren't
to blame." I couldn’t tell if that was me saying it, or if Loverboy
was trying a sensitive route into her flesh. Maybe there was no
difference.

"He gave me ice cream, after."

Ice cream. The moon had risen higher, a sick
white smile among the leering stars. Virginia was a black
silhouette against the weak blanket of light outside the car. I
could see the quiescent angles of her profile now, her lips parted,
words waiting in her mouth.

"It's the little girl's voice that talks to
me the most. She's always afraid. She doesn't want me to talk to
people. She wants to play dolls."

"Is she talking to you now?" Loverboy moved
closer, until he could feel the stirring of her breath. I was
helpless, watching this monster inside me stripmine her past,
extracting nightmarish ore. Or maybe I was riding the coal car.

Her voice became childish, sing-songy. "No.
She goes away when men are around. She thinks men are bad."

Headlights glared on the horizon, disembodied
white eyes that grew in size as they approached. In their light, I
saw Virginia's face. The dark circles of shadows around her eyes
made her look like a cornered animal. Her skin was almost
translucent, and for a fleeting moment, I was afraid she was going
to slip from under my hands, turn to mist, and join the nightfog
that hovered over the ground outside. But they weren't my hands,
they were Loverboy's, and he wasn't ready to let go.

The headlights swept onto us, flooding us in
their searing brilliance. It was a battered pickup truck, the kind
that every farmer in the country drove. It slowed a little as it
passed. Perhaps the driver thought we had car trouble, that we had
broken down here miles from anywhere. We were stranded, all right,
but on a road from which there could be no rescue. The truck's tail
lights brightened as the driver touched the brakes, and then the
lights winked and hurried off into the distance, red eyes that
marked the evil twin of the white eyes.

Leaving us to ourselves. All of our
selves.

"And there's a tough girl, older," Virginia
said, her voice going deep and coarse. "She started when I was
fourteen, when I finally started fighting back. She calls herself
'the Bitch.'

"She stole this jacket off a barstool. She
likes to make me go to biker bars and strip joints, dangerous
places, so she can show what a badass she is. She gets me to drink
until I black out. She's got me to shoot heroin, too. Huddled me
down in a fucking alley in Des Moines littered with winos and big
rats, kneeling in puddles of stale piss and gutter trash with a
rubber tube around my arm. Some faceless dick with rotten breath
melts down the shit in a spoon, with a couple of us strangers
gathered round like cavemen at the first fire.

"Then the dick, the
voodoo-man, sticks the shiny tip of a needle in the liquid and
draws it up, and I hold out my arm and he slides it in, a hundred
bucks a hit, and it's warm gold, it's blue wax, it's a fucking
lime-yellow cloud that changes into a horse with wings, floats down
and carries me away. And I'm sweat and death and God and goddamned.
And the bitch likes it, maybe she even lets the voodoo-man fuck
her, maybe any of the strangers, too. But it's
me
lying there helpless, me with my
back on wet newspapers and rags while they take turns.

"Then they're gone, and it's just me, staring
at the faraway streetlights, collecting my bones and putting them
back together, fumbling for my clothes in the dark, getting up and
walking back to the world I had flown out of. But you know
what?"

The night and Loverboy both waited for her to
answer her own question.

"The Bitch thought she was escaping. That out
there, there would be no fucking problems. But it's only a bigger
prison. It only goes so far. Well, fuck it all anyway."

The edge left her voice and she sounded
weary, defeated. "There's enough of me left to stay away long
enough to not get hooked. Part of me worries that I'll get AIDS,
that maybe the Bitch wants me to get AIDS. But that's not so bad.
AIDS is normal. AIDS kills you safely. It's the other things I
worry about."

She paused. The silent dark was like a smooth
onyx cliff face on which we were both grappling for purchase. Only
I didn’t control my own fingers.

"Like wanting to kill people," she said
matter-of-factly. "Now do you think I'm crazy?"

I wasn't one to judge. I had
real blood, hot and red, on my hands. Not theoretical blood in some
faraway future. And I had
liked
it. No, no, no, that had been Little Hitler. Or
Mother. Anybody but me.

I finally spoke, surprised I still had voice.
"You said you had wanted to kill us in a car crash. But you didn't.
You don't really even want to kill yourself."

"Sure, I don't. But I'm weak, and I'm getting
weaker. The Bitch has her way with me more and more often. And this
new one. It really scares me."

"New one?"

"It came with the Bitch, but
it doesn't do much. It just hangs around in the back of my head.
But once in a while, it
whispers
. Nasty things. And it's bad.
It wants to make me hurt people."

Her voice had become the child's again, then
just as quickly shifted back. I thought of Mrs. Ball, the high
school counselor, and how she’d tried to trick me with Freudian
horseshit. Sometimes a cigar was just a cigar, but sometimes it was
a banana. Loverboy preferred the banana.

"Hey, I know about Sybil, multiple
personality disorder, and all that,” she said. “I thought about
going to a shrink. But what good would that do? What could I say?
'Hey, Doc, I got too many birds in the lighthouse. Give me some ice
cream and let's fuck.'"

She laughed bitterly. "I
know I'd end up in a rubber room somewhere, wasted on a dozen
different tranquilizers, half the time pounding my head against the
wall, the other half sucking my thumb and staring off into space.
Hell, the Bitch might even like that. And the little girl, at least
she'd be safe. But this
other
voice, it wouldn't like that at all. It says it
has
plans
for
me."

"Plans?"

"Its voice is cold, like
it's been dead a long time, trapped under ice water. Why am I
telling you this? I
knew
you wouldn't understand."

How could I tell her about my Little People,
the residents of the Bone House, a personal commune of confusion
where no one ever did the laundry? I knew the courage it took for
her to bare her soul like this, to expose herself to my scorn and
ridicule. I was aware of the trust she was placing in me, the tiny
crystal snowflake of her sanity she was exposing. But I could say
nothing. Loverboy was feeding on her vulnerability, growing
stronger. He took my mouth.

Besides, anybody dumb enough to trust
deserves whatever they get. You just lose all respect for them.

"I understand," Loverboy said, and drew
closer to her in the dark. "It's okay to be different. I like you
for who you are."

"Who the fuck am I?"

"You're Virginia. Don't ever forget that. No
matter what else, you've got yourself, even if the whole world is
screwed up. And I'll be here for you."

"Aren't you afraid of me? I just told you I
wanted to kill you.

"But you
didn't
kill me. Or yourself. You want
to live."

Loverboy held her with my arms, smelling her
tension, raw and metallic. My strange Loverboy voice was soothing
and artificial, a baritone of betrayal. "I'll help you,
Virginia."

"Richard..."

"Shh. It's going to be okay."

I pressed my face against her cheek, there
under the distant Midwestern moon. Outside the car, among the corn
and sparse forest that surrounded us, night creatures scurried for
food or shelter in an unending circle of death, mocked by the
laughing wind. Miles away, people huddled in front of the blue
campfires of television sets, frantic from having too much time and
burdened with having to spend it all. Back in Ottaqua, Mother was
probably passed out face down in her own filth.

Virginia and I were alone. We were on an
island beset by inky oceans, and the darkness extended into the
heavens and beyond, behind the curtain of stars and galactic debris
it had thrown up for illusion's sake. The true darkness that was
behind everything.

My lips met the delicate shell of her
ear.

"Daddy wants sugar," Loverboy whispered.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

"What?" the chick said.

Why the fuck did I say that? I'd better be
careful, or I won't be peeling the old banana tonight. No monkey
business. And, thanks, Richard, for letting me be the first-person,
present-tense narrator here, because, let’s face it, you know how
to write but you couldn’t fuck your way out of a soggy Hilton
sister. Leave that part to me. "Uh—I said I wanted to kiss
you."

"I like you, Richard, maybe even love you,
but right now I'm so screwed up, I can't trust my feelings. After
all I've told you, I can't believe you haven't jumped out of the
car and run into the cornfields."

Richard? Oh, yeah, what's-his-face, the one
who went away. I feel him back there somewhere, watching from the
dark. Such a spaghetti dick. Let him stay back there. Let's see,
what would he say next?

"Hey, Virginia, it'll be all right." And
it'll be even more all right when I get into those hot little
pants, girl. Come on, give it up to the man. Let Loverboy rock you.
Hey, don't push my hand away. You know you want it.

"I don't know. I'm just so confused right
now. I'm not even sure why I wanted to go out with you. Maybe I
sensed you weren't like the others, that maybe you'd listen instead
of going for an easy lay. Because I've never told anybody else
about this. I just feel so naked right now, like all the layers of
my soul have been stripped away. I'm afraid."

Yeah, easy lay, naked, riding bareback,
that's the idea here. Take it all off, baby, uh-huh, strip those
reservations right now and quit pretending to act vulnerable.
Because first we have to go through this fucked-up game where I
have to pretend to give a damn. But, hey, the end justifies the
means. And your end is pretty fucking worthy of justification,
babe.

So think, think, think. "There's nothing to
be afraid of. I won't let anything hurt you."

"That's fine for out here,
in the real world. But what about in my head? Are you going to go
in
there
and
protect me?"

"Trust me." Yeah. “Trust,” that’s what that
limp-wristed Richard would say. Now I'll just reach out here ever
so slowly for your knee—what's this? Oh, the goddamned gearshift.
Whoever invented foreign cars didn’t know shit about getting
laid.

Ah, there, nice, soft skin.
Well, pants, anyway, but I can feel the heat underneath. I can get
them off in time, no
problemo
, my man. Just be easy right
now. I don't care if the old six-inch submarine's ready to plow
through dry dock and go deep. Patience is the key. Time it just
right, and I'll do more skindiving than
Jacques-fucking-Costeau.

"I want to trust somebody, Richard. I just
don't want to be alone."

"I won't let you be alone,
Virginia. I like being close to you, I like spending time with you.
I don't care what kind of problems you have, I know we can work
them out." Maybe you and that Richard-fuck back there can. Just let
me have what I want and you can have that codpopper all to
yourself. The two of you can sit and talk about relationships over
coffee and whole-wheat bagels tomorrow morning. Maybe he'll even
get you to buy. But I need some
tonight
. I need a bite of that sweet
honey bun.