Entropy (18 page)

When I turned around and saw her I just couldn't believe it. We were unable to go to her concert but there she was; the musician who I respected and admired so much. It all seemed so natural, her sitting in our yard, playing and singing. You asked me to dance with you.

I held your body so tightly against mine, and tucked in my head so that I could feel the comfort and security of your shoulder. I felt so exhilarated, so wanted. No one else would have done something like this for me. Part of me wanted to know how this had happened, how you convinced her to come here and perform privately for us. We had been dancing for about twenty minutes when I closed my eyes. You asked me if I was okay. I was. I was so okay that I wanted to capture this moment in time and never let it slip through my fingers. I didn't ever want you to slip through my fingers either.

I told you that I was scared.

You laughed a little and I had to smile. I explained that I was afraid because there could be nothing after this that could surpass this moment that you had created, and that everything which followed it would be a disappointment, would feel like nothing more than a wasteland of unfulfilled promises. You responded by touching your hand to my face and pushing my hair back behind my ear. I felt so bad because of the way that I had treated you. Tears flooded my eyes and flowed down along my cheeks. When you wiped them away I pulled you closer and kissed you, lightly brushing my tongue across your lips. I wanted to thank you, but I didn't know how. Before I could say anything, you took my hand and introduced me to her.

After the most surreal night of my life had passed, we lay on that blanket in the yard. I thought that nothing would ever come between the two of us, that we were strong enough to withstand the greatest of storms. When I started trying to undress you, you stopped me, stood up and said that we should go inside. I pulled at your wrist and made you sit back down beside me. It was so late and I didn't want to leave this place, this oasis that you had created just for us. I stood up and slipped off my clothes.

For a few hours we just held one another, letting the moon spill its light over us like water, wetting our intimacy in a silvery paleness. You wrapped your arms around me and held me so tightly that I thought I would lose my ability to breathe. Your body felt so warm against my back. No one could see us. However, I wouldn't have cared if they could. I wanted others to see what I had, the man that meant more to me than anything, the man who had stopped time, even if it was for just a moment …

But wasn't I telling you about the bassist?

I know that you were upset by the fact that he told you what he was intending to do in writing; that he didn't even have the decency and the respect to talk to you about it face to face. You felt like your feelings just didn't matter, were inconsequential.

Nothing you have ever done, especially with me, has ever been insignificant or meaningless. If I have to tell everyone in the world, call out across the oceans and deserts, to prove to you how important I feel in your presence, I will. I will gladly call out until my mouth is dry and my breath is gone. I know that you wanted the world to see it, that you wanted to scream out with all of the power in your lungs. You hoped that your music and the group would make the world see, make the world hear that what you had to say was powerful, that what you felt was important.

Just because you weren't muscular didn't mean that you weren't erotic, that you weren't a good lover. I wish that you were here right now to make love to me, to take me with torrid, reckless abandon, to tear through my flesh and let me take you all in. I know that when I talk provocatively you always tell me to stop, and say that you don't see me like that. But sometimes you could be so sexy, and not even know it. You could stir my body just because you listened to me, when I felt I had something important to say - even if it wasn't that important in the grand scheme of things, you still felt it was important to listen because I was the one having the thought. That made me feel both empowered and impassioned.

I am telling you all of this as I am going through our closet, looking at some of your clothes. I can smell you on them. God help me for saying this and I am sorry if it affected you, but I want you to come into this room and take me in your arm. I want you to turn me around so I'm facing you, move your tongue across the sweat on my throat and fuck me, right here against the closet door. And I don't care if anyone can hear us. I want you to raise my skirt and force yourself inside me, and make me remember all of the reasons that I fell in love with you.

But I am here in our bedroom, alone, and I have no idea where you are …

***

The things that I remembered about her, about that night, the intensity, her sensuality, the smell of the skin on the inside of her elbow where I rested my face, I carried selfishly with me every morning. But there came a time when those memories began to hurt more than calm. It was hard to avoid the brutally intense and consistent condemnation of myself. It was always there, no matter what happened; forever moving under the still surface, like the decaying water under a frozen pond. It didn't breed. It didn't nurture. It just lingered and slowly destroyed.

The musical career I had desired was gone, and my friends had abandoned me, leaving behind a vapid aggregation of audibility and production. Music had been replaced by sound and noise. I thought about what had happened as I scanned through another series of DAT recordings, imagining her words would eventually change like I had. Soon her praise and her love would become violent and censured. It had to. Mechanical sounds started on a new tape that I had put into the recorder. It was a recording of a factory that made copper piping. I continued to listen as the tape moved on to recordings of the abrasive sounds of other machinery: welding torches; combines; presses; sledgehammers; explosives used in a quarry. That was where the police had discovered the body of the latest child that my brother had murdered.

It was also near where I had the accident.

The intense dissatisfaction and antipathy that I carried inside had finally succeeded that morning in overcoming me. It was that simple. I had wanted to vanish into a forgotten world of tragedies, buried deep in the recesses of the earth. Down in that abandoned quarry I would have rotted, covered in filth, hidden by darkness. But everything changed when I struck and killed that boy.

The police said that he lived in a house less than a mile away from the quarry, and they weren't quite sure what he was doing there at that time of night. No one had seen him leave. No one could explain it. But it didn't matter, and it didn't need to be explained to me. It had happened and that was all that counted. Understanding the truths behind it was ineffectual and pointless, and it could never change how I felt – or the fact that he was dead.

Liberating the details didn't make the dead breathe the air of the content and the conscious. The violence in the collision between the narcissistic manipulation of self and his indelible innocence was gruesome. To the emergency responders who first arrived on the scene, it must have looked like the aftermath of a tornado when they saw the twisted wreckage of my car. Then they would have seen the lifeless form of the boy.

The boy's slight cheekbones had ripped through his skin like fragments of broken porcelain dishes, tearing through a silk tablecloth. The coroner had removed over sixty pieces of glass from his head. The accident report from the police department was highly exhaustive, eventually describing what happened as vehicular manslaughter.

I had seen photos of traffic fatalities before, but I never expected that his body would move the way that it did. I expected them to have discovered him mangled, his blood splashed over the incandescent headlights. However the car had struck him about waist high, flush across his hips and his left thigh according to the report. His pelvis was crushed on impact. Instead of being pulled underneath the front tires, his body had bounced off of the hood of the car and careered through the glass. The violence and the physical impact caused by his body stunned me as he had only weighed seventy pounds.

After the accident the driver's side door remained ajar. Smoke rose from the engine. I had been thrown from the car and had watched the tail lights trail off and be smothered by the darkness. It didn't fit, but it reminded me of squinting into the night sky, trying to identify the constellations.

It was determined that the boy had been killed instantly.

All things considered, it would have been easier on everyone around me if I hadn't survived. Soot and ash covered my body. Blood poured from the stump where my left arm had been severed when the car overturned. I couldn't see clearly because blood was dripping from my forehead. I was concussed. Parts of my shirt and pants were torn open. The dirt road had lacerated the skin on my chest and thighs.

I tried to move like a wounded soldier closer to the opening of the quarry. It took me almost nine minutes to move my body only eight feet. I struggled to reach the end, so that I could close my eyes and discover peace as I fell into the depths of a surrogate womb. But I even failed to complete that simple a task.

Lying in the hospital bed, with my remaining arm strapped and restrained bar because I was considered a danger to myself, I was a misrepresentation of everything that I was supposed to be. I hopelessly wanted other people to see something different than what they actually did. It was a horrible thing, being trapped inside a costume of self-hate.

A man could run from everyone and everything in the world but himself. That could never change, the internal essence of what a man felt, what he was born with, what drove him to make the physical and emotional choices that another man wouldn't. I tried to focus when I opened my eyes, and discovered my wife in a chair next to me, her arms folded lifelessly in her lap. She looked exhausted.

That was when I tried to reach out and touch her, but couldn't. The pressure from the straps restricted me and enlarged the veins running through my right arm. I opened my lips, but couldn't talk. There was a tube strapped with gauze and wires over my mouth. It led down my oesophagus and into my lungs. One of my lungs had been punctured by a rib that had dislodged from my chest cavity.

Anything beautiful was at the same moment insufferable. The range and depth of disillusionment pressed deeply into the almond eyes of my wife. How helpless she must have felt. It was an inexcusable thing, disappointing a woman.

And that's where the variegation of medications had first appeared. I hid them from my wife for months after the first surgery, embarrassed by the absence of emotional strength and biological independence that I once possessed. Things became more disconnected and less intimate. It was difficult to become aroused. I couldn't provide her with what she needed. I thought that women needed to be touched, stimulated, physically and emotionally. It was different with her. She needed to be sensed and embraced, clutched tightly with resolution and courage. It was hard to do that when missing a fucking arm. I was an incomplete, decaying structure, like the unfinished scaffolding at the abandoned construction site on the other side of the river.

Everything felt weighted in my chest. It took almost two days before my wife could raise her head and look at me without sobbing uncontrollably. She searched desperately inside herself to understand why. She often stared at the motionless tiles under her bare feet; her ballet shoes placed under the chair, listening to the breathing apparatus pumping oxygen into my body. Unfortunately, that became her metronome. For her, there had to be a reason for what I had done.

But I have never found the right words to tell her.

***

The world outside was dark except for the array of emergency lighting. It was now harder to see. It looked as if the emergency workers and police had gathered underneath the trees to try protect themselves from the steady rain. By now, someone would understand what I had done. The police department would retrieve my case file. The photographs from the crime scene of my car accident were scorched into the dense scrapbook of my failures.

No one could possibly understand how I felt and that I spoke the ancient language of the neglected and the unwanted; that I was the steward of the fallen; the broken man. I reached into my jacket again, but there was nothing left. The pills, my chemical salvation, were gone.

Although it was still raining, the temperature on the bus had become unbearable. I had asked the negotiator to bring water some time ago, but it remained stifling on board. I set the gun down on the driver's chair and tried again to open a window. I dug my fingertips hard into the latch on the right side, hoping it would hold, and then moved to the latch on the opposite side. However, the first latch kept locking back into place before I could release the second one. Both needed to be released at the identical moment in order for the window to open. Defeated, I took the gun and bashed it several times against the glass window. I could see it initially fracture across the disappointment of my own reflection until it finally ruptured. Pieces of my present and my atonement fell broken upon the pavement.

I slumped against one of the seats. I put in another DAT recording. Sounds of laughter swelled around me. They were recorded at an amusement park: roller coasters; arcade equipment and games; voices cheered; the pipe organ of a merry-go-round. Almost all of that sightless joy was a composite of what I had taken from that poor child. In every unique sound, I heard an indiscriminate portion of the life he would never lead because of what I had done. It didn't matter how many decibels it registered, or where it was recorded. Even in places that he might have never known existed, I would hear a noise that made me remember; and think about the things he might have wanted to do with his life.

All I had ever wanted was to be remembered, not to have been abandoned. I didn't want to be judged. Through all the violent sounds and the frailty, I had wanted someone to hear me. And because I believed that I was immaterial and insignificant, and that no one would listen, I decided that I had to make someone listen.