The Cloaca (4 page)

“Like how?”

“Like laughing at the way you were kind of says that you're, you know, above that now, right?”

Her friend tucks a curl of hair behind her ear and picks at her plate. “Fine.”

“So someday you'll move on to laugh at everything that means the world to you at this instant. Everything you love.”

“This Jonathan Brandis killing himself thing really got to you, huh?”

“You know my father committed suicide,” this woman says.

Cheek puffed out with empanada, her friend pauses, this hollow look of horror in her eyes.

“Jesus,” she says, the wet mess of her meal gawking out of her mouth. “Fuck. I'm sorry, Emma. I didn't know.”

Of course this woman's father never killed himself and she suspects that this friend of hers was the one with the cat head, the one with the appendectomy scar, the painting fawned over by every viewer the night of his show. The number her boyfriend will sometimes call from her place.

“Help me help you,” she whispers in the dark, attempting to somehow sound sexy in this desperate position, holding him uncertainly, with a mannequin's grip.

“Don't worry about me,” he says, reaching again between her legs as if for a bowling ball. “Getting you off gets me off.”

Maybe her boyfriend is a little too good at all this sex stuff. He flips over her cover page with the aplomb of a student who can't wait to ace a test, whereas this woman hasn't got a clue what she's doing, stares dreadfully at the questions put before her.

Working away at her, he moans more than she does, is more out of breath than this woman is after she has come. Though his is a different sort of pleasure, she is sure.

She wakes up later that night having to piss. Already his rambunctiousness has given her two urinary tract infections. His side of the bed is empty and the ensuite bathroom glows at its cracks. With an ear to the door this woman hears the sound of one hand clapping. She climbs back into bed, still having to pee.

Having sex with JB never crossed her mind. As a girl, she dreamt of going to dinner and a movie with him, of having her mom drive her to the mall and drop her off there, where she would meet with JB by the fountain. And then marriage, eventually. There wasn't one salty drop of prurience to that attraction. This woman never thought about having JB sweat on her, or having him scrape her calf with a toenail, or having him wake her up in the mornings with a harmless erection jabbing her in the hip. She never imagined having conversations with JB. What would they have talked about? JB had been no different than a baby doll that wets itself, something girls coddle and care for to prepare themselves for the real thing. He had been a tool, an aid: light, stiff, plastic and unkillable.

When her boyfriend returns to bed, she rolls into him, thinking to broach the problem, only he reads this as her asking, and so graciously lays once more into her. Lord only knows how many minutes later, this woman is exhausted, doesn't know what's what and has to pee worse than before.

“Thanks,” she exhales, dumbly combing her hair back over her forehead.

With her windows closed, the rain outside is only the crinkling and snapping sounds of a campfire left to burn itself out. In the crotchy heat of her apartment this woman removes everything but a light dress shirt he has left there, which smells of cigarettes, and sweat, and boy. She stretches out on her couch and looks at “The Shrew's Dilemma” across the room from her, still unfinished after a month. With one eye closed, she gropes for it with her toes. Tonight is too hot for anything. All July has been too hot for jack fucking shit.

When she was a girl, this woman was taught to treat life like a gift, and she has done her best. For others, though, this gift must be no better than a gaudy sweater too long in the arms, knit for them by some doddering relative they can't recall ever actually meeting. Some will wear that gift dutifully, with the fear that that old relative will stop by unannounced one of these days. They don't want to be rude, so they feign appreciation always, in case. The others—those that dump themselves in front of subway trains, those that loop nylon rope around their necks—they return that gift to the sender, with a note that says, You don't know me at all.

Only JB didn't leave a note. This woman read on the internet that he didn't.

A few times she phones her boyfriend and every time hangs up before the machine. His message always tricks her in to thinking he has picked up and said Hello, and every time she feels stupid, like he's making fun of her.

You can't help but imagine life before you live it, she thinks. For her first two decades she played out the rest of her life in her head. How she would move to the city, study art, make enough money making sandwiches in a collectively owned vegan café to rent a loft but not enough to fully furnish or heat it, be thought of as a marvelous painter for her age, become strong and independent so as to survive turbulent, passionate relationships with brilliant and troubled men who grow full beards and write poetry as sarcastic as it is beautiful. Why else would you strike out into the world if you hadn't first considered what you might find out there, and how amazing all of it would be? No one is born stupid enough to knowingly enter a hard and hurtful fate. You have to trick yourself into getting out and into it, or be tricked.

The days following his opening this woman imagined the two of them staying inside for entire weekends, painting, being so involved in the work that neither would notice when one side of a mixtape ran out, passing by each other's work spaces sometimes and smiling. There would be parties at his place on weeknights, with red wine and organic food, and someone's homemade ice cream. Parties that weren't planned but that happened as each person stopped by unannounced, until his kitchen, living room and balcony became a tumult of opinions, one overlapping over the other: highfalutin, overly intellectual, but still informed by a very honest and relevant curiosity. They would plan sex, but become busy with other things, fucking instead in unexpected bursts and unexpected places. Maybe some public hand jobs. They would cut each other's hair. They would expect nothing of each other and get everything

Since the winter he hasn't worked on anything that she knows about. He eats fast food without apology and never invites her over, preferring instead to show up unannounced at her place, which, hardly a loft, is beginning to feel more tank-like the less she goes out. Sex is a given and expected. And she is smarter than him. He once insisted that Charles Dickens was the author of
Don Quixote
. Sunday afternoons he disappears and she only just found out that he is classically trained on the guitar.

She calls her friend—the one from the café—who does not pick up and who does not have a machine. Maybe she is meeting with Rick Moranis. Maybe she's fucking Rick Moranis.

You can only ever have an idea of another person, a sort of surrogate you create in your imagination, or your heart, or whatever stupid place. Feelings of betrayal come when that person wanders outside the parameters you gave them. This woman admits to herself that she can never know her boyfriend, but only harbor an idea of him. To be with anyone for a stretch of time, to do anything for any significant duration, to live happily, demands a readiness for surprises and constant, willing revision.

Life is not hard, she thinks, staring across the room at “The Shrew's Dilemma,” straining her toes to touch it, life is only life. Hardships are bred by our expectations.

“Hardships are bred by our expectations,” this woman says out loud. So what is suicide, then, but the consequence of a broken-down imagination? An inability to put a happy, hopeful face on any and all situations.

This woman wonders what it was JB wanted so badly that he would kill himself in its absence. Her problem is that she can only imagine JB as giving, and can't even begin to conceive his wants. As a girl, she took for granted that he would be interested in her. She wanted him, really, only because he was dreamy. Her pimpled eighthead, her shyness, the speech impediment from her retainer, all this would not factor in his love for her. He would just love her.

Her initial shock didn't come from finding out that Jonathan Brandis was dead, but from finding out that he had been alive, that he had continued to exist long after she lost interest in him.

Unable to stand the heat any longer, this woman gets up off the couch and opens the window. The sweaty air in her apartment rushes past her, is sucked out into the cooling night, lifting up the tails of his shirt, giving the city an eyeful. The rush slams her bedroom door behind it like a teenager throwing a tantrum and nearly sucks “The Shrew's Dilemma,” in progress, from its easel.

A bird flies into the window this morning while they are fucking, just as the tendrils of orgasm are beginning to curl up her spine. This woman will not say
make love
. She finds the phrase misleading, like fast food
restaurant
: a stab at glamourizing and romanticizing something so sloppy and inexpensive.

The bird collapses the house of cards she has built and nabs the concentration needed to build it back up again, so this woman makes a loud, writhing show of getting off, for his sake. In the residue left by rain and dust on the window is the imprint of the bird, which looks nothing like a bird.

This woman has read on the internet about oxytocin. She knows enough to know that she is biologically predisposed to fall in love with whoever makes her come. It's the same hormone she will release if she ever gives birth, is what will supposedly endear that child to her for the rest of her and its life. Maybe in this way only is
making love
a workable term. Except now, having skipped that release, this woman is not so fooled. She is not blurry like usual and sees the smug smile of satisfaction on his face.

“How long should fruit be kept out on the counter?” she asks. “Should it be pitched before or after it has gone rotten? Because by the time the signs of decomposition start to show it's already too late, right?”

“Stop that,” he says. “Don't be weird.”

From here on in, she knows, their relationship will only get worse, until the time comes when the pain of being together becomes greater than the pain of being apart. It's childish, this woman thinks, to think that anything will last forever, but it is craven, she knows, to avoid something only because it will end. What he thinks, about this or anything, she can't say. He's just lying there, smiling.

“What's the problem?” he asks. “I think it works.”

“It's not really what I was aiming for.”

The problem is that the shrew is a hideous little thing after all. There was not a human enough face she could fit on it. Its scraggly dun fur, its wrinkled, pointy snout, its eyes too beady to contain even a pinch of thought or emotion. A beast doing a beastly thing is not as meaningful as this woman hoped it would be. For the shrew there is no pickle. He gets peckish, he eats.

The problem, she realized finally, lay in the shrew's captivity. A desperate enough shrew will hold its breath under water to kill a fish over twice its own size by nibbling out its eyes and finally its brain. This is comparable to a regular-sized man battling an elephant with a plastic bag over his head. This is all on the internet. Working against the shrew is what a dolphin lacks, that invisible grip on its scruff that will yank it to the surface regardless of desperation. Maybe there is no apparent danger when there is another shrew to eat, but left finally alone, that last shrew would make some attempt to free itself before resorting to its last resort.

This woman's solution was to add, to that last bloody painting, a dainty index finger holding the cup in place. A finger from a graceful, fluid hand—not dissimilar from the finger of Michelangelo's God that sparked life and thought into his reaching Adam. Only, added weeks after she thought she finished the painting, the finger stands out as what it is: an afterthought.

No painting of hers ever seems to come out the way she intendeds. Realizing this and not knowing how to turn back, completing the thing becomes a cinch. With no real investment she can give the painting what it needs instead of hopelessly trying to force onto it what she wants.

“Who cares what you think?” her boyfriend says. At least he's dressed.

“How bad would your life have to get for you to kill yourself?” she asks later that night.

The question comes in the soggy silence following almost two hours between the sheets. Through perseverance and jelly, she was finally able to finish him off.

“What?” He's genuinely winded and she's glad for that.

“Under what circumstances would you, you know, end it?”

“I don't know,” he sighs. “Don't be weird, Emma.”

“Say you were paralyzed from the neck down, or say you had your arms and legs blown off and couldn't talk and were stuck inside your own thoughts, like in that Metallica video. Or everyone you cared about abandoned you and you were left with absolutely nothing in your life.”

“Do we have to talk about this?”

“We do.”

“Then my answer is I would never kill myself. Simple as that. Suicide is the most selfish thing a person can do.”

“Okay,” she says, and nuzzles her head back onto his shoulder, spreading her hand on his chest. Past the bracken of his chest hair, past his skin, past his meat and past his ribs, there is the faint flutter of his settling heart, his beating heart, something she can only feel if she is quiet enough, and patient enough, and knows what she's looking for, something that, when finally found, she can easily verify by that same obvious cadence she sees in his fading erection.

And what is love, really, this woman thinks to herself, if not selfish?

Unburdened Things
|
3

I don't think I want to be the kind of person anymore that brings tears to things unnecessarily.

Like, say, “Belly's missed us,” I'll say when our cat returns from a week off exploring, hunting mice, probably, in the few condemned factories in the neighborhood that haven't been turned into condos yet. “Look,” I'll show my boyfriend, “She's crying.”

Cradling her, making a slim ghost of his finger with a tissue, Kim will wipe away the line of goo in the corner of Belly's eye. “The Bully's been fighting is all,” he'll say. Belly will not allow herself to be held by me, will writhe and twist until she either falls or I drop her. “Bullies never cry.”

Or else, we're under the trees after a summer rain, say. Kim and I will be on a stroll and a breeze will ruffle the leaves, and we get sprinkled. Like the tree's sobbing all over us.

I can bring tears to pretty much anything without having to try.

And I gather from this that I'm either overly emotional or underly creative, and I'd really rather not be any of those ways.

Because it's not that those things don't cry; it's that they can't.

And it's not our business to burden unburdened things with ours.

So:

Kim comes in from the courtyard with drops of water hanging from his earlobes in no way like teardrops. Maybe more like earrings.

They'd ambushed him.

A rush of water balloons and those pump action deals that can soak you from fifty metres away while he was having a beer on our steps after work.

Kim turned the garden hose on them and wrestled their guns away. Turned the tables on those kids.

“We're going to get a phone call,” he says, walking into the kitchen, struggling to peel his sopping shirt off his skin. His shorts come off and he's down on the kitchen tile, which is the coolest part of the house during early August. A secret he learned from Belly.

The tongues of his steel-toed boots droop out like the tongues of exhausted dogs in this heat.

When he fights with the neighborhood kids, Kim loses with a stink. They clobber Kim like clockwork and he's such a sore loser. On purpose, though.

Because for a kid nothing's more insulting than having an adult let you beat them. There's no joy of triumph. Only that weird feeling of being patronized. Like the feeling of wearing a shirt backwards. Upon losing, Kim throws a tizzy and won't talk to them for days.

The following afternoon, the kids show up hugging basketballs to their chests and balancing ball bats in their palms.

“What's Kim doing?” they ask.

“Don't tell him I told you,” I'll say, “But he's upstairs. Crying. Can't you people take it a little easy on him?”

And they scatter away, triumphant, miffed and still needing a third for Suicide Squeeze.

Of course Kim is really at work, building cookie cutter houses on the crusts of town. These kids think that because they're off of school he gets a break, too.

But I'm afraid if I called them on their oversight, accused them of not knowing how the world really works, probably they'd ask, Well, then what are
you
doing home?

Days later, those people will be on the court behind our house and see us on the roof killing a bowl at dusk.

“Kim, come play!” they call.

They don't even know my name.

Kim's over the fence. He takes the lead, but then falls back by a few points. And that's when he becomes a flurry of elbows, inevitably opening up a young chin under the boards. Kim runs home and hides, leaving me, high as a spooked cat in a tree, to assuage the inevitable moms that will come knocking.

Kim has no problem being fucked up around children. But I can't abide that. If I had a child I would never let it see me drink or drug. Never let it see me cry. Never let it see me rolling pennies at the kitchen table. If it saw me doing any one of those things and asked, Why do you do that? there's no way I could tell it the truth.

Because it's hard sometimes.

Belly flits in through the kitchen window now, sniffs at Kim's sock balls on the floor. She curls up on his bare stomach.

There's a knock at the door.

Kim, lethargic like he just woke up, is running his finger over the grey down on Belly's nubs. She lost most of her ears to frostbite before she was our cat, back when she was someone else's kitten.

Another knock.

Belly will only let you play with her ears until she feels she's being made fun of. She'll try and twitch her ears away from you, only they're too stubby for this to be actually evasive. A bellicose growl and a chomp at your finger if you don't lay off.

A rapping now.

Something I've noticed about cats: this threshold they've got. Comfort is their primary aim. When they've established a cozy place, they grab on firmly with both paws. Like Belly has this way of stretching out across our bed at night so that there is no way for Kim and I to sleep comfortably.

We skitter our hands around her like chaseable critters, trying to tempt her appetite for the hunt.

We tug the blankets.

Mumble, mumble, she goes, ticked but immovable.

Bark, bark, we try, tired and desperate and getting weird.

Jumping up and down on our bed like it was a motel bed is what it takes to get to sleep most nights.

Pounding.

Kim stays put, but Belly looks over at me. She says, Are you going to get that or
what?
Keeping in mind that cats can't talk like they can't cry.

I do.

Three of them, arms raised, gripping swollen, sweating balloons.

The phone rings. I bet you some irate mother.

The kids see that I'm not Kim and they lower their arms. Then off they scamper.

Two separate from the third and unload on him. He stands betrayed for the length of a commercial before charging after his best friends in the world.

The phone rings and I actually can't remember what it was exactly I was doing before Kim came in.

Are you going to get that or
what?
Belly asks. In her own way.

Once you could bike out to the limits of town to gander at the mostly unbridled night. The Milky Way was a drool stain on a cerulean pillow cover. Now stadium lights illuminate broad burrows and suggestive frames. A shopping centre with a library inside is being raised in anticipation of this burgeoning community.

Life is becoming so crowded and bright these days.

Kim was due there for five. He set the alarm for three.

Why does Kim get up so early?

“Because rolling out of bed and onto the job blows,” he says. “I need some allusion of having a life outside of work.”

Kim hides the alarm on the other side of the bedroom every night so he has to bound out of bed and scrounge around the laundry like a narcotics dog to silence it every morning. After that panic he's wide awake. And you better believe me too.

Kim always confuses illusion with allusion. And for Kim the Pacific Ocean is Specific also.

For summer coffee we fill the ice cube tray with cream and leave it in the freezer overnight. My idea.

I'm brilliant.

Staring at the ceiling fan over our bed, trying to plan my day, I give Kim a head start.

Kneading the night kinks out of his neck, he's hunched over his sketchbook at the kitchen table. On the counter he's set out my mug for me, unfilled.

Our stove clock wasn't changed when last we leapt ahead. Instead of adjusting it, we learned to read the time wrong. When we fall back we'll have to get used to not correcting ourselves.

Kim squints at the page, trying to see a clear image through the bramble of other ideas. Already he's begun sketches for the graphic novel he will make. He'll be ready to throw himself fully into the project by the time it's my turn to start working.

A few incorrect minutes happen.

I slurp my coffee, reminding him I'm here, too.

“So,” he asks perfunctorily. “What're your plans for the day?” Patronizingly.

Kim will never tell me that he hates that I get up with him. Hates that because he's working for me right now he has hardly a moment to himself. And the time he does have, I occupy.

He never says anything like Belly never says anything.

“The Bully's at the window,” he says.

I look behind me and, with the kitchen lights on inside, only see me in the pane.

We cut this deal like mustard, Kim and I: for one year he works while I do whatever my heart desires. Then we turn the tables.

Jump back. Fall ahead.

Inside of me I eventually see Belly on the ledge, pawing, going
tack tack tack
on the window. Like a teacher tapping chalk to the right of an equal sign, pleading and impatient.

Like, Come on, kids. You
know
this one.

What I would say if Kim ever said boo, is that it's difficult for me also. It wasn't supposed to be difficult, this year was supposed to be a productive breeze, but there you go. His free time is the only time I have to be with him, otherwise I'm alone. He has too little time and I have too much.

Run a tap hot on your hand and it will become freezing to you in time.

I open up the back door and cluck for Belly to come. She stops pawing and looks at me. Her eyes flare spooky green. She turns back to the window and asks again.

“Belly,” I say. “Come on.” But she keeps at the window, so I open it. She falls inside and saunters towards her food bowl. I close the door and leave the window open for her to go back out.

I will sit with Kim, not bothering him, until it's time. He will kiss me and split. I will go back to bed and sleep until ten-ish. I will wake back up and have no idea how to get out of bed. I will think about how late in the day it is already, and that to start anything now is pointless because anyway I have to make lunch first. And maybe afterwards I will have to run out to the store for toilet paper, for anything. By the time I get home it will be time for the Sassy Judge Show that I like. It is the gift I give myself for all the hard work I do in a day. After which Kim will be home in an hour from his job. I will make him supper because he works so hard.

A year, and what?

I am no better at the drums, though I can twirl my sticks in a way that would make the ladies in the front row wet, the men hard.

Mr. Dumbface, my dummy, can't talk without me gritting my teeth in a horrible, threatening way that would scare the children at the birthdays I was hoping to perform at.

There isn't a play in my head that doesn't take place at a bus stop or a TV pilot that doesn't take place in a living room.

The pair of socks I'm knitting stay heelless.

A year, and that. And my time's running out, the breadth given to my heart's desire shrinking.

Full, Belly plods to the door and rises up on her hind legs to ask.

“Belly!” I scold. When she sits back down and looks at me I point at the open window. She looks at it, then back to the door. And then me.

Belly always looks at me like she has no idea what I'm talking about.

Kim has gone.

What's that joke about the broken clock again?

The stream of eye goo runnelling along Belly's nose catches the kitchen light and shimmers like a knife come out of nowhere in a fight you didn't think was that serious.

Kim warns me not to give too much of a character to Belly. Like he tells me that trees don't and can't cry. Animals don't think anything, he explains. They don't mean anything. Or at least, they don't think or mean anything that we can understand.

It goes even a broken clock is right two times a day.

There's this rap.

Behind my kit, I'm holding my sticks like a fork and knife, waiting for a late meal to be served finally. Even though lunch has just been smoked.

No dishes.

I'm brilliant.

Three of them. One has a black eye. The other has a scab shaped like an overfed lightning bolt on his shin. The third has corn rows and a basketball at his hip.

All four of us are roughly the same height and have roughly the same mix of masculinity and femininity to our features but only three of us are rough.

“Kim home?” they want to know.

“I'll play if you want.”

Sour, their pusses.

“Two on two,” I offer.

“You any good?” the shiner-one asks.

“Good?” I say. “Are you kidding? They don't call me the White Larry Bird for nothing.”

So me and Corn Rows versus Shiner and Scabby then.

My signature move is sending the ball into orbit around my waist. They see this and are impressed.

“Kiss your moms at the bus stop,” I say, “Because I'm taking you kids to school.”

With that, they are further wowed.

Until I check the ball out from my chest like I'm shoving someone. Their eyes roll like shoes in laundromat dryers.

Dribbling up court, Shiner slaps the ball away from me and lays up the first point.

Corn Rows looks at me like, Come on!

This time he checks and Scabby's on him as soon as he passes half court.

I am the wide open Specific Ocean.

I'm unguarded under the net and flagging Corn Rows down like my car has crapped out on the side of the highway. But he makes a break for the hoop anyway. And is denied.

“I was open,” I say.

“Didn't see you,” he says.

So: two to fuck you.

I check and charge towards half court, jump, plant my feet, and take my shot.

Nothing but air.

There are other things I could be doing right now. Learning Wipe Out, or perfecting that Hole in the Bucket routine with Mr. Dumbface.

Their bodies change after my Hail Mary. Before, they were on the balls of their feet, but now they're flatfooted as detectives. The boys turn languid and gentle.

Carrying the ball, forgetting to dribble, I slip past Shiner and sink my first.

Kim is a stickler, will call all transgressions. A kid looks at him the wrong way and it's a foul. Kim will slap his wrist like he's demanding the proper time. For a travel he will spin his fists, one around the other, in some furious rumba.