Jake shouldn’t have worn the attempt at a necklace, converted from one pair in a string of broken headphones, which effectively makes him look like he’s trying to DJ backwards. His pants do nothing to contradict this. He’s lost her in the thick blind dance crowd, which shortly squeezes him out like an oil blob in a novelty egg timer.
Out back on the patio they’re playing a different song, and their instruments are bottles hurled down and out toward the basketball court. “Break shit,” advises a Phi Tau named Ogre sagely, handing him an empty tallboy. Jake concurs, and obeys.
“You’re aware of why you’re doing this, right?” Amy waves at the screen. “Working, throwing it all out there, panting over every inbound link? It’s such a transparent cry for affection–”
“Like you?”
“Like me.”
“But free distribution of digitizable content is the only model that even makes sense anymore!” Jake protests.
She smirks. “Coincidence. You only download music to get back at the RIAA too, right?”
“So what, I should put it behind a subscription wall? Print stories on t-shirts?”
“Well,” she says, “you could resell it in hardcopy.”
Jake winces. “Do I have to call it a ‘blook?'”
The whole thing is very bookflap-bio: downtown sub-efficiency with a sink, shared bathroom, thin towels, the view consisting exclusively of another wall. There’s even a jazz band filtering up through the floorboards at night.
Except Jake is no chain-smoking playwright, no starving bassoonist with dreams of bassooning glory. He’s just a wanderlusty working stiff.
He tries to imagine himself as Van Gogh, as Bukowski, as… somebody who played bassoon. It won’t take. They didn’t have clean floors or Xboxes or the ability to leave whenever they wanted; his suffering is insufficient. At least the bathroom smells like pee.
Catherine’s eyelashes go from blond to brunette, but her hair is red. She wears L’Oreal Volumizer Darkest Black.
“I tried going without it,” she says into the mirror. “In college. Everyone said I looked sleepy, except the ones who said I looked scary.”
“Moon Baby flashbacks?” laughs Jake.
“Yes! Enough people recoiled from my giant head when I was little!”
And she doesn’t see how bold her eyes are, without it: how cold and brave. She should be on an album cover with a bloody lip. She should be standing on a parapet, rock in hand, fighting to the last child.
Friday, September 16, 2005
When Jake was small he’d always end up on the floor, during attacks. It wasn’t that he couldn’t stand; something about the texture of carpet on his cheek was soothing. He tried to scratch his back on it, too, but that never worked. The itch was on the inside.
Asthma. Old enemy. He sits propped against a stack of pillows and watches the wall like a distant army, but then everything’s distant on low oxygen. Asthma’s a full-sensory experience, and the synaesthesia is taking him back in memory: detachment, his tight chest, dog-heavy legs and the strange plastic taste of albuterol.
“No use!” he repeats, hustling to keep up with Jake. “They read the Bible? Because God ain’t a snitch, okay, God already sees. Sees everything! They say God is love. Not sex. Ain’t nobody ever give me any love, you understand? I’ve had sex, that ain’t love, brother. And you see them with kids–you think that’s love? Huh? That’s repentance! Dependence! That’s just it!”
Jake smiles a little and tries not to make eye contact. The man’s missing teeth and he’s smoking, predictably, but what’s unnerving is his khakis: clean and neatly pressed, with the look of an expensive brand.
Tuesday, September 28, 2004
Jake isn’t sure whether to turn his back. It’d be a little weird not to, because she is changing, and it’s not like they’ve kissed this week. But it’d be equally weird not to look: they are still technically going out.
He ends up lamely flipping through her scrapbook again–an excuse not to watch, which turns out to be a mistake.
“Here,” Ruth says behind him, and slips out the one of her on the escalator, hair in her mouth. She’s very beautiful. “I’d like you to have it.”
“Thank you,” he says.
“Wanting you is killing me,” he doesn’t.
Thursday, August 19, 2004
Jake stabs blindly, uncovers his eyes and finds the finger-grease print over a “thus.” Can he cut that? He’s not sure. He could replace it with a “so,” but no, this isn’t about letters. He has to trim it somewhere, and random selection isn’t working.
It had seemed so easy, in theory. He’d written whole stories in fifty before, in twenty-five; you just traced lightly and trusted your reader. But the rules here are harder, and he can’t just wait for inspiration anymore. There’s a demand. Every day.
Jake sighs. One hundred and one words is too many, and not enough.
Jake’s aware that people have died this summer, but it’s not made fact to him until he finds her, a block from his apartment.
His first thought is Don’t Move The Victim but it’s boiling out and he carries her inside. Her skin is dry and hot; her hair has been cut recently, too short. A silver bracelet gives her name as Holly.
Somehow he ends up riding in the ambulance. She wakes as they start to wheel her out. She’s holding a dirty black lump in one hand. She touches his lips, and the taste is sticky, gritty, impossibly sweet.