The Anarchy of a City Night
by
C. L. Myers
On an insignificant triangular strip of grass between six lanes of traffic a nearly naked woman lies face up. Her pale skin glows like a full moon in a starless sky, bobbing amidst the flying cars, mute against the babel of motor and horn. She is too much to take, juxtaposed against the machine noises and visions. Her proportions appear overly generous, overly sexed, a longing sketched into concrete and turf. Music from the car radios lodge love songs in the dark openings of her ears and then retreat into silence. The headlights from the passing cars reach out like the spiny arms of urgent lovers, suspended just short of, over, or abstractly through her, but never quite touching her. Three young boys hang their bodies out of a jeep, grab their crouches and moan. And through it all she just lies there, placidly, unconcerned of the chaos she initiates.
The excited anarchy rises as high as it can and then falls back down upon the city like a mushroom fog. On the twenty-six-story-high surface of this overgrown cacophony floats the soft regimented sound of Andrew.
Hear him breath. The short rhythmic breaths. Almost silent on the intake and then forced on the escape. Hu, hu, hu, hu. Hu, hu, hu, hu. Like a soldier's training march.
Andrew opens the window and sticks his head out over the taut roof-bellies of buildings, over the exclamations of neon signs, and out toward the river. If one looks carefully, through the squints of tall buildings, one can see the form of the half-naked girl still lying on the median strip. But Andrew sees nothing. Sight is a choice not a gift and Andrew has no use for what passes outside of himself.
He sits on the edge of the bed and waits for the sign. He makes no impression on the mattress; neither does his image reflect on the fogged windowpane. He does not hear his own breathing, as we do. He has forgotten he is alive.
Down below, someone leans on a car horn. A man cries tersely: "Ah, fuck you." These noises come to him slowly, hesitantly, as if from a foreign source, as if unsure that Andrew is an ear capable of receiving them. Andrew is roused, somewhat, like a drunk who is kicked. He hears, but these sounds are only a bother, tiny pains that worm into the numbness.
His head hurts. He feels on the side of the bed where the woman had slept. He feels the warmth, the slight dampness of the sheets, and adsorbs it through his fingers, allowing it to spread through the palm of his hand. He rubs a crumpled tissue across the lip of the coffee cup that sits by the bed. He sucks in and wipes out the remaining traces of the woman's existence. He peels her shadow from the wall and twists her neck until she falls through the cracks in the floor. He kills his own memory with this routine. The memory that he once sought something from a body, from a smile, from a pair of thighs. Something that was never found.
A longing crouches on the floor, its arms folded over its head, unable to look for fear of itself. Andrew thinks of another woman, who does not yet exist.
***
In a world where nothing is attainable, two twelve year old girls make out on a twin bed. They play act stereotypes, each pretending alternately to be the boy. The boy is the one on top, the one who feels, the one who seduces, the one who admires. This is the way they see it. The girl role is just to lie there and allow herself to be turned on. The girl character is the coveted one. They fight over who is to play the girl.
***
Annamarie sits at the counter and worries that she will wake up and find herself an old lady, with rotting teeth, a crazy smile, and the memory of a hallucinary dream. She blinks her eyes and watches everything go black, white, black, white, until nothing is either. The light plays a game that it does not explain.
The waitress turns her back and Annamarie watches a wiry man steal a donut from the sugared pyramid under a plastic dome. He stuffs the donut in his mouth and smiles at her, the powdered sugar raining on the counter and into his beard.
Somehow she had crawled into the fuzzy set, that wide open space between zero and one. She should have been in bed, but the smell of sulfur burned her dreams and sleep was a darkened window with a sign on its dusty ledge. Cerrado. Closed forever.
She drank bitter lukewarm coffee and ate a slice of cold apple pie which made the nerves in her teeth shiver. A man with a withered hand tried to convince her to give him a blowjob for ten bucks. She made a bunch of cruel and stupid jokes hoping he'd go away.
"You're looking for a HAND-out right?"
"Why don't you give yourself a HAND-job instead?"
She went on and on thinking of every bad pun she possibly could.
Finally she swung around from the counter and announced to the entire late night crowd:
"Ok everybody, let's give him a HAND."
A few muffled laughs and the thin man donut thief coughed into his hand. The waitress asked if she wanted more coffee and as she nodded yes, she watched misery walk across the crippled man's face. He sunk into his wrinkled flesh colored raincoat and left, leaving her sticking to the cold plastic stool.
Annamarie was on edge, positive that IT was going to happen. IT whatever IT was, was more terrible and more fantastic than imagination reaches and she was walking right into it, had been her whole life.
She let her intuition guide her. It was one of those moments where that seemed to be the only reasonable action. She had no idea how she got from one place to another, from one thought to another. There was this constant buzzing, like a tv on a dead station.
She found herself walking along the dock, the river snuggling against the shore and then pulling away like a coy lover. The whole world was a tease.
A plane flew overhead, sounding like a drain being unplugged
A car with a megaphone on its roof passed by. The words exploded in front of her.
"Find the center. Just find the center." It repeated.
When she looked toward the car it became an intense ball of light, like a sun, and she had to turn away. When she did, all these beautiful oriental daggers appeared and started dancing and twirling in front of her eyes -- each one slit down the center by an array of dazzling jewels. She kept blinking her eyes at this vision. Did she really see it or was it just a mirage caused from looking into the bright light?
The voice over the megaphone kept repeating its message. And then changed to:
"If there's danger, just move out of the way."
She had the feeling that she was in possession of great secret. She closed her eyes and felt herself being transported, spirited through the empty spaces.
When she opened her eyes she found herself in a small white apartment. A man was seated on the bed. He had a knife. It lay across his lap. He looked at her with sad and beautiful eyes and said:
"Come here. I'm going to kill and torture you, cut you up the center, rip you open and watch you spill out."
All this he voiced in a whisper, as if he were trying to seduce her into a simple act of sex. Up from the depths of her being she felt an intense desire for this man and what he proposed. Coyly, she approached him and bit him on his ear.
"Is that a threat or a promise?" she murmured.
The man answered by grabbing her and pinning her down on the bed. He put his whole weight upon her and crushed his face into hers until she could barely breath. The smell of whiskey and cigarettes unraveled.
His penis reminded her of a wing, fluttering between her legs. He put the knife in her mouth and she felt a momentary pain as it cut her gum. He jammed the knife in and out to the pulse of his penetrating penis and her fluttering heart.
There was no more pain only a feeling of coming upon a transcendent knowledge. Joy and happiness gushed into her. It was definitely not as if these things came from within, but as if she were a standing, open jar and a liquid bliss was literally poured into her.
The man rolled off her. They were both covered in blood. She thought:
This is it. I have been waiting for this moment all my life.
How odd to be in such a situation, one which other people would surely flinch at. How people would moan over what had happened to poor Annamarie. How strange that Annamarie, at this moment of apparent horror, felt nothing but ecstasy and the sure feeling that she was just where she should be, that she had always meant to be the victim in this bizarre play of violence and passion.
Coming from down below she heard the voice from the car: "Find the center, find the center."
"I've found it," she whispered.
The man rolled back on top of her, the bloody knife still in his hand. Slowly, he moved the knife between her breasts and began to cut. She watched as her flesh tore and the blood poured out of her. She pulled his head down and pressed her lips to his with a sudden and intense desire. She watched her blood flow down his head and cover his hair. He picked up his head, and looked at her. He pushed a lock of hair from her face and kissed her cheek. A radiant smile flashed through his bloody face. She felt the love and desire well up in her and she took a long deep breath as if she was trying to gulp it all in. It was then that she started to choke, and it felt as she were coughing up pieces of flesh. She began to panic; she couldn't breathe. She felt the man's arms tighten around her.
"Shhhh, baby. Shhhh."
She could never, would never, explain how she felt at that moment. It was as if she had become something so foreign that even her own true thoughts made no sense to her. It was as if she had become a beautiful stranger.
And then the darkness fell over her, and she fell into the warm darkness of her own womb.
*** Andrew down the city streets, trying not to feel his feet hitting ground. He sits down on an empty bus stop bench and pulls a piece of paper out of his pocket. It is a letter he has written to his lover, a woman he has never seen.
It is good that you can form such a safehouse in your mind.
When the loonies that are locked in my surreal head become agitated. when I can feel, though I sit perfectly still, that one small step, that one long breath, is apt to cause great peril, I come here to this desk and try to form the truest simplest words I can.
Like basket weaving. One after another I weave these modest vessels, each one thoroughly indistinguishable from the next, yet each one necessary to some whole beyond my understanding.
I walk up and down these words, like an apartment building staircase, pausing from door to door, pressing my ear against the thin wood to listen to the strange murmuring of the occupants.
It is almost morning. The sirens cry with the agony of longing.
The lights, red and yellow, pulsate the strip of grass and encircle the girl's almost naked body in a hypersexed frenzy. Two men in white bend over her statuesque form for a few moments. Then another man comes over with a sheet in his hands.
Andrew watches as the paramedic pulls the fabric over her shining body, like a cloud moving over the moon, leaving the morning dark and the sky empty.