Please Don't Go (43 page)

“
Lay down,” Lilith demanded. He laid on the bed, staring at the ceiling, still picturing his mother’s skull, jabbering its rigid jaw at him, asking Zephyr if he wanted a ride to school, if he wanted to go shopping for new sneakers, or if his homework was complete. She had never been a pushy mother, but she had always been there for him when he needed her. And now, she was no longer. All that remained was a whitened bit of something three-dimensional that had once housed her brain. A bony ash tray. A fallen soldier’s helmet. Satan’s shopping basket.

“
I’m enjoying this body. So different than the ones I’ve had over the years. I’ve moved to and fro inside of piggish males for so long, ever since that little demon Emily. From there, a boatman in Ireland. An airline pilot. A police officer. A farmer. I hopped in and out of Charles so many times I can barely count, but that was an absolute bore, just staring at the mirror.
Quite literally talking to myself.
And even that imbecile who picked you up in the truck. Another bore. I’ve touched the inner nest of so many, but none feel like soft velvet upon my fingertips, not like this lovely young thing that you have become so enamored with. Now that I look like her, like your own object of desire, don’t you love me some?” Her logic was infantile.

“
No.”

“
Just a little bit?” the thing asked, pulling down his pants and caressing his limp servitude with Jackie’s soft mitt. “That’s not what you said yesterday.”

“
I don’t care what I said yesterday, and I don’t remember it, anyway,” he said.

She kissed him on the mouth, trying to obtain his eyes with her own, but failing miserably as he glared past her. The thick air circulated about them, candles flickering, smoke adrift in a closed-off environment where nothing made its way free, not even the flow of oxygen. At this notion, Zephyr gasped, coughing up in disgust at his resolute trap. She kissed his mouth again, deeper, but found nothing but a dead fish with immobile lips, pursed against her forward advances.

“
Stop being such a sack of poisoned flour.
Fuck me
, Zephyr,” Lilith whispered into his ear, attuning those twisted vocal intonations to that of Jackie, mimicking the woman that she hoped to become, but still failing in arousing his desire. It angered her, and so she kissed harder, deeper still, so much so that Zephyr’s lips started to tremble in pain.

He did not respond, biting back on any emotional reaction. Not until she closed her eyes.

She clenched her lids shut, masking those colorless globes of vacancy, her hips riding atop Zephyr while she emitted a series of moans. He opened his eyes for but a fleeting moment in time, looking upon the woman he had loved with all of his hardly beating heart. Her eyes were shut, but her lip quivered in just that special way that he remembered from his moments of warmth with Jackie. It had not been so long after all, only
days
really (eternity felt more like it), and he could still draw a direct path between the woman he loved and this possessed vessel atop him. He sat upright with her astride his naked lap, clenching her body against his, the first inklings of perspiration coming to life on her body. “I love you,” he mumbled, forgetting the details, in exhaustion, of the where, when, and how of his current tribulations. Zephyr knew when Lilith smiled inside, because Jackie smiled even wider.

Lilith resigned to keeping her eyes shut, to hide those terrible signs of the dead that she could not control. “It won’t be so bad, being trapped here with you,” Lilith grunted, thrashing against Zephyr, playing the role of Jackie in his sick imagination. It was nothing more than a role-playing exercise, but all the actors were willing and able participants. “I could do this forever,” Lilith clattered her voice against the silent walls in the voice of Jackie, throwing her new-found human hair back against her flexing shoulders.

Jackie cried out, beneath the rabble and confusion manufactured by the demon Lilith. Zephyr enjoyed every moment, wanting to take her a second time upon completion. He stated as such between breathless pants, but Lilith rolled over, away from him. “Not tonight, lover. You’ve had your fill.”

Lilith grinned, clutching the sheet close to her breast.

3.

Rattup always claimed to me that he was a writer in the most genuine sense, and I know now that he was being honest about that. He was a writer, in that he had been published in a seemingly respectable compilation. Sure. Though it was only one publication, and he never pursued anything more than that... I’m not sure if I should blame Lilith or his own laziness for that failure. But there were other undeniable evidences that indicated he was, in the truest sense, a natural born writer. An artist of the mind, even more so. The definer of truth. The possessor of the world’s looking glass.

The greatest writer that the world could ever be bestowed is the grinning mythical sort of man who can lie without consequence or moral dilemma. We are scolded, as children, to battle against the lies that are thrust upon us by society, by corporations, by elders, by capitalism, by competition, by the media, by every outlet of human communication. That which is corruptible becomes corrupted, without fail. When we transform into adults, we have two options: condone the lies or destroy the motherfuckers. While half of humanity spends all of their waking moments trying to slay the beast of lie-dom, the rest harness that power, cradling it in their arms and packing it away like a soulless battery that can be extracted for personal gain, most often to satiate desires of sex, power, and greed. How we treat our lies is how eternity will treat us; I am convinced of this.

I am no writer, and I see this now. Rattup thought I would make a good wordsmith one day, but maybe that was all part of the game. He saw my desire and lured me in to his comforting tutelage.

I write because I always believed that I had something pertinent to say. Now, trapped here beneath the invisible thumb of Lilith and all her hatred, I know that I am no writer, not by any stretch of the imagination. I write out of boredom, and even these words don’t properly translate this thing that I’m going through. My lover is atop my every last breathing moment, limiting the ways in which I can function as any semblance of a human being. I love her with every last beating pulse of my heart- for reasons I can no longer comprehend- but I cannot bear to look her in her dead fucking eyes for the poisons she has injected into me. She is Lilith one moment, and then she is Jackie in the next. This is her intention, and I cannot help the flipping and flopping I am feeling, back and forth between love and hate. Since we (Jackie and I) first met, it was nothing but forward steps toward our eternal-eventual beings, together, in the grips of some brand of puppy love that spread through us like the ebola virus. We met in a classroom at the University of Maine and we will die in a dusty bed several decades from now. I cannot picture our journey in any other context, and even that prospect makes me sadder than I have ever felt in all my life.

She (Lilith, I mean) told me, last night and the evening before last, that my former mentor, Charles Rattup... is dead.

At first I didn’t believe her, but then I asked myself what gain that would allow for her little chess match. There was no pragmatic purpose in her lying, unless of course she is using him as an example, that I can never truly escape with my life intact. I guess, though, that none of us can escape when it comes to the steel jaws of Death, knocking on our goddamned door like the Census Bureau. Jackie will die. So will I. Even the baby inside of her will lose its life, without any doubt. This thought brings me to wonder about Lilith. Can she even die in any traditional sense? Is fighting back against her even an option? Am I doomed?

I have to give him this much. Charles Rattup was a brave man, and only half of that ideal man that I hope to one day become. If I can achieve only a nano-slice of the being that he transformed himself into, then I will have self-actualized myself. From the core to the fingertips, I am a man of action. Like Rattup before me, I am persistent and bold. I must tell myself this daily, in order to soldier on. I could have never done to somebody what Rattup did to me. I’m not sure if that is the ultimate question of right versus wrong, but I know where I am now. I can’t fault him for being cunning. Maybe my anger has faded in knowing that Rattup is possibly dead and buried somewhere. Free, but dead as a doornail.

If you were to ask me, “Zephyr, do you miss your old friend Charles?,” well... I DO. I know that I shouldn’t. He should be scorned when his name crosses the threshold of my teeth. But I can’t hold myself against the man, no matter how hard I try. It is sick, and I wonder how infected by Lilith I have truly become. I feel my inner sanctity slipping away. I feel her breathing inside of me, nestled beneath my esophagus. She permeates the world as she sees fit. She sees what I am writing at this moment, via my thoughts, but she does not intercede. Perhaps this is because she’s already won, so no damage can be done against her vile campaign.

I’m going mad? No. Not mad, just reinvigorated by my own thoughts.

I cannot stop thinking of Rattup.

Maybe I’m a liar, after all. Maybe he did no different than I would have done.

In the long view, I’m as tired as a dead puppy, even here at only the beginning of my imprisonment. I try to tell myself that it’s not so much a prison sentence as it is a new life. Maybe that’s a form of denial, to pretend that my life is the furthest thing from a shit storm, but I can’t quite complain as I did when Lilith first trampled upon my liberty. When you get down to the truth of the matter, I have a very simple life now. My girl is by my side, though possessed by a demon, but still... I can look at her face on a daily basis. She is as adorable to me as the day we met, all except for her glossy eyes. I can kiss her just the same, hug her just the same. Something is missing, but I can hope that Lilith will return her to me at some point. Jackie is my overdue library book. I have no need for food or entertainment. Books and a scattered array of DVDs- they will grow tiresome, but that is a ways off. I can garden. I don’t know how to tend a garden very well, but I can learn. Rattup left me a series of gardening instruction manuals and how-to guides. I will consume them when spring rolls around again. The deep heat of the summer is upon us, and I have let the plants in his greenhouse falter, brown and shriveled and worthless like an old man’s dick. I have failed, but will find success next year. I am certain.

Gardens are the tattoos of the soul. I’m not sure what that means, but it just popped into my head like a curious groundhog. A lot of things pop into my head, but I think part of that is the lack of oxygen in my home. It is recycled so much that I can no longer discern where.... where am I?

My garden will be one that Rattup will look down upon (or up upon, if he is in that darker place that I fear for him), and say, “See, that boy did just fine. He made the best of it. Isn’t he grand?”
My life isn’t all that bad. You may think it’s deplorable, but you’re also a fucking idiot.

4.

The heavy air of summer had come sweeping through their lives with dogged heat as its traveling companion, but with an ample amount of rain and thunderstorms to counteract the misery. And just as quickly, the summer was swept away again. Their daily routines were contented to some degree, but they never spoke of anything beyond Lilith’s needs and Zephyr’s successful satiation of those needs. By the time autumn was upon them, Zephyr felt as if he could barely remember the previous day, as if it had all been a murky dream that he had awoken from, gluing bits and pieces of his short term history together with sloppy, mixed results.

Jackie’s belly grew rotund, barely able to contain the new being gestating inside of her. She would be due sometime in late October, by Zephyr’s best estimate. He had not been allowed to speak with Jackie again, not since that first evening when she came sauntering back into his life, so he could neither confirm or deny the due date with the Real Jackie. He missed her, but knew (hoped) that she was still alive inside of her shell, and so he was comforted by that.

Time went by with each tick and tock as it always did, in the face of every living moment, but rubbing its grimy hands together behind the curtain of humanity like the sneaky conspiracy-driven monster that it was. The glory of time fought a toothy battle against the pain of it. Zephyr no longer minded the shaky passage from one day to the next. The transitions were dull and unnotable.

Rattup was lost from Zephyr’s mind, as was the simplest concept of escape. That silly notion was a distant memory. How could he have been so arrogant to think he could outwit her? Resignation wasn’t necessarily weakness, it was wisdom. In telling himself this, he felt better, but still... he was bullshitting himself.

The belly of his love blossomed a bit more every day, and Lilith smiled her crooked smile as it did so. Zephyr would often wake up and enter the living room to find her speaking to her tummy, giggling and snarling and sometimes even gibbering in ancient tongues that he knew nothing of. “Our baby is a terrible little thing. You should hear what she says to me. I love her more than life and death combined,” Lilith noted. In the texts that Rattup had left behind, there were indications that women sought to protect their unborn babies from the winged demon Lilith, that she would snatch them away at the moment of their glorious escape from the womb. It seemed, realized Zephyr, that she had taken a more direct route to taking their baby, a proactive interception before the pass was even executed. It seemed unlikely that Lilith would be a loving mother to his child, but she had surprised him in recent weeks. The
little things
, always the
little things
that made the difference. He had started to reconsider his initial hatred of her, though he knew it was a folly on his part to do so. Any situation can become bearable and normal with the passage of time. Any prison inmate could attest to that.