Warmed and Bound: A Velvet Anthology (6 page)

All the Acid in the World

by
Gavin Pate

Sunshine

At thirteen they made the pact, swore they’d reign forever. The Acid King and Queen. He told her you have to do it this way, taking off his clothes in the middle of the woods and folding them on a patch of pine, because it’s ritual, it shows a way to God. She nodded and peeled herself naked. He tried not to look at those freckled breasts, knowing she knew he was looking just the same. They couldn’t hide anything. 

This is ceremony. 

She said she knew that too.

They scored the yellow blotter from her cousin’s friend, the one who said it would burn right through their brains. No matter. They already couldn’t concentrate in class, couldn’t stop drinking their parents’ liquor, couldn’t wait the three months before they’d be policed at 4:00 a.m. in the orange chairs of the elementary school, Wizard of Oz singing Dark Side of the Moon off some teacher’s VCR.

In the woods they held each other’s hands and the trees bent into a portal blowing a voice through their flesh. She came down talking of a tunnel in her grandmother’s basement, that behind a bookshelf burrowed not into the middle of the earth, but a secret passageway to the second floor restroom of JC Penneys. He said God lived in the dirt, and she agreed, said Hippo Penis, and they found laughter everlasting under the cap of a small red tree. 

Mostly he rode his bike past her house morning and night tasting the air that watched her window and not feeling the crucible already hanging from his neck. 

Escher

Fifteen.

The stairways went up and down and came around to beetles and fish, open panes of window glass dripping soaked and drowned.

She hung posters in her room, he drew imitations on the desks.

The hits were big—MC Eschers under their eyelids—and they went to class, laughed off lessons, learned walls can cry and breathe.

They ran away from home and stole her grandmother’s Maxima with the factory equalizer and Guns N’ Roses all the way to the beach, a mix tape with nothing but Sweet Child o’ Mine and November Rain over and over again.

But later he’d remember not the strips of Eschers they ate like Twizzlers, but the way she willed their car into space and took him in a Motel 6, her hands showing him there were still some beautiful things.

He could look right through her skull.

She could taste him in her throat.

The Eschers got bigger, stronger, and sometimes he worried the acid would be too much.

Next thing they’re at the 7-Eleven and she’s just gotten her license and leaves the car idling outside. Somehow she’s arguing with the clerk, her purple batik skirt washing away the white light, saying the rotisserie dogs are cold, the nacho cheese is runny, and by the way, where’s the secret passage to the world under the sea? And there he is, his pupils wide as quarters, saying he’s found it, right here beneath the Pennzoil display. Somewhere in the distance a clerk is saying Hey now, Hey now, and the words slip away even as they’re said. Backing up, spreading his arms like Jesus Christ. At a full sprint he dives into the portal. Wow, she says. Wow, Wow, Wow. The bottom of the ocean shoots out of the hole, drips from the ceiling, spills from his scraggly blond hair. The clerk with a mop like a baseball bat, trying not to slip, pursuing and tumbling through the aisles. And because no one ever noticed, she rolls up the celebrity magazines and sidles out the door. 

It was easy to blame the Eschers. 

They found a way to hold hands at psychic distances and push their fingers safely through one another’s skin. And he’d only just started to say there had to be another way, as something made her smile, laugh, even as he knew it wasn’t funny anymore. 

We’re made of plastic, she said, her face in her hands. 

To prove it: a shard of glass he’d found the universe in, an anatomy lesson of flesh and blood.

Later during the three-day hold, the ER wouldn’t believe he’d done it for all the right reasons: not because he loathed himself or wanted to die, but because he loved.

There’s a way to lose yourself completely.

Which got his hold bumped to a week. 

Microdots

This is when senior year never happened, when the holds and evals are steady and predictable, when she’s in his room, showing him the acceptance to a college he swears does not exist.

From the Carmex container he dumps the purple microdots like caviar between.

To celebrate.

To push them all the way.

But she had given it up, too much unhinging the final door, coming too close to the God they’d been looking for all along. And she wasn’t ready. 

But there she is, eating acid all the same.

They stare at the acceptance letter written in a language he lost in a swirl of mental pixels by November of eleventh grade.

She tells him not to apologize or abdicate the throne.

He doesn’t say it was always more than a pact, and she doesn’t say he never has to.

Jesus Christ on a motorcycle: these hits are really strong.

The thing with acid is this. It’s you in there, always has been, and just now, for this time, while your hand does cartwheels and your mind can’t hold the seconds together tight enough, even then it’s you.

Their clothes folded on floor instead of pine, their legs crabbed together, her hand in his stringy yellow hair.

They want me on medication.

Medication

Not like this.

The place where his laugh once was is disappearing.

Heavy.

She can see the word fall right through the floor.

Heavy.

Her neck elastic now, his hands working. She slips him inside and feels him crying Houses of the Holy and Wish You Were Here. 

This is when you remember it’s dangerous to feel too much.

He snakes through and she lolls her head back and forth. It rushes between: what her mom’s boyfriend said he didn’t do when she was twelve, what his dad had said so often in whispers and in rage.

So many ways to use a voice.

It wasn’t about God, either. All the acid in the world. Because she saw through it that time they ran away, Guns N’ Roses for 200 miles, his hand on her neck like maybe, just maybe, her head would dislodge and fly out the sunroof, and there he’d be, trying to explain to cops, parents, everyone, why she’s lost her mind. 

In the truck stop with the rigs lined like caskets, the smell of gas and yellow light, their seats reclined, the sunroof open, the night wide and forever above: they were too far already to double back. Dawn would beat them home and their parents would know the kids were not all right.

Sunshine, Escher, Microdots. 

It gets into the hair, seeps into the spine.

He plucks one deep, the grey matter clinging to the follicle. She pushes her fingers through his neck, dips the hair into the spinal fluid, and they suck both ends like nectar from honeysuckle on a hot August day. 

But that’s not what’s he’s saying with the acceptance letter still unread. 

It’s about a squirrel.

Somewhere he remembers to roll down a window, clear his throat and spit.

She moves their hands, finds what might be a constellation and follows it to design. Gods and humans, November Rain again and again. A truck shifts into gear and a sun, their sun, blinks on the horizon.

Squirrels, microdots, medication.

Somewhere there are parents in an argument about who their children are.

It’s really about how he and his brother trapped the squirrel at the bottom of the outside stairs, the ones with the three stone walls that led to the basement, and how the brother, older, already gone, didn’t have to say anything to start the exercise, didn’t have to explain why to the twelve year-old at his side. 

There’s a tunnel, don’t you understand? And when we find it we can get away.

Their hands on the emergency break together, he tells her this is my family.

His brother who chased the squirrel into the pit, and how all he had to do was nod at their father’s unused pitchfork beside the never-yet-strewn pine straw, the one his dad brought home, drunk, loud, standing in the front door with the porch light’s silhouette casting him across the room.

Only a perfect throw would do, gravity and patience, aim and will. 

Afterwards they didn’t even bury it, just his brother slapping his shoulder, reciting lines from movies that never got made.

Already he knew God would stop listening and it didn’t matter from here on out—what he did, how hard he looked—the world would hide its beauty.

They leave the truck stop, hole up in the Motel 6, and she tries everything she can to show him how to find it, swearing up and down that they will be enough. 

But this is when she’s not in the basement and losing her mind and crying on microdots, but when she’s alone and crying at the face he couldn’t shake, the one candle lit in the mirror, him picking at the corner of his pupils that refused to ever shrink, and she, rushing at him with the cup of water, trying to extinguish the candle and the mirror and everyway his face suggests all that has gone wrong. 

Liquid

But it was too late to wash it all away.

Sixteen years later, when the child they would never have is sucking down liquid, tripping her way into bliss, she awoke at a reunion with her husband and the story everyone was dying to tell.

How he had lived through a kid, a divorce, an institution with white walls and locked doors that called him its own. A deluge had come from God and he never found that olive branch or the return of his sweet white dove.

She could never be a sweet white dove.

How he swerved into the ER lane, ran to the waiting room and tried to untangle the wire and ball sculptures that kept the kids distracted while the hospital sterilized everything left unsaid. There would be no note except the article in the morning paper and the remaining silence was a hammer that began to smash her life away.

How he held the security guards with the .45 he stole long ago from his dad, backed his way into the small chapel, a few pews and a giant cross and a little piano in the corner. He sat, smiled, cracked his knuckles and soothed the opening chords of the next nine minutes of her November Rain. 

And how he doesn’t have to sing because by the time he reaches the second verse there are people at the doors singing for him, nurses and patients and a janitor tilting his life on a broom, knowing it’s his wedding and funeral wrapped into one. He shakes more sound out of the piano than the chapel can hold, his color coming back, his arms tightening up, pounding away at the silence with his own little hammers to show her what beauty might mean and how to get there.

And then we’re at the 7-Eleven, and the cops are at the door, pushing the rest of us aside, working their way into the pews and up the aisle. It’s too late. He’s started his crescendo. And we all begin to sing. You’re not the only one, you’re not the only one. And he raises his hands like Christ on the cross, sprints up the aisle and into the hall with the .45 in hand, tossing the unsuspecting deputy through the gift shop’s still glass door.

And I know my part because no one ever notices. I reach into the toppled gift shop rack and grab the magazines, rolling them under my shirt, already outside before someone doesn’t see he never stole the bullets.

I take the crucible and begin to run, leaving our kingdom behind, take it the rest of the way to the tunnel beneath the road, the one that digs down deep where God can never find us. I hurry inside, descending, descending, and knowing right or wrong this is the only way I can hear it if I ever tell it all myself.

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Crazy Love

by
Cameron Pierce

So you meet a stranger on the bus. The two of you speed headfirst into small talk about diminishing salmon populations, and that settles it. You will have a casual fuck. Two hours later, you float on the pillows that appear when the storms of good sex have ceased thundering. You’re both vigorous cuddlers, so it’s hard to tell in the half-light where your flesh ends and the stranger’s flesh begins. You fall asleep, very much in love.

The stranger shakes you into wakefulness around seven in the morning and says, “You knocked me up.” You insist upon the eternal virtues of prophylactics and tell the stranger to go back to sleep. The stranger gets out of bed and paces from one end of your room to the other. This irritates you. You have always hated pacers and morning people. It seems you have fucked the wrong kind of stranger again.

Five minutes later, the stranger yelps and gives birth to a child. Faithful to its strange origins, the child is a weird-looking thing. It could pass for one of those plush, cutesy-eyed hearts that pop up in grocery stores and boutique shops when February rolls around. You find it hard to imagine that your genes played any role in its creation. 

“It sure is a weird-looking thing,” you say.

“I think it is beautiful,” the stranger says, and that settles it. You make coffee and eggs and the three of you take the bus down to the courthouse. You get married. With a child thrown into the equation, you see no option but marriage. Still, you’re uncertain whether you really love this spouse-stranger. After all, the spouse-stranger is a pacer and a morning person. You return home from a honeymoon of takeout Chinese and an Italian horror film that the spouse-stranger claims to have seen precisely thirty-six times. “Once for every child born,” the spouse-stranger says.

You think this is a lot of children for one person to have, but decide it is better to leave your separate pasts unspoken. You find yourself warming up to the fuzzy infant dozing between the two of you on the sofa. Family life might be okay after all.

A month of swell fucking and many diaper changes goes by. Then one morning at the crack of dawn, the spouse-stranger asks for a divorce. You pull the covers to your chin and say, “I thought we were happy.”

“I am happy,” the spouse-stranger says, “and I feel like I’m in Hell.”

“How can you feel both things at once? What makes you think that?” you ask.

“Oh, a lot of things,” says the spouse-stranger, packing a suitcase that belongs to you full of clothes that are yours. The spouse-stranger slams the front door three times on the way out.

You prepare to face the trials of single parenting, but first you sleep until noon. With the spouse-stranger gone, you can finally return to your normal habits. When you wake up, the empty bed saddens you. Prickles of loneliness scratch at your insides and turn your thoughts into some kind of lousy meat. Everything you think seems out of place in your head, dragging you to a new all-time low every minute.

You walk into the kitchen and spot a note on the counter. Your heart beats with the gusto of a Bach symphony. You clear your throat and restrain the great hopes the sight of this ketchup-stained note has bestowed upon you. You hold it between your fingers like a scroll from the heavens and read:

The baby died. I put it in the trash. Remember to pull the can to the curb tomorrow. I’m sorry I don’t love you anymore. Don’t feel bad about it. This is just what I do.

You pace from one end of the kitchen to the other. You hate yourself during every minute of it, but you’re compelled to pace. You’re a mad pacer. You were born to pace. The sun shines and you pace. The sun hangs itself on the blue horizon and you pace. The blue horizon fizzles into black emptiness and you pace. Black emptiness and you pace. Black emptiness. Pace.

Morning comes and you pass out on the floor. You dream that you die and meet the spouse-stranger on a bus taking you to Hell. The spouse-stranger shows you a ticket stamped PURGATORY in gold embossment. The bus drives off a cliff and you wake up. You realize what you must do.

You leave your house and stand at the bus stop. The bus pulls up five minutes later. Strangers occupy half the seats. The other seats remain unfilled. You sit beside a stranger near the back of the bus. The two of you speed headfirst into small talk about the poisoned cat food epidemic in China, and that settles it.

You go to the stranger’s house because your own house is behind you now. You feel the stranger’s stop approach like a historical compendium of all the strangers who have ever slept together.

But when you get to the stranger’s house, you find that it is haunted. You stand outside and squint your eyes at the house’s twisting spires, as if to gauge its spook count and decide whether the risk is worth the fuck. “I grew up in a few haunted houses,” you say.

“It isn’t that haunted,” the stranger says.

Puffy white ghosts peer out from all the windows. The house is definitely
that
haunted. “Maybe it isn’t,” you say, and walk inside.

The stranger guides you upstairs to a room where a stained mattress lies in a corner. “I can’t have sheets in the house because the ghosts poop on them,” the stranger says.

“That would be a lot of dirty laundry,” you say.

You and the stranger undress and lie on your backs. Then you turn and kiss the stranger and you fold over each other. The sex isn’t that great because ghosts howl and fly through the walls. Lovemaking strikes you as a funny thing to do in a haunted house and you laugh. The stranger takes sex very seriously and does not laugh. This also makes it less great. The stranger sighs a ghostly wail and orgasms. You haven’t come yet, but the stranger says, “I guess that’s the end of our sleeping together.”

“I guess that’s it,” you say. You dress in silence, recalling all the reasons you vowed never to live in a haunted house again. A ghost follows you down the stairs on your way out. You wonder if the stranger ever gets lonely and tries to sleep with the ghosts.

You stand at the bus stop and figure you’ll have to try again some other day. The bus arrives a few minutes later and you step on. You spot the spouse-stranger you’re still legally married to. The spouse-stranger sits beside another stranger who once meant something to you. You can think of nothing that made this stranger different from all the other strangers you have slept with. That stranger was not special, you think. Anyway, it took place in some half-remembered time.

It no longer matters that you engaged in brief encounters with either of these strangers. You still love them, but in the way people love the memory of a carnival funhouse. A gust of longing rises up in you because to hell with it. These encounters do matter. They must add up to something more meaningful than any of the strangers who make them happen. To think otherwise would be sticking a foot in the mouth of your own aimlessness.

Your stop is coming up and you want a stranger to talk with, but all of them converse with other strangers. Your thoughts no longer slosh around like bad meat, but you are hungry and a hamburger sounds delightful. Half a mile from your stop, you stand and tiptoe to the front of the bus. You tap the driver on the shoulder. You think that even if she’s a pterodactyl and missing a front tooth, her blue uniform compliments her yellow eyes. You can tell this dinosaur has style and taste.

You ask if she’s heard of an all-night diner that recently opened.

“No,” she says, bubblegum smacking between her elongated jaws.

Before you can tell her about the diner and ask her on a date, the pterodactyl misses a turnoff because you’re distracting her. The bus zooms straight ahead, right off a cliff. As the bus plummets into a canyon, everybody screams, including your ex-lovers.

The bus driver climbs out of her seat and takes you in her arms. She opens the door and leaps out of the bus. Her wings unfold like a lovely umbrella and you sail toward the sun. Deep down in the canyon, the bus explodes. Those strangers are dead now. It’s just you and the pterodactyl. Maybe, if she doesn’t have a nest full of babies somewhere, and she doesn’t feed you to them, the two of you will hit it off.

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