Leaving New York

"You might have laughed if I'd told you. You might have hidden a frown. You might have succeeded in changing me. I might have been turned around. It's easier to leave than to be left behind."

It's been awhile wince there was any fiction here, I know. I'm trying to write, but what's coming out is mostly random and nonsensical. I wrote a short story the other night called Nothing Untoward. It was funny and - in a way - heartbreaking. It was about losing the past and how you sometimes forget how much you care. A friend of mine, the same friend that struggles not to laugh when that plane flies into the side of that building, would understand the sentiments and the words a hell of a lot more than anyone else ever could. If I ever put it up anywhere, I guess I'll dedicate to him. Everyone else would appreciate the writing but miss the deeper meanings.

Welcome To Forever will not be finished by the end of May. Not a chance. For that to happen I'd have to sit and do nothing but write from now until then. The way my life is now, that'll never happen. Perhaps I had an inkling that things would be this way when I made that promise, but I didn't say anything. Now I've told a lie and broken a resolution, and honestly, I don't care that much. I'm comfortable and confident that the thing will get written soon. No more promises. It'll be done when it's done.

They sound sad, these words. When I read them to check my spelling and my grammar, I find myself wondering how others will take them, what impression they'll get about how I'm feeling. For the record, I'm lonely. I miss Jenn. I miss the things I don't have and the things I haven't yet left behind. I feel like I'm reaching out to the future while at the same time unable to take my eyes from the past. It's an odd state of mind, but not entirely unpleasant. Bittersweet, I suppose.

What starts when the italics end is a story that is also bittersweet. It's the final part of a series I wrote that began with Want You Like A Pisces Rising. The others are still sitting on my hard drive, but I doubt I'll ever share them with anyone but Jenn. This is what happens at the place where fiction and strange realities meet. It was written a few months before I first went to the states. I hope you like it.

He emerges from the bathroom naked save for a bright white towel that hangs oh-so-loosely about his hips. He’s slimmer than I remember from our initial meeting, more confident than he was in those first few days and weeks. Still the same smile, though, still the same curious eyes painted a washed-out blue.

“It looks okay,” he says, running a hand through his hair. “You could’ve been a hairdresser.”

I smile, but I don’t really feel the emotion that should be behind it.

“You okay?” he asks. We’re just getting to that point where we can really read each other, and that thought cheers me up some.

“End of the line,” I say, lifting a hand that feel oddly heavy to wave at the window, at the city beyond.

He purses his lips and his gaze follows the gesture as he absently pulls the towel away and walks to the chair to pick up his jeans. Even now, I find myself unused to his nakedness, still capable of being surprised into arousal.

“Life has a certain…gravity,” he says, speaking in what I think of as his Writer Voice. “It pulls you back, pulls you down. You knew that. We both did.”

He turns back to me just as he reaches down to zip and button his fly, shows me a flash of his cock and his untidy pubic hair. I think of him in my hand, in my mouth. I think of how many times I’ve had my legs wrapped around his waist. I remember Philipsburg, where everything got just a little out of control until the spell was broken in the exhausted aftermath of the violent sex we had up against a junked car on some backstreet I don’t even remember the name of.

“I’m in love with you,” he’d said. “Let’s not lose this.”

This being my hands buried in a torn canvas roof, skirt hiked up on my hips, panties bunched around my knees. I felt dirty and sweaty and somehow beautiful in cold Pennsylvania air. He made me feel like a whore. He made me feel loved in some huge and indefinable way. He knew exactly what he was doing. So, for that matter, did I. That thing between us, the Bonnie And Clyde thing, we just let it off the leash for a while. No-one got hurt. Not really.

“I don’t want you to go,” I say, back in reality, back in the hotel room where he’s now sitting beside me.

“I’ll be back,” he says. “Or you’ll be visiting me. In the end, we’ll be together. It can’t be any other way.”

“I know that. I just don’t want to miss you.”

“There are ways,” he says. “We’ll do what we have to.”

Like in Pittsburgh, when he was complaining about his hair and I snatched a hat I liked straight off some guy’s head and we ran laughing down the street. Like on the road, when we hitched a ride with a woman and she left us in the car when she stopped for gas and he messed around in the glove compartment and found a wad of cash and a Saturday Night Special and she came back to find us gone. Like in Philipsburg, when I pretended to be a whore and demanded cash up front for services never rendered, when he played cards for money and did better than we expected, when an argument in a bar turned nasty and the guy came out swinging and suddenly the gun was in his hand and pressed hard into the guy’s forehead. There were maybe ten people in that bar and we were so calm and professional it frightened me. He made them toss their wallets on the floor and face the wall. I collected the cash without being asked. We slipped out into the night. We were flushed and excited and triumphant and he fucked me so damn hard up against that car that I was sore for days. Even then I wanted it harder. I wanted him to fill me up. I told him so. He kissed me and held me and I felt warm and safe.

“Bonnie and Clyde,” I murmur, tracing patterns on his bare back with my fingertips.

“Clarence and Alabama,” he replies.

“Nora and Mark.”

And we’re both laughing and maybe a little sad at the same time, remembering how he drove my car down I-15 into Primm, Nevada like a man possessed while I sucked hungrily at his cock, how we made love in the wet grass beside Lake Michigan and words came out of my mouth that I never believed I could say and he cried into my chest, how he sang to me in our hotel room that same night, when we’d both been drunk and the light fell from the moon and skimmed the surface of the lake and all I’d wanted was to stay there forever and ever.

Forever and ever. All these songs. Alkaline Trio back then, telling us about the thoughts in our heads, dirty as fuck and never leaving us. It’s about time – my lover had sung in my ear that night – that I came clean with you. At that song’s final punchline, his voice had cracked and I’d felt myself trembling with feelings that were so new and so powerful that I had no words to define them. What do you say – his breath hot against the side of my face – your coffin or mine?

Now we’ve come full circle and it’s REM again, the same distinctive vocals that had haunted his thoughts on the plane that brought him to me, this time singing about leaving New York, this time soundtracking the desperate melancholy of knowledge. I told you I love you – he sings in the mornings – I love you forever.

“Forever is a long time,” I say, without really meaning to.

“The longest,” he replies.

“Do you?”

“Do you?”

“I asked you first.”

“What are you gonna do if I don’t answer?”

“Not let you do what you wanna do.”

“Oh, and you think you can stop me?”

“I could scream. They’d lock you up.”

He grabs hold of me and pushes me down onto the bed, presses his weight down on top of me, clamps one hand over my mouth.

“Scream,” he says.

I scream into his hand and it’s so muffled that there’s really no way it could be heard outside the room, not unless some maid happened to be pressing her ear to the door. I think how it would be if he was just some guy sneaking in here to have his way with me, how I like it when he does shit like this, when it’s rape but it isn’t. I start struggling. I want him to hold me down and fold me up and fuck me till I’m dizzy. I can feel how he’s hard inside his jeans and against my belly.

“However long forever is,” he says. “I love you.”

He takes his hand away from my mouth and kisses me. I react with a confusion of emotions, a whirl of passion and lust and affection that has my lips describing tender pouts against his while my hand goes down between us to grab at his crotch. He pins my wrists to the bed, but not really. He leaves enough give that I can pull free of his clutches and fight him. We wrestle in a tangle of duvet and limbs. I get the front of his jeans open and then he holds me face down for long enough to haul my tank-top up around my shoulders and then off. I grab his cock and he shoves me away. I try to crawl to the floor and he pulls down my panties. We end up with him seated on the edge of the bed. I’m in his lap and we’re lost in a kiss. His cock is trapped between our stomachs and I’m lifting myself a little and trying to push it down, gasping into his mouth when its head slips over my clit and then divides me and finds my opening and I push my weight down and he’s up inside me with his clever hands massaging my breasts. I ride him fast and frantic, chasing an orgasm that’s been small and hot in my lower belly since those first thoughts of rape. He leans back on his elbows and watches me. He loves to watch me. I feel sweat on my face and between my breasts and my shoulderblades. I find my pleasure in the friction of my insides against the hardness I drive myself down on time and time again. His eyes follow my hand down over my belly and watch my fingers move over my clit. I let my head fall back and stars dance across the cracked and patterned ceiling and it feels like his cock is growing huge inside me, like he’s filling my belly and my chest and my throat and my skull with this pulsing warmth that squeezes my lungs and flicks playfully out at the tensed muscles of my thighs so that my legs twitch and spasm beneath me and I have to stretch and move my toes like I’m suffering a cramp. I say his name and then I say God’s name and then I swear and then it’s all torn away by a cry that feels like it’s dragging my heart up into my mouth and rolling back my eyes and making it so that I can’t breathe or move or scream until this massive fist is done kneading me all over and I fall spineless and exposed into his embrace.

“You’re so beautiful,” he says, and what makes it good is the awe in his voice. “You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Forever, I swear.”

I bury my face in his neck. I kiss his warm skin. I fall into a state that is neither conscious nor unconscious. I remember.

“New York isn’t like this,” I’d told him. “I mean, we’ll need a place to stay.”

That was much earlier, back in Missouri. Later, in Philipsburg, he’d used the gun one last time, leaving me alone at the cheap motel we’d been staying at for several hours before returning with a credit card he held out to me with a flourish and a grin.

“Where did you get that?” I’d asked.

“It doesn’t matter. It’s safe for a few weeks.”

“How do you know?”

He’d shrugged. “I just know.”

“You robbed someone?”

He’d nodded. “Money with menaces, I guess. I give the guy a couple of weeks before he goes to the police.”

“The gun?”

“Gone. I dropped it down a sewer. I just wanted to buy us New York and safety.”

“You’re crazy.”

“About you,” he’d said, and pulled me into his arms.

I snap out of it and we’re lying together on the bed. He’s awake with his eyes closed, his flaccid cock a soft shape against my cunt. I can feel how my arousal has covered our skin and dried there. I slide slowly down his body, feeling how the blood makes his cock move and swell against my belly and between my breasts. My knees find the soft carpet beneath his dangling feet and my mouth finds him semi-erect and hardening. He tastes and smells of my sex. I bring my hand up between his thighs and his balls are swollen and full. He groans when I squeeze a little, his erection mine to play with now, straining upward between my lips as I work my tongue around its tip. I can already taste the prelude to his orgasm and I grip him firmly with my other hand, begin to stroke his shaft with the same rhythm as I’m now kneading his balls. I hear his hands moving over the sheets, feel his body reacting to my caresses. I let my head move up and down, adding the friction of my lips to these myriad pleasures. He stiffens. His knee brushes my flank. My mouth is flooded with warm, thick come. I swallow theatrically, so that he sees it, tasting him, letting my throat work at the stickiness threatening to coat it.

I climb back up onto him, laughing at the colour in his face. He puts his arms around me and we wriggle up to the pillows together.

“It won’t be long,” he says, his face serious. “I know it’s not easy.”

“I can’t,” I say.

“Of course you can. I don’t make you who you are any more than you make me who I am.”

“I know that. I need you.”

“And I need you. That’s why we’ll be together. We did it once, we’ll do it again.”

“Such a confident boy,” I say, touching his face.

“It’s you that does that. You make me feel like I can do anything.”

We kiss for a while. We sleep.

That fucking song, they’re playing it everywhere. In the cab, we listen to the radio jabber on about things we care nothing for and then those familiar, haunting notes pour into our space once again. He’s looking out of the window because he’s only really seen New York through glass. We’ve been poor tourists. He told me the only sights he wanted to see were behind my eyes and inside my clothes. Still, there were things that mattered, places that meant something. We drove through the Mojave Desert and we kissed on the banks of Lake Michigan. We had shared memories of music and films and books, all those little references that brought us together in the first place.

Michael Stipe tells me that life is sweet and he tries to take what it brings. Loneliness wears him out, though. It lies in wait. My stomach turns a lazy somersault and I’m glad there was no time for breakfast. I feel horrible. I feel like he’s gone already.

I turn to my own window and reflect that leaving New York is no big deal. Manhattan skyscrapers reach for a chilly winter sky while people and cars scurry between them like insects. I hear a million radios, a million voices, the endless tramp of stylish commuter footwear on colourless pavements. Horns blare, patience wears thin, and somewhere in the distance is a dog that just won’t stop barking. I don’t give a fuck about leaving New York. Let it burn. I just don’t want to leave this. How can he be so calm?

“Where you flying to, man?” asks the cab driver.

“England,” he replies.

“You British, huh? You going home?”

He shakes his head and I see the frown that creases his brow, making him look troubled and unhappy. During another airport journey in what feels like another time, there was a similar reticence about him, a sense of internal struggle, of a battle between a steel-trap mind and a much-abused heart.

“I’m going away,” he says. “But not forever.”

Like synchronicity and serendipity, he says those last three syllables at the exact same moment they are sung from the radio. The cab driver seems repelled and distracted by the sheer size of the atmosphere this generates in the back of his little yellow car, and we pass the rest of the journey in silence.

“Enjoy your trip, my friend,” the driver says, as we exit the cab. “And your lady, too.”

He pays the man through the open window, nods and offers a thin smile that grows to a familiar grin as we pass between the sliding doors of the terminal. I grope for his hand and he laces his fingers through mine.

“What are you smiling at?”

“He told me to enjoy my trip, and to enjoy you.”

“He…” I’m thinking back. “…fuck off.”

He laughs and lifts my hand, kisses it with mock gravity. We find each other’s eyes and before I’ve even thought about it I have thrown myself at him and we’re kissing, wrapped up in each other while the tourists and travellers grumble their way around us, heads down and eyes averted.

“It’s like dying,” he says.

We’re sitting against a monolithic pillar in the terminal, looking up at the departure board, around at the antiseptic briefness of the airport, where people scurry aimlessly in all directions, dragging their possessions in wheeled boxes that take on the guise of fashionable little coffins in the harsh light of his words. An abrupt female voice announces delays and cancellations and flights boarding. Above us loom two huge screens that display adverts and news updates. Everything seems false and unfamiliar. We have removed ourselves from the world and I no longer recognise faces that once inspired comfort or outrage. It makes for a surreal sight, all these talking heads with lips moving silently, expressions contorted into grotesque parodies of sincerity and sympathy. Neither of us knows who the president is. Neither of us really cares.

“I’ve been someone I always wanted to be,” he says, “and I feel like I won’t be that person anymore. It’s like going knowingly into a coma, going back to sleep. I don’t want to waste anymore time. I’ve done enough of that.”

On the heels of this monologue comes the abrupt woman announcing another flight, announcing his flight.

“Don’t,” I say. I throw a leg across him like I could hold him down, pin him here until the plane has left without him and he has no choice.

He mouths my name but no sound comes from his throat. He takes hold of my waist and pulls me into his lap. I think he’s going to kiss me but he just stares. He touches my hair. He runs his hands down my face and over my neck, along my shoulders and the length of my arms. His fingers brush mine. He shapes my breasts, smoothes my belly, cups the curves of my waist and my hips. He squeezes my behind, caresses my thighs, fingers slipping briefly between and then down; my knees, my shins, my calves, even my feet. He’s looking into my eyes and smiling just a little, like he knows there’s something ridiculous in this but it’s just love and love has no shame at all.

“I’m going to miss you,” I tell him. “But not for long.”

“No, not for long,” he says. “Come on. Walk me to the gate.”

We go slowly, hand-in-hand, as close as we can be without tripping over one another. He has nothing to declare but the clothes he’s wearing and the ticket in his free hand. The sign tells me I am not allowed beyond this point and we halt right in front of the faceless customs officers. I lean in to kiss him and it’s tender and brief.

“I have a kiss for you,” he says, still smiling that strange smile, “but I’m going to save it for when we next meet. Call it a promise. Things to say to you and do to you. I’m going to keep them all for next time. That’s the best goodbye I can come up with.”

“I’m going to hold you to that,” I reply, and for a moment his jaw clenches and I can see how close he is to tears.

“Take care of yourself,” he says, his voice just barely a whisper.

I nod, unable to manage even that. I watch him turn away and offer himself to be patted down and scanned with the wand one of the officers wields like a weapon. He walks through the gate and away from me, into the crowds that mill aimlessly in the lounge beyond. He turns back and I see him as he is, as an entity separate from me, just a boy in dirty jeans and a Dead Kennedys T-shirt on his way back to a place that has never been home. It is a moment of complete understanding; how he feels, how I feel, what we are to each other. He raises a hand and smiles and the water that fills my eyes makes my vision blur. I blink to clear it and he’s gone. My confident boy is leaving on a jet plane.

On the flight back home, exhaustion overtakes me and I sleep. I dream he’s over the Atlantic with airline stationary in his lap; a pen and a few sheets of paper. He looks out at an azure sky filled with wisps of winter cloud. His hand begins to move, and in his childish scrawl he writes: “Memory fuses and shatters like glass. Mercurial future, forget the past. It’s you. It’s what I feel.”

Instead of writing his name, he signs it: “Forever.”

He smiles. He tears this strip away from the sheet. In the logic-free domain of dreams, he calmly opens the window and lets the shrieking wind drag it from his hand, where it twists and flaps like a paper butterfly, carried back towards the continent and the girl he is leaving behind.

My car is full of music and memories. His Jimi Hendrix CD starts up when I turn the key in the ignition and I start laughing and crying at the same time. Interstate 15 will never be the same. I am tired and numb and I keep catching my concentration slipping away, trying not to focus on the life I’m returning to.

Home is stale and empty. I am not ready to face this world and I fall straight into my bed, where I wrap myself in blankets that still smell of us and sleep until I feel heavy and sick with it, until I can do nothing but sit staring at my computer, knowing that typing at him is no longer enough yet aching for any kind of contact. It is still too early, of course. No doubt his exhaustion is the equal of my own, and jetlag is not a problem I have to contend with. He may not even be there tonight.

I take a shower and feel better. I drag our bags in from the car and open the one we filled with CDs. I’d like to hear a little Alkaline Trio, I think, some loud guitars and bittersweet lyrics to get me angry and sad and ready to start living my life in rebellious silence once again. The disc I want is at the top of the pile, and I hear my heart beating loudly in my head when I see the strip of paper folded untidily in front of the inlay card. I open the case and pull it free, unfold it half expecting to see the airline logo, feel both relieved and somehow disappointed that it isn’t there. His childish handwriting is exactly as it was in my dream, though, quoting a different lyric from the same song: “And all not lost, still in my eye, the shadow of necklace across your thigh. I might’ve lived my life in a dream, but I swear it, this is real.”

The signature at the bottom is not “Forever.” It is his name. But that’s okay. In my mind, they mean the same thing.