Courtney and I moved in together three months ago based solely on our decision that we felt that we were ready for it, mentally and physically (“It just feels right.” were the words that she used). We found a place on a small residential street in an “up-and-coming” section of town, according to the girl we sublet it from. Around the corner several restaurants line the street, all different according to their cuisine’s origin: the Colombian steak house, the Cuban café, a greasy Chinese place called Lin’s Garden, an Argentinean chicken shack, and of course the few Mexican places that are shit randomly into vacant buildings in every city of America. We frequent these sullied fronts whenever our wallets allow, about once or twice a week. Courtney, being the more au courant to the various choices supplied by the eateries, usually chooses and I, wanting only to stop my complaining stomach, invariably shrug her a yes. The neighborhood offers few other places of interest save for the small bars that I find on nights that we argue.

Our apartment is positioned on the southwest corner of the top floor in a quaint three-story building. I had recently become interested in growing various houseplants (and everybody knows the importance of the sun’s natural rays flooding plants with warmth), so I made the decision to take this one after the multitude we’d already looked at based solely on its placement in the building, letting the light pour in for most of the day. We have four rooms: kitchen (enough of a room to keep the dining room table but scarcely to eat comfortably in), sitting room (where the front door opens to and if company were present the conversations and visitation would take place), a small bedroom (big enough for a bed and a place to dress), and what I like to call the library (which is where my books line the walls in homemade bookshelves and where I am allowed to smoke). The decorations are few but select. An oil painting of a solemn baby graces a sitting room wall, the bedroom keeps Courtney’s large pictures content (maps, foreign movie advertisements, etc.), while the library holds all that I keep dear (posters of various writers, cheap prints of priceless paintings, random found figurines). We have a few area rugs spread around and a coat rack next to the front door to make the place feel commodious. Courtney has done her best to drape the tables and windows tastefully, leaving few complaints to the visitor. We split the cleaning chores as equally as we can but seeing as how we both work full-time, the quality of the job is sometimes lacking; cups with remnants of liquid, socks in the cushions of the couch, etc. Although Courtney regularly spends her money on candles of various scents, the place always seems to have the same smell: cigarettes, my contribution, and skin, something that I attribute to two bodies living in such tight quarters, leaving their discarded follicles scattered about like invisible snow.

As I remove my shoes, Courtney’s voice explodes from the kitchen exclaiming in my cold, red ears, “Is that my Alex?!” Her jubilance for everyday occurrences, like the availability of pepper in someone else’s house (“Oh, how fantastic!”) or neighboring seats on a bus (“Look! We can sit next to each other!”), often perplexes me. I used to find it endearing, almost precious, but now I find it confusing to the point of revulsion. I say nothing. Rather I start undoing my left shoe and think about the drink that I’m going to pour myself as soon as I am in stocking feet. “Are you ready?” Her eager question fails to raise my pulse. I throw my shoe down and begin to walk to the kitchen. I am ready to turn the corner into the doorway when she emerges quickly, nearly causing our bodies to collide. “Woah…,” I utter as I collect myself and then focus on her head, and then her hair. “What the fuck?”

“Do you like it?”

“Honestly?” I feel my lip turn up and my eyes widen, not in disgust but of wonder.

“Of course.”

“I don’t know.” I peer into her hair as if it would have an answer for me. “What happened?” Her hair had been shoulder length, give or take a few inches, since I’d met her three years prior. I’d always liked it. I do find discrepancies in most things but her hair was never one of them. What I see now is short-cropped-little-boy-hair. This is the result of what a mother who spits on her hand and presses down her son’s cowlick right before his school picture wants.

“I got it cut and styled!”

“By who? How much did you pay for that?”

“What’s your problem? You don’t like it?” I notice her face change from a check-this-out look to an I’ve-just-learned-Santa’s-not-real look.

“No. I really don’t – listen; it’ll just take some getting used to that’s all. You kinda surprised me.” (Dear god…when you pay people to remove things, its usually bugs or rodents or cancer…not beauty!)

“I thought you’d like it…but you don’t! You don’t like it! Not at all!” Her hand raises quickly and smacks me on the shoulder in a impish, pouting way. I hear her feet stamp to the couch and see her ass jiggling underneath her pajama bottoms that she always wears on nights that we remain home.

I know that she wants me to follow and to comfort her on the couch (pull her close and say, “There, there…”), which anybody should’ve done, but instead I turn around and continue into the kitchen. I can see her without looking – eyes facing forward, looking at nothing, with arms crossed underneath her breasts so that they rest in the saddles of her elbows, and pursing her lips in a puckish anger. I know that it’s her way of asking for a kiss and an apology.

I shuffle my feet across the kitchen floor and place the packaged bottle on the counter. I open the cabinet and place my finger on the underside of an upside-down whiskey glass, drag it to the edge, grip it, turn it over and place it gently down. The bottle, after its neck is grabbed and yanked out, separates the narrow wrinkled opening of the bag. I set it, now naked, down, making a distinct glass thud, and twist the cap off. Opening the freezer, I am swallowed in the condensation that flows out, spilling around my cheeks and over my shoulders. I know that Courtney will now become tired of me ignoring her and will soon yell something in the direction of where I am, finally forcing her to move. I pull out one of the ice trays and wait for her monumental inquisition.

“What in the fuck are you doing?!”

There it is. “I’m fixing myself a drink. You want one?”

“NO!”

I picture her on the couch, arms still crossed, but instead of staring forward she is looking to her left, away from the kitchen, and down towards the floor. Her head is shaking slowly from side to side and her lips apart, noiselessly asking the ghosts, “Why do I stay with him? Why? Why?”.

Standing in the kitchen I whisper, “I don’t know, Court. I don’t know. I don’t know,” into the ice tray that I am twisting against its will.

A voice inside of my head screams, “The situations that you place yourself into always juxtapose what you really feel, Alex.” Don’t use my name. “Why, I am only calling you what you are – “ I know…its just…whenever I hear my name in a serious conversation, or situation, that I feel uncomfortable… “You take this as a serious conversation? Alex, you are talking to your own head. This is insignificant, like seeing a bomb drop from a paper plane…this is me…YOU! You can run whenever you want to…it’s like a dream, but you can’t control it. Are you ready to run?” Yes. “Well, you can’t.” Why not? You just told me that I could. “No I didn’t, I just asked you if you were ready to.” But I control you. “No, Alex. I told you that it is like dream except that you can’t control it.” I told you to not use my name. “Will you kill me for it?” I just might. Let me find a weapon. “Go for it!”

“What are you doing in there?”

I look in front of me and see a fork in my left hand and a drink in the other. When did I pour myself a drink? “Nothing. Why?”

“You’re making a lot of noise. Why don’t you like my hair?”

I look at the fork and the drink. I look around the kitchen and the dirty dishes. My eyes rest on a wine rack that nestles itself between the refrigerator and the wall. Where did that come from? There is a dirty rag and a note, both hanging on the fridge. The note reads, “Went shopping with mom…be back at 5:00. Love, – C.” Everything reminds me of Courtney and I living together. I shake my head to believe that it’s not true. “I don’t know, I just don’t. Don’t ask me now. Not now. You know what?”

“What?”

“I want to be young again.”

“What do you mean?”

I see her now becoming more passive and cocking her head to the side honestly wondering what I mean by my words.

The barnacle of youth…gripping and preying on the side. The passing current washes away the sins of choice. Eat free and be the same! The mouth must remain open for there is a particle that ye have yet to devour. Butterscotch and oats – the new food of the gods resting on your palate waiting to be praised like a new choirboy, so angelic in the face…a mouth in the shape of the letter O asking you to be friendly and to pass judgement only to the less deserving. Will I accept? If not then who else? Restless in the sleep (picked upon by the scavengers of the earth), I will rise, though, rested. The new day will greet with the sun proving to all that one is powerless over nearly everything. Nearly? What am I not the ruler of (asks the man with one arm and a bartender’s foot in his mouth)? The water and the vomit. The sea anemone and the pianist. The things that I cover with a quilt are the same things that will set it ablaze. I can’t say no and I can’t stop it. The sea will go on churning the bodies of the dead and the sky will rain down the prophecy of the pimps and moneychangers. Though the hand holds itself out on a flagpole screaming stop! the index finger beckons one to dare approach closer for the time of youth is eternal and the will of man is unshakable.

I look to the left of the refrigerator and see the wine rack holding six unopened bottles. “When did we get a wine rack?”

“Didn’t you get my note? I went…”

“”I just saw the note now. You went shopping with your mother today?”

“Yes. I took the day off of work.”

“Why is your mother in town?”

“Come here.”

I clutch my drink and begin walking into the living room, awaiting her glance. It meets me as I step onto the area rug that cushions the floor and I bring the drink up to my nose to smell its bouquet. I smell pepper and pussy. “What’s going on?”

“Cousin Jerry died.”

“Who the fuck is Cousin Jerry? And why did you cut your hair?”

“Shhh!”

I look around me to see if there is a bandit or a sniper and then I look back with a look of Why the shhh?

“Mother is in the bathroom,” she whispers jutting her chin forward and looking up at me with eyes that ask me to take her seriously.

I look around and settle upon the bathroom door, waiting for an answer. I gaze back into my drink. The first sip makes my eyes clutch. I breathe deep the breath of the news. “Why is your mother in the bathroom?”

“For the funeral.”

“Is it in there?”

“No, Alex, it’s not in there.”

“Then what do you mean? Is she getting ready for it…eighteen hours early?”

“Alex…don’t.”

I plop down onto the couch next to her. She reaches her arms around my neck and I suddenly feel strangled and force out a mock cough to show my unreadiness at her action. “Don’t,” she speaks softly now, “I just want to tell you what’s happening. First of all, I’m sorry.”

I move my head back and attempt a glance into her now close shit-eyes. Her elbow stops my movement and I settle forward, “For what?”

“I was thinking…it seems to be a lot of stuff to come home to, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, yes it is.”

“Well, I’m sorry. The hair was mother’s idea. She said that she saw an actress on television that had the same cut and thought it would look good on me. I don’t know how I feel about it myself and I was worried on how you would take it. You’re not good with change, you know.”

“I know.”

“And now mother’s here…”

I sigh and take another drink.

“It’s for these things that I’m sorry.”

“Tell me about Cousin Jackie.”

“Jerry.”

“Sorry…Jerry.”

“I never mentioned him to you because, well frankly, I never really knew him that well, either. He was mother’s nephew but he went out west a long time ago, when I was about five or six, and never made it to any holidays or reunions. Mother said that he went out there for a job but always seemed to be broke. She supposes that he was some sort of male escort.”

“They make good money, though.”

“That’s not the point. The point is his body has been flown back here…”

“Why here? He’s not from here…is he?”

“Yeah…my Uncle Gary, his father, lives here.”

“I didn’t know you had relatives here.”

“Well, just him. Anyway the funeral is Thursday and…”

“That’s two days away!”

“Shhh!”

I roll my eyes. Again with the shhh.

She leans in now, very close to my ear. I feel a slight erection at this movement. “Don’t worry, honey, she is staying in a hotel. She’ll be leaving soon.”

I breathe a sigh of relief and take a silent, celebratory drink from my now dwindling whiskey. I turn and, almost touching her lips with mine, whisper, “How soon?”

She breaks a smile open. “Soon, baby.” Her crooked, sympathetic smirk raises her left cheek and shrinks the corresponding eye with almost happiness. In a thought her face returns almost perfectly symmetrical. “What did you mean when you said that you wanted to be young again?”

“I was just singing.”

My heart thumped hard three beats in a row. As much as she can make me cringe, I love her in times like this…simple, almost childlike. I take in a fresh gulp of air and a healthy drink and lean my head back to enjoy the fact that she is lying her head on my shoulder and, most importantly, not talking. She reaches her hand around to the opposite cheek and pulls my face to hers for a wild, carnal kiss. Her breath tastes like a lover’s and she kisses with the excitement of the first time. With my hair clenched in her small fist she pulls my head back to tell me, “Don’t worry about anything, baby,” and her shit-eyes turn into sinless comfort and I smile for the first time in what seems like weeks.

In a moment her mother will burst from the bathroom and set our forest of solitude ablaze with useless words, but I won’t think of that.

I can’t think of that.

Biting my face like a cannibal, the wind rips a newspaper off of the sidewalk and plants it firmly onto my left shin. I look down and read a headline that is moving forward and backward that says “Delaney Pleads His Innocence; Many Doubt”. The cigarette burning in my gloved hand nears the end of its life and I throw it to its quick death in the street. The wind now tells me to go home, seek shelter. My feet tell me to sit down. My mind tells me to find a body of water and jump into it. I turn the corner and am met by another human possibly pondering the same mortal decisions as I. He quickly moves to his right as I to my left, forcing us into the head-on battle as before. We both dance. We both stop. I go to my right, him to his. Never a word was spoken. We both know that we will die like that, in a dance.

Everything is a goddamn dance.

I walk on, despite the wind and feet and mind, towards the train that takes me home. The streetlights are out all the way down the block suffocating any safety I might feel in this decrepit neighborhood. The empty buildings exude the stench of a proprietor’s stifled dream. The plywood sits in the sills of fights between immigrant spouses and bloody language between parents and children. A liquor store is the sole source of light since earth’s clouds covered us up for the night. The bell rings as I open the door, awakening the cashier dozing in the droll of life. The exchange is made, whiskey for cash, and I burst onto the sidewalk with a newfound disgust for myself and for everything that I could hit by throwing my bottle.

I sidestep a puddle of urine descending into the subway station. The buzzing of florescent lights recess my testicles, returning them to their motherland, my cavity. A man is waiting for someone to give him change and I haven’t even the humanity to give him a fair grunt. I position myself like a race horse into the turnstile and penetrate the mechanical slot with the subway card. Pushing myself through, I approach the tracks with expectancy as if something else, like a parade float or an island of mermaids, will be arriving shortly. I wonder if it is possible to feel yourself, second by second, wasting away, to forever vanish into only the memory of the few that know you. I feel my skin wrinkling with age and my teeth yellowing, falling out like melting icicles. Trying my best to look like a gentleman, I lean against a pole to support myself from my quickening of breath. The distant rumble of the train reminds me (and I don’t know why) that I have no desire to leave this world but, rather, for this world to leave me.

The train arrives and opens the door welcoming me inside with a synthetic bell signifying that there’s no waiting and no turning back because the “DOORS ARE CLOSING”. The air inside is stale, despite the constant movement through the underground tunnels and open air elevated tracks. The colors mix together into a vomit brown as my eyes swirl from one open seat to another. I choose one that is placed in the middle of the window to give myself the feeling of being outside in spite of the controlled environment that I actually rest in. The train coughs into movement and the click clack increases in pulse. Like pudding-filled bags of clothing, the passengers dance together the dance of the numbered and the dead.

Everything is a goddamn dance.

Drowning me is confusion because I can’t feel movement. I’m anxious because I feel like I am never going to get to my destination. I’m nervous because I don’t want to arrive at the destination. I’m confused because goddamn it I can’t feel movement. I can’t feel change of direction. I can’t feel anything except distilled – my soul working its way out of my body through its pores, leaving a stale smell of liquor in the air surrounding me. The hot, humid air surrounding me. I am producing a great amount of heat, but yet I can’t feel anything! Did my body burn my nerves away? Am I brain-dead, unable to realize the rules of physics? Am I to be left with only an inner monologue until eternity dries up like a baby left buckled into a safety seat on a sweltering summer city day…unaware that crying and screaming is actually killing it faster? (A baby cries for its mother. I cry to a doorknob, a wall, and a dirty plate. Because of that I stopped crying.)

Somebody says something to me. I remain motionless. I am waiting for the missiles. I am waiting for the sterile gauze to keep me from dying. The man that spoke to me stopped waiting for an answer and sat next to me, answering my question of what was said: “Is anyone sitting here?” I want to inform him that no one is sitting even where I sit…but kept quiet, not wanting to explain or to get into any sort of theological debate. Does he smell my soul bleeding? (My sight is filled with clouds of white. The more that I blink, the worse it gets. I have feeling! ((It is only the sensation of dying)).) I want to take my dick out of my pants and just hold it…the warmth of a living, breathing thing in my hands. I need the gauze quickly. I need a moment to place the gauze up my ass and onto my soul. I don’t want to leave the train until every orifice is vomiting gauze. People might look at me but people also look at fashion magazines. I snap back into normalcy (I think that’s what we call it). I wonder what people care about and I want to be given the same choices. I don’t know if I do care about the same things. I don’t think that I want to. Fever strikes. The soul reprimands me for straying so far away from the agony of the death of self, the rebirth of the mind. The Christian dies to become the angel. The plastic dies to become the automobile. The mind dies to become one with its surroundings. I am dying so that others may live.

Who is there? I hear a knocking but Jesus died long ago. A homeless man killed him…Isaac was his name. He informed me of the fact just for giving him a cigarette. The savior position is open and I think that I need a change of places. To be set so high above the world makes it easier to shit on everything at once. Amen!

I instinctively clutch my paper bag as the man next to me raises to get off of the train. I look around me and realize that no one notices my sweating or my thoughts. I force a blink to focus on my surroundings. Looking out of the window I notice a sign that tells me I am already one stop away from home. I place the bag between my legs and rub my thighs warm with my clammy hands. A sigh drips out and I get ready to depart the train.

Another cough and another jerk of the head and we are all moving through the black urethra tunnel. Soon the sperm will be spit out to birth the city with hundreds of hungry orphans pissing and shitting their money into the drinking water. (That, in itself, happens hundreds of times a day…how is it that we are not thirstier?) Pushing, muttering orphans dancing together like enemies…enemies with the same king.

There is a worker mopping the floor of the station as I step off of the train. I read the yellow hinged sign, “Watch Your Step”; he tells me the same thing, adding “man” to the end of it. The air smells like a chemical pine forest and I sneeze. If a body slips and falls in a chemical pine forest and no one is there, will a lawyer hear a sound? The baby blue stairs to street level are fitted with grip tape on the lips and the handrails are bumpy with multiple coats of navy blue paint. The air that strokes my face like a lover becomes chillier with every step that I ascend. I try to breathe in as much as possible to push out the remnants of the last twenty minutes. Like a turtle, I bury my head as deep as possible into my upturned collar as the noise on the street surrounds me. As I watch my feet swing like pendulums beneath my stationary torso, pounding the pavement deeper into to the earth it suffocates, I wonder what key the hum of the city is in. Loneliness is in the key of E minor, love, C major. I hum in F# minor, the key of alarm and surprise, as I wait for the orange hand halting to switch to the white man walking.

The black sky is reflected on the damp street. Between the passing cars hissing, I listen to my breath, bringing life and exhausting death. My sweaty palm softens the paper wrapped bottle, quieting its crinkles to mumbles. I find that I am yielding it like a weapon, holding the neck so that the body rises upward through the dimple of my clenched fist. I hear a tree rustling to my left and stiffen for the wind that is yet to reach my face. My body moves slightly to the left with the invisible current. I correct Mother’s nudge and think about Courtney.

Globular brown eyes (shit-eyes) are staring at me in an innocence that I take as unfamiliarity. Stunning brown hair (shit-hair) swooping across the flawless (save for the minute scar from a bicycle accident at the age of nine) forehead, asking me to smooth it aside. Despite the tone or the subject, in the voice a command is always heard. On the sides of the head hang those ears (small, wonderful ears) that don’t hear a damned thing. The cheeks give a permanent pout and the chin joins in on the game. This trophy sits atop a long sculpted neck, smooth and pristine and vaguely hinting at the blue jugular rivers underneath. Following the invisible lover’s hands down, you will inevitably find them clutching breasts; humble mounds of tissue that scream to be heard. The caps that they wear are oblong and kissed with dimples and a small mouth that tells you what to do though you attempt to strangle it in a violent exercise of lust. The smooth, peach-fuzzed belly heaves with words and the impressible arms hold in the evidence of being only scarcely well fed. Strong thighs wrap around in a time of need and pose lustfully when pushed away. Between these mountains of instability lives Courtney’s Center; the scanty, Hitler mustache rests upon full lips that breathe the breath of the ancient language that is understood but never defined; in this I keep my home.

The front door flags me down with stickered numbers and I fish my keys from the sea of my pocket. The door creaks and my steps sound like thunder in the reverberating wooden entryway. I check the mailbox and my stomach drops at the discovery of its contents…nothing. From that I know that she is home. It is 7:30 in the evening and I was hoping that she would be at work until 8:00. It is Tuesday, I now remember. She works until 6:00 on Tuesdays. The stairs wait for me to apply each one of their purposes and I have no choice but to. Scream by scream, the creaks of the aged steps sound like dead cats still groaning to be given a tenth chance. I clutch the bottle tighter and close my eyes to recite a silent prayer: Let me think clearly and let no innocent bird fall in the mayhem.

I feel as if I make a crucial life decision every time I stand in front of the apartment door, and this time is no different. Opening it, I subject myself to one more day of resentment, one more empty conversation about goings-on, one more day closer to our fiftieth anniversary. A life! Turning around and returning to the street, I would be flaccid on the ground waiting for anything that wanted to pick and peck me apart to freely do so. After this sprint, I shall not run from anything again! The words of my father: “You’re a good boy, you just make bad decisions.” The key turns in the lock and I sentence myself to one more day.

*Part two is coming shortly.