Intermusings Read online

She cocked an eye at the overloaded shelves.

  "It’s a hobby," he confessed. "I don’t sell them."

  "Oh?" She glanced around the elaborately furnished apartment. The high-dollar entertainment center, a shadow of the truly expensive setup in the living room, but still out of the reach of most people. The heavy oak furniture. The paintings on the wall — originals, every one. The thick and luxurious carpet. The crystal light fixture suspended from the ceiling (where that dark stain served as the room’s only flaw). The fine wine, now just an empty bottle, abandoned on the night stand. Despite the skeptical tilt of her brow, he knew — how did he know? — that she believed him.

  "I trade them for things."

  She pulled her panties up and started on her black leather skirt. "I don’t think we should see each other again."

  "Why?"

  Her blouse was draped over the bedside lamp. When she reached for it, he caught her wrist. "Why?" he repeated, his heart suddenly trip-hammering in his chest and his throat dry.

  With a neat twist she pulled away from him. He was reminded of a past summer’s interest in Tae Kwon Do; of the way they’d taught him to exploit the weak link between thumb and forefinger. "Don’t ever grab me like that, Dante. I can hurt you. I can hurt you bad." Though her eyes were threatening, the anticipated follow-up roundhouse kick didn’t come.

  He almost made the mistake of laughing, but pinched it off. "I’m sorry. I just don’t want you to leave without telling me your name and when I can see you again."

  "I don’t want to see you again. I wrote you, and I don’t like the words I found."

  He was momentarily at a loss, incapacitated by confusion. She slipped on both her shoes, found several pieces of jewelry that had been cast off, and was on her way out when he finally sprang from the bed and blocked the door. "The poem? You mean that?" he asked, thumbing at the lipstick letters on his wall.

  Second Verse:

  solitary fortress

  fortified by brief glimpses

  synaptic images

  of dreams half-feared

  and desires

  molten through indecision

  to the soul

  "You don’t like me because you don’t like the poem you wrote about me?"

  "The poem is you," she said.

  He frowned. He wasn’t qualified as a critic. Was it artsy to avoid punctuation and capital letters? Wasn’t something supposed to rhyme? Or was this what he’d heard called free verse?

  Why was it suddenly so damned important to know?

  And how the hell was it him?

  She read his confusion. "You live all alone, fearing tomorrow, fearing the mistakes you’ve made and the things you’ve overlooked. You trade drugs for friendship, drugs for sex, drugs for anything you haven’t the money to buy."

  He bit his lip, thought about letting her through the door. Who the hell did she think she was? She’d had nothing bad to say about his drugs a minute ago when she was at his stash. But he was more intrigued than angry. How the hell did she know these things?

  "You’re Don Quixote tilting against impossible odds, because the demon you fear is just around the corner and the people who pay you to do what you do have waited too long. The world will come crashing down around us all when the numbers roll over and you’re the only one who believes it.”

  "Because you know that you can’t stop it."

  Third Verse:

  dangling carrot perfection

  slides easily through

  timorous groping talons of

  self-imposed

  inadequacy

  chemical bandaged mind

  driving drained and broken frame

  buying time/love/nothing

  until the 2000th time

  a day is born

  and truth and reality

  merge-reform-destroy

  and twist in endless spirals

  ending

  She slipped past him and through the door. He heard the echo of her footsteps in the hall, the slamming of the front door. He stumbled to the window in the living room and watched her hail a cab. Watched as it swept her away on Fifth. Behind him, in the bedroom, his computer came on and played a dirge, reminding him that it was time to get out of bed and go to work. Reminding him that it was pointless and inevitable to go to work. This week it was an investment firm whose clients could count on losing every penny they owned when the firm’s computers encountered the new millennium . . . unless he fixed their software.

  The sun leeching between the buildings downtown was bloated and brown. A sign of rain or maybe even snow. A sign of impending winter. Impending doom.

  "How did you find me?"

  He slid her bracelet across the table. "You left this at my apartment." Her name was engraved on the inside, all in lower case, like the poetry on his bedroom wall: Adrian. He’d asked around at the Weeping Violet and several other clubs until someone connected the name with his description of her. The bartender there had known someone who thought they knew someone who knew where she lived. Three connections later, he’d finally gotten a phone number. It had cost him most of the drugs he had in reserve, and he didn’t have the money to make more. But he’d managed to get hold of her.

  She’d agreed to meet him here — though it was growing late in the year for such places — at this sidewalk café. A public place, as if she had something to fear from him.

  "I had to see you again, Adrian."

  "You should have listened to me. You should have stayed away."

  "It wasn’t my idea for you to write me, it was yours. You come to me, turn my life on end, throw my problems in my face like you’ve lived with them all your life, then you disappear. ‘We can’t see each other again.’ Bullshit!"

  "Less than two years," she whispered. Her eyes gave away nothing. There was no intonation of emotion in the tones of her voice. He felt her fear.

  "Two years is enough time to do something." he countered. "I can make a difference."

  "You are tilting at windmills."

  "What about you? You’re writing about me tilting at windmills — lots of satisfaction in that."

  "You aren’t the only one I’ve written."

  "Yeah? Well, have you written yourself?"

  She stared at him. Her eyes grew suddenly fearful, then returned to the blank, emotionless stare. Things had been going poorly since he sat down, but suddenly Dante felt a slight advantage, and he pressed it.

  "If things are so bad, why not write yourself? If the words that are me are so repulsive to you, what are the words that are you? Who are you?"

  Her lip trembled, but he saw that he was getting through. To where or what he couldn’t tell. The tremble was working its way through her body — he’d have sworn she was vibrating. A tear had formed at the edge of one eye, catching the sun’s light like a tiny prism, sending multi-hued beams to glitter across the surface of her face for an instant — then away. She dabbed at the moisture with a napkin, afterward tucking the napkin away in her purse, as if she feared to leave something as vulnerable as a tear behind.

  "Hold me." She said it quickly and so softly, he wasn’t certain he’d heard her correctly.

  He took her in his arms and she sank into him, burying her head against his chest. He held her like that for a long moment, then pulled away to gaze into her eyes, savoring the sensation of her flesh against his own. He rose, leaving money on the table, and they left in silence. The chill in the air forced them closer. The silence grew deeper and threatened to swallow them whole.

  The steam rose around them, and the soap slid down his body, the soft press of her skin softened further by the lather. When she slipped through the shower curtain, he hung back, reluctant to leave the warmth so soon. He felt it draining the tension from him. Images of the past few hours swam before his eyes as he closed them against the heat of the water. He barely resisted the urge to touch himself.

  The water swirled down and away, and he forced his mind back. He twisted the knobs an
d pulled the curtain aside, groping for a towel. He imagined her, naked, combing her long hair and staring at the words she’d written on his wall. He imagined a great many things, but not the empty room he stepped into, the door to the hall still ajar and a slight breeze wafting through.

  He stumbled to the bed. She’d dressed and gone. Nothing remained of her. Nothing except . . .

  On the table beside the bed, held down by a vial of yellow powder that he noted was half-empty, was the napkin from the cafe. There were words scrawled on it, but he turned from them, moving toward the front window. He looked into the night, stood naked in the glare of the street lights and stared through moonlight after nothing. Gone. Dripping and chilled through bone and soul, he picked up the napkin and began to read, the moisture from his fingers dampening the paper.

  First verse:

  muse’s curse

  to see this clearly

  so that every broken promise

  lies on the surface

  and wearing your insides out

  with no shelter from the vacant wind

  you fall farther in

  . . . always farther in

  Unlike the piece she’d written on his wall, this one appeared to be titled. Scrawled at the bottom of the poem, rather than the top, was simply: grey. But was it, he wondered a second later, really a title? Or was it her signature? He’d never asked for her last name, but she might be Grey. Adrian Grey.

  Muse’s curse? He suddenly recalled mindless conversation (or so it had seemed to him) from the night before, he dosing off after whispering some empty flattery about how talented she was, how lucky that she could write such beautiful verse.

  "It’s not a gift," she’d replied, her voice all but lost in the dark. "It’s a curse." He’d wanted to laugh at the absurdity of that remark, but his mind was already slipping away, succumbing to warmth and fatigue and a welcome night that promised her by his side. He hadn’t heard the rest of it. Not then. Not consciously at least. But it had been recorded in his mind, and it came back to him now.

  "You don’t understand," she’d said. "You don’t see what I see. The beauty — the lives and loves — the very words fall short. I close my mind and imagine lives dripping onto the paper through my pen, but I always fail, always fall short of the vision. It always fades to grey."

  Second verse:

  grey-clouded eyes

  that see reality

  and much farther

  that capture beauty

  but fail to tell of it

  that break every moment

  over the back of one’s failures

  "Once a thing is written, it goes grey. The words become the reality. The truth is lost. Don’t you see? What I write is a pale shadow of the truth I see — a failure. The more I write, the more of myself I put into my writing, the more I lose. Everything goes grey. Eventually that’s all there is. Grey. Your world loses its color. Your life loses its purpose. You lose your heart . . . one word at a time.

  "I’ve written you. Doesn’t that scare you? Don’t you feel it all fading — rearranging? I can see it in your eyes, feel it, but . . ." She bit her lip. " If I write myself, what will happen? You ask too much, Dante, but, God help me, I can’t refuse you. What if I cease to exist? What if I am replaced by a pale shadow, a shard of grey that the world will see as Adrian, but that will fall far short of what I’m meant to be? What if you don’t even notice. . .?"

  Third verse:

  and all that you fear

  all that you hide

  all that you carry deep inside

  isn’t enough

  for you

  for them

  for the salvation of your soul

  There, where she’d written the word soul, a tiny wrinkled circle of ink lay diffused and striated along the veins of the paper napkin . . . the spot where she’d collected that single tear.

  Dante folded the napkin and clenched it in his fist, certain of nothing save the fact that he was rapidly losing his heart to this strange, too-serious girl. He knew he had to find her — didn’t know why he was so frightened, or wouldn’t admit it. His walls loomed about him, grey and colorless, broken by words in black lipstick.

  He mixed the chemicals carefully, keeping his mind focused despite the urge to lose himself in the words on the wall — in the words on the napkin. He had the vials color-coded, but was finding it difficult to follow his own instructions. They seemed faded. For the first time in years he had to hold each one close, reading the label carefully to be certain he didn’t botch the mix. He blamed Adrian. He blamed himself. Blamed his lack of understanding and his foolish demands that she turn her talent on herself. He flipped the top on his Zippo and brought the Bunsen burner to life, sifting three types of crystals into a tiny metal pan and adding a drop of sugar water. He watched until it had melted together, watched it coalesce, and pulled it away from the heat, setting it aside and moving on to the next mixture.

  He needed to catch up on his supply, needed enough reserve to be certain he could find her without being stopped at some closed door. The drugs were his keys to the city, and behind one of those locks she waited. Blinking on his computer monitor, in mocking silence at his back, the screen-saver countdown to the millennium ticked away slowly. He needed to work, but desired more to find her. He needed to finish the damned mix before his shaking hands wasted it in flames. Nothing seemed to work. Focus was illusive.

  Trent Reznor banged at the back of his skull with a voice raspy and clear: Without you, everything falls apart. . . The last of the mix slid into the now bubbling solution, and he lifted it carefully from the flame, moving it quickly to the dish where it would cool, where the crystals would form. He needed it as much for his own nerves now, as for his search. The damned screen-saver was so loud — How could he possibly hear that?

  He gritted his teeth, snuffed the flame, and staggered to his bedroom to change. He would have to cut and chop the crystals, would have to pour them into the little capsules. All in the name of chemical bliss. All hail better life through modern chemistry! He slipped into tight black pants, a ragged, time-worn t-shirt with an LSD molecule on the front in neon green, ran his hand back through hair long past helping, and took a deep breath. She was out there. She needed him. That was his mantra.

  He pulled the napkin from his pocket with shaking hands and held it up, sweat-coated fingers tearing at the edges of it as he tried to read through salty tears of frustration.

  First verse:

  muse’s curse

  to see clear

  so that every broken

  lies on the

  He held it closer, thinking it was blurred, that he’d be able to read it. The paper was moist and torn, and his shaking hands nearly ripped it in two as he concentrated, trying to remember, trying to put back what had been lost. Muses curse — to see . . . to see what clearly?

  and wearing your insides out

  with no shelter from the vacant wind

  you fall farther in

  . . . always farther in

  He folded the napkin carefully, putting it in his pocket. It was just getting dark, and the Weeping Violet would be opening soon . . .

  The brute at the door was the same he’d slipped past before, so many nights in his past that it was hard to reconcile it with the moment at hand. He remembered well enough the chemical key to this door, and was inside within a matter of minutes, far too much given for what had been received, unless one counted the price of the poem disintegrating in his pocket. He was certain the cost wouldn’t matter at all, however, if he didn’t find her.

  Making his way to the central bar, he ordered in a daze, something green and cold, ice melting and cracking in its depths. He sipped it once, shuddered, set it on the bar and spun in a slow circle, searching the shadowed booths and alcoves, sifting through the twisting, twining bodies on the dance floor. There. Between the dancers. A fleeting glimpse: wide, vacant eyes, hair wild and unkempt, dressed in black, as if in mourning.

>   He left the drink on the bar and hit the dance floor at a run, pushing through and jostling several couples from their chemically induced visions long enough to earn a quick curse, or an elbow in the ribs. He staggered through the far side of the writhing mass of arms and legs, pierced flesh and altered minds, regaining his balance with a lurch, just in time to see her duck into a booth near the very back of the room.

  He slid soundlessly in across from her, watching her search a half-empty glass of wine with lowered eyes. His hand slipped into his pocket, dragged free the napkin and slid it across the table to her. He realized with a shiver that in his haste, he’d pushed it across a spot of condensation.

  "What did it say?" he asked, voice strained.

  She did not look up, but her gaze swung slowly to the napkin. He saw her shoulders tense, saw her shudder just once before growing very still. He pressed it closer to her, leaning down to follow her gaze. There was a dry napkin sitting near the back of the booth, and he grabbed it frantically, slapping it down beside the first.

  "Fix it," he demanded. "I messed it up. . ." His words trailed off, but hers did not fill the vacuum left by his inability to explain what was happening. The poem shouldn’t matter. That the words were fading should be trivial. They were only words, with no more power than what was lent them by the reader. Adrian was sobbing softly, her shoulders shaking, staring at the napkin. Dante leaned close again.

  "Adrian," he whispered. "What . . . ?"

  And he saw. The words were smeared in an alcohol-scented smudge on the table between them.

  "No." His voice no more than a whisper. "God . . . no."

  She looked up then, her eyes lost, empty. What color were they? He remembered other eyes: green, deep, powerful. Had they been hers? Did he remember her at all? The eyes that regarded him were now were a smokey grey. Perhaps it was the lighting. It could have been the heavy fog of cigarette smoke permeating the bar. It could have been. . .