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Decay, by Jenny CorvetteShe looked up at me, eyes full of sorrow. Her dark cropped hair hung in her tears. "You're not real," she said, her hand touching my face.
"I am," I answered but she didn't hear me. Her fingers traced my lips slowly, as if she were blind. I touched her back but could not feel her skin beneath my hand. She felt like nothing and everything all at once. Air. Wind. Warm and heavy.
"I miss you," she breathed into my mouth. Her lips probed mine. She tasted wonderful. Her wind became rain, wet and cold, dripping behind my teeth and down my thirsty throat. She pulled back and opened her mouth, eyes now wide with horror.
Her lips were dripping with blood!
I sat upright drenched in sweat. Alone in bed and haunted by this same dream each night. I touched my mouth. Dry. The bed was empty beside me, as it had been now for several months. She was gone, ever since that night when I came home late, and she left me. Loneliness leaves a hole in one's heart, an emptiness that cannot be expressed in words. I felt it each morning when I woke to an empty bed and ate breakfast alone. I tried to find company in the newspaper, but names printed in black and white could not substitute for flesh and blood. Each morning, I'd wash up to my own reflection; slide the razor up and down my legs, always detouring to my wrists. I'd think about pushing the blade hard into my veins. What if, I thought drastically some mornings, what if I decided to join her? I'd stare at my face in the mirror, staring blankly at me backwards. I'd given up hope of living if I could not live with her. My fingers would often grip the tiny blade I've taken out of my razor, and I'd wait. I'd wait for something to convince me not to die. For something to make me want to live. This morning, nothing did.
The mirror, my reflection, the blade... all was still. Everything was quiet, so quiet I could hear myself crying inside. Dying inside. The blade trembled. My left hand clenched into a defiant fist, and didn't move an inch. The cold steel of the razor slid across my wrist. I felt no pain. I could no longer feel pain since I lost her. I felt nothing. My skin was bulging open with blood, yet I felt nothing. I thought of dissections when in school. My skin had cut like the dead flesh of a laboratory frog. My own blood dripped into the sink. My life was spotted out before me. Running down the drain.
Looking up at myself into the mirror, I saw someone I no longer recognized. In fact, though my body had not lost any sufficient amount of blood, I already appeared quite dead. I dropped the blade from the grip of my dying right hand and it tinkled into the sink between two of my life spots. My fingers had trails of blood dripping down them. I couldn't feel how cold it was, how wet it was as it dripped from my body and into the sink. In fact, I couldn't even be sure it was my blood and not someone else's. Not hers.
I blinked and when I did something caught my eye. At the edge of the mirror, something had moved. Something - or someone - who had before been standing there. Watching me.
I turned, splashing fresh blood in an arc around the bathroom. Behind me, where I saw the movement, there was nothing.
Hope disguised as nothing.
I gripped my bleeding wrist and opened the medicine cabinet with my elbows. I wrapped gauze tightly around the wrist I'd earlier sliced up like an orange. Blood was everywhere. I could hardly believe it was all mine. I cleaned it up, making it look like a suicide had not nearly happened. And then I felt faint. Stumbling to the bed, I fell onto her side and dreamt about her last night alive.
It had been raining outside. She was in bed when I walked in the door, leaning there, book in hand but the book was just a prop. She hadn't been reading. I sat on the bed, my clothes wet, my back to her. "Where have you been, Tina?" Her voice was soft, uncritical. Remembering it brought a tear to my eye.
"I told you, Sarah. I went out for a smoke." My tone was impatient and frustrated. I did not like being questioned. I wanted, demanded to be trusted, though this night I had no reason to be. I could still feel the other woman's hands on my skin, wet from the rain.
"You went out for a smoke?" she said bitterly. "Four hours ago?"
I closed my eyes. Four hours ago seemed far into the past. On my way to the cigarette store a skinny scantily clad woman whispered in my ear from behind me, "What'd you fight about?" I stumbled and stopped. How she knew my lover and I had fought I didn't know. An hour later while she was naked beneath me in a cheap hotel bed, she said she saw it in my eyes. An angry bitterness that powered my heavy steps on the sidewalk. I cupped my hand over her breast, intrigued how the two fit so perfectly together, and pinched her dark nipple between my thumb and forefinger. Sarah interrupted my memory by sliding her hands up the back of my wet shirt, unclasping my bra. "Who was she?" she asked softly. Not angry but betrayed. I saw the other woman's face in front of me. Red lips and long blond hair. Legs to die for. I couldn't answer Sarah's question. I didn't know her name. "How was she?" my lover asked again, this time louder, driving a painful stake of guilt into me. Yes, it was good. The fuck of my life, just like she'd promised. I'd taken out my anger for Sarah on the beautiful blond girl and I could still feel her wet cunt wrapped around my fingers. Sarah pulled me backwards onto the bed. She started unbuttoning my blouse and I couldn't stop her. Her suspicions weren't real. I could tell by the way she kissed me. But I couldn't kiss her back. I could only lie there and let her lips travel my guilty body, hoping I still had it in me to get wet for her. Hoping she wouldn't question me if I couldn't.
That night, as she slept beside me, I woke up and walked to the bathroom. There I stared hard into my own reflection, and I didn't like what I saw. Time stopped. My world grew quiet and all I could see was my own guilt running through the veins of my body. Behind my reflection, I saw movement on the bed. She walked up behind me. Stood there for a brief moment. I looked at her without turning around. She seemed passive. Small and weak. Then suddenly,
as if willed by a higher power, she turned and walked away. Out of my life.
Forever.
I felt helpless. Moments after I crashed back into bed, we were traveling down a road in the country. The sky was dark and the stars were unusually bright. Sarah drove with her eyes straight ahead, fingers wrapped tightly around the steering wheel. The stream of the high beams sliced through the darkness, rolling over and above the dark pavement, tunneling our way into the night. I stared out the window, my own reflection faintly looking back at me. Beyond it I could see the barren cornfields, the ditches just beneath us, and trees zooming past like they were in a hurry to move out of my sight. I pointed at one tree. "There it is," I said to no one in particular. "There's the tree." Sarah didn't respond. In fact, she acted like I wasn't there. "Do you see it?" She stared straight ahead and only took her eyes off the road to turn up the radio. I looked hard into the tree, still far ahead of us in the windshield.
The tree. Just yesterday I thought of driving into it on my way into work. I passed it every day, and never would the thought escape me. That tree can save me from my futile existence. I promised it my life someday. It was quickly approaching, as if it was driving towards us rather than the other way around. I knew it well, and recognized its every nook and cranny the closer it got. One afternoon I ate lunch by it. In one hand I held a ham sandwich. In the other, I felt the tree that someday I knew would take my life. It was very near now and approaching fast. Sarah seemed angry. When I looked, her anger was spilling out of her in tears. I reached up and turned the volume down on the radio, but it remained just as loud as it was. Her hand reached up and brushed mine, but I couldn't feel her. She reached for her cell phone, frantically pushing the buttons. Nothing seemed that strange to me until the car dropped its wheels off the road and headed toward the tree. My tree. "Sarah!" I yelled, but she was talking into her phone and I suddenly flew out of the car. One moment I was sitting there, watching her dial and drive. The next I was standing on the side of the road, watching her red Pontiac Sunfire about to hit the tree I knew so well. There was a loud crash, a sound of the cranking and twisting of metal, the car driving into the tree. And neither budged, like soldiers in a battle. Until all was suddenly quiet.
I moved closer, but not too close. I saw her sitting there, as if alive, but dead. There was one tiny line of blood, dripping down her forehead. Her eyes were open, but blind. Her hands still gripped the steering wheel. Around me the night grew dark, and the Pontiac's headlights eventually grew dim and burned out. The deepest darkness was just before dawn and I stood there without a thought in my head, or a feeling in my heart as dawn rose around my dead Sarah. Not a single car drove down that road all night to see her mangled car sticking out of the tree. Early in the morning, along with the chirping birds came the distant hum of a motor down the road. A yellow Buick slipped its way down the street and past the tree. Several hundred yards down the road the motor stopped, switched gears and started up again. Backing up, the driver peered out his window and stopped his car when he saw her. Not more than 19 years old, he got out of his vehicle, looked up and down the street as if he'd discovered a pot of gold and didn't want anyone to else to notice. He walked across the street slowly, sliding his glasses up the rim of his nose, as he peered on at her silently. He thought she was hot, I somehow knew, that is, if she wasn't dead. Her eyes were open, her left hand still on the steering wheel, the cell phone flung onto the dashboard. He walked up and leaned down to her face. To look in her eyes? For a moment I thought he would kiss her. Then he leaned in and grabbed her cell.
The ringing phone woke me at once, bolted me out of both the bed and the nightmare I was having. I was drenched in sweat, and tangled in sheets. I suddenly realized the ringing phone was not in Sarah's mangled car, but from my kitchen wall and out of my dream. I wiped my face and stumbled into the kitchen, catching a quick glimpse of my empty bed on the way out.
My throat was dry from screaming. My voice was a mere whisper on the phone and when the doctor at the hospital introduced himself I didn't even consciously recognize his name. My head was throbbing because my sleep had not been deep and my dream seemed just beneath the surface of reality.
"There's been an accident and Sarah--,"said the caller. A pause and then, "Sarah was fatally wounded." The worst news comes coldly on a phone. She was dead and I was being told through a wire, by a talking plastic handset pressed tightly to my ear. Forgive me for not believing what it said. But even so, I fell against the wall as the doctor asked me to come identify the body. That's what he said. Not her body, but the body, as if she wasn't even a person anymore. Wasn't she anymore? Wasn't my lover anymore? She was just a husk now. And it that needed to be closed up underground and forgotten. To be done away with. At first I thought I was still dreaming, having a dream within a dream. But as I stood there, hearing the details of the crash - the tree, her red car, the young man who found her early this morning - I knew I was awake. But somehow I knew the details already, these last fragments of her life. My finger pressed the button of my blinking answering machine and it beeped. Suddenly I heard the loud twisting of metal as it crashed into the tree. And then silence. The line clicked dead and I imagine the doctor probably scribbled a note to himself to set me up a psyche evaluation. I didn't care. Sarah was dead and so too was I. I could feel my blood spilling out of my head, dripping from my moist eyes. The clock said 10:31 and there was a bird at my window. The machine beeped, announcing the date and time of the message. 3:56 AM. The machine beeped again for another message, but there were no words. At first I thought it was a wrong number. But just before I punched the delete button, I heard weak breathing and I saw the calling number on the caller ID. "Sarah?" But it clicked before saying anything. I rewound it and listened again. She sounded fragile, injured perhaps. I noted the time of the message. 7:16. I'd heard that same breath time and time again beside me in bed. I knew it well.
I saved that tape. Stuck it away in the drawer where I kept our photo albums. I showered and dressed, all to identify her body, all to see her bruised and lifeless body lying on a cold slab of metal. This should be good, I remember thinking. How could the hospital have her dead body when she wasn't dead? I imagined the doctor pulling out an empty slab in the morgue. I imagined laughing at him.
I made it all the way to the hospital parking lot before wussing out, realizing I couldn't do it. I couldn't identify her body, even if there was no body to identify. I called her brother, who never approved of our relationship, and went back home. Then I sat in numb pain for two weeks. I sold her mangled car to the wrecking service without seeing it. I missed her funeral because I feared she was really dead. And if so, I knew I'd try to jump into the grave with her. I didn't answer the door when her relatives called. I let the phone ring constantly. I didn't open the cards and refused the flower memorials. I was omitted from her obituary so that no proof of our love survived. It was as if she and I never even existed.
Two months have passed. Our bed's still empty. I only pretend to sleep. If she is dead, she haunts me still. When I look in the mirror, she looks back, staring hard into me with blame in her eyes. I sit awake at night, at the kitchen table, drinking and smoking cigarettes and I can hear the clatter of the spoon in her coffee, the sound that used to mean she was angered by something I did or said. "What?" I said aloud to the empty dark kitchen. "What can I do?"
Only the question isn't what can I do, it's what could I have done. How could I have saved her? If she'd stayed with me, she'd be alive, or at least more alive than she was now. If I would've loved her half as much as she loved me, she'd be sitting here with me every night, giving me hell for smoking too much.
The clattering grew louder. "I couldn't go, you know that. I've never liked looking at dead people in boxes. Least of all you."
She grew quiet. Behind me, I heard the door peacefully close. I shut my eyes and tried not to think about upsetting her.
I can only see her in my dreams. Her face has never been so vibrant and alive. Her voice, like the melody of a morning bird. I can only touch her when I'm asleep. Her skin has never felt so soft, and her bones so hard. Like a satin sheet over a marble statue. Only in death have I really love her.
But she's not really dead. I know that now. She's come back and is living in our house, footsteps light as feathers, her body as elusive as a mouse, slipping into shadows beneath the recesses of my mind. It'd be hard living in a house without someone knowing, I'm sure. But she knows my routine well, and when I enter a room, she leaves it. When I awake, she sleeps, and when I nod off, I can almost hear her running through the house like a child in a playground. Sometimes I can feel her. Watching me as I shower, as she shyly used to do after we first met. I remember once, before the accident, she snuck in, unbeknownst to me, and slipped a wet hand between my legs. Shocked, I dropped the soap, but didn't need it. Her tongue washed me better than the soap ever could. I showered alone now, although I never felt alone. Not really. I half expected to feel a cold wet hand slide inside the shower curtain, and her voice to pipe out, "Had ya goin', Tina. See if you ever cheat on me again, you bitch." And a flirtatious giggle that meant she wasn't really angry.
"How did you know?" I ask her, tossing the soap aside with a grin.
"It was your eyes. They keep no secrets."
I kiss her as the drops of water pelt away at my shoulders. "What are my eyes saying now?" I ask between quick breaths.
"That you're sorry."
"I am," I say, and mean it. Her tongue darted in and out of my mouth like a snake, circling around my teeth as if it would bite them off. I pulled back and looked at her. "And now?"
"That you love me."
I did love her. Over and over, in my dreams more than in my life. Everywhere. In the shower. In the car, in the backseat in the garage. Even in the kitchen. I remember how her heart beat heavy the first time we made love. I was her first lesbian fuck. Her heartbeat was quick and nervous as I undressed her. My strongest memory, my most haunting vision was of her pulsing heart in rhythm with my pulsing body. For an hour we fucked, until I could no longer hear her vigorous beating heart, or see her rising chest.
"Sarah?" I said, but she only lie there like a sheet. "Sarah, are you okay?"
Brief moments. Seconds at best, I lay on top of what I thought was a corpse. Then her eyes popped open and she stuck her tongue out like a four year old.
I breathed again. "Don't do that! I thought I'd killed you," I said angrily.
"I was just seeing if you were paying attention," she said like it was a game. "Anyway, it'll take a lot more than sex to kill me."
Not so. Infidelity and a tree did the trick, I thought, suddenly shot back into reality. Now her beating heart haunts me. The heavy pounding keeps me up most nights, and I can best hear it in the bathroom, near the shower where we had perhaps our best sex. I stood in front of the shower curtain, imagining her standing behind it, visualizing her naked body, nipples dripping with water and waiting for me. The pounding gets stronger as I imagine, and my hand reaches up to grab the curtain. I can almost hear the water running, slapping her soft flesh in a playful light tease. The veins pop out of my hand. Blood rushes through them at an astonishing rate. I pull the curtain, and stare at nothing. The heartbeat weakens when I close my eyes and relax. But it never ceases. I can even feel it in my own chest, hard and heavy like she's beating to get out. Like she's pissed at me for letting her leave. For letting her die. The sink is behind me, and above it, the mirror, looking back at me like I was crazy. Behind the glass, I know, is my old friend, the razor, still with my blood on it from the last time I seemed so crazy. Calling to me, or was that her? Wanting me to break on through, as Morrison coined it. Sarah, my friend the razor said, though not in words, is waiting for me there, in front of my tree that took her life, tempting me to come with one finger, as she often alive.
I wouldn't hear it. Plugging my ears, I slumped down against the toilet, and I threw up my guilt. There was blood in my vomit, long lines of red that formed a kind of pattern or code I couldn't figure out. I vomited again, losing all the alcohol I'd drank to forget the pain. Between the lines of blood there was Jack Daniels, and Jim Beam, two friends Sarah never liked. But Jose wasn't there. He was still in my stomach, burning the inside of my belly as good as Satan in Hell, making me double over, the pain was so intense. And then I thought, Sarah had befriended Jose a time or two herself, and she was putting him up to this. No doubt. She was stabbing me from the inside out. And I deserved it. Every moment of suffering she could muster up I'd asked for time and time again.
My friend and lover, patient even in death, was finally delivering.
I drank more and more. I quit my job, only because I couldn't trust myself anymore to drive past the tree. I felt my life unraveling, like it was all a ball of yarn that had lost its solidarity. My dreams seemed too real and my life, too dreamlike. I couldn't recognize reality if it bit me in the nose. And too often it did, usually in front of the mirror where I'd see the empty being I'd become. Nothing consoled me but buckets of liquor. I tried thinking backwards, to a time I didn't know Sarah, but that was hardly possible while living side by side. Everything reminded me of her. Even my passing thoughts had direct ties to her. I'd make a sandwich, and be taken away in thought just by the sight of the kitchen counter. We'd fucked there once, back when Sarah was no more than a sex toy to me. Or while getting the mail, I'd see that knick in the post where she once backed into it. How I was mad at her then. But not half as mad as I was now. I could almost feel them, these memories, but what I felt even more was the haunting reminder that I'd never feel them again.
Night after night, I drank till I passed out.
One night I'd not even made it into bed. I awoke, slumped over at the kitchen table. Before me, Sarah was sitting quietly, eyes glancing over a crossword puzzle. She noticed me and looked straight through me. There was nothing incriminating in her look, but it was the kind of look I'd always feared. Right through me, as if her eyes saw something I did not.
Was she real?
Was anything real anymore?
This was it. My chance to make amends and say all I wanted to say to her. I opened my mouth but nothing came out.
"Have you been drinking?" she said to me. Or was that the tequila talking? She fingered the rim of my glass, as she always did while alive, and brought the finger close to her face. She didn't even need to lick it, having smelled the alcohol immediately. Her fingers were pink, her nails red. I looked harder to see if they weren't really covered in blood. Again her eyes met mine, and I thought what to say. Waiting, the only thoughts to my head were how wonderful this hallucination could impersonate Sarah. She had her act down to a tee.
This was no dream, I knew. My grief had expanded its horizons so that I was now completely delusional.
But the wonder of it all! Everything was so immediate and seemingly real. Too real. I noticed every detail, every small facet of my life before me. I could see not only Sarah, but also her diligent work on the Sunday crossword.
Was it Sunday? I'd lost track of the days. The mail on the table was postmarked four months after Sarah's accident.
"I have to ask you something," she said in that soft voice of hers. I almost had forgotten she was there, so immersed with this detailed universe I suddenly found myself in. I perked up, and looked at her. Nothing about her was dead. Everything seemed vibrant and alive. Between my legs grew a familiar moistness that I tried to ignore. She seemed serious enough, as though what she would ask would reduce my life to a single question. I listened intently.
"What's a five letter word for disintegrate?"
"I know you're alive," I told her, as if I was accusing her of hiding it from me. "You pretend like nothing's changed, but everything has. Everyone thinks you're dead. But you haven't fooled me."
She looked up curiously. "Yes, but do you know a five letter word for disintegrate?"
"Damnit, Sarah!" I pounded my fist on the table and the sound barreled through my head. I wept uncontrollably. She took my face in her hands and held it steady as I fell apart before her. In the middle of my sobbing, she kissed me. It was the most beautiful kiss she'd ever given me and with it, my tears instantly dried. Kissing her back I could, for the first time in what seemed a lifetime, feel her soft warm skin underneath my fingertips.
Suddenly, because I didn't know how long I had with her, I pulled her up from her chair and into our bedroom. We fell onto the mattress like we had so many times before. Frantically, I undressed her and gazed at her beautifully shaped naked body. Then I spread her legs with my face.
She tasted beautiful, just as I'd remembered. Her warmth heated my entire soul as I rocked my body against her own, and let our magic fingers make up for lost time. When she came, she held me so tight, I never thought she'd let go. I thought I'd died and gone to Heaven.
"Tina, there's something I need to tell you," she said, several minutes after the ecstasy. "I was leaving you that night. That phone call I made, I was calling to say goodbye forever. But I shouldn't have left. It wouldn't have happened if I hadn't left you." Her eyes seemed swollen. Had she been crying?
"But you're here now," I said, to reaffirm it to the both of us.
"No, Tina. You don't understand."
I repeated the thought that haunted me from the first day we met. "We can't be together, can we?"
She looked down and shook her head. Her short hair, grown out a bit now, swung from side to side over her eyebrows. "I have to show you something." She stood up, and dressed, waiting for me to do the same. She walked to the door and I followed. We left the house together.
The outside world was vague and blurry. I couldn't tell if it was foggy or my senses were dulling, my delusional buzz dying off. When we got into the car, her previously mangled Pontiac Sunfire, and were half a mile away, I wished I'd brought along the liquor.
"Where are we going?" I asked her, but she wouldn't answer. She just drove as quickly as she drove that night when she decided to ram herself into my tree. And speaking of my tree, we were heading towards it, so that for an instant I thought she was recreating the crime. Perhaps this was her way of bringing me along with her. Yes, it all made sense now. She'd come back to take me with her.
But I wasn't so sure I wanted to go.
"Sarah, you can't do this. Not again."
"What are you talking about?" she answered as I saw the tree come up from over the hill.
I braced myself for the impact. But as quick as she hit it the last time this time she zipped past the tree that took her life. I turned around quickly to see it fly out of sight from the window.
I started breathing again.
Sarah turned to me. "Wasn't that the tree that–"
"Yes," I told her.
"I was always insanely jealous of that tree, Tina. It was on your mind more than I was. Sounds crazy now."
Lots of things were sounding crazy. I was getting quite used to it.
"Where are we going?" I asked again, after I knew she wasn't planning to kill me.
"You need to see something," was all she said. And I wondered, if not the tree, then what else was there to see?
Twenty silent minutes later, after I'd convinced myself three different times that I must have been dreaming, we pulled into the Oak Grove Cemetery. At that point, I could no longer convince myself to awake, because my dreams never went on for this long. The delusion story was getting lost on me too. Sarah was there, beside me, sitting in the car that she died in. Red Pontiac Sunfire. I was sitting beside her. That was all I knew, but I was sure that at least that much was true.
She stepped out of the car without a word or a glance. I figured I was meant to follow. She walked briskly, over several graves and to the back corner of the graveyard, where the tombstones were shaded with heavy oak trees. They were not unlike my tree, I remember thinking, but found myself falling behind and figured my legs ought to be running and not my mind. It was all I could do to just stay steps behind her.
She stopped at a grave, riddled with tree leaves, and hidden behind her body. She stood at it quietly, looking down as if she were praying. I suddenly realized why she'd brought me here.
When I caught up to her, I was short of breath. She still seemed perfectly relaxed, as she was when she stepped from the car. I wiped the fresh film of sweat from above my lip. "Sarah, I get it now. You've brought me to your grave to tell me you're really dead. I already knew that. I only didn't want to know."
"No," she said, dissatisfied. "You have to move on."
"Yes, I understand. Move on with my life."
"No," she said again and when she did she stepped out from in front of the grave so I could read its inscription. "I shouldn't have left that night, Tina. Will you ever forgive me?"
The letters were deep and aged, despite the date of death being only four months earlier.
I touched the name to see if it was real. The stone was almost as cold as my own skin. Sarah kept talking. "I called you but it was already too late. The doctors said you went quickly."
I looked at my wrist. The wound was still there, but my skin was flaking away at the edges. The details were astounding, and it all was coming back to me. It was my old friend, after all, slicing into me like only good friends could. I couldn't live without her. I'd betrayed my tree for a cold impersonal razor blade.
Sarah's voice continued, but it was slipping further and further away. The last words I heard her say were, "I love you."
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