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But someone did follow. He looked like a shabby Jehovah’s Witness, with a polyester suit and uncombed hair. He hung behind me in the shadows.
“What do you want with me? I’m an Orthodox.”
I spit in the gutter and he stopped. He was too far away to hear what I had said. A furtive rat who didn’t dare to get too close.
“Oh well,” I whispered, and threw my cigarette on the ground. I was a long way from home, and drunk enough to die. Tonight I would sleep.
The coughing started a few days after Jennifer. My sister had an illness. She coughed all day every day. Jennifer and I had visited her, a week before. Now whatever she had became mine. I fed myself mechanically on pizza. Just as mechanically, I puked it up. From that day, my weight spiraled down as I coughed up every meal. I smoked, and I drank, and I coughed.
One week after Jennifer, and someone took me to the doctor. He gave me antibiotics, but the coughing continued with grim robotic precision. I stopped smoking because the doctor made me. For a while I stayed off the drink.
A month went by. I met a girl who worshipped death. We drank each other’s spit with undisguised contempt, but I came to realize that other liquids are better for murdering thought. I drank a bottle of Wild Irish Rose at her house a week later. I managed to finish the bottle before the coughing took over my body. Her father found me lying on the floor in front of her bathroom in a pool of my own spit, unmixed with hers now as she had decided to sit out my melodramatics on the front porch.
I started to laugh again after that night.
“It is permissible,” I had told myself, “To have a drunk on such occasions. But only once.”
So I walked down to the bar and downed vodkas until the barman asked me if I was okay.
“She’s dead,” I said, “But it will only happen once. Let me sleep tonight and I’ll be fine.”
But I didn’t sleep through the night, as the vodka had done its job only half well. And sleep was a poor improvement on waking, when I walked with a living her in my dreams.
So- the next morning was here. I showered and shaved. I put on my best suit and tie. And that took care of half an hour, leaving only twelve or so hours to go until I could go back to sleep.
I took out the piece I was working on and stared at it stupidly. At first the shining colors and fine lines made no sense to me at all, and I couldn’t remember what I had been painting although it was right in front of my face. There were a number of smaller figures grouped around a larger figure, and I knew the larger figure should be a man. But there were hints of tentacles and a beak…
I blinked my eyes and looked again. There was no beak, of course. There were no tentacles. This was Christ the Great High Priest and Virgin Enthroned, surrounded by the Apostolarion and the Dodecaorton. An imitation of Joseph son of Paschalis. I stared at it a while longer and then put it away.
I walked the streets that day in a dull dream. Time on my hands meant time to think, time to stare the facts and their triumph in the face- and I knew they wouldn’t blink.
Thought of all kinds must be avoided. Still the feeling would come over me at odd moments- the sense of being in a roller coaster just as it begins to drop. The falling away at the pit of the stomach as gravity makes its claim.
I opened my door and kicked an old box out of the way. Behind me the unwashed evangelist still waited in the night. Let him wait, I thought. Let him wait for me forever.
It had been a year since my oh so permissible drunk. A year of coughing and watching it die. A year in which blank pieces of pressed board littered my apartment, sharing their futile space with acrylic paint, egg tempera, gesso, gold leaf and empty bottles of Evan Williams and Mad Dog 20/20. And still I hardly slept.
I dropped my leather jacket on the floor, to cover the unfinished face of Christ with his luminous eyes. And I followed into dreams of her, shortly after.
She wore a red velvet dress and her arms were open. As they had been open when we first knew each other, when I could barely keep my hands away from her body even when we were in public. When I had dragged her into a men’s bathroom and made her come with my hand even though someone could have walked in at any moment. As they had been open that night on the floor of my office.
I kissed her full and perfect lips. Her eyes were not passionate; they were kind. Kind as they had not ever been when she was alive. My hands rested on her bare warm back, inside her dress. She climbed up on my lap and pressed against me.
“I’ll never go away from you now,” she whispered. I felt her warmth on me and I grew hard. “I’ll stay with you forever,” she said, “I want you inside me.”
The tears gleamed in my eyes. “I missed you, Jennifer.”
“You won’t ever need to miss me again,” she said, “I’ll hang myself every night.”
She dangled from the ceiling, grotesque and familiar. Like a ripe piece of fruit. Like that night.
“I can do this for hours.” She smiled. “Don’t you think it’s better?”
I woke up retching and crying, and felt for my bottle on the floor. But it was almost empty now.
The mirror had told me that I was wrong. But that didn’t stop me from going down to the bar the next night. Nothing did. Nothing could.
The need to kill thought was still king. Whenever a thought floated up, it floated up belly first. Scoop it out and flush it down the toilet.
I drank alone most nights, but I preferred to drink at the bar. The colorful ghosts who flitted through were more entertaining than my walls, although like ghosts they never spoke to me.
Until that night. She came through the door with a sense of purpose I recognized as my own. A fellow hunter of thought, picking up ammunition.
She had long blonde hair, and a clear translucent sadness. Accidentally or not, she sat down beside me. I bought her a drink out of thought-hunting camaraderie, not any romantic impulse.
“Don’t bother to hit on me,” she said coolly.
“I don’t plan to,” I said, “I only want to loosen your tongue.”
“Why should I talk to you?” she asked me, “Why should you want to talk to me?”
“Because I know you want nothing,” I said, “And I myself want nothing. And something has to break.”
She seemed to be intrigued. “You give yourself away,” she said, “I could use all of this against you.”
I shrugged and shook my head.
“Are you sure you aren’t hitting on me?” she said, “Let me tell you a story. I’m bad luck for lovers.”
“That sounds a lot like my story,” I said, “Who should go first?”
“I will. You loosened my tongue, but not with that drink. I don’t know you and I shouldn’t talk to you. But what the hell. I want to.”
She didn’t say anything at first, so I motioned for her to continue.
“It’s not easy for me,” she said, “Let me have another go at this.”
She finished her drink and I had it refilled.
“When I was six,” she said, “God came to me all the time. My parents told me I was imagining it, but I knew the difference between imagining something and seeing it. I used to talk to God. He answered all my questions.”
“Like what?” I asked her, “What did you and God talk about?”
“We talked about the sea. About his home beneath the waves.”
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