Supple Towel Cuddle

Me Write : You Read :: Me Think : You Think

.:-The King of Carrot Flowers (Part 1)-:.

“I am the king,” you sing, Sister, with your whiteblond hair a perfect mess of backyard sharkleaf weeds and carrot flowers.

“You’re the king. Of what?”

“Of where we’re going,” you sing, looking at the sunblue through tree leaves and then at me. “I’ll be king.”

Mom is in the kitchen drunk and quiet. Daddy is in the basement sad and sober. You are in the yard with me, building a tower through the trees, stacking sticks and being eight years old. And pretty. With the carrot flowers.

“You’re the girl,” I say. “You can be the queen and I’ll be king.”

“No,” you sing.

I love you. I kick a fallen coil, sending it rat-a-tat at your feet.

You step on it, and it crunches into the loam. Some forgotten sunny season later a baby tree would sprout from the spot. And be mowed over.

“You’ll be my queen,” you sing.

“Up there it’ll just be us,” you sing.

“And anyway I don’t make fun of you so no one will.”

That night, Mom sticks a fork right into Daddy’s shoulder and he throws the garbage all across the floor. Upstairs, meanwhile, we twins lay and learn what each other’s bodies are for.

You and me and Mom, we get through Christmas and through growing up and through the incident at school without him.

.:-The King Of Carrot Flowers (Parts 2 & 3)-:.

My nightmares groan slow, pluck-lazy wails out of tune to Jesus Christ.

“I LOVE YOU JESUS CHRIST!”

Slower.

“I LOVE YOU JESUS CHRIST!”

Slower. And now louder.

“AH-EE LUH-OVE YOO-OOU JEE-ZAH-SSS CAH-RAH-EAST!”

I dream of sonorous chords that cannot be replicated.

“YEHH-EH-ESSS I DOOOOOOOOOOO.”

Trumpets blare and snare drums burst and come near tearing for the Lord.

.:-:-:-:-:.

But that’s not to say I believe He died for anybody but Himself. People do not die for other people just like people do not think for other people. I know this in my sleep and I know it when I’m awake. I know it when I’m finding myself and I know it when I’m losing myself, thinking about everything and dead dogs dissolving and my insides proclaiming Me Me Me and, and—and the day waiting and waiting and waiting for me to make it up and over through the weight and undertow. In my dreams there is marriage and flying machines and more dead dogs than I have ever really seen. Again and again, since I was eight years old.

We go whichever way we fall. But if I’m wrong, Sister, if people can die for people and Jesus died for me and you, then I choose to die right back at Him. I will dream and shout and drown to save JEE-ZAH-SSS CAH-RAH-EAST, until they know what I mean. I do love Him. I just don’t trust Him, OK?

.:-In The Aeroplane Over The Sea-:.

It takes several minutes for the mind-blindness brought on by the incident at school to
turn off. You are the first thing I see, you watching the soul return to my sixteen year-old body.
What a beautiful face! With your elbows around your knees, you lean forward in the grass and bring it close to mine. I don’t blink like in a flash it could be gone. Let me hold it close and keep it here. Sister, let me.

“One day we will die,” you sing, breathily, like it’s a secret. You lean back again. “Probably I’ve thought about it too much, you know, though I don’t picture the dying, like, the death itself. I think about everything after we die. I see our ashes fly from an airplane over the sea. Picture it.”

I can’t picture it.

Our hunched backs are to the school, and neither of us turns to look at the questions in our heads. Maybe, I fear, they’re only in my head. You’ve gotten so thin. I blink.

“What about us after we die?”

“What do you mean? I just said. Our ashes should—”

“I’m going to hell.”

“No,” you sing. “Not if I have any say in it.”

“Fuck. I am going to hell.”

“We’re not going any place like hell. We’re not bad people just because of what we do when we’re awake. Since when do you believe in hell, anyway?”

“Since a couple minutes ago.”

“You mean, since in there? Because of what happened in there?” You point over our shoulders at the school. “You’re going to let those kids change your entire outlook on—I mean you’re going to let them really have an impact on you?”

I can’t say anything to you.

“You came with me to school,” you sing, whining. “Today. You drove right there in the seat next to me and you talked about how the songs they play between the news are the best parts. You said they’re the only the reason you listen to NPR. You didn’t say a goddamn thing about wanting to turn around—shit, even anything like—hey, Sis, I’m just gonna’ drop you off and go home.”

I look, and your face is still here. It’s tan and noisy and squinting in the sun. What a curious love I have found out here on the school lawn. I want to push my fingers through to make those muscles move, and make your voice so smooth and sweet as it was before you were king and Daddy left.

I glance over my shoulder at the school. It is all walls. The invisible beast is silent.

“Someday I will be up on a cloud and laughing,” you sing.

I can’t believe how strange it is to be out here in the grass.

“Laughing at everyone,” you sing.

I can’t believe how strange it is to be anything at all. Wind washes up into my nostrils, smelling like the dying leaves in the backyard trees over the fences at the edge of the field. I spit and visualize your dreamplane and my billowy ashes snowing below, dusting onto the surface of a heaving wave.

“You go home. I’ll walk,” you sing.

In my imagination, my ashes become a muddy salty film, then swiftly drown and dissolve. Another death, another dissolution.

.:-Two-Headed Boy (Part 1)-:.

The night before the incident at school, we take off our clothes and you lay face-down across my bed. Dangling your arms over the edge, you empty a fistful of bullets onto the hardwood floor. Signals sound in the dark.

Pinch one up. Lick your lips. Kiss it.

Sitting beside you, watching you slip the cartridge into the clip, I place my fingers through the notches in your spine. You pick up another bullet and kiss it, too.

“Come on,” you sing, squirming beneath my palm.

And I begin to rub as though my kneading knuckles can unshape you. All the while I want to just break you, raze you, shakily resculpt you—as you load the pistol slowly, finish, and slide into your slumber—even while you sleep, though your eyes lay quiet in their clay.
But summer moonlight glides across your back on beads of sweat. Glossy armor. Perfect skin and salt. The way you sleep, you will never go to hell. No, your ashes will rise up from the airplane over the sea. They will take to the sun.

I am your wavering iconoclast, Sister, and I am doomed.

.:-The Fool-:.

I sit at a table alone in the bustling cafeteria the morning of the incident, waiting for you to take lives. Sunlight beams through windows, onto and into glass walls. In one window and out another, light is everywhere and we are awake for it. No one opens their mouths save to eat, and to utter a few words once every several moments. And yet the chatter is so noisy. It is the ceaseless breathing of a beast that is all its own and nothing but the sum of its parts.
The beast. It never goes anywhere. The people of the beast, its limbs and lungs and pores, they spread out to their respective places in the high school and out; and the beast, it too spreads. Thin and ghostly-transparent it cellophane wraps the world. It suffocates it, its every marching breath—bum-kik-kik, bum-kik-kik—an exhalation of toxic air, toxic sound, toxic thought.

We are the liquid blood of the invisible beast. Here in the sunny cafeteria is a human heat, molecules blindly binding and detaching at a pinpoint on the slow-spin earth, excited only by the sunlight. Call us chemistry. Call us awake and melting. At night, call us asleep and freezing. Call birth precipitation, and death dissolution. Bum-kik-kik, bum-kik-kik. But do not call this beast the all-encompassing metaphor for human existence, because it’s no goddamn metaphor.

The proof: we dream on its behalf. Singly, I dream all the things I can on my own. But the sleeping half of the world, the shadowy subconscious of the beast, dreams all things at once—bum-kik-kik, bum-kik-kik—as to keep them on ice. For in every cell of the beast is a human brain, mitochodrious things believed to once have been independent organisms, and now nightly assigned an infinitesimal agency. I, for example, belong to the dead dog dissolution and to the Me Me Me and to the undertow.

And Sister, I am sorry. I am the fool who keeps you in the beast, who binds you to it with tenuous love. We too help to hold the musculature of the beast in place.
All we can do, Sister, all we could ever do, is destroy our surroundings. Subtract ourselves from the sum of its parts. Kill the cells that attach us to the thing. We will make the beast itch, and we can pray, Sister, that it scratches. That we flake off like so much infected skin. From where we leave, the thing will bleed. That is most important. May its systems send blood to where we have been, empathize the wound back together, hook the collapsing flesh to itself from torn edge to torn edge. Let scar tissue be a jagged misrepresentation of our legacy. Good riddance. We are the fools who know, from what little we know, that we are everything redoubled on our own.

.:-Holland, 1945-:.

I hesitate in the driveway, wanting to be home facedown in the bed where I was born, but wanting to wait for you and tell you, Sister, that you are done destroying. Please be done, I would say. But afraid of what you will sing in reply, I go inside.

Mom is unhappy when I enter, and briefly I fear she knows what we have done at school. She is in heels and a tan skirt-suit and dry brown skin. Her expression is soppy and homesick. But when I come into the kitchen and eye her rather than initiate conversation, she becomes love-faced. I watch tendrils of empathy wrap and flex around me, suffocate and secure me. The beast doesn’t need me, you know, but it doesn’t want to let me go

“You look tired, bean,” she observes.

Exaggerate. “I am tired.”

“Sorry. You want to go get something to eat? Get some life in you?” Her teeth and nose are red-wine purple. A bottle of merlot on the granite counter is empty.

Pretend. “I’d like that, yeah. In a couple hours maybe.”

“Sure.”

Leave. I pivot blankly toward the hall.

“You going to go take a nap?”

Stop. “I was going to lay down and see what happens.”

“Alrighty, then I’ll come wake you up when it’s dinnertime.”

Nod. “Mexican place tonight?”

“Possibly,” she answers. But then peering into her empty wine glass, “No, you know, actually I’m not feeling like Mexican.”

Shrug. “We’ll figure someplace out in the car.”

“Honey—” she starts.

Interrupt. “Long day. I know. I’ll drive.”

“My brain is just tired, you know, bean? Frazzled.”

I hear her say this on my way to the stairs. I trudge slowly, taking each riser like a stop on a ferris wheel. Little by little, the fairgrounds beneath me grow smaller.

I doze open-eyed in Mom’s bed, terrorized by the thought of your homecoming, Sister. We were born in this room. There are indentions in the sheets where Mom sleeps. I roll over belly down into them. With my face buried in her pillow, white roses in my eyes, the smell of shampoo and mothersweat follow me to the sea where I have dissolved again and again.

.:-The Communist Daughter-:.

Things are bad here. My impossible chords churn the sea. The ashes from your airplane engulf the sky, obliterate it, and form a storm that pours a city’s wealth of rage and cars and bursting bridges. You stand upon the roiling water, seaweed softly sticking to your toes; you watch me spit and try to swim. Wanting something warm and moving, you bend forward and knead a fist into your spine—the soothing proves that you must still exist. You do dream. But why here? Sweet Sister king, where are my dead dogs and my insides’ Me Me Me?

.:-Oh Comely-:.

The wailings of my nightmare flood my ears and eyelids, burning. I sink into the ocean, weary, ready. But here something is different. I do not dissolve. Through the water, the cacophony of the sky is muffled and made more beautiful—this is a song I have heard ten-thousand nights but never so calmly and resolutely. Far enough from the surface, even the raucous chorus for Jesus Christ is changed. Refracted. The vibrations of those unseen voices separate out. Pitch is pulled apart like loosemeat, reduced to a velocity that reveals not single beats upon the voice box, but moments. A lifetime. Mom.

Her father is out with his fleshlicking ladies while she and her mother are asleep in the trailer park. There comes a gutshake rumbling. Fireworks. Mom, the pudgy girl on the couch next to Grandma, feels them too. Outside in the night, a walk’s distance through the dark, a nearby stadium’s sparks explode and give her hope. Hope gets her through the night. But, like old training wheels and everything else, it gets tucked into a garage sale and sold for Grandma’s coke.

For her birthday, twelve-year-old Mom snorts her very first line off the kitchen table with Grandma, but then she ages in an instant—she grows as thin as she is today, consumes a thousand bottles of wine, marries a man too much like her father, and buys herself a dog. Our home appears around her. She grows fat with twin fetuses. You and me.

We burst from Mom’s belly, all bristling, all bubbly. She bathes us, plays with us, coos at us, and curses the dog when it snaps at us. For a time. We grow more lanky and less affectionate; she reciprocates. And it is not too long before you get the idea to build a tower out of this place, Sister.

But after all of this comes something most unusual.

I do not want to see this in real time.

I sink to a scene aggressively forgotten. I try to sink faster but no. I panic-pedal upwards but no. I thrash about for anything but this memory. Yet my muscles burn out like a match in a hurricane. My blood is oxygenless and dead. There is the bedroom. There are the carrot flowers. There are the bruises, swollen dimpled black across your throat. Mom is cradling you, Sister, telling you it’s gonna be alright, Goldaline, it’s gonna be fine. Daddy’s shoulder is still oozing through the bandages. He is standing in the bedroom, sure, but he is nowhere in particular.

I am balled in the corner, shaking. My tan forearms cover my ears. My terrible fingers are tugging on my shaggy blond hair. My face is a wide-eye, deep-breath version of yours a few feet away.

I love you Jesus Christ, Mom sings. She is sobbing, violently, but not even looking at you, Sister.

I love you Jesus Christ, she sings again.

You die there in her arms, but she doesn’t realize, she just wails the awful song. All around the room, the invisible beast howls.

AH-EE LUH-OVE YOO-OOU JEE-ZAH-SSS CAH-RAH-EAST!

I begin to sink more rapidly again. For weeks afterward, I am completely quiet. Mom is afraid of me. Afraid of my silence. Daddy even leaves one night, just days before Christmas, and I say nothing.

Until one Sunday I enter the house and report that the dog is dead.

I came home and he didn’t waddle to the fence, I tell Mom. He just laid there on the hill. So I decided to go wake him up. But he was dead. His eyes were—they were—when I saw em’ they were—

Mom hugs me to stop me talking, and, when I smell her, I start to cry. I cry and cry and cry until my head aches and I have to go to bed. At 5:00 in the evening. And I sleep like a tower of sticks until 5:00 the next night. You and me and Mom, we loved that dog.

Here, I stop sinking. Here, my feet touch the bottom of everything.

.:-Ghosts-:.

“Wake up,” you sing. “Nap-time’s over.”

You.

“We’re almost there,” you sing.

Stop this destroying. Stop it here. Leave the room and the house and the surface of my ocean. Clean up my sky and go to the sun.

“Those things,” you sing, “Are not my problem.”

Please be done.

“No,” you sing.

I love you. I punch you in the eye-socket and mar your beautiful face.

You pull your eyeball out of its swelling purse and throw it on Mom’s pillow.

“It’s you and me in this,” you sing.

“What’s a king without her queen?” you sing.

“And anyway I don’t make fun of you so no one will.”

I blink, and there you are, beautiful again.

.:-(UNTITLED)-:.

We descend the circus wheel, and reenter the fairgrounds.

Call out. “Mom?”

“You already up?” she asks from the kitchen. It’s been twenty minutes, I realize.

Enter. “You ready to go eat?”

“I suppose if you are, sure.”

You jab me in the back. It’s the barrel of the gun. What is this, Sister?

“A hostage situation,” you sing.

“What?” Mom asks; she has heard you. “Hostage situation?” Clearly she wonders if she’s had too much to drink right now.

“We’re almost done here, Brother,” you sing. I sing.

“I just—bean, I don’t get you sometimes,” Mom chortles. “What do you mean ‘hostage situation’?”

Distract. “Nevermind. You still need me to drive?”

“Oh. Honey—” she starts.

That’s a yes. “Long day. Got it.”

“Tell her you’re not hungry, Brother,” I sing.

“Now—” Mom stammers. She is changing something in her eyes. “Why are you talking like that?”

Oh god. “Mom, you just don’t get me sometimes.”

“This can be beautiful, Brother. This whole thing can be perfect. Just cut the shit, tell her you’re not going out to eat. Tell her what’s going on,” I sing.

“You can stop that,” Mom commands. “Watch your language.”

I can’t just—What do you mean perfect? I don’t know how to help you, Sister.

“Fine,” I sing. You pull the gun from behind my back, Sister, and shoot myself in the stomach. The bullet, your kiss, knocks the air out of my lungs and keeps it out. My body’s first reaction is to collapse and try to breathe, but it’s just white-hot heat that’s coming in with each gasp. Molten lava sucker punches to the stomach. Not oxygen.

Mom is shaking her head vigorously.

“Mom, I had some–th-th-things I wanted to say to you,” I sing, laboriously and excruciatingly.

She stops convulsing. The floor is yours. She’s waiting, Sister.

“I love you Jesus Christ.” You can barely move my mouth to the words of the song.

Mom. I’m sorry there is blood on the wall behind me. Bone chips and globules of warm Me Me Me.

“Don’t leave me,” she whispers through purple teeth.

“I never did,” you sing. But you’re already you again, beautiful and free. She doesn't hear.

Already, the beast is scratching at us.

“Jesus, an ambulance!” Mom lunges for the phone on the kitchen wall, behind the counter where a new bottle of merlot sits, freshly opened, its mouth gaping at the ceiling. Like me. Beneath it, on the floor, I see now the powdery remnants of hastily hidden cocaine. I don’t give a fuck. I can’t breathe, Sister.

“I’m sorry. It hurts at first. This isn’t perfect, but it will have to do,” you sing to me, as you hunch over my body. You look up at Mom and frown. “I thought she stopped using after Daddy left.”

Mom is in hysterics, sobbing fiercely into the phone. She is not being informed as quickly she needs to be.

“Jesus, fuck, what the fuck do the police need to know the make of the gun, for?” Mom shrieks. The police have been to school.

I try to imagine the smell of Mom from here.

But then she is silent, Sister, like on the night of the fleshlickers and the fireworks. She is quiet, watching me pale away in a bloodblack puddle on the chalk-green tile. I hear the tiny tinny voice on the phone plead for her attention:

“Bum-kik-kik, bum-kik-kik.”

.:-Two-Headed Boy (Part 2)-:.

The lawn grows yellow, warm and hungry at the top of the hill, stretching toward the bone dry blue expanse above. It is a beast all its own and nothing but the sum of its parts.
When obstacles get between the grass and the sun, they are absorbed, dissolved.
Today, Sunday, a dog.

I waste a few words trying to wake him up. Then I see his eye—I see the maggot writhing blindly to get beneath his dead eyelid. I notice the flesh around his eye is swollen and bubbling from within with larval activity. I am alone in the back yard and eight years old.

“Have a nice day,” I say aloud, my first words in weeks.

“Who are you talking to?” you sing.

Nobody.

“Nobody, Brother?” you sing.

The dog.

“The dog?” you sing.

“Well the dog and you, now, I guess,” I say.

“But he’s dead,” you sing.

“Shouldn’t you go tell mom?” you sing.

“You and me and mom, we loved that dog.”

.:-IN THE AEROPLANE OVER THE SEA-:.

Lyrics by Jeff Mangum
Story by Towel

"Two-headed boy, she is all you could need. She will feed you tomatoes and radio wires, and retire to sheets safe and clean. But don't hate her when she gets up to leave."
Jeff Mangum, Two Headed Boy (Part 2), 1998

Posted by suppletowelcuddle at December 10, 2007 1:44 AM