​3:18 PM, Sunday, Bedroom w/ Corinthian Walls

By Eli Dowd

​Content warning: Sexual assault

There are three of them in the room. The tallest holds court in a bed He (the tallest) ostensibly shares with the cross-legged woman on the flokati rug. O (the other one) has already gone to great lengths to demonstrate his ignorance with regard to the text messages and now plays sentinel next to the mahogany door frame. The woman is smiling. She has been doing this for some time now.

He’s telling me something the other one’s girlfriend sent Him. A series of things. A decidedly one-sided thread by His telling. Across from Him, O wears a funeral expression of sorrow and shakes his head slowly, as if unwillingly, after several of the more visceral terms his alleged “person” had used to describe the man he spent most of his time quite literally following around.

“Listen to this. She says I’m a ‘disgusting bastard man who can’t discern the stench of His own dick from a rotting fish,’ but ‘can still be saved by the awesome power of our Lord, The Great Holy Redeemer.’ And she ends it with, ‘Praying for you.’ Then a heart emoji. I can’t make this shit up.”

He has not shown me any of these texts. I don’t expect Him to. He has a history of embellishing these things. His “gift to those less privy to the subtler of our world’s absurdities,” He once told me as we sat atop the balcony and watched blood drain from a sun-raped sky. This was just a line, of course, a wink into what He calls the void. Most of what He does is angled this way: a carefully calculated display to prove to the mirror how little He cares. It’s for His own sake. It always is with Him.

O steeples his fingers, closes his eyes, and shakes his head once more, prayer-like in his deference. O knows He occasionally glances over to check for appropriate behavior, which in O’s case should be plaintive and unsmiling unless He puts on His “bitch voice” or pauses to give time for a nose laugh at one of His quips. O is slow on the uptake, but He isn’t one to turn down a reminder of His role as the wittiest man in the room. I have a bit more leeway; He has no concerns of any vested preference of mine for the “ad hominem evangelist,” and He likes how my face looks lit up with a smile. It’s best for Him if I appear happy when company is around. Or when it isn’t. O hardly counts as company anyway. Really it’s best for Him if I appear happy whenever He wants me to be. And He does. Want me to be.

Her use of “irregardless” draws His ire for a time, and O chimes in to say she shouldn’t be trying to use a “word” with so many syllables. She is compared to three dissimilar animals in the span of 30 seconds, and O does the thing where he doesn’t finish his line with a complete sentence but rather trails off to invite interruption from a more assured tone. He looks at me with a knowing smile, which I return automatically, without a clue with regard to origin. It’s something He does periodically to imply He sees it too, whatever it may be.

I sometimes wonder if He can even believe Himself, or if He considers His unique and inexorable fraudulence (and His equally unique awareness of that fraudulence) just another aspect of what makes Him such a singular figure amongst the flocks of insipid sybarites that make up His would-be peers. Not that it matters what He thinks; I predict action. And I know that more often than not, it’s best to play the mirror. He gets testy when people disagree with what He feels very fundamentally to be true, and He claims a great many things to be self-evident. I am quite skilled in the fine art of nodding and laughing. It is why He still likes me. And wants to be with me. He says it’s because I’m smart, and beautiful, and sensitive, but I know it’s mostly the nodding. He’s in love with a steady voice that confirms what He already knows. I say yes, and He says He loves me. And I don’t mistake love for the art with love for the artist, but He does. And I guess for a while that was enough for me. But it’s been harder lately. It might seem an obvious choice, but I’ve never enjoyed putting down the dog, and that distaste is only compounded by this specific dog’s tendency to disguise His bite.

He’s directing Himself towards me now, and along with Him comes the conversation. He’s good at this, including others in His rants, maintaining complete control by handing off what looks like a wheel. He wants to know what I would say if one of my friends’ boyfriends sent me something like this. “Like this” being relative, of course, adjusted for changes in elevation. The threat of violence is a lot less quaint when convexity and concavity are reversed, but that isn’t the right answer; He told me the answer years ago, implied it from the very start. The expectation is plain on His face, and O is already smiling at the approaching release. O loves when I deliver the line, so long as it is appropriately gift-wrapped, fresh off His prolific tongue. I get to choose the wording and be the last to speak before the laughter; if it came up, He would even refer to the laughter as mine, and He wouldn’t make a face or hedge; He’d just say it. Maybe even laugh again to show just how funny I really was. But I would know. There would be an implicit understanding that this was mine because He gifted it to me. And He wouldn’t admit it, but He would know I knew it too. And He’d like that. Because it would show I was smart. Aware. It would make Him feel that much better about being the man who’d given such an impressive woman a reason to fall in love.

But I say my lines anyway, and I skew towards the inane, and there is laughter, which I let wash over me. And it is not unpleasant, the momentary lapse from the window with jagged glass, even if it is a fleeting escape, and I cannot help but feel a bit vexed by my role in it all as O carries on with his madcap wheeze, proposes for the third time this week that they should make a sitcom about us. And I am by no means unaware of my complicity in this life of mine, but it is mine, and the view from the window is familiar, and the whole viewing apparatus is at a far enough remove that I can take solace in being the only one who can actually see what’s going on. It seems better than finding someone I actually need. And I am aware too that I perhaps place too much weight upon this awareness. That there might not be so much to hold precious in my ability to see these weightless things as weightless, my capacity to identify myself as the instrument which allows those weightless things to become heavy with a significance of my own choosing. Windows and scales. Weights and percepts. I’ve mixed my metaphors, but it had all seemed like something we would joke about when it first happened with Him. I’d laughed about it preemptively even. I’d thought the whole thing ought to make for a good time.

It was a couple years ago, at the Italian restaurant with the post-ironic Koi Pond. The type where a suit is expected, and the servers all have accents. When we arrived, He sent a busboy to tell the chef, and when the chef appeared, He greeted him vigorously and demanded he do more than say hello. And when they talked for a few minutes in a way that seemed smooth and comfortable, He managed to make me feel as if I was in on it when I noticed that the words weren’t important; that the show was in the space between. There was intention in the way He pawed at the air, like He was somehow advancing, even as He leaned way back in His chair, and made a show of His willingness to defer to the chef’s culinary expertise. It was not a long talk, but by the time the chef was dismissed, it was clear that what I’d witnessed was less a conversation and more one man convincing another that he was made out of clay. When I told Him I was impressed, He told me that so was He. When I told Him I enjoyed watching a craftsman at work, He told me He enjoyed a perceptive audience. We talked about what felt like everything that night, and after dinner He smiled like He recognized something necessary in me, like it would not be possible for either of us to feel any other way. And after we split the check and stepped out for a walk between halide fans of thin white light, He told me His father had died tragically three days after He was born, and the same had happened to His father’s father, and His grandfather’s father, and to every father before Him for as far back as His traceable lineage goes. And I’d never heard of something like that, so when we looked into each other’s eyes, and His were green and mossy and familiar, I decided I’d like to see Him again. Then He told me how He was going to die, and when, and I superimposed a roughly husband-shaped significance upon His slightly uneven shoulders just to see what would happen. And in the years since what has happened is the progressive withering of a large part of myself, accompanied by the gradual and ongoing recession of that self’s ability to identify as something with the capacity to independently be. And that was familiar too.

But presently O is talking about her, the far end of the phone, O’s “own personal girlfriend” (personal tends to skew towards personnel, but I don’t think the mispronunciation is intentional), and how she makes him resent himself and how what she did was totally out of line, and how he feels dreadful and sorry on and for her behalf, and hopes she’ll come to her senses and snap out of what he describes as a “potentially relationship-ending funk," and he repeatedly claims she’s been acting “crazy” and not at all like herself until He clears His throat and O trails off and waits dumbly for the next topic of discussion.

“What would you do, buddy? If she had sent something like this to you?”

There’s something in the way He says she and flicks a finger in my direction. He’s done it before, and repeated action is rarely coincidental. At times I feel like Pavlov’s benefit, but there is safety in a consistent response, so I keep smiling, make a noise like a less assertive laugh, and prepare to excuse myself to the bathroom during the next lull for a reprieve from holding my face like this as O makes a hackneyed joke about violence, and we all seem to laugh at the idea of a hammer putting a series of dents into my skull. It’s been a recent and rather alarming development for O, joking about braining me with various tools, somehow blind to the most obvious of metaphors even as he refers to how much he misses the way his “own personnel (sic) girlfriend” used to go down on his own personal Tool before her radical shift in personality/friendship with Him. But now isn’t the time to ponder transitive relationships between my battered skull and the other one’s member because the bit’s gone stale, and He is coming back around again. It seems the bathroom will have to wait. His hands are white-knuckled on the wheel. It’s been long enough since a monologue, and He’s decided that He has something to say.

He takes a bit to find His way, but the initial premise is what He calls “distorted messaging systems”: the way in which what was thrown as a dagger was received as a strange feather; the way in which every negative thing He has ever encountered in His life has in actuality been an opportunity to prove Himself in a kind of universal arena. And He says it like He thinks no one has ever thought this way before. The obvious, surface-level psychological rub, of course, being that everything is a trophy to Him, but He’s so profoundly wrapped up in Himself that the internal v. external distinction starts to get a bit scuzzy, and it is not long before His initial point is occluded by a new tack about a so-called “anti-solipsistic, apotheotic perspective afforded to those capable of achieving the vantage point of the true Vitruvian Man.” And it’s all nonsense, but He’s dressing it up with so much philosophical jargon it’s as if He’s reading it from a book. And by the way He says it, He may as well be, because He is in a rare and procrustean form; He is leading me and O (but mostly me) to a newly ordained truth and I do not have a say in the matter; He is going to tell me something so quintessential, so beyond my grasp that when I hear it I will need a moment to collect myself; He is going to pull me by the hand to what I would not see without Him and then look at me with that queer twist of face that always accompanies the moments in which He feels He has said something profound, and by His expectation I will be dumbstruck and silent and supplicant until He breaks the silence with a slap of His hands and says something light and breezy and topical and laughs as if dispossessed by the oracle; and then He’ll say He’s not sure what He’s been going on about, and He will somehow think we don’t know it’s bullshit, just another part of His absurdly convoluted, pseudo-self-deprecating, gratuitously self-involved, asphyixiatic fucking shield, which He must always preserve in case He should one day re-misunderstand Hegel and decide He finally really understands what sublation is, and that this newfound understanding is itself its own sublation, and it was all oh-so worth it because now He is certain that if He thinks about anything long enough, He simply cannot be wrong, and because anything that may have previously seemed off or incorrect in any way was just another step in this anthropologically significant and necessary ideological progression, it was really only wrong from a myopic perspective, and in His so-called “Vitruvian” reality, the most ontic aspect of these not-really-mistakes is the opportunity they have come to provide; and, through all this pointless conjecture of mine, He is still building, referencing previous jokes, bits of text from the other one’s girlfriend, using actual fucking wordplay in conversation! and taking brief asides to parse His own monologue, to point out the subtleties of His syntax; and it’s all so clearly rehearsed, and I’ve known this for some time now, but for whatever reason I am suddenly fully aware of the effort He puts into every single fucking conversation. And for a moment I cannot breathe.

The curtains are drawn, but a seam of light has found purchase in a skein of wool filament a few centimeters from my fuzzy-socked big toe. Agarwood incense burns in a little waterfall stand and smoke pools and dissipates in a faux-grain basin. A voice is sharing that the brain is capable of adapting so that even pain can be viewed as its own reward, and this is in many ways metaphysical. The voice asserts that this is what is called a “tentpole belief” for the modern man, but cautions that it can be misconstrued as masochism if not tempered by whatever else He is about to say.

There is a moment now. And in the moment the actor has begun to realize that she is indeed an actor. And it is not so explicit, but she begins to cast about for the telltale, antic thinness, to pluck at the delicate, transubstantial carapace of the all-pervasive play.

You tried to tell Him about the dissociating once, but the words came off with a lyrical bent, and He laughed it off and pinched your butt and told you it was cute when you tried to get poetic. There is no way to describe it that He would understand, but if you tried again you might call it the reality of a shift in pronouns. A sensation less like a transition than a relapse, and it is not sudden, but you would realize suddenly that it has happened again. You think it is something like the perspective of perspective itself, and if that doesn’t make sense it’s because it is independent of sense. You are the space between the data processor and the lens, and the audience for all the ephemera that dances in between. The world is there, but it is displaced and distant; you can react to a reaction, but you cannot see.

He is still talking, but you can no longer hear Him. Perhaps a muffled tympani accompanies His most stentorian plosives, but it is all very far away from you, and it’s rather silly as He puffs Himself up and exerts upon every muted word. If it is a carnival out there, then it is for them, Him and her and the imperceptive O, who credits Him credulously and occupies space in the vein of an empty seat. They do not need an audience because the show is by and for the actors, and the only goal is to help themselves forget that it is indeed a show. But as neat of an explanation as this is for the conveniently abstract “human condition," it does not explain the faint basso hum; because, as you float here in your little embryo and judge them with the impunity of an amorphous blob, you cannot help but notice that it is the one thing you hear too: the soft and violent rumbling, the involuntary shiver. It is the sound they hear but hate to recognize; it is the trembling, repressed acknowledgment that all of these performances may not be enough, that even the best of their sophists may fail them, and it is a matter of time before they must confront the emptiness on either side of the double-sided mask; it is the sound of people who are trying their best to appear unafraid, and you are not immune because it is not endemic to the masks; it is the through line from then to now, and no amount of layered awareness is enough to escape an inevitable return. So they can talk and distract and dance and shake their righteous hands and believe in themselves so totally that there is no room left to disbelieve, but they still do. And you may be blind and far enough away from it all that you are for the moment safe, but you cannot help but feel it in and through them. In their remembered bones and imagined faces, their tired smiles and tumescent creeds. You can try as hard as you may, but you cannot forget just how hell-bent they are on forgetting. How futilely they have preconditioned themselves against the sound that will kill them before it lets them get away. And you know they can hear it because no matter where any of them run, they are just like you, closing their eyes against what is already between their ears. And even as the show goes on, and He pauses for effect after affected effect, and you try to shift off this tack that makes you feel like the smallest, most insignificant thing in the whole goddamn world, it becomes truly, egregiously, painfully obvious that it is inevitable, and that’s what makes it all so absurd. Every single part of this ridiculous fucking interplay between the specious song and the forgetful dance. And they know it. And if they are all to be inevitably beholden to this concomitance of being as a species capable of debilitating self-perception, you just wish they would just be more honest about it. Because maybe they could get somewhere if they stopped the performance and admitted to the world that they were deeply, universally, ontologically fucking afraid. That they’re all confused and terrified, and the most confusing, terrifying part is that there is nothing about it they can do but try and fail to forget. It doesn’t even matter if you trick yourself with a well-placed "they," because no matter what it is you think or don’t think you are, you are just as terrified too. And then some limbic tether emerges from the recesses of the grinning lady’s brain and informs you that you will need to speak soon, because He has finished now, and she has forgotten her lines.

“Woah. Got a bit off the rails there, huh?”

He runs His fingers through His hair and exhales so His cheeks puff up and then deflate. He is looking at the woman and nodding. By the door, O is fiddling with the fray at the end of his drawstring; the same drawstring she’d seen a few weeks ago when he’d sent her that unsolicited photograph. She hadn’t ever mentioned it, and she’d thought the whole situation was better off left that way. She’d learned on a long-forgotten moonlit night that it’s not always productive to have something to say. It was the same night she saw it for the first time, whatever it may be.

The old man had looked tired when he picked her up all those years ago. They were supposed to go to a movie, but he took the first turn away from town, and before long it was nothing but empty roads and the waxing smell of an ocean breeze. He’d taken her camping this way once, but there was a prelude for that; she’d picked out an old sleeping bag and packed her duffel and all in all been very excited because it was all he’d talked about in the leading weeks. It’d been a good time. He’d helped her catch a fish. But it wasn’t camping, not this time. They stopped well short of the old logging routes, and when the dusty pickup shut off with a rumbling decrescendo, they were just a few miles from home, and a decrepit beach access sagged a few yards ahead, and he shushed her nascent questions as he wrapped her little hand in his and led her through rain-rotted slats to an empty pebble beach. For a few minutes they walked and said nothing, and it was nice because the moon was bright that night, and it was a beautiful beach. And after another few minutes, he stopped to show her a flat piece of basalt, and when he sent it chirping across the licorice waves, she felt proud of him. Proud that such a capable hand could feel so familiar wrapped around her own. And still he did not speak, and once the stone had sunk below distant swells, he grabbed her by the hand, and they clattered on along the salt-rimed stones. A few minutes later he stopped again, and again he said nothing. Just looked down at her and scratched a finger down his hispid cheek. Looked at her long enough that she thought something must be the matter. So she asked him what was the matter. And when she looked at those old green eyes of his, he looked away. And when he breathed, it was slow and heavy. When he finally spoke, he told her there was something she needed to see. So they walked. And as they walked, he did not speak, or look at her, or release her hand from his. And this went on until she took the silence upon herself. She told him that the waves were whispering to her. She told him they spoke of long-gone giants and it was the memory of their booming breath that tugged at her coat sleeves and fluttered her chest; she told him that when she listened close enough, she could still hear the long-gone giants sing. It sounded wonderful, she said. It made her happy just to be. But he did not hear the giants, or acknowledge her words, or notice the snot that rimmed her small and wind-whipped nose. He just pulled her onward with his oven-mitt hand and told her that there was something she needed to see.

You do not remember the specifics of how the night ended, just the police car ride into town the next day, and the way your aunt and uncle had always spoken about the old man in hushed tones afterwards. You know what had happened, but it felt unreal in a way, like it was less an event than a line of demarcation, and everything from before was part of someone else’s life that you’d just happened to witness. You don’t think about it much because you don’t ever need to. You don’t think about it much because it has a way of constricting her ability to breathe.

And sometimes it’s useful to breathe. So you breathe. You float in the middle space between these in-between places, and you breathe. And for a moment all you see are faint impressions on a fading window. All you hear is the sound of emptied lungs.

A callous that scraped across her peach-skin lips. The warmth of his breath and the mantric promise.

“There is something you need to see.”

But the inconvenience is temporary. Soon I have found the window again and remembered again that I am the window, and if this window wants to retain any semblance of agency in this glandular action it has found itself absorbed by, then it should say something. I should say something. Because there is evidently something that I am being expected to say. This is made considerably more difficult, of course, by the fact that I have completely lost the thread at this point and my “boyfriend” is just looking at me with the same fucking half smile he has when he tells me I look nice, or sound smart, or compliments me in any way at all. Just looking at me and making a face so fucking smug that it makes me want to punch him. A face I caught him practicing in the bathroom once and that—as I think back on the moment now, him standing there with his chin slightly raised, framed against the peach-cream walls in all his ring-lit salubrity, staring into his reflection in the streaky vacancy he’d carved with a closed fist into the steam-clouded mirror, breathing in the scent of a cologne so expensive that complaining about it would be déclassé enough to render the complaint more an admonition of the complainer rather than the complainee—a face that makes me feel physically ill and on the verge of actions both societally contraindicated and irreversible, and it may not be productive in terms of the conversation, but it is at least a feeling I can identify as my own, so I let it linger, and think about how easy it is to hate him sometimes; and I decide what I hate most is that I give a shit about any of it, because I very much don’t want to give a shit about any of it, but at least giving a shit is something that I very clearly do.

And I can’t be sure of it on account of some apparent internal v. external temporal inconsistency, but it’s been about five seconds since anyone has spoken now, which is long past time enough to register as an anomaly on a conversational timeline, and nobody is talking still, because these two treat conversations like some sort of by-the-numbers coloring book, and there is a growing atmospheric pressure with which every unspoken word is bloating into this vacuous space they have so generously reserved just for me; and the whole fucking situation is at this point ventricose and hanging like the belly of some rachitic child, and all of it, the it that extends so much further than a single conversation, is suddenly pouring into these foreign encroaching syllables, which coagulate on my tongue independent of any conscious decision, and tumble out as if cattle-prodded by the now nearly eight second infinity; and they are glossy, and full, and red-paint-rich, and visceral in a way I have not felt in a long, long time, and, as they fall from my mouth with a volume I by no means intended, I am somehow aware of the impossibly long series of reactions that precedes conscious thought, and it’s not even something I’m really capable of actually processing on a conscious level, but it still hits me like a goddamn truck, and I finally, barely, almost understand why it is that I am so fucking tired.

“...”
​
And then I say the word he hates. The word he punched a man over. The little bit of staccato he has afforded such significance. Which he lets ruin him. And I just say it. Nothing else. No analysis. None of this degenerative, cannibalistic, anti-catalytic thought. I just say it. And watch. And listen. And he is quiet. Wearing a frozen face I have not seen before. And then O laughs, and it sounds animal. And real. And it makes me want to join in. So I do. Belly laughing so hard that I can hardly see, but I do it anyway. And then he starts to laugh. And he doesn’t get it; none of us do, but I can tell it’s real. And I’m certain of it because it’s the same laugh he has when he watches those videos of the dancing pigs. The laugh that had always struck me as strange and not so easily identified, but now seemed to be the laughter that came from coming oh-so-very-close to recognizing that fundamental human dissonance—that strange half perception of simultaneously weighted and weightless things. And we are sitting here in a bedroom on a Sunday afternoon, wrapped up in the fustian of our own solipsisms, laughing so hard that we cannot breathe.

---

​Eli Dowd is a student living and working in Virginia.