Gish

Gish
Don’t want to be here anymore. Everything’s a haze, overloading the field of view. Head for the door, over crushed cigarette butts and beer puddles, past the people at the basement staircase with tattoos and clothes splicing into geometric patterns. Force a foot up the stairs, then another; they’re heavy, and barely listening to you. Cool outer air leaks in at the doorframe. Turn around, Malcolm in the audience at the gig, staring at you blankly. Leave.

Outside, its calmer, the haze settles down. It ain’t ideal, but it’s nothing new. While the party was full of people, the world is full of fog, and it irks a little how similar they are. Its three AM and summer, but it’s cold. You’ve been walking in a straight line, not caring where you go. You halt at a crosswalk, on the edge of Allston. You could go home to the Hill but don’t feel like it. It’s not home sometimes. Maybe Eliza’s, by Dorchester Ave. She lets you crash there still, and won’t mind so long as you’re quiet. After thinking a moment, you head for your sister’s house, hope Eliza won’t get mad in the morning. Walk on. In your mind Malcolm is still standing drowned in bright lights and sound and his face keeps morphing into someone else’s, and it’s one you know but don’t want to recognize. Like a frightening copy with no original.

 Boston’s stuck in the no-season, hot and freezing in equal measure. Out through the night fog, to the rhythm of your boots, the streetlights flicker back and forth, thick gray chokes the shapes of light posts, cars, bushes, benches, turnstiles, stores. Wonder if ratmen live under manholes armed with dry-ice blowers flooding the neighborhoods in smoke. A moon ritual; maybe they like having parties too. Everything bleeds neon, drenched in glow. You imagine a nervous system like a fungus running beneath the pavement, giving all objects the capacity to breathe. It feels alien and alive like the earth has eyes that follow your every move.

There is no difference between the world and your condensed breath, only lines and pieces unfulfilled, swallowed in the muck of atmosphere. You know the way by heart but it’s so foggy it’s hard to read street signs. If you stretch your arms far enough, you can barely see your hands, and you think of disappearing in the mist. It’s you, these arms, objectively, but it’s a body, and you are not just a body. Or not this one, anyway, you don’t want to think that. You just happen to be sewn into it, and it drags you around through the daydream of living.

Malcolm’s face doesn’t stop, and it begins to weigh a ton. You dig around in your pocket and find a thin, crushed joint, roll it on your fingers like a child worming play-doh, light it and blow a dirty cloud, watch it crash with air and swirl then merge and disappear. Frustrating. No completion, no answer or definition. It all thaws into sameness. Creeping dread gets knocked off by the high. New England weed is good, and you space out for a couple seconds, standing on the sidewalk.

What was your name? Gish, right, name’s Gish. Name’s Gisella actually, but mom always called you Gish because when grandma saw your baby face, she double-took it, and somewhere in the creases of her ancient brain Lillian Gish popped up. You hated either name but you were too lazy to demand identity. And once you understood you didn’t like it, way too deep in. It stuck. A meaningless name tied to nostalgia for a woman who existed on a screen, summoned like a séance from your grandmother’s memory of a theater in the South, drooling at a black-and-white doll-faced actress. A cute gal no one knew who was nothing but what they said about her. It’s so distant and fuzzy, a mannequin pressed in haste, the limbs all scaly and burned in factory failure. Even more irritating, it fits. You’ve never felt like you weren’t faking something; always have to play person when someone else is in the room.

Now, keep walking, keep thinking. From your own observations, you got a vague 90’s Courtney Love thing going on, which means you look like the vanilla kind of white trash punk girl. You were this in the South and you are this in the North. You blended with the hipster runts in ATL, so you’re easy plugged into the basement of drunken Berklee kids on a Saturday night. The trek from Atlanta to Boston wasn’t harsh or long except for the fact that you are still nowhere in a different place. Whatever you weren’t then is what you aren’t now. It’s similar with gigs. Whoever’s playing doesn’t matter, they just make sufficient noise to justify the $5 cover. At least the beer is free. The drugs aren’t really, but you’re a girl so they become free.

Earlier today, your roomie Lynn and you smoked a joint then dug around in her boyfriend’s stash as you left for the gig. Whatever you picked you jammed into your pockets, then got on the train.  You did half a tab of acid then snorted Adderall with Lynn, and by the time you got there everything had a soft colored outline like a damaged VHS. It was pretty weak LSD, so the addy gave it a necessary push. Couple shots of Fireball helped too. The three-story house was full of geeks and scrawny kids, Mac DeMarco-looking motherfuckers, denim clad girls in band t-shirts; the everyday Allston kind. You picked up a beer cup then followed the music all the way to the basement, taking casual sips.

The bands weren’t spectacular but competent enough to convince you. They all mixed together in the same sound with different members. You peaked around the third act, when Lynn left with her boyfriend. The high made it fun to dance, you forgot about her, about the people and yourself, and it felt rather good. Through your eyelids the showlights grew into pretty ribbons moving to the buzz that ran all around your head, then, Malcolm snuck into the crowd and eyes open you found him dancing next to you. Handsome, big nosed, tall, big-boned kinda dude. Introduced himself and made you laugh. Couldn’t dance worth shit but had confidence. Smoked you out later, and then spoke about his major, his art, how much he liked your bright blue eyes.

The thing about uppers is they make your whole metabolism run faster. Every impulse you have gets streamlined into action, so by the fifth band or so, Malcolm, stoned out of his mind, undressed you in a bedroom as you kissed his neck and rubbed his crotch. He pushed you onto the bed, crawled over you and shoved his fingers in between your legs. Whenever you looked up, it surprised you to see a whole human being, his figure blending in an out of darkness. He became some disembodied feeling existing for itself, like he was working a machine, focused and crude trying to make you wet enough to fuck you. Your hand crept back towards his cock, and stroked it softly. His tongue wormed inside your mouth, tasting you.

Being totaled made you think outside yourself, imagine what he saw from above. You stopped kissing, entrenched in yourselves, his mind gone in the idea of your body, and yours dissolving into mush. His eyes shifted from your tits to your eyes and back again. From outside, you saw the both of you, on a screen, a looped image repeating in a vacuum, void of a start and rushing to an end. Malcolm pulled his fingers out and rammed them down your throat, and you gagged because the taste and smell and feel were so foreign and painful. He smiled. You were still coughing when he rolled the rubber on and entered you.

His hand covered your mouth, you felt encased beneath him. With eyes closed you forgot he was there at all. The whole world snuck away and you were left alone in a manic wave. It felt good to be restrained, to confirm that you existed, occupied space, had physical limits. You forgot you were a body, drove deep into yourself, collapsed you and your being into one, and when you came and squirmed a faint chuckle cut across the background noise. Right, you though, he was still there. For all you knew, he had forgotten about you way before you did. He quickened his pace, smashed his hips on yours, grunted, then tumbled on by your side. You and the air and the room pulsed slowly.

You opened your eyes again and turned to see his face, as he ran his hand across your jawline and your cheeks. In a calm numbness you let his hand move your chin towards him. The light from the street crept inside and through the curtain of his hair a ghost solidified so densely that it pushed you out of your material being, to a space you’re always in but struggle to ignore, fast and silent like a gas leak that kills whole families in their sleep. Whatever pleasure you felt was deleted instantly. You felt your body kidnap itself and holding back a panicked scream you pushed him off, got up, dressed then leapt for the door. Every action took too long. He sat in bed naked, calling you, confused. Running down the stairs into the basement, the music blared and beat you with the strobelights. You smashed into the crowd and tried to fade away. You felt like throwing up. His face looked exactly like Julian's.

Fuck. You stop walking, the smell of saltwater breezing by. You hoped to escape the thought but it circled out and busted through. The space between your eyebrows is twitching. The fog and your clothes feel made of lead. Eliza’s is close, but the will to walk is gone. You slowly lower yourself the sidewalk, and sit. Julian was what, seventeen? Yeah, and you’d turned eighteen a month before. You’d been here a little while. Eliza and her girlfriend were nice. You hadn’t seen her since she left for college on your twelfth, until she came back three years later. After graduation she had settled in Mass. You were a kid then. Didn’t think you’d follow her to Amherst after high-school, and a couple years later to her new apartment in Southie. She helped you get your own place in Mission Hill too. She was, still is good to you, took you outta mom’s house, gave you new scenery. Somewhere in there Julian came about.

People called you pretty, and you’d read and listened to enough things to conversate. Good at playing human so people talked to you, invited you, and boys always said they liked you and told you all the things about your face you never noticed. In your mind it was an oval washed out, no features, static mannequin. But you went along, observing yourself from a drone camera, watching. Mouth moved but no words were yours. Never see a boy more than once in Atlanta; it was too easy, and carried too much. You weren’t a virgin but you never let them have you. To start with, you never even had yourself.

Even then, you only let them in you because of boredom, and it was always at a distance. You don’t remember any face you’ve ever kissed. Mom loomed over you, Southern boys were offputting. The whole of living was offputting. But Julian, in Boston, had you, because you wanted him to. You urged him on from there, because for the first time, you figured something out. The feel of humans undressed, attacking each other in that weird nowhere state. Sex has never been good to you. It feels good, but it isn’t good. Still, you do it. You figured, in sex, you can focus. It narrows existing down to the body and nothing else. All the blur, the confusion, all the heady stuff gets wiped away like misted glass pressed under heat. And beneath it a malformed box full of cranks and pulleys crawls out, and its ugly as hell, but its tangible enough that it doesn’t scare you.

Julian wanted you, convinced you. On his eyes, in his veins, the hand stroking your hair, his cock, the pressure on your pubic bone, the noise of skin, saliva, incoherent moaning, bullshit, groaning, cumming. Then his face, his honesty. The theory is people never lie when they feel good. Julian, certainly, couldn’t. What they do, what they ask for will always tell you who they are. His big nose, pouty lips, wet hair draping across the neck. Something in it let you in, and he knew. Theory is flawed, the precise details aren’t there, but you knew something was off, and it felt like you knew it. You both did. His eyes were so worn. His soul was exhausted. He hugged you for a long while, both tired, floating in the orange afterglow of evening, air compression easing your beings into a single, pulsing body.

So, Julian took you on a stoned and drunken night to a bridge running over a drying, dirty river somewhere in Southie. It stunk of shit and low tide, the plastic summer aura scalding you both, even at night time, near the ocean. Julian took you tenderly underneath the bridge, spray cans’ metal clink bouncing in your backpack. Somewhere in there, beneath the underpass, you wrote something on a wall, and Julian said it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. The smell of thinner mixed with dust and dampness seemed sweet, kind, intrusive but apologetic. You emerged from the bridge, the world still moonlit blue, ocean waves beating on the filthy sand, your mouths and tongues tripping on each other.