"And in The Frosty Darkness"
by
Timothy Stillman
I do not like the me I have become. That is what inane psychologists say on inane TV talk shows. But I do not like the me I have become, all the same. I am on fire for him. But ice fire. The kind you plunge your hands into, ice water, freeze, fingers dispersing electricity out into the world, emptying themselves, numb, other worldly, out of the body, the need, the ache, to have feeling back in them, the fear of the pain that will happen when that dream turns real.
He sleeps nestled in my arms on our warm bed in our cold bedroom and the snow rushes past our small window opposite me like angels trying to escape ice daggers. I am lying straight as an arrow. He sleeps in the shadow of me, in the crook of my right arm, he curled up like a moment that has peace in it. He has much peace now. I crave peace. I make love to him. Alone. I eat with him. Alone. I sleep with him and my arm, my side, my mouth as I lean it down now and kiss the top of his head, all tell me he is there. But I am alone. With him.
Sex is a blue dagger dripping blur that slices into the night winter sable sky. I can almost hear the slicing of it cutting. The scream after it is sliced, and the stars in it fall and fall, and are only the love shining in my eyes as I look at his shadow. I am shadow too. Our cabin in Maine. Top the mountain. Snow and permafrost. Ashes in the fireplace out there in the living room. The cold bedroom. But the warm bed. The blankets around us, over us. The pool of moon sliding down the wall from the window. I do not think the night has ever been more peaceful. I do not think I can be loved enough ever again. Not the way he has loved me.
We move in syncopation. We are dancers on opposite sides of the mirror. Like the Harpo Marx routine with Lucille Ball in an "I Love Lucy" episode, where she pretends to be the reflection he is trying to trick into showing as a fake--that she is different than him, that she is having him on. British phrase, having him on. That is where I came from. Come from marshes and heaths and tinker toy postcard pretty villages to this tundra. To this place where the stars are dancing in my mind so fast I think it shall shut down like a room that has no walls and has finally become ashamed of itself, too gaudy and too huge and too small and too mousy at the same time.
We had sex an hour. Two hours. Ago. We went at each other like dervishes, like tornadoes trying to get inside the tin cans of each other's heart and mind and body. We dangled and swayed and dipped and formulated and entangled and denied and enraptured and exploded and then we settled down to being what he is. What I am. Which is what scares me. For he is trying to kill me. Not literally. But by being what I want. By being on the other side of the glass and on putting me on this side of it at the same time. The Looking Glass War comes to mind.
Only it is no war. It is a piece of time that envelopes me and pushes me out. You would think I did something to him that had hurt him so badly that he has spent his life begging me to forgive him for it. He is hot in my arms. He seems not a man but a little baby all burning up with fever. All feverish with pain and broken glass windows inside him. And to be made love to by a broken man, my hearing the crunch of glass inside him. To feel his eyes on me as he is on top and is stroking me with silken hand. To feel his eyes peer into mine, to focus other depths in me that I did not know I had--Christ, I pull away from him now, and he stays curled up. Dreaming. He knows I will look out for him. Pace the night for him. Keep guard. For him. Protect him.
I wish to do that. But I am keeping guard for him against me. And he does not want me to do that. He wants me to be his lover and he knows I am here and he does not believe I am here at the very same time. We are snug in our hollowness. We are snug in our naked desires that are immediately gratified. I think I can hear the snow fall. The snow here is heavy and bleak. It seems like the flakes are living things cutting through the leaden sky and hurling toward earth. Away from the devil prongs in the sky above. But where is the devil and what are the angels? I would die away from him. He is kind. He is so apologetic. He is hinged into a soft delicacy like a flower that has madly and for no reason known grown with such addled limp strength, through the white mantle outside and has decided to make its day in the freezing and below freezing night weather.
I am the night. I am life to him. He has never asked a thing of me. He need not. He is so monstrously selfish in that way. He has asked only that I hold him at night. When the bad dreams come. When he can feel me next to him. Even though asleep, he can feel me. And can be reassured and can swim from the waters deep and strangling of nightmare to the waters soft and cool and fragrant of spring just up ahead, just cropping round the rock formations of winter gloom, with no seaweed to muddle through, to tangle ourselves up in. When he touches out to me. When we are together like we were hours ago. Three. Or four. Before the fireplace. On the soft rug on the hardwood floor. The flames banking, scuttling like red and gold fall leaves come to tell us they have not forgotten. And we were spiked for each other. We wept into each other the sexuality, the sensuality from the very bones of us. Yet he did not touch me. He did so by not doing so. I am glass. Fragile, according to him. In my intent taking care of him, he thinks it is the other way round.
When I kiss his lips, he pretends to be kissing mine. When he holds me, I am holding him though my body is numb and I cannot feel him. I have pulled completely away from him, though I can never really do that, and I sit now on the edge of the bed, covers thrown off me, feeling his heat still nearby nonetheless. He pretends I am here. He pretends he can touch me. He can feel me but he can only feel the illusion I am. We have gone round and round about it. As though it is an Alice Through the Looking Glass sort of world that is full of doggerel and silly faces and rhymes to meters that only Mad Hatters can understand. He is the blue star of my world. I am the golden sun of his. We are summed into each other and we are nothing but apart.
Is it a subtle torture? Has he decided to work on me for some reason that was never there and to bind me to him while he is just a man hauling a mirror on his back up a steep mountain grade? We have talked. Our words move out of our mouths like words in balloons from comic strips and comic books. But there are no bright colors for us. We are, the world we inhabit is, black and white. Film noir. We do not practice what the denizens of film noir do. We do not practice deceit. We do not practice murder. He is too delicate to commit murder. He is frail. His penis is long like a pistil of a flower that has grown long, tubular, the idea of a penis more than the actuality in itself, in the dirt of too many summers and learns nothing but to be pale white and veined worm, and torpid and loose and lost. He is a man no sun has warmed. But I have lived in England, land of rains and hard people and hard scrabble, and knowing the knives that lie just under the polite little bubble captions of frothy banter and upturned accents. I have spent time in the South of France, warm and free and naked on the beaches, and bold. Haven't I? Memory fails me so these days. I have been wined and dined by no one. I played it hard. To get back to him. I curled up people and stepped on them and used them and brutalized them to get rid of him, to get here. Why can't he appreciate that? Or is that another thought his wizened mind has placed in mine? No, the truth of it is still there. Doesn't he see that? Isn't there some answer on the phone to his head that I AM HERE?
I kicked the Strand to ribbons. I choked the Marleybone all its cobble stoned lanes. I pissed on Camden Town. I want him to tell me what is the matter, I did these things, doesn't that count, kicking asunder my ancestors' bones and birthrights from here to kingdom come for this ungrateful--no, I put my hands to my naked lap. I shiver in the cold. I shiver with a memory of cold. I will not let him make me fight myself. He is water and acid and he always helps me out into the winter snow when we go walking, so attentive, so caring, he, when we make our snowman, when he sees me as short and warm and brown and, compared to him, so very alive, and filled with a brown crisp warm cracker sun inside me and this just stuns him. Blinds him with my radiance.
This just sneaks down the stairs of him and hops into the boiler in his stomach, the boiler that does not work, that freezes him colder and colder. So I have to hold him. I have to press him on his back into the snow and work a snowball all frozen and bizarre white and packed with little shushing worms of winter inside as I rub it into his unlaughing face. It is so good to see him unlaugh. I take it for its opposite. I have to or go mad. It is so good for his arms to go round me then as we lie in the swirly whirly white winter world and he holds on tight. And I cannot feel. I cannot feel anything. I can not feel even my own penis. Here, now, as I sit on the bed by him. It is in my hand, the light and shadow tell my eyes what I see. I feel a certain weight of it. I feel my balls heavy. There is--something there. But it does not seem to belong to me. I feel but do not feel. I do not like thee Dr. Fell.
I feel as though I am flying away. Somehow or other he has put the shadows in me and is in the process of taking the sun, wan glowing red of some memory of sommerset, of me into himself. But he doesn't know this. He is like a child. I am like a parent. I am like a child. He is like another child who does not want me to guess even that part of the secret. So we have to lie to each other. We do practice deceit, not to harm the other, at least I don't think intentionally, but deceit that allows us to stay together. Because the world is round and the days are numbered and I want him and I want him to see I am not glass. Our lies are our existences. Our truths he must someday see. That I am not breakable. I want him to see that I can be done all sorts of love damage and will not crash and crush under his force. For his force is weak. He gets paler every day. His hair is gray and long to his shoulders. His chest is bird thin. He coughs deeply within sometimes for hours. I fear for him. I fear for him because should something happen to him what would I do? And there is my selfishness. For anyone to see. Dammit, he is selfish too. He must admit that. He does admit that. Endlessly. Incessantly. I am nothing. Without him I am less than nothing. Suddenly nothing seems like something of solubility and dimension.
"Forgive me, for I am so selfish," he will say to me often, and I will hold him on the couch or the floor or the bed and I will say, "no, you're not." And he will want me to say yes he is, but that is the gambit. And I will not bite on that bait. But if I do, then I whirl and swirl down into his paranoia, down into his swirlpool of disbelief that I could love him, that I could put on many leagued boots and step across the Atlantic from the X there to the Xasperated him here. He wants to hurt me and he loves me and he kills me and I love him and I can't hurt him because when we are wrapped in each other's arms, when his mouth is hard on my ghost of nipples, on my ghost of me, when I feel the grating scratch of his salt and pepper bearded chin against my bare flesh, the feel that is more a guess on my part. I feel he is kneeling to me, praying to me, and in that way is putting me out of existence, erasing me like I have never been here at all. Not killing. Denying. Taking me back to the birth canal from which I came and dispensing of me altogether. Turning me pruning me whittling me zooming me back to a zygote, and then from that to lesser days, latter saint, then a cell, then a sperm and an egg that never met, and then eternity that cannot accept me because I came in the wrong door and it denies me.
Because I never was.
I tried to tell him that tonight as we ate the venison I hunt in the form of once living breathing massive strong noble animals. I tried to tell him as we ate from our plates of bone on plain wood table. I tried to make him see the injustice of getting me off by offing me in his primal pleasure. But look at him, meek and leaking tears and blood all over the place, look at him moony eyeing me, and I feel like the biggest git on the planet. I feel as though the planets all round me have swivel hips sitting on swivel chairs that have castors on them and they roll hither and yon and the whole goddam universe is swimming dizzily coming apart and out of control and falling all over the place like a pocket with brass balls in them come alive and going haywire and knocking against each other, shooting craps with themselves, and we the billiard balls going down into each other's dark corridors never to be resurrected again.
He talks about the beach sometimes. He might be now as he sleeps. For he is mumbling. Something of a constant when he sleeps. It is like breadcrumbs of his dreams that he is floating on the air in front of us between us beside us. Maddening in that I hear them, almost see them, almost touch them, but not quite able to, can almost follow them along and see where the gingerbread house is to which they will lead me. He talks about the beach often, as though he is talking to someone else, as though he is not talking to me, but looking to, directing his voice to someone over my left shoulder, or my right, and I have to move a small few inches into the face of whoever he is talking to and show him it is my own face he is seeing. He makes me like a ball of silver mercury. He makes me roll and tremble on a slide and I can't stay in me. I am constantly bouncing out of me. Going somewhere where his image of me is but where I am not. The intensity of all this, the huge mandibles and heavy thick curtains of sexuality of all of this is maddening cause I can't reach out and touch it, dammit. And how soon will his image of me be the real me, and because I have stayed where I was, I will suddenly be nothing at all, but an observer of him and of me. I put a hand to his bare left shoulder. He is hot. Burning up. At night he gets like this. A kiln fire. A stove that is too hot to touch. When awake, he is icy, almost as icy as I am. And he mumbles now. A live wire is inside him. Stringing him. Strangling him. Indicting him for the power he does not know he has.
He talks about the beach and winter warm and snowy parasols carried mushroom topped by perfectly angled arms over stout women's heads with veils from their hats over their faces, who are walking single file along the snow flecked sand, wind blustery and brash, and prattling on as though there has been a funeral pyre, as though a dead loved one has been released into the sea and they are counting graces and reading psalms from the little black Bibles in their old wrinkled granny hands covered by immaculate white gloves with little yellow roses at the tip of each knuckle joint. Is it me who is out there on the raft, heading toward oblivion? Has he seen the future and does he enter me as though into a door that is his salvation or his damnation? Such thoughts jumble together, and three or four or five hours ago as I was on my knees and he was inside me, that long trout of a penis in me, his hands on my shoulder blades, his left hand pulling at my erection, did he see me in the firelight dying scudding out? Me as an igloo feeling nothing as he felt nothing but the same desperation? Did he want to be in my body warm and tight and elastic and caught in the secrets of my muscles and my sagacious sphincter muscles that worked on him without my knowing it? Did he put his right hand to my buttocks to feel me there, to rub there, to worship there, because I was there or because he was remembering how it was with him and me?, or how he wished we had been, and that wish cutting hollows into him? As though I had been a casual take it or leave it friend, placid, unsexual with him, as though I left him, without a thought of him again, and told him never to try to find me, and the sun will come up soon and the fingernails of mine need paring and I will make him a breakfast of eggs and toast and bacon.
If I am dead, if I am a memory, if I am a wish, if I am the hoariest of all the old clichés, a dream, and I am not a dream I will be bound, then I will prove to him that friends can get over things. That things can be taken the wrong way. That he has made a fool of himself overdramatizing all of this. I used to gentle him out of things with laughter. That was where he got mixed up about it all. This was no Romeo and Juliet to the death business.
And tell him: That snow is for running on and running hand in hand gloved of course to keep the frost out and snow is for running over and together just as much as snow is for hiding in and digging tunnels in dark and deep and sloe eyes and slow hearts and our hearts together as he came in me hours ago or days ago. Cheep silver glass balls like Christmas ornaments beneath our penises instead of human man balls, warm and heavy and tight and good feeling. But like we are now, it's as though we are Christmas trees come stupidly, fumblingly hideously to life, as though he was practicing being a joke. No, not practicing it at all, but doing a damned fine job of it. Or all of this to him a joke. And me being the dramatic one. Being the butt of it. He has never let me penetrate him. Because he wants all of him inside me alone. Alone. And there, in me, to what? To squirt seltzer into me instead of cum? To pop a pig bladder at my butt at the most inappropriate time possible in the sex act so it sounds like something rude and bodily and shameful? I am British after all. I do have my standards of propriety even though I love Monty Python with the rest of them. Even though we're really all Monty ourselves, though perhaps we have escaped the curse of being Benny Hill.
He is making me a joke. All of which I am taking so terribly, so stupidly, seriously. Did I crawl from the ocean to the beach for him, am I a beached birth, and did he take me in cause he could use a few laughs? Did I laugh at him? Did I say it's over, forget it, use some dignity man for god's sake, and then did I laugh at him and make fun of him and tell all my mates about this idiot moony Yank bloke? Or has he planted these vague snaky smoke memories in my mind just out of reach as are his dream bread crusts from me just out of reach? I feel myself hard now. My uncut Old World European dick sticking out of my hands and from my lap and I wish I had my crummy boxers on because it's embarrassing, things used to turn me on, I'm being had, used, what I once loved, all of it, now they only remind me of him, my worlds have become tainted stained with the fingerprints of this man. How horribly unfair. How dare he? How terribly unforgivable that he should do such an unkind thing to me. Me. Who has given him the best years of my life. I work like a Trojan dammit. Pun intended.
I say I love him. That pushes him away. He comes to me. That pushes me away. We come together. We might as well be on opposite sides of the world. Which perhaps we are. Maybe he's got some psychic, paid lots of money, or maybe only a little money, the thought of the psychic giving a cut rate fee when it's just me, is insulting and makes me feel bad. Maybe I'm in my home in London or Bristol or somewhere and I am really a mirror image of someone who does not know me or has only a pocket memory gleam of glimmer of me and he has tracked me down and traced me, and I am acting my part out in front of a looking glass in my flat, pretending, not pretending, but tricked into thinking the image of me in it is really him, and we are doing the Harpo mirror routine for real. As if I needed to look into a mirror to see me. As though I couldn't get away from my own savage selfishness that cuts anyone dead when I think they are dead weight. But where does he get to be so prim and proper? He's over there somewhere in Maine or wherever and he's watching his own reflection in silver backing, pretending it's me. Talk about selfish, for God's sake.
I find myself rubbing my erection. I pull back the foreskin. I feel the tightness. I feel it so much it hurts. It wants to hurt. It wants to feel. It can. It can't. I can't. Is this another part of the joke, the rubber bands round the ball, the Chinese boxes within Chinese boxes? That I can only feel with my dick and ass, that I have no other way of feeling and so he's made me numb? Mean, isn't he? Shot me with Novocain with his dick each night when I sleep fitfully when I think he is asleep, at the cusp of dark sun gleaming in the offing morning, and this is an elaborate hoax, with stage directions, all down to the last second planned. Some day I will fall across the scripts he has been acting out. So I can play too. Love should not be a game. How wrong. And I love him. And he loves me a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck. And everything can be explained away like in an Agatha Christie? Well she got into unexplainable ghost stories too along the way don't forget. As well as mathematical solvings of cubed problems where the shadows offered solutions when she showed her Poirot or Miss Marple deductive logical light of reason into their musty dusty corners.
But I can no longer feel with my dick or my ass hole, so I guess that is a joke too. I guess the whole damned thing is. He stirs. He opens his eyes. In those eyes the shadows accumulate. It is like looking into a pool down way deep and dark and fearing and scared child and filled with an inarticulate love, an inarticulate boldness and awakening spring flowers under the black mantle of night cowl, and a gentlessness that is harrowing. He sleepily gawkily puts his arms out to me and I lie down beside him. We are thin pointless pointed porpoises united in the bed of our salvation, in the bed of our assignation, in the bed of our retirement and resignation. We hold our arms around each other and he is as frightened, as baffled, as lonely, as single, as needful, as here right now in the present, I am, and he is a leaf falling into eternity with me and without me. DON'T LEAVE ME, I want to cry out. We are glasses of frigid water joined. We are mirror frozen lakes and ice and snow and love and death and hate and dependency and a conundrum, and we are in time and out of time and out of our minds and the sanest persons on the planet--are we somehow the only persons on the planet that has been annihilated save for us?--and we tumble to teach other like heather that had gotten brave and had decided to be sentient as best it can while the winter frost covers us, until spring when it can have life again. But is the winter frost our life? If there ever is a spring, will we melt and not be? I burrow under the covers and I take his penis in my mouth. He says he feels me. I say I feel him. We both lie.
My tongue is the new budding clumsy tongue of a Christmas tree that does not know how to use it. His erection is the new budding clumsy human erection of another Christmas tree that does not know how to use it. I am a frost cave. He is the frost man come to live in it. We trust each other. We can never trust each other. If we do trust each other, we shall surely die. We each know about trust and what that awful word does to a person when it is twisted and torn and thrown back in your face. We know the darkness of the soul it creates. We know it is the worst of murders. It is the most monstrous thing one human being can do to another. It cuts whole worlds out of a person. It runs down deep in the blood and takes over the person like a parasite, a leech of the lowest circle of hell is suddenly in control. As you start to like it. Want it. Nurture and get used to it. And dwell within it. A cradle everybody is at home in. Absolutely everybody. Done to. And done by. God, the massive enormity soul shattering universe toilet bowl flushing madness of it.
And it wends through me like a dark road trying to find home. And it wends through him like a dark road trying to find home. And there is something--odd--as I suck him--something I can't quite place but is so hauntingly familiar. Different as I feel the black well pain that betrayal can cause, as I--somehow--admit it, as I hadn't before, as I suddenly see the levels of betrayal in me, as he sees the levels of betrayal in him. We, each in the other, as we are holding down to the rungs of ourselves that become maybe sometime soon or far the rungs of each other, so we can cling to other than ourselves alone. As in my mouth I feel his, just the first salty fleshy hard soft taste of him--and then gone, then numb again, but there a moment, a second, as I pull the covers from over me and with him still in my mouth I look to his eyes, his face looking down at me that has felt the expression, any expression will do, for a moment, a second, a wisp of a wish, an idea, an admission. But then gone. Then perma frost over us again. For some time to come. But not forever as before was forever.
As I look up at him and he does something I don't ever think I have seen him do before. As the bed grows cold and we grow colder, in the room where the dull gray light of morning has begun to sneak the night a bit further off stage, heading to the wings, he almost began to, then lost, he almost began to--happily maybe even a sad melancholy shadow of lovingly--like a child almost, testing, tentatively lurking and holding in, the memory of a sunny smile. But no. I will not think it now. For bad luck I believe in. Good luck too perhaps. Though I will deny that too. We commingled and he came in my mouth and I felt nothing, and swallowed the memory of a swallow, a memory not so deeply ghostly and far away from us as before, and we lay in the other's arms and we were cold and freezing and snowmen and he was no longer hot and burning up. We warmed each other. In a way. And we held like that for some time after the watery bleary eyed sun came up. Perhaps we even dozed together. I not having to protect him for a minute or two.
Then we got up, dressed, and, beginning to act like two different people (is that good or bad?, I fear, and I do not know how I feel about it, that itself is like being cut off, alone, it shivers me, and not the memory of a shiver either, the real thing) and I, we, went in search of something to eat. Odd thing, hunger. Sometimes it can feel so good. When it's not been around for a time. And is more than an empty hollow duty to eat, to sleep, give it time. Feel the blood back in fingers. A little on each, steady as she goes. So maybe this time, the pain won't be so lacerating. For either of us.
If we dare ever allow ourselves to trust for one single solitary second again. Do we dare even?
the end