Fugue States Part I

Do You Feel Who I Am?

"Well, let me know if you need anything."

"Thanks"

"I mean it, anything at all. You know?" Thom said with a firm hand to the shoulder. "Your mother will be missed."

"I think I'm going to hurl." Cherry said with a pallid face pressing against her stomach.

"She's usually better at handling her alcohol than this."

"It was the tequila, shut up." she retorted.

"I told you." he chided.

I knew what was coming. It had been weighing heavily on me all night. It was the accumulated effects of a time bomb that had been waiting to detonate and there wasn't going to be any help despite Thom's or anyone's empty assurances. I knew it even before the key froze in the lock, before I tried a spare and laughed with a stilted attempt at keeping appearances and checked my accounts with the succession of recorded voices saying pending and stood isolatory under the breezeway and it's polished brass veneer with the hiss of nearby traffic as Cherry watered the hedges with her vomit.

Shock faded to acquiescence then to numbness as hours and weeks turned into months, months into a year. I lived the later part of the year in a decaying marble and brick building with blacked-out windows; warehouses were rented by the square foot on the first and second floors; the rest was abandoned. Some nights I would awaken to the sound of a door slamming in the hall. Some nights I would see an apparition of someone sitting a few feet from me watching me sleep. For months I would pass it off as my imagination and say "Oh, it's you." and tell a joke. I rationalized the sounds in the hall by thinking they where from people that had found a way into the building and I'd feel around for the steel pipe I kept near me remembering scenes from movies or techniques I'd seen in weapon training manuals thinking of them in terms of real world situations. I heard a rustling sound and said "You again? What do you call acid with a bad temper?" and the sound subsided until it was barely audible and sounded like a foot pushing a newspaper along the floor for the simple intention of annoying me. "Acid with a bad temper what do you call it? a-min-o-acid." I jumped to my feet as I heard laughter and looked at the doorway. "That's so stupid." A voice came from behind me and I spun around with the pipe in my hands.

People gathered late in the night in an Industrial room the size of an airplane hanger; invitation only, some gazing introspectively at the nihilistic concept art in the open area and in the freshly erected halls, some spilling onto the dance floor. Projected images landed on unconducive surfaces. Lasers and neon splashed and meandered. I moved to the pendulum of rebellion and freedom and unquenchable thirst for life.

"I want you." a voice came from behind me.

"Love me." another one from behind her.

"You turn me the fuck on." another one coming from the side, warm against my skin . It was Cherry. She was wearing leather and a ripped euro-goth t-shirt and stared unflinchingly into my eyes.

"What about Thom?" I shouted over the kick drum.

"What?"

"What about Thom?" I shouted again with my mouth on her ear.

"Broke up!" she shouted back and put her number in my phone.

Cool air flowed under the door jambs from the open leaded glass entrance to the balcony of her apartment. Folded twenty dollar bills were left on the table by the door for me to take on the way out and she was shedding pieces of clothing and walking backwards to her room enticing me. She knelt down and looked up showing me the inside of her mouth with her tongue and her uvula unbuttoning my jeans and putting my cock in it and pulling it out again with a loud suction sound, jacking it and putting it back in again. I pulled my jeans down getting one leg free and stepped on the bottom of the other with the side of my foot struggling to keep my balance. She positioned herself on the bed as I got the other one free and leaned forward between her legs. My thoughts went back to Rumi in the bath at the hotel. Her foot was in my hand as I rubbed her big toe. I pressed my fingernail into it leaving a slowly reconstituting sliver of white and wondered if I should draw blood.