Will Baer - Hell's Half Acre

I look around the room and everyone is sky high.

Jude is crouched on the floor near the wall, twisting her hair into pigtails. Her movements are feverish and precise and I know she knows that I think pigtails are terribly sexy. I am sitting on the sofa, in a low humpbacked position that makes me feel like a troll. Miller is like a dead man. He lies on the floor at my feet, his head cradled in his hands. Molly is on the far side of the room. She is dancing, I think. Molly is floating on air. But there is no music. I am becoming painfully aware of the fact that there is no music in this house, which is just creepy. I am about to say so when Miller beats me to it.

There’s no music, says Miller. Because I want you to get used to functioning without.

What do you mean?

Molly will play the cello over the credit sequences but otherwise there will be no music on the set, no music in the film.

Why not? says Jude.

Because music manipulates the emotions.

And what about silence, I say. Does it not manipulate the emotions?

Maybe. But it’s more organic, says Miller. And I want it to be creepy.

I smile and smile like a madman because I’m tired of talking to John Ransom Miller. I’m tired of listening to him think out loud. I’m tired of him reading my mind like it’s nothing and I am fast coming to the conclusion that, like cab drivers who secretly want to be writers, lawyers who want to be filmmakers are often dangerous assholes.

Excuse me, I say.

What?

Where is the bathroom? I desperately need a bath.

Yes, he says. You do need a bath. But I thought we might have a conversation.

About what?

About sleeping arrangements. About personal philosophies.

The fuck do you mean.

Monogamy, he says.

I reach for the gin. I change my mind and reach for the plate of coke. Monogamy, I say. What about it?

Do you believe in it?

I look at Jude. She’s crouched against the wall, angry. Her arms and legs are pulled close to her body and she looks like a beautiful, yellow spider monkey. I’m not sure what she’s angry about. But I see her as a whole, a composite. I see her ankles and feet. I see the tiny white scar on her left knee, the big scar over her eye that she hates. I see the long shadows of muscle in her bent thighs. I see her dark green torso and I suppose I regard her body as mine in some way, simply because I know it so well. Every curve and hollow. I close my eyes and I can see her fingers, furiously twisting in her hair. I see her face, the long sharp cheekbones. Her lush wet lips. Her dark yellow eyes. I don’t particularly want her to fuck another but I know she will if she wants to and ultimately I don’t care if she does. She is not mine but on some molecular level I feel like I am hers, if only temporarily.

No, I say. I don’t necessarily believe in monogamy.

Excellent, he says.

I like Miller, really. He’s an interesting person. But he is beginning to irritate me. I want him to stop using that word. Excellent. It bugs the fuck out of me.

What about you? he says, looking at Molly.

She stares at him and I get the feeling they have had this discussion before.

Yes, she says. I believe. You know I do. I want to believe and I want love to work. I may be romantic and stupid and puritan but I believe that monogamy is possible. And I expect to find it, with the right person. I am with you now, but I don’t want to be yours.

That’s enough, says Miller. That’s more than enough.

He turns to Jude but she withers him with such a look that even I feel pale.

Never mind, says Miller.

Where is the bathroom? I say.

The nearest one is upstairs. Down the hall to the left.

THE UPSTAIRS BATHROOM IS LARGE and relatively spartan with a black-and-white tile floor and a white clawfoot bathtub. Toilet and sink and shower with smoky glass door. Black towels. The closet is empty. In the shower are expensive shampoo and conditioner and black soap. I have brought my glass of gin with me. I am smoking a cigarette. I drop my clothes to the floor and consider the bath. I don’t much like baths. I don’t care to sit in a pool of my own filth but I have always loved the clawfoot bathtub, as an abstract concept. And it reminds me of my mother’s house. I stand there, naked and smoking. It is everything I can do to stop from looking in the mirror. The coke is causing a nasty rattle in my skull and I don’t want to descend into any prolonged examination of self. I have an unfortunate tendency to cut my hair in these situations, to somehow mangle myself. There are knife scars on my arms and chest that no one can account for. I drop my cigarette into the toilet and crank up the hot water in the shower.

I scrub myself fiercely with the black soap. It smells of opium, of wormwood. There is something visually disturbing about black soap and somehow this appeals to me. I wash my genitals with curious fanaticism. I let the water pound down on my head. I am obliterated by needles and I am slowly disappearing into the smoke of irrational shame. If not for the night in jail and a fear of parasites, I’d probably not bother to wash my hair. The shampoo is also black. I dump a small amount of it into my hand and drag it through my hair, then rinse. I sink into the corner of the shower with glass of gin in hand and breathe the hot steam.

Jude opens the shower door and stands there, looking at me. I am crouched in the corner, rubbery and wet and dizzy from the heat and under her gaze I feel like Gollum with my empty glass in hand. I have lost my precious. I want to ask her a riddle. What is the shadow with green skin that is not man and not woman, the shadow that stretches before us and becomes another.

It’s not fair to ask us what it’s got in its nasty pockets.

Jude still wears that green dress.

She mutters something that I can’t hear.

What? I say.

She smiles and steps into the shower with me. The water crashes down on us and soon her hair is wet and hanging like black ribbons in her face. Her dress is soaked, a dark green secondary flesh. Jude kisses my neck, my chest and belly. I am thirsty and I want her. I reach for her but I am clumsy and my muscles are atrophied from the heat. I am briefly detached from my arms and legs. I want to drink her, to eat her wet eucalyptus skin. I want to rip the green dress from her body but I am floating somewhere above her and I have a magnificent almost distended erection. I pull Jude close to me and lift the wet green dress up over her waist and slip inside her and she is so wet and my thoughts are so splintered that it is hard to say where either of us begins or ends but soon the noise of our breathing is like the rattle and hiss of new fire.

I read somewhere that more than half of all household accidents take place in the shower and I am not surprised. It’s very slippery and dangerous in there, what with your arms and legs wet and twisted into rubber doll parts that don’t quite belong to you. Your mouth is full of hair and you can’t breathe and you can’t talk and within five minutes I come inside her, which is exactly what she wanted. Because I have been unable to come lately. And because it makes her feel pretty when I come inside her, or so she says.

Are you joking? I say.

But she just smiles at me. If I were her shrink, I would probably say it has to do with power. I would speculate that she was anorexic as a girl. I would root around in her skull for some barely remembered incident of childhood fondling or worse. But I’m not her shrink and wouldn’t want to be. I would rather eat my own eyeballs with a spoon than wiggle around in that head for money. As for birth control, well. Jude told me a few nights ago, in bed at the King James, that she doesn’t bother about birth control anymore because she had her tubes tangled sometime after the unwanted pregnancy in New Orleans.