Greg Baxter - A Preparation for Death

We’d been at the Lord Edward for an hour when Olivia arrived. She had sent me a few texts in response to my invitation, aloofly intimating she might pop along, at some time, if she got bored of what she was doing, and wasn’t too tired to go home, but she’d see. John and I were outside, smoking. We saw her only when she stopped in front of us. She walks so softly, arms always crossed, shoulders never rising or falling, that she seems to stand still. She wore heels — she wears heels to run across the street for bagels on Saturday mornings — and dark blue jeans.

Hey, I said.

Hey, she said, as though I had introduced myself at a nightclub, and she was not interested.

The three of us sat at the bar, and John and Olivia did most of the talking. I was wiped out, drunk, and had nothing clever to say — I just wanted to lie Olivia in front of me on the bar and go down on her, with everybody watching, her legs buckled over my shoulders, her arms knocking down glasses. Once I tried to speak and mispronounced music . They asked me to repeat myself, and I made the same mistake: moosic, moosic . I went for cigarettes to keep from drinking, but smoking just made me worse. Parts of me grew very heavy, such as my tongue, my brain, my eyelids, and my lungs. Olivia asked John if he was a writer, and his answer was to groan and say he’d done my classes. How’s it going, she asked him. Not well to be absolutely fucking honest with you, he said.

Olivia went to the toilet at one point and John said, Fuck me, horse, she’s good-looking.

It was the truth, and I knew she had men falling at her feet. But she didn’t trust men. Once, while lying in bed after sex, I put my arms around her and she said, That’s not necessary.

John left at ten, and Olivia and I decided to go to Wexford Street. The taxi took a long time, in heavy traffic, going up George’s Street. Every laneway seemed to be occupied by a thousand bodies. The street between Hogan’s and the Market Bar was impassable with people smoking. Two girls screamed insults at each other outside the Capital Bar. I was happy to be in this city, but not of it. If it had hit a wall then, it would have smashed entirely to chalk and glass and blood. I tried to hold Olivia’s hand. She asked, What are you doing?

We went to Solas, which was the only place that didn’t have a cover charge and wasn’t impossibly packed. I’d drunk myself a little sober — this always strikes me as uncanny — so I was chatty again. We stood by the bar and I watched her in the mirror. Barbarically I tried to kiss her. I had my hands up the back of her shirt, and she wiggled away now and then. Another couple kissed beside us. Don’t you see how disgusting that is? she asked, but after another vodka my hands were in her back pockets, and she was giving in. I lifted her onto her tiptoes and I kissed her open-mouthed and roughly, and she put her hand on the back of my head. The bar didn’t notice. People ordered drinks beside us. When somebody knocked into her, she dropped out of my arms abruptly. She looked at me as though she might slap me and said: You can come home with me, but no sex.

No sex?

I can’t.

Out of action?

Out of action.

I thought I’d say, I’ll fuck you anyway. It was the truth. I like the bloody aftermath. But I caught myself.

I want to go back with you, I said.

It’s probably pointless.

We went out to the street. It must have been around midnight, and I felt as though I might fall asleep standing up. There were free taxis everywhere, which saddened me a little, since I had hoped to kiss outdoors for a few minutes, and soak up the last bit of atmosphere — there would be none of it in Texas.

In her flat I wanted to make myself something greasy to eat, but her fridge and all her cupboards were empty, as usual. Every week she planned a big food shop, and every week something got in the way. I poured myself a glass of tap water. She sat on her couch, curled up in one corner. I sat on the other side and we listened to music on the radio. I yawned and checked the time on my phone.

What’s wrong with you? she asked.

Huh?

You’re usually on top of me by now.

But you sat so far away.

I always do.

I pulled her on top of me and looked at her for a while. She has big eyes and dark eyelashes. When I started trying to undress her, she crawled between my legs and blew me to the background noise of house or trance or industrial — I simply don’t know what these terms mean, I only pretend to — and I pulled her hair back to watch my dick screw in and out of her mouth. I became the whole city, and I turned to chalk and glass and blood. Olivia was getting tired and out of breath. Little droplets of saliva and ejaculate, from many near orgasms, leaked out of her lips. When she stopped to catch her breath, I jerked myself off to come. She watched patiently, breathing. But I couldn’t. I was too tired. I told her to put a towel down and we’d fuck.

Disgusting, she said.

Finally we lay down on the couch and kissed. I closed my eyes and opened them.

You’re awake, she said.

What time is it?

Just past three.

I fell asleep?

While kissing me.

She was in the same spot, lying beside me with her left arm bent helplessly between us. The radio was still playing, but it wasn’t loud anymore; it was something like jazz and very bad.

Sorry, I said.

It was romantic, she said. The snoring.

On the way home, in the taxi, I texted to say that I’d miss her, and would bring her back a souvenir.

You’re a girl, she texted back.

And I felt that I was surely in love with her, or in love with a life in which she existed.

I had a five-hour layover in Atlanta. My departure gate hadn’t been assigned, so I walked aimlessly for a while. I found some underground tunnels that linked the terminals at their ends — normally one takes the main shuttle link that runs right down the centre like a spine. I stood on the slow conveyors in these half-mile-long tunnels, all by myself. There was no music.

When, after an hour of this, I saw that my flight still had no gate, I stopped in the smoking room — there are two in each terminal — asked an ugly woman beside me for a light, and chain-smoked three or four cigarettes so I wouldn’t have to bother anyone else: the black dude checking his texts, the cute girl with a tattoo on her neck, the obese man in a white beard wearing an NFL jersey, breathing as though he were about to dive underwater. The room was not ventilated well, there were few seats, and the ashtrays, which were deep, did not extinguish the cigarettes; they made a bonfire of them.

One man, on the phone, told his wife, Honey, I’m not smoking, I’m in an airport . Veterans and soldiers chummed up. A large bearded man, mid-forties, in a baseball cap and T-shirt with some writing on it, told a soldier, a short Latino with dimples in his fat cheeks, that running every morning in combat boots had busted his knees. He’d still be fighting, if they’d let him, if he had any cartilage left, and I knew it was the truth. Another old guy leaned in to the discussion; raspily he talked about his training, and the miles he ran uphill, and thanked the young Latino for defending his country.

I rejoined the non-smoking flow of the airport. I had three hours, and, sober, in the bright lights, the world’s busiest airport, the Christmas muzak, news-stands, CNN at every gate, I had the rats. It was almost midnight in Dublin, and the poison of forty straight nights — a true but accidental number — was starting to flood from my armpits, crotch and forehead. I’d withdrawn completely from my job, producing a drip of news and analysis so trivial that I could not remember what I did from hour to hour. Outside of work, I re-energized. I’d been teaching four nights a week all autumn, and in December my classes had ended, meaning I had money and time. It had been hectic and drunken and sleepless.