Darcey Steinke - Milk

Sta-fon stared into his coffee cup and there was an awkward silence as Walter watched the waitress with the ponytail carrying a cappuccino topped with whipped cream and sprinkled with cocoa to a table nearby.

“You seem like a nice person,” Sta-fon said. “Do you want to tell me what actually happened?”

Walter felt his face get hot; the way Sta-fon spoke reminded Walter of a schoolteacher instructing children, and his face, while open and friendly, seemed premeditatedly so. Probably a twelve-stepper, Walter thought; soon he’ll begin his drunk-a-log and start reciting all those platitudes. One day at a time. Fake it till you make it. Easy does it. Do the next right thing . Walter took out his wallet, laid down twenty dollars and stood up.

“It’s been nice talking with you,” Walter said, “but I have to meet a friend.”

Sta-fon gave him a sad smile and looked at him directly; his eyes were green again, the green of new leaves.

On MacDougal the snow was icy and coming hard. Ice had already encased the evergreen, naked now and lying on the sidewalk. He felt his heart throb and his body felt fragile and empty, like a delicate glass vase. Fuck Sta-fon and his love of middlebrow novels. He headed down Sullivan toward the Two Potato.

His rage flew out and attached to objects. He hated the red gloves in a store window; he hated the cold that made his cheeks burn and bit through the thin material of his pastor pants. He hated the ridges of dirty snow and the sky; he really hated the sky which was completely starless. He saw two men holding hands. He hated them. He saw a man and a woman holding hands. He hated them. He saw an older man walking his dog; he hated the man for living so long and he hated the stupid little terrier that continued to shiver even though it wore a kelly green sweater.

Inside, the bar was warm and barely lit, and Walter felt relieved, as if he’d been covered over with a layer of warm earth. The scent of sweat and gin was like a tranquilizer, and even the red carpet, covered with a constellation of cigarette burns, was comforting. Mirrors covered the walls and a few stray bits of disco-ball light flew over the bar like flakes of ghostly snow. He ordered a Jack Daniel’s straight up and looked around the bar.

Businessmen in button-down shirts and loafers clustered around the jukebox; a German man in leather gazed at the blond boy dancing alone. This place was definitely holy. Mostly because of the longing. God loved longing and imbued it with sanctity. All through his life, things outside the church were just as holy as the crosses and statues inside: rain and hard rain particularly, which made his mother’s apartment cozy and complete; his book of fables with the picture of the sad lion with a thorn in his paw; the way, on youth group retreats, Silk read a Jane Austen novel out loud as he drank cognac from a tiny red glass. In high school the janitor had taken him down to see the furnace. The gray-haired man had swung open the metal door and Walter had felt he was getting a glimpse of eternity. Carlos’s body was definitely holy, his black chest hairs, and the way his hip bones stuck out from his pelvis.

The ice cubes dissolved into his last swallow of bourbon. Fuck Sta-fon and his love of Cajun cooking. The bartender, unseasonably tan in a tight mesh tank top, asked if he wanted another. Walter nodded and watched the blond boy sway on the dance floor. His eyes were closed and his face freaked with disco-ball light.

Just the thing against the other thing . In this case the blond boy’s cock against his taste buds and, really, there wasn’t much else to report, Walter thought, not drunkenly exactly but definitely from another room in the heavenly mansion, one filled with black glitter and gnaw. He opened one eye, saw the young man’s white tennis shoes near his knees and how the black light in the Two Potato’s back room scintillated bits of lint on his jeans.

The motion of the young man’s pelvis sped up. Just the thing against the other thing . Just the bottom of a glass against a wood table or a chair pressed up against a wall. The thing against the other thing; that was the most human of all, the most embodied, not flesh infused with spirit. No. Just the thing against the other thing . It was holy no matter how sleazy the circumstance, as it was the sensation beyond the reach of God. The feel of soft hair against his lips made him see colors: green and pink as he hung in the dark; the black light showing white buttons on one man’s shirt; and the yellow beads around the neck of another.

Just the thing against the other thing . Walter tried to remember Carlos’s body. His black hair and brown eyes. His lankiness. When he laughed his dark eyebrows rose up in his forehead and his mouth opened. But dead people, no matter how fascinating, didn’t hold up in fantasies. Carlos had no body. His physical form was ash, ash in a canister Walter kept under his bed, and so in reality to fuck Carlos would be to fuck dust, which could be like fucking God. But before that thought got him anywhere, the young man came salty and acidic as a margarita, and Walter felt many things, including degradation and peace.

THE ALEPH HAD come to represent to Mary an outward manifestation of her soul. For a while Walter was fascinated by how she claimed to have seen her mother as a girl chasing a chicken on one shiny disk and on another a lady watching television. There were on other disks noisy baby birds waiting for their breakfast and a nighttime parking lot. Not to mention the dead boy with red running out of his nostrils, and the white tulip moving slowly back and forth on the tiny circular screen.

But after a few weeks of her insisting on talking about the aleph over breakfast and dinner, as well as bringing it up in front of Mr. Cabalaro, the head of the church trustees, Walter was growing frustrated. He explained to her how, when the present became unbearable, the brain’s happy hideout was the supernatural. He urged her to wean the baby and get on the pills, but she refused. Seeing his discomfort, she tried to replicate the aleph using tiny mirrors she found in a store on Canal Street and suspending them with dental floss from the ceiling of her room. In the evening, after extinguishing the lamp, she shined a flashlight on the glass slivers and described the internal sensation that accompanied the sightings. A sucking sensation, as if her heart were sucked by the nozzle of a vacuum, and mental deterioration, similar to the mind’s assignations on mushrooms, the brain’s surface texture changing from hard metal to something damp and porous like bread.

She was becoming, even Walter had to admit, a sort of spooky chick with her delicate frame, its angular elegance akin to a skeleton’s and her limp hair hanging around her face. A dozen times he found her praying inside the closet. She seemed to prefer the one on the third floor where he had first found her, but he also discovered her inside the kitchen pantry, kneeling among cans of tomato juice and rolls of paper towels.

Mary said she needed to talk to him, and he decided that if she started up about the aleph, he was going to suggest again that she wean the baby and get on the pills. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe her. He did. But if God wasn’t going to make his message known, there was nothing Mary could do to force it.

He’d known other people who got obsessed. One, a pale southern boy in seminary, was fixated on kudzu, its viscous growth pattern and how the noxious vine infiltrated America. Walter remembered how, in Old Testament class, this young man always tried to use kudzu as a metaphor for God’s motivations in biblical narratives. The other was a cousin, who, after John Lennon was murdered, became convinced that his spirit inhabited all cellular life, so that even a blender had qualities of the most complicated Beatle, as did her tennis shoes.