Kyle Muntz - Voices

"Was it before you met her ?" I loved the way he enunciated, pronunciated, droned. She wasn't quite ripe for capitalization, but there might be a day, someday.

"It was a long time ago. Before."

"You realize, right, that you might never find her again?"

"I realize."

He sighed again, and finished the rest of his drink. Ice cubes clinked to the bottom, absolutely without purpose. If he set them outside they would evaporate soon. The streets and the city didn’t care: useless and impotent, melting.

"Sometimes," he said, "I think I might be better off you than are." — Was she there when you got back? he asked. I was too afraid to answer.

::::::::::::::::::::

(why,

didn’t

you leave?)

::::::::::::::::::::

Yeah, he said, I met her at a party a few years ago. She had darkish reddish hair that got bluish when the light hit it right, over every strand, illuminating? I met her once. She didn’t say anything about a boyfriend. She came up to me all angles and elbows and cheekbones and graceful shoulders. She blew me

in the hall. I was surprised too. We were just making out, then she had her hand on me and I was on the floor and people were walking past some of them maybe giving us strange looks if they realized what we were doing. She was my nymphomaniac vulture, striking, with violent beauty, with willowy, flowing fingers, her nubile tongue. full, full. lips. I’ve

never been so surprised before. Not since once when I was young and I discovered that if you try sometimes you really can get away with lying if no one knows if you don’t give yourself away so soon. She gave me restraint and cardiac arrest, a paradise that didn’t so often have to lie. But the strangest thing

was that when she was done (the people still passing, giving us strange looks, her splayed hair and horizontal posture) I felt dirty, or used. No. that wasn’t true. I’d used. her.(she.was) my ticket to purity. But it didn’t matter. I couldn’t help thinking that she’d used me, by being so perfect, by never coming back. I think I still might love her. I’ve never dealt with loss

very well.

::::::::::::::::::::

Birds flew by overhead, aerodynamic, a flock of prophets, changing seasons. No: the winter wasn’t coming soon, no ice, no falling snow. If they shat, then they shat, and Markus would eat shit, in his nose and mouth, white and falling, putrid, hardening. The seasons changed. The year was not ending. James threw more rocks. "You know, dude," I said, "if you keep this up long enough, sooner or later you

really are going to hit a car."

He shrugged.

"I know."

::::::::::::::::::::

I found him again: Jacob in his cave, where the world fell away. No wind blew, not wasting in the alley. All was stagnant as an empty night in a dead city, where the corpses were, where death, and rot, and enmity came awake.

"Why do you come here?" he asked. There were cracks on his skin, and spiders, making webs to anchor him to the wall. His eyes were the dullness of inhumanity, lidless, unseeing. I don’t think he could move. His sweater had many holes. Redness strung his face and hands, strings of infection, sickness and hurt. He wept. He was a monster and a horror, weaping for lost life, distant memory and gross, gross pain.

"If you want," I said, "I could help you."

"You’ve done enough."

"Maybe I have." I turned my back on him. He was hideous, disgusting and vile.

He smelled of old flesh, fermentation, mucus, filmy. The insects had not been kind to him. They were parasites of the very worst, burrowing, pecking his pieces. I turned around.

"If you want," I said, "I could still help you." Though I didn’t want to, and I didn’t think I could. There was no leaving this place, no forgetting awful transformation. He took a croaking, groaning breath and spat yellow, wormy phlegm. It had roaches in it. He didn’t move. Slime stuck him to the wall behind. I couldn’t bare to see.

"I know what you’re thinking," he said.

"What’s that?"

"You’re thinking about what it means to approach geometric patterns as though

they were art." He coughed. "And how difficult it is to tell red from dark red, red orange from something in the middle. That is," his voice broke, and he didn't sound like him anymore. "That is what you’re thinking about, isn’t it?"

"It was."

"And you’re thinking you never should have helped me."

"Maybe."

"Get out of here," one last time. "If you’re going to be that way. I don’t want

you here, and I don’t want you seeing me like this." He was crying, yeah if he could cry, acid, venomous tears.

"I can’t go yet," I said.

"You can," he said. "Yes you fucking can." Groaning.

You did

this to me. I shook my head.

"You did this to yourself," I said, "and you know

that too." "Just get out," he said.

I

went.

::::::::::::::::::::

Markus’s mother was a prophet of cereal box wisdom, new prescriptions and popular opinion. She preached to us. We learned very little. She knew her images, her falsehoods and prejudices. On occasions she got very passionate. Just as frequently I tended to walk out. Somewhere inside, I hope she understood why.

::::::::::::::::::::

The next time Travis asked me to play, I decided to let him win. He tried very hard. He went half an hour without making one shot. It got to the point he couldn’t even dribble. The ball flew from him at unrealistic angles, warping physics, deflected oddly, playing strange directional games. Half an hour later we were still zero to zero. He gave up, congratulating me on a game well dominated, leaving to go home.

It feels good to be right.

::::::::::::::::::::

I finally talked to that prostitute after years of seeing her there.

When I was young, I think I might have been in love with her, but I’m not sure. I’d seen her one day, when I was walking to school, and dreamed about her later. I didn’t know what it meant to like a woman; she was just a mysterious thing, pretty, wild and pretty, with her dark hair, her crazy angles.

She's almost thirty now, but still pretty. I’m not sure what I saw in her, but she was a multitude of things, spanning an individualized past, unfathomable.

We went into an alley. She stuck her hand down my pants. When I said I didn’t want sex she looked at me strangely. What was I there for, she asked, if I didn’t want sex? I said I wanted to meet her, vulnerable in her absence of self, respect and center. If I paid her, she would let me do anything. I didn’t want her to be an object. She said it was all she knew how to be.

"I just want you to talk to me," I said.

"That’s the thing," she said. "I don’t know how."

::::::::::::::::::::

"Can you hear them now?" I asked.

"You sound like a commercial."

"It doesn’t matter," I said. "We all sound like commercials."

"I suppose that’s true."

I wondered if there should be a question mark there.

There I was, being imperative, being interrogative: man and creature, stealer of

souls. No, that’s not true. If we had souls the world must have had them already, swirling, a glorious brocade of screaming, screaming voices, onto a brutal, impious sense of the grand, the great, the final.

Markus waited. He said he couldn’t hear, though he might have been lying. "What about you?" he asked.

Maybe.

We walked. Cars passed, a convalescence of faces, grilles and glowing eyes, not

living. We’d been here before, to find the center, making war on whispers. We left behind a trail of paper cups, gum wrappers and footprints. They. we left behind. Tw.igs. leave.s. the breaking. Times.

"Why won’t you ever give me an answer?" Markus asked.