Лидия Юкнавич - Verge - Stories

“Nice place,” know-nothing says.

“Works for me.”

“Bet you never expected this, huh?”

“What?” Bosch begins the slow undoing of layers of clothing, his skin hot and cold at the same time.

“This.” The man’s clothes shed themselves, his collarbone and shoulders dipping and curving, his hands hanging down the length of his arms.

Bosch thinks and thinks what “this” means. Is it the man before him, his crotch bulging up like prayer between them, the gap of not knowing each other at all luscious and ripe and making him salivate? Or was “this” his whole life, the long wait waiting again and again until new seasons and tides and moons turned the world over? The younger man’s lips puff out. Mama’s boy, Bosch thinks, only it’s a mouthful of bliss.

The room heats up in nothing flat, stars illuminate their naked. Bosch can’t see his own hands, but they find the form, working and reaching and sliding their way along. The man is swimming beneath Bosch, he is licking and teasing, he is moving in the underwater of night. Breathing forgets itself back to its blue past. Their mouths gape and suck.

Their two faces point up toward the surface of the night. Bosch tells him about the last guy his age to come through. People saw him out there in the nothingness making a goddamn snowman with his bare hands, frostbite, but the dumb motherfucker didn’t know it, pumped himself so full of acid that his hands were two numb clubs, came to work, worked the row without the massive yellow rubber gloves, until someone finally looked over and said, Jesus God—look at that, he’s got meat for hands . And they took him away with those red and useless weights of flesh hanging from the ends of his arms, and he lost one of them. Couldn’t have been more than twenty-two years old.

“That’s the trouble,” he found himself saying. “You’re all fucked up on dope and shit half the time. A guy could get himself into a lot of shit out here that way. There’s no room for error. You have to find the rhythm of the place, being here. It’s a whole different existence. Don’t come to work fucked up. I’m telling you right now. Guys’ll take advantage of you, try to mess you up, because when you’re out, their pay goes up. All you young guys come out here, college boys, trying to score the big bucks over the summer so you can quit waiting tables during the year, or buy some shitty-ass car, or more dope, or whatever it is you do. Just… all I’m saying is, watch yourself. Pay attention. You’ll be all right.”

The man runs his finger over Bosch’s stomach, light as feathers, flesh whispers. Everything inside him—intestines, muscles—squirms and lifts toward the touch.

HE IS IN THE BED of his childhood, in his mother’s house. His father has been gone for two years now. His father a no-good his father a cook at a diner his father a clerk at a 7-Eleven his mother needing to feed her baby. It is night. The front door is rattling and cracking and splitting open with his mother and a man. Laughter brings their bodies into the house; he holds his breath, his heart dull-thudding in his ears. He is sweating under the covers from not moving. Not breathing. They careen off edges, furniture, cacophonous, they nearly crash through the wall of his room; no. They are going to her room, to his parents’ room, blue walls, blue bed, perfume, and a mirror.

In the morning the man drives away in a Pinto wagon. Bosch eats cereal, his hair a mess, his hands little fists around spoon and bowl. He stares at the milk, the flakes floating there, bobbing up and down, stares and stares at anything but the tired woman entering the kitchen smelling old and distilled and too sweet. Something—breathing?—gives him away.

“What are you looking at, you little shit? Ain’t gonna find any goddamn answers in your Wheaties, that’s for sure!” Snorts of laughter. “Hey. Mr. Man of the House. I’m talking to you. When are you going to get a fucking job and start earning your keep? I can’t keep stuffing your little fat face with food, you know. You’re old enough to take care of yourself. Goddamn little suckerfish, that’s what you are, a bottom-feeder. Suck suck suck. You make me sick.”

Bosch looks up for a slow second before she leaves the room with a bottle. He sees her eyes magnified and blurry, sees bubbles escaping from her mouth instead of words; his mind drifts away from her without sound, water filling his ears, his nose, his mouth. Only his heart beats out a rhythm. She dissolves from sight until she disappears in a wave of stained silk.

THE MAN’S NAME IS ARAM, and he is out of sight, down and down the line from Bosch. Now and again Bosch can see a patch of his bleached-blond in the corner of his eye, and he is glad. His own flesh seems warmer than before; he can feel his own pulse, and his hands glide and cup and dive between the fish bodies as never before. His neck does not ache in a knot at the base of his head after three hours, his vertebrae do not feel leaded and distorted when he has an hour left, his feet don’t throb and spike with the day coming down on them. It’s as if his mind is coming back to him in small increments. He sees an image of Aram gently turning in the night, his torso, the muscles of his back barely visible, the fin of his rib guiding his sleep. The salt smell of the sea mingles with his image of the boy, and the image overtakes the present moment. He breathes in the sight, he lets go the work, his body moves without thought, his mind’s eye deep in the tangle of memory, or is it the future, coming to him like a pool of water?

ARAM PUTS HIS MOUTH over Bosch’s cock. He can see the woodstove and its little light just behind the boy’s head appearing and then not, like that, in the dark of night. His cock sucks thought from his brain. He closes his eyes, and when he comes, it is into the mouth of the world, young and in the shape of an O. He is lost there. A younger man’s mouth takes him out of himself. He places his hands on Aram’s head, his hair a bright stunning halo. He is caught there for a moment, dazed and electrified.

IN SEATTLE THERE WERE JOBS, but the boys emerging from Issaquah and Chehalis and Sequim were malformed somehow, their bodies twisted away from offices and college degrees. A high school diploma was simply a ticker tape running across his forehead for anyone to see, saying, I do not speak your language, you must speak more slowly, what are the directions? Seattle had a different smell, different air—even their hair and shoulders looked different. Contained and quick smart like the click of heels on pavement. When he’d landed a job at the corner bar as a busboy, his mother had said, “That fucking figures. You’re exactly like your father, aren’t you, pretty boy? I just hope you can do something for a lady with those hands—that’s all he had going for him, I can tell you. You got shorted on the brains, and come to think of it, the brawn, too. Nothing in this life gonna come easy to you. You got big lips like a mama’s boy, too. I bet you get your nose busted before you’re eighteen.” And she laughed with the open mouth of a bass, huge and obscene and devouring.

Nights he’d come home and she wouldn’t be there, and then she would, him in his world of a room with earphones closed so tight around his skull that his lips puckered, and she’d bang on the door or even open it, swagger in framed by the disconnected air around them, foreign and malevolent. Then she’d cry, or shout obscenities at him.

Other nights men would come, men with hair greased black, slick as a record album and with teeth missing, or with leathery skin and marbled eyes swimming in their sockets. Once, in the earliest hours of morning, he saw her walking naked to the bathroom. Her breasts dropped down like dangling glass globes. Her shoulders sank, as if her spine had given over years ago, her ass dipped in instead of out, and her belly, rotund and hard as a melon, balled out from her spine like a child’s. She’d fallen to the floor just in front of the bathroom that morning, and in the bruised light and half consciousness of the vision he’d watched her wriggle there on the floor before turning her head back, contorted and begging, in the direction of his room, her mouth slit downward in a terrible arc. He closed his door, not listening, not thinking. In his bed his mind made waves. I am weightless, I am adrift and nothing.