Leopoldine Core - When Watched - Stories

His husband wishes he made more money and his family feels the same. They think he is delusional, calling himself a writer. It feels a lot like hate, the things they say. They don’t understand, he thinks. They can’t imagine doing the same thing every day for hours simply because you’re compelled, though you’re not getting paid.

“That is not a career,” his mother has said.

“Think of religion,” he said in response. “It’s like that. I have visions .” But this only enraged his mother.

He thinks that if only he could write all day alone, if only he were not always drenched in the anger of his mother and his husband, then he could arrange some semblance of a writing career. I need some fame, he thinks. And he writes these words very slowly. Then he hears his name. He sets down his pen. “Coming!” he says and walks through the door.

“You’re like a radiant corpse,” she said to the man in her bed. She had wanted to say it for days.

“I know,” he said brightly, looking up from his book. He was older than she was. “I get exhausted,” he explained. “I really do. But then I get excited.”

“Then you forget your body,” she added.

“I really do,” he smiled.

“You’ll be on your deathbed,” she said. “And then you’ll get excited.”

“And then I’ll live for ten more years,” he said, returning to his book.

She chucked her head back with a laugh. “You’ll be like, I forgot to die.”

He laughed too. He liked her cavalier attitude toward death — his death. Perversely it relaxed him.

She moved the sheet off her naked chest and wanted to kiss him but instead stared, which felt tantric — a slow burn.

He didn’t mind being stared at. He felt the measured heat of her gaze and soaked it up like sunshine. Being loved — it was exactly like being at the beach. She was the sun and the ocean and the hot sand too, enclosing him in airy pressure.

She went on staring with her head on its side. She could tell he hadn’t been handsome as a younger guy. But age had pushed his face into another dimension. He was handsome now. It was so often like this for funny-looking young men, she thought. Funny looked better later — rotting.

And it was just the opposite for baby-faced heartbreakers. They aged into ugly guys, she thought. All of them did. Because their perfect soft beauty wore down and all you could see was that it was gone. They age like women… old peaches, she thought, smiling wide.

He wasn’t looking at her but he could hear the wet sound of her teeth being revealed. It was like a wolf breaking out of a child’s face.

“Tell me about acid,” she said because she’d never done it. She really wanted to but feared the things she’d do, slice her arm open or just stare into the mirror and into herself, going permanently insane.

“I already did.”

“Tell me again. Tell me about looking at money.”

“Well I remember looking at a dollar — the pyramid. It seemed like a religion.” He set his book down. “This one guy who wasn’t tripping — he was leading us — he decided we should eat pizza. And it was the kind of pizza with bubbles — you know, like airholes. So it looked like it was happening in front of us.”

“Happening in front of you?”

“When you’re tripping nothing is still so it wasn’t just a pizza that had a few bubbles — it was like it was bubbling right there. Like it was the surface of Mars blowing up. And you would no more think about eating this thing than you would think about throwing your face down on lava and licking. It was the craziest thought in the world. So we were like scared children and of course this guy was laughing.”

She smiled giddily, loving the story and his face as he told it. And she knew it was a kind of sickness, how she fell so hard and wore her weird heart on her sleeve like a little hungry roach. “I love that you did so many drugs,” she said and felt like a moron. What she meant was “I love you.”

“I never wanted to be anything,” he said. “I just wanted to feel good.”

She nodded and thought to herself that he was still living that life.

“I was a pleasure kid,” he said.

She smiled. “I don’t know if I am.”

“I think you are.”

“I might be a masochist.”

“No.” He shook his head as if to say that he had fucked many young masochists and was therefore an expert. “You like to feel good,” he commented.

She lay there and considered her own existence, coating and enslaving her. Did she like to feel good? Sure. Good and then blank. She loved this man and would soon feel nothing for him. Even in the heat of her love she could feel the devil peering, waiting to enter her. The devil is blankness, she thought, hating what she contained. It was why she didn’t want to do acid. Evil was too close. It lived in her cells and yearned to sing.

He was getting tired. He set his book down and looked into her blinking eyes. Then at once she asked: “Do you love me?”

“Yes.”

“Really and truly?”

“Deeply and terribly.”

She smiled like a fiend and he joined her there. Then, “Look at your hair,” he said, giving it a stroke. “It’s so brown .”

Her smile fell. “What does that mean?”

“It’s unaltered by time,” he clarified. “A tree full of leaves!”

“Oh.” She grinned then, happy to be a tree and a full one. Though it was certainly strange to be stroked for having lived less. And stranger to love him for having lived more.

Her gaze seesawed around the room and landed on a Ghostbusters DVD. It lived with the books on a nearby shelf, like it was hiding.

“You like Bill Murray?” she asked.

“What?”

She pointed to the DVD.

“Oh. Someone left that here.”

“I would watch it. I like Bill Murray,” she said, cocking her head at the bookshelf as if it were Bill himself. “He’s looked the same for twenty years. I mean old but never older .”

“I know,” the man grinned. “He’s like my apartment.”

That made her laugh. Then she settled her face into the crook of his neck and felt how awake she was.

He switched off the light.

“Do you still love me?” she said.

“Since a moment ago?”

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“How can you be sure?”

“It’s the last thing I think about before I go to sleep,” he said. And then he did.

She exhaled. It was such a good answer. Her heart thumped against his dreaming body and she wanted desperately to join him there. She had read that people sleeping in the same bed — people in love — could quite literally inhabit the same dream.

But she wanted a cigarette badly. The door called to her. And soon, without even really deciding to, she was walking toward it.

Outside the air was soft on her legs as she walked, lit cigarette in hand. It was the way she wished she felt in the morning but only felt at night, full of intelligence and curiosity. Not optimistic — not at all — just focused and hungry and on a path.

She stopped outside a bar and lingered in the red light, flicking her cigarette into a dark puddle and lighting another. It was then that she noticed someone — a small person — walking toward her. It was a child, a little boy, getting nearer and nearer. Soon he stood very close and said, “Hi.”

She took a step back, then smiled with fear and wonder. “Are you alright?” she asked.

The boy said “Yes” with a kind of adult conviction. It made her stare.

“Where’s your mom?”

“She’s at home.”

Her gaze lingered. He looked so relaxed.