Leopoldine Core: When Watched: Stories

“Do I have really bad breath?” Ava asked, a laugh in her voice.

“I think we both do.” Gretchen grinned. “We could brush our teeth.”

“I don’t have a toothbrush.”

“I have a new one you could use. Still in the package.”

They brushed their teeth, hip to hip, and spat green foam into the sink. Both wiped their mouths, smiling. They returned to the bed and resumed kissing. The kissing became a laugh.

“I still taste onion,” Gretchen said.

“But mint too.”

“Yeah, it’s like a little mint messenger carrying an onion.”

They laughed heartily and smashed their mouths back together, tugging out of their clothes. Heat came off Ava in great waves, while Gretchen’s energy remained cool and mechanistic. A pure chill.

• • •

Later it rained. It was a violent fall rain, knocking tree branches to the pavement out front. The two lay naked with the lights on, Ava half under a sheet, Gretchen fully exposed, legs crossed, a pillow behind her back. She got up and removed the screen to close the window. Rain pelted the glass. A clap of thunder lit the room and Ava pulled the sheet up over her breasts.

Gretchen brought a glass of water to bed. She reached for her newspaper and spread it wide in front of her. Another bolt of thunder turned the room white and she flipped her newspaper over with a closed expression. Ava looked around the room. It was sparsely decorated, with a small television, several shelves of graying books, and some free weights rowed by the wall. She felt suddenly, incredibly lonely.

Though she sensed no invitation, Ava rolled near Gretchen and kissed her shoulder, a fearful smile on her lips. Gretchen pulled slightly back and gave Ava a pat on the head, as one would a little purring cat that is bothering them. Ava lay back down and folded her arms in amazement. Gretchen continued reading her newspaper as if she were alone. There was evil glittering in her beauty, Ava observed. Gretchen looked almost cadaverous. She had taken the most ordinary act in the world and injected it with malice.

A pained silence entered the room but Gretchen seemed unscathed, newspaper in hand. Charm is a creepy, scary thing, Ava thought. The light shifts slightly and she looks maniacal.

“Do you want me to leave?” Ava said finally.

To this, Gretchen looked up from her newspaper, still naked. She made a face of mock guilt and said, “Well maybe. Yeah.”

Ava was jarred. She felt her eyes moisten, if only from astonishment. She considered saying something frank like, “Oh, so you’re a bastard ,” but it seemed no use. Gretchen appeared impenetrable. Responding would be like pissing into a rainstorm, Ava thought. She got up and dressed, hating to be naked, however momentarily.

“You should take an umbrella,” Gretchen said as Ava approached the door.

Ava paused. A smile of acute pain spread across her face. “Thanks,” she said and bent down, seizing a small black umbrella with a hook handle. “Bye.”

“Bye.” Gretchen smiled mildly. It was the smile of a priest or a friendly stranger on a subway platform. Not the smile of someone who just bought you dinner and fucked you and is now sending you out into a downpour, Ava thought.

Outside the streets were empty. The umbrella was broken so she had to hold it open. After a couple blocks her arm hurt so she threw it away. The rain had become more of a mist. Ava wanted to drink. But more than that she wanted to vanish, to linger in some way station between life and death. A ghost, she thought, or a gas .

By the sixth block of walking, Ava was convinced that she wasn’t an alcoholic after all. I’m just lonely, she thought, craving some culty community . She imagined brown liquor in a glass on a wood tabletop and her body softened. It seemed like the most normal thing in the world, to pick it up and drink. I’m just a masochist, she decided. And that has nothing to do with drinking. It had stopped raining but Ava was soaked. “Fuck you, Gretchen,” she said aloud. “And fuck God .”

Ava walked through her front door and instantly felt disgusted by her apartment: her faded black couch with the broken springs, her groaning refrigerator. She wanted to catapult herself somewhere, anywhere . To be in that soft, familiar spaceship, a drink in hand, ice cubes rattling as she raised it to her mouth. Ava peeled her clothes off and let them slap to the floor, thoughts of brown liquor blazing in her mind. She imagined slowly sipping the dark drink, although her drinking had never been slow. Ava had been an Olympic drunk, careening throughout the East Village from bar to bar, shouting things she wouldn’t remember. Those nights always ended predictably, with her sprawled under a stranger in a strange bed, tipping into a void-like sleep.

Ava remembered waking up and seeing a stranger’s naked backside, their cats walking around meowing. She remembered her dread, her fear of who the person would be when they turned around. But that was better, she thought. Better than all this consciousness.

Ava toasted a slice of raisin bread and spread butter over it, then took a bite and threw it out. Food was sickening. I am an alcoholic, she thought. She ran a bath and tested the temperature with her fingers, hot. She climbed in and wondered if it was possible for someone to drown themselves in a bathtub, holding their body down with pure will alone. Probably not, she concluded, because the creature wants to live . A friend of hers had hanged himself and she often pictured the act of his departure. The thought she couldn’t shake was that, undoubtedly, when he kicked the chair away, he wriggled. The body fought to live, she thought. And while he was wriggling like that, he must have known it was a mistake. The creature said no and the creature was him. She sank down, her knees jutting up out of the water. But maybe not , she considered. Hair raised around the sad island of her face, eyes closed. Maybe it is possible to end your life unambivalently. It seemed entirely possible at the moment. With her ears under water, Ava heard her pulse. She raised herself up and stood before the mirror, steam rising around her naked body.

In bed, she wore an oversized T-shirt with palm trees on it. All I do is talk to myself, she thought. She wanted to believe that God was glowing inside her. But it seemed that where God might be, there was a batch of whispering goblins, taking turns convincing her of crazy things. The sea of devily voices occupied most periods of silence. They were like her family: menacing and enduring. She wanted to choke them all with booze before one took over.

Ava strained, inside of herself, to tunnel through the dark verbal smog, clasping her hands together. She looked about the room and asked a chair for help. Then the closet door. Help. Next the ceiling fan, its slow, maniacal turn. Help me. The window. The tree in streetlight, rain dripping off its leaves. Let me out.

They are lying in bed naked, she with her head on his lap. And he is gently raking her scalp with his fingernails, which she likes very much. Possibly she likes it even more than sex.

“Tell me what you were like,” he says.

She smiles and looks up at him.

“I mean when you were little,” he says.

“I loved rolling down hills,” she says.

“Oh yeah ,” he says, remembering all the hills of his life, high and green and endless. “It was like the first drug,” he says. “It felt so dangerous.”

“I know!” she says, her eyes growing wide. “There were rocks and shit. It was so exhilarating. It was like sex.”