Bruce Wagner - The Empty Chair

We were in the parking lot of the club and my man was drunk. When he got drunk, he got very, very quiet. Never a good thing when that happened, nuh uh. Supposedly, I was the first girlfriend he’d had in years that he didn’t beat the living shit out of. The other gals who hung around the club — all older, 19 and up — they couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t believe I wanted to be with him or that it’d lasted so long. They just shook their heads. “He must really love you, Cassie.” (That was them being kind.) Mostly, they looked at me like I was psycho, which I was. I didn’t care what he did to me. I actually started to goad him. There wasn’t anything cute or courageous about it… it was ugly and degrading. He’d been in the penitentiary for murder, for like 10 years. He told me about two killings, contract killings he did while in the joint. That’s what they call the penitentiary — the joint. If you were a junkie you were a hype , and your needle was a harpoon. I picked up a whole new vocabulary. I learned about rigs and works and wolf tickets , oh I learned a lot. Quite the sentimental education. I thought he was afraid of me! Which probably he was, a little bit anyway… We were in the parking lot, standing next to his car. I said some stuff I knew I shouldn’t have. I was horrible, Bruce! I needed a shot — had a bad habit, an expensive one, and he wouldn’t give it to me. All part of our little S and M game. I was out of my skin. I think I probably called him — no, I did , I remember , I called him a fag. Nice, huh? Because he couldn’t get it up a hundred percent of the time and I thought I was the Fuck Queen of the Western World. He actually liked when I got aggressive in bed, he was one of those guys who liked to be dominated but didn’t want anyone to know it. So I called him all kinds of queer, loud enough for people to hear and then I said, “Why don’t you just fucking kill me, faggot?” I was wired like that, I had kamikaze swagger. (I must have been blasted out of my skull too.) You know, you can get away with stuff for a long time. Luck’s a big part of it.

That night, my luck ran out.

He grabbed me by the neck and I felt a sting. I remember it was freezing, a freezing wind like a knife itself. I wasn’t wearing my coat… I was cold, then suddenly warm. I smiled at him. I don’t know how or why but I knew it was the end. I was very calm… he smiled back. It was impossible to know what he was thinking, why he was smiling. In the slow-motion madness of it all I looked up and saw my namesake constellation. Really seemed to have the time to look — and it was upside-down. Did you know Cassiopeia is topsy-turvy half the year? She is, that was her punishment for sacrificing her daughter. It must have been like only 10° but I felt so warm, so sort of strangely… groovy . I thought he must have given me a hot-shot, spiked me somehow. And I kept having all of this time to stare at the sky… I was looking at one queen, he was watching another (me). Then I got so cold —talking about it now, it’s so vivid! I can feel and remember so much . Everything but his name. And I hope to fuck I never do. I’ve tried to before but it’s just gone , erased from the memory bank. One of those amazing tricks the mind’s so good at. I don’t ever want to remember it. Not ever—

My theory was that he had trouble in bed because he didn’t fuck with his cock, he fucked with his knife. The thing that excited him most was holding a blade to my neck during the act. That was the only way he could orgasm. Like a bad B-movie, isn’t it? Some deep Richard Widmark weirdness from the ’40s. What was that flick where he pushes an old woman in a wheelchair down the stairs? He’d make cuts on my neck while we made love, little crosshatches. Boy, I’m glad I don’t know you better or this would be too embarrassing! If I knew you any better, I don’t think I’d ever even have opened my mouth! Obviously, that excited me too — the knife — Jesus, what a sick puppy. O! Check this! You’ll like this detail: I wasn’t completely crazy because I always held his wrist when he came. Because there was always that possibility in the back of my head that he’d get overexcited and give me a slice , not really meaning to, you know, one nip to the carotid would be all she wrote. Finito. Over and out. Though he probably wouldn’t have stopped there… Hey, if you’ve gone that far, why not take the whole head! I could just picture his cronies (who weren’t very fond of me anyway) hustling him to a safe house before shipping the sonofabitch off to Central America or wherever.

Okay, the parking lot: later, I heard a whole mob was out there, but right when it happened it felt like we were totally, spookily alone. Like the scene in West Side Story when Tony and Maria are at a dance and suddenly everything spins and goes dark? And everyone disappears except for them? He got down on the ground, on top of me. I’d fallen into shock, staring over his shoulder at the upside-down Queen. His hard-on felt like the handle of a whip. He was rubbing it against me. Nice, huh. I mean, kinda thoughtful — who wouldn’t want a little frottage before dying? The familiar rhythm of his breath told me he was about a minute away from busting a nut. Sorry. That was crude. I’m getting drunk. Anyway, he was real quiet. Which, as I said, was not good. Didn’t ask me to look in his eyes like he usually did when he was gonna come, he was too far into the kill. I was pretty much gone anyway. You know, starting to merge with the jet-black majesty of woozy sky. He was good at what he did. (With a knife.) The weight of him on me was a comfort… then I felt this tug , but its meaning failed to register… then another — pinpricky tugs that sent me farther into the upside-down Queen’s palace.

In his trance, he’d taken two fingers. I didn’t know this at the time — they told me a few days later.

[points to a constellation, almost directly above]

See? Can you see her, Bruce? That’s her throne. See? See it? Tonight, she’s right-side up — all’s well with the world. Back on her throne where she belongs. As am I…

Okay, back to the parking lot!

There was this gust out his mouth — a stench — then he started spewing waste like a broken pipe. I probably thought he was coming… in my hallucinatory state. He lifted himself. Floated above me then stood straight up but as if not by his own power. It was eerie, like a crazy puppet pulled by unseen strings, something superhuman, something abominable had plucked him off me. I can still see his mouth as the body was dragged off, that septic mouth, smiley face crapmouth unleashing a torrent of bright, brackish blood. And that, my friend, was that. His invisible predator retreated to the lot’s far corner to fuss over its exsanguinated prey while someone wrapped something around my hand. That would be Kura. He used his shirt as a tourniquet, leaving him bare-chested in the cold, a very Kura move, the swashbuckling touch! I’m sure he knew I wouldn’t be able to appreciate the gesture but he did it anyway. (That, my friend, is style. ) I know I smiled at him. I was smiling at everyone, especially Mama Cassiopeia — I was already pinned up there , clueless, to the topsy-turvy night.

Then upside-down I went, and fainted dead away.

I awakened in a too-bright room that smelled of ether and fast food.

Loud voices, laughter, shushing. Kura hovered close to Coat and Shabby Tie, who gave a tidy running commentary on my needle tracks — I had an abscess on the inside of my elbow — and couldn’t stop throwing up. Blood-soaked compress on hand and under rib… those cigarettes he was smoking — not Kura, but Coat and Shabby Tie — the ones that smell like weed and incense and cheap Egyptian perfume— clove. Oh, and Coat and Shabby was most assuredly a doctor because I knew my doctors. This one was pasty, late 40s, an abortionist-type out of Faulkner, with the missed-train look of one who’d burned his adrenals for a middling cause at too young an age. Or a tragic one — maybe on a balmy summer night, he’d backed out of the driveway and run over his kid.