“It’s almost midnight,” my father whined.
“Will you bring us some blankets and pillows and stuff?” My father lifted a cookie from a desultory plate that had been set out, possibly many hours ago, and began gnawing. He could as well have chewed his shirtsleeve or arm.
Was my mother a conspirator, too? All I know is she executed my commands (for they really were commands) with robotic precision. She delivered pillows, copious smoothly folded sheets, and the guest bed’s duvet to the door of the empty room. By this point Deanna and I were concealed naked behind it, having widened the gap only a few inches in order to toss our undergarments onto the pile. Midnight came and went unremarked on either side of that barrier. “Candles,” I answered, when, as I opened the door to gather in offerings, my mother asked whether there was anything more we needed.
“Your parents seem pretty great,” Deanna said with superb neutrality, as she lit the first of the joints she’d rolled. We’d switched off the empty room’s ugly overhead, and outside the snow, dribbling down through a windless sky, glowed like blue cotton candy in the penumbra of the driveway’s single bulb. We fucked twice, quietly but concealing nothing, Deanna’s three outcries rising through the ceiling and floorboards above, Arfy curling meekly onto a pillow in the corner once it was clear no attention was available for her.
Afterward I crept out. My mother and father had retreated upstairs. Deanna and I used the bathroom and then I collected some Tupperware for future such occasions. I also gathered food, including a Saran Wrapped platter I found in the fridge, full of triangular sandwiches: chicken salad, cream cheese and cucumber, crustless and heavily salt-and-peppered, just the way we liked them. I moved the den’s stereo into the empty room, too. It wasn’t good, but good enough for Deanna’s homemade cassettes.
Charlotte came tapping at our window, clued in by our tread marks in the snow or the flickering candlelight. Wrapping myself in a sheet, I raised the sash. Arfy keened delight, nosing at the opened window, and Charlotte waved off whatever friend had delivered her home. Headlights swerved into the night.
“What time is it, anyway?” I asked her.
Charlotte shrugged. “Four, five, beats me. Is that peepee?” She meant the yellow fling pattern staining the snow behind her. I nodded. “Sick,” she said approvingly.
“Climb in.”
The empty room, being a tabula rasa, bore aspects of total corruptibility, a potential we’d in childish obedience overlooked until now. Our poses, cross-legged in sheets around the plate of triangular sandwiches, the ashtray, and the flickering candle, which illuminated the tumble of pillows and duvet like a pink-pale mountain range, evoked perhaps a Native American or Haitian voodoo ritual site. Nothing of this scene would have signified much in a dorm room. Here: revolution.
“What’s that?” asked Charlotte.
Deanna understood the question. “They’re called Echo and the Bunnymen. This is ‘The Killing Moon.’ It’s pretty much their best song.”
“You got Mom’s sandwiches? That’s crazy.” Charlotte accepted the joint from Deanna’s hand. Arfy clambered into her lap.
“It’s safe out there, if you want something from your room.”
“You guys want to fool around, huh? Dream on, unless you want to put up some kind of tent out of these sheets. Because no way am I leaving here before you.”
“You don’t have to leave,” said Deanna. “We already fooled around.”
My sister raised her hand. “Enough about that.”
“They’re upstairs,” I said.
“Well, congratulations on a unique accomplishment,” said Charlotte, with sardonic emphasis derived from my father’s manner, however much she’d have hated to believe it. “They haven’t been upstairs at the same time in a year.”
“If we keep the music playing I doubt you have to worry about them coming down.”
“What are you suggesting?”
I gestured at the empty room, a vacuum laboratory.
“Haven’t you ever wondered,” I asked my sister then, “how much stuff we could fit in here, if we tried?”
The Dreaming Jaw, The Salivating Ear
I do not think I shall visit my blog anymore. It is not so much the smell that discourages me — gulls have skeletonized the corpse in the entranceway, and the lapping tide has salt-rinsed the floorboards where the intruder’s blood was once caked as thick as fruit-leather — as it is a certain malodor of memory persisting there. The stink of my disappointment being that stink which the sea’s salt can never rinse.
*
I study my blog through binoculars from the distance of the boardwalk, but never approach. Gulls wheel over my blog’s entranceway, vultures at my kill, much as they do above the splintery planks of the boardwalk, scavenging the greasy paper sleeves containing, if a gull should be lucky, some remaining tidbits of cakey frankfurter bun, the last dark rejected french fry like a withered witch’s finger. Let anyone imagine I gaze at the horizon. It is a kind of horizon at which I gaze, an inner-made-outer vanishing point, a place where feeling ventures out to make a meeting with language and finds itself savaged.
*
I will not forgive The Whom. He would not forgive me.
*
I thought I would see justiny at last, but the tiny bird has flown. The question I cannot allow myself to ask: Were they not two, but one? Was The Whom pretending to be justiny? Or was justiny pretending to be The Whom?
*
It was him I killed. He is not unnamed. He has a name, even if inadequate, bogus, contrived. The man I killed, The Whom. It was The Whom who tried to enter my blog and it was The Whom I wanted to keep out and The Whom I laid low with a single remorseless thrust with the blunt editorial object I had carried with me hidden on my person and with which, gripped knuckle-tight, I lay in wait inside the entranceway of my blog. It was The Whom I wanted to reduce to gibberish with my disemvoweler, it was him I wished to see undone and unspeeched it was him who poisoned the well and stole the goose it was him who could never would never be silent I tell you it was never other than The Whom.
*
A man tried to enter my blog. I killed him at the entrance there. In order to make you understand I would have to go back to the beginning and that is impossible. I am not trying to hide anything, I swear this.
*
I could never have protected anyone. I don’t know who or what I was trying to protect. Since the day I killed the unnamed man there has been no one else remotely near the blog, no evidence of justiny, not an extinguished sasparilla candle, not an herbal-cough-drop wrapper. justiny has gone, if he or she ever dwelled here. justiny, I now believe, was as frightened of me as he/she was of that malignant other, the man I killed. And will I go unpunished? I have come to believe so. My blog is a site on no map, is sanctioned in no precinct, patrolled by no militia. Its occupants have only ever constituted its sole authority. The three of us, if it ever was three. Or two. Now gone.
*
A man tried to enter my blog last night. I killed him in the entranceway with a blow to the head. I felt in the impact as I heaved my cudgel and met with his grunting pumpkinthick skull that he was dead, and I discarded the brainoiled implement in the darkness there and ran upstairs and hid in a far high corner of my blog in bereavement and horror not so much at what I had done to the man I killed, to that rotting gourd full of evil, but at what I had done to myself and to my solitary majestic kingdom here, to my elegant elaborate and irreplaceable redoubt now beshitted in revenger’s shame. But it was done. He is silent now. I will need to pass his body there in the entranceway if I am to leave, the mouth-stilled black form slumped in the dark joint of wall and floorboard with its dumb black legs blocking the threshold. I am not afraid.