Lullabies for Suffering Read online

  4.

  “I wanted to be an artist for the longest time, ever since my parents took me to Atlantic City and I saw those guys doing caricatures on the boardwalk. I was enthralled by them. Couldn’t stop watching them. Couldn’t move. Would have stayed there forever. These working joes getting to sit outside with the smells of the sea and the popcorn and hotdogs, painting likenesses of people all day long. Took me years to realize I wasn’t very good and never would be, though I was featured for a while in The Vanderelli Room. People seemed to like it and it excited me to be so positively appraised. I thought I might be going places, but I couldn’t make the spark catch again. I felt trapped, so I moved, thought a new space might serve me better. Thought I might be able to make a living from it someday. The self-delusion of all budding creatives. We should be compensated fairly for our passions, shouldn’t we? And if the world deems art should be free, then I propose that so too should living.”

  I didn’t respond, because I knew there wouldn’t be time before he started rambling again. Besides, he wouldn’t have heard my answer even if I’d cared enough about the subject to offer one.

  “But then I started to feel tired all the time. And down. Started to feel nervous over nothing. Couldn’t get out of bed. Didn’t want to. Couldn’t paint. Felt like I was disappearing.”

  This at least was more interesting, a thread of commonality to which I could relate. I was quite adept at disappearing and the terror of unbecoming. It’s why I still check my skin for the faded floral patterns of the wallpaper from my childhood home.

  “It’s frustrating, worse than the notion of death.”

  “What is?”

  “The idea of never being good at life.”

  We ordered more drinks. I was floating above myself by then, tethered to my body by some biological arrangement to which I’d not been privy and trapped in the room by the distant engine drone of his words.

  “A man bit me once,” I said, simply because the words had been burdening my throat.

  He’d been in the middle of his mournful pontificating but stopped to consider my words. “Bit you?”

  “Former lover. Blind date. Hopeless alcoholic. Woke up at his place in the middle of the night and found him chewing on my arm.” I roll up the right sleeve of my denim shirt to show him the oval ring of white em-dashes. “He woke with a craving for more alcohol and had none in the house, so he decided to siphon it from my veins.”

  “Jesus. What did you do?”

  “I clawed out one of his eyes.”

  “Seriously?”

  It felt like I was talking to him underwater, my words slow, emerging from my mouth like delicate brush strokes. “Left him there screaming. Don’t even know if he survived it or just bled to death in the bed. I took the eye. Had it encased in Lucite. I keep it on my nightstand as a reminder to be cautious among men who don’t know themselves.”

  “Whoa.”

  My grin feels like my face is made of butter and I’m gently scoring it with a knife. “I’m kidding.”

  “About the eye?”

  “The biting part was real. I figure it was some fucked up fetish. The rest is the kind of thing you think of later when you’re safe and it’s too late to act on it.”

  I could tell he didn’t believe any of it, but I didn’t care. What was it all but words to fill a silence that didn’t need filling? I wanted to fuck and sleep and get high and die, and none of that mattered either. If art requires you to be still, then life demands motion, given that there’s far more of one than the other. We were cohorts in a heist, he and I, thrown together by our strange natures and mutual ambivalence for life, stealing whatever perfunctory moments of joy we could find amid the ruins of the world. There would be no consequences or penalties. We hadn’t ended our lives, not yet, but inevitably we would, which freed us from the prison of obligation.

  “I miss the rush,” he said then, and even without knowing the flavor of highs to which he referred, I agreed. No rush is the same, and the first is always the best. Get clean and come back to it and it’s like an angel is fucking your brain. There’s no guilt, no shame. That comes later when you come down or when a well-meaning Samaritan decides to adopt your burden. You feel bad because they feel bad, not because you actually regret letting the angel fuck you.

  “When I paint, I become someone else. Something else. I actually like what it makes me even if I don’t have a name for it. But I can’t do it anymore and it’s left a void in me I only know how to fill with bad things.”

  “‘Bad’ is a relative term though, wouldn’t you say?’”

  By then, I was starting to return to myself, prematurely brought down by the counterweight of his melancholy, and it was getting old. We needed a change of venue, a change of high. My elbows and toes were starting to tickle from the dust of inertia. I looked around at the long rectangular room, built to mimic a train car if Union Pacific had a habit of filling their cars with neon beer signs, Christmas lights, old TVs showing Keno numbers and NASCAR, cheap tables, bar stools with ripped red leather for seats, and admitted only the dangerous and disadvantaged. There was an old glass rotisserie too close to the bathroom door, within which flaccid hot dogs turned like the vacant fingers of a wet rubber glove. An overweight woman with dirty blond hair wearing a T-shirt bearing the legend WHITE LIVES MATTER looked up from her game of pool and glared a challenge in my direction, cue held rifle-like by her side. As I had no intention of getting into it with anyone brave enough to stand so close to the forty-year-old franks, I returned my attention to Calvin.

  “Towards the end, I started seeing things in the paintings. The stories behind them.”

  “I thought that was the point of art?”

  He ignored me. “Instead of photographs, I saw the people who took the picture. Instead of paint, I saw the inspiration through the eyes of the artist. Often, it was wonderful to behold. I saw incredible things. I traveled through time, awoke in strange beds, walked unknown roads. I became other people in places alien to me. But it was not always so benevolent. Sometimes I saw terrible things. And toward the end, when it got really bad, sometimes they saw me.”

  “Who’s they?”

  He looked down at his empty drink and shook his head. “If I knew that, I suppose I’d know the true meaning of art, like seeing the face of God, but I don’t.”

  It was getting late, and I was getting bored, so I punched him on the arm to jar him from his reverie. “Let’s blow this joint.”

  “We should go home. I’m tired. Worn down to ash by the pretense of being human, of being sane, of being, period.”

  I rose, the chair legs barking like a startled dog. “Fuck that. We’re young. The night’s young. Let’s wreck it.”

  He looked up at me then and there was such a naked fear in his eyes it gave me pause, penetrated the protective veil of my high and twisted my guts. It’s a look better suited to my own reflection on the bad nights: the atavistic dread, the misery and desperation, the absolute fear that you’ve reached the end of the road, and all that’s left is for someone to make it official.

  I didn’t allow the recognition of his fear to take root. If I did, I’d be forced to join him in his dull introspective meandering, and I was too restless. I needed to keep moving, keep going, keep the high alive, or risk having my nerves exposed to my own reality. If the face of Calvin’s God was art, then the face of mine was Chaos, raw and bleeding, filling the sky in a universe of my own design. Looking upon it was to risk going mad, and I was always never less than halfway there. It demanded I look, but I couldn’t. Not yet.

  I braced my hands flat on the table on both sides of his empty glass. My hair hung in my face and I could smell the grease. “Look. You’re having a moment. I get it. Your life didn’t work out the way you thought it would. Welcome to the suck. We’re both fucked, and that’s fine. This rollercoaster doesn’t go in reverse, so what say we ditch the self-pity and finish the ride? We’re still here, you and me, primed for adventure, and
if sometimes they see you, so what? I’m seeing you now and what I see is potential.” I leaned over and kissed his whiskey lips. “What say we don’t waste it?”

  Now that the decision to leave had been made, the clamor from the bar beyond the radius of our table rushed back in, as if we’d been encased in a bubble all night.

  “Hey,” the barman bellowed at us, and in his meaty hands he strangled tapwater into the sink from a frayed, once-white dish rag as if it were our necks. “Order a drink or get the hell out. You two have been sitting there dry for, like, over an hour now.”

  “Have we, like, been sitting here, like, for over an hour? I just finished my drink, you fucking putz.” I admit I was offended that somehow, in this squalid shit pit, we were the offensive ones, so I threw him a glare and kicked my chair back from the table. “We’re leaving. Got reservations at a place that doesn’t smell like your mother’s ass.”

  The barman’s long face turned the color of a pickled beet. “My mother’s dead, you junkie bitch.”

  “Then it probably smells even worse.”

  Calvin’s chuckle was the sound of a bathtub draining.

  The toothless and ferociously bearded old man who had spent the greater part of the evening openly ogling my breasts from his corner of the bar called out, “Might not want to be drivin’ drunk. Police’re everywhere.” His rubbery lips spread in a wide empty grin, exposing a tongue paler than a sundried dog turd. “I could give y’all a ride. ’Specially the lady.” He cackled and I thrust a middle finger at him as the barman rounded the bar like a tornado.

  Calvin shoved the door open and we staggered out on a wave of laughter into the chill night air.

  5.

  What followed is hazy: snapshots of pulsating lights and music, of altercations and raised voices, of broken glass and an irate Uber driver throwing us out somewhere short of our destination, of more raucous laughter, of fucking in the rain, of running from the police, and the taste of paint on my tongue. Eventually we found our way to a shitty motel, the neon light a beacon for sleaze like us. We had no pills, no coke, no heroin, but we had a bottle of cheap vodka and that would have to do until we had the presence of mind to formulate a proper score. There were tears, of course, from Calvin, who, in the absence of whirling lights and adrenaline, returned to his ennui.

  “I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what I’m doing here.”

  “Does anyone?” My nose was burning and my veins felt hollow. I considered getting off the bed and just fucking him senseless if only to shut him up, but that required an effort of which I was incapable, and I wasn’t sure he’d be up to it, so I busied myself with taping up the smoke alarm so I could have a cigarette. “Hey, how come you don’t have any paintings at your place? Any of yours, I mean. I’d like to see some.”

  “I destroyed them all. Hardest thing I’ve ever done, but it needed to be done. It was a kind of cleansing. I hoped it would help.”

  “And did it?”

  “A little. Not enough. Can I tell you something?”

  “Anything, mi amore.”

  “I know why this is happening to me. I know why I can see things in the paintings that other people can’t. I know why I can step through them into those worlds and see what the people who painted them saw. And I know why I’m being punished for it too.”

  I dropped down onto the bed and mumbled around my cigarette. “Good. Closure’s good.”

  “It’s because of my mother.”

  “Isn’t it always? Mine used to slam me into the walls and force me to stare at the patterns on the wallpaper. If you’re wondering why my nose looks like this, now you know.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It was good for me. Opened my eyes to things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Who we are beyond the artifice.”

  He swept his hair out of his eyes, which were gleaming. I’ve seen that look in the mirror many times before.

  “Yes, yes, that’s it exactly. I see things now because my mother used to make me stare at her paintings until I saw what she wanted me to see in them.” He nodded at the picture on the far wall by the door. Housed in a cheap brown frame, it was a drab, acrylic picture of a farmhouse and barn. “She would have torn that one off the wall. Bad art disgusted her. She agonized over her work. Sometimes I think it’s what killed her. It used to drive her mad that she couldn’t properly nurture her work into being. Even when she sold them and they were received well, she said they were unfinished. She said the same of all her work. She hated it. And I feel that hate, still. It lives in me because I’ve never been able to shake the sense that she felt the same about me: an unfinished disappointment.”

  I was starting to get tired. It had been a long day, my system jolted by so many drugs while being softened by too much alcohol. My heart didn’t know what to do with itself, so it was time to let it rest before it decided to quit.

  “She made me stare at them for hours. I used to make up things I saw in them to keep her happy.”

  “That’s nice. You were a good kid.”

  “I did it for so long and so often I started seeing the paintings move. It made me ill. I was sick for a long time. My mother got sick too. Cancer. She had my father set up an easel in her room, but not for her. It was for me. She wanted me to paint her, to preserve her suffering. She wanted me to be an artist. I didn’t yet know how, so I couldn’t paint her. I was terrified I would disappoint her. But I forced it, and what emerged was the kind of effort you’d expect from a twelve-year-old. After the last stroke was done, I turned the easel around to show it to her, but she was dead.” He shrugged, picked at the dead white skin on his big toe. “I don’t blame her. I loved her. She just wanted people to be able to see what she saw, so they could understand her, but she couldn’t get the images right. Which means no matter how her work was celebrated, she died a stranger to the world. The same will happen to me.”

  “The same happens to everyone. Even if you’re known in life, we’re all strangers in death.”

  “It feels like my time’s coming.”

  I don’t like when the conversation turns this way, as it so often does among people like us. There’s always a moment in which you decide you’ve had enough of being nothing, that it’s time to put the eraser down before you vanish completely, that you’re finally ready to make a fresh start. The problem with that resolution is that it’s like deciding to build a house because you know where to find a hammer. The tool is nothing without the materials and the will. If you allow the vow to take hold, it becomes a bogeyman, terrifying in its implications, so to prepare for it, you make a ceremony over having one last bump, one last high, and that reminds you how ill-prepared you are for anything else. Why in holy fuck would you ever want to face the world clean? you think. Even if by some miracle you come out of it with your determination intact, where do you begin? Rehab? Here’s the funny thing about rehab: it’s full of people who smile and tell their stories and congratulate each other and applaud and give out coins and then walk back out into the world with no idea what to do with themselves. Maybe they have a nice 9-5 job, a supportive wife, some kids. None of that can expel the nagging feeling that something’s missing from you, something’s not right. It’s as if some mad surgeon crept into your house and removed one of your lungs while you slept. You live in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction, of being a passenger on the wrong train looking longingly out the window at all the happy people traveling the right one. For no good reason, you randomly find it difficult to breathe. You have no friends who aren’t junkies. You become an expert at spotting people who are carrying, and they’re the angels beckoning a return to the fold. It’s grief, it’s mourning, and there’s only one way to cure it. It’s why they call it a fix.

  So no, I didn’t want to have this conversation now. Or ever. A day might come in which I turn a similar corner, decide to get my shit in order and try to make it through without chemical condolence, but that’s not today, and it’
s not tomorrow, and it’s none of your fucking business.

  I threw back the covers and patted a hand on the bed next to me. “Come on, lover. Come to bed.”

  “I can’t stop walking into those paintings,” he said then. “But the last time…the night I met you on the bridge…that was the worst of all.”

  He rose unsteadily, and that was progress. His pupils were small periods on a page streaked with thin red lines. A bead of sweat hung suspended from his stubbled chin.

  “Why’s that?”

  He pulled his shirt up over his head and the bones in his chest were like kindling beneath a dirty white sheet.

  “Because I almost forgot how to get back out.”

  6.

  Even under oath, I’ll never admit to being an addict or an alcoholic, no more than I’d swear to have either habit under control. No denial for this girl, no, siree. Just evasion. I prefer to think myself caught somewhere in the middle, a woman without a country but with periodic access to GPS if I ever want it. Weeks go by in which, despite the all-consuming suicidal horror of detox, I don’t take anything. Calvin called it Jilting the Dragon. It’s good to jilt the dragon every once in a while, even if just to prove that I can, to engage in a brief reminder of what it’s like to be back behind the wheel of my own life. But those are also the worst times, dark and frightening times, and I don’t much care for them. The world thinks being clean is the respectable way to be, but it’s also the hardest. Sobriety is a world of sharp edges and pain, and I will never understand why you wouldn’t avoid it if you had the choice.

  Andrea, my younger sister, wants nothing to do with me. No doubt she tells herself it’s because I’m an addict. She acts embarrassed by me, though I’ve never given her any reason to feel this way. I’ve never done her wrong. The beating heart of the enmity between us then, has more to do with how she feels every time she thinks of me, not as an adult, but a child. My memories of her are bittersweet. For a time, we were close, but the schism began once my mother began to physically abuse me. To Andrea, my mother showed only love, and no sign of the abject hatred which one day materialized out of thin air. While I was getting my nose broken, or beaten with a wooden spoon, or being dragged by my hair along the hallway floor, Andrea was in the living room, pretending to watch TV, while watching our reflections on the screen. She has no reason to hate me, nor do I hate her, but I clearly remember feeling that our bond withered a little bit more every time I asked myself why she had escaped my mother’s wrath, why I’d been chosen as the target of her fury. In my darkest moments, I felt an impulse to bestow upon my sister the same violence bestowed upon me, perhaps as a means of restoring some perverse balance, but I didn’t have it in me. I think now she wants nothing to do with me because I’m a walking reminder that if not for me, the sacrificial lamb, her world would have been very different. There is, of course, no way of knowing if this is true. Any hope of divining such information would require us talking, and we don’t do that. The deep cracks in our relationship are destined to remain unshored.