09-10-2013, 07:07 PM
She mean to check on him every fucking day, but. She didn't. Missed someone the transit between here and not here. Time is her plaything yes but it also slips away. They went back to Utah over fucking Labor Day to play that goddamned bowling alley again. It was madness, Sera loved it. All those poor fucking sister wives.
The tubes were out of the priest and the priest was out of the hospital and she told him to stay put and she told him that she would call her but no, no, Sera could feel the work around him and the fucking stubbornness all in him and he said no. He said, Don't bother calling her. He said, I know where she is.
And Sera trusted that: he did.
And: he would.
And: it would all be all right now.
And she was so fucking happy that the weight of those weeks and the pressure of her fears and her fucking semi-regular thoroughly rational thoroughly irrational breakdowns - which happened when she was alone, standing in the lee of the building stacked above her, pushing back against the sick and throttling panic that was like to strangle her every time she walked into that place, which she kept to herself, because because because - just melted away from her and hey,
everything seemed better.
--
So this is how she finds out that he's: gone. And who knows where. No one knows where and fucking Rosa is not going to tell her and there's a stranger - but wait, that comes later.
Four a.m. and a locked door and a tightrope trip that has her wanting to see him or be near him or feel the peculiar atomic-brilliance of his resonance against the back of her mind. Illuminating. Sometimes she needs that: lacerating brilliance without heat. Just light light light. And there was something she wanted to tell him about something she cannot remember but the words are inside her all swirled up. Yes, darlings. Swirled.
Like a soft-serve ice cream cone.
With curving lines and a tucked-over peak.
She thinks of the way they fold together - words and so fucking strange, especially when you are tripping and they feel like solid things, external, and thinking about that and about him pulls her back from some edges that she doesn't know she's traversing or rather: yes. She always knows that there's darkness and a swift deadly plunge on the other side of this. That's the awareness. That's the thrill but:
words, see. She feels them drilling down inside her and that's making her half-smile as she stumbles out of the yellow cab and shoves a generous fistful of cash at the cabbie who cannot precisely imagine what a girl dressed like that wants at the Church of the Good Shepherd at four eighteen a.m. on a Wednesday morning. She'll just let herself in and curl up on the couch and be there in the morning. Even his orange juice glows. She's thinking of that as she opens the latched gate and thinking of that as she wanders up the sidewalk and it is making her more than half-smile because this is so familiar and so necessary to her somehow. This ritual.
It feels like a ritual.
But see: one locked door.
Maybe it is because he's sick, right, and maybe it is for other reasons, and maybe it is something else entirely and maybe maybe maybe he's in there even though all she feels is the baseline nuclear-waste glow of his lingering presence. This is what she's telling herself. Sera has always been remarkably good at lying to herself. Still she knows:
things are already starting to go wrong.
--
Because the front door is locked.
And there's someone fucking new living in his goddamned house.
--
An hour or two or three later, the new pastor of the Church of the Good Shepherd finds a rather striking looking creature whom the League of Mary now believe is a call girl sitting on the front stoop of the rectory, the shaved line of her head tucked against the peeling paint of one of the support beams. Thinks she's passed out maybe because she's not really moving but she's not passed out.
She's just quiet.
She's just tripping.
Dark eye makeup smeared like whoa. The world banked and bounded in shadows that feel both rising and steady, that hollow out her chest and curl up inside the cavities they make.
That drift from her skin, smoke made visible as the streets give way to morning.
Her eyes are open, pupils hugely dilated.
Sera dropped the acid hours ago. Hours and hours and hours and hours ago. Was starting to think that it was bad shit and kept bugging Dan to check her pupils are they dilated yet I think this is bad shit its all speed it's not -
- so she went out and started drinking because what the fucking hell. Making Good Choices is really something other people do.
The most intense hallucinations have faded to a sort of afterglow burn, but every light is ringed in rainbows and the tracers are like the promise fireworks in the sky, just before the blast, the rain-of-fire. And she knows, she knows, that dark things lurk just at the edges of her field of vision.
She has dreams, sometimes. She has such vivid dreams.
--
Sera takes one look at the new priest and instantly hates him. Hates him and everything about him. Hates the bulk of the church and the stupid confessional booths and the dead-eyed statues of the saints thinks of other saints saints with their eyes boiled saints with their bodies riddled with arrows and roasted over coals and torn apart.
Thinks of: a leaded glass window arch, smoke rising, the silver light of the moon cutting through at midnight and then later, the green morning, after the sun has risen, before the mist has lifted from the land. The statue of a dead god, splayed open.
They always cover him up but she knows he would've been naked when the Romans killed him.
Why the fuck can't these assholes face that?
--
And maybe he says something to her but she ignores him and will ignore him until and unless he threatens her with police and/or paramedics. She ignores him ducks her head and works through the motions of her fingers and the way they open a phone. Swipes the bar on her iPhone the wrong direction seventeen times before she gets it right and then thing wakes up all happy to see her and after three or four wrong numbers (sorry guys! just another random call from Sera at 5:30 in the morning) she gets it right and tries calling him and what the fuck this asshole's pager rings.
Which takes the breath out of her, all over again.
She wants him to be there. She wants him to always be there. Wants him to call her m'ija and give her a fucking bottle of water and sheets and a blanket and put her to bed on his stupid cheap scratchy couch. She wants to go to sleep or rather: not-sleep, that drifting not-sleep that comes in at the end of a trip where everything merges into a dreaming landscape of presence and absence that seems to radiate out from her spine in the half-light shrouded by cheap curtains both thinking and not-thinking about the stupid religious iconography on the wall. Wants to wander out of there around noon, not really having slept but having rested, all smeared sandpaper eyes and toussled hair and last-night's bruises on her body the straps of her stupid heels tucked in the curl of her index fingers and - and - and - bring him pan dulce in his office and scandalize the congregation and then drift out and wander home in the afternoon light and and maybe find someone to fuck or just curl up in the messy nest of her big bed and sleep until it is time to do this shit all over again but
this asshole's pager rings.
"What the fuck did you do with him?"
[We imagine, this does not end well.]
The tubes were out of the priest and the priest was out of the hospital and she told him to stay put and she told him that she would call her but no, no, Sera could feel the work around him and the fucking stubbornness all in him and he said no. He said, Don't bother calling her. He said, I know where she is.
And Sera trusted that: he did.
And: he would.
And: it would all be all right now.
And she was so fucking happy that the weight of those weeks and the pressure of her fears and her fucking semi-regular thoroughly rational thoroughly irrational breakdowns - which happened when she was alone, standing in the lee of the building stacked above her, pushing back against the sick and throttling panic that was like to strangle her every time she walked into that place, which she kept to herself, because because because - just melted away from her and hey,
everything seemed better.
--
So this is how she finds out that he's: gone. And who knows where. No one knows where and fucking Rosa is not going to tell her and there's a stranger - but wait, that comes later.
Four a.m. and a locked door and a tightrope trip that has her wanting to see him or be near him or feel the peculiar atomic-brilliance of his resonance against the back of her mind. Illuminating. Sometimes she needs that: lacerating brilliance without heat. Just light light light. And there was something she wanted to tell him about something she cannot remember but the words are inside her all swirled up. Yes, darlings. Swirled.
Like a soft-serve ice cream cone.
With curving lines and a tucked-over peak.
She thinks of the way they fold together - words and so fucking strange, especially when you are tripping and they feel like solid things, external, and thinking about that and about him pulls her back from some edges that she doesn't know she's traversing or rather: yes. She always knows that there's darkness and a swift deadly plunge on the other side of this. That's the awareness. That's the thrill but:
words, see. She feels them drilling down inside her and that's making her half-smile as she stumbles out of the yellow cab and shoves a generous fistful of cash at the cabbie who cannot precisely imagine what a girl dressed like that wants at the Church of the Good Shepherd at four eighteen a.m. on a Wednesday morning. She'll just let herself in and curl up on the couch and be there in the morning. Even his orange juice glows. She's thinking of that as she opens the latched gate and thinking of that as she wanders up the sidewalk and it is making her more than half-smile because this is so familiar and so necessary to her somehow. This ritual.
It feels like a ritual.
But see: one locked door.
Maybe it is because he's sick, right, and maybe it is for other reasons, and maybe it is something else entirely and maybe maybe maybe he's in there even though all she feels is the baseline nuclear-waste glow of his lingering presence. This is what she's telling herself. Sera has always been remarkably good at lying to herself. Still she knows:
things are already starting to go wrong.
--
Because the front door is locked.
And there's someone fucking new living in his goddamned house.
--
An hour or two or three later, the new pastor of the Church of the Good Shepherd finds a rather striking looking creature whom the League of Mary now believe is a call girl sitting on the front stoop of the rectory, the shaved line of her head tucked against the peeling paint of one of the support beams. Thinks she's passed out maybe because she's not really moving but she's not passed out.
She's just quiet.
She's just tripping.
Dark eye makeup smeared like whoa. The world banked and bounded in shadows that feel both rising and steady, that hollow out her chest and curl up inside the cavities they make.
That drift from her skin, smoke made visible as the streets give way to morning.
Her eyes are open, pupils hugely dilated.
Sera dropped the acid hours ago. Hours and hours and hours and hours ago. Was starting to think that it was bad shit and kept bugging Dan to check her pupils are they dilated yet I think this is bad shit its all speed it's not -
- so she went out and started drinking because what the fucking hell. Making Good Choices is really something other people do.
The most intense hallucinations have faded to a sort of afterglow burn, but every light is ringed in rainbows and the tracers are like the promise fireworks in the sky, just before the blast, the rain-of-fire. And she knows, she knows, that dark things lurk just at the edges of her field of vision.
She has dreams, sometimes. She has such vivid dreams.
--
Sera takes one look at the new priest and instantly hates him. Hates him and everything about him. Hates the bulk of the church and the stupid confessional booths and the dead-eyed statues of the saints thinks of other saints saints with their eyes boiled saints with their bodies riddled with arrows and roasted over coals and torn apart.
Thinks of: a leaded glass window arch, smoke rising, the silver light of the moon cutting through at midnight and then later, the green morning, after the sun has risen, before the mist has lifted from the land. The statue of a dead god, splayed open.
They always cover him up but she knows he would've been naked when the Romans killed him.
Why the fuck can't these assholes face that?
--
And maybe he says something to her but she ignores him and will ignore him until and unless he threatens her with police and/or paramedics. She ignores him ducks her head and works through the motions of her fingers and the way they open a phone. Swipes the bar on her iPhone the wrong direction seventeen times before she gets it right and then thing wakes up all happy to see her and after three or four wrong numbers (sorry guys! just another random call from Sera at 5:30 in the morning) she gets it right and tries calling him and what the fuck this asshole's pager rings.
Which takes the breath out of her, all over again.
She wants him to be there. She wants him to always be there. Wants him to call her m'ija and give her a fucking bottle of water and sheets and a blanket and put her to bed on his stupid cheap scratchy couch. She wants to go to sleep or rather: not-sleep, that drifting not-sleep that comes in at the end of a trip where everything merges into a dreaming landscape of presence and absence that seems to radiate out from her spine in the half-light shrouded by cheap curtains both thinking and not-thinking about the stupid religious iconography on the wall. Wants to wander out of there around noon, not really having slept but having rested, all smeared sandpaper eyes and toussled hair and last-night's bruises on her body the straps of her stupid heels tucked in the curl of her index fingers and - and - and - bring him pan dulce in his office and scandalize the congregation and then drift out and wander home in the afternoon light and and maybe find someone to fuck or just curl up in the messy nest of her big bed and sleep until it is time to do this shit all over again but
this asshole's pager rings.
"What the fuck did you do with him?"
[We imagine, this does not end well.]
But my heart is wild and my bones are steel
And I could kill you with my bare hands if I was free.
- Phosphorescent, Song for Zula
And I could kill you with my bare hands if I was free.
- Phosphorescent, Song for Zula