It. (rasatabula) wrote in repose, @ 2017-12-17 20:59:00 |
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Entry tags: | *narrative, jack penhaligon |
Narrative: Jack P
Who: Jack P
What: Remembering, time-fuzzy.
Warning: Uh, ex-sanguination.
Not a word to Newt, who nudged curiosity and anxiety over the table as if they were cards Jack was meant to have taken up and played. Not Cat (who he pictured sitting across from an utterly different table, Lady Fate herself rather than a mere player). He’d thought of Dahlia. Christ knew he didn’t know how to pick up the broken threads there. Diamonds didn’t exactly repair what had been built on muddy ground Jack really didn’t want to wade into early. But he thought of her when he woke on dreams of sharp, grey buildings and jostling bars, the morass of paper on his desk the only sea he crossed.
It was a Rubicon of a sorts. He could remember Jen bloody clearly now. He could remember her smile, her laugh, the turn of her head, the way she flexed her fingers at the back of her neck when she was reading documents brought home. He could remember the sharp incision of her voice and he couldn’t forget the shape of her face when she carved out what was his interior. He wouldn’t have known it without the detachment - or was it attachment - that came with a refresh that cantered through months instead of years. The idealism lingered like the smell of fresh paint, the highs were all the sweeter because they came so swiftly on the heels of desire and expectation fulfilled.
Triumph and Jack savored it. He knew it was short-lived, he wasn’t forty in the driving licence and paperwork filed in the B&B room and the office of that awful paper. He knew it would go, this gush of stories and drama, the laughter from a creased pillow and tangled, musk-laden sheets. He knew it ended as he remembered a registry office and the startled look on Jen’s face as he kissed her in cream, as if she hadn’t expected him to say the words after all.
It was like the onset of a nightmare but he woke every day a fraction older and that sleep, no matter when, no matter where, would bring it on. The triumph turned torpid, the expectation, rancid. It was day after day after day in rain and in electric lighting. It was the bike (because the bike was an alternative, it was a goddamn necessity if he wasn’t to get stuck in the rat-race of mindless commuting and an office and back) and turgid stories about politics and communities, not even a precursor to conflict.
He didn’t know the ending. Jack was curious but he’d always preferred the answer he found out for himself, hadn’t he? It wasn’t enough to be told, it had to be lived for it to be true. His dream this time was sharp relief:
Blood. Thick, red, viscous.
Crumpled sheets. A shoe at the foot of the wardrobe, tipped on onside tipsily, like it was drunk, heel spiking air.
The smell of warmed meat, and musky, all the inner secrets of the body painted vivid and visceral and rancid in cold air.
Thick, red-glinting hair spread across the pillow, matted and crusted and thick.
He remembered. He remembered before, he remembered the taste of it, milky and thick like a dream, he remembered the stupor of sliding down the wall and sitting without sound, without words, without anything but the roaring of dead air in his ears and the turn of her head.
He remembered the papers spread out in the office, the burnishment of books, the same office she’d kissed the side of his forehead and said something sweet and contemptuous in the same breath about an office for a man who never left one during the day. He remembered the cracked spine and the pages that smelled of dry rot and sweet, sticky incense, that crumbled in his fingers as he turned them. He remembered the ketamine and the whiskey and the acidic retch of it on the carpet, souring.
It was cruel. It spread across three nights in succession as if his past were determined to show itself in facets, by degrees, in inching precision. And when he woke, with the funeral a memory instead of a foregone conclusion, with the dread and weight of it parcelled away behind his breastbone but truth burning like a brand, scorching away the mist of so many years and so much belief in what was muzzy and thick - he left the apartment, not for the B&B but for the nearest bar and christ, he understood why.
Two nights, back to back, in a bar that played circular music and jostled in alongside him and Jack remembered, after all - how ironic that it took bloody now - what it was to exceptionally, deliberately, make oneself alone.