mountaintop
Mostly he has nightmares now.
Those moonlit nights of neon signs and pulsing beats visit him often. The wild parties, the dancing, the sweaty bodies and smeared makeup, fingers tangled with hair. Heat and motion and clandestine winks.
The breathlessness of need.
Flashes of color between flailing elbows and bent knees, tanned shoulder blades exposed, heat-curled hair and expensive perfume. White teeth gleaming in the stuffy darkness pierced by strobe lights. (greenpurplebluegreenpurpleblue) Smoke and music, low voices murmuring in his ear, silken strands of liquid craving: Hello, handsome, lookin' for a good time?
Yes. Goddess, yes.
The groping that always followed, concealed under the cover of moving bodies: sticky palms and fingers crawling, prodding, lingering on buttons and zippers with sensuous ease. The cab ride to the apartment—yours or mine?—the clothes dropping to the floor—zip, swish swish—the grunts and moans and heavy breathing.
Each time with the heavy breathing.
The awkward moments spent smoking cigarettes in bed in the half-light of dawn. Ashtrays by the bedside. The radiator buzzing. Also the hung-over mornings with its furtive glances, the oh-no's and what-have-I-done's. No names exchanged. The hurried ritual of searching for discarded articles of clothing, rumpled little things, sometimes stained by Goddess knows what.
No strings attached.
No names.
Just faces, and bodies.
Moving scenes, all of them. Passed through a filter, clipped and timed, superimposed on the backdrop of the city: great skyscrapers poking the starless, eyeless sky.
They're gone now, those days.
Gone but not forgotten.
Something inside him sighs.
He glowers at the hills down below, the straight-backed trees of lurid green, the branching streams that glisten in the sun. Picture perfect. Houses with multi-colored roofs poke up from between the shimmering canopies, rural shacks with clapboard walls swimming in a sea of leaves, like buoys in the middle of the ocean. Here he is now, stuck in a dull backwater village plopped down a hundred meters past the outer fringes of nowhere.
At any rate nowhere is somewhere. Maybe.
Nowhere is home now. Because home is just a shell and home doesn't exist anymore. Home is a pencil-drawn box with a triangle on top and a single apple tree to the side. Home used to be wild nights and callous kisses and now, now, home is the smell of fire and a hammer in his hand in front of a forge and the words Not good enough, try again, again, again.
No.
Not again.
Not good enough. Never good enough.
He's drowning in fury, in frustration, in birdsong and running water and sincere smiles and he has nothing to hold on to, no foothold to stick his toes into. Falling from nothingness into nothingness. Running away from whatever it is behind him. He's alive but not living; he doesn't know which way is up. The city, the village, it's all the same: names and voices and faces, always faces, too many of them to remember, none of them important enough to care about.
He doesn't know what he wants, what he needs. Not happiness. Happiness is subjective; only children wish for it. Happiness is the Santa Claus for adults: they believe in it until they catch delusion in disguise, at night, filling their socks with colorful dreams and bittersweet ambitions packaged in shiny, crackling tinfoil.
They unwrap happiness and find lies inside.
At least on Mother's Hill he can seize solitude in fistfuls, gulp it in without choking. Inhale it through a rolled paper bill like a drug, like crushed powder—no.
Don't.
No, those days have long been in the past. Dead, buried and abandoned, holed in a coffin of crumbling skeletons. Lodged in the dusty crevices of the mind and pressed into the underside like chewing gum. There, below the table, between bouncing knees, where the consciousness flits by but never lands. No use reopening old scars only to wait for them to heal again.
He takes a deep drag on the cigarette, keeps the smoke in his mouth. Already he can feel his lungs blackening, shriveling, hastening his death: come on, Grim Reaper. Do your worst. A taunt sent south of sunlit days. He exhales through the nose and the smoke streams out, ephemeral, rising up.
Smoke and music.
Everybody has a scar or two, behind the buttoned-up collar. Under flounced skirts and gold cuff links and the flapping black tie: secrets, dark ones, hidden pasts and dodged bullets. Little sticks carved into the plaster wall, like a prisoner, counting the days, the reckless forays beyond the boundaries: third chance at life, kitten. He flicks the cigarette by his feet and watches the embers pulse a dull red, smoke coiling upward, before crushing it with his shoe. Ashes underfoot. In the long run, dead people and cigarette butts have at least one thing in common.
The unlucky ones don't even get burned: their bodies lie on the asphalt and get eaten by the birds, their necks broken.
No names. Just bodies.
"Screw this," he yells to the emptiness. The blank echo of his voice bounces back to him, intersecting layers of anger washing down from naked air, lapping at the base of his neck like a reprieve, a forgiveness unsolicited. He hopes the roofs below house people inside, and that those people have heard him. Is he visible from up here? No, to them he must seem like an ant. A speck on the mountaintop, lost, breaking through the trees. Dust wanting attention, dust waving its arms, bobbing its head.
I'm here, look at me, watch me, and screw you.
Screw everyone.
No strings attached.
"Echoes just don't sound the same," she says, and he turns on his heel, a feral snarl rolling through his chest.
"Leave me alone."
His voice doesn't seem to reach her; the expression on her face is wistful, pensive, as though she's still asleep and doesn't know it. She's closer now, walking towards him, step, step, step. She treads on a twig and it snaps. Her eyes shoot past him, over his shoulder, gliding along the hazy skyline snaking in the distance. She might be seeing ghosts. Watching echoes, watching fluttering coldness from the morning's somnolent yawn. "They're like husks," she says.
"What?"
"Husks. The echoes, they're husks. Think of a glove: it looks like a hand, but the fingers are empty."
He laughs, harshly, the noise rasping in his throat. How poetic, how pathetic, how stupid, absurd, dimwitted. He shoves his fists into his pockets and the knuckles brush the flimsy fabric, worn soft by time and constant wear; there are holes in them. If he ever puts coins in there, they would fall right through the leg of his pants. Clink, clink, down on the ground, metallic.
She's smiling; he's not sure, but a corner of her mouth lifts and skews her face: a bland smile, a little brackish. The sun is up; it strikes her face flat and raises her features, the cracks around her lips and the moist gray-white chafing in between, the freckles on her nose, her large jug-ears, pink, slanted backward. She hums, and he finds the melody annoys him.
Smoke and music.
Sweat trickles down his nape, leaves a trail wetness that cools with the wind.
"Leave me alone," he says again, with less force this time.
"You can be surrounded by people and still be alone." Damn her. Damn her and her philosophizing, acting like she knows, like she cares, when all she wants is to knot him into a ball she can play with. Bounce him on the wall, or throw him far enough for the dogs to follow. The dogs first, then the wolves, pouncing on his weaknesses.
"Go away." The words come out rough, snappier than necessary.
"Is that what you really want?" She turns her glassy eyes on him, soft, probing, impossible to hold down, water in a drinking glass. "Do you really want to be alone?"
"Yes. Now leave."
A staggered laughter comes out from her, slithering close to the grass like a snake, like a stalking predator, coy and feminine but the wily kind, the kind that tends to raise its eyebrows and say Bad dog. "You don't own the mountain," she says.
"Neither do you." The fight drains out of him, he's had enough and he just wants to close his eyes and fall backward through time with his arms spread out and never hit the ground. Falling forever: now there's an idea. Blood rushing to your head, your eyes rolling around in their sockets, your tongue hanging out, the wind in your ears, and no one to see you. And then you pass out, but you keep falling. It's morbid, but it brings a sense of comfort, a freedom of sorts, if freedom means letting go. That must be how death feels.
No strings attached.
"You don't want to be alone," she says, facing the horizon again. "Nobody does, but not everyone's brave enough to admit it."
A growl rumbles deep in his throat. He's angry. No, pissed off—big time. "You know nothing about me." Images fly by behind his eyes, bodies, always bodies, always in the darkness, most of them alive, one of them dead. Eyes open and staring. Neck broken.
They loom behind him, no matter how much he tries to run away. They have long arms.
"Maybe I don't." She blinks, slowly, still wearing the half-smile that's sadder than a frown. "But maybe I do."
She doesn't. No one does.
He sighs, defeated, tired. Again. "Kinda presuming of you," he says. He squints and stares at sun sideways, from the edges of his sight; it stares back. "You don't want to be alone?"
The lifted side of her mouth sinks down, deepens, crumples the skin surrounding it. Small gesture, but significant: I don't know, it admits. "All I can say is that I'm not brave enough."
He shrugs. "No one is."