Gasoline and Concentrate
"Where would Jesus be if no one had written the gospels?"
Doc Worth gets me a job as a nurse, and after that Worth's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, to conquer death you only gotta die. For a while though, Worth and I were something very nearly like friends.
People are always asking me if I know Doc Worth.
With the barrel of the gun knocking against the roof of my mouth, Worth says, "we ain't gonna die, really."
I know this gun. It was the first gun I ever held. In England you don't just hold a gun, like you hold a coffee cup, the way people around here do. I picked it up pretty quickly. There's something user-friendly about guns, like they want you to shoot them, neat little safety buttons and smooth-pull triggers brushing up into your fingers.
Shooting came natural to me.
"This here," Doc Worth says, "this ain't death. We're gonna be legends, carry on walkin' while the rest'a these bastards get old. Waste away. Get th' fuckin' Alzheimer's."
I tongue the barrel into my cheek and say, Worth, you terrible cunt, you're thinking of vampires.
The building we're standing on won't be here in another ten minutes.
There's about a million ways to make an explosive. Doc Worth knows them all. And me, I know them too, because Worth knows them. A lot of people think that it's some big secret, the making of bombs. If everyone could make them, thing would be blowing up all the time, right? That's what I thought, anyhow. But it's easy. All you need are the ingredients.
The building we're standing on won't be here in ten minutes. If you take enough blasting gelatin and wrap it around the foundations columns, you can topple any building in the world. The trick is directing the blast where it needs to go—it's all science, all delicate theoretical precision and dirty, practical application wrapped up in one. Focus the destructive force. Think clearly. Tamp it down with sandbags.
Once upon a time, I wouldn't have thought Worth was capable of this. Now I know better.
Worth and I, at the edge of the roof, and the chartreuse dawn breaking over the jagged edge of downtown. I really hope this gun is clean. I know it probably isn't, but I can't do much about that.
Guns taste like iron and soot.
This gun had better be clean.
The world trade center went down vertically. It collapsed like a star sinking into a black hole, sucking up a chunk of city into its empty space. The place where we're standing is going to be a point in the sky, negative space, in just a couple minutes. Somehow that's more unsettling than the fact that Worth has a bullet aimed at my reptile brain, ready to send me tumbling down to a void just like this god damn building. That reality is somehow more comprehensible than the idea that in a couple minutes, there won't be any way to return to where I'm standing now.
That old saying, how you always kill the one you love? Well you never stop and think that the one you love might kill you first.
"This's our world now," Worth says, grinning down the sights, "yers 'n mine. Don't belong ter none'a them dust bags, no goddamn George Washington's gonna take credit fer it now."
Looking crosseyed down at this one last thing standing between me and Worth, it hits like a baseball to the head that this isn't really about philosophy at all. Well. Maybe it is. But Doc Worth's philosophy isn't like regular philosophy.
This is about Hanna.
Worth and Hanna and I. Hanna wants me, Worth wants Hanna, I want… something. We all want something. We want too many things. Worth always sees the clear solution, the bright white laser line between point A and point B. Worth always knows exactly what to do to get what he wants. After a while, you get used to it, you start relying on it, even. Accidentally or on purpose.
This isn't about love as in caring. This is about property as in ownership.
Worth may know what to do, but Worth's solutions are as cold and razor-edged as the scalpel he carries loose in his pockets. Just as precisely efficient.
Maybe he's got a point about the legend thing. Maybe not. No, I say, just wait a second. Nobody knows the whole story, not like I do, right?
Dawn is breaking.
I tongue the barrel of the gun to one side, soot and saliva, and I say, if this is about being a legend, Worth listen, I can make you a legend. If we go out here, nobody knows. But I know, and I can make it happen. I can make you a legend. I was here from the beginning.
I remember the whole goddamn thing.
All of it.
-X-
It's a year ago.
The bench in front of me squeaks, screws older than I am protesting under the oncoming weight of another body. It's amazing how much body we lug around. Pounds of fat and bone wrapped up in a thin pink case, slung around under the power of a brain twice the size of a fist. Marionette limbs dangling from their wooden cross.
The man sitting beside me gets up, after a few uneasy seconds of wringing his hands, wondering if he has anything worth saying. It's his second time coming to group, and he's not sure, not yet, that anyone cares. Of course no one cares. When you stand up on the podium and tell the room how your sheets are a suckered monster wrestling you into the lightless thousand pound atmospheres in the deepest trenches of the ocean, nobody sees you standing there. Nobody hears you talking. They're too busy hearing themselves saying the same thing.
I never speak.
I've been coming for a couple years.
You walk down the street and everything from the color of your shoes to the expression on your face is a wide open display for the rest of the world. You brush your hair, shave whatever you've been told to shave. You hear female coworkers talking about each other's shoes, writing up their critiques on the living art performance they're putting on for each other. Tonight's exhibit, Marylin's undisguised crow's feet. Tomorrow night, Marylin's undisguised suicide.
You spend your whole life trying to be perfect, and you think that if you just please this one person—one more person, you've just got to get it right one more time—eventually you'll stumble your way into some kind of fucking nirvana where everything is exactly, effortlessly right and you won't have to worry about pleasing anyone ever again. You'll be a conduit. You'll be perfect.
At group, no one is looking at you. And if they are, you've at least got the satisfaction of knowing they're just as miserable—maybe more miserable, you can only imagine—as you.
The man next to me gets up. He's pretty young, actually. Possibly not even old enough to drink? There's just a split frame of a second where his eyes are toxic dump-grounds green and pointed right at me, and he looks so jagged at the edges that I wonder what kind of anvil life slammed him down on.
When I first started going to group, I held my shoulders a lot like his. It takes a long time to fully grasp the idea that they want you to be miserable here. At group you soak yourself in misery, feed on it, wrap your shaking fingers around its neck while the organizer goes on and on about coping mechanisms. Every group is different. Tonight's is for abuse victims.
My first group was for depression. When my last shrink moved away years ago—he never said why, and you don't just pry into your shrink's life—he pointed me toward group therapy as a kind of concession for leaving so suddenly. I think that must have been the last one my mother signed me on with, and he'd lingered in my life long after I slammed the window down between my mother and I. At the end of our last session he pulled a sheet off a tiny notebook, small enough to be a kid's journal.
"Here," he'd said, "I know you'll want to find a new psychiatrist soon, but I'd urge you not to snap up the first one you see. Take your time, find somebody right for you. In the mean time, I think you should go visit one of the depression groups in town. Talk to some people who know what it's like."
I didn't go.
The kid with the sizzling green eyes stalks up to the podium. You don't have to say anything here that you don't want to say, and the councilor reminds him gently, as his crooked fingers—bones mishealed?—grip the podium edges.
"I'm Veser," he tells us, snapping it out in front of him like a banner, ready for battle. "I don't want to be here."
Later, I'm standing in the middle of the room during the portion at the end where they encourage us to share our stories one on one, bond with each other, cry a little. Veser finds me, his hands tucked into his pockets, like a dog scenting out the tracks of some unidentifiable animal. Lion or bear? Rabbit or rat?
"This is so dumb," he says to me. God, he really is young, isn't he? There's a hopeful note buried under the camaraderie of that proffered cynicism. He's not fooling anyone.
I tell him not to be a judgmental douche, because even group night can't make me perfect.
Fast forward to eleven months ago. It's abuse victim night. I carry all the ghosts of all the bruises and broken bones of my fellow group-goers to a seat on the bench in the basement of an Episcopal church smashed between three stories of insurance sales and a law firm. Down in the basement, the whole squashed building opens up like a second big bang, full of florescent lighting and half-eaten donuts. Veser goes up to the podium for the second time, tells us that his mother disappeared over the last week. He doesn't know why he's sharing with us.
By the half-eaten donuts on the plywood table, he wrings a Styrofoam coffee cup down to clump of springy white flakes.
I ask him if he's okay.
"I didn't even love her," he replies. Flakes shred into smaller flakes. It's snowing in the basement of an Episcopal church smashed between three stories of insurance and a law firm. "She was a shitty fucking mother. I don't even care."
Okay, I say.
"She didn't love me," he says, "it's not like I didn't know. I'm lucky she didn't drown me in the bathtub."
Okay, I say.
"It doesn't matter where she went," he says. "I wasn't planning on seeing either of them ever again anyways."
Okay, I say.
"I'm not crying," he says.
I think you kind of are, I reply.
Veser Hatch cried, and suddenly everything was beautiful. I told him everything he wanted to hear. That night I was an empty vessel. I was a funnel for all the ugly crackling wretchedness of the world to come pouring through. I am the sewer system. I told him that it's not dumb, not really; I told him that we're all miserable in the same way, and it's better to be miserable together than miserable alone. I told him that love doesn't matter, because you can't untie yourself from people by not loving them.
I told him all the horrible, beautiful thing he ever wanted to hear.
And I was perfect.
-x-
Group therapy is how I met Veser Hatch. It's also how I met Hanna Falk Cross.
Hanna is the worst thing that's happened to me in seven years.
On Tuesdays I have Abuse Victims in that Episcopal church in the briefcase-loafers-wristwatch heart of downtown. It's convenient, more convenient than Depression Night at the edge of the city on the community college campus or Alcoholics in the rec center of a smalltime gated community, and I can walk there from work if I stay late enough at the office. It's not hard. I used to leave at four thirty. Now I'm lucky to get out by six.
Hanna sits in the row behind me. In my perfect circuit of bargain bin misery, he's a chunk of rock blocking the flow. He's smiling, he's frowning, he's listening. He's sympathizing, you can see it on his face—his presence is an alien thing that fills me with so much sourceless rage I can't even breathe.
I'd forgotten what it's like to be this angry.
The pipes are shattered and leaking.
Someone stands in front of me and opens their arms in this utterly breakable plea for a hug. She's someone I've talked to before. This is supposed to be the one time I can stand being touched, the one time that mundane things like germs and sweat and dirt don't matter to me, because I'm a living conduit and petty fleshy things are the concerns of people still scratching away up the ladder to nirvana. It's supposed to be, but Hanna is watching me from across the room with his frazzled red hair and his staring eyes and it's not, it's not at all and I'm an empty leaking shell and I can't stand the feeling of this girl's skin.
All this rage is pooling up inside me with nowhere to go.
He's looking at me, and I can't find that hot bright center of life. Perfection slips through my fucking fingers for the millionth time in my life, and he's patting some poor bastard on the shoulder like he's trying to understand—
He doesn't belong here
He doesn't belong here
He doesn't belong here.
Bright blue eyes, so bright they're like someone took a chisel to the sky and mortared the chips around his pupils. Dark curves of purplish skin under the rim of the eye socket, like he has anything to keep him up at night. He can't be any older than Veser, this bloody tourist who's been the fly sitting on the wall of my groups. Depression. Bipolar. Alcoholics Anonymous. Abuse Victims.
He's been in every one of my groups for the last week, and my skin feels like its peeling off my bones.
The firm where I work has me doing at least three projects at a time. I get done with one logo and the boss comes by with an advertisement, and this mechanical loop goes on and on with pistons going up and down, this Rube Goldberg machine goes wheeling around and around dropping the boot on the lever for the thousandth time. Light a wick. Roll a marble. Who knows what the hell it's supposed to do.
You get half way done with a travel pamphlet and word comes down the telegraph wire.
I've bit my cheek so many times my mouth is the floral print on a 1950's wallpaper.
Veser finds me by the donuts, his hands shoved in his pockets, he's a junkie who can't admit he's hooked. He pretends, at first. He always does. He says lame, lame lame lame, like it'll rewrite the instinctual need to rejoin the conduit, finish the circuit, and for the first time in eleven months I want to scream lame lame lame with him. I don't know how to do it anymore. Hanna is watching us from across the room and I can't remember how to climb this ladder up to Nirvana, and Veser is looking at me like he's waiting.
He's waiting.
He's willing.
"Excuse me," I say, scraping for politeness up and down the flesh in my throat. "Excuse me."
-x-
Someone popped the cap off the soap dispenser. I jam my hands into the pearlescent pink goo, up to the wrists, cover every inch of skin that ever shook a hand or grabbed a doorknob.
Hanna is here tonight. Hanna was there last night. Hanna will be there tomorrow night. His arc reactor eyes keep me up at night, staring, like a light blazing through my windows, burning away the shadows I need to sleep.
Tomorrow night I'll talk to him.
I'll be polite. I'll be removed. I'll point out to him that he doesn't belong here; I'll advise him to spend his nights elsewhere. I'll tell him it's insensitive to keep coming. I'll tell him to stop faking it, he's only embarrassing himself—we can all see he doesn't belong, everyone can see it.
Mr. Cross, I'll say, Mr. Cross whoever you are
Get out Mr. Cross
This is the one kind of freedom in my life
And you're ruining it, Mr. Cross
You bloody tourist
Get out.