To say its been a while would be a drastic understatement indeed. Had some free time and I just want to attempt finish this fic once and for all....hope people enjoy it.
__________________________________________________________________________________
"I mean really. What else is going for you honey?" Dallas says with some tenderness, with stern and dry practical calm. His voice contradicts the horror of his fleshy and slack skin damp as a toad. He says honey with a brain curdling intonation.
Dally looks profoundly aware, standing firm with unflinchingly insane conviction on his slim young face-this pathetically dignified expression is one I would imagine is the expression of a man standing before a firing range, the sense he is forcing his will of his humanity against other people's guns. At sun set or the sun rising, the blood and his hair matching the color of the sky. (How vulgar it would be to die during midday.)
An angel, I think. He is an angel who has been blasted in the guts, who is suffering and will die forever. Suffering has always been a task for angels and gods and devils. Like how Christ in church is nailed on the cross for all time, tormented and dying, somehow blazing with the light of life.
Dally is a burning bush I realize. A sacred and rather stupid invention. (The blood from his chest is actually flames extending outwards) I never knew how hotly and fiercely holy, how purely inflamed a man could be.
"My work." I mumble, like a defendant in a hopeless case. I can barely speak, scalded by his ever burning presence. "I work. I do very important work."
Dally pauses ever so brightly as if he is translating this in his mind. His timing is perfect. "So you're waiting to bone your boss?"
"No." I do not even think about it, I say it like a sneeze. "I can't marry Soda." I choke on sobby vomity glob of mucus. "I don't love him."
Dallas laps at his own mouth like instead of blood all over his face it is butterscotch. He looks down at me like a disapproving soldier. He might want me to scrub the floor with a toothbrush.
"So fucking what? Marriage has nothing to do with love. Anyways, he loves you. Isn't that pretty? He still loves you. You don't even deserve it."
" But I don't want it." I explain.
"Aw c'mon. What do you want? There's always his dick to think about!" Dally winks. "He was a good ride wasn't he. After work, invite him for a drink and take him home with you. He's traveled all this way to see you. You ought to give the poor bastard something for his troubles."
"I can't." I say lamely.
"Ah so I get it. You're on your period. No wonder you're such a big mope."
I shake my head. Such a statement should offend me, but I am not me anymore. I am living in some horrible myth, I have been made into someone else, depersonalized and pushed into some role I am entirely unprepared for- the bitch of the world.
"Then you're a dyke. Little Lesbian spinster Sandy married to her work."
I think about the funny appellation Dally has given me. I think about grabbing a breast, plunging my fingers inside another woman. There is something disgustingly violating and mannish in it. I feel as through I have turned into Soda.
Dally touches his long torso with his fingers with a boyish coyness, as if the question is: would you like to dance, to hold me. The answer : is just a bit. His wounds I imagine look like wet pretty gaping mouths and openings to kiss and lick. Maybe I am a lesbian after all.
"Women don't interest me." I claim. At least I can say that. I wasn't raised to be a lesbian. I was raised to be frigid like a proper girl.
"Neither do babies eh? You came all the way to Florida to get an abortion. Only whores and rich girls get abortions. But you're not attractive or honest enough to be a whore. You're not rich either, you got no big future ahead of you. So why?"Dallas barks. Like a dog. He rolls in my humiliation like a dog rolls in filth.
I try and imagine my breasts swelling and swinging with milk, my stomach protruding and bloated like some starving creature. Water gushing down my legs and a bloody glistening baby's head brutally forcing itself of me in a punishing contraction, a baseball tearing out of a nostril, the stupid villainy of it, to extract a personality from a squealing new body, to assault it with a gross crude greedy love, and give it an name, and expect it to be glad and grateful expect it to succeed and to get along with the other grubs.
Books lie. School lie. Parents lie. Mothers and Fathers do not really love their children. (Shhhh, God might hear us) They love them before they are even born, before they're even conceived. Their love has nothing to do with the thing they produced, or what it is. Rearing children is vanity, a strange project to make the task of living seem important.
Can't Dally see how lucky he is? He died a tragic clown death, but he just isn't anymore.
"It was a mistake." I whine, not a baby, but a tumor, a parasite. "We would have killed it in another way, a worser way."
"We. " Dally jeers. " I had nothing to do with that shit."
" Our children would live with us in a kind of miserable numb emptiness. It would have ended up like Soda, or me, or you. Soda would have resented me for trapping him. I would hate him for the same reason."
I sacrificed so much out of kindness for everyone, out of concern for everyone's dignity. But does anyone care? No. Growing up is learning nobody gives a damn about you. You don't even give a damn about you.
How I stole some of mothers and fathers money and I bought my bus ticket and left town (Christ they're expensive) all the way to Grandma. No one (thank god) tried to be nice to me. I urgently wanted to disappear forever.
I felt torn to pieces, like I knew what it was like to be eaten alive by a savage animal.
But I was hopeful. Travel is always a sort of death. Like converting to an religion, you must forget your past life, your sins, your family. You must be born again. I would emerge, Jonah slimy and digested from the whale.
I wish I had cried more over the time. Tears are a precious frightening thing- frightening because they are willed and they aren't at the same time. When they did come for me, they were stiff and thick as glue, and meaningless as dribble. I cried after my abortion, not for what I had done, but out of a frivolous sense of guilt, about the indignity of having to do it, I cried that I was a born a woman, that I had ate of a serpent. I cried because I had done something irrevocable and been forever changed (but not really. Thats a lie)
I went to secretary school to have a trade. To make myself more sellable. Like soap or Brillo pads. The secret was I've always wanted to be a writer. The difference between a secretary and a writer is like the difference between a nurse and a whore- their purpose is to make you feel better.
Soda thought I was sure cute with my strange thoughts, and my ideas and fantasies. But Soda didn't know anything, he didn't read except for auto magazines and playboy.
No one ever picked up a god damned book in our neighborhood, except to smash an spider. Ponyboy did supposedly, but he was young, so it was still considered 'OK'. Later, I knew the other boys would give Pony boy shit about it and he would stop, and chase skirts and drink, and his mind would be rendered useless pile of ads and animal wants.
I would sit at and wait to think whatever I wanted in the world, but I learned after many months of bitter and patient sitting, I had no thoughts at all. I was not spiritual, not clever, hollow and stupid, like everyone I had left behind. Attempts of writing never came to any fruition (more abortions), amateur indulgences. I send a poem about love to a magazine. They thanked and refused it. No doubt they could feel the fraud vibrating from the page. No doubt I may have loved Soda. I must have cared for him deeply to destroyed him as I did, to lie to him so consistently. But nobody wants to read about that. That makes people sick. Even Dallas's face looks a tinge green, like his head been wrapped in nickel. It hurts me, that that revolting creature is repulsed by me.
Most of my life of Tulsa was for the sake of my survival,blessedly forgotten. Out of sight and out of mind. I achieved a kind of sleep walk life.
When I did think of my family and my friends they were shadows swimming under water, tendrils of black smoke far away, premonitions of an enormous problem that was steadily gaining momentum, a theater where I would be both heroine and victim. But when it would come it would be like a holy ghost descending . Everything would be torn asunder, made comic and tiny, and like a wheel spinning over someone's head, I would be released and suddenly fly off my bleak little arc into black and limitless space.
"You look like an aborted child." I say, at Dally painted red self. He has changed from mother to child. "Beautiful but whole."
"Right." Dallas smirks proudly, putting his hands on his hips. "I am an aborted masterpiece. I aborted myself- death is just sliding back up the cunt of the universe. You see things never really die Sandy. They're only hidden, left unfinished."
"Sometimes things are finished for good. Soda and I are finished. The baby" ( I think the tumor's) finished. "You're finished. Johnny is finished. Don't you see? You aren't real." I say emphatically. "The story ended a long time ago. With the newspaper."
For a moment, Dally thinks. Death has made him a philsopher.
Dallas then says flatly. "I doubt you know how much of a dumb bitch you are, do you. You can't escape from any of us Sandy, you cannot escapes surprises. We live inside you and you are at last seeing the real, and hearing it. It cannot be fucked with or ignored. I am telling you the only truth that matters, and beyond the glory and beauty of what I say, what I show which is that is beyond words, there is nothing. I am where form and death and substance and innocence and sin hover upon the brink of meaninglessness, where you and I move through absurdity, and truth to silence. But am I here by accident, I think not. Did you invent me? Fuck no!"
"I... I don't understand," I take the bait.
Dally sits down on the floor, cross legged. He smiles up at me with a grotesque sugary serenity. He almost looks sweetly mischievous. A boy god. He looks like he might put a flute by his bloody teeth and charm me to dance. Dallas wants the world to dance, but only with him.
"All that time you felt that urge to seek something- something you couldn't put into words?You've been looking for me Sandy babe- since you left Tulsa and here I am!" He laughed, then gags on some clot. "Your fucking holy grail. The crown of your travels. Your Excalibur. There's no hurry to how long we can stay here. Time for us has become an eternity. It doesn't matter , what you do where you look at, because all our lives, stopped two years ago."