Coming Apart

I watch him come apart in front of me. Literally. It’s frightening to watch. At first his voice starts to modulate like a radio. It climbs up and down through different frequencies, sometimes so high that I cannot understand what he is saying. His skin … his whole surface seems to be bubbling or blurring. I can hear something vaguely reminisant of what a slinky sounds like when you shake it: A metallic noise, stretched out. He unpeels right in front of me. It’s an Escher nightmare. I can see through the tessellations that were his arm into his bones, into his veins. They are unpeeling too. It is all happening so fast. I can see his eyes filled with pain and shock, until his head begins to come apart. The worst part is; he is conscious through all of this. He is trying to explain to me what is happening through all of it. I can no longer understand him, but I can still hear a high pitched, ticking whine that must be his voice, his consciousness, his thoughts as they unravel too. This noise is the last to go. In seconds he is gone. As if he had never been. He has unraveled.

I look around the coffee shop … I look around Torrefazione’s trying to make eye contact with someone, anyone, who has seen what I have just seen. No one has noticed his unraveling. I am sitting in the middle of San Francisco. I am sitting at a coffee shop on a busy street. People are walking by me. No one has seen my best friend come apart. No one. And now it is as if he had never been. There is no trace left of him, except for his empty cup and the crushed teabag sitting atop a stained paper napkin.

* * *

He holds his head in his hands. The pain is unbearable, a throbbing ache at the base of his neck that broadcasts itself up and around the sides of his skull. The notebook is open, the page blank. Empty. It is mocking him, that white expanse. It is like the look on her face. Her face, like a Greek statue, cool, empty, frozen. She looked at him, in him, past him, just like that page.

When was it, just yesterday? A week ago? He can’t remember. He just remembers the way she turned from him, gripping the door of the truck, and pulling herself in to settle next to Timothy.

Why had he just stood there rooted in place? Why had his face betrayed none of what he felt? She left blind and empty to him, like a blank page.

That was when the ache had started.

The pain is not going away. He feels that if he can’t place his mark on that page, if he can’t mar that perfect surface, that the ache will consume him like fire. His pen floats above, unmoving. His teeth grind together. He is like wood. Wood that has sat for seasons, drying, becoming brittle, incendiary. He is perfect fuel for the hurt. His skin feels dry and hot. He is frozen by inactivity. Petrified with it. A fly in amber.

His eyes blur.

The tear tracks down his cheek, flying out into space. Brave. It strikes the perfect white void of the page dimpling, staining, marking the surface.

* * *

I look up into the eyes that are floating above me. My whole world is blurry around those eyes. I can feel a dull ache at my wrists and ankles. Dully I remember them being lashed together with wire. Wetness at my temple marks the place where he hit me with the pipe. I don’t feel the pain anymore.

When did this adventure become such a nightmare?

His face is made of wax. At any second I expect it to start dripping down onto me. He keeps moving in and out of focus. I can’t tell if he’s really moving or not. I can’t comprehend the passage of time. An hour, a second, a day, all tick by at the same pace.

He’s talking to me while he fades in and out of my view. It takes me a long time to realize that the strange buzzing drone is his voice. He must be telling me who he is. What he is doing. He must. It is the only thing that would make sense.

I wish I could understand him.

When he starts to thread the wire under my skin, I am not even aware of it. Slowly I realize that the hoarse warble I’ve mistaken for some strange bird, maybe a peacock, is really my voice.

This must really hurt. I am making an awful lot of noise. I guess you’d call it screaming.

I no longer care about Marilyn, or Amy, or the nameless one whose identity we never discovered. They all seem like characters in a book now. Fictional.

He is very meticulous. It must take him a long time. Filaments of spindly wire thread across my body, beneath the skin, like the veins of a leaf. If I roll my eyes down, I can see the ripples of them in my cheeks, in my arms, in my chest.

He steps outside of my vision. He fades away slowly like a scene from a silent movie.

The wires are attached to the generator, and it is switched on. I can feel my muscles begin to tense. I am a shackled marionette. My body is not my own. I lift off of the chair, arching my back, straining against the restraints wrapped tightly around my ankles, neck, and wrists.

The wires get hotter. They begin to glow. You can see their pathways gleaming beneath my skin. There are rivers of fire flowing underneath the surface of my skin.

I don’t notice, but I’m sure it is quite beautiful. Perhaps I look like one of those old anatomical paintings from the 18^th century. Muscles, veins, all of it visible, lit from the inside.

Soon the wires begin to smoke, and little sparks of flame crisscross my body. My skin catches fire.

Soon I burn. Consumed in a map of pain.

* * *

Electric dark. The edges of the world burned down until there is nothing beyond the walls of this room. Nothing outside. All the world encompassed in what is immediately in front of me. Everything within the reach of my senses.

Touch: faint lazy tracings … flower petals brushing against finger tips … heat like warm sunshine, like breath, blossoming, opening, against me … soft, wet, firm, pressure … yielding, elastic warmth … the electric spark of skin touching skin …

Smell: Salty wet ocean’s breath … earth crushed between your fingers … hints of the iron tang of blood … the heat has a scent … freshly mowed grasses? Cherry blossoms? Meat? It opens in my head like a slow motion explosion … a drunken bouquet …

Sight: All earth tones … burned away to black and white … curves and geometry intersecting … lazy red and pink brush strokes … like flying low over landscape … hillsides … forests, rivers … transport across this terrain … sight is travel …

Taste: Like drinking tears … sinking teeth into sighs … ocean waves lap against my tongue … salt … blood … smoke … tasting the thudding beat of pulse … the shudders of muscles contracting … I am a glutton … I am the starving man seated at the table of plenty …

Hearing: Intoxicating crash of surf … moans more like touch than sound … drunken words repeated … growling … shuddering breath hissing … involuntary … uncontrolled … guttural glossolalia … sound as physical manifestation of desire …

The wave crests. All is lost. All is burnt down to three embers. All is desire. All is heat. All is one. Melting. Splitting open. Radiant.

Have you ever been in the turbulent churn of water left by wave’s crash? Tossed, turned, unable to tell where your skin ends and the white chaos begins? Decision gone. Free will surrendered. Carried beyond the ability of your will. Have you ever surrendered completely to a feeling? With no fear? No capacity for fear?

And I come … and I am lost in myself … tossed in that turbulence of ejaculation … never coming up for air … breathing in the shuddering waves of infinity … emptiness … life.

And I am washed up upon the shore of her … beneath me … warm, white sand of her … beneath me … I am spent. I am weak as a flower petal.

Her fingertips trace slow indulgent circles in my hair.

I cannot move. I slowly come back to myself. As my skin shrinks back to contain me, the world opens once again.

© Jason Nunes 2001