Noise
An excerpt from Blue Ink Chapter 20
Cacophony. Lights rotate blue green red blue green red. Speakers vibrate an incoherent buzz into ear drums ringing. Shouting bodies bounce against the outside of the bubble I’ve created—of drugs and other numbing agents like denial. Inside, a hand presses against my skin, sensitive; a pill slips past my lips, desperate. And then our tongues intertwine. My body bounces, buzzes; the room rotates. The music grows. The lights turn. His hand lowers. I rise.
The room floods white and everyone shouts. Him, in my ear, “Bathroom!”
I am bent over in a stall, hand on a grimy toilet seat for stability as he pounds his body into me, grunting with each thrust. I’m numb. I watch the water in the bowl reverberate slightly. I imagine what would happen with one flush. I reach out for the handle and watch myself swirl down the bowl. But I haven’t moved, fingers gripping the seat, eyes locked on the ripple of the otherwise calm pond. It would be the perfect place to lose it. I can hear the sloshing against my walls, roiling stomach the antithesis to the subtle ripple of water. I can feel it coming up. And just as he climaxes, I spew my stomach contents, mostly missing the bowl and coating the seat—it dribbles down the sides and onto the floor—but a few murky drops land in the water to upset its peace.
He zips up his pants while I stand and wipe my mouth with the back of my hand.
“Got anything else?” I slur into his ear. The dull music of the club leaks into the bathroom and contorts my words into near incoherence.
But his own tipsiness straightens the sentence into an articulate thought. He pulls out a plastic bag with two pills and dumps them in my hand. Then, he puts his lips to my ear. “Clean yourself up and find me for round two.” He bites my earlobe and grabs my crotch before leaving me alone in the stall.
I toss the pills in my mouth and swallow them dry as I work at my zipper, leaning into the sharpie graffiti of the stall to piss. My eyelids do a gentle bounce as they fight gravity, and I am still hardly upsetting the peaceful pool, contributing mostly to the messy seat.
I button my pants back up sloppily and stumble into the stall door, barely locked and clanging open at my impact. My hands automatically extend for the sink, and I splash cold water in my face. I look at myself dripping in the mirror. My eyes are smudged black from the eyeliner my ex put on me. Lost her as soon as we got into the club. My mouth has a red ring around it from where the stranger had been sucking on my lips. There’s glitter on my cheeks and I can’t pinpoint where or when that’s from.
My eyes begin to water. I’m afraid. And I wish that I had his stoic presence beside me so I could put my head on his shoulder and he could tell me that it’s all right. So he could take me out of this godforsaken place and back to his room, his bed, where I could watch him writing at his desk while he thinks I’m asleep. My body aches for him.
And then the pills kick in. I sigh at their relief. Close my eyes to reset and leave the bathroom.
Don’t find the guy from the stall. Someone else. But it’s the same cacophony. The lights the music the shouts. The hands and lips and tongue. Blue green red blue green red. The room spins and spins and then the lights shut off.
—
Deafening. A drum beat against my pillow. The wailing of my blood stream. Echo of the lost hours, days maybe. Open my eyes to the smeared image of a yellow light and a white room. A strange shadow beside me breathing steady up and down up and down. He doesn’t snore but his quiet breaths still bat around my ear drums. Their unfamiliar pattern.
I remember watching his lips on the beach and memorizing the way his chest moved. It’s what I fell asleep to that night. I felt more peaceful than I ever had.
Moving the stark white covers off of my body is like carrying the weight of my feelings for him times a hundred. My hand trembles with the effort. Beneath, I find that I am still wearing my underwear. I strain to lift the covers higher. See that the shadow is also wearing his. That’s all I need to know. I drop the covers and let my eyes fall back closed. Imagine its him beside me instead of a stranger. His breathing.
But my fantasy is interrupted by a shrill voice: “You two haven’t fallen asleep on me?” I open my eyes to a short girl with small breasts and big hips, evident in the skin-tight tube dress she’s wearing. Though she slips it off after she has thrown a pencil case on the bed by my feet. Left only in her bra and panties. “Not while I was out getting our supplies.”
I glance over at the shadow, who is now sitting up and fully man. I don’t recognize either of them.
She crawls up between us, bringing the pencil case with her. She unzips it and begins taking out its contents: needles, cotton, lighter, rubber tubing, a spoon, and a small bag of brown powder.
“Levi, the water on the nightstand.”
She knows my name?
Dazed, I hand her the plastic bottle. She goes to work. Sucking water up into a needle. Putting the powder in the spoon, the water; mixing it with the plunger end of the syringe. Heating it to a boil with the lighter. She tosses a bit of cotton in which absorbs the poison. Then it’s back up the needle.
“Who’s first?”
He holds out his arm and I don’t object. She ties the rubber tubing around his bicep and taps two fingers against the crock of his arm. Then, the needle goes in, the poison, and he falls back against the headboard with a heavy sigh.
“Your turn.”
She goes through the process again with the second needle. I’m wary but say nothing. And soon the needle is in my arm, the concoction inside of me, flush.
Noise blurs and swirls down the toilet bowl My weight sinks I feel heavy beautifully My burden is released I shiver with satisfaction like little lightning bugs Dancing across my skin Raising goose pimples Is the laughter mine or theirs It’s a symphony of smiles Fluttering butterfly eyelids Kissing my lips I decide I love her Kissing him I decide I love men The outside world folds up into origami birds flown away The room is only ours Yellow light White walls It’s all we have Not smeared but dripping As if I’m underwater again Him on shore Lips glowing What happened to the light What happened to him Where has he been and where am I Who am I with Their skin is clammy and not warm like the poison When it ends I sink beneath the bed beneath the ground and I recognize faces even though it’s dark
—
I want to gasp awake but instead I stay completely still because there is someone on top of me violently pressing themselves into me over and over. Thump thump thump. Him into me. The headboard into the wall. And my heart. I feel it beating again and I know it’s tearing. But I make no sound. I lie completely still and this time alone, I don’t pretend it’s him because he would never do this to me. But I do think of him and the day we met, staring up at storm clouds. They seemed violent then. Not so much anymore.
Tears fall from the corner of my eyes. Nothing that had been lost—
Except life. Something he already knew. Something I am learning.
He is going faster now, his grunts thick and desperate. Their pitch rises as he approaches orgasm, into a hideous screech that rings in my ear long after he has blown his load and left the room. I remain unmoving for a while. All I have is the ghost of his weight on my back and the white stain dripping onto the sheets beneath me; otherwise, I am empty.
I finally rise and clean myself up. Collect my dingy clothes one by one from their haphazard hiding places around the unfamiliar room, folding each neatly on the chair beside the bed as I go. Once I have reassembled all of the scattered pieces of my appearance, I put my socks on first and then my underwear. One foot and then the other.
Fully clothed, I wander downstairs where a group of strangers sit on stained furniture around a coffee table full of vice. But they know my name: “Levi!”
I can tell my aggressor by the sweat on his forehead. Plus, he doesn’t say my name with the others but just gives me a sly grin, waving subtly with a massive hand attached to a monstrous arm.
I sit far away from him. The girl beside me puts a pipe to my lips and I breathe in the pure white smoke. Soon, I’m staring at the ceiling.
all their noise rattling between my ears and the sound of his climax his thumping my heartbeat so rapid the whole room shakes fish swimming through my veins plunged underwater and gasping for breath nobody on shore all storm lightning bugs setting sparks beneath my skin and it’s all violent buzz buzz buzz thump thump thump fuck fucking help me I scream but it seems no one can hear me under this dark cloud blue stains and words that are constantly being washed away nothing that had been lost nothing that had been lost except me losing myself he already knew and I am learning white light white walls white stain dripping flush me down flush me down flush me down you got anything else just words the stories I wish would wash away I’m lost but nothing that had been lost blue stains new words the noise is overwhelming Charlie please your blue ink I’m losing and the next day writing beneath lamp light nothing that had been lost nothing that had been lost nothing that had been lost nothing
“Someone call me a taxi!” I scream, bolting upright.
—
I lay back on the front steps, trying to find the stars so I can ask his brother some advice. All I see is the rotting wood of the porch.
A car horn.
I tell the driver to take me to his dorm.