Still Alive by LJ Pemberton (EXCERPT)

EXCERPT FROM STILL ALIVE, A Novel

Leroy asked me if I'd heard anything. We were in bed together, but we had not been fucking and weren't thinking we would. It was easier to be close, like this, when we were lonely, than give up on love. She's been hooking up with Beck, he said, and I said I didn't care, look, it's not like it's a big community, and he said okay. What have you been reading, I asked, and I propped my head up on my arm, and he said he had been reading these old gnostic texts—Pistis Sophia, he said, and the Hypostasis of the Archons. 

I listened as he told me about them, about how the Hypostasis is a midrash of the creation story where Eve has the breath of Sophia and Adam has only the breath of Yahweh. He laughs: Yahweh thinks he is the only god, isn't that perfect? And I smile and he tells me that Adam rapes Eve because he wants to possess the Sophia in her—but Sophia leaves, her spirit leaves, he says, and becomes the tree of life. There's more, he says, but that tree’s my favorite part. I want to be a tree, I say. He kisses me. Sophia, he says, you're so much more than a tree. What do you know about trees?, I say. More than most people, he says. We pull the covers up. The sun has set and the room has slowly darkened except for the light beside my bed. I wait. I tell myself that life is long and I have be okay with waiting, and then he rolls to me and asks if I remember Philip? 

Philip who looks like he was chubby in high school? I ask. Philip who loves Isherwood and who flirts with us both, he says. Have you been in touch? I ask. They have. Two hours later we are at Holocene dancing beneath neon lights and Leroy is edging up closer to Philip and I am twirling and when I stop I see Leroy's smiling eyes. The room is crowded and the lights are blue and pink and red and purple and gold and they’re swirling over us and around us and flashing off the disco ball hanging over our heads. I’m in love with the noise, with my feet, with my spinning body, my kicking legs, my shaking hair. 

Leroy’s dancing beside me and Philip is getting looser, letting his shoulders drop, realizing it’s okay to do this, it’s okay to like us both, it’s okayyyyyy—and then I stop, really stop, because beyond the crowd, against the wall, I see Lex. She’s sitting next to a thin woman, a woman like I’ll never be, whose small tits are peaking through shreds in her oversized black tshirt. I pretend I haven’t seen them. I pretend I haven’t seen those small nipples. I leave the group, leave the floor completely, and get a standing spot at the bar. Order a g&t. A woman puts her hand on the small of my back and I smile and she asks me my name and I tell her. She says something about how she moved here three months ago from Wisconsin, and I say that Portland’s an alright place if it's what you're looking for, and she keeps talking and I’m not listening. I’m still looking at Lex without actually looking over at her. My face is inches from this Wisconsin woman’s mouth, and I’m trying to care, but I’ve seen her—I’ve seen Lex. I say I'm sorry. I tell Wisconsin I think I need to be alone right now, and thankfully, she leaves. A little huffy. Who cares? I sip my gin and bounce my head. I do that club thing where you’re busy even though you’re not doing anything. Nothing at all. In the middle of the dance floor a group of deaf friends are dancing and laughing and signing in exaggerated articulation. The beat bass beat vibrates the floor beneath them, beneath me, in the wall, all around us. I sip again, and then spot Leroy with Philip, and I watch Philip flirting with his own gay self as much as he is flirting with Leroy. Lex hasn’t seen me. It is better this way. She's got her head back and she's watching the thin woman's clavicle and the gin and music and distance and lights erase what I know about discretion. I stare. My vision blurs and then focuses and then blurs again. I wish-want them both, imagine myself between them, try to turn away, fail, sip, and order myself to believe it’s a good thing I don’t always get what I want. I finish the last cold draught, leave my glass at the bar, and rejoin Leroy and Philip to dance. 

The music thumps and soars and the three of us gyrate and smile together and not together in different configurations. When we line up, our pelvises play chicken with touch—up and down and around—and the music continues, always the music. I yell over Philip’s shoulder in the din, yell to Leroy that I’m going to kiss him, and Leroy knows that I mean Philip and Philip knows that I mean Philip, and Leroy responds: my dear, if you do, you kiss him for us both. So I do. Philip’s mouth is small and the kiss is wet and fine and good and then Leroy turns Philip’s head and kisses him too, longer, while I brush Philip's hair from his eyes and run my hand slowly down his back. He shivers. He is beautiful between us, so fresh in new knowledge, and I am watching the veins on his neck stand from his skin so that I will not look in another direction. They take a breath and then I kiss Leroy, long, longer this time, and he understands. I pull away and look at him and he smiles at me and I tell him: I’m gonna go take a walk, and he says, I'll see you tomorrow? and I say yes and I leave. 

*

My mother's apartment living room is hot and she is single again. You can't trust this fucking town, she says, before dinner. The roses grow like weeds. I am wishing I was by the river and it was morning. I am wishing the season would change. She has made filo bowls with rib tips—an attempt at what she calls ‘country living’—but it is only the two of us and I am tired of only. Your brother has decided to stay at the ashram permanently, she says, and I say, that’s interesting. (I don’t know how he’d have the money, or why he should be so lucky, or if he even knows what the concept of permanent is—but she is discreet about any support and doesn’t flinch.) She pours a butter sauce on the asparagus. She opens two bottles of wine. The Basement Pub has trivia tonight, I say, and she says I can walk—it isn’t that far anyway—and I don’t have a good excuse to argue with her. I will enjoy what I can. 

I’m not going to ask about your father, she says, which is her way of reminding me that she wants to know more but knows that she isn't supposed to say so. There isn't anything to tell anyway, I say. He has moved on, I don't add. Why do you still care? I don't ask. Then, aloud: what did you imagine for your life when you were my age? That's a cruel question, she says. She holds her knife blade down with one finger extended over the blunt edge as she strips a rib of its meat. I watch the precise movements of her hands for clues, to know the shape of her anxiety, why she treats men like a habit and why she believes alcohol is good for anything. Of course I learn nothing; only gamblers carry secrets in their hands. The wine makes me hot. I get up for a glass of water and I hate her as she feels sorry for herself. 

She pours more wine. The conversation does not get better. She tells me I'm so much like her mother, it depresses her. You invited me to dinner, I say. I did, she says. It does not help. I do my dishes and leave; in the night air my hands remember the scalding water and the hair stands alert and awful—so dry and itchy as I walk west. The pub is crowded when I get there and I don't feel like texting up a team. I turn and head into one of the expensive neighborhoods and duck into a café for some coffee and pie. It's quiet. A few college students sit in the corner studying for their futures and I stare out the window at the oasis of grass where on other days, fun-lovers have gathered for croquet. I wonder if they know something I do not—the nature of life, the goodness of a good crew. The city is killing me. There is nothing for me here, but sex and rain.

At home I turn my cat skull to face me from the top of my dresser. It watches me as I sleep, dress, get my next gig in the Pearl District, grow my hair out, smile again when the sun peeks through, finally, and I bring home a chess player—his name so common, it takes me three weeks to remember. I avoid saying it during sex, afraid I'll grab the wrong one. Matthew, but Matt to his coworkers, he says. It is an attempt at uniqueness. I don't disabuse him. He bikes everywhere and has four zombie escape plans. I am bored, but he has decent taste in movies. We watch Scorsese together (the bad ones) and I keep suggesting Tarkovsky but he prefers the French new wave. He finds a slip of paper by my desk with a note I'd written down, drunk, as a reminder: do not text Lex. Who's Lex? He asks. My ex, I say. Are you still in love with him? He asks. Her, I say. Oh, he says and forgets he was waiting for more of an answer. 

I ghosted or he did. I don't remember now. In the wet spring I filled the time with new ambitions. I burned my hands on the stove and killed pallets of plants. I dyed my hair blonde, decided I didn’t look like myself and dyed it back. Afternoons passed at other people’s bbqs. I drank wine, fell asleep, told stories, got lost in the woods, paid my rent—barely. Leroy and I went to the porn shop and bought salvia. We smoked it and laid around on blankets in the dark and waited for something to happen. On the weekend we went to the mortuary and read the names and epitaphs, imagined the grudges of the dead and wondered what secrets they had taken with them. Other afternoons we went to Movie Madness and held up titles and play-acted their best-of until we settled on Camus’ Black Orpheus and Will Vinton’s claymation Mark Twain. Strangers auditioned to be our lovers.

One night I smoked so much weed I started narrating the narration and then I fell asleep on the couch in the basement, with Leroy snoring in his bed a few feet away, hidden behind green and purple batiks that passed for walls. The next morning Leroy said it was okay that nothing made sense right now, that I was figuring out my drag name, my flavor. I told him I could see the point of cannibalism, but I knew I wasn’t supposed to say so. He said the taboo around eating people was relatively recent, actually. I decided my flavor was lime. Leroy said I was too sincere for drag, and I did not argue.

*

She had seen me, but in the intervening months between when I watched her at the club and the morning she texted me as I dressed for an admin gig out past 84th street, I had not known. Weeks, the same: sleep, wake, shower, coffee, work, shower, rest, sleep and again. Still, I had carried the memory of that night in my pocket like a rock plucked from a mountain. In my boredom I had rolled it in my fingers. In the sun I had held it up and stared at the lines of quartz, wondered at what was inside. I looked at my phone. Her words: I'd like to talk next time we run into each other. Coffee?, she asked. Yes? I thought, yes? I wanted to think of another answer but I couldn't, and so I texted yes (she had seen me?), and we met, and it was summer in Portland with the sun high in the evening. No wind. I wore harness boots to feel tall and a jacket to feel hidden. She arrived late, with a nod, and slid into the booth in front of me. She chose Dot's because she knew I was a sucker for burritos, and (this was before the smoking ban) the darkness and the velvet paintings and the smoke made it feel like rules were for other people. 

Coffee and a beer. Two beers. She drank the coffee fast and the beers slow, nursed between her lips, between her words. How've you been, she asked me, and I said I keep going, and she said this summer is pretty nice so far, and then she said I fucking miss you. I sipped my beer. (You know I wanted to hear it, but I didn’t know what to do with it once I did.) I said I missed some things about us, and then she got into what happened after us, and half of it was answers I had wanted to hear months ago, but what good was that to me now? 

You know I thought about calling you, she said (but she didn't call), and I nodded and watched for the plate that might have my burrito on it and not the couple's across the way. I just don't think I'm good at being responsible for anyone, she said, and I said, what the hell are you talking about? And my burrito came and she said, you seemed like you wanted so much (and I fucking did), and I said: I wanted you to see me as your equal. 

It wasn't a lie, but it wasn’t all true, because that was what I wanted now, not then. Then, I didn’t care. Then, I just wanted her. She unzipped her light hoodie and I saw she was wearing a ribbed tank over her bound breasts, her stomach so tight beneath them. She leaned forward. I'm afraid, she said, and what little ground I was standing on gave way. I leaned in. Managed somehow not to say: me too. I feel like I'm gonna unravel, she said, or need to? Too tight or something. You're not a fucking ball of yarn, I whispered. No, no, you're right, she said, and smiled all wry and then reached and picked a piece of tomato off my plate and popped it into her mouth. She knew I was back. An hour later we were walking side by side to my place and then we were standing in front of my duplex and she had her hands in her pockets and then she didn't—one finger was tracing from my collarbone to the topmost button of my shirt. She unbuttoned it and then took her hand away and I stood in front of her, rapt, breathing more heavily now, my chest nearly exposed to the street, to passersby. 

The problem is I like your games, I said. I know you do, she said. And I did. I loved them. I loved her powertrips and disappearances. I wanted to be found and lost and found again. I didn't care about not getting hurt—I'd been hurt and come out okay. I believed I could do it again. 

We were together and not. We did not text except to meet. We did not meet except to fuck. Our dalliances were punctuated by total silence between meetings. We were without the regular hindrances: we did not discuss family. We did not plan. When we were together, we spoke of daydreams and let our ordinary anything belong to another time. She told me she had been reading Kant. She told me she had been reading Augustine. I said I had an ongoing flirtation with Marx. She slipped her fingers in my underwear and said it was because I was red inside. I sneered at her bad joke. She bit my lip. I licked her lips. We lost hours and forgot our names. I bought her a cross and she hung it upside down over her mirror—like Peter's, she said, as the good lapsed-Catholic she was, and we were in the bathroom, getting ready to go somewhere—out? Did it matter? I was already dressed. She was shirtless, with her binder tight around her chest. Hear my confession, I said. She spit out her toothpaste. What do you have to confess, she said, putting my hair behind my ear with her finger, bringing her face so close I could smell the mint on her breath. Forgive me, father, for I have sinned, I said. I was just this side of a laugh, but I wanted it to roll; I wanted her to play. Tell me, my child, she said and moved closer, kissing my neck with my head cradled in her hand. How have you sinned? she asked. I was pinned against the sink, back to the mirror. I dropped the lipstick in my hand. I have coveted that which is not mine, I said. Have you? she asked and she pulled my shirt over the top of my head and hands. Do you know your hail mary? she asked, and she ran her finger down my back, unharnessing my bra and then cupping my breasts in her hands. I know the beginning, I whispered, and she nodded and I began: Hail Mary, full of grace. She answered: the lord is with thee, and my chest heaved against her strong fingers. Blessed are thou amongst women, she breathed, her mouth an inch from my nipple, and blessed, she licked, is the fruit of thy womb. Jesus, I exhaled, and she took me in her mouth and said yes between her teeth, my left nipple bit between them.

*

We did not last long, but our fucking sustained me through boring dates and the gray slide into fall. Jobs came and went. Time slowed. When the Cuban welder next door—Ernesto—invited me inside for a smoke one evening, I felt reckless and said yes. I sat on his couch and smoked his weed and loved his laugh. He said he loved my name, that it reminded him of his mother. He showed me his scars. He begged me to stay. I went home and touched myself to the thought of him fucking me, but then the thought was her, or she was him, but it was Lex, only Lex, no matter how it began. 

Later he sees me going out and asks: you have a new boyfriend? Something like that, I say. You are a heartbreaker, he says, too many secrets. I don't mean to keep secrets, I say. No? he asks. What is there to tell anyway? I say. No, he says, you are right. Most people don't want to know. And what about Julia? I ask. (He had mentioned her when we were smoking.) I am her secret, he says. And I smile.

I think I was the one that broke up with her a few months later, which is why I hardly remember it. I just know we were together then, for a while, and then we weren’t. I couldn’t do it anymore. It wasn’t the last time I’d think I could be cool, could handle our fucking, the other people, the mix of us that wasn’t an us but was a habit, but like always it made me sad, and hungrier, and so I (think it was me who) stopped.

***

LJ Pemberton's essays, poetry, and award-winning stories have been featured in the Los Angeles Review, Exacting Clam, [PANK], Hobart, Words & Sports Quarterly, Malarkey Books, VICE, the Brooklyn Rail, the Electric Encyclopedia of Experimental Literature, Northwest Review, and elsewhere. She was previously an assistant editor at NOON and she currently reviews fiction for Publishers Weekly. She is the editor of the Bureau of Complaint. Follow her on twitter @ljabouttown.