Non Sequitur Love

Words falling, dropping against the floor in Cuban jazz rhythms.

“What’s hid-ing in the ten-e-ment hawwwls?” she sing-songs, her
fingernails trailing against the old hallway that’s wearing thirteen
coats of off-white paint.  She looks over at me for acknowledgment
of her creation, and I smile and force an audible amount of breath out
of my nose to let her know I’m amused.

I look back down towards the end of the hallway, the dark door to the
stairwell glowing red under the EXIT sign.  This subtle
disassociation is enough to annoy her.

“Cassander,” she says.

I look back over.  She stops short for a moment, fingernails
frozen still waist-high on the wall.  She waits a long moment for
me to say something even though I’m looking right into those gift shop
birthstone eyes.

“What?” I whisper.

Full-bore loud: “Wh-hat’s hiid-ing in these ten-ement-ement
hawwwls?!”  The song gets bitten and swallowed by shrieking
laughter.

“There’s only one door,” I say, trying to synch up with her half-sane
mood.  “The door to my apartment.  The rest of them open up
onto Hawaiian diving cliffs.  Blue thunder below.”

“Ooo!” she squeals.  “Let’s go, then.  I’ve always wanted
to!”  Before I can grab her, she runs to the nearest door and
tries the knob.  It gave an annoyed rattle in her hand, and she
turns on me, mouth wide and eyes rolled back in mock devastation.

“Fuck the Hawaiians,” I say.

“Fuck the Hawaiians.”

“Shoot to kill on my orders,” I say, edging towards my apartment’s door.

She points finger pistols and me, Pow, POW!

She starts humming the same tune, only without the words this
time.  Her eyes tell me what she’s thinking, though, the same
question going through her head.  Unasked, unanswered: who are your neighbors?  Why don’t you know
them?  For some reason it is a serious question for her,
a deep flaw in my character.  It bothers her to be with the guy on
the floor who keeps to himself.  She stares at me as I pull out my
keys and put them in the lock, staring until I feel paranoid and
vaporous.

“You’ll never guess what I bought today,” I say, trying to distract her.

“What, what, what?!” She actually claps.

“The bullet that killed Kennedy.”

“You’re joking!” she says, now over-exuberant, really milking it.

“The magic bullet.  On eBay.”

“Your first religious relic.  I’m so excited to see it.”

The door swings into the apartment, scrapes against the linoleum.
Disaster, economy.  She tiptoes over the scattered clothes,
papers, odds and ends, and approaches the bed that takes up most of the
only room.  She spreads her arms wide like takeoff and falls face
first into the quicksand of blankets and sheets.  I lock the door
behind me.

“Give me the fuck of a lifetime,” she says and sticks her butt in the
air.  She says this every other day.  I take one step towards
the bed, and she rolls over quickly onto her back.  “Oh my
god.  You were going to do it, weren’t you?  You really were
about to just rip my skirt and shove your cock in my ass!  Don’t
lie to me, Cass.  The thought didn’t even cross your mind, did
it?  It was pure instinct.  Mad, primal instinct.  You
want to impregnate me, don’t you?  Deep down, that’s all you want
out of ol’ Maisy, isn’t it?  To leave your slobbery seed on the
walls of my uterus like some kind of cave painting.”

“You hungry?  Thirsty?”

She puts her finger on her chin in the universal sign for thinking,
then just blurts again, “Whooooo’s hiding in the tenemenemenemenement
hawls!?”

I fall down on the bed, too, and start taking off my clothes.
“Old ladies.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but they’re all
old ladies.  They’re all grandmas who knit all day.
Sometimes I can’t sleep for all the sounds of the knitting.  Kit-kit-kit-kit.”

“Bullshit,” she accuses, but I don’t respond, and the echo of her curse
absorbs into the walls eventually and the room is silent except for our
blinking eyes.  For a long moment, we both consider nothing.

…and later I will finally convince her to abandon her going-out
clothes, the long skirt with maroon and black diagonal stripes and the
white blouse and the pins in her hair and her hose and she will be left
in a black bra with itchy frills and my arms tied in a sailor’s knot
around her, my chin on her shoulder, and we will breathe and float and
glance cross-eyed at the digital clock and before we fall asleep we
will end up saying something tender, something viably affectionate and
let each others’ saliva cool on our exposed skin, but until then I can
only edge closer to her, bit by bit until she is ready to be touched
and try to make out what she is saying.  She is mouthing words, I
can hear her lips touching then pulling apart in syllables, and now her
breath is rising up and giving the words tone and whispery shapes, and
now she is barely audible, her vocal chords vibrating at the lowest
level, reciting something:

“Clothesline. Pile-driver.  Flapjack.  Power slam, elbow
smash.  Vertical suplex, knee drop.  Backbreaker, half
nelson, scissor kick…”

“Maisy,” I say.

“What?”

“You are insane.”

“Then caress my ears with sanity.  Tell me a story.”

“There were no landmarks, but it was definitely Tennessee,” I say, not meaning to pause and tease her, but I do anyway.

“What time was it?”

“It was mid-day or late-afternoon.  I was on vacation.  I was
in the backseat, laid out, looking up through the window.  On this
car…the cab or whatever it’s called sort of slants in.  Like
this.  So that if you’re laid out in the backseat, you can look up
and your vision isn’t blocked by the roof.  I was looking up at
the sky, which was terribly dark for mid-day.  A hurricane or a
storm caused by the outer fringes of a hurricane farther east was
chasing us down.  We had been driving through it all morning, but
we were slowly outrunning it.  We were on our way to
Graceland.  My mom had a fetish.  Or a…collection that needed
adding to, at the least.  She looked over her shoulder and said,
‘Are you all right?’  I nodded.  She winked at me.  ‘The
sky is breaking up, up ahead.  You’ll see it soon.  It’s a
very beautiful kind of breaking up, the split between black and gray
and blue.’  And I knew that my mother could understand me.
She knew what I was looking at and why I was looking at it.  The
sky.  She didn’t tell me to sit up or to read a book or
anything.  She let me be.”

She says, “That’s not a story.  That’s a fucking daytime TV monologue.”

“I’m going to slice all your ribs apart tonight while you sleep.
You won’t even feel it.  Then when you wake up, you’ll sit up real
fast like you always do, and everything will just slide out in thin
lasagna layers.”

“I can hear your commas.  Did you know that?  When you speak
I can actually sense punctuation.  You’re anal even in your speech
patterns.”  She blinks.  “So let’s do that sometime.”

“What?” I ask, propping myself up, easing closer to her.

“Go cliff diving.”

“Okay.”

“Cassander.”

“Maisy.”

“Shh.”

“Ssshh.”

I smell the scent of lips and hear one whisper-quiet kiss.