Kissing Carrion

Things got dark, then darker. I’d snap my alarm off at eight, open my eyes what felt like a few minutes later, only to find it was two in the afternoon. The phone rang, intermittently: Relatives, old acquaintances, other band members—replaced, eventually, by their lawyers. They talked about stuff I’d signed. Contracts, whatever; that fabled three-album deal everybody’d dreamed about for so long, each side at least five songs long, with not one track of it written or recorded yet.

It didn’t matter. Turns out, I’d only had the one song in m

e.

And now it was gone.

* * *

Anyways, enough said. I’ll cut to the chase.

Three weeks of hell later, I was standing in front of Lovecraft, comparison-shopping for “marital aids”—dipsy-doodle half-inchers, bright pink rubber cartoon Japanese animals full of rotating plastic balls, two-foot ebony Pulverizers (“life-like in every way, complete with veins!”)

And I saw her. A little black dot on the street behind me, tourists recoiling as she limped past them down the avenue with that sidewinder strut of hers well in play, swaying like kelp on a dark current. Blind, but purposeful.

Yeah, I called after her. What do you think? And no, she didn’t turn.

So I followed her down.

Down past the Strip, down past Front Street, down through the underpass. Right on down to Harborfront. Down to the cold and slimy shore of Lake Ontario itself, where ducks float and fish-bellies flash, surfacing intermittently against the dark green waves. Down to the end of a long, long pier, its foundations slicked with chemical foam, where yuppies from the condos on either side stand arm in arm each night, to sip their take-out cappuccino and watch the Island ferry go by. Down where the land runs out, which is—naturally enough . . . where I stopped.

But she didn’t.

* * *

Happened so fast, after our hour-plus meander, it took a breath just to register. One minute she was there, the next—

I heard myself scream, and plunged in after her.

* * *

When I made the pier again—which was a lot harder than it seemed like it would be, from dry land—I just lay there, panting. Soaked through. Jesus, that water was cold.

The sun moved higher, drying my clothes. Dogs came and sniffed at me. Shadows flickering across the mirrored windows and distant highrises. Clouds. I shut my eyes, retreated into a dim, red roar, and lay there playing dead man—which, at that point, I very seriously felt like I might as well be.

I just couldn’t get my head around it.

When my back hurt too much to lie on anymore, I shuffled away; I don’t know where to. Vague images of hats and sports equipment hanging in space, mannequins contorted in pointless displays, my own eyes staring back at me from a series of department store windows. I picked yesterday’s newspaper out of the garbage and dissected it, unread. I hung around the pay-phones, hypnotized by their calling-card readouts.

By six, the sun was setting, and I found myself back at the shore, stumbling along a seemingly endless stretch of what passes for beach in Toronto. My shoes were full of sand, so I stopped to knock them out. Right one first.

A few drops of what I thought was rain kissed the back of my neck.

Then a shadow fell across my bare foot.

I looked up.

Rictus stood there.

* * *

Her clothes hung slack on her, shiny and deflated, like popped seaweed pods. Water in her hair. Water in her kohl-smeared eyes. She gave a great, jaw-cracking yawn, through moist black lips, and I heard it rattle in her lungs.

She cocked her head at me, inquisitive. But only mildly so.

“We met before,” she said. “A while back.”

My heart was a fistful of broken glass.