Solomon’s Knot

Tuesday night’s a quiet shift: only a bike accident & a stabbing, & before you clock off, a patient codes. Your hands ache from filling out the incident report, but (you think grimly) at least there’s variety among the alcohol swabs & needles & staples & waiting for the cops to go. Last of three days picking up shift alerts, what’s becoming an all-week slog. Staffing’s short; they’re paying nurses twice the usual this week.

You have night-shift brain: Up is down, day is night. The night is nice so you stop to get blasted off vodka tonics at the dive bar close to home that’s blasting disco. After being so much in other people, it can be a relief to find someone willing to be in you for a while, & you’re tired of being precise; the net you cast for cock is wide. Tonight, it turns up daddy.

He’s halfway to half-gone by the time he notices your empty glass beside his elbow & asks who you’re having, no who you’re drinking, no what—his laugh is a cackle. He says he always says the brown won’t go down, but he’ll go down on brown. He is, like you, white & his body language says that he is, like you, willing. You’re eager: Banter is good, but it don’t hit like dick.

You get so hard for gray you can overlook when they do management consulting, went to Wharton, or—like tonight—can afford gadgets you’ve barely heard of (he’s got the earpiece & the watch, he shows you where they put the chip in near his thumb, lets you feel the scar & the bump).

Don’t you think there’s a sort of middle-distanced-ness to Spanish cinema, he asks. Tell me how to pronounce Al-mo-do-var, you say. He brings out your brat, makes you fight the urge to bite his lip, just see what he does. Beard bristling your face, he paws at your pants, one finger slipping under elastic to touch you.

Yours? he growls. Wallets shuffle. He twists to pay, shirt pulling at his waist only just: smallest curve of age. He’s fit & you hate that you’re drunk enough to drool, that you’re a moth, arching thorax up in the air, that you’re ready to beg him to pin you to the sheets. You want to get fucked so hard you talk yourself out of swimming tomorrow morning, even though you know nothing eases a hangover away like the shock of acclimating to water a few degrees too cold. You feel like a mammal in liquid, a reptile on land: drowning to sober up, craving the dead man’s float.

Your place is close enough to walk, but daddy insists on a car, gets hard & handsy in the back seat. Driver keeps his eyes on the road. Top of the stoop, your pockets are flat & empty except where they’re not, wallet but no keys. Daddy asks two times, three, what happened, if you dropped them in the car. He asks for definitions you don’t have. You call the driver once, twice: nothing.

Should you go back, daddy wants to know. But you’re sweating: You want the nothing you’ve made him out to be capable of dispensing & you say, no, no it’s fine. You can get in anyway—the first time you’re glad the landlord’s been slow in replacing the lock on the front door. Daddy gets nervous, but you shoulder it open, pull him into the hall.

You’re hit with the cat-puke funk. She comes rushing to greet you, screaming at the hour & how long you’ve been gone. But you keep pulling, slipping a few of daddy’s buttons free, kissing his chest, pinching a nipple between your teeth. You’ve been in hospitals long enough to know the shapes discomfort can take, the look when someone realizes they’re in a room they want to leave.

He starts to pull away, asks if you’re going to clean that.

How long until he stops you? The leather of his belt feels complex to undo: square knot, reef knot, Hercules. Pants come down & you’re shocked to find he’s commando. You make of him a mouthful, yet you can taste his unease, taste his cold feet.

Actually, he says. He’s gonna call it a night. Cock pops from your mouth.

Ask him to stay (you know he won’t).

Do it anyway (to see if he’ll firm up, the way his dick wouldn’t).

He zips up & goes outside to wait on the street.

You make of him a mouthful, yet you can taste his unease, taste his cold feet.

*

She fills the silence with chirps for food, whipping her tail round your calves. How many times have you been here: swiping wet cloth across vomit, shaking food into a bowl from an old measuring cup in the dim light of the stove. You piss in the shower because you can’t aim, then hope for sleep if your body will let you. You’re the flavor of drunk that sinks into the bed forever, the spinny where you can’t keep yourself hard alone, can’t come.

She settles against you. Your one constant through the long years of school, when you were so tired of people & stimulation that her warm & insistent weight in your armpit, her chin vibrating against your pulse, was all you had energy to accept. You envy her for so much, though it’s an envy streaked with gratitude: The ice caps won’t get her how they’ll get you.

Her snores wheeze ever since she slipped from the banister in your last place, & the sound of her yowl sent you falling down the stairs to find her, but she’d bolted. You found her half under the bed, half out, eyes hunter-black but confused, too glassy & blank. She screamed for you like she couldn’t see. You scooped her gently to the bed. All four paws on the comforter, she tried to keep her eyes open, rocking back & forth. She swayed, eyes pinching, &—you had no other word for it—glitched. You went back upstairs for tuna & the squirt bottle. She hadn’t moved, & you cried that fish & the rattle of plastic were enough to ground her. She licked the pink shreds slowly, then lapped from the bottle’s neck as you tilted it. She let you dab the tears from her eyes, the one bloody bead from her nose; she pulled away, though not hard.

The crease in her nose never leaves—a reminder that one life was gone.

You don’t like thinking about if there’ll be companions after her, but you’ve always been someone whose thoughts misbehave.

In the morning, next week, three years from now, you’ll catch yourself wondering if & how much you’ll miss your days of being sloppy. But your hips now pop, your hair thins, your teeth hurt despite. One body out there is going to be your last (one has to); you just hope it’s not this one or next, the one after, or the one after that—even the one after if you’re lucky.

• 0