The swoosh of denim of outdated wide legged jeans soothes the air. Synthetic drums build up in echoes and droplets in a dank basement on West 75th and Detroit Avenue. They vibrate out onto the street traveling through the grit in the bitumen and crushed glass particles that dance with ice dust from the lake. Beats homemade in dilapidation of the Midwest and with hope of resurrection of scratched vinyl and rewound crinkled tapes and iridescent cds and any form of clamor to drown out the white noise silence of this grave city. She steps up onto the curb.
Lifts her chin until her neck pinches in the coat zipper and examines the sky and it has no perceivable distance. Instead of stars orange streetlights conduct their disco over top, dusty and crooked. Her body shakes, maybe in dance, maybe in fear, maybe in sickness. She thinks they've all become one since the white men went to die in hospitals. Some didn't go anywhere. They just died where they sat, leaving neighbors and strangers to sweep at their remains. These bodies, dry in patches and filled with tumors, expired while the sun's unseen death was soaked up by their skins and the air supply began to stink like burns. The white men who survived were the judged, locked in prison cages and cement houses: crazy, sick, perverted, guilty. White women orphans abandoned by their protectors and oppressors all at once, left to sort through watches still ticking and underwear and legal papers.


Coming back, she held her head up into the air crisp as printer paper and heavy with the color grey. This place like a catapult- the longer you stay, the further out you go. But no one speaks of how people boomerang back ravenous for simplicity and wanting the lake to bite back. Zombies, leftovers, hobos, white trash and hoodlums. She thinks about how this beast is being gutted, how its skeleton is mummified beneath the ice. Even when the glaciers melt, its bones will stab through fast food cups and pink slim tampon applicators. The ribs will come off their cage, wrapping up sheets of plastic and indestructible Styrofoam. Screams and gasps ring above her. The birds don't migrate or make choices and she finds a restless comfort in that. Her irises rise and fall with the smooth swell of the two waves of currents keeping their spread bodies trembling like poorly made paper planes over the highway.
The living room, too spacious, is burdened with synthetically woven orange carpet and in the low light she catches lime green threads within it. Like a virus creeping back for its epidemic resurrection. She dreams often of disease now and this carpet reminds her of the cancer. She tastes it in her mouth, on the surface of her teeth. Tacky film of fear. The party is all circles and piles. Round gatherings of young ghosts touching ridged green bottlenecks to their warm mouths. Pensively watching froth crawl back down like spit into the pool of piss beer at the bottom. Nicking at the labels with dirty fingernails.

They don't leave and feast with ravenous eyes over each other, savoring the glimpse of a tailbone in low rise jeans, of a jutting hip, of inappropriately large wet lips. The wallpaper obscured by swollen shadows of dancers spinning awkwardly over the sitting circles, is cherries. With blossoms. Bubbled from smoke, it gives the gigantic room a funhouse effect. She scans the bodies with hunger she won't admit to. Lusty moist tentacles enveloping curves, testing peaks and lines of separation between torsos and legs. Parking herself in front of the fridge she waits for the parting of backs to see her way in. Bony hips in corduroys and a flat narrow back block the yellow light and the wafting smell of defrosting. A light head lifts and turns swiftly.
He is a survivor and this oddly embarrasses her enough to reach back into the fridge grasping at the yellow stale cold nothing. She hasn't seen a white man in enough time to make her instinctively reach for her camera. She instantly stops herself and tugs her shirt's edge down over her hip. Thin, translucent skin is stretched over a lean frame and for some reason she thinks he is knobby kneed. Wire frame glasses, something out of the early 2000s, balanced on the bridge of his nose- rigid in its arch and square at the tip. Hair on his head is a whirlwind of strawberry tufts, some magnetized to his round forehead with sweat and stuck there pathetically.
Embarrassment washes over her and she fingers the steel casing of her point and shoot lodged in the sag of the front of her sweatshirt. Her nail scrapes the folds of the shutter and she imagines prying open its eye to save the translucent glow of the man's flesh in its memory. Parchment. Something vulnerable and sick. The cancer had likely spared him somehow, but she couldn't help but see how small he was and how faded his body seemed in this enormously useless house.
He smiles sideways averting his eyes. Extends his long arm to her with a cup of tea. I can't believe this is true she says looking to an empty spot on the kitchen counter. I don't believe in truths he says and bobs a bag of tea neurotically in the cup. It's a zinger he says and it tastes to her sickeningly of sour berries but it's nice and acidic. Still, she says, I do. He guides her hand out of her front pocket where she is squeezing her camera. Turns it on and scrolls. These corrected? For color?
Nah she answers.
Right he laughs that wouldn't be the truth would it? These are just so grey and empty, but in a good way he is quick to add. I guess don't see much of that even though it's everything.
But that's why she says. Everything IS like that now and there IS nothing else, so these are just proof of what you don't notice. The truth. See?
There IS something else, though, he says. There really is.
Yeah? She snickers. You found it?
I have, maybe, he answers a little hurt.

Well, cheers he sneers and she sees how sharp his teeth are. He lifts his heavy ceramic earthenware mug and clanks it against her immobile one. Cheers.

Outside of the window below, an ugly green church had gothic windows. He was like a baby bird pushed and dropped by the wind. He had hung his head and the tips of his curls were touching the air around the white curtains and seemed to end in little flames. Shame. She felt it on him, sensed its weight on his angled shoulders. Like one of those eunuchs in marble at the museum by an Italian sculptor- a name no one remembers. A castrated boy of sexless beauty. A freak, made not by nature but by people. A white man somehow alive. Frail, but alive. So she obliged him. Sauntered to the grimy window, craned her neck. Waited. Not long. He pressed into her with need, not lust or desire like she'd had before, but a need to be a part of someone else, to force his sad skin into her rich one, lifting her thighs up above the floor. His splayed feet planting into the boards of the ground like ginger roots, toes grabbing for traction. Her own hands tangled objects below her, nails scraping the cornice, rubbery fingertips doing push ups to steady her large body in the spotted light. She stood silently, losing her footing, being a raft for the survivor.

Hey.
Hey she says right into his head above his neck. Her nose is barely touching his skull at the bottom and the strawberry wisps surround her face on all sides. His pink skin gives off a hint of pepper and something medicinal that makes her think of root beer.
Hey. His face crawls to a smile half drowned in the pillow. Hey. It comes out raspy.
I want to go there she says into his scalp. You have to take me there with the camera. With you. His mouth drowns into yellowed pillowcase.
I can't he says.
What's it like there?
It's not going to work for your truth quest he mumbles and buries his face in the pillow again. She pulls it from under him cruelly. Pulls her shirt on.
Sorry he mumbles but they're really serious there. They're in denial you know and they fuck and dance and sleep in all kinds of tents. They see freedom where there is nothing. You see the nothing, right?
Right. But I can't photograph nothing. She slides into her shoes.
You have your ways you know he says and nods just enough that she lets a hint of anticipation push up.

We have to keep on he says tapping the small of her back with anxiety. When he offers her his hand it is wet with a pallor of skin and it doesn't melt into her palm, just sits in it. They are on a highway that winds in a threatening spiral along the lakeshore somewhere below them. Two West, the drive along the lakeshore. Her eyes get used to the heather boundaries of the sky and continuously trace the charcoal skin of the road stretched thinly over the white broken divider line, like a scoliotic spine shattered in a horrible collision.
He leads her down off the highway at an exit for West Forty Ninth Street, where the spine takes another curve to the right. She senses the void of the paved hill where the soapbox derby was held all those years ago and thinks the asphalt must now be scarred with cornflowers fighting their way through the broken lines. The grey changes to a peach, only enough to be a small spray of light at the edges. Sunrise and she feels terrified inexplicably.
They lower themselves to the beach. Shit shit shit he spits. I was hoping we'd make it before this and guess I'd forgotten what time the sun comes up. Soon the lake wraps around to the right with its perpetual coldness and the aroma of rotting fish. Its pulse takes her by surprise: it is still very much alive breathing out stench against their cheeks.
To the right and ahead are four destroyed walkways leading broken lines into the foaming water. Jagged cement limbs floating threateningly over the surface. Threaded metal bent and beaten reaching like sprouts to the morning sky. At the fourth pier, in the distance, she sees silhouettes balanced like birds on the cement pillars. The sleeves of the figures up on top allow the sun to obliterate them and they glow. She thinks of light bulbs turned on in daylight. They are watching the sun she whispers to him. His own hair glows in front of her filtering a sheath of fresh light through the strawberry curls and gathering on her forehead.
White goose-pimpled legs woven over dark warm thighs, huddled into a tapestry of chill of the morning. Something inside of her lifts and beats against her throat. He is staring past the huddled bodies into the sun itself and in his pink-highlighted pallor he looks like a displaced ghost. She loves these people so suddenly and so violently that she is frozen by their iridescence. Women lay dreamily sprawled in the laps of their lovers dunking their foreheads and eyes in the first sun.
The woman in front of her turns her head slowly and gently up and her eyes are yellow like a puma's. The face is older but still glossy and buttery with ancient wide cheekbones and kind soft lips. This woman smiles a sleepy smile and reaches back with the ragged sleeve of her poncho to encompass her knees and pulls her down on the cement slab. She surprises herself with how easily she sinks into the woman's hair, which wafts of licorice and wind. Puma’s fingers begin to carve drawings on the palm of her hand and the woman's yellow eyes return to the sun now hovering over the line between blue and mauve. She looks back to see his reaction, but he is not behind her or on the pier and she pets the camera in her pocket with a pinky and sinks back into the hair.

The rest of the day melts into sweetness. She is led around the beach by her elbows, pulled on both sides by mocha children with soft brown ringlets. They heave her up onto white anemic pieces of driftwood so she may ride them like wild animals and they shriek in delight at the ones that resemble alligators, hippos, or dragons sticking their tops out above Erie. She laughs too, in a way that scares her and causes her to gulp for air. The children's parents watch from the water, bobbing on tires sewn together with ropes and old picnic tables which rock unevenly in the grey water threatening to disappear. The mulatto children grab at her camera and she sees that the tops of their hands are like coffee, while the palms are the color of burn scars and tea rose petals.

As the sun descends and dances its minstrel dance on the line between sky and water helplessly, it floods the air around them with gold, which melts into an angry bruise on the edges. The lovers begin to shiver and run gathering wood for the fire. They still laugh. The trees overhanging the tents swat seagulls towards the darkness. She reluctantly tucks her camera into her sweatshirt and begins to gather wood as well, dragging black-green branches towards the pit in the middle. Finally, a violent spark as a flame is thrown in and the pit explodes in a drumbeat of pops, as the fire swells from the bottom.
The puma woman squats beside her as they all crouch and sprawl, except for the men and women cutting potatoes without peeling their pink skins. They throw them in large tin pots and stir up spices that smell of cardamon, crushed pepper, and some kind of heavy green olive oil.
The vagrants eat violently pushing sandy palms into their maws, crumbling steaming potatoes with callused fingertips. Blowing quick breaths into their cupped hands. She watches as they wash sand, potato, and black pepper flecks away with water from mason jars. Whispers with food breaking up at the corners of their lips as the murk of the evening turns to an earl grey and the last bit of flesh-colored sky fades to black. Creeping from all sides, drumbeats begin hopping towards the flames. Men sitting on washed-up trees begin rhythmically slapping old white pickle buckets and soggy cardboard boxes with torn off flaps. Beats built up into a cacophony, smoothing out into some kind of layered lullaby, which then inflates into a bellowing crescendo. She throws her head pointing her chin at the void of low-sitting sky and laughs hearing herself between her temples, where laughter explodes into something so hysteric that she is startled by it.

A bony frame begins to shake past the drummers. The silhouette hovers in the sizzling air and the edges of his shoulders blur in with the dark. She looks at the hips and finds them beneath the licking flames and they are narrow triangles suspended above the belt line. Even in the darkness his front glows white and comes alive in a way that it takes her many minutes to recognize her misplaced companion. Her eyes widen as she takes him in; shirtless, stretched into unrecognizable lines and slants. Fine grey branches and maple leaves stick up out of his curls like limp deformed hands.
His glowing chest begins to sway and turn shined with a shroud of cold sweat. Like a tribal chief he taps his feet and raises his face to the flares of fire. They all start to clap and slap their ankles and feet, to wave what is left of their shirts in dizzy whirls in the space above their heads. They grab at his ankles, rocking his whole body like a white paper birch and their voices build to a roar. Hands powdered in sand adorn his feet with pieces of gleaming green bottle glass and dry grass. She feels the Puma's crooked nails speed up at her shoulders, drawing new patterns of lines in step with the roaring and the beat of hollow plastic.
A dark young woman rises slowly and gracefully from behind his silhouette and the crowd hums and growls in a sexed frenzy. The indigo woman begins to move her hips side to side sweetly. Thrusts her lower body against him as she rounds his shoulders and the crowd ahhhs. He opens his mouth and swallows bits of fire around him. Figures begin to slither in the way, erasing parts of the mating dance. They are crazed, pushed to their heights by sex and hot food and the dry heat of the fire baking their skins. She arches up to see him again and feels the weakness between her legs as she does, but he is a blur of a halo hovering above the heads of the lovers and she no longer sees his face.

The flames hidden amongst the sweat-heavy bodies begin to withdraw their heat and she looks around slowly to see the bodies giving in to gravity of the sand. Still intertwined, fighting their lust lazily while indulging in long, raw strokes of each other's flesh. She looks over her shoulder, but not even the Puma is there, and she wonders if she, with her yellow eyes had been given a white body to rub against.
She crawls until she is no longer part of the mass of lusty bodies and she is cold then. The openness of the beach is a void on all her sides. She sucks her breath and stands up looking back at the lovers. Some are not moving having fallen asleep with the drunkenness of pit fire embers, sex, and dance. She squeezes her camera against her hip and walks briskly towards the brush not looking back. Stops and listens to the cicadas making their electrical vibrations in the brush. Among their strings of song she hears a sharp crunch and stands startled watching the condensation from her mouth reach out into the blackness. The crunch repeats, heavier and longer this time, grinding against the branches to her right.
Without rotating her head she moves her eyes to the side and sees a flicker of white between the leaves. It comes and goes like the tail of a deer, only it is low to the ground. She balances on one arm, pressing the camera into her knee and leans forward until her face is up against a trunk of a young tree. The bark is smooth scales that smell of fish and the foam from the lake. Through the branches are two bodies, both ashen white. She recognizes only the strawberry head, neck, and shoulders. The other white body is sunk beneath him and pressed like a cotton shirt into the ground. She sees smooth hair spread into the sand around the woman's head like strange flippers.
They move as one, pumping and pushing off with their toes, mocking her fear in each beat of stomach against stomach. She thinks of being underwater, of floating behind the seaweed, of watching her predator unable to swim with it. Her camera gasps between shots, shocked at the urgency. She finds herself swallowing anger and lust in big empty gulps as bile sinks to the pit of her stomach and calcifies. Just then, the flattened body beneath him comes up for air, thin careful lips drawing in air over his pale shoulder, chin nestled in its clavicle. The woman turns her head and the smooth hair trembles and slithers on the ground. It is only for a second that she meets her eyes, then a mocking smile creeps across the white woman's mouth as the strawberry head catches its breath above her cruel face.
She begins to run weaving through brush. Feels the thorns ripping through her arms, opening her skin. Panicked. Not by being found, not for the shame that wells in an undefined part of her intestines, but by her own delusion. She checks that the camera is there and feels the weighted straps pumping against her cuts. She weaves onto the beach again and scuttles under a washed up rusty picnic table. Tries to feel herself breathe, but hears the wind howling through her ribs instead and the fevered tears come. They roll so violently that she is hesitant to move. Wraps her arms under her knees, tucks the hood of her sweatshirt under her cold wet cheek and is quickly asleep in her rusty wet hideaway.

The morning is gentle. The sun is a broth that fills the cold sky with mild color and feeds her eyelids until they glide open. She rubs the side of her face where the drawing of the ground is imprinted and her hand instinctively bends at the wrist to feel for her camera.

It isn't there. She sticks her hands in her front pocket. Only feels a sea of moist folds and her fingers move them around shakily. Fuck. The thought releases adrenaline. She jumps out from under the table and shakes her whole body, runs her fingers through her matted down hair.
Nothing.

She begins to comb the beach path with her eyes and forces her soaked feet to trace a path back to the underbrush. The expanse of the shore is transformed by the morning and the harsh light changes everything into ghosts of the previous night's pleasure. She looks off in the distance and sees the haze over the Key Building and the ancient tooth of the unrestored Tower City. One half-moon of the sand over is the charred void of the fire pit with colorful bodies deflated around it, some under dirty tarps, others with their faces half-buried by the ground.
She presses on into the overhang of balding buckeyes and begins to move branches aside. Stiff and stubborn, they fight her, springing back and opening new cuts on her palms. A pain sears through her thumb and she grabs at it. Fuck. Withdraws her hand to see a crooked black thorn lodged in the yellow pad of it. Yanks it straight up to see just a pearl of burgundy rise up and fill the labyrinth of her fingerprint. She wipes it on the shoulder of her sweatshirt and when she looks at it again, the blood is back. This time it is on her forearm above the pulled-up cuff of her sweatshirt and she instinctively brushes it with the opposite hand, but there is no mark beneath it.

Something hits her shoulder with a small empty thud and she turns wanting to see a chestnut or a beetle. Her eyes still swollen from the cold night and they strain to focus on the wet fabric. She watches as a drop of blood soaks into the thick cotton and disappears into the woven squares. Without thinking she follows the invisible path of the droplet up past the ridged grey trunk of the buckeye and into the shedding leaves.

She parts her lips and their separation feels like a harsh tear. Inside, her mouth is textured with dry heat and the metal taste of vomit. Above her sway large, dirty pink feet, a hung paper-white sharp body with wide shoulders crowned with handfuls of large strawberry curls. They glow caution orange as the sun lifts itself even higher above Cleveland.

Impressum

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 10.01.2010

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