Guy with acoustic guitar in college dormitory room places his fingers on G and his mind on H., who made him feel last night a little Em; that chord out of tune though, he not having an ear for music, but of shapes in his mind, blurry and under some sheen—H. removing the crumply exoskeleton of her shirt, straddling him with two legs all over him they could've been eight, and jutting his face with her breasts in a motion which brought to mind a car wash, those noodle-like things coming down on his face and touching him wet were it not for the windshield, through which in more morbid days he once wished to exit. As a child he cried in the car wash; the mechanical cold birth into the street just as alienating as the real one. Guy ad libbing an unwritten song with unsure voice and fingers.
Girl sitting on floor in college dormitory room listening to the unshaped strum of G looks at guy with acoustic guitar then looks down at the carpet again, at her shoes, the new ones she got for the party, ones which might turn her into the kind of person she wanted to be, somebody loud and obnoxious who took what she wanted in a world that wasn't keeping score. Timid for his actual head, she settles for the shadow, placed behind him as a portable stain. Her name is Amber, Amber with an A; not ember with an E, though there is a fire inside her chest, coal black coming out snapping red through her arms and legs every time she touches the knife. "D'you know any Dylan," she asks.
Guy with acoustic guitar says he knows "Just Like a Woman," having no clue what exactly is just like a women. No clue that girl sitting on the floor across the room looking at her shoes wrote a note to him in faint pencil then erased it, no clue that he, so large before her, has become an initial—that devastating cancer of ideation that turns people into capital letters. Guy moves from F to Dm and sings "Nobody feels any pain," the first line of that song, one in many lies from that poet, and Amber's fire is puffed and smoke rises up her throat, fogging her mind and vision, the smoke making her cough, which interrupts the song just when guy is about to lose pitch at Bb. Girl says "sorry" and the people in the room stare.
Girl in the backseat driven by her father leaning her head on the window, seeing her town get farther and farther and a new town get closer and closer. "I already hate this place," she says, against the bottomless sideways lake of the translucent window. "You'll be okay," the father says—same thing he said at the in-patient psychiatric unit, or at Thanksgiving when she said to the turkey "Lucky you, you're dead." At the out-patient workshops, before the insurance ran out, she told the MDs and PhDs and PsyDs why she cut, and those reasons made sense to the doctors as they checked boxes on clipboards, and over time, with enough pamphlets and diagnoses, they made sense to us. Girl in urn in mausoleum one day cut too deeply on her wrists with box cutters, her flattened self forever leaning on the recycling bin in some attempt at cardboard reincarnation.
Guy at work at his computer typing this. Guy is girl's brother (though there was guy with acoustic guitar in college dormitory room she once told me about). Guy found out his sister had attempted suicide over the phone at 1:23AM, shortly after the college Provost's office had called their parents. Dad on the couch crying and Mom in the kitchen staring into space cannot be described here because guy wasn't there. Guy on the next flight out rents a car at the airport and drives to that town, that hospital, finds that room through eyes blurred by a thick saline bubble, as if numbing daylight into dusk, rounding out every sharp edge into butter. Guy gets on his knees like he's about to propose, but girl is not girlfriend, but sister. "I need you," guy says to girl. A heavy oblong tears falls on the unbandaged portion of her arm, hits her skin with a muted note. "I need you Amber," holding her hand. Girl is staring ahead of her—just stares—into a squat future punctuated by various attempts until one day the attempt is deep and exact enough.
Girl sitting on floor in her kitchen only does so when her roommate B. is gone, usually Sunday mornings for sure when B. is jogging with her jogging group, which she, girl sitting on the floor, always considered sad—the provincial faith in numbers, people as parasitic mirrors of one another, sharing and easing the same loneliness. She imagines 5-6 people, complicit in the well-adjusted goal of a 4-mile run, running there, stopping out of breath for a while, the small talk of movies they've seen or might see, then returning to their respective homes as anti-climactic walking boomerangs. Girl sitting on floor with less than 6 months to live imagines the window above her as seen from outside, someone looking inside the house and seeing nobody home. "I am nobody home," she says to the drawer. A rustle of leaves outside, each leaf some crackly dry note—the song that tree almost sings. "I am nobody home." Girl sitting on floor takes out the knife, and digging a little, draws tiny red rivers on her thigh, finally released into the soaked estuary of the world outside.
© 2010 Jimmy Chen
