I spent the first few minutes of 1996 trying not to come. I had Nadia up against a smooth section of an otherwise roughly stuccoed wall, and the soft, wordless rhythm of her voice brushed past my left ear as I tried to postpone the inevitable. The surrounding air’s dry, cool bite was more than tempered by the warmth of her breath, combined with everything else radiating off us, and my self-control melted a little more. I tried to focus, but the night had been so long and debilitating already that I was ready to accept the careening rush into oblivion.
UPDATE: Edited a bit per helpful suggestions…
Soundtrack (mp3): ‘The Morbid Frieze’ by Low Tide
After leaving Olivia’s party under a cloud of guilt, we’d hurtled up Del Obispo and then Del Avion in the Altima, charging over the hills straddling Dana Point and Laguna Niguel. I’d guessed where Nadia was going once she blew through a yellow light at Crown Valley and rocketed up Pacific Island toward the hilltop. Once out of the car, she’d exploded in wild waves of jealousy, overcome by the same old importunate paranoia that was always so close to her surface these days.
Show me Roy, she’d pleaded as we crunched over the gravelly Aliso Peak trail, past the half-finished mansions that had almost burned down two months ago. Show me that you haven’t fucked off with any college girls while we were separated all this time. Show me you love me, show me you want me and only me, she begged, as we threaded the trail above the burned-out canyon. Show me right here, Roy. Show me now.
So I did, and was still trying to, but probably not for much longer, as Nadia dug her chin into my neck, her voice rose a note or two, and the irreversible spiral of sex began to overwhelm me. Suddenly, though, her voice seemed to jump from careless ecstasy to something like surprise or maybe fear, and her breath held the beat for a few bars before some signal fought its way into her brain and she began to scream.
Or tried to. My senses hadn’t totally abandoned me and for a split second I stifled the worst of her noise with my right hand before she bit down in a manic attempt to do the same. The sharp pain from her teeth released all my other sensory receptors as she and I fell apart and landed in the dust. I hit my head sharply and felt the dirt begin to cling to my skin. My eyes were shut tight and a weird mixture of adrenalized, painful pleasure shot through me as I took maybe five seconds to right myself and look at Nadia.
She had fallen the other way and was as half-naked and dirty as me, but had wrapped herself in a tight ball with her small arms, shivering from fright and cold as she fixated on a point halfway up the wall not far from where we lay.
“Jesus, Nadia, what’s wrong?” I tried to sit up but my head swam in the effort. “What happened? Are you o-”
“Shhh!” She cut me off and pointed wildly. I looked, and at first couldn’t figure out what had frightened her. Few streetlights worked in this brand-new, uninhabited neighborhood, and anyway there weren’t any on this side of the property (rendering it an otherwise prime make-out location). I had to wait a bit for some moonlight, and even then the stucco was laid on so thick that discerning detail was tough.
Then I saw it. Embedded right next to the smooth section of the wall, barely hidden by the sprouts of a small seedling and bathed in the dim moonlight, was the faint outline of what looked like the bones of a human hand and arm. Blobs of plaster distorted it here and there, but when I got closer it was unmistakable. I stared and stared, forcing my brain to process it, but deeper, malevolent things instantly tried to crawl out of old nightmares and claim their share of attention. I fought them off by forcing myself to think my way through my old tenth-grade anatomy textbook.
“Wow… is that, uh… do you think it’s…?”
I was answered by the sound of retching. Nadia’s shaky “I don’t know” peeked out of the chilly silence a few moments later. What I could see of her face had gone very pale. “I don’t fucking want to know, either.” Nadia coughed out a few more dry heaves, began to gather her jeans up from around her right foot and stepped down clumsily a few times with her left before finally getting her leg in. “Roy, let’s go, right now. I can’t stay here, even if that thing really is not what it looks like. I can’t stay here with that image in my head.”
I felt the same way, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the morbid frieze. I must have pulled my pants back up at some point, but I don’t remember looking down to button them or anything. It wasn’t until Nadia had made her way over and almost yanked my own arm out of its socket that I wrenched my eyes away to follow her back up the dark trail to the car.
We tripped and stumbled, hustling without a word over the pebbly track. Removed a little bit from the reality of what I’d seen, an inexorable creepiness began to filter into me, and I started really running as I imagined the pinpricks of empty eyes on my back and tried not to listen for Spanish whispers. I pulled ahead of Nadia, dragging her along the last few steps, before collapsing against the car. I wanted to just jump in and leave, but we were both too tired to move any more. Fight-or-flight lost out to sheer physical and mental exhaustion.
“Roy, I… feel …terrible,” gasped Nadia, with her hands on her knees, trying to catch her breath. “I can’t drive… right now, I just…can’t. I’m sorry…that thing just scared the living shit out of me and… I think you have to drive.”
I was afraid of this, but still felt too mired in my own freakout to think clearly.
“Well I can’t…do it either…dammit,” I wheezed, but froze in the rictus of the hopelessly wrong once I looked up and received an immediate assault of piercing blue eyes and Ukranian righteous anger.
“Oh, you’d better,” Nadia snapped, suddenly much more alert than I could ever hope to be, “and I think you will, too, unless you want to walk yourself back down the hill and all the way home.” She lost her breath again, but still coughed and sputtered with blooming indignation. “I’m sure you’ll have plenty of time to rehearse a great explanation for my parents when I don’t get back before dawn.”
I slumped my shoulders in abject defeat, burning with embarrassment. She could tell right away, though, and seemed to recover a little patience. I closed my eyes and waited for it, but it still took Nadia about five more minutes to change course.
“Roy, please, I can’t. Please take yourself home first, and I’ll try to be able to drive myself after.”
I sneaked a glance at her, but now she showed only apprehension. I relented, opened the door for her, walked around, and got in the driver’s side. I was still grasping at coherence a little later as I carefully, soberly steered the Altima back down the hill, with a jumble of stimuli emerging from the ether to besiege my senses all the way home: Chris Addison yelling, the salty smell of my bloody knuckles, flickering shapes in low light, Olivia’s whispers in my ear, a stale whiff of vomit in the back seat of Derek’s Civic, wet tears balancing the sting of smoke, Nadia’s scream, R.J. babbling away in Spanish, frantic TV reports of the fire from two months ago.
Nadia’s mechanical goodnight kiss brought me back to reality. I stood in my stepfather’s driveway watching her car creep away, no longer thinking about staying sober or about Derek Haynes or Lisa Arroyo or my sticky underpants or hot tubs or Olivia’s hands on me or anything like that. I’d even pushed Nadia out of my brain by the time my head hit the pillow, and unwillingly dwelled on one thing and one thing only for the rest of the night- so much so that I’d gone back up the hill the very next day and looked in vain for the place we’d been, for the distinctive grubby hole, the exposed metacarpals, and the gentle ridge of stucco that looked like someone’s arm. I looked almost all afternoon, wandering all along that damn wall, but never found it, and I couldn’t understand why.
I never forgot it, though- hell, for the next month or so, even back at school, when I couldn’t fucking sleep at night, not at all. Nadia and I found reasons to not call each other as often, I quit the intramural soccer team, my class attendance went to shit, and I barely partied with my few friends in the dorms because I was constantly delirious with sleepless fatigue from new nightmares, about disembodied arms coming to get me, strangling me while I slept; of featureless, faceless Stucco-Things mucking out of the walls and smothering me, suffocating me in silence, muffling my screams with their pasty, semi-solid hands.
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I think I may need some help with this one. It doesn’t feel “done.” It’s actually gone through the most editing, since it was one of the first things I wrote for this project (I think the first draft was from around a year ago).
Something isn’t sitting right and I’m not sure what it is. ANy thoughts?
was the conversation about driving the car… it didn’t seem to fit the rest.
but then maybe there really was no connection between you and Nadia and that’s why that happened. how could you not both stumble to the car and talk about the body part… and maybe death or nightmares… like sex and death all at once… pretty heady stuff.
then crash… she’s threatening you about driving. maybe try to take it somewhere else.
i thought the beginning was great (and v. sexy) and the last three paragraphs were good.
but i agree there is a disconnect… how did you get to those last three paragraphs?
Some scenes never feel done to the writer, but it’s not necessarily because something needs to be added. If there’s anything technically missing, it’s that the motivations of the characters aren’t clear, but they’re in a situation where they don’t really know what to do.
This scene feels real, that matters more than having a tidy “finished” scene with a contrived resolution. The conflict and uncertainty both characters are trying to deal with cannot be resolved in just this one scene.
But they don’t have to be, one or both of the characters can realize later in the story what they learned from this experience.
It’s well-written and I like it. I’m trying to understand what the story is doing.
You’re inviting the reading that this is a very unreliable narrator, decribing a rape attempt, who then negotiates the memory of it with a fantasized dead hand image — that’s what freaked her out so much, not him.
Or, if the narrator is not that unreliable, then you have a story that begins with trying not to come and ends with the image of a dead hand, which is certainly good, sex and death, hard to miss with that. But you might be leaving to the reader more than you mean to be, what it all means.
the arm or body. The whole piece has a certain blur of urgency and speed both sexual and emotional as well as physical. The car is the great as it make place move also. The only out of sync element for me was Nadia’s dialog Staring with “Oh you better… to …five more minutes to change course. For me it seems like a light being turned on a time out from the reality and mood you have created. It’s a good contrast but maybe too mundane dialog wise, or placed to soon.
As a big fan of the noir and this has that feel. Very visual. Good. Didn’t mean to nit pick but you asked. I have a friend who is a great artist and often asks what’s wrong with this piece? Then I tell her and she argues with me for weeks. Fun to hear the process in writers I admire as it varies yet is similar to visual art.