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In this dark haze of panic and abandonment, she forgot about a future sunrise and dreaded the whole dark street. Inside she cried softly like a child and then tried to stifle it. Nikita knew that she was in trouble, when she collapsed by the bedroom window still looking out, wearing her silver stilettos. It wasn't like he had used her either. She'd had a great night on Saturday. They had both made sure they did. It was simply him not showing up and that she didn't know an end to this emptiness. She was not in the mood for astronomical quests and theories on the origins of the universe. She was just a dressed-up horny chick. But he was too late to come tonight. Her small fist struck the glass and a slice of it slid out of the steel braces in the window and dropped. She had been touched by an acute sense of absence. She knelt down on the old grey carpet holding her stomach. Any hope of intimacy fled down the street like the last car. Her ego set like the sun and suffered behind the ocean. It was more than death, it was dissolution.
It was when Nikita sank to her knees by the frosted glass window on the frayed carpet, that she knew she was in trouble. She did not know how to live her life beyond the moment, or how she had lived before. She had come from nowhere in particular, or at least not that she remembered. Her hold on the present faded behind the transparent fabric of the curtains, and torn grey carpet above the house foundations. She was quickly going under it, to where the spider webs were empty death traps, filled with lost lives and thick dust. When she looked down at her legs, it was as if her eyes had driven her mind there. She was half her original size, vague and inconsistent. She was fading like the elderly. Her gold bracelet hung on thin transparent flesh. The time had come again, for her to be a ghost. She would be gliding through the walls inside her house, as simply part of her own imagination. He had rendered her helpless through deception and disinterest. She was incapable of inaction. Yet there had to be a way out, an obvious escape route that she had overlooked. Suddenly she snatched up the car keys and fled the house. Even in this humidity, the night air cooled her clammy skin and she felt dark like steel, a big moon rising. Once outside she felt her body already partially returning.
I understand why Nikita did what he did. When the pain starts I choose to run. It was a bit like the day when I burnt my hand by lifting the cap off the car radiator. I thought that I was fast enough and perhaps even good enough, to avoid all kinds of pain and that I was immune somehow. I hadn't counted on my stupidity leading me astray. The lid popped off as I jumped back. The boiling hot water captured my fingers and burnt them to the bone. At first I was too shocked to understand my error and the skin itself appeared to pause a moment in shock. The sun shone down and a bird went quiet. Suddenly this wave of golden agony stripped the skin back from my fingers and rolled up my arm. I screamed like the spine was burnt out of me. My body curled up to burn as I began to run. Nothing could take away the pain on that outback road, with the hot wind trying to get a grip on my raw skin. It was the time before blisters, bubbling and forming beneath the pink transparency. If I was meant to act like a volcano, I would have had the consistency of lava. I couldn't just stand still and take it. So I just began to run, as someone who is on fire runs, carrying the burnt log of my arm. I ran in circles and long strips, the sweat streaming out of my forehead. I ran to a place in my heart where no one could find me and where I was unable to find myself, because I knew that in this world there were mainly onlookers to tragedy and few heroes. My tongue hung out like an old exhaust pipe dragging its entrails in the dust, as if it and the other organs were already abandoning the doomed vessel of my body. But in reality I was not alone. We all hold on by ropes of pain.
Nikita was foolish to think that she could escape herself. Anywhere she went she followed. Her body cradled her aching heart. It was like picking up a bird's nest full of green speckled eggs swept down from a tree. It was as careful and astonished as that. The body will choose what to give and what to receive. Upon death it will expel fluids and excrement. It will loosen the bowels to gas and relax the muscles of the nasal passage, the ear canals and dry throat. The body will let go of what it has to when it is ready. The mind will not participate in these actions. Darwin is a small town on the northern tip of Australia. We might be working girls who cannot reveal our identities but in reality we're all in this together. Three weeks on and I've had them all and often their wives, the pool and spa shop owner, the music lecturer, the geologist, the photographer, and the guy who works at Time Zone. Which one am I? I'm the one with the tits and hole. You say it's wrong. I say to you: no heaven, no hell. So who's gonna punish them? You want to ask me out just to save a little cash. Well you know I'd really love to stay and chat but I've been severely burnt and I'm way too self-absorbed. |
