The pair stood abreast of one another, smug, uncaring eyes caked with mascara wandered down the subway tunnel.
Reese dropped oversized, crimson sunglasses back over her face. Claire shrugged, tapping her left foot, high heeled and booted to the knee in slick leather, against the ground before responding.
“Fucking laundry list of reasons, too much Xanex, too much Lexapro, not enough Ambien…Wait I take that back,” she caught herself suddenly and, index finger held up like a politician or a professor, continued, “not enough Xanex and way too much Valium.”
Claire was taller with stone archways for shoulders, while Reese looked frail, too frail but, as everyone said, those perfect tits made up for it. They stood close enough that a worn sign reading ‘No Smoking’ screwed to the wall behind them was just legible between their heads. Both balanced orange-tipped cigarettes on their lips. Claire tugged at the seam of black leggings on her right thigh while glancing into a cell phone with a convenient mirror feature. Reese spoke, almost in monologue.
“I mean its not as if she doesn’t have a reason to live. Dumb bitch. She always has Dylan there to fuck her.”
She paused. Reese had fucked Dylan too, often. Sage didn’t know and on paper he was Sage’s twisted hybrid of steady fuck-male companion.
“She’s pulls this shit like every other Tuesday. It’s all I’m not happy this and oh why doesn’t he call back that. Get a fucking grip. If she really wants someone’s damn attention at least use a razor. That’s what I did the last time I tried. Everyone rushed to me and I was loved again. Remember?”
She paused once more, a grin creasing her tan cheeks, proud.
“I mean, what’s a couple of scars anyways? Just wear a sweater.”
Reese broke off and glanced at Claire, she was twiddling the stringy auburn curls that bounced on her head, still captivated by her mirror-phone.
“Hmm?”
Reese resumed her oratory.
“Even met a George Clooney look-alike on my last day in. God, he was a fuckin’ moose. Huge.” She arched her back at this and wriggled her hips slightly, letting a soft groan quiver from her lips or maybe from between her legs. “He pulled my hair and slapped my ass for at least an hour. He left with a tuft of my black locks,” she cooed. “But I didn’t care. He stuffed me all night.”
“George Clooney?!” chirped Claire, oblivious to anything Reese had said before this name. “Oh I’d kill for Clooney, the guy I just fucked didn’t do anything except leave the condom inside me.”
“I bet that’s because you have a fat vagina sweetie.”
“Hey! You’ve never seen my vagina,” Claire shot back, curling her lips and cocking her head forty-five degrees. Silently, she wished that Reese actually had seen it.
“I’m just saying daaaling.” Reese stretched her last word and touched Claire’s shoulder like a mother would. She stepped in front of Claire and onto the newly arrived train. Claire shuffled in behind her, slipping a curious thumb under the hem of her pleated skirt.
Reese and Claire babbled at each other all the way downtown, on their way to pick up their third, Sage, who, lost in a throbbing dementia of straight whisky, key bumps of pure MDMA, and an already crippled self-image, had gulped eighteen various prescriptions at 3 a.m. that Wednesday morning and tried to kill herself.
* * *
In the four years since the three had met, in the depths of the SubMercer lounge over drug-rattled chatter, they had never worked a day or an hour or minute. Never worried about a resume of a cover letter. The letters CV would be mistaken as a new prescription pill to try. Posh apartments came from parents who couldn’t stand them or understand them or just didn’t want to know them. Life ran on platinum, black and other exclusively colored Amex and Visa plastic. They barely knew where each other came from and they didn’t care, it didn’t matter, nothing mattered.
Reese and Claire slouched into two metal-backed seats at Café Natural, the hospital cafeteria.
“I hate the fucking bullshit chairs in this place,” shouted Reese. A wide-eyed, grey lady with an IV in her arm muttered something from two tables away.
“My bony hips always get so fucking sore…this fucking body, it’s like I came out of the womb a corpse, a fucking skeleton. Fuck.”
“Oh fuck off,” Claire puffed.
The two stared at each other from behind their sunglasses. The silence was broken by the presence of an orderly and a small, curvy Italian girl with a stale complexion. Her long, black hair was gaunt and stringy as if she’d run for hours in a blistering wind and hadn’t washed it for weeks. But she was gorgeous.
“Sit down you crazy fuck,” Claire said. “We saved you you’re favorite seat.”
The seat didn’t matter but the place did. Café Natural. A favorite haunt of these three. Every few days they ended up here, eating a meager breakfast or lunch or dinner depending on the drug or drink or suicidal inclination or mix of all three. Reese usually arrived by ambulance in the afternoons, frequenting the daytime coke bars she’d come to love, by 2 p.m. feeling sorry enough for herself to slit her wrists or at least overdose. Claire nourished herself on Bloody Marys and Codeine, known to hail a cab and check herself into the hospital when she was nearing coma. And Sage often watched the sunrise, eyes bloodshot and head pounding, with a bowl of uppers and downs beside her. So early morning meetings at Café Natural were usually her fault.
In an instant, Sage’s color was back. She smiled. But this smile meant nothing. Not a reassurance to the others or a comfort for herself – just a crude mask, covering the grotesque vacuum in which they existed.
“We should have frequent flier cards at this point,” Sage purred, her voice raspy, sensual.
The orderly turned and strode silently away, shaking his head. Around their table, patients, doctors, and family members filed through the ‘grab-and-go’ cue, picking their nutritious meals – whole grain pastas, tofu burgers, fruit smoothies. The girls noticed no one.
“Ha, we should, maybe get a discount…” Reese murmured. It was the third time in two weeks Sage had ended up here and her friends weren’t happy. They were wasting their day.
“That’d be wonderful,” Claire bumbled in a trippy tone, she talked like this often, constantly dazed. But her voice cracked as she spoke. Blushing scarlet, she feigned a cough and murmured, “funny idea.”
“Really? If it’s so funny than why don’t you fucking laugh?” Reese barked.
Sage snorted a laugh and Reese giggled at her own joke. Breasts, loose in a blouse that hung off her shoulder, wobbled as her chest heaved. The two liked ganging up on Claire. She was the oddball, never quite up with their dry, drab humor. And she was clearly the least good-looking. An easy target.
Claire hung her head and Sage grabbed across the table for Reese’s silvery fish-scale purse. The brass zipper scraped her left wrist as she shoved her hand in.
“Ouch. Fuck. ” She ripped her hand, now clutching a packet of Camel Blues, away from the bag. She stood. Faded jeans hugged firm calves as she sauntered, a drunk, sexy sway in her hips and ass, towards a wooden bench in the open air outside the café.
Plopping down on the bench, she fumbled with the pack and began tearing at the first thin, white cylinder she could coax out of the cardboard. She ripped the filters off her cigarettes when she smoked, hungry for the toxins lost in the white fuzz between lips and tobacco. But filterless cigarettes left a permanent mark. The skin on the inside of her index and middle fingers was charred, like the core of an apple, beginning to brown in certain spots.
Reese and Claire followed. Reese shoved in next to Sage. Claire, looking to do the same, caught her boot on a crack in the beige pavement and twisted her ankle. Unconcerned, the other two watched her wince and then regain her balance. Reese reached for the pack and Sage blew a curt breath into her face, clouding her head in smoke, fogging her sunglasses.
“Fucking bitch,” Reese spat.
Reese didn’t really like Sage or Claire. It wasn’t clear if any of them liked one another beyond a bond shared over white lines in bathroom stalls, shadowy night clubs, and apartments they’d sleep in once and forget the next day. Superficial was too nice a word for this threesome, speeding vaginas first uptown to downtown and back up again. Night by night by night, bodies and minds consumed with themselves, consuming themselves, self-loving and self-loathing, drifting through days, coming awake at night only to self-destruct. They were nocturnal druids, unable to predict anything beyond their next pleasure, clinging to these hollow others for lack of another identity, doing nothing, absorbed in a lifestyle that made them feel like queens.
Or at least princesses.
“I wish I was a princess,” Claire blurted, unprovoked. “I’d buy Louis Vuitton and Ralph Lauren and Jean Paul Gaultier. Not the brands but the actual guys. I’d fuck them, even if they were gay, just to say I had and then they’d work for me. Only me.”
“Yeah, Jappy Jap Jap,” was Sage’s response. She exhaled, quick and hard. The smoke obscuring the dour contortion of her face. Her head shifted right, away from the table. Long and soft, she starred at nothing, deep in thought… No, just bored, not just of the conversation, or the girls around her, or the city, bored of bored, of boredom and apathy. Bored. But there’s nothing else there. Nothing clicking behind those ‘fuck me’ hazelnut orbs that flitter now –able to spray sultry passion with a glance – focusing on being unfocused, above the cigarette smoke dancing in wafts around their faces.
“Fuck you Sage, why don’t you go try and kill yourself again?” Claire said with sickening aplomb. Her head teetered as she stared at Reese.
“Why don’t you?”
“Maybe I will!”
“Maybe you should. God damnit you bitches, I just wanna go fuck Dylan.”
“Ladies, ladies,” interrupted Reese, tender and conscious at the mention of Dylan’s name. “I like the fire, the passion, let’s all fuck some time. But right now,” she waited, eyes ablaze, clammy palms resting suggestively on boney hips, “there’s an all-day rave in Brooklyn.”
She dropped her own hand into her bag and returned with a clenched fist. Splaying her fingers with the craft of a magician showing you the card you picked from the deck, Reese instead produced three tiny pink triangles each engraved with an asterisk.
“Cute!” piped Claire, sarcastically. She pressed her index finger against Reese’s palm and popped a triangle in her tongue. The others followed and stepped into the subway, heading further and further down, nothing but obliteration on their minds.
* * *
Claire thumped against a bronze mallard duck protruding above the handle of her apartment building’s front door.
“Too late for the fucking doorman,” she sputtered, between gasps for breath and gulps of bottled water. She hadn’t gone into the rave. No, instead she told Sage and Reese she’d meet them inside, strolled back to the Subway and now meandered through her building’s first floor, eyes wide, waves of blissful warmth washing over her as the pink triangle did its job.
The 6th floor hallway, marble floored and with mirrored walls, opened onto a curved, granite balcony – an ideal perch for late night cigarettes or risqué blowjobs. She wandered down the hall, running clammy hands along the mirrors, smudging the glass and tickling her fingertips.
Her emotions splintered and she stumbled into the balcony’s sliding door. The ecstasy was turning on her. She moved forward onto the balcony and considered the ledge. A flat stone wall, cold under her perspiring grip. Easy to sit on, legs dangling in the air. Easy to slip from, tumbling into a memory, a thought forgotten. A permanent end. No more cries for attention. No more horizontal wrist cutting. Pussies. No more beauty contests, no longer the butt of jokes. Nothing more than the nothing she already had. Darkness.
She teetered back. Her heels tapped against the marble, a misguided horse in a drunken trot, and she reached her door. Fumbling with the keys, she stepped across the threshold.
Inside, he shut the door and breathed relief, excitement, the hollowness after climax.
Reaching above broad shoulders, he peeled off thick auburn curls and tossed them to the floor. False lashes thick with eyeliner fell to his feet, picked from his eyelids. Coughing, he scratched his chest, behind the plastic cones that passed as breasts outside his door.
Tripping into an open space between the kitchen and living room, he snarled at his stainless steel reflection on the fridge. The glimmering metal warped him, drawing an incipient creature, trapped in a fog behind the metal, features a breath and sleeve wipe away from clarity, amorphous and ugly and misunderstood. Except for those eyes. Sooty ovals, grim and piercing, staring out from the steel into his own eyes, blazing fiery in their centers, scanning the physical presence that created them. The steel reflection, a splatter painting of his existence, more real than any of the persons he ever was.
A pain stabbed through his temples and he doubled over. A shuddering left hand clenched the chiseled ivory side of a low coffee table and his knees buckled. He tore off the blouse, bra, boots, skirt, leggings, panties. The blissful waves collided with an explosive throb deep in his skull.
His vision blurred and his thoughts swirled. Long arms rubbed against his forehead and then in a swift motion reached down to his sweaty thighs and tore a foot-long piece of ducted tape from between them.
Suddenly, he was numb. His penis slipped down, shriveled and distorted. He stared at it, sweaty and sticky between his legs, unknowing, unfamiliar, an appendage trapped, hidden. Another pang and his eyes watered, unable to see, a caged libido spewed out of him.
Look at me.
His eyes darted from the front door to a coral white sofa and then through a doorway on the left where he slept. Nothing.
He stood. Scrambling towards a mahogany mirror in the breezeway of his apartment, he scratched at his face, make-up smearing, lipstick smudged against a faint hairline on his upper lip.
Touch me, you have to, feel me, know I’m there, I’m here, always.
His head, topped now with a blonde crew cut, tilted down and his eyes shuddered in their sockets. An erect penis stared back at him.
Manic, he grabbed it and squeezed. Pain and pleasure splashing and crashing from his crotch to every extremity. He screamed, howled, ran to the bay window looking out over the city, spread his legs wide and squeezed. His head tossed and his teeth chattered, froth and snot and sweat sprayed across the glass. Deep inside him, behind his bowels and beyond his loins, two shadowy figures collide.
Silence.
He collapsed on plush pink wall-to-wall carpet. A freshly waxed chest heaved long and steady, remnants of mascara trickled watery down his face.
From a tan and gold Gucci handbag, lost in a shredded pile of women’s clothing behind him, a vibration. He rolled over onto his stomach and clawed his way to the noise. Tossing the lacy bra, with fake breasts sown into the cups, aside, he found the bag and cell phone inside.
Text message from Sage.
Dylan will you come find me, I’m rolling hard and I’m all wet for you.
A twisted grin, those eyes pleased and focused.
I’ll be right there.
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