Super Flat Times by Matthew Derby Read Free Book Online Page B

pressing her as close to my body as I could, “you are so much of a surprise — I didn’t think. What I did think was that — you were — so young. We could help each other be together, couldn’t we?” The band finished the number. A great crowd of people applauded, and they started in again with another bleating, primitive waltz. In several of the most important ways, I had the distinct sensation of already having attached Marian to the rest of my life.
    “Oh my God,” she whispered between sharp, heavy breaths. “Oh Jesus God.” Standing behind her, I did not see when she started to cry, but felt her body sag and lurch.
    “What — do you?”
    “I need to. Get back —” It was difficult to tell whether this last fragment was a proclamation or a directive. She slipped out of the Eating stance we’d attained, Pride of the Alaskan Pipeline, and broke away to the stairwell. I followed her into the belly of the vessel, back to our cabin, which looked, suddenly, as though it had been made with a crayon and a napkin. She was sitting on the bed, satin dress half off, hands pressed to her face.
    “Jesus, what’s — wrong?”
    She did not look at me, but slowly capsized onto the bed, like the victim of a slow-motion shoot-out.
    “Marian. What’s —”
    There was a television monitor bolted high on the wall opposite the bed, which broadcast the view from the bridge all day and all night. It was what we had in place of a window. The screen was a deep black then, save for a single, tiny string of bulbs that ran down the middle of the vessel, lights that hardly put a dent in the night.
    She took her hands from her face, where mascara had pooled in heavy, expressive crescents. “Geoffrey, I — you’re an old person. Your skin is so — it’s like a sequoia — you’re like an antique chicken. I’m sorry — you’re very kind and I might even love you in some awkward manner, but I’m sickened by the presumption your body makes to the world. When you hold me, I think of my father, of the brutal Indian rope burns he would give me during summer break at night after my mother passed out. He’d press himself up behind me, and it was like being lowered into a tub of thick dough. I let him do it again and again because I knew that someday I was going to be one of him — my body was going to be wrecked and pinched off like an ancient, desiccated fruit. I felt as if I needed practice at being sick with myself. The sickness of it got inside me — whenever they were away, I tried to make myself old, brushing school glue on my face and arms and letting it dry there. I would sit in front of my bedroom mirror for hours, masturbating to the image of my own wasted body. But now it’s actually happening to me. Here, this boat — I’m already there. This is old. I’m going to be old. So soon I can already feel it. I don’t want to be an old person, Geoffrey. I don’t want to be an old person. Jesus.” She started to sob uncontrollably — the whole room seemed to shake with each violent contraction of her body.
    “Please oh please, Marian, don’t — you shouldn’t —”
    “Just, just go.”
    “You want me to —”
    “Go.”
    I had never been so close to a person in this condition. Most of the people I knew who didn’t want to become old had simply killed themselves. Myself, I tried to but was unable to fully remove myself from the act. I kept making incisions and then reneging, so that after two hours or so, with blood everywhere in my small, dingy kitchen, I gave up and fell into a deep sleep on the floor.
    I left Marian in the cabin, curled around herself, clutching a fistful of toilet paper. She looked like a stuffed puppet, something I could fit inside a cereal bowl. Her face was white, charged with cold sweat. It was true that she was going to be old — there was little I could do.
    I was alone on the sun deck. The sound the brackish pool water made as it lapped gently against the porcelain ledge merely