Catastrophe Jones

It was bitterness and heat, it was tears and fire, it was blue eyes and gunsmoke, black gloves and confusion and rage.

I’ve had a hundred thousand dreams before this one, remembered and journaled them and there’s this archetype that shows up, not an anti hero, not a beleaguered hero not the protagonist not even necessarily a main character except that I can’t help but reach out and make him the focus. He laughs like rasping, surls like nobody’s business and if I ever dared to call him mine he’d walk away faster than I could blink and beg to apologize.

Don’t be sorry, just don’t do it again.

Is it a flaw in me that I want to be fictional? I want to exist forever in print and pages, more than just my words but the heart of me that some other person has understood well enough to give a name, even if it’s not mine.

I want to be read in lines and panels, and I want my four-color self to be as real and existing as the grey day outside my boring windows.

I want you to make love to me on glossy pages, laugh when I light a cigarette in the middle of tension and cry your fucking eyes out when they find me, on page twenty-two, with a hole in my head and the last of my sensibilities lost to the hardwood floor.

I want more than this. I am more than this.

It’s never enough.

God, just give me the scotch, would you?

I’m only real when I’m drowning.

Over and done with, the Thanksgiving meal was oddly pleasant and had left him with that triptophan-induced lethargy that not even a fifth of Chivas could quite give. He helped with the dishes and cleanup, and then had retreated to the bathroom to take a shower. A long, hot, slow shower, where he carefully shaved, rinsed off dust and grime and smoke and sweat and managed to feel something like clean.

Not once did he meet his own eyes in the mirror.

Polished shoes, a neatly pressed shirt. Thin black tie. Black jacket.

While he was readying himself for the beginning and end of his last assignment, all he could think of were the photos carefully wrapped in the pocket of his overcoat.

A beautiful woman and two smiling boys, blowing bubbles in a backyard. Three pairs of dirty footprints on a set of crisp white sheets. Two hands linked together, shining rings upon the third finger.

They smelled like smoke, as had his hands, now clean, and no longer shaking.

He wondered if she would want them back.

There were no new faces; all the names and dreams he’d remembered from countless other hells were melted back into a single face. A single face that knew him, above all others, in ways he would not admit.

Something in him lay more dead than he could comprehend — all other deaths before, every single time he knew his heart to be stone proved wrong; this was the worst it had been, the worst it could be.

And yet he knew there was more to come.

It would be weeks before he found the note and months after that until he realized the bottle would not kill him, no matter how hard he tried.

It wasn’t that they’d parted on bad terms. That morning was like any other. It wasn’t that he never got a chance to tell her what he felt. She had always known. It wasn’t a matter of unfinished business in the case of his job or their strange relationship. They both knew what could happen, and lived their lives the way they chose.

It was that he’d wake up screaming, the taste of blood in the back of his throat, the scent of her cigarettes, the stupid fucking fuzzy dice she hung from the mirror because he hated them, and every single tattoo he admired and the way she was the first one, after Marie walked away — she was the first one he loved.

There wasn’t enough blame in the world for him to lay beneath.

“I’m here to help you,” he said quietly, and brushed black curls back from pale cheeks and bright eyes. There was something infinitely sad about the face that watched, the face that compelled, the face that hoped. Few could meet his gaze and not want to tell, to confess, to beg forgiveness.

His mother had always hoped he’d become a priest, announcing salvation with a nod, a touch, a whisper.

Rosary beads and crucifixes, mercy and prayer.

Alleyways were his confessionals; icy rainwater sacred and the feel of his teeth a holy pilgrim’s kiss.

He gave absolution of a different kind.

The searing sound of a whisper, hissed and sibilant, and then a red
line across the skin, like the lick of a whip.

Bullets passing too close can kiss.

This, he knew.

The crack of a gunshot sound, echoing like pulseless thunder, and then
the heart, startled into cessation, and the pain of it starting again.

Fear passing too close can wound.

This, he knew.

The electric fury of an argument, tension rising and crackling like
some barely subdued storm, and then lightning flashing, snarling and
tearing through the sky between almost lovers.

Anger passing too close can blaze.

This, he knew.

Silence and echoes, wondering and dreams, and then the maddening hope
that reaches through the flesh of a man and destroys the heart that
beats within.

Love passing too close can kill.

This… oh, God, this… he knew.