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birdmad
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Alex sat with a cigarette in one hand and the box cutter in the other. It was an eerily familiar position, one he had been in in different times and places and with different cutting tools, but an altogether familiar position.
The CD player and the swamp_cooler were the dominant sounds in the house, the cooler becoming something of a futility as the humidity rose.
The lights were low and every few minutes or so, sitting there smoking, Alex would lazily scratch another mark in his left arm, which was now red with scratch marks, some of which were bleeding from where the tip of the blade had broken skin.
It was an anniversary of sorts, a few years ago tonight he met Amber for the first time, not knowing that she would become the most enduring symbol of why he was afraid ever to let anyone get too close again.
That, of course, was what he liked to tell himself, but the fact was that he could be charmed into letting his guard down, and as soon as he did, he would land in the same spot, like Charlie Brown running to kick the football, knowing full well that Lucy will pull it away as soon as he's committed his momentum and leave him crashing down on his back.
The bottle of vodka in the fridge was starting to cultivate a very potent appeal as the Cure's "If only tonight we could sleep" played, taking his mind even further back to that debauched night when Zoe and Michelle had tied him to the chair, able to do nothing but watch and ache.
He knew there was a certain amount of metaphor in the memory anymore. Zoe and Michelle were long since gone, but in a few less literal ways, he was still tied to the chair, the frustrated observer.
Only difference now was that there was no anticipation to sweeten the frustration and lend some voyeuristic thrill. It was something else now and the pictures being painted for him were coloured in subtle and not so subtle shades of mockery.
Steeped in the books he read, he fell back into thinking about the myth of Tantalus and his punishment in the underworld. Food and drink always within sight, but always just out of reach.
Suddenly he found himself genuinely missing some of the stranger nights with his old partners in crime. It was interesting to discover that he, Henry Ash, and a couple of the Jimmys were literature freaks and in some of their less pernicious, criminal moments styled themselves as something of a clique of rogue poets.
Truth be told, they were all just a product of poor impulse control grouped with a numbed moral sense, an appetite for cheap thrills and a predilection for criminal enterprise.
And it was fucking beautiful most of the time.
This night, however, found him wishing that on one of those less beautiful nights, Henry and Billy had made sure he was going to stay asleep before tucking him into that hole in the ground.
Alex's spirits lifted for just a moment when he thought about his friend at the office. Tonya, a complete and hopeless flirt and gorgeous as well. He didn't know why, but she was paying him an awful lot of attention lately. He had always been struck by her beauty but avoided letting himself get too mesmerised by her because while he was creeping just past his twenty-eight birthday, she was just a couple of weeks away from her twentieth.
He felt anxious and creepy at the thought of being attracted to someone who was still a child when he had shattered and swept away the last pieces of his own childhood.
The fact of his growing interest in her was not just the obviousness of her appeal, but sort of a situation that occurred by default. Though he had known Tonya since he started working in the office, as they were hired the same week, he had been more interested in Rosie, the slightly goofy, but also terribly cute lady who had been hired to fill his old position when he got promoted from the clerk's position to being one of the mid-level staff assistants.
Rosie seemed like a safer bet, but she was married and had a kid, and as the office discovered, her husband was a few bricks short of a load, showing up at the office and raising a couple of scary scenes.
When one of those scary scenes had resulted in a scared and shaken Rosie coming back to work in tears, Alex felt quite prepared to take the same kind of action he had taken against Billy in the heat of the moment, but in this case, he was willing to make an exception and plan the kinds of grievous bodily harm he would like to cause James if he did anything worse than use harsh language against her again.
Needless to say, once things settled down on that front, he was surprised over lunch with Rosie one afternoon to hear her say that Tonya had been talking about him in what sounded like at least a marginally interested manner.
Well, Alex thought to himself, that's unexpected. She was seeing someone, and he had gotten the impression from some of the things she said that she wasn't too sure if getting involved with someone who wasn't Diné wouldn't be a source of friction with her family.
They tapdanced around each other's defenses on the subject of relationships whenever they went out to lunch, and again he was surprised about how direct some of her questions were, and it left him afraid to answer because he was afraid if she knew about all of the insane shit he had been party to and privy to, she might not be so keen on wanting to know anymore about him.
Of course it was too late now, she was rapidly becoming the flame to his moth and he knew that sooner or later, for one reason or other he should just back off.
But that sort of thing is easier to say than do, and we all know that, don't we?
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030712
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