Bob Above by Thea Zimmer
In the default room, my secondary hope(lessness) is to make them want to die for the existence they’ve allowed me, a living death rather than something sacred and brilliant. There’s a razorblade hidden inside a box of Sominex, just in case, and a bottle of gin I hide under the big wide bed of adolescent sprawl. I must be young. I could be thirteen or thirty. It could be spring, long past or ever present. My body a blob, the sheets holding me loosely, smudged with sweat from family-slashed dreams and salty snacks (train-wrecks, morgues, Cheetos). My mother says all this lying in bed is without purpose; I’d say it is without time. Bless-Ed, without restraint. Filling only with you, Bob. You come to me (and come inside, haha). Knock knock! She stands in the doorway in her mom jeans, suggesting in her jaunty manner I eat buttery bread and oozy cheesy pasta, the thought of which, in my ravaged state, makes me want to devour, to annihilate fat and meat, yet I know the edibles, like words sent in love letters, will likely revolt, RETURN TO SENDER, make me run to the john in the en-suite bath with the yellow wallpaper, the words refusing to be flushed. Your face resurfacing. As if life were merely eternal waiting, deathly jabbing! Letter upon letter. Hang-nails mangled, scar upon scar. More days without you than with. Only you can save. You’re lanky too. Your dirty-blond hair cuts across your face, your eyes skirting away, as if ashamed of your own good looks, like a man in a photo, a man I can barely remember, emitting low rumbly laughs, body-warmth, sinuous, on an old twin-bed, a shabby sublet, in the room… cryptic Judge Judy, lullabies of Oprah, Dr. Phil…. the mumble of news, a forever drone…. your voice drifting beyond the murmurs, the TV echoes, its sound-shield of devastations…
Layered in webs we feel but do not see, gathered in old-timey corners, shadows among many, darkness cultivated in daily dive-bars, your face cigarette-lit from where you lounge, glamorously idle, your scruffy blankness, a jolt to my groin—it seems—in stealth or shame, pulling me along in avoidance of the swarthy bartender (with whom you live for free until you find a job that suits). He feeds (on) your low-glow, your dirty blondness, in his fantasies; you sit two stools down from James Dean, Kurt Cobain. It’s not until my endless waiting bores (into) you that you swivel-around. I meet your eyes, their metallic-grey containment! I sidle up, your dick poking me through your pants. I take you home. Your blunt cries remain. “Get up. It’s almost night.” Moving through me, my nether-parts tangled in afterthought, anticipation, infused with pity-lust, it’s all the same. No clocks. They make me nervous. There’s a big closet with feminine clothes left hanging, waiting, their assault of bright colors. Rarely, I slip out to a nearby store. A few supplies, for destruction of self and others.
“For God’s sake,” my mother says, “get out of bed.” Later, she’s merry, going out with Earl, murmuring sweet to him, which the poor man soaks right up, there in the doorway of the room. His hair’s pure-white. Once frightened? My mother has told me: his wife is horrid. My mother’s hair must be a joke, the crew-cut she gave herself long ago in such a drama, frozen in the ‘80s, the hairstyles suggesting female independence, the need for a man perhaps more reprehensible than in the 70s, the 90s, now.
“Have you washed the sheets lately?” Like she doesn’t know this bed’s been here forever, its pillows damp, splotched with love.
Sometimes, Bob, you’re a Botticelli boy, and we’re thrilled to make love under mother’s nose. In this very bed made for waiting. All perspective swooshes and warps, the parting of seas, the timelessness of grandeur, closer, closer, you come, your eyes in their light-blue sweetness. Your lips are perfect cushions upon which to float. There’s a tiny scar on your sculpted chin. Your Armani jacket laid aside, you chuckle about your youth and inexperience, your inbred wealth, the Florentine dynasty from whence you came. We lie in bed, disheveled, ecstatic. You lean over, your blond hair catching the light. It halos you as you weep above. You disappear.
“Honey, get up. It’s almost night.”
“Shut the door, please, mother.” I carry on by whatever means, Sominex, Benadryl, Nyquil, gin, pilfered Valium, whichever works.
The TV voices, lull to darkness, Mom and Earl going on with happy, banal chatter just beyond the door, mother’s murmurs, Earl’s baritone acknowledgments, coalescing in some great purpose, your accent cutting through, both aristocratic and streetwise, your words Yankee-clipped, the tone offhand; you barely ask to walk me home. I’m convinced, Bob, of your Puritan roots. You’re a fire-and-brimstone preacher, a cape flowing off your able shoulders, your face nobly perturbed, its flatness subtly (deliciously) reproaching. It’s dramatic, Mom would say—
if I told her—my love all mixed up together with disgust. Let me tell you.
“He's a jerk,” my mother has said, making her little signal, ever since I can remember, for “dick”: two fingers sticking out in an apex from her crotch. My sisters, a little older than I, they remember better, our mother in bed for days, weeks on end, after you “ran off with that bitch.” She winks at me. She’s devoted and happy with her Earl, no longer lamenting a man who left her moaning his loss, a man who’d also left my sisters, who’d grabbed at what they could, little girls disbelieving who I can still hear crying in the far reaches of the house. You wrote a letter that said you’re NEVER coming back.
Would you like me to wait?
Thea Zimmer’s stories appear in Fringe (Emerson), Hobart, r.kv.r.y quarterly, Mannequin Haus, New Dead Families, Unlikely Stories of the Third Kind, Weirdyear, Infective Ink, Infinity’s Kitchen, Hackwriters, and Dial Magazine (The New School). She’s working on a short-story collection. She’s also the librettist for a dystopic multimedia opera and the scriptwriter for a virtual-reality experience promoting peaceful coexistence. https://theazimmer.wordpress.com