Eyes

I didn't know how long I'd been looking into her eyes, then...in my apartment, with her in the middle of the living room and me in what passed for a formal dining room, I guess. I shook my head (it felt like I had been shaking it for a while, like windshield wipers for early morning fog), and it seemed as though she had just said something, or was waiting for me to say something, which is mostly the same thing, right?

They were black, and flat, her eyes, and her voice too when I guess she got tired of waiting for me to talk. "Why are you so obsessed with pictures?" she said, and I looked down at my digital camera then, pointed it at her and pressed the button again. "You won't find anything that you couldn't find right here, right now, that you couldn't remember yourself if you could just keep yourself here in the moment, you know..."

The eyes were the same flat black, but the voice was now coming from an impossibly low register, and I felt it wind its way up the long bones of my legs and into my stomach, my back...I was hearing Morse code now, reading her lips and interpreting seismographic scribblings instead of listening. It was easier, more intuitive...more intimate.

She didn't step forward but somehow she was in front of me now with her hand around the back of my neck, sending short electric shocks down to amplify the dying echoes of her voice below. I still couldn't put a word together as she pulled my head forward and burned the side of my face with her hair; I still can't remember whether I was even afraid.

-------

"So...you moving or something? Documenting stuff for your landlord?"

Nathan was sitting on the couch, paging through the shots on my camera again without asking, of course. There was football on the TV--college, I think--maybe USC or something like that.

"All these empty shots of the living room?" he continued, in the face of my blank silence. "Aren't you supposed to do that before you move in, though? Like on rental cars?"

"No...that's the girl I was telling you about, you know, that I've been going out with? That I met at the show?"

"What, that girl Veronica?"

"No, man, that was forever ago...I met this girl at the...well...shit, I can't remember who was playing, but it was down at Antone's, Thursday night?"

"Dude, that was two nights ago! You're not 'going out' with her...so she came back to your place that night?"

"It couldn't have...I mean...yeah, she...but it's been longer than...I mean, you met her the other day, right?"

"I haven't seen you since the other night, and you didn't answer any texts yesterday, either. Damn, what'd you do, skip work to stay here with her? No wonder you're still so out of it!"

"No, she...well, she left sometime, I can't remember really. No, here, let me show you this one picture; you can see her eyes really clear, you'll remember her then."

But the pictures were just of the living room, like he said...no girl, no eyes, just weird distortions of the flash in some of the pictures that almost made it look like there was someone's shadow across the floor. I guess it was hard to see on the small LCD screen, but when we uploaded them to my computer it was the same thing...zoom in to 800 percent and you still got nothing but pixellated emptiness.

He wouldn't let it go, kept asking me what she looked like, what she was like. All I had to give him were the eyes, and the voice, and the way she had of asking questions that made you feel like she had just finished putting the answers inside you a few minutes ago, just to peel them back out. Because I wasn't obsessed with taking pictures of her, and I don't have trouble being 'in the moment' or whatever, but when she was asking...well, it was all different then.

-------

"Mom?"

My mother had an annoying habit of immediately starting an elaborate story about someone from the neighborhood that I only vaguely remembered as soon as she got me on the phone, and I couldn't take it this time, I really couldn't. I had felt my way out of the dark bedroom to the bar, somehow knowing that I couldn't turn on any lights, somehow remembering (for once) exactly where I had left my cell phone. I noticed then that she wasn't telling a story (she wasn't saying anything, actually), and then I saw on the microwave that it was 4 in the morning, and I was lost for a few moments trying to work out if she was an hour ahead or an hour behind--as if it would matter--and then I was spilling out the recurring dreams of the girl and Nathan and her eyes and him sitting on the couch and his endless questions and always returning to the blood, always so much blood so everywhere...

I felt my dry tongue stick to my lips, felt my parched throat working to make the sounds, and I realized that I had been whispering into the phone for hours, it had to have been hours. I took the phone from my ear and saw the dead blank screen, then the battery somehow over on the coffee table now, and her standing behind the couch as I guess I'd always known she had been, twirling Nathan's hair around her finger carelessly as she watched me again, waiting for her chance to speak.

"You didn't have to kill him, you know...there are other ways for these things to turn out. You're letting your imagination run away with you; you think you're something now that you are not yet, you feel the beginnings of hunger and you imagine that you're starving to death. You're too much inside your own head, even now, even faced with such an enormous reality as this...I think that you will overcome it with time, but for now, come to bed, it's time to sleep." Her words not a request, but not needing to be a command, her eyes showing the slightest spark of life as she took her hand from Nathan's hair and sucked half-congealed blood from her fingers.

-------

It was 1:30 before I woke up, shivering though the blankets were piled high on the bed. She lay as dead next to me, every inch of her covered by the blankets, limbs splayed out at the unnatural angles of dinosaur fossils, of the victims in mall shootings. It was hard to move now, for me...somehow there was too much light to think clearly, but I didn't have to think so clearly anymore, not for very long anyway.

I found my camping gear at the back of the closet, jumbled together in the chaos of the careless unpacking of an exhausted weekend. The silver canister of white kerosene for the cookstove sounded about half full as I shook it, but as I poured it over the bed and the girl with the eyes and Nathan pushed onto the bed beside her it seemed more like a gallon than perhaps a quart, spilling endlessly and filling the room in an instant with the smell of disaster. I had been afraid that all the activity would rouse her, but the juxtaposition with Nathan's body actually made her look more dead, somehow, not less...now that rigor mortis had passed he looked strangely peaceful under the dried blood, while her open eyes clearly spoke of an eternity of unrest, of perpetual yearning. She was right to live in every moment, I guess; it was the only option she had anyway, in the endless moments, an everlasting supply, somehow stringing together into much, much less than a life.

It took about a minute for the bed to be completely engulfed once I set it ablaze, and as I walked to the windows to open the blinds I wasn't sure if the flames were burning hotter and faster as they reached her or not...I dunno, maybe it was just my imagination again. I heard the screaming start, though...maybe it was me, maybe it was her from the fire and the sunlight in her eyes and the sudden realization of her fatal mistake; maybe it was the fire alarm. All I knew was the fire and the freedom that it promised, now, and maybe a cleansing too, and so I did the only thing that was left to me to do--I lay back down beside her, just to see if I could look one last time into her eyes, those eyes in all of that flame.