GORDON NOW
At first it’s like I’m lodged in an artery, a tacky clot—and then, months later, a miniature corpse inside another, whopping corpse. It builds up like plaque.
Every day Gordon is somewhere: Crawling back into the water heater cabinet when I flick on the hall light. Or lying really still beneath the snowdrifts along the driveway when I go out to start the car—in the mornings, when the light ain’t arrived yet. He finds it funny, I’m sure. He was always creeping and shit. Now this.
They come and drag me out, into the cold, to party all night. It’s like a second funeral. “We have to do it,” they say. “For Gordon.” The fucking van kids. It’s an excuse to use drugs. Everything is.
From the stage to the barn doors there is dancing, and the smell of animals and animal waste. The barn looks like it’s been cleaned, but somehow the smell stays. A bubble machine, tied to a rafter, is working overtime, and I’m grinding, half-assed, against this Persian chick I know from Steelville.
Resentfully, but gracefully, I do a back flip—straight up and then down. I almost land in the spot where I jumped. The Persian chick gets sucked into the crowd like she’s a weak drink. Everyone has gone; they’ve cleared a space for me. The subwoofers are covered in forties; I wanna down them all. When the spotlights rise, I see the liquid shudder inside the bottles. The synthesizers are squealing and the sound lights up the stables—all red and smoldering. “Holy shit,” someone says, and then I’m pressed again between so many fucking people, standing on my toes to see what it is. I take someone’s Olde English from the speaker; a tablet has settled at the bottom—swirled and totally disseminated. I can see the last of it. The “Holy shit” was about me, I realize—someone going on about the flip. Go figure. I just tip the bottle and gulp, taking even the warm froth. The strobe lights go quick and a giant bubble descends like a crystal planet—impaled on a glow stick.
Outside the snow is blasting across a harvested field; I watch it through a tiny window. In the glass, too, above the rows, the mirror ball revolves. Finally, I break a sweat.
They found Gordon, two days ago—some bones and teeth—every piece carpeted with lichen. The body was not a body at all. What was it? A joke? A handful of muddy stones?
Or something. Go figure—he was always saying that shit. Like he expected bad things to happen. And usually they did.
Girls bounce by—tits, big asses—their slick ponytails pivoting behind them like the tails of well-groomed ponies. What else? The Marishi sisters pop and lock on a speaker box wrapped in blue Christmas lights. Their expressions match—bitchy—and their limbs glitch in unison. Some punk in an arm cast fakes a sweep drop near the kegs. The people here are totally gone; only their bodies are left, shifting and sweating like professional athletes.
I do my best air flare near the fog machine, then freestyle. The girlie boys huddle around me like fucking pets. Like they want this shit.
“You don’t come to the Shoe Factory anymore,” they say, bumping hips. “…The kid on the Wavetable tonight is serious, too bad it’s a Yamaha. …That’s fucked up about Gordon.”
Man.
They’re rags, downers, always.
That they would say his name now, it seeps like poison from my forehead. “My buddy swears it’s not Gordon,” the one in geeky red glasses announces, like he knows it all. “He says it’s some hippie that drove his car into the strip pit five years ago.”
Fuck you.
I just stare at their made up faces, balancing the empty beer bottle on my fingertips before I fling it, stunningly, really, into a garbage can maybe two yards away. I squint at them. The coils of the portable heaters glow like little burning fences, corralling everyone.
Someone says, “My brother has a Yamaha...sounds like someone threw a microphone at a feral cat.” Their laughter is thin and sharp as a pocket knife.
I should leave. I should catch a ride back to town, head into the snow and wait for this shit to kick in. Tonight the world is an icy eyehole. I want to crawl inside it. I want to burrow in it. But, I see Gordon here too. Damn, and now he’s climbing onto the speaker box with the Marishi sisters. Gordon wedges himself between them. Or creases? Or has grown there, all of a sudden, in that infinitesimal fucking space between their bodies. It’s like Gordon owns them; he’s grinning a big ol’ clown grin, because he knows how much girls love to get owned; he gives them both a leg so they can ride him—mount him like two toddlers mounting a big ol’ clown toy. The Marishis are trying to climb Gordon—he’s a sandbar and they are, like, drowning. Or something.
All three of them flicker like a robot before the strobe—a single-choking-engine-on-the-verge of—breaking the fuck down—turning more and more sinister between the segments of light.
Over the throb of the bass beat, one of the girlie boys, the one with the rhinestones glued to his face, yells, “Who’s your ride? You drive out here?”
Shut up.
Bitch.
“I came in a van, but the van kids are doing horse in the stables,” I say.
Again, all of the girlie boys laugh. “Love it!” they say.
They make a sick sound—disgusting, desperate as dogs.
The music has changed. The lasers scan the barn like they’re searching for a clue. I’m scanning too. No way I’m riding with them.
What is Gordon now? A memory? My step uncle? My grandmother’s boyfriend’s nephew? A hand down the front of my fucking jogging pants in the bedroom of an abandoned house last summer?
“I see them,” I say. In a corner stable, with hay stuck to their faces and arms, the van kids are fucking; it looks as if everyone, somehow, is holding hands with everyone else.
Was it August yet? In that abandoned farm house in Pope County. A man becomes a skeleton in this way, gets divided into mismatched parts. He’s all wrapped up in the world, and then ripped from it. His skin slips, or else it is torn off his bones by the jutting undercarriage of an automobile. He gets done in—a long blade in the heart of his own awful life.
Someone has flung open the top half of the barn door. In spirals, in giant breaths, in wide sparkly crests the snow comes, stinging, and suddenly all the people are turning toward it and yelling and covering their eyes and dancing. Now it’s like the DJ is playing for the mother fucking snow, toggling his synthesizer as the gusts fold into the barn. I’m chilled, instantly—a dead fucking filament.
“I’ll be outside,” I yell to the van kids, who are far off, still fucking, not even listening.
Outside people are gathering, walking like pioneers in the drifts, passing through the electrified snowflakes in their headlights. Is it midnight? Is it morning? There’s someone I know—Gordon, again?—dressed like a girl, closing a car door, a feather boa surging between his throat and the wind. Hello, hello. Gordon is doddering forward like a bitch. And his hands are full of something. Glass bottles? Bottles with something living, something dusty and fleshy crammed inside?
Finally I find the van and hide behind it while I make myself vomit.
It was right before he disappeared, I punched Gordon, all awkward, in the neck. I’d aimed for his mouth, but missed. “What the hell?” Gordon said to me. “Don’t be such a girl. Stand the fuck still.” It was sweltering. The sweat stung my scratched mosquito bites. Gordon moved his hand around inside my jogging pants until something happened. What? Nothing. Total anarchy. Like my body obeyed out of fear. Or something. Not a real response. More like a fever dream. My body just synthesized the panic and the pressure. It was not sexy—that’s the last thing. Not satisfaction from his greasy, hot hand tugging at me, trying to draw something out, draw it out and use it to flood the fucking room around us. What else? Like he was trying to drown in it? Like I deserve to be left with this, the audacity of a fucking haunting. I get closer to the trees, with the parked cars at my back, and cup some good clean snow, just pack my mouth full and let it melt. I’ve been thirsty. There’s nothing like it. First I was just the sticky clot. That was right after. And mostly during sleep. Now, I don’t know. My one reasonable desire: Thirsty. I’d break dance all night if I thought I could sweat it out. But then, like, out of nowhere—damn, he’s so fast. He’s off in the trees somewhere. He’s running. What is that shit? A giant fucking buck? A ten pointer? Its antlers all dripping with velvet. “Gordon, dude,” I yell to him. “What do you think? I’m going to follow you or something?” Hell no.
He’s a bitch. Bitches love it when you run after them. No way.
I pull my hood up. Hot and cold. Freezing. Burning. What are they? Opposite thresholds. Gordon’s like way back in there. He’s bending down to get some snow too. His tongue goes into it. What the fuck is he doing? He’s like drilling into the snow with his tongue. He’s making a hole. He’s making a place to bury something. A pocket knife. A life. Some boring secret. Go figure. Is it a command, you think? Like go and figure this out and then come back? I just stand there and watch and try to make out what he’s doing with the snow. It’s bad. It’s really bad. Finally, it gets so loud, the deafening burrowing, and I just go.