ochre & umber

Lord: it is time. The summer has been immense.
- Rilke


Exhaustion: a seep, a leak, a hiss, a sigh. Above, the fullness of the moon, pendulous in the sky, like a fat white berry about to drop from its invisible branch. You lick your lips self-consciously, flashing the barest sickle of tooth in a grin. You roll over onto your left side and study me in the dark. I have always looked better in the dark. Your eyes flash like garnets in a mine. Their glimmer is furtive, nimble, darting.

It is not yet cold, not thoroughly. Summer’s lungs still pump, though fall’s breath is coiling in her mouth. This is my favorite time of year, and you say it is yours, as well, though sometimes I am afraid that you lie just to make me smile. I don’t mind the lies, but I mistrust how you make my mouth behave. You’re murmuring something about the cats. I’m not really listening, and feel that brief twinge of guilt as I scramble to catch hold of the conversational thread. It’s another one of your banalities, catalogued as something meaningful in that teeming card catalogue within your skull. I’ve grown used to the little twist of introspection in your tone after we’ve had sex, how you look at me and then away, even as you’re talking about the grocery list, the pile of debris in the kitchen yet to be swept, or what needs to be done to the apartment in order to defend it from winter.

The lightest skirl of wind, dainty and mischievous, makes a whorl over your exposed shoulder and you immediately horripilate, shivering violently and yanking up your shirt as if to disengage from some invisible assailant. This will be the last time this season that we meet like this. For the next few weeks, it will be long walks, barely touching, coats knitted up to our throats and hats jammed on our heads. You dislike the cold and I say I dislike it too, though secretly one of my favorite things in the world is to come out of the cold and take my jacket off. Secretly, the cold makes more sense to me. I know what to wear in the winter. You make fun of me because I don’t wear shorts in the summer, and I’ve confessed once that I don’t understand why even though, in truth, I know.

We will get up from this place and rejoin the world. It still surprises me how much you like to be outside, when you seem at your most comfortable curled up on the couch in an afghan, buried in a book. You just finished a book on colour theory and are contemplating taking up painting. I encourage it. I think sometimes that I fall in love with images of you that I film in my head. I’ve seen you do things inside of my head that you’ve yet to do. I’ve always wanted to make a movie, but you hate to act and say you can’t. I have fifteen or so unfinished scripts with you as the main character. They gather dust and spiders in one of my desk drawers.

In fact, this whole thing could be one of my dreams. This whole thing with you and I could be nothing, could be nothing more than another scene in the movie I’m writing and will never film. I hear the soundtrack to it in my dreams at night. This morning I woke up with “Golden Brown” stuck in my head, and when I looked over at you, the images came rushing back … a subway, rocking and tilting, rocketing through the tunnels of some city. Probably Boston. The lights go on and off, intermittent and epileptic, spasming. You hold on to one of the bars with a white-knuckle deathgrip, but none of the fear in your hands registers in your eyes. You are determined to survive, though there is no immediate threat. That song on the loudspeaker, dim and crackling, though unmistakeable.

We will get up from this place and rejoin the world, secrets of summer buried deep within our bodies like seeds. We keep them dormant and savor them through the whole of winter.

You’ll go away, off to another city, and I will wander the autumn roads after you depart, kicking desultorily at the sodden leaves. It rains the entire week before you go, denuding the trees of their foliage. You call the wind Delilah and I confess I do need a haircut. You’ll laugh, but it’s nothing like your June laugh. This is your October sound, and it’s full but dry. I can taste the anger in it, that dull, thudding sound like a sluggish heartbeat. It’s tinged with wistfulness. I am used to the twist in your tone. As we draw nearer to your leavetaking, you become slightly distant. You look at me less. You are preparing.

I wake up one morning near Halloween and roll over to touch the space in the bed you used to occupy, now vacant. I am like a tongue aimlessly exploring the abscess left by an extracted tooth. You’ll come back – you always do – but I am always here. I’ll get up from the bed and pad to the desk, pull out the unfinished script, and stare out the window while the cats butt their heads against my calves and purr insistently, as if to tempt me with the spectre of their future pleasure. I want no part of them, and swat them away with an outstretched palm – they just push their small skulls into my hand and burr their pullulations even louder. They are both of ours, though they’ve always belonged to you.

There’s a heaviness in the air, though there is a distinct fragility, too, like eggs in a nest of swaddling cloth. I am sometimes afraid to walk outside without your hand in mine, and the eyes of strangers seem to know and understand that I am one-half of who I should be. Winter is a fractious mathematician – it leaves us all one-half of who we should be. Our steps become slower, more cautious, down city sidewalks. It takes twice as long to get anywhere. Lights come on earlier and leak out of the sides of blinded windows. I take to drinking, first just beers at home, six-packs of cheap lager. I sit in front of the television with a glass bowl in one hand and the can of beer sweating on the coffee table. I think of nothing and everything at the same time.

I’ve called you a couple of times now. You sound so distant, as though I’m calling the afterlife, and your spirit is annoyed at having been invoked. I make hesitant, tentative conversation about the city and our friends, and how, the other day, flakes of snow tumbled from the sky’s cotton-stuffed mouth. I make a bad joke and you laugh, but it’s polite and gray, like a deserted spiderweb. I am afraid you’ve found some robust someone in your city and you spend your cold nights with them, curled up on their couch, reading. I make a brief, coy allusion to our last night together and the silence is impassive, like a tomb’s door. I won’t give up hope – I know you will come back for a break, and then for the summer in the spring. This is how it has always been and how it will always be. I turn the conversation to you and you are evasive, vague, banal. In the long silence before I end the call, I suddenly find myself hating you. I remember the catlike flash of your eyes, your drunken pinwheels. It’s easy in these depths to freeze. I remember to breathe, and apologize for the call. You are quick to remind me that there’s no reason to be sorry, though I do it again, anyway. I don’t say “I love you” when I hang up, and you don’t either. You tell me to say hello to the city for you, and I will. I see myself standing at the Top of the World, up on the hill, arms outstretched, bellowing my salutation on your behalf.

I go the wrong way down one-way streets on purpose in my old Volvo, late nights, when I can’t sleep. I roll all the windows down and smoke American Spirits because I know you hate it when I do. I find myself wondering if I miss you at all, or if it’s only that I miss how I look when you look at me. I figure it’s probably the latter, though the former makes more sense to my viscera -- which, as of late, behaves like a contortionist at every memory. Perhaps you are why I have come to dislike summer.

I have become unmoored from time in a way that I find pleasing. I drift ceaselessly, become unconcerned with appointments, dates, times. Work is the only thing which provides structure, though I hate what I do and have never been able to find something that I enjoy. This year, you have taken more of yourself with you when you left than you ever have before.

It’s one night in the bar over an Irish coffee when I decide maybe it’d be a good idea to come visit you in your city. My limbs are jittering because I have a sensitivity to caffeine, though I could also chalk it up to anxiety. I go outside and lean heavily against the side of the building. A friend of mine is here. I admit that once I liked him like I like you, though not with the same heat. He’s always been cold to the touch, and you – you’re liquid fire, you’re pyroclastic, even when your voice is chilly. He has a new scar on the side of his face, under the trapper hat whose ear-flaps slap his cheeks in the wind. That night, I catch him in the men’s room, leaning with both palms on the porcelain sink, staring at his reflection and gritting his teeth like an athlete about to take on a rival. He pretends its nothing, says he was just fooling around. I don’t believe him, but we’re not as close as we used to be. Before, I would’ve put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed with all of my fingers, but now I just nod from the doorway and slip out sideways. I think he might be a little jealous of you.

I have decided to come visit you in your city. I swallow the last of my Irish coffee and it plummets into my stomach like an unexploded depth charge. I am bottomless, I am fearless, I am confident. It is the distance between us which is my rival, and I will defeat it with my stride. My friend is waiting outside when I leave, throwing my scarf around my neck like a hero in a movie. The sky has emptied of clouds and now is bare, bristling black all the way up to the cosmos. The wind is still and my boots crunch on the packed snow. He wants to talk about something, he says, and he refuses to look away from my eyes. His are shockingly blue, like the guts of a flame. He’s letting his beard grow out. He’s shorter than me, though wider in the shoulders. Tonight he’s in a flannel jacket, buttoned right up to his Adam’s apple, and the top button bobs when he swallows. He doesn’t own any scarves or gloves. He says he hates them, but I think it’s pride.

When I see him outside the bar, he’s smoking again. The last time I saw him, he hadn’t had a cigarette in over six months. I’d like to ask him what made him start again, but the look in his eyes makes me reconsider. He asks me where I’m going and I say home, he asks if he can walk with me. I don’t mind, though I’m wary. He seems invisibly crippled.

The walk isn’t a long one. My friend has a manner of speech that I’ve always found myself endeared to, halting and somewhat vague. It’s nothing like your cadence, which is maybe why I like it so much. He’s circuitous, coloring in the scene around the thing he needs to talk about before actually attacking it, like a dog mistrustful of his bed. He is much more direct with eyes than you’ll ever be. I’m not sure I like it. The whole time he is talking I am half-listening. I am preoccupied with the thud of my heart and the images of you from my dreams, on the subway in your city. Placing myself there next to you – we’re not even touching, we just stand and let the motion of the train rock us back and forth while the song plays. I find myself even in dream behind you, staring at your dark hair loose over your pea-coat. How your shoulders tense almost invisibly beneath it when the subway bangs around a corner and rattles through the tunnels like a teeth in an jaw gone slack.

He’s telling me about her, his you. He’s angry, but sad, and suddenly I imagine we’re oil and water – he’s the oil, and on fire – and I am refusing to help extinguish him. All at once, I put you out of my mind and stop walking. He stops too, a step or two away, and looks back at me. He is at once apologetic, and I tell him not to be. I look at him and tell him that things are going to be all right. I notice the scars again, and it’s obvious now that they’re from fingernails. When I ask, he says nothing, then curtly turns on a heel and mutters something about having deserved them. I walk alongside him for awhile in silence, our depths mirroring the bible-black empty of the sky over our heads.

We arrive at the back door of my apartment and I, as always, am immediately putting the key in the lock to turn it and allow ingress when his hand – cold, red-fleshed and white-knuckled – comes down to rest on mine. His eyes are the same color they’ve always been, though the blue of them has now frozen over and seems nearly Arctic. He confesses that he has something to confess and I take my hand from the doorknob to withdraw a cigarette from my pack. I notice that I have somehow unconsciously become distant, and I hope it doesn’t show in my outward demeanour. I offer him a smoke and he accepts both it and the flame from my lighter. I urge him to continue silently, but he takes a long, shuddering drag before he does.

He confesses that he hates himself and that he has for a long time. This is not surprising to me. Unbidden, my thoughts return to you. Perhaps it’s something about the crunch and hunch of his shoulders over the cigarette, or the way he won’t stop shivering. I feel a gentle derision for him sweep over me, like the loving loathing of an older brother or parent. In another time, I would have slapped him until he stiffened his spine and narrowed his eyes. I find myself hating myself for being unsure how to proceed. I listen. He is again stalking around the edges of the conversation. This is how he prepares himself. He is telling me how much he loved her, his you, but that things one day just grew wrong, went askew, like a tree being forced to split itself in two to grow around a boulder. He is in the middle of luridly describing the night they fell apart when I stop him and put my hand on his shoulder. My breath is moist, hot, and turns instantly to vapour when it encounters the air outside of my mouth. I suppose it’s my way of slapping him in the face. I do it as gently as possible; I ask him what’s wrong, what’s really wrong. He looks me in the eyes and breathes his first complete lungful of air since I’ve seen him and winces at the invading cold.

“It’s you,” he says, and stiffens his spine. He’s no longer abstruse about it, no longer darting or sneaking. It spills out of him like water from a ruptured pipe, gouting madly out of his mouth. His feelings, his thoughts. All those dull platitudes you never want said but secretly wish to hear. I can feel something exploding way down deep inside of me, fathoms into the pit of my stomach, and can hear your voice ringing like a cathedral bell in my skull. Again, the rattle of the subway car. Again, the haunting refrain.

He asks to come in, and I let him. We leave our boots by the door.

I wake up. There’s a moth in the room, an ugly brown-winged furry thing that keeps battering at my face. I wake up in a haze and it’s gone, but as soon as I close my eyes it’s back, rubbing and fluttering against my jawbone before disappearing again. I’m surprised it hasn’t woken you yet. You’ve ended up in my bed. We didn’t take our clothes off, though our hands have played cartographer for a number of hours before eventually capsizing like yawing sailboats in a tempestuous sea, folding beneath the waves of each other’s hair. They have migrated during the night’s hours to different locales – sandwiched between pillows, as a trivet for the heated head, at rest on the shoal of a shoulder, limp and disused in the crevasse between our bodies. As I wake, so do my hands, and they resurrect themselves, crawling out of their hideaways, blinking and startled in the morass of sheets.

Then the tidal bore of wakefulness, tinged with the rye-brown of drunk, a wave through the estuary and up the wide-mouthed river of sleep. You are there, towheaded and tousled, breath fluttering in and out of your mouth left ajar. There is no moth, I realize. You stir, soundlessly, and I remove myself from the bed. The heat's come on, and I am sopping through my clothes. The bathroom's anodyne light causes my eyes to rebel, and I stagger away from the mirror, muttering something unintelligible to myself, like a warding spell, before I realize it's your name - though which you, I am uncertain.
I have never been certain of much. It's always one thing, then the other, and then another on top of it. How life goes: an unending accumulation, like silt at a delta. We deposit and are deposited upon, a chain of transactions that leaves us somehow always with one more thing than with which we arrived. I wouldn't categorize you as a thing, either of you, nor myself. We are epistolary, all of us - fragments, spinning, like a shattered window in slow motion. I have told you that I do not believe in being whole, and you make your customary frown before launching into a tedious dissertation regarding fate and the like. I don't believe in such things, but sometimes I tell you I do and listen with rapt attention. Sometimes I can even convince myself that I do believe in your grandiose notions of how the world operates, as if on some invisible axis comprised of spirits and unearthly beings who take interest in our mortal affairs. It's easier than the brittle realism of cause and effect, easier still than the blank face of reason and logic, like a Greek god on its plinth, boring its eyeless, infinite stare across the centuries. Though I always catch myself, you decorate the hook well and I am constantly drawn to its spiralling glitter.

I used to call you by colors, both of you, and perhaps it'd be best if I revert to that now, for the sake of clarity. You are Ochre, the hue of your hair, the hue of red-clay earth. You are Umber, the raw brown of varnished wood. This makes it easy to tell the two of you apart, even though distance separates you. I am standing in front of the door, waiting for you to pass by, smoking a cigarette. A transient with gaps in his mouth asks me if I have fifty cents and I give him a penny out of spite. He throws it on the ground in front of me and curses me in some bile-inflected, spittly tongue. I am indifferent and blot him from my sight. He vanishes appropriately, though I am made nervous by his indictment and the memory of him lingers in my brain long after suppertime. I am poor, lately, too, and my pockets are fast becoming threadbare. I am always seen wearing the same pair of pants, and sometimes, the same pair of socks.

The sky above tumbles by, as if it is trying to get ahead of itself knowing it never can. The wind is loud and blustery, more befitting an April afternoon than a December evening. You've been working all day, chained to a desk by a headset, answering phone call after phone call. I imagine you in mechanical repose in front of your computer, inert until needed. A strange sense inside of me is awoken at this image. It has been days since I've thought of you. I've prepared a bottle of whiskey, which is to say, I've opened it and had a shot. The warmth of it is even now is metastasizing inside of me, spreading from organ to organ. I have my head tilted up, slightly, and am watching a fat bank of clouds shove itself imperiously along. I know that by midnight they will have usurped the heavens and will dump their accumulations on top of us, unceremoniously, and with little regard for our bared heads. A bus lets off and I watch the passengers shuffle their way out of the heaving vehicle's innards. Umber is a bad name for you, but it's what I've got. I might tell you tonight, though I don't think you'd appreciate it.

I'm playing music in my head, and the urge to throw myself at the bar is gargantuan, like a hand pressed firmly against the small of my back, goading me on. I know I might find you there. You've lost your phone and I don't even know where you live. I've told you to knock on my window, though for the past week the window has remained resolutely silent. My doorbell is broken, and I've tried to fix it, though only ended up with the frottage of an electrical shock for my pains. I know I might find you at the bar, though I am resolute in waiting.

The fifth of whiskey goes down smoother after the first three shots. I have forsaken a glass and have taken to drinking directly from the bottle, as classless and gauche as it is, taking great pleasure in swimming within its brown depths. I imagine myself in miniature, dancing like an angel on a pinhead, around the rim of the bottle, before teetering and falling in. I imagine a hand - yours - opening and closing, slowly, then quickly; as if asking for something, then begging, then demanding. My head is beginning to spin, wobbling on my spine like an unbalanced, greasy ball balanced precariously at the top of a tall pole. This delirium, I tell myself, is more comfortable than loneliness.

A man with dark-rimmed glasses and a white coat is leaning over me. He is fastidious but for his beard, whose gray coils spring from his chin like the innards of a broken pocket-watch. His brow is unevenly furrowed over wiry eyebrows and brooding, dark eyes. He has concern coming out of his mouth, but I am barely able to hear it through the booming tripartite throb of my heart. I hallucinate that I am lashed to a gurney on a subway, staring at your dark ochre hair. You never turn around, even in my dreams.

I wake up on my couch, unkempt and with vomit staining the corner of my mouth like an ill-advised brushstroke. You are laying in the bed, one shoe on and the other off, sock bunched up and dangling from the edge of your toes. There is a thick, musty stillness in the room which, after a moment or two, I realize is the smell of my own sick. I am immediately overcome by a surge of embarrassment. You are just as you were the last time you were here, laying in exactly the same position, lips parted exactly the same way, breath fluttering out of you in resigned, slow patterns. I imagine I can see it in the air; frosted iterations of gentle recrimination. I do not know what day it is, though the whiskey bottle sits not far away from me and still has a drop left in the bottom. My fingers are stained with the yellowing scent of just-smoked cigarettes. There is no clock in my room and I do not care what time it is.

I stumble up from the couch into the bathroom again, giggling slightly at the repetition. My mind sharply invokes the image of the transient, cursing and spitting, and I giggle a little harder. The laugh causes my stomach to cramp and I bend over the sink to eject more poison from my insides. It's only poison on its way back up, I think deliriously to myself, amid whorls of head-splitting pain.

Your hand comes to rest between my shoulderblades, and I hurl myself as far away from myself as possible, feeling a sudden collapse incipient. I sag at the knees and you curl your elbows beneath my armpits, hoisting me up. You're stronger than I thought you were. Your fists curl at the sides of my jaws and I notice that your fingernails are ragged - some are discolored with the ochre of dried blood.