Servility masters a sort of dull sensitivity in the hearts of the forlorn; the same dullness felt with the instantaneous removal of a limb. As I have experienced the former in all its depleting humility, I have also been the butcher in the latter. I speak of limbs here though in the most delicate and ethereal sense. That of a bonding. Of hearts. Of souls. The spontaneity of my deed was less governed by scruples than a feeling of unrest. And the empowerment that coursed through me following was of such magnitude, my soul could have burst from my flesh in a shower of gold confetti. It was an illumination of Self! Such as a killer must feel when he destroys life to realize his murderous nature. It was as if I had committed murder and gotten away with it!

But it was not to last. The faint cock of her head, the bland repose of her lips, the lifeless stare in her eyes — this nothingness about her held solace for me. Were it that she could have held that pose for an eternity, bliss would ever be mine. But my fortitude collapsed inward in the blink of an eye. Her eye. What conveys in the minutest of gestures can command the very will of a creature. In that tiny insignificant twitch of flesh was awakened in me a feeling of inadequacy, which I was susceptible to only in her presence. My confidence quickly reduced itself to ambivalence. She was on the couch with various medical journals. I stood over her (I had shoved my hands in my back pockets at this point) peering down at my feet. With the same ease which she had so many times stuck my heart — with her indifferent casualness to my love — she comported herself at that moment. It wasn’t enough, the elegance with which she gathered her things and rose to her feet, but her deadpan stare had enjoined on me a cold gray dearth, which seemed to measure my very existence.

“You’re going to be nothing but a lonely, old drunk.”

And she turned away and left, casually, dispassionately, without thinking twice, without looking back, without slamming the door, as if it were her long time job of disclosing men’s failures to them in their moment of glory. Then she was gone.

Not that I feared becoming that bitter jaded hermit, incapable of loving and thus of being loved, that propelled me after her. Knowing the loneliness that fills me when I am amongst strangers, even amid those who would call me friend, I prefer my own company. Nor was it that I worried my indulgence in alcohol precluded any natural human bonding, for drunkenness is much like a vacation of sorts, a temporal stasis between indentured servitude and the mundaneness of everyday living. No! I followed after her to tell her that even she will grow old!

Outside, however, there was no sign she’d ever been here. I hung out over the porch searching for a swirl of exhaust, some tire marks in the street. I squinted through the yards of houses to the street beyond hoping to catch a glimpse of her speeding along, but there was nothing. I smiled.

It was over.

It was then the myriad images reflecting my feelings toward her had overtaken me. Nothing of how I might miss her, the good times we shared, the emptiness that would inevitably ensue, but vivid sequences of our entropic nights together. Nights how when I’d climb over her it was like mounting a slab of clay. How her flesh, wherever I poked, pushed back to its original shape, not sensually, as if of a soft silicon, but forcefully, as if she were filled with mercury. This resistance which I had taken to be her inexperience with men I later realized was her utter rejection of me. I would have gained more from expressing my affections to a cantaloupe, a bag of broken marbles, some rusted razors, a tin of searing coals!

She has not jaded me. Not by any means. I have had many experiences in the hard cruel world of love. I have evolved defenses which can separate soul from heart to crush the strongest of egos. Still, at times I falter. Despite my attempts to master Love, I am impressionable. Perhaps too much so. It is because Love for me is a light into which I run with open arms despite my inability to see what manipulates it. Thus, it becomes malignant. And it is only after I have embraced the beast and my eyes adjust that I see that with which I am to be inoculated. It is only then that I am repulsed.

In the end her company had become obtrusive. In whom I first found an articulate, insightful woman, madness soon emerged — for hers was a clinical intellect, a maze without turns or dead ends. She saw life as a straight line and knew precisely how she’d arrive at point B before point A could even be established. I have difficulty seeing past an afternoon, much less, where to step. I deal with things as they arrive, then I worry. “You’re insane! would cry the Voice of Reason. “I am, am I?” I would retort. “At least I have a pulse! At least I can draw breath through the gills — even out of the water!” I took as much as any man could and thusly said my farewell. “Farewell, my acrid boil of delirium! Farewell, my love! Farewell to your vapidity, your reason! Farewell, my chilled slab of clay!”

With her gone, it was behind me. I convinced myself I would forget about her as easily as I would a stubbed toe.

We were to go to a reception party for some local bourgeois painter in the evening, but not now. Oh, I would still go. The invitation was for me and a guest. I’d received it just a day ago, whereupon reading the sender’s name I was stricken with malaise. It was from a woman whom I knew despised me. Sharon. It was with good reason that she disliked me; I’d wrecked Sharon’s last party. Had gotten drunk and smashed some things, some valuable, irreplaceable things, had painted my face with some woman’s lipstick, puked on furniture, puked on guests, none of which I could recall but was made full aware of on my release from jail the next morning.

But Sharon had no sense of humor. She was another creature without a pulse. A bilious sow too odious for slaughter, too ungrateful for a mercy killing, she flits about a crowd like a harpy, fangs full of venom, mouth cast in a wax smile. On and on she’ll rant without ever uttering a word. And were she to take a breath between syllables you still wouldn’t understand her, for Sharon doesn’t talk, she bleats! She’d long thought of me as a cur, a blight on the scene. Where there bloomed Monets in her ana, a Rorschach had slipped in; Dostoevskis, a Celine; pomegranate and honeydew, garlic and onions. If her invitation were a ruse or if she had actually forgiven me, I was nonetheless wary; it was Sharon who’d turned me in to the cops.

With the apartment empty, the air was somber, my mood grim. I was in terrible agony awaiting the night. For all my senses had been reacquainted with, for all the abjection I thought myself cleansed of in the wake of solitude, it was in solitude where I felt most wretched. I sat restlessly staring at the wall, shifting in my seat, crossing my legs, uncrossing my legs, standing, pacing, sitting again, the ennui from not having the woman around to take cheap shots at me eating through the fabric of my being. I dug the crumpled invite out of my pocket and read it numerous times over — you are cordially invited … 7pm — until the words danced discordantly on the page. The finer italics at the bottom said to bring something for everyone to enjoy; again I was flushed with remembrances of attempts to please my ex. This request (or dictate as I perceived Sharon putting it) sparked a deep hatred within me. Had I not played the subservient long enough? At this I felt my virility, my very backbone fill with rebellion, fill with an exhilarating necessity to stomp on all facets of etiquette!

“To hell with everyone!” I cried and fell giddy.

In the cold water at the back of the toilet was where I’d begun to hide a fifth of vodka ever so often, as drinking became more pleasurable than my ex’s company. At the end of the night as we’d go to sleep there were many times, in reference to my bad breath, I’d confessed to having eaten some sauteed onions. Vodka, you see, possesses no distinctive odor on the breath; however in time I’d stopped making excuses altogether. Now I kept bourbon there, just because the water was cold.

I set the tank lid against the wall and the bottle glistened as the water rolled off. I grew impatient trying to get it open, for the pull tab had snapped, forcing me to meticulously pick at the remaining foil. Little slices etched my fingers in white like the forming breaks of waves. To the untrained eye my handiwork would have been viewed as an emaciated blossom, a perverse variety of Black eyed Susan perhaps, meant for masochistic lips. I, however, saw the shredded blouse of a prostitute ripped from her shoulders in the heat of passion, exposing herself to my molestations. I handled her roughly, tossing away her wig and forcing my mouth on hers. Her saliva a scorpion sting in my throat, she smelled of the hundred sweaty men before me. Had I the strength to refuse her I would, but my limbs were suffused in her passionless embrace, her toxicity numbed me to elation. I could barely contain myself. When I did manage to pull away, she was half drained. I was very drunk, and shortly thereafter, I blacked out.

When I came to it was on mounting the steps to Sharon’s, my jeans cold and stiff with whiskey, a dark stain lengthwise on my button up. The doorman gave me a disdainful glare. Not even a real doorman, but some poor slob Sharon had duped into standing there. That’s the kind of woman she is: a delicate promising lamb, full of honey and butter, then when you’ve sucked up enough and lowered your guard, WHAMO! a volley of quills to your throat. Her callosity for which I have harbored an abstruse admiration for in the past, at the moment disgusted me. I felt sorry for this fool at the top of the stairs — because I knew it could easily have been me!

I handed him the invite anyway and he was kind enough to open the door.

Inside were all the limp, pallid faces of the local art world, filling the air with token gestures of congeniality while concealing daggers at their backs (which they absentmindedly reveal when sipping wine from their paper cups, for they are clumsy in their conceit). The hauteur of these people fills me with angst. First, because it distresses me that they possess such shallowness of spirit that they can only feel alive through cannibalism (eating each other’s egos); and second, because I am such easy prey to their appetites. Though I am a wolf among sheep, the sheep being cannibals are carnivorous! I thus become the inferior, the ignoble, and by my insecurities I reflect what I perceive is their perception.

Though empowered by this transcendence to a symbol, I remain cautious.

I did my best to ignore them, to absorb myself in the dry prophylactic art set precisely about the room, but it was like fire under my feet. I began to sweat. I recognized no one with whom I could shield myself. There was a need to keep moving. I came to a dining room with a table laden with hors d’oeuvres and surrounded by guests. I speculated that if I could spend the rest of the evening here, submerged in bodies, everyone would forget about me. So I nudged my way in amongst the leeches and filled a paper cup with Bordeaux, my mouth with mussels and spring rolls.

It was on filling my cup a second time that I saw two faces enter the room. One a former foe of mine, a guy by the name of Munoz, the other unknown to me. And as luck would have it, I was spotted. I pretended not to see them. I merely sipped my wine and inconspicuously kept them in view.

I’ve forgotten how it came to be that Munoz and I had our falling out, but it seemed this unknown character had something to settle now. He was tall and lanky, his hair cropped short, but it was thick in some places giving it a patchy appearance. Also his skin was gray. I figured I could take him.

The two of them moved around the crowd and flanked me. “We want to talk to you,” the kid said. “Outside.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

The kid was a hothead, instantly impatient with me. “Six months ago you put a cigar up to the eye of a friend of mine and said how she reminded you of an ex-girlfriend, that you should burn her eye out for looking like such a whore.”

“I was flirting.”

The kid sneered then shoved me back into the crowd. I fell easily being drunk, but due to everyone’s close proximity I maintained my footing. The sudden upheaval made the crowd fan out like frightened elk, and then all eyes fell on us. Portraying the ghoul they would have me be I grabbed an empty wine bottle and smacked it against the table’s edge. However, the glass was thick and made only a loud THUP sound. The failure of my intention, the ridiculousness of this thup sound forced me to laugh.

By this time the crowd had given us more than enough room to entertain them. I was nervous. At any moment Sharon would enter the room and find us, find me causing trouble. It didn’t matter though. I’d had enough of these people. But if I was to be thrown out, it was to be justified. I was just about to hurl my bottle at the kid when a hand grabbed my arm and pulled me into another room.

…to be continued.