the soundtrack to our suicide

I’ve been living on the road for 36 days now, fueled by coffee and diner food; staying with strangers and in cheap hotels.  Everything I own fits in the trunk of my car, and I no longer pay rent.  I’ve come down with a wicked cold, and this weekend I will return to the town I grew up in.

The nameless faces I encounter and the stories I collect have brought me endless inspiration.  As a result, I am launching a new project today, right here: Your New Pornography, a site dedicated entirely to the art of the short story.

What follows here this week on Make It MAD is a work of fiction I wrote from the bathtub in the bathroom of a run-down motel, smoking cigarettes and drinking cold coffee well into the night. Consider any coincidences to you or your likeness purely coincidental. It’s just the business of fiction. 

| | the soundtrack to our suicide by Max Andrew Dubinsky 

Stale coffee and sulfur, I’m sitting in the bathtub smoking cigarettes with the door closed because nonsmoking rooms are all they had left, and it’s too cold to stand outside. I’m striking matches with no real intent to burn anything other than time.

Kissing the inside of your thigh, I noticed the bump on your leg, red and swelling fast. When I asked you about it, you said, “Spider bite.”

I got up and used the mouthwash even though we’d just had sex without protection.

Funny, the things we truly fear.

I’m dropping ash and discarded filters into the toilet. My boots scuff the porcelain; tiny bits of dry dirt and dead earth keep falling from the soles.

We’re here because I’ve got a strong will and a weak heart, and your father never loved you the way a real man should.

“I’m on the lam,” you said the night we met, drunk and taking a mental picture with your fingers and a wink so you wouldn’t forget my face in the morning.

That was sometime around eleven before you ran into Adler, but after that crooked little thief, Jimmy, who peddles smokes and dope to high schoolers behind the gym during cafeteria hours showed me a Polaroid he pulled from his back pocket—a picture of your old glory days together.  A time when you all lived in the same house on Maple Street like a bunch of anarchists looking for something to believe in.

I only gave him the time of day because who carries around hard copy photographs anymore, let alone a Polaroid?

Your hair was shorter in the picture.  Your face full of black eyes and bruises because you love too hard and your hands aren’t strong enough. And Adler, Jimmy had said, was just looking for someone to hate.

I had heroic visions of macerating his face with my fist.

Then he showed up at the bar, and you broke a bottle across his neck.

“Want to get out of here?” you asked, and I said sure because I’ve got a thing for pretty girls and abiding fugitives.

You still can’t make a fist with your right hand, and I spent the night picking tiny shards of beer soaked glass from your skin.

“I’d better not drive for a few days,” you said. “I’d hate to get a DUI.”

You, always seeing the funny side of things.

My heroine.

And this is my idea of going on the lam: two college dropouts hiding in a motel room on a diet of coffee and cigarettes and sex.  I think there’s an old punk rock song from the nineties about this sort of thing. It’s the soundtrack to our suicide.

It’s only a matter of time, though, before someone finds us. I’m not very good at a thing like this, a thing like running. I smoke too much, and I like updating my Facebook status too often to not be found.

I’m in here because you’re out there, thinking things over.

You’re always thinking things over.

You, you always need a few minutes.

Eighteen to be exact.

You’ve never needed more or less in the three months we’ve been together.

Funny how that works when you’re in love.

Never needing more or less of anything.

You unsheathed the pocketknife you keep stashed in your boot. Slicing the dirt from your fingernails you said, “Just give me eighteen minutes, okay?”

Your fingernails are always impossibly dirty. God knows why.

Eighteen minutes if you’re ordering a sandwich or picking out drapes.

Eighteen minutes never seemed so long when I’m fully clothed, taking a bath, and you’re lying on the bed in only your combat boots and underwear; a t-shirt I swore belonged to me in high school, but you said you found it at a thrift shop in Portland.

I’ve never been to Portland.

“This is going to change everything, you know,” is what you said sitting on the edge of the bed, me slinking over to the bathroom like I’d just flunked out of the spelling bee.  I can’t compete with this sort of thing.

“You can take twenty minutes if you’d like. No one has to know.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“I’ll be in here if you need me.”

“I won’t.”

“I’m just saying.” Sometimes it’s nice to be needed. I put a smoke between my lips and you told me I’d be paying the fine if I lit that in here.

I can hear you over the exhaust fan.  Or maybe it’s the television.  It’s hard to tell the difference sometimes when you’re talking to yourself.

I’ve got sunglasses on because these fluorescents are too bright, and I’m thinking a day or two outside after this might do us both some good.

“Skin cancer,” you tell me.  “Everyone’s getting it.”

And you’re mad at me for using the mouthwash?

I pick at the scabs on my arm where I’ve been cutting myself out of guilt. A reminder for all the bad things I let happen to you. I’d have gotten a tattoo instead if I had the cash.

I’ve had to take a piss for at least fifteen minutes now, but I can’t bring myself to get out of the tub and back in again.

A thing like that says a lot about who you are.

Eighteen minutes is almost up and you’re going to want to talk, and I’m not going to be able to concentrate with all this pressure against my bladder.

This is my dilemma. I’m almost feeling guilty about it, but I don’t have anything sharp in my pockets.

I told you I loved you before I knew, so now what’s a guy to do now?

When I said it, I probably said something stupid like, “I promise I’ll never leave.”  I don’t have enough arm left for that kind of guilt.

It’s hard to have faith in a thing like that when it comes from the lips of men.

Because I do. Love you, that is.

But who could blame me for leaving? It seems like the American thing to do. Something gets hard and you bail and start over. You can kill the kid or keep him. I’ll change my number and never need to know.

I read a story once about a man who died and went to heaven.  He meets God and God says, “Ask me anything,” so the man asks what any man would ask, and he asks, “Why, God? Why all the famine and diseases like HIV and cancer? Why didn’t you do anything to cure these problems?”  And God said to the man, “I did. I sent him again and again, but you aborted him.”

I’d have to cut my whole fucking arm off over a thing like that.

A boy needs a proper father, and the world doesn’t need another Adler.

Someone knocks on the door, and I’m hoping it’s room service or the authorities.  I could use a few extra minutes.

It’s only you.

It’s always you.

I stand and smear stray ash into my white t-shirt when I try to brush myself off to appear presentable.

You tell me I look as though I could use some sleep.

“A lot has happened in the last eighteen minutes.”

“It took me nineteen. That’s never happened before.”

I look at my watch. She’s right. How easily you lose track of time when you’re having fun. Or something like that. “Nobody’s perfect,” I say.

“I don’t want to be just someone with a kid.  I want to be parents.”

Those boots make you two inches taller, and when you’re not wearing pants I swear your legs go on forever.

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

“You’ll have to quit smoking, though. I won’t stand for that.”

This coming from the girl who keeps a concealed blade in her shoes.

The smoke rising between us, I was hoping it would kill me before I actually had to deal with this.

Now it’s actually happening, and I’m still breathing.

Your lips are chapped and cracked, but they taste sweet and dry like wine inside.

Your eyes are still closed when I pull away.  “Give me eighteen minutes to think it over.”

I shut the bathroom door and climb back into the tub.

© copyright April 6, 2011 Max Andrew Dubinsky || Make It MAD

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