Arthur feels bad. Everyone can tell when Arthur's feeling bad because he speaks slowly, like his mouth is full of syrup, and he stares into the distance and reacts to nothing. And everyone loves when Arthur's feeling bad because he will accept anything that's said to him, and any abuse, and will never do anything but sit quietly, barely processing, or processing something else entirely.
During these times his mother will get wine drunk or take one too many pills, and there will be a confessional, and a vomiting up of half truths and non-apologies. They'll sit together in her bed and Arthur will stare at the wall as she talks to herself.
"I was such a bad mother to you, wasn't I?" she says. "I know you hate me, Happy... don't you?"
"No, mom," Arthur responds automatically, already disinterested in retreading this same conversation, "you did your best."
"That's right. I did." She nods to herself and for a moment Arthur thinks that it's over, that he won't have to pretend he's listening, pretend that they're bearing their hearts to one another.
"But you know I didn't have a choice. You had so much wrong with you and I didn't know what to do. And I was so lonely and scared."
"I know, ma," Arthur says.
"You know, there was a time where I was sure you were going to - to kill yourself, and I was just waiting for it. No one could ever help you. I didn't want you to do it because I'd never see you up in Heaven but I thought nothing could help you. I tried everything."
Arthur begins counting the petals on the wallpaper. Methodically working through each flower one by one.
"But there were a lot of things you were doing just for attention. I knew you were. You always liked to trick me and make me upset. So I couldn't give in. You had to learn that it's wrong to say scary things on purpose." She sniffs, and the shadows on the wall warp as she lifts her hand to wipe her eyes. "It was a scary time for me."
"Sorry," Arthur says vacantly. Of course dead people can't get attention and he knows this. Only the living can get attention. People who are grieving and who have lost their sons; their sons who they loved so much and did their best to protect.
She sniffs again and when she speaks her words are wet, "It's okay, Happy. I've always forgiven you."
They sit in silence for a few minutes, his mother dabbing at her eyes with the sleeve of her nightgown and Arthur counting petals aimlessly.
"Sometimes," she says, "I wish I'd never had you. I love you so much, Happy, but I think my body can't cook a baby right. Everything that's wrong with you... it must be my fault."
The admission hits him the same way it's hit him every other time she's said it. "I'm glad I was born," he tells her, "Life's not so bad. I'm happy I'm alive."
"Do you really mean it?"
Arthur knows that she's looking at him but he can't bear to turn his head to look at her. His eyes linger on the wall as he answers, "I'd never lie to you, ma."
She smooths out the bed sheets around her knees and Arthur knows that it's finally over. He counts one more petal, rounding out the number into something clean and even, then he stands and walks around the bed to her side, bending to kiss her still-damp cheek.
"Good night, mom," he tells her before turning out the light.
"Good night, Happy."
Arthur gathers his shoes before walking out into the hallway, closing the door behind him.
"So when you think about fucking me, do I have a cock or a pussy?"
"W-what?" Arthur’s head snaps over to where the man with the painted face is lounging in his mother’s chair.
"C'mon. I know you think about it."
Arthur struggles to his feet and rushes to turn the television up just enough to drown out their voices. Then he sits down in front of it, legs crossed, and looks at the man with the painted face watching him from his throne-like perch.
"Why are you asking me?"
"I wanna know. You're thinking about me so I deserve to know. It's only fair."
Arthur runs a hand through his hair. He takes a long drag of his cigarette and sighs out a shaky cloud of smoke. There’s no reason he should answer this question. He shouldn’t answer this question.
"Both," he answers.
"Both at once?"
"No - that would be good, too - but you only have one or the other when I imagine it."
The man with the painted face stares at him, dark eyes glistening. There‘s an uncomfortable pause between them, stretching out just long enough to make Arthur squirm. "So what's it like when I have a cock?" the man with the painted face finally asks.
Arthur turns to look at the opening into the hallway, thinking guiltily about his sleeping mother. When he begins he speaks so lowly that he can’t hear himself over the sound of the television droning behind him. "I'm on my knees and - and you're deep in my throat. As deep as you can go. My nose is pressed against the skin here," he points to the patch of soft skin just beneath his belly. "The smell of you is the only air I can breathe. You hold me by the hair and I feel hot inside every time I swallow around you."
There's more he could say. How specific and vivid his fantasy has grown over months - over years. the shape of his own hands gripping scarlet trousers. The single finger he's slid into one belt loop and the way the sharp red line around his skin makes it look like it's been severed. The thick line of drool running down his chin onto the floor and how each drop catches the light before it falls. The soft struggle of stifled breaths in a quiet room.
"And when I have a pussy?"
Arthur steals another glance at the dark hallway before closing his eyes and letting his mind shift. "My fingers are inside of you. We're as close as we can get to each other. Maybe even closer. Where our skin touches it's like you're melting into me. I don't really move, I just feel how hot you are. How tight. You like it. you're saying the same things to me that you do when you've got your hand in my stomach, or when you dig your fingers between my ribs and hold onto me like a cage. For you it's like - like you're holding me in a brand new way."
Again, the intricacies of the fantasy are too overwhelming to describe. Skin sliding over skin and clawed fingers digging indents into his back. How he's buried his face into the man with the painted face's neck and it's dark and warm and the world has been carved down into what he can feel and what he can hear. The intimacy of it is so intense it's painful.
When Arthur opens his eyes all he can see is an open grin; jagged teeth hugged by red.
“Which one’s your favorite?,” the man with the painted face asks in his lilted voice, “Which one gets you hard?”
Arthur shakes his head. “I don’t want you to have anything down there. I think the way you are is best.”
“Aw. That’s so sweet.”
The way the man with the painted face looks at him makes Arthur know he wants him to come closer. So he stands and stubs his cigarette out in the ashtray on the coffee table before crossing the room to the chair, to the man waiting atop it. Arthur leans over him, gripping the back of the chair for support, and they breathe each other in for a moment before they kiss. Arthur can feel a smile under his lips and then a hand cupping his soft cock through his trousers. He flinches and pulls the hand away. But as their kiss grows hungrier and a hot tongue slides over his teeth the hand is back again, warm and insistent. This time, Arthur lets it happen.
Content: Louis Bloom, NSFW, Trans character, Aberrant sexuality
Let me watch you - w4w 23 (Los Angeles)
Hello. I would like to watch a woman pleasure herself, preferably from a place where I cannot be seen. Older women are preferred, but this is not a strict requirement.
I will not be undressing and I will not touch you. I only want to watch.
Looking for an older woman with good fashion sense - m4w 26 (Los Angeles)
Hello.
I am looking for an older woman with good fashion sense who will allow me to watch her undress. I am not interested in intercourse, only in seeing your clothes come off. This would be a fine opportunity to display the more fashionable and rarely worn pieces in your wardrobe.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Seeking someone who likes to stay still - m4m 28 (Los Angeles)
I am interested in finding someone who enjoys lying still while being intimate.
I do not care about your demographics. If you are capable of lying still and not speaking, please get in touch.
I want to film you - m4mw 30 (Los Angeles)
Hello. I am an established filmmaker who would like to practice the basics of camera work in a spontaneous environment. I am offering to film you in a situation of your choice. Nothing is off limits. I will NOT be participating, only filming.
Get in touch to see examples of my work. You will be given a complimentary copy of the final product.
Content: Arthur/TMWTPF, Allusions to child abuse, Self hatred
There are dancers on the television. Arthur watches intently, leaning in from his place on the couch. The volume is low, hidden from his sleeping mother, but he can hear the music clearly through the dance itself. Between his fingers burns his last cigarette, its hungry flame eating paper until it finally bites at his skin.
Arthur flinches and stubs it out into the overflowing ashtray. Beside it lies the empty pack - a useless pile of bent cardboard and foil. He reaches for it on instinct, then curls his fingers into a fist and stands, walking quietly to the kitchen where his jacket is hooked over the counter. From its pocket he fishes out the pack he'd bought that afternoon, and when he returns to the living room the man with the painted face is sitting in the armchair beneath the lamp, watching the dance he'd left behind.
"Hey," the man with the painted face says, gesturing to the television, "you think you could do that?"
Arthur picks the lighter up off the coffee table before sitting down. "Does it matter? It's not like I'll ever be on TV."
"You don't have to be on TV to dance. Do you only dance because you wanna be on TV?"
"Not really," Arthur says, peeling the cellophane off the fresh pack and crushing it into a crackling ball. "I dance because I like it and it feels good. You don't really need a reason."
The man with the painted face gives him a knowing look, "Yeah, but you have a reason. Don't you?"
"Maybe," Arthur considers. "I've never really thought about it." He pulls the first cigarette from its snug row and beneath it lies a perfect hole - darkness surrounded by columns of white.
Throughout his childhood there were always crowding men. And as time went on they would leave things behind: sometimes scars inside and out, sometimes clothes that would find their way into his wardrobe, sometimes worthless things that would collect like garbage in smaller and smaller apartments. And always new shards of disappointment and anger and resentment. And a hole that felt safe but that his mother was desperate to fill. But once or twice he was left with something good that remained with him, something gentle and calming and perfect.
"My mother had this boyfriend," he says with tentative shyness. "I was pretty young, still in elementary school. He had a lot of money - more money than we did, anyway. He was a lawyer or a professor. One of those people with big patches on the elbows of their jackets." He absentmindedly covers one elbow with his palm. "He was never violent and he spoke softly and he always took care of us. And one day he asked me 'what would you want to learn if you could learn anything, just like that?'" he snaps his fingers, punctuating the memory, "And I said that I'd want to learn how to dance. So he paid for dance lessons." Arthur flicks the lighter a few times, watching sparks burst in and out of existence, before holding it to the cigarette between his lips.
"You only dance because of some guy your mom fucked?" The man with the painted face sounds incredulous and his lewdness makes Arthur wince.
"No," Arthur says. "Because of him I learned that I was good at it. It made me happy. And people like you when you're good at something. When you're good at something it makes everyone think you have a purpose because you can give them something that they can only get from you."
He remembers a sunlit gym and the smell of warm rubber, the feeling of slick hardwood beneath his feet, the gentle tug of his hair being tied up by a laughing girl.
He breathes smoke between his teeth and it curls around them in fading patterns. "My mother tried to talk him out of it," he explains. "She was worried it would make me grow up to be - y'know - to like men."
The man with the painted face laughs, something high pitched and cackling, "Wasn't she right, though?"
Arthur shrugs. "Who knows. Who knows what makes people turn out like me." He turns his attention back to the television, to the dancers moving behind glass. He wonders about the life he could have had if things had been different, and the life he wishes he had even if everything had stayed the same.
The man with the painted face carves into the silence. "So what happened? Did he die?" he mimes holding a gun to his head and pulling the trigger. "Was it like that? Did he fall and break his neck? Was he hit by a car?"
Arthur flicks the lighter one more time before tossing it back onto the table. "No, he didn't die. He left. Every good man left. My mother drove them away. She's like a poison to kindness."
The man with the painted face leans in, serpentine and smiling. "So you're saying you're not a good man? 'Cause if you were a good man you'd have left a long time ago, just like he did."
Arthur is quiet. In the background, the music fades into the white noise of applause and the curtain closes on the bowing dancers, cutting them away one by one. "I guess I'm not," he says.
Content: Arthur/TMWTPF, Child sexual abuse, Sexual dysfunction, Disturbing sexual fantasies
Arthur is six and his head hurts. Someone close to him is breathing hard. His back rubs painfully against the carpet and later on he will feel so guilty about the rugburn that he will wear three shirts to hide it. He closes his eyes and imagines himself at a carnival.
Arthur is fifteen and in a hot room with the blinds halfway closed. A boy his age is curled over him, panting. The way Arthur's vision swims and the shadows striped across their bodies make the boy seem faceless. He will cum on Arthur's chest, then he will get angry and call Arthur a faggot before leaving. But it's okay, because he always comes back.
Arthur is nineteen and the depth of his loneliness makes him want to die. His mother tells him that he's a good boy, unlike all those other men who only want one thing.
Arthur is twenty-three and knows something is wrong. He thinks about his own corpse when he masturbates and afterward the shame he feels turns to nausea. He vomits into the bathroom sink and before he's cleaned the bile from the faucet he is hard again.
Arthur is still twenty-three and is sitting alone in a blinding white room. He has one hand down his pants - someone else's pants - and the cloth is crisp and itchy. He notices a woman watching him through a window in the door and he pulls his cock out.
Arthur is twenty-nine and knows there is a name for what he is: Sexually Dysfunctional. Having a name for it doesn't make it better, but the medication does. He can't get hard and his orgasms are weak and dry and barely worth the effort. All of his desire has been condensed into a small, dark sphere. Small, but still painful, like a bullet lodged in his gut. Now when he imagines sex it's in a state of pressured unarousal, and always with faceless people who touch him while he's still. If he wakes from that stillness, something brutal happens, something base and animal that makes him more ashamed than excited. When it's over, the bullet inside him throbs like it's about to explode and fill him with shrapnel.
Arthur is thirty-five and the bullet is still there. Sometimes when he imagines sex it's pleasant and warm. He thinks of kissing the soft rise of a woman's stomach and of her fingers brushing through his hair. But more often he imagines a man who comes to him at night, when his body is heavy from lack of sleep. The man covers him, takes his limp thighs in his hands and spreads his legs apart. Arthur nestles his face in the crook of his neck, seeking closeness. When they're gentle together it is so, so unhappy. But when they're rough Arthur can lose himself; he can flinch and twist and fight and refuse to play dead. And he knows that it's okay, because the man will always come back to him.
Content: Arthur/TMWTPF, Child abuse, Emotional abuse, Death
Arthur sits across from the man with the painted face at the cluttered table. A newspaper is spread out between them, all its pages chewed through with scissor cuts. Shreds of clippings litter the floor. As Arthur turns each page, a grey curtain casts him in shadow and back into light again. He stops when he finds the obituaries and they both lean forward, coming so close to one another that Arthur can smell paint.
"There are some really long ones today," Arthur says, running a finger down boxed rows of tiny print. "Why do you think that is? That there are some really long ones and some really short ones?"
"The short ones are probably for people nobody liked, and the long ones are everyone lying about how great the dead guy was."
Arthur nods. It makes sense.
The obituaries look the same as they always have - uniform blocks of text, bolded names above lifespans described in two dates, a few coin-sized photographs, the smudge of chalky ink. And always the same words rearranged: veteran, husband, grandmother, son. Passed away, taken too soon, survived by. Kind, doting, smiled, laughed. Lived, died. Loved.
"Look at this one." The man with the painted face points out the dates atop a ladder of grieving words. "He was four. Do you think he drowned in a tub? Do you think he fell off a building? Do you think a dog got him? Do you think-"
"I wrote an obituary once," Arthur interrupts.
"Yeah, we wrote yours together. I liked it."
Arthur shakes his head. "No, a different one. I helped mom write hers when I was just a kid." The memory ignites an uneasy sense of pride deep inside himself. He reaches beneath the newspaper and pulls out his cigarettes, sliding one from the pack with his lips.
"How was it? Was it as good as ours?"
"I dunno," Arthur flicks his lighter, "it was a really long time ago." He does know that there was a different room, and a long-gone couch, back before his feet touched the floor when he sat. He and his mother would sit together in front of a sunny, open window. The sheer curtain had a single stain on it; he remembers its blossoming shape and the way it appeared and disappeared behind his mother's head. Everything was bright and billowing around her shadowed face.
"She asked me what I loved about her so she could make a list," he explains. "We were going to go through it and pick out the best ones. The things that would make everyone miss her most. But when I started, she didn't like any of them. She'd write them down and then cross them out." He scratches dark Xs over newsprint, blocking out words indiscriminately. "Her long hair, how nicely she dresses, her eyes, her laugh... It kept going like that for a while."
His vision narrows and he sees the window again, now a dim scene oddly framed, like a television has been rotated to perch on its corner. A gnat cloud of static obscures the picture; the sound is scarred and skipping.
"You only love me because I'm pretty," she snarls, "I'm just thing to fuck. You dont care about who I am and what I do for you. I do everything for you. When I'm gone you'll see." Her voice lowers, hoarsens, churns like gravel underfoot. "When I'm dead you'll see. When you find my rotting body on the floor you'll see."
A deep tremor grinds through the bones of Arthur's fingers, bringing him back to the room with the open paper and the body with a pen in its hand. The man with the painted face has grabbed his wrist and gouged an X so crude and deep that its streaked ink into the table.
"I wanna hear the rest of the story."
"She told me that everyone should be loved for who they are inside, not the way they look," Arthur finishes. "The end."
The man with the painted face claps his hands together gleefully. "And that's why a handsome guy like you can't get laid, right? Everyone looks past your beautiful face and sees your ugly insides."
His cackle is shrill and piercing, and Arthur worries that his mother will wake up, worries that he'll hear the sound of her footsteps stalking toward him at a pace he knows she can no longer manage. "Shut up," he hisses through his own painfully stifled laughter. "That's not funny."
"Sure it is. Write it down. Tell it to your doctor. She'll laugh."
Arthur begins to smooth out the tears and wrinkles in the now mangled paper. "I'll have to make another one for her someday. But she's a lot different now than she was then. I don't need to remember that stuff."
"She can't read it if she's dead. Why waste your time?"
Arthur's thumb runs over a single phrase - familiar in its sterility: Loving mother.' "I don't think these are written for the dead person. They're for everyone who's still alive, to help them feel less guilty about the secrets they kept."
"So you're gonna lie to everyone in the city and keep all the secrets to yourself?"
Arthur shrugs.
The man with the painted face looks at him with razored eyes, in a way that makes him feel two dimensional. "You'll feel guilty when she's dead. You'll feel guilty that you never told her how fucked up you really are. Maybe you'll even feel guilty that you didn't kill her yourself."
Arthur sucks down laughter, then the rest of his cigarette. "Sure."
Content: NSFW, Arthur/TMWTPF, Genital dysphoria, Masturbation, Oral sex
The air is hot and the television is muted. Arthur's muffled, panting breath hits the pillows of the couch and pushes back against his face. All of him is tense and teetering. The man with the painted face is lying behind him, so close that the buttons of his vest dig indents into his spine. Color smears across sweat-slicked skin - white, blue, and red.
Arthur's hand is in his underwear, wrapped around himself, and the man with the painted face has enveloped it with his own; gentle and undemanding. He murmurs words into Arthur's ear that sound like pictures melting into each other - spread legs, fingers in holes, cum painting teeth. Arthur feels the heat of a mouth on his neck and the cotton softness of a thigh between his legs. He tastes color and salt and the sweetness of smoke. Then the fingers slotted between the ridges of his fist squeeze, just a little - just enough to matter - and Arthur bites his lip, smothering the noise he makes when he reaches a dry, shuddering orgasm with his half-hard cock in his hand.
There is a brief moment where Arthur stops existing, where the world is consumed and his body is gone, and all of him has been collected into a single, heated pool. Slowly, things begin to skim across the surface of him: the humid air, the glowing television, and the man at his back.
"I wanna - you.." Arthur fumbles behind himself, touches the man with the painted face's thigh, then slides his hand higher. The man with the painted face takes it and guides it to the hollow between his legs.
"You're not hard," Arthur says, panicked and ashamed. He tries to pull his hand away but the man with the painted face presses it closer and Arthur feels nothingness beneath it. "You don't have a-"
"I don't have a cock, yeah."
"D'you have a, um-" Arthur flips through every term he knows, trying to find one that fits the situation, one that his mother rarely uses for herself and that won't make him sound like a child, "-a vagina?"
The man with the painted face laughs just to make Arthur blush. "No, I don't have a pussy. I don't have anything."
Arthur turns and his eyes flick down to where his hand is now flush against fabric hugging pelvis. "Nothing?"
"Wanna see?"
Arthur's eager nod makes the man with the painted face grin like he's just won a game. They move together on the couch, Arthur sliding to one end and the man with the painted face stretching out languidly across from him. He tugs his trousers down his hips and off his body, letting them fall into a puddle on the floor. And there, framed beneath the V of his parted shirt, Arthur sees nothing. Where something should be there's only a pale, empty slope following the curve of his body.
"Oh", Arthur breathes.
"You like it?"
"Yeah. I like it a lot." Arthur puts his fingers there, just two at first, and the man with the painted face spreads his legs wider to make room for his palm to fit between them.
"How come? 'Cause you hate what you have?" The man with the painted face asks, simplifying it, twisting it, warping it into something more painful than it really is.
"No, I don't hate it," Arthur answers, "But I don't like it either. It barely works now and when it did it was like I couldn't get it to go down. And every time I got hard I felt... dirty."
It's deeper than that, more complicated. He felt sick. He felt evil. He felt like a predator. He never touched himself without a layer to hide the shape of his hand; or he'd rut against something like an animal, covering as much of himself as he could. Whenever he did look at his own erection curving against his belly it was when he was so sick and so low that his mind and body were fractured and disjointed. He would take it in one hand and it was like jerking someone else off.
Arthur watches his thumb rub up and down soft, empty skin and thinks.
"Sometimes I wish I had a vagina. Something out of the way that I wouldn't have to think about as much, or feel as often. But I'd like being like you even more." He searches for something else to say, the right words to describe how he feels when he poses in front of the mirror with his dick tucked between his legs. The way his body becomes streamlined and transforms into something both sexless and sensual. "I think I would look prettier." Arthur swallows. "I wanna- can I lick you? Here?"
"Sure you can," The man with the painted face says with a sly upward lilt, grinning like this is just another game he's won.
They move together one more time, Arthur sliding to the floor and crawling into the space the man with the painted face makes for him between his legs. Arthur reaches up and drags him closer, to the very edge of the couch, and nestles his face in the valley beneath the tendon that joins thigh to hip. He kisses the hollow there, then trails his lips along his body until they're pressed against the center of him, where the skin is petal soft. Heat radiates against his mouth, past his teeth, into his throat. Licking up and over the slope of his pelvis feels like running his tongue across polished, sun-warmed marble.
The man with the painted face tenses and shivers, though it's impossible to tell if he's feeling something or if he's pantomiming pleasure the way they've pantomimed sex - frantic nights spent forcing their bodies together in ways they were never meant to fit. Arthur pauses to suck at the place where a cock should be, or a clit, and the man with the painted face pulls him closer, raking his fingers over his scalp and twisting them in the thick locks of his hair. His grip holds the memory of every other time Arthur has been held; things tender and painful and sharpened by control. Arthur moans, open-mouthed and muffled, when he feels the quiet pressure of penetration deep inside himself.
Above him, the man with the painted face is making new sounds; desperate but muted. Soft, unthreaded, discolored, and human. And Arthur recognizes them as his own - the same sounds he had been making when they had lain together earlier, and every time they had lain together before - and he knows that this is what he would sound like if someone else touched him, if someone else loved him, if someone would just let him get close enough.
It's Wednesday and it's 4pm and Arthur is opening the door to Dr. Kane's office like he does every other Wednesday at 4. He greets her and she nods in acknowledgement as he crosses the room, toward the single chair across from her desk. It's empty and stifling and brutally hard; the same way it's been every other Wednesday at 4.
"Arthur, please sit down," Dr. Kane says, looking up at him with poorly concealed frustration. But he continues to stand, staring at all of the chairs dull wooden edges, and at the shallow dip in its seat, like he's felt it over and over but never seen it before.
"When there's a room with only one chair," he says, "that's a dangerous place, right? Because you know you'll be the only one sitting."
She doesn't respond, so Arthur keeps going.
"For a while, before things got bad, I knew something was wrong. I felt like something was wrong. And I tried to explain it to people, the ways I was feeling, and the things that were happening. And no one would take me seriously. So it got worse and worse until no one could ignore it because what I was doing was affecting them."
"That's unfortunate." She seems unsurprised, and that feels more comforting than her concern could ever be.
"No one will ever believe you if it's just you," Arthur explains, "If you're the only one sitting in a chair. Because they can't sit in the chair with you and understand how it feels. And even if you got out of the chair and let them sit in it, they'd sit a whole different way, or they'd be a different size or shape, and it wouldn't be the same at all. Why should anyone believe what you say if they can't feel the same thing you do?" Arthur runs his fingers along a narrow bridge of wood and his skin snags on the places where it has splintered with age. "Now I'm still in a chair and I'm still trying to explain to people how it feels, and it's like they believe me even less. Because they think I've only ever been in a room with one chair, and a room with one chair is a dangerous place."
When he finally sits, there's the familiar sound of wood and nails creaking nervously under the weight of his body. Dr. Kane waits in silence as he lights a cigarette; the same way she's done every other Wednesday at 4.
"You're shivering," The man with the painted face says. He's straddling Arthur, engulfing him with his body, and it had felt good until it didn't.
Arthur is shivering. Uncontrollably and violently. It's painful, and it's humiliating. He laughs and the sound is stabbed through with the clicking of his teeth. The man with the painted face lingers for a moment with his mouth at his neck, and then the shadowed weight of him is gone.
"Get up," he says, and Arthur feels himself rise and stagger to the bathroom. His body drags itself against the walls, scrapes against the doorframe, and lays itself down on cold tile. It's not soothing but it's grounding; the feeling of his bones vibrating against the floor. The air shifts above him and color blooms behind his eyelids.
The man with the painted face kneels and rests a hand on his side. He rubs him, and it's a distant warmth. Arthur feels like an animal curled up at his feet, bleeding out from an open wound. He knows that he won't die, that he will stand again on shaking legs and lick the blood from his fur, but all of him will be sticky and tender until a new scar forms. And inevitably, the same wound will tear itself open again, leaving him just as vulnerable as he is now. Feeling just as vulnerable as he had been when it was made.
A can, yeah, or a bottle. You'd need something that's only job is to open it. A can opener's only job is to open cans, and a bottle opener opens bottles.
You can smash open bottles. You could probably smash open a can if you threw it hard enough.
But that ruins what's inside. If you smash a bottle then whatever's in it'll be full of glass.
Isn't it better to have glass in you than to wait around for something special to open you up? You could die waiting for a bottle opener but anyone could smash you on a table.
Finding someone who likes drinking glass is way harder than finding a bottle opener.
You don't gotta find someone who likes drinking glass. You just gotta find someone who likes smashing bottles.
Well I guess I'd rather be unopened than undrinkable.
Lou peels an orange with his fingers, tearing apart the leathery flesh and letting the pieces fall to the ground. He's sitting with his back against the narrow trunk of a palm tree and Arthur is beside him with his arms wrapped around his drawn up legs. Far off in the distance two men play chess on a board laid out in the sand. They're too close to the tideline and the game is a precarious, vaguely frantic act, as if they're trying to finish before the ocean swallows them whole.
"Do you like to play chess, Arthur?" Lou asks.
Arthur shakes his head. "I don't know how to play. But I like the pieces. We had a nice set for a while - something someone had left behind. It was red and blue instead of black and white. As we moved from place to place it slowly disappeared, but I kept the horses. I liked them. Their colors. They felt good to hold."
"The horses are called knights," Lou says. He separates an orange segment from the others and passes it to Arthur. Its softness carries the warmth of the sun and the heat of his hands.
"I know... I just like to call them horses."
Lou feeds Arthur the orange piece by piece, until there's nothing left. They watch as the tide sweeps in and drenches the two men in salt water before carrying their board out to sea.
Lou and Arthur sit together in the dead of night. They'd driven past the city, into empty wilderness where the sky is starless. The police scanner is on and Arthur listens to quiet strings of numbers and words and remembers when he heard the same sounds in his head, secret and unshareable. Lou is picking each code out of the silence and one catches his ear.
"That's a suicide," he says.
Arthur shifts uncomfortably. "Oh?"
"Yes. They're generally not worth filming unless there's a domestic dispute involved. Murder/suicide. Family annihilation," he glances at Arthur, "public suicide. People don't want to hear about anyone who dies alone. They don't like to be reminded that they have to fear themselves."
Arthur nervously runs his fingers over the leather of the car seat. "They don't want to hear about it because those are thoughts they feel they should be punished for. They think people only talk about them to scare everyone and that makes them angry. Anyone can die if they're destroyed by other people's shame."
Lou grips the steering wheel, then reaches over to turn the scanner down. The words become whispers - indecipherable.
"My father committed suicide," he says.
Arthur doesn't speak, doesn't know if he should. The revelation is sudden and vulnerable but Lou speaks impassively.
"He hung himself at night, when no one else was home. I heard my mother scream when she found him. It was a new sound. It was anguish - different from fear. She pulled me away before I could look. I saw an empty chair toppled over in the doorway, but I wanted to see him. I wanted to know what it looked like when he died."
A lone coyote passes in front of the headlights and Lou watches it with mild interest. After it disappears into the darkness he continues.
"I didn't like him, but once he was gone I found myself missing him. The predictability of his cruelty. When life is chaotic the quiet feels dangerous. Like sharks circling the water."
Arthur nods. He remembers his mother's first marriage, then her second, and all her live-in boyfriends. Once they would leave there would be a lull in the storm of their lives that would quickly be swallowed up by her destructive loneliness and the threat of a new encroaching man. Until there were no more men and they were alone together. But fear forever tainted the air between them.
He turns to look at Lou and sees him staring out of the window into the dark. Seeking the coyote, or maybe something else.
"We should go home," Lou says, "Nothing is happening tonight." He turns the scanner off before starting the car. As they drive back toward the city, dust billows behind them.