WE ARE OBLIVION, CHAPTER ONE (MICHAEL SONBERT)
The girl known only to me as Fancy is sitting on the toilet with the door open when she says, “We should go to Paris.”
“Paris,” I whisper under my breath, staring at the tulips in the kitchen as the teapot whistling in the background sounds like a screaming, helpless child.
“Jesus, turn that thing off,” she says as she spits on the floor. I don’t know why that turns me on as I pour hot water into the flower pot, wondering if it’s possible to burn a flower from the root up.
Steam rises as the TV shouts, begs for attention in the distance.
She grabs me from behind and whispers, “Have you ever wondered what it would be like to kill someone?”
A bird bangs off the window in the kitchen right in front of us and we both jump. All I can think about is how broken its tiny neck must be as it falls to the dirty, freezing sidewalk.
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“Have you ever thought about killing someone, what it would feel like?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
“I think I have, I just can’t remember.”
“I think we should do it. I think we should kill someone.”
The tulips look just as alive as a minute earlier and I’m sad because I want them to be on fire, I want everything to be on fire.
“We should kill the President,” she says, as I lean down to the tulips. “…Not for political reasons or anything…but just because everyone always remembers the people that kill The President…or at least the people that try to.”
Her stomach looks a little bloated as she walks past me.
Too much vodka? Not enough food? Who knows?
“I haven’t had my period in a while,” she says, as I take a match to the flowers.
“So,” I say, watching the flame destroy the petals, one by one.
“So I haven’t had it in almost seven months…and that’s a long time.”
“That is a long time,” I say, as I inhale burning tulip smoke into my lungs and hold it. I exhale and feel dizzy…maybe from some sort of tulip high, maybe from holding my breath. “We can’t kill the President,” I say.
“Why not?”
“Because we’ll never be able to get close enough. Besides, killing The President would be like killing a cockroach. It would probably feel good at first, like you accomplished something, until you realize that there are millions of people like that. And that another one would take his place in a second.”
She’s in the bedroom, rummaging through a pile of clothes. “We should go to Paris.”
I don’t say anything. Outside the window, a black helicopter is flying low. Its light is on even though it’s the middle of the day.
“You can fuck me under The Eiffel Tower.”
“OK,” I say.
“Or maybe we’ll go up on the thing, I don’t care. I’ll wear a skirt with no underwear and you can come up behind me and put your jacket around me and fuck me while all the fag tourists watch. What’dya think?”
“I think that tulip just got me high.”
She smiles and throws her bag over her shoulder. She kisses me on the cheek and says, “I’m going to make us some money. I’ll see you in the morning.”
I spend most of the night burning and inhaling the tulips, and jerking off, and also after discovering a small Superman tattoo on my chest, over my heart, I try shooting lasers out of my eyes like Superman and I’m only mildly surprised when it works. And then I die and then I come back to life. And then I eat a peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwich because that’s all we have in the fridge. And then I smoke some more tulip. And then I try slitting my wrists but I use a plastic knife and all I do is scratch the shit out of myself. And then I prank call a bunch of numbers and whenever I get a woman I tell her I’m going to kill her but I don’t say who I am, but I tell them all, “Rest assured bitch, you’ll be dead by Monday.” And then I stand against the wall for forty five minutes in a row without moving, trying to look like a painting. And then I stand in the bathroom doorway and count 1,000 drops of water as they drip from the leaky, mold covered faucet and I wonder if all that water accumulated, would it be enough for me to drown myself. And then I force myself to throw up, just because I feel like it. And then I snort something white that I find on the bathroom sink that at first I think might be coke but it turns out it’s just baby powder (lavender), and I imagine the inside of my right nostril is smooth and baby fresh and that makes me laugh. And then I try to burst my appendix by hitting myself in the side with a hammer but all I do is give myself an awful red mark. And then she comes home and the sun comes up and I don’t ask her how many guys she had sex with, I only ask her if she wants some breakfast. And she says no and hops right into a shower.
I sleep most of the day, next to the girl known only to me as Fancy, except when I get up to shoot more lasers out of my eyes like Superman and except when she gets up because her vagina is burning so bad that she has to put ice on it.
“Anything interesting happen here last night?” she asks.
“No,” I say, unwilling to let her know that I discovered that I may be a superhero. She starts saying something but I go deaf and watch her talking with no sound, like she’s underwater, and then my hearing comes back and I get half an erection in my dirty underwear.
“Did you hear me?”
“I guess not.”
“Oh…I was telling you that last night I fucked my first Spic.”
I look at her the way a baby would look at an alien.
“Oh…I’m sorry…a Spic-American,” she says and does air quotes with her fingers. “And I gotta be honest, he wasn’t that dirty like Theresa says they are.”
“Isn’t Theresa the one who thinks the sun and the moon are the same thing?”
“She just said that as a joke.”
“How much money did you make?”
“Umm…four hundred,” she says. “Why?”
“I don’t know…maybe we should take a trip. Get out of here for a while.”
“Really?! You really want to go on a trip?! You never want to go anywhere!”
She looks happy but I’m deaf again and can’t hear her.
“Wait…are you fucking with me?” She asks as my ears turn back on.
“No. I want to leave this apartment,” I say. “And I don’t think I ever want to come back.”
“Can we go to Paris? I want to see The Eiffel Tower.”
We pack a few things and take all of her hooker money and leave. But before we get all the way down the hall I tell her I need to go back for something.
I sneak back in the apartment and crush a bunch of newspapers together, making a big ball. I hold a match to the edge. In an instant it crumples up black and turns to fire. I throw the fireball on the bed and the bed ignites. The fire burns up the unmade blanket and stretches its arm down the side of the bed devouring the bed skirt. Some fire leaps up onto the curtains and begins eating them alive. I leave and we walk out to the sounds of alarms buzzing and people yelling.
We steal a car. We see one running in a parking lot so we hop in and drive away. But it’s a piece of shit and it barely goes more than ten miles and hour. So after about three hundred yards we stop. I hold my foot on the brake as we get out and then I let off and the car drives slowly down the main road with the doors open and nobody inside and it looks hilarious, especially when everyone with their shiny cars start driving all over the road trying to avoid the thing. And then she tells me that we’re morons because we stole a car from a service station and that it must’ve been a broken down wreck that they were working on. But I don’t care as we get on the next bus. The bus is warm and it drives smooth and I watch the town shrink behind us. Then I shoot laser beams out of my eyes like Superman. Then I fall asleep.