Nobody's Taken Your Place*


He prayed he had gone mad.

All of time and space reeled like a nightmare, or a dream, or both mingled within the vortex of the unforgiving brick-walled room, tasting of blood and salt and death itself, he swore. His lip was split, he realised now, the back of the one hand stained red as he drew it away, the sight stunning him. He must be mad, had to be, begged heaven (what heaven?) for it as he slammed his own arms against the wall now and choked a sound out through his clenched teeth, biting his arm then to smother himself (you do not, you do not, you do not deserve to scream to cry to acknowledge worldly pain you hateful boy, how could you, how could you...) How could he have, what did he think, how did he dare to dream?

She was frozen, but a cell in time, a mirage wavering there where she stood as the black spots dripped down his eyeballs on either side of her form, a frame for Ophelia submerged in his own tears, drowning and slipping away. But Ophelia herself had died an easy death; it is a little, easy thing to slip into sleep with the purest compound in existence filling the lungs, feeling as if it's replacing the blood in one's very veins and then darkness, and then light, a few wildflowers clutched in one's hand, the pansies and spiked rosemary, the bitter herb (the one for remembrance and not all the water in the world will ever be able to purge you and make you forget). Ophelia had not worn fishnet stockings, torn now and weaving blood around their mangled threads in an incomprehensible fashion. Nor had she been left to tug at the seam of the most pitiful tartan-plaid pleated miniskirt in history (in all her life she had never worn a skirt before today) where it had ripped down, staring without seeing and asking again and again in a soul-less voice "What did you do, me cor', what did you do?" She raised her head, the red line rolling down the side of her lip, her chin, then falling off to become part of the pattern on the floor, and her eyes met his and froze, she shook her head numbly and asked him one final time, "What did you do?" And he choked on his sobs and slammed his fists into his own aching stomach until he began to scream as if he'd never stop, what they call screaming bloody murder, because that's what it is, it was, it will forever be, blood and tears and all those other components of the body water-based, coming together in his throat, only teasing at drowning him, a moment in time and space forever left behind to haunt an east-end warehouse abandoned but for this.

He watched her walk away.

The time could be measured in years now, not a year and then months, since he'd found the grave; the headstone inadequate for she-who-lay-beneath, he wreathed it with flowers as he would have done her head, and when he left her in the mornings the frost had crystallized them into jewels, Cinderella re-enacted sans the happy end. At last he erected his own memorial to her, a copy of Wuthering Heights , half-buried in the earth by her head and mouldering now. He stayed in the cemetery all night for weeks and stared down things he'd never seen before, daring them to come close to her bed, fear a foreign concept but to her; she had no fear of dying, but rather, of the dead and in life she had watched, unblinking, in the dark for its duration. Only when the images had disappeared did he sleep, stretched out across the grave with one arm over it and his hand resting where he imagined her heart to be, blending in his sinking thoughts with the nights he had slept like that to be sure it was still beating. He'd awake with a start, certain he perceived her there, and the hell of finding it had been but a dream was enough to kill him, he was sure. That's all he wanted, anyhow, to be tucked into the box with her and hold her at his side, and no more endless cycles of tempestuous days and nights and give and take and sleep and wake again. Eventually he wove back into the world of convention, or something.

comparable. It was there that they met again, months later, keeping each other at an arm's length, because how do you act toward the person with whom you have but a dead lover in common? He realised early on that she had no idea where the grave was, and he had no intention of telling her, making his mind believe it was because the knowledge would only hurt her more. In time things changed between them, because they had to, they were all each other had left in the world. He saw her for herself, not an extension of a ghost-girl gone, nothing physical to remain but the terrible scar on her breast. They awoke now by each other's side, but that was all because she wouldn't have it any other way, her heart was in the buried box and would always be, take it or leave it, and so he took what he could and eventually found he'd fallen in love again. In time he ceased trying to hide it in silly camaraderie and biting remarks, it had become too difficult and was without point. There were moments, more and more frequent, when he thought his heart would burst and he'd beg her to come with him (come with me to the north, what have we got to lose, and we'll live in a little house there, isolated, by the sea, silent save for the sound of terns and waves, far from this god-damned city that's killing us both, swallowing our souls a little more every day, and I won't ask you to marry me, I swear, I only want you at my side for all the days I have left here, oh god say yes say you'll come my only one, my only peppermint-girl).

But she said no every time, that that was not the life she was meant to live, and as cruel as it was, this city had to be her home, and after she fell asleep at last, he cried.

It had ruined him.

She found the grave that morning, he knew even before she told him, something in her stare gave it away, and he couldn't accept this, would not stand for it. The dead girl had already broken his heart twice, in contrition and in death, and here she was back to break it yet again by taking all that he had left to live for. He hated them both at that moment, the peculiar breed of hate which makes the heart ache harder because there is really too much love. She spoke the words then, making it all too real and he went mad (or so you hoped) and a thousand years of the sleeplessness that comes with consciousness broke, a torrent of justice in injustice, and he loved her so much he slammed her against a wall, and struck her across the face so hard her head spun before he shook her for all he was worth and hurled her to the ground, wrapping a hand around her mouth and choking on the words, "I love you," again and again and again. After a time she ceased fighting back. He never saw her eyes, brown and green and gold and full of fire, trained on the ceiling, not seeing it as it was, but rather watching the past and future unfold in perfect order with the cosmos; in that instant she saw herself from above and knew everything. If only she could remain there, tearing away and away from the physical and beyond the furthest reaches of the universe, but it was not to be, and in the next instant she had plunged back to now in horror, reaching desperately to maintain her hold on the cease of dimension even while slamming hopelessly back into her body here on earth. She lay herself down under a subway car a few days later. Mike Zephyr had come to him where he sat waiting, in her old room, to ask what they should do with the body, the coroner was waiting on the telephone for an answer. In the end they had her cremated because it was all any of them could afford. They buried her on the ninth day of the first month, nineteen eighty-one, and he had to be carried away afterwards, supported on either side by her friends and his peers, he had lost the function of both legs and one arm in the days preceding.

If there had been no sleep prior, the days to follow became, then, Sartre's hell, without even the supreme luxury of a blink to break the endless horror of the days and nights all run together for an eternity. The fourteenth day of the first month, nineteen eighty-one, and he filled the bath and watched the steam and felt it wrap around his eyes and bring forth the same black ink to drip down the edges of his field of vision, and beyond. And it would have been pointless to open the veins of his wrists, when that would never bring him- did he dare to say- anything somewhere near to peace of mind, because it wasn't his wrists that made him what he was. How many times had she said "If only you had been born a girl"? What then? Why wonder when he knew the answers to this and every question ever asked in love or hate or loneliness so profound, but not quite so enough to forgive him the greatest crime of all he had committed in his twenty-one years in this life, his sex? It is a little, easy thing to slip into sleep with the purest compound in existence filling the lungs, feeling as if it's replacing the blood in one's very veins and then darkness, and then light. He had suffered enough for his wrongs ('...Forgive me the wounds, and all the world was used to love and yes! we'd still be happy in another time, but so what?'*).

Mike Zephyr found his remains there late that afternoon; the razor, stained now, laying on the floor, the knees at a bizarre angle and, as he came closer, the face and body invisible, submerged under a pool of dark, dark red. The cause of death should have been obvious, but an autopsy needed to be done just the same, a formality of the state. When the results came back they read them in horror, and turned away hugging their arms around themselves in assurance of their own beingness. He had not, in fact, died as a result of the perfectly unperceivable type of self-mutilation. His lungs, it was found, were filled with the water from the bath, and so it was, he had drowned in his own blood.

*from "So What?" The Cure's Boys Don't Cry album, copyright 1979 Elektra/Asylum Records.



--N. E. Buenzle