Drown in Yoghurt and Formaldehyde

(one)

Like Darkness in a Jar

“A little less happiness, please, Joey?”

That frustrated request, a little smile. I wonder if she’ll forever stay this way.

“Come on.” She pulls at my arm, takes my hand away from my guitar. I’ve been playing karaoke songs for her, at her request, to pass the time. Five hours ‘til our respective three-hour exams and nothing to do but crash and burn. We’re both too lazy to study and simply too resigned at the prospect of failure. We’re seniors. We’re Ateneans. We’re rich. More importantly, we’re connected. We can get hundred-thousand-peso jobs at a text message’s notice.

“This is not happiness,” I tell her. I sling the guitar over one shoulder. “This is manic-depression, nicotine-deprivation—”

Sara lets out a laugh that draws everyone’s attention. It is finals week and no one isn’t feeling a little homicidal. Everybody’s thirsty for blood, especially of those who have the gall to laugh.

I flash the finger to one I catch glaring, but surreptitiously, so she does not know. She hates it when I intimidate people into letting them accept her idiosyncrasies.

Nothing’s wrong, I remember her telling me, with bullying people into dealing with you. But it’s another thing to make them cave in to dealing with me. That’s just… crass.

Oh, sure. Whatever she says.

I remember telling her that it didn’t matter since I have no desire for them to like me. Or even have them think that I am a likeable person. I just don’t care. But Sara. Sara… That’s different.

I catch her looking at me, the way she’s taken to looking at me when she doesn’t think I know. This time, however, she smiles and it’s that smile that sucks the air out of me.

A couple of steady breaths and an averted gaze, and I’m all better.

Sara is potent. And it’s getting dangerous because she’s beginning to know it.

“You going anywhere after the exams?” she asks me, tilting her nose up in the air. Nothing like “normal” conversation to give people another opportunity to hide from what’s already in front of them.

I shrug.

“I need to get something for Mom.” I’m sure the confusion is clear on my face, since she swats me and lets out another laugh. “Tanga. It’s her birthday this Saturday. Although, it’s just constant—”

“Denial,” I finish for her.

She shrugs, not unlike how I do it.

“I don’t see what the big deal is with the big 5-0,” she says, a little disdainfully. “The world doesn’t stop there.”

She doesn’t understand that it might. Even if we’re the same age, to her, youth is constant and age is as far away as one of the abstractions in the poetry I slave over, to her scarily mathematical mind. To her, it’s all concepts proven by a graph and concrete formulas, despite that laugh, that smile, the innocence.

I see time, age, youth running by me, mocking, second by second, every day. And what frightens me is that sometimes, they’re flesh and blood.

“What’ll I get her, you think?” she asks me.

“A mirror.”

Eight and a half hours later, in my car, driving around, wasting gas. In the shadows of looming mansions in this stiff little exclusive subdivision, the Jag—one of the few gifts from my father that I actually care for—fits perfectly, like a puzzle piece.

Riding shotgun is Sara, singing a little breathlessly. Hard metal complete with impressive tongue-gouging screaming but she’s relentless. Despite the occasional wince for her poor ears and even poorer throat, she sings on. I’m impressed she knows all the words.

“…please use my body while I sleep…”

At a STOP sign held up by a harassed security guard, I turn off the CD player and she falls as silent. Only when we move again does she speak.

“You never told me what you were getting for Mom.”

“Oh. Why would I get her anything?”

“Well…”

I slam on the breaks to let a darting cat live its remaining lives.

Her surprised yelp and the subsequent “fucker!” amuse me but I do not laugh, don’t even give any indication that I heard her. A murmur of “shit” or a gasping “oh my God” from her is enough to raise people’s eyebrows and it’s more than enough to drive her crazy. So many people have labeled Sara as an angel that I think she’s starting to believe it herself.

“Are you okay?” I ask her.

“You should’ve killed the fucking animal!” she yells at me, massaging the spot on her shoulder where the seatbelt dug in. “No one cares.”

I look at her closely but she’s preoccupied with unbuttoning her blouse, reaching for that sore spot. At the glimpse of her plain, serviceable bra, I rev the idle car and drive on.

Sara was one of those people who turn spotty red and cry buckets at the first sniff of a cat. I had no idea her dislike surged this deep, however.

“Were your exams hard?” I ask, breaking the charged silence that followed her words.

She doesn’t answer me. I risk a glance at her and see that her blouse is completely undone. There is a diagonal red welt on her white skin and her fingers skim over it like a hovering bee.

Ever since I could remember, she’d always had sensitive skin.

“Are you okay?” I look back at the road in front of me.

“You don’t have to talk,” she says.

I purse my lips and nod.

That’s the first thing I said to her. When we were both twelve, my father and her mother left us in my father’s empty conference room. I didn’t even bother to look at her, since I figured she was more than making up for both of us. She’d been staring at me openly the moment our parents introduced us to each other and it was only a matter of time, I was sure, before she started blabbing.

Predictably, she did. About a show in Cartoon Network, her mom’s car, a new Polly Pocket and her pet dog. All in one jumbled burst of speech.

“…and then there’s ‘Oh, Clementine’ whatsisname and this puppy Mr. Bubbles, oh, he’s such a little dog we found limping along the—”

“You don’t have to talk,” was what I first told her. Ah, so bitter, even at the cusp of childhood, the shaky beginning of adolescence. So screwed up that even when this fascinating creature with large, wide eyes and unstoppable mouth was practically throwing herself at my feet, all I could do was pretend I didn’t care.

She blinked at me then and nodded slowly. Then, she gave me that half-smile, the first of many.

Now, in my car, we have long since passed that wariness and the feigned indifference. Now, she knows I care. And she doesn’t have to agonizingly draw it out of me.

We are both twenty and itching to get out to the world. One of us—most probably her—would end up in that very conference room. Who knows, maybe two as-yet-conceived kids, one glum, one deliciously perky, would meet there in the future. But oh, how clichéd.

It’s exactly what I could write about but would never believe; it’s exactly what Sara would fantasize about but could never understand.

I look at her then and it’s her blouse I check first. Neat, prim, buttoned to her throat.

There is a God.

She’s looking out the window and I can see her reflection on its surface. Pensive, if not a little solemn. But resolute.

I evade a hump on the road before I return to looking at her. She couldn’t have changed in less than a second but I wanted to be sure. And I just wanted to watch her.

She was smiling again. Her fingers were making lazy circles on the hem of her blouse, causing it to inch up to reveal tormenting glimpses of her smooth skin.

A goblin, all sorts of stupid and crazy, wants to leap out of me.

But how could I begin? How should I dare to?

When Sara speaks, she strengthens my belief that we could read each other’s minds.

“Do we have to go home?” she whispers. I could hear every word, every lilt, every meeting and parting of her lips, the sliding of her tongue.

I take a deep breath. My heart is thudding in my ears.

Taking my time with my answer, I turn left at an intersection. After a few moments, I feel her hand on my thigh, way too high, too close. Too warm.

“Do we have to go home?” she asks me again.

Red light. I look at her, steeling myself. She doesn’t look any different this time. Same half-smile waiting to burst into a laugh, same severe ponytail with a glimmer of red.

“Janet…” I begin, referring to her mother. But she laughs at this too so I stop.

“Janet doesn’t care.”

I nod.

Red dappled light on her cheek. Raindrops against the windshield. Yellow light against her skin, then green. The corner of her full lips tilts up. At the sound of an angry horn, I turn to the road.

She squeezes my thigh and lets out another laugh.

“We’re not going home,” she says, sure of herself. “Not yet.”

With every inch of her skin bared, I feel myself sinking deeper into a pit I’d never get out of. Right here, in front of her, above her, I have no desire to go away. I’ve thrown out common sense, trampled all over my conscience.

This is so right, so perfect, so fitting.

She’s always belonged to me and I to her. In my dreams, day or night, she’s ever-present, that porcelain face filling the void that was once the very core of my being. Her eyes, large, expressive and deep, captivate with their light brown hue, their thick fringe of lashes. Her lips are of the softest, pinkest flesh. So tender to the touch, so pleasing to my jaded eyes. Her lips, her lips. How long I’ve dared to worship that strawberry smile.

And then there was her skin. So milky, so smooth. It seemed, not so long ago, that if I dared touch it, touch her with these ugly brown hands, touch that wonderfully living flesh of her body, she would shatter. The porcelain smoothness would be tainted and she would be ruined forever, all because I dared.

But now I touched, I reveled. And Sara, dear Sara, was whole, and I was part of her.

This couldn’t be wrong, could it? Could it?

I can hear the moist parting of her lips, right before she sighs. When she speaks, it is her lips I still listen to.

“Joey?”

I’ve parked in the cul-de-sac where our house is. From inside my car, I see that only my younger brother Dom’s bedroom lights are on, though even they are on low, burning a slow orange. He’s most probably smoking pot.

“Can’t we—”

I know it’s a display of my cowardice that I cut her off. But I have to. “Are you cold?”

She gives me a look and from that she lets me know that she knows what I’m up to.

She wipes the condensation off the windows before she rests on it. “Okay, if that’s what makes you feel better.” She sighs again. “Talk about darkness.”

It was familiar territory. Even before I knew I could write, she kept pushing me to make up worlds for her or deconstruct something and hand it to her, wrapped in my words.

“Talk about darkness.”

“I might sound like a poem.”

She straightens. On the surface of the window, I could see a five-peso-large oil stain from her skin. She rubs it off when she follows my line of sight. “Pay attention to me.”

“I am.”

“Fine. Sound like a poem then.”

I’ve been watching the parting of her lips once more and their even more sensual closing, as though she savored her words. She puts a hand to her mouth and lets out a grumble.

I look away then, searching for something. The wall in front of us, Dom’s bedroom window, the dead mango tree in front of his house. I want to return to Sara, to drown in her. Or maybe I could just look. The words usually come then.

I settle on my reflection in the sidemirror.

“You can cup darkness in your hands, like you do when you caught something like magic by accident. As if cupping it would really keep it.”

I breathe deeply. I disappear in the mirror. Her hand rests on my knee, like it has always belonged there.

“You can put darkness in a jar. As long as you put holes on the lid. Only four, though, don’t forget that.” I know there’s a smile or something like it on my lips. Sara told me there usually was when I talk to her about… things.

“Darkness in a jar. It’s what you’ll stare at when you’re done tossing and turning, when he can no longer understand you, when he turned away to sleep. It becomes the cracks in the ceiling, the tongue you watch snaking out of your lover’s lips, every time he yawns.”

We are both quiet then. Above us, Dom puts his speaker volume on maximum and The Used filters towards us.

“Why four?” she asks. She was never one for silence.

“I like how it sounds.”

“Are there really cracks in the ceiling?”

“Not when you live in these houses.” I gesture around me, to indicate the American South knock-off houses in this third-world country.

She chuckles. “Your tongue does snake out when you sleep. I’ve watched you.”

What could I say to that? I’ve watched her sleep too. In the end, I put my hand above hers.

“What happens to the jar?” she asks me.

She closes the distance between us and rests against my side. I can feel her breasts against my arm.

That is when I look at her. But I have no chance to fully see her, as her face, her lips, her breath, are pressed close to mine.

Somehow, I know she has that smile on her face.

“Now.” She licks her lips, and mine too, and her tongue touches me, sin against my lips. “Talk about this.”

“Everything is about sex,” I remember her telling me once. We were both thirteen, I think, and we’d just waded through her mother’s collection of romance books. We’ve been at it since the week before, when we’d caught her reading one of it with her arms wrapped around my father.

I had tossed a book in her direction, one with a particularly racy cover: a man who looked like every other hero in Janet’s library, holding a scantily-clad woman with an impossibly helpless expression.

“Romance,” I scoffed.

“Not just these. Everything.”

As though to prove her point, my father entered the room, with Janet tossed over his shoulder. They were both laughing and squealing like little children. I froze where I was, but Sara turned to me then and smiled her little smile.

My father was the first who saw us. “Joseph, Sara, what are you doing here?”

Janet struggled with him to get down, giggling all the while. When she straightened, she hooked an arm around my father and smiled at both of us. “Your daddy and I sort of need this room, darling.” When my father chuckled, I made a face. Janet saw this and pounced. “Well, then, Joey, be a responsible kuya and go to the park with your sister.”

We left the room then, me dragging Sara along with me. We didn’t speak; just held each other’s hands tightly. At the foot of the stairs, we stopped and she rested her forehead on my back.

“I told you,” she said.

Labels: General Fiction

posted by Sasha Martinez @ 9:10 AM 0 Comments