Christopher Kills Me

 

Kim Shable

 

 

See the moon? It hates us.

--Donald Barthelme, “See the Moon?”

 

 

            Christopher kills me with his Feeling Wheel and his poster of Tintin, hanging in his bathroom so it can watch you pee. Some cover of a Tintin book I read in French class in high school—Tintin en Amerique—and he’s tied to a stake as an angry Indian points at him, his hatchet ready to taste some French blood. The poster is old and peeling away from itself in places, and above Tintin’s head, someone has written “I Taste Like Chickn!” He isn’t even on fire yet, so how can he know how he tastes?

            I let myself in even though Christopher’s there, asleep on the couch, his loafers still on. He works mornings and weekends as a CD arranger at Drew’s Party Discs, putting songs in order for Drew’s Party Classics! and Drew Goes Luau! It’s a shitty job, listening to those songs all day—they’re not even by the original artists, but Drew’s Starlite Party Band, for whom Christopher sometimes plays the vibraslap if he’s around when they’re recording. I see the discs at K-Mart sometimes, on sale for $4.99, and I read the back:

1.       At The Hop

2.       Tequila!

3.       Mockingbird

4.       Put Your Head On My Shoulder

5.       Sh-Boom Sh-Boom

6.       Blueberry Hill

7.       Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

8.       Shake, Rattle and Roll

9.       The Stroll

10.   Rockin’ Robin

 

            He says there’s an art to putting songs in order, not a science, but an art. The first song is a throwaway, one everyone will like but wouldn’t mind skipping. The second song is the one everyone buys the CD for. Four and seven are the slow dance songs, allowing plenty of time in between for the procurement of punch. Eight and ten are the sing-alongs, and three and six are the ones everyone has forgotten about until they hear them.

            Nine is the line dance. There’s always a line dance on a Drew’s Party Disc.

            I’m just here for some lemonade, I tell him. I live across the hall, but I drink his lemonade anyway. It’s better than mine because it comes from a can. Mine’s from a powder.

            They wouldn’t let me talk about the Death Star, I tell him.

            “They shouldn’t,” he says, pressing his face into the couch like a boy into his mother’s lap. “Good for them. Hurrah.”

            “We heard all about the Death Vortex and the Death Comet, but the Death Star, damn. They wouldn’t hear of it.”

            “I already said hurrah. Do you want me to throw them a ticker tape parade?”

            “Fuck you, Christopher, you and your feeling wheel. I’m taking my lemonade and going home.”

            “Later, baby.”

            I am in love with Christopher.

 

            The Death Star. It’s like Santa. No one believes in it, not really. But me. Am I the only one who sees it, dragging its death-filled sleigh behind it as it circles earth looking for the perfect parking space?

            I must be. I called NASA once, to tell them about it, right when I first found it. I tried to call NASA. But I couldn’t find the number for their emergency hotline, so I had to call the NASA Lewis Research Center in Cleveland. I thought they’d tell me what to do. Stay calm, stockpile. But the lady just asked if I wanted a tour, if she could send me some astronaut ice cream, if I knew that Ohio was really very important in America’s quest for outer space dominance. I told her to fuck Ohio, and then I hung garbage bags over my windows. No sense in watching the end of the world.

            It’s not a big loss. I miss it, during the day. The sky. Clouds and whatnot, the world a peaceful shade of asylum blue, it’s nice. But at night, I don’t look at the sky. It’s trapped-in-a-closet black, the-only-one-in-the-world black. At night, I stay inside, or keep my eyes on the ground. Unless I have my telescope. As much as I hate to keep an eye on destruction, if NASA isn’t watching the Death Star, I think someone should.

 

When I come home from dinner I find a feeling wheel under my door. “How the Death Star makes me feel,” Christopher has written at the top, and on the wheel he has circled “confused,” “angry,” “agitated,” and “concerned.” I stick it to the fridge with a magnet in the shape of a telescope and turn on the TV. If the Death Star is coming, I don’t want to see it. I want to be watching Antique Roadshow.

            Later, he knocks on my door.

            “You got my feeling wheel?”

            I point toward the fridge. “You need it back?”

            “I brought one for you.” He sits down next to me and smells good, like he’s doing it on purpose, shooting off smell rays like bottle rockets.

            “I don’t need a feeling wheel.”

            He looks at my telescope, folded up in the corner like the head of a praying mantis. “You spying on the neighbors again?”

            Using it to read the fine print on my lease. See if there’s anything about nosy neighbors with feeling wheels, neighbors who don’t wear socks, even in winter, and smell good on purpose.

            “I don’t think you should keep reporting on the Death Star,” he says.

            I say, in my head, put your hand on my knee, you fool. He doesn’t.

            “You’re making yourself sick.”

            Put your hand on my knee, would you, please?

            “When was the last time you looked up at the sky? Really looked?”

            “Yesterday.”

            “Without the telescope?”

            I told him I couldn’t remember, and would he like a Pizza Roll?

            “No, I’m going out for dinner. You can’t remember? Did you ever look at the sky?”

            “I used to, in high school. I used to go out to the basketball court behind the school and lay there and watch it. The sky. You know. Like everyone did. That’s what you did. In high school. Watch the sky and wait.”

            “What happened?”

            I hate this. It’s like a support group. My therapist doesn’t wear socks, either, and I think he shaves his legs.

            “I don’t know. Too many things fall from it. The sky. People die up there. Don’t you remember that guy in ‘Space Oddity?’ Major Tom? He went crazy up there.”

            “That’s just a song,” he says.

            “But I think it’s based on a true story.”

            He brushes a wrinkle out of his pants. “I found a new constellation yesterday.” Christopher is always doing this. Finding constellations. Opening his heart chakras. Rearranging his furniture to keep away demons. These sorts of things.

            “Did you? Fascinating.”

            I met him at a building meeting about who is leaving their garbage in the lobby? He sat next to me and whispered “Probably the same guy who lets his cat shit in the elevator.” I wanted to tell him it wasn’t a cat, it was the old man in 4A, that I had seen him do it myself, just squatting—but then his hand brushed my arm, and I was rendered speechless.

            “It is. It’s more fascinating than the Death Star.”

            It’s probably just particles of the Death Star. His constellation, a big broken cluster of Flaming Death Particles in the shape of a woman buying cans at the grocery store.

            “What does it look like? What’s it supposed to be?” I ask.

            He says it’s a depiction of the grail story, where the knight finds the sleeping woman and steals all her jewels. He says you can see the jewels and everything. He’s calling it “Seth at the Bedside.”

            “Why do you smell so good?” I ask him.

            He has a date.

            He has a date with a backup singer from Drew’s Starlite Party Band, Tiffany. Tiffany, who doesn’t know anything about the sky, or the grail story, or Tintin, and he’s smelling good on purpose for her.

            I’m going to make up a boyfriend and make him watch Antique Roadshow with me. He’s going to smell like Zest.

 

            My therapist says I should move away from Christopher. If I don’t want to look at the sky, he says, it’s my own damn business. I think he’s been drinking bourbon during our meetings lately.

            “He keeps bringing feeling wheels over,” I tell him.

            “Yeah? What’s a feeling wheel?”

            “It’s a thing—a circle, with all these lines radiating from it. The middle of the circle has what Christopher calls base emotions, and then there are these other bogus emotions that come off them. Like enervated.”

            “You think enervated is a bogus emotion?” he asks, tipping back in his tilty leather chair. On the walls are inspirational posters, eagles swooping down over mountains, the silhouettes of two young boys on bicycles. Pride, they advertise. Communication. Just once, I’d like to see one of a monkey on its back, scratching itself. Could give a shit, it would say underneath.

            “I don’t even know what enervated means,” I say. “It’s just an emotion, some dumb emotion that comes off sad, I think. Or nervous.”

            “And these are the base emotions?”

            “Two of them, yeah.”

            “Are they your base emotions?”

            “Listen.” I don’t want to talk about this anymore. The key to changing the subject in a therapy session is to say listen. Or to get up and walk around angrily, pulling your hair away from your head in messy fistfuls. That scares them, I think. But listen works well if you’re just annoyed. “Listen, I want to talk about the Death Star today.”

            “Again? With the Death Star?” He takes a swig from his water (bourbon), kept in a mug that says “Irish Do It Standing Up.” Like enervated, I have no idea what this means.

            “I just don’t understand why no one believes me,” I say. “It’s up there. I know.”

            “How do you know?”

            “I’ve seen it. I have a telescope. Any moron with a telescope can see it. It’s in Orion’s Belt. Or the Pleiades. Something like that. Anyone could see it if they just look.”

            “I just think it’s time you start looking for other things,” he says. “Get away from the Death Star. Get away from Christopher. Get back to Hillary.”

            I look out the window and cry like a woman in a made-for-TV movie would, twisting my tissue in my hands.

Christopher calls me and says he wants me to join him and Tiffany for dinner tonight at Whitey’s. I’m only going because my imaginary boyfriend and I have been having problems communicating. For someone so imaginary, he hogs the remote a lot, and he smells like sweat and onions.

            So I tell him that I’m going out with Christopher, and expect him to get jealous, but he burps instead.

            “Later,” he burps.

            I invented a very charming man.

            At Whitey’s Christopher and Tiffany sit on one side of the booth and I sit on the other. I ask the waitress for a booster seat for my son—“he’s really tiny,” I say—and she laughs and doesn’t bring the booster seat. If she had, at least it would have looked like I was with a little kid, one of the blonde-haired ones that were running free in the smoking section like antelopes. I don’t mind being alone, but I sure hate looking it.

            Tiffany.

            Tiffany is blonde and tall and thin, and I bet she looks at the sky all the damn time.

            Tiffany is only singing with Drew’s Starlite Party Band until she can get a contract of her own, Christopher says. She’s already got an agent. She writes her own songs. Why don’t you sing one for us, Tiffany?

            I kick her under the table, and pretend I thought her leg was the pole holding it up.

            “Hillary is the secretary to the vice president of affairs at Tricorp,” Christopher tells her. She sticks her nose into his neck, nuzzling, I guess, but it looks like she’s going for the jugular.

            “I type real fast,” I mutter.

            “Really,” she says. “Really fast.”

            “I got it.”

            “Well, it’s just that you said real.”

            “I have my master’s degree, you know,” I tell her. I slurp my coffee like I think someone who would say the word real instead of really would do it. I bet she thinks I say liberry and nuculer, too. And foilage instead of foliage.

            Tiffany. I bet she has her master’s, too. Her master’s in Long-Leggedness, with a Ph.D. in Pretty. I can be pretty, too, Tiffany. I have legs like circus tent poles.

            “I showed Tiffany Seth tonight,” he says. “Before you came over.”

            “That’s great.”

            “I’d like to show you sometime,” he says.

            “No thanks.” Where is our waitress, our non-booster-seat-bringing waitress who’s getting no tip from me, no tip! “Do any recording today, Tiffany?”

            “We did ‘Drew’s Smooth Grooves,’” she said.

            “I already have the CD planned out,” Christopher says, and charts it on a napkin like a to-do list of sexual healing:

1.       Candles In The Rain

2.       Let’s Get It On

3.       Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon

4.       We’ve Got To Get It On Again

5.       O-o-h Child

6.       Have You Seen Her?

7.       Never. Never Going To Give You Up

8.       What’s Going On

9.       Let’s Stay Together

10.   Up Where We Belong

 

“I don’t know if ‘Up Where We Belong’ should count as a smooth groove,” I say, downing the rest of my coffee.

“I played vibraslap on that one,” he says. “But they edited it out.”

“You can vibraslap me anytime, baby,” Tiffany says.

Tiffany. When the Death Star comes, it will hit you first.

“And there’s no line dance,” I press. “What’s a Drew’s Party Disc without a line dance?”

“You don’t line dance to Smooth Grooves,” Tiffany says, sliding her hand up the back of Christopher’s shirt. He looks like a man undergoing a rectal exam, like skin on skin contact might upset his karma. “You dance real slow.”

“Really,” I say, stirring my coffee with the tip of my finger. I resist the urge to suck it clean, to graze it with my teeth so that Christopher will see and feel and be amazed. “Really slow.”

“Yeah,” Tiffany says. “Whatever.”

“Anyway, I don’t think it’s going to sell without a line dance. You don’t need music to spend all night grinding together.”

“Maybe that’s why you’re not doing any grinding at all,” Tiffany says, and throws down her money for the tip before sauntering away to the bathroom. The tip is a gauntlet. I see hers and raise it fifty cents.

After dinner is over, after we have begun digesting ham on crescent rolls and a veggie sub for Tiffany, and we have paid our bill and walked to the parking lot, Christopher tries to trick me into looking at Seth.

“There he is, Tiffany, see? You can see him, right?”

Tiffany looks up and her long hair falls away from her neck long enough to display a tattoo—a tattoo!-- of Popeye the Sailor Man, right at her nape. “Right, he’s holding a scepter. Right?”

Like she knows the word scepter.

He nods. It’s such great fun to look at the sky, the thick black blanket with the holes poked through, suffocating. The holes are the real light, the life beyond the blanket. The blanket that wants us dead. The shroud. I won’t look, even though when my hair falls away he will see nothing but a white column, straight and fine, wispy.

The blanket that holds us back. The too big blanket. I can’t look.

“It’s a great sight, Hillary,” he says. “You should check it out. Sometime.”

“Maybe later. With my telescope.”

He opens the door to my car for me. “I don’t understand why you’ll look with the telescope and not with your eyes. You’re missing the whole point.”

They’re going to go to the park and make out. I can feel it.

 

Anyone can look at the sky. The Pope does it. Serial killers do it. Turtles. Neil Diamond. Why can’t I?

I can.

I can. I can, I will, I am. Right now. Here.

So I go into the bathroom and get into the tub. It’s the smallest room in the house, the greenest and bluest, the one that looks the most like day. It has one tiny window, above the tiling, that would let light flood the room while I bathed, if only it were uncovered. I have to stand on the edge of the tub to reach it, and it is sealed tight with tape.

Right now. I can. I will.

I peel away the first corner, where the tape is mildewed and brown with life. Three dead bees huddle on the sill, caught between the glassed-out day and the night of the garbage bag. The moon highlights them, makes them glow like costume jewelry.

I could see it from here, if I wanted to, from this one flap. But I peel away the other three by feel, my eyes stuck hard to the rust stain by the drain. The bag drops, covers the tub, slick and old.

            I look.

            I try to look. I see the moon, and that’s all. And then I jump backwards, hit my head on the toilet, cry on the floor. Tomorrow I’ll hang the bag back up. I saw the moon, and that was all.

I saw the moon.

What will Christopher say? When I tell him?

I make a chart on the back of a feeling wheel Christopher has stuck under my door, one with the words “perturbed,” “disappointed,” and “bemused” circled.

Why Tiffany Is The Wrong Person For You

 

You:                                                                        Tiffany:

Are sensitive, yet manly                                      Is the devil

Roll your ‘s’s when you’re drunk                       Eats the bones of dead babies

Know all the words to ‘Misty’                            Probably uses heroin

Once told me you were afraid of                       Looks like a polo pony

                polo ponies

Have body hair, but not too much                     Kisses with her eyes open

Are perfect                                                            Is evil

 

I slide it under his door and go to sleep, waiting for the magic to happen. I should have made a folder for it, I think as I begin to drift. I should have used brads.

            In the morning I go to Christopher’s for lemonade wearing a Special Sweater, one that’s cut low so my breasts cohese into a butt, two sexual body parts for the price of one. He has already poured himself some, and is using my chart as a coaster.

            When he was fifteen, he was a model for one of the cards in Mystery Date. I think the card said his name was Chet, and he liked to go hiking with special ladies. I have it in my room, between my box spring and mattress. I bought the whole damn game at an antique shop just for that card. And he’s using my chart as a coaster.

            He wouldn’t be doing this if there had been brads.

            “Nice graph,” he says.

            “It was a chart.”

            “I think you need to get a grip,” he says.

            I’ll grip Tiffany’s neck. Is that good? I can make Popeye’s eyes bulge.

            “Do you think you’re better for me than Tiffany is?” he says.

            Then he says: “At least she’s not afraid of the sky falling. Chicken little.”

            Then he says: “At least she isn’t hanging out with girls she met at her phobia support group. She’s not wasting her time looking for the world to end.”

            It wasn’t a phobia support group. Just a regular one.

            “At least she can look at things without a telescope.”

            “I’m leaving,” I say.

            He shreds the chart, the chart that says he’s perfect, and throws it in the air, confetti. It lands in his hair.

            Christopher kills me.

 

            The therapist tells me he’s leaving me for someone else.

            “I have to drop you,” he says, his legs crossed tight at the ankle. “My schedule is full, and there’s a new girl who wants in, multiple personalities, maybe. Could make me famous. Like the woman who wrote Sybil.”

            “Wonderful,” I say. “Who do you want to play you in the miniseries?”

            “Now, listen, Hillary—”

            “I could play the girl. I have acting experience. I was in Annie Get Your Gun in high school.”

            “We only have one more hour together.” He sounds like Moses. “Do you want to waste it arguing about the new girl, or do you want to talk?”

            “I want you to talk,” I say. “I’ve been coming here for two years, and you haven’t told me one damn thing that’s wrong with me. You haven’t helped me at all. So spill it. Look at the sky, don’t look at the sky, kill Christopher, kill myself, become an astronaut, what? What do I do? Tell me what to do. That’s how I want to spend our last hour.”

            “I can’t.”

            “What?”

            “I can’t tell you what to do, Hillary, you know that. That’s not what counseling is all about.”

            “This is bullshit. You don’t even know what’s wrong with me, do you?”

            “We were supposed to figure it out together,” he says. “But you wouldn’t cooperate.”

            “Wouldn’t cooperate?” I want to rip out my hair in fistfuls, shove it down his throat. “I told you everything. About the Death Star, about Christopher, about the sky. Everything. You know it all. How is that not cooperating?”

            “Because you never told me one thing about yourself.”

            “Like what. My middle name? It’s Flora. There. Now you know everything.”

            “You’re just afraid to get to close,” he says.

            “I know everything about the outside, and nothing about the inside,” he says.

            “This isn’t a relationship,” he says. “It’s a study.”

            “Goodbye,” he says, and ushers me to the door before our time together is up.

 

            Later, Christopher comes by for lemonade.

            He says he’s sorry, stirring his powder and water into lemonade. He adds ice. He’s sorry he was so rude to me this morning.

            He says he just doesn’t understand. It’s just the sky. It’s never killed anyone before.

            Tell it to the dinosaurs, I tell him.

            “I just don’t see the problem.” On the feeling wheel, I am ‘disgruntled.’ I am ‘misunderstood.’

            “I’m looking for another constellation tonight,” he says. “I think you should come with.”

            Another thing to add to my list: you: say come with. Tiffany: somehow involved in the Kennedy assassination.

            “You can bring your telescope,” he says.

            So that’s where we are now: sitting on the hood of my car behind the Circle K. I swing my telescope on its tripod from east to west, lazily, with one finger. Maybe toward Seth, maybe toward the Death Star. I don’t know. I can’t look.

            “It’s just the sky,” he says again. “Just look.”

            “I thought you said I could use my telescope,” I say.

            “I said you could bring it. Not use it. Just look.”

            “I saw the moon yesterday,” I tell him.

            “You did not.”

            “I did. I took down the bag from my bathroom window and looked.”

            “Then you can do it again,” he says.

            “No.”

            And then he wraps my hair around his fist—my hair, my God, he’s touching my hair!-- and yanks my head back, and that’s it. I’m looking. And I see a mouth, a giant mouth open with teeth shining. I see the moment after the coffin is closed, when dust motes begin to settle. I see the Death Star.

            And then I just see the sky. Not so bad. Christopher’s thin arm with its thin hand with its thin fingers in my hair, up close. Big. Something to focus on, a pinpoint, a view through a telescope.

            “You see Seth?” he says.

            “I think I see the Death Star,” I say. “Above that antenna.”

            “That’s an airplane. Look.” He points with his free hand—the other one is in my hair, it’s in my hair, it’s in my hair—to a spot above the Weiner Works three doors down. “See him? By the bedside? With the jewels?”

            I don’t see anything, but I lie and say I do. I see it all. Especially the jewels. What’s that one, an emerald?

            He tells me they’re all diamonds.

            “You can find one,” he says. “It’s easy. Like connect the dots. Find one,” he says.

            “Christopher, I don’t think—”

            “Find one,” he repeats, yanking my hair.

            I scan the sky for something, thinking it will be easy, like finding shapes in clouds—this one’s a clown with a pie, a three-legged pony, an elephant with a guy in one of those hats shaped like an onion on its back. There’s nothing like that anywhere.

            “This is stupid,” I tell him.

            “You’re stupid.”

            “My therapist dropped me today,” I say, my eyes still scanning the sky.

            “Yeah?”

            “He thinks I should drop you, too.”

            I stare into the sky, and he puts his free hand on my knee.

            Forget you, Christopher. I can find my own constellation.