28. “Breathe”Amir looked at me over the pile of clothing. He could have been a demented tailor, making ingenious creations out of little more than paper and thread. Fashions from the 1920s mated with fashions from the 1890s, colors clashed, hairstyles unfurled, Abraham Lincoln stood around in his underwear next to Carmen Miranda. Gibson girls and Marlene Dietrich swapped fashion tips. But Amir wasn’t doing it because he liked it. It seemed very hard to believe that to alleviate the boredom, Amir had decided to take up paper dolls. Oh, I’m sure it was because he missed out on it when he was a little kid. I put my head in my hands. When had I become this sarcastic and cynical? It seemed like the world was just there to torment and fuck with all of my emotions. Took another cigarette out of the pack on the table and lit it deftly, staring at him the whole time, staring at the glittering steel as it sliced and diced and no blood came out.
It was only by pretending that I didn’t care at all that I could get through the day. Jay dealt with it differently, staying with everyone else only when he had to, perhaps when he was eating or when we were recording, then he’d just go back to our room and sleep. I didn’t doubt that he needed the rest, it was just that it seemed like a childish way to deal with things. Of course, I totally understood why he did it though, because Ryan was acting like the world’s biggest asshole (as if he didn’t do that already). Anytime Jay was even in the same room Ryan would pop open a can of beer and drink it loudly, making little comments about how good it tasted and continue in that vein until Amir or Paige told him to shut up. They hardly ever did. I made sure to never let Ryan and Jay be alone in the same room together.
Snip snip snip snip snip snip snip snip snip... Grating metal, sexual tension, Amir would look at me like he was imagining me naked. I would glower at him like I was imagining him leaving me the fuck alone for once. But oh no, Bobby has to be constantly watched because he might just go psycho and cut himself again. If anyone was supposed to worry about me, it was Jay and Jay alone. The temptation to just stab out my cigarette on Amir’s hand, grinding down until it made a permanent mark, was almost, almost, over-whelming.
Instead I reached over and grabbed his spare pair of scissors. He opened his mouth and made fish faces as I opened and closed them. Did he really think that I’d do it in front of him?
The scissors were heavier than I remembered, the orange just about as unflattering as anything I had ever seen. Ran my finger over the manufacturer’s name, the blades were smooth except for a few rough spots. Plastic and metal entwined in a vicious lover’s embrace. They were made in Korea, it seemed so odd that a country thousands of miles away had created my addiction. Amir looked like he was going to run out and grab Paige to hold me down and force feed me sleeping pills or lock me in the closet again.
Instead of lifting my sleeve and having at it, I reached for the pile of paper doll books and pulled out one of the “Fashions of the Gilded Age”. Turned to the first page, a fat and ugly old man in his underwear and started to cut. A few times I came close to perhaps turning him into the first castrated man in the series, but my hands finally stopped shaking and I continued. Amir watched me like it was my first time using scissors and I felt that as soon as I finished he would start clapping and give me a cookie or something. That brought back memories of Gavin, of how I couldn’t even deal with that.
I cut as hard as I could randomly. The old man’s wife’s head fell to the table. Amir jumped back as if I had really cut someone’s head off. In a way, I wished that I had. She stared at me accusingly, her ringlets spun in white, her eyes swirled with blue. Yet I continued to dismember her until her arms floated down to land near her head and her legs underneath the bodice or whatever the hell it was were cut into a thousand pieces. Flipped to the next page, the younger husband and his wife. Husband had huge pecs, wife had big breasts, so realistic. They had to die. Or at least join their relatives in pieces on the table. Amir watched for a while as I slowly cut small pieces out of paper flesh and made small piles of limbs on the table. He still looked like a demented guppy gasping for breath.
“T...those cost five dollars apiece!” he cried out finally, reaching for the scissors. I handed them to him slowly, letting my fingers trail off of the blades. I was done with my carnage. Well, not yet.
Put my cigarette down onto the shiny paper and let some of their bodies burn. Then I just flicked the dead cigarette into the ashtray and put out the small fire. Amir kept on staring at it like I was insane. “That was mean.” he whispered.
I sighed and rubbed at my forehead vaguely before getting up and leaving the room. I was losing it, losing all concept of what reality was and how I should relate to it.
Paige and Ryan were in the living room jabbering mindlessly. They stopped as I walked in. Ryan put his head on Paige’s shoulder and whimpered, Paige gently ran his hand over Ryan’s swollen cheek and glared at me. I sighed and ran up the stairs, hoping that Jay was awake.
I almost tripped over the spilled sleeping pills. Thankfully, it was most of the ones in the package, so it wasn’t as bad as I thought. Bottle overturned, cap torn off and flung to the far reaches of the carpet. The little fake cotton wad thing was a little bit further on. Jay was curled up in bed in a fetal position, his favorite right now. He’d pulled the blankets and comforters and other shit all around so it was like a little nest. I stood in the doorway and stared at him for a while. Then I found myself crawling into bed next to him and snuggling up to him, sighing as I pushed my forehead against his back. He breathed in and out, he was still alive at least. I wished that he didn’t feel the need to hide behind artificial sleep to control himself, but there was little alternative...at least that I could think of, except for spending the whole time in a drunken stupor.
“Bobby...um, could I talk to you for a bit?” Paige asked, tapping me on the shoulder. We were eating dinner, something Ryan fixed from a box. Tuna noodle casserole or some shit like that. It just sort of floated on a little bed of cheese, processed grain made springy and happy by the addition of dead fish and cheese that needed water in order to live. Jay was really out of it, he had made himself a sandwich but wasn’t really eating it. He just stared at the cupboards dully. The sunglasses covered up his dementia, Ryan and Amir his silence.“Sure.” I said after a bit, taking a quick glance at Jay. Bread crusts made a small pile on his plate, he was just picking his food to pieces and trying to ignore Ryan and Amir during their chugging contest.
I sat down in the chair by the window, a bit angry at the fact that it forced me to sit up straight. Paige got the couch, but he leaned forward in the pose that I decided to christen “concerned friend/parent/lover”. Leaned over, with one hand on my knee, a fake disturbed look, eyebrows furrowed. I sighed and moved my leg. “I...I know you’ve been under a lot of stress lately, what with all the shit with Gavin and Jay and...”
“Paige, I don’t need the build-up, just tell me what you’re trying to get at.”
“Maybe...maybe it would be better if you didn’t promote this album.”
“What do you mean exactly?”
“Like...you don’t go on tour.”
“Then how would we get any publicity?”
“Bobby, you could stay at home, we could get someone else to fill in for you.” I stared at him, trying to process how his logic worked. This was absurd. I put my head in my hands and tried to regain some sanity.
“But Jay...”
“I’ll look after Jay.” he said quickly.
“You’d really do that? I mean, you’ve got two other people that sort of drag on your time, it’d be a little much to expect you to take care of a third. Especially a third who probably needs about as much attention as the other two. Would you make sure that he’d stay sober?”
Paige peered into the kitchen and I looked in as well. Jay was still ripping things apart and Ryan and Amir were floundering on the floor in a puddle of beer. “He’s doing a good enough job himself.”
“That’s because he’s hopped up on sleeping pills. You didn’t see him begging Ryan for beer.” Paige sighed.
“Bobby, are you sure that you’re not just making that up as an excuse for letting out some of your anger? Because you’ve been really angry and cynical lately. I just want to...”
I grabbed Paige’s hand and made him pull up my sleeve, revealing the raised bumps, the scars, the small pricks of blood. Forced him to run his fingers over my flesh, closed my eyes and exhaled slowly. Opened them again, pointed to the largest scars, the ones from the time I had to go to the hospital. “Paige...Jay and I...well, we need each other, I think. If I stayed here he would want to too. And if he went without me, he’d probably destroy himself.” Paige opened his mouth like he was going to say something. “I can handle going on tour, really, I can.” I said softly, looking at him through veiled eyelashes.
He stared back at me impassively. “We’ll see.” And, since he effectively had a 3 to 2 majority on the matter, I knew that he was holding all the cards and I was left holding Jay. Fucker.