I wrote this story a long time ago, and I think it plainly shows. There’s an immaturity about it; a cynicism of a young person who thinks they are wise beyond their years. There are things that I would love to change about this story, but I’m not in the same kind of place I was when I first put the words down. This is more of a monument to youth – a tip of the cap to the writer I was.
Swan Song
By J.A. Miller
“She’s dying.” My voice crackled like static over the phone. “She’s dying and I can’t save her.”
Her eyes were shuttering rapidly like the lens of an auto-wind camera. Click, click, click. She danced violently with the red shag carpet and it was leaving marks like lipstick kisses upon her pale white skin.
Her partner in this impromptu dance was a needle plunged to the brink in her arm. It held her fast in its grasp and refused to let go. I wanted nothing more than to yank the damned instrument out of her but I was afraid. What if doing so would be to kill her? What if it was like a cork and removing it would deflate her like a balloon? I couldn’t take the chance.
“Her skin is changing. It was milky at first but now it’s purple.” Like her velvet crush jacket. She loved that jacket. It’s beautiful, she said. Not as beautiful as you, I replied. It was the only thing I ever bought for her that she didn’t ask for.
“Yes? 11 Hilda Street.” Pause. “Apartment M205.” Click. I think the sterile voice of the operator told me to stay on the line but I wasn’t really paying attention. It was not possible with the disharmonious performance that was taking place on the other side of the room, a private performance just for me.
“Even now you’re beautiful, Chelsea.” Her golden locks obscured her face but I could swear she was smiling at me. She never thought much of her physique yet playfully goaded me on whenever I paid her even the slightest of compliments.
“Like a swan…”
* * *
The walls of our apartment didn’t have even the faintest trace of white upon them and were instead smattered with various murals. In the living room was the Field of Bleeding Hearts as she called it, rows and rows of roses with red tear drops flowing down thorny stems. In the background was a man harvesting buds from the bushes.
“No heart bleeds forever,” she whispered into my ear from behind as I penned down my often times cynical thoughts on past heartaches into one of my beaten composite notebooks. “Not even yours.” I remembered the kiss that followed.
In the bedroom was the Lake of the Black Swan, her prized work. “Why not a white swan?” I asked as she painted the centerpiece above our headboard.
“Because white is depressing.” She said, mixing colors on her palette. “White is void, an unrealistic ideal that no one can hope to attain. Other colors when set against a white canvas look dirty by comparison. Nothing in the world is really white, not really.” I loved the way she talked about these things and was perfectly content listening to her go on for hours. “The black swan represents real beauty, real love. It represents how things really are. A white swan would be to idolize how things would be in a perfect world.”
“And we don’t live in a perfect world.” We were reminded too often it seemed.
“No we don’t. But we can appreciate what is real. We can appreciate what is truly beautiful. We can appreciate us.” Those eyes killed me every time.
“But there are white swans in the real world.”
“That’s a moot point.” She bit down on the end of her brush and tilted her head towards me. “You of all people should know that.”
* * *
The E.R. waiting room was almost wholly white with its sterile furniture and brightly lit walls and I with my torn jeans, faded Rolling Stones shirt and cracked boots was but a stain; a nearly forgettable blemish on a landscape that was supposed to represent hope but in reality was the most depressing place in the world.
There was a doctor sitting next to me dressed accordingly in freshly pressed doctor’s garb. He was balding save for a small shock of salted blonde hair that resided on the highest point of his cone shaped head. His stethoscope hung limply about his neck like a dead snake. I wondered if he had ever even used the archaic instrument or if he only kept it to make himself feel more important. On his left breast pocket the words St. Mary’s Hospital were embroidered in bright red and just below this was a nametag that dubiously announced his unfortunate name, Dr. Hoar.
He was talking to me about Chelsea. I don’t remember what his voice sounded like. It was as if my brain was filtering out everything unnecessary and was only allowing relevant information process like a smooth voiced automated answering service.
For instructions in English, please press one now.
“…overdose…”
For technical questions, please press three.
“…a lack of oxygen to the brain…”
For hypothetical questions, please press nine-nine.
“…no way of really knowing…”
For inquiries on the meaning of it all, please stay on the line.
“Just hang in there.”
Thank you for calling.
* * *
Just over a year ago I had an affair with a little tart named Katrina of whom I had met at a writer’s seminar. The theme was Morality: Affects on Character and Reader and I had been asked by my editor to deliver the keynote on the second day which was devoted to works of poetry. I never liked to speak but Chelsea told me that it was a great opportunity to get my name out there and that I would regret it if I didn’t go.
The seminar was downtown in the bowels of the events center. The monstrous building resembled an old cantankerous man to me. The stone was strong but had been washed with rain and age into the streaky dull skin of an ancient being too tired to care what went on in the world around it. We were down in the lower levels where the lights cast a yellowish glow on the world. It was as if everyone had cholera and didn’t know it.
I first saw Katrina while I was speaking. There was a minimal crowd that had turned out for my 9:00 A.M. keynote which didn’t really bother me. Most came to these things to mingle and network their way to a lucrative publishing deal. She was sitting in the first row all alone; gnawing at the end of a pencil as she sporadically took notes.
“There is a moral fiber to all works of poetry that carries through the piece and into the reader’s subconscious.” I had no idea what I was talking about. “It is the author’s job to make sure that the morality of the story receives the proper attention so that underlying themes can be understood and constant.” I sounded like Charlie Brown’s teacher. “…Treat your subject as you would treat a human being…” Muah, muah, muah, muah.
I made my exit to the sound of sporadic applause and called Chelsea.
“How did it go?” She was painting. It was in her voice.
“Shitty, but at least it’s over with.” I was lighting up a Djarum Black clove cigarette and promised myself I would quit after this last pack.
“Well that’s good. When are you going to be home?”
“Tomorrow,” I Exhale the lie. “Scott wants me to come by his place tonight and entertain some young talent he has taken under his wing.” Scott hadn’t even been there for my speech. “He said I could sleep on his pullout tonight and take off in the morning.”
“Sounds fun,” She said. She was always distracted with her work.
“Yeah, well you know Scott so I’m sure it won’t be. I’ll see you in the morning, love. Bye.” I lied to her at times for no reason at all other than to stretch my legs and see if I could really get away with it. She trusted me so implicitly that there was no joy in it anymore; rather it was simple habitual behavior that made me feel like an asshole in the morning.
One of the event coordinators had told me about a little place called The Mark, an after hours hangout for aspiring poets, self proclaimed martyrs and the so called saviors of the human race. The directions to the place were complicated: Just take the green line and transfer to the yellow line. Look out the window and you will see a moving commercial for Existentialism, a new bar, and get off at the next stop. Get above ground and go north on 43rd, its right across from the Blue Box jazz club. If you run into Dante’s you’ve gone too far.
I swear I heard the conductor say, “Next stop, Cataclysm.”
The Mark was the most remarkably bland place I had ever seen. Everything was white though amazingly still mismatched. There was a wide assortment of eccentric lounge chairs, couches, tables, stools and counter tops placed at odd angles. In the front there was a stage currently occupied by a nervous young man spewing out stilted poetry to a bongo beat about some unattainable woman: She wore poetry as she walked away from me. The miserable young man was flanked by two lavishly dressed manikins. I immediately wondered how many dead baby seals it took to dress these fakes in such high class.
I kept myself to shadowy corners and periodically escaped the darkness to peer at one of the many various paintings that adorned the perimeter of the depressing club. I found myself particularly intrigued by a piece called Black on White. In the foreground was a man dressed in black on his knees looking towards heaven. Above him was an angel in white shaking her head.
“You like it?”
“Pardon me?” I turned and was greeted by the angel herself. Instead of the traditional robe she was adorned in a lovely white dress with a smile to match. Her hair held an odd shimmer in the limited light. It was dizzying just looking at her. I recognized her face now as the girl in the front row at my lousy keynote.
“Did you paint this?”
“No, my friend Devon painted it.” She said with a smile that damaged my brain. “But I modeled for the angel.”
“I see.”
“I liked your speech this morning. I’m a big fan of your work.” She bit her lip, just slightly enough for me to notice.
“It’s nice to know someone does.” I said. I felt awkward. Something wasn’t right in my head. “Some days I wonder if anyone actually reads what I send out.”
She leaned in close. She smelled like opium. Her words were soft in my ear and a shiver went down my spine.
“Pardon me?” I hadn’t heard her word.
“I’m Kat.” She said as she pulled back rather quickly. A more than ample description I thought studying her feline mannerisms: a subtle tilt of the head, a coy grin and piercing eyes.
“Nice to meet you, Kat.” I offered my hand. “I’m…”
“I know who you are. Besides names don’t matter in the dark.” What a cleverly deceitful girl.
I fucked her that night and many other nights. Our meetings were always the same. I would run into her at The Mark and we would play our little cat and mouse game until she ensnared me so completely that I would only be reminded of where I was when she removed her clothes.
It was when she was naked that I really did see her. She had tan skin, raven black hair and often wore blue eyeliner to frame her icy eyes. Her thin lips were done hooker red which left marks like bruises as she adored my body. It was when we kissed that I first noticed a small mole on her left cheek just above her lips and it wasn’t till I went down on her that I came across a small brown birthmark made its home on her inner left thigh.
It reminded me of the plague.
She wore acrylics done French and her toes to match. Her teeth were slightly crooked and raked against my skin with serrated kisses. Simply I saw her true through her nudity yet if you asked me what she looked like clothed I would tell you simply, white, that’s all there is.
She praised my work often and begged of me to recite lines while she masturbated, her toes digging into the love stained sheets.
“More…” Her gasps for poetry, like air, always surfaced between moans.
As her skin blossomed into the most perfect shades of red I would momentarily comprehend the gravity of the decisions that had lead me into poorly lit hotel rooms. Then I would cite:
“Her hair was a monument to Chromatic and I followed her wherever she went so that perhaps I would be able to bask in color unknown.”
“Tell me more...” Katrina said just before climax.
* * *
“Blue so that you can breathe. Red so your heart may beat. Yellow so that you may feed.” I had never seen so many chords and tubes before in my life and they all led into Chelsea’s colorless and comatose body or one of the many machines that periodically beeped, buzzed or hummed. It was a symphonic discourse and I wondered how anyone could rest in such a place without the luxury of high volume painkillers.
The hospital room was like any other with the notable exception that it was filled to the brim with wilted and dying flowers. Most were from me. There was a small bouquet from her disengaged family. I had decided not to water them.
“Send me dead flowers to my wedding and I won’t forget to put roses on your grave,”
She would often sing the Rolling Stones tune to me as I tried to sleep at night. She was completely tone deaf but loved to sing and though I would grimace at her high notes I always looked forward to my little private performances, knowing she sang to no one else but me.
Though they are dead, the sent of their life permeates all receptive to such things.
No one had visited her in the past three days. She didn’t have many friends and her family all lived in Georgia and wouldn’t justify the airfare to see their fading daughter. “I’ll be your family.” I said to her once while we were waiting for a tow truck to breathe life back into my rusty blue Oldsmobile.
“You are my family.” She said in return, simply without looking at me.
“Do you really feel that way?”
“Always.”
* * *
I think Chelsea knew about Katrina. My guilt was always painted red on my face after late nights downtown.
I love you. She would tell me with a hoping smile. I know. I would return, breaking her teeth. There was an eventual draining of color from our lives that manifested itself in Chelsea’s skin and my work.
Heaven wouldn’t have me
Because I wouldn’t have heaven
And damned the whiteness of oblivion
“Why don’t you paint anymore?” It was a stupid question but the only thing I could think to ask her. We hadn’t talked about anything important in over a month and she would cry after sex.
“My muse is gone.”
“What?”
“You left me.” She had said it. Those words impacted me like a nuclear bomb, vaporizing all previous thought and showering my brain in toxic fallout.
“I never left you. I’m right here.”
“Physically yes…” She turned over and caressed my cheek. “I can touch you. I can feel the warmth of your body. I can even smell your scent. Yet you are off somewhere else.” She turned back over. “I don’t think you love me anymore.”
I thought for a moment, searching through the dark recesses of my mind for the proper words, if such a thing were to actually exist. “That’s not true. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t love you.”
She was quiet and only moved to scratch her arm. This was our life, our relationship. We sat longer in silence than anything else. She didn’t know me and I had the faintest clue as to what was going on in her life. We lived in separate worlds yet slept in the same bed.
“Nothing is where it belongs.”
“No, everything is in its place. Just not you.”
I awoke the next morning to an empty bed and the smell of burnt metal.
* * *
I love you. Screech. I love you too. Clear! Don’t ever forget that. We’re losing her! I won’t.
* * *
“What’s that smell?” I remember that burning sensation that awoke me in the morning. It reminded me of the smell of a pot on the burner after all the water had evaporated. I found Chelsea in the living room bent over several buckets of paint: black, brown, grey, and red.
“Nothing…” her eyes rolled into the back of her head and her secret fell lose from her grip and tumbled to the ground. It was a little white butane lighter. She had tied off her arm with an old belt of mine that no longer fit. The needle was still there and it was holding onto my dear Chelsea with a strength I could never know.
She fell back to the floor and smiled. She showed her teeth, white and perfect. She never smiled with her teeth anymore and though I didn’t want to I smiled in return.
“I thought you didn’t believe in drugs.” I remembered lectures on the long term affects of frequent marijuana use. I hadn’t smoked in three years because of them; not because I believed them but because she had. She moved almost seductively on her back, wiggling her hips from side to side like a snake. I saw Katrina in her and my smile went away.
“Cite something to me.” She was tearing at the collar of her lacy eggshell undershirt, feebly attempting to pull it down to her waist. Her skin was clammy. Her eyes were bloodshot. I could hardly hear her voice over the thumping my own heart and yet my lips knew to move to a rhythm that pleased her very much.
She danced in clouds of color
Wishing for absolution from her lover
A helpless fool for not coveting
That heart she kept from oblivion
“Tell me more…” Chelsea said as she overdosed.
911 emergency response, what is your emergency?
* * *
Her casket was as white as the drug that killed her and as I watched the gravediggers cover it with brown earth I played over and over the words I had said as her eulogy to the four bodies that had decided to attend.
“Chelsea knew me better than anyone. She knew me better than I knew myself. And yet I was unable to see her through the rolling fog. I loved her, this is true but I did not appreciate her as I should have and neither did any of you.”
I left those four strangers to contemplate the bizarre nature of my words and drove around for the next few hours. I wanted nothing more than to scream at every driver that passed me on the road. I wailed on the steering wheel at red lights and drove down roads that reminded me of her. At times I would glance into my rear view mirror and see her smiling at me from the back seat but I knew she wasn’t there. She was back at the cemetery in a filthy hole.
I burst a tire going down some dusty back road and had to pull over. I was surrounded by grotesque trees that leaned over my shoulders, whispering into my ears, you’re lost without her. You can’t see the forest from here. Now no one will cry when you die.
“You don’t know that.” No one would respond but there was a shuddering like laughter as a stiff breeze tore through the trees. I didn’t even believe my own words. I opened the trunk of my rusted blue Oldsmobile, hoping to unearth my archaic spare tire. I was greeted instead by a ghost. Staring at me was a painting of Chelsea gently holding a wounded white swan. Her eyes were pointed up towards the heaven and ringed in fiery tears that trekked down her pale cheeks. They left charcoal trails that matched her eyeliner. I had never seen Chelsea in this state and it occurred to me that I would never again have the chance.
I gingerly picked up the painting and flipped it over. She always put her titles on the back of the canvass. Swan Song for the dearly departed. It was dated the day before she overdosed.
* * *
I returned to the sight of her stone a week later. It was the first time I had seen it.
Chelsea Sullivan
Loving daughter
May 21, 1979 – October 17, 2004
I shook my head. There were so many words they had forgotten to etch in and I would have words with her family later concerning this delicate matter but now was not the time.
“I miss you.”
I know
“I’m moving out of the apartment later this week. Too many memories. They want me to paint over your murals but I can’t bring myself to do it. A painting crew is coming tomorrow morning.”
It’s okay.
“I’m getting published again. It’s a story I wrote about you. I wish you could read it.”
I still read all your work.
“I know.” My sight was blurry with three years worth of tears. “I brought you roses.” I set them down against her pale stone and took a few steps back to take in the contrast. “I also wrote you something. It’s not that good.”
Let’s hear it.
She sang her swan song as she died
And opened up my eyes
For the first time did I see
The meaning that she gave to me
And though I lied
Myself despised
It was in this way
That the memory of her life
Would not fade.
I walked away from her grave for the first and last time that day. I don’t think she would have minded. She had attained that perfect sense of being that only the dead can know.
Her life was now white.
Id10t Savant 