Tell Me I'm Worthless(7)

“Fuck, yeah,” I say, “I’m sorry, I didn’t really think. He was very important to me when I was younger.”

I extract myself from Sabi’s arms and walk across the room, naked, trying not to think about what my weird, pale, flabby naked body looks like while I move. I pull the poster down, but I’m careful not to tear it. Pulling it down does not actually rob it of its power, because whatever is here is deep inside now, like how a tick’s head stays dug deep into you when you pick its body off. There’s no use in pulling down this poster beyond the symbolic. Not that the symbolic is of no use, of course. The symbolic can be vital, the symbolic can evict or restore power. Symbols hold a shocking potential energy deep within, sometimes not evoked for generations upon generations. When I take the poster down, I see that the mark on the wall beneath it appears to have grown, from a tiny spot into a blotch. Getting closer, I think, but I don’t know why. I can’t say what it is that is getting closer. The thought vanishes as soon as it arrived, and I put the poster under my bed, in the dark space where I put things that I cannot deal with. Under there, too, are pictures of Ila and I, holding hands looking at the sunrise, pictures taken by Hannah on a little disposable camera. I can’t look at them, but I can’t bear to throw them out. The sigils down in the dark there too are supposed to keep things safe. I am not always sure they work as I hoped.

Sabi looks at me. “Thank you,” she says, and puts her arms around me.

I pour us each a glass of wine from a bottle on my bedside table, and we sit on my bed.

“Have you lived here long?” she asks.

“No, not really. I mean I’ve been in the city for a few years, but I move house a lot, I can never seem to settle in a place, really. I’m… a restless thing.”

She laughs. “A thing?”

“Not a thing, haha, you – you know what I mean.”

She touches me, and her arms are real arms, I think, I feel real arms. She looks into my eyes. “How do you want me to treat your body?” she asks.

The question takes me by surprise. I remember once sleeping with a girl who insisted on referring to my penis as a “pussy.” I’m going to suck your pussy now, she said, crawling towards me over her parent’s sofa. She’s dead now. She killed herself about a year ago. I got a strange message from her a week before she died, and it seemed like she didn’t know what country she was in.

Sometimes, very occasionally, she is here too, with the eyeless singer from the poster, standing next to him and whispering about me being a beautiful little doll. But I have to admit that I don’t think she is really there. I think she’s just a symptom of the thing in the poster’s presence. She has no business being here, this isn’t her place, this isn’t her pussy, even if she used to touch me and say, this is my (her) pussy, you are mine (hers), I am not her doll, her muse, her plaything. In any case, she never stays for long, which is how I know she is only a momentary spasm of the soul.

Beneath the bed, the man in the poster hears and feels Sabi and I fucking, although it can’t see it.

Her finger traces my scar again when we lay in the sweaty aftermath. I didn’t cum. Sabi asks, what happened, in a sleepy, off-puttingly romantic tone.

“I was attacked by a friend.” Sabi looks horrified. “She, uh, I don’t really know. This isn’t really the right way of saying it, but it was like she went insane.”

I’m not sure how true that statement is. Ila would say that it was me who went insane. Maybe I am too easy on her.

“It would have been hard to continue to exist,” I say, carefully, “in the place we were and not break.”

Because. Because… okay, let me describe it like this, in a way that can be understood. No live organism can continue to exist compassionately under conditions of absolute fascism, even the pigs in Chile under Pinochet’s rule were observed to take part in political killings. The House, not compassionate, stood ringed by a thick, angry forest, holding inside, however messily, its overpowering ideology; it had stood so for a hundred years and would stand for three more. Inside, the hallways were as still and empty as a frozen lake, and the walls found themselves leaning in different directions depending on who they hated the most that day. Sometimes, animals would wander into the House, but they never wandered out again. Whoever owned it did not seem to care for it, so we, Ila, Hannah and I, decided we’d break in and spend a night there. Young people can be stupid. We wanted to make some political point of the whole thing, we disagreed that great old houses like this should be empty when there were homeless people on every street. We knew that the owner might send people to pull us out, but we wanted to prove something. We were young and idealistic. The House stood on the outskirts of a city, with a huge DANGER KEEP OUT sign across the rusted gates. The fence, however, had decayed, so we bypassed the gates and crossed the boundaries easily. Nobody was around.

I first read The Haunting of Hill House when I was sixteen, and I’ve never been able to think about hauntings since then in a way that didn’t align with that book’s idea of a fundamentally demented place onto which you latch. Our house, my house, her house, was not like Hill House, however much I structure my thoughts on it in the same way. Hill House was, I think, an apolitical animal. Our house was not. It had a system of beliefs. And those who walked there marched as one faceless mass.