It’s hard to hope for things when the world is disintegrating. Sliding into the void. Everything around us going up in smoke.
She expresses this to me in the darkened booth while the piano man sings a lonely, melancholic rendition of “Wicked Game.” Her bare leg, stretching like a burst of prolonged ecstasy from beneath the hem of her dress, touches mine under the table. I can feel the cool heat of her through the dark fabric of my jeans.
She says when she was young, she believed so much would be available to her. She made assumptions about what life would look like. Not just hers—everyone’s. She shrugs one shoulder and sips her negroni. The orange peel brushes briefly against the rouge of her lips. She says she guesses at a certain point she just stopped believing.
I know what it’s like to stop believing in something. I know what it’s like to believe in nothing. But right now, these sensations elude me. It’s impossible to look at her and not believe in something.
When I kiss her, her lips taste like loss. The pain is so sweet it’s unbearable. And even when she puts her hand on my lapel and pulls me closer, kisses me harder, the piano man is warning me with his low, sorrowful voice. He’s changed the lyrics, replaced the word “world” with “girl.” Chris Isaak says this world is only going to break your heart. Tonight, the piano man is telling me this girl is only going to break my heart.
Some obscure part of me knows it because I’ve been here before. That part of me knew it more and more each time she spared a glance in my direction within the first hour. I saw rapturous hell in her eyes and wanted only to burn there. A beckoning Gehenna both foreign and familiar.
The first line of the song is something about the world being on fire and how no one can save me but you.
I don’t recall ever dreaming of salvation. But as the world spirals into a swirling inferno, I think to burn for her instead might be something like a baptism. Maybe it could get me close.
“Melpomene.” Her whispered name on my lips like a prayer to something I never thought was real. I hope it’s real now. I hope it’s listening.
The piano man is still playing “Wicked Game” when we leave. He’s still warning me and I’m still not really paying attention.
The streets are awash with garbage. Howling vagrants light black fires in trash cans chained to the sidewalk. Amorphous mobs of protestors march between stalled cars, chanting gibberish incantations. The words scrawled on their signs signify nothing.
Laughing crowds adorned in diamonds and feathers dance and drink on rooftops or behind locked gates, oblivious or indifferent to the pandemonium. Police helicopters circle high above, their spotlights sweeping without aim or purpose. Five- and ten-dollar bills float on the hot winds that hurtle like mad chariots up the avenue.
Melpomene and I share a cigarette as we wait for the valet. I watch her and wonder how such meaning can still exist in a universe which has crowned chaos its king. It fills me with a hope so foreign it feels like a sickness. I’m not confident it isn’t.
In bed, I tell her she’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. She says I’m lying. It doesn’t feel like I am.
“Writers don’t lie,” I say.
She says they lie all the time.
“Not about beauty.”
When she’s asleep, I drift to the living room and light a cigarette, sitting on my couch beside my Hello Kitty throw pillow. The clothes strewn across the floor create an image which feels somehow ominous. Like it has lasting potency. Like I’ll remember it. There have been so many other nights with so many other discarded clothes and I remember none of them.
Reading together one afternoon in a park overlooking downtown Hollywood, I’m able to convince myself it’s real. We lie stretched on beach towels in the sun while smoke from the riots rises into a toxic black cloud above the city. Shrieks from homeless marauders aren’t quite enough to drown out the guy sitting a few yards away from us who’s telling his girlfriend about the impending AI apocalypse (“There are these robots,” the guy is saying, “and they’ve taught themselves how to play soccer.”) But when I look over at Melpomene and she smiles up at me, the sun glinting in the Wayfarers atop her head and highlighting my name on the cover of the book she’s holding, I think about how I’m surrounded by things that are ending but maybe this won’t be one of them.
Another lie I like to tell myself is that I’m not sentimental.
It happens in an alley off Fairfax. The piano man’s promise fulfilled. A kiss cut short by a tentatively remorseful hand on my chest. She shifts her eyes downward, and I shift mine away. “I knew the first time I kissed you that you were going to break my heart,” I say.
She tells me not to be deranged. She tells me we hardly know each other.
Walking her to her car afterward is a privileged kind of pain. A condemned corpse escorting his executioner. The cigarette has already been smoked and even firing squads go home to their separate lives.
When she hugs me for the last time, I feel for a moment as though all my broken pieces have been reassembled and glued together by her embrace. She is not the first one to do this, but each time the adhesive feels a little stronger.
And yet I keep falling apart.
It’s a Sunday. We met on a Sunday. Three weeks and the sabbath comes full circle.
I drive home along Melrose amid burning trash and scampering rioters with crazed desperation in their eyes, grieving as MGMT’s “Little Dark Age” pulses from the stereo. It sounds strange. The cigarettes I keep smoking are like everything else in that they won’t kill me fast enough. The tears that won’t come are a pregnant, nauseous ache behind my eyes. It’s midnight but I put on my sunglasses.
“It’s like I’ve been saying,” Summer Priestly is telling me over the phone the next day. “You keep chasing these cruel fantasies. What you really want is to suffer. That’s why you keep setting yourself up for it.”
“She looks like Brigitte Bardot. She looks like Sailor Moon.”
“Yeah, well. That must be very hard for you.”
“Her favorite book is The Elementary Particles. She listens to Red Scare.”
“You need to get a grip.”
I’m smoking in front of my refrigerator, staring at a strip of Polaroids hung there by a Grumpy Cat magnet. I shut my eyes and I’m back in the photo booth, Melpomene on my lap, her lips on mine. I’m back there but the void is with me now. It hadn’t been there the first time. You can see its absence frozen on my face in the photographs.
Maybe that’s all this is. Maybe it’s just about a cyclical reconciliation with my most faithful mistress. The thing inside me from which I keep fleeing. To which I keep running back.
Suffering aches best when it’s earned. When it’s deserved. I’ve lost count of the guns whose barrels I’ve stared down, but there’s a familiar comfort in knowing I loaded all of them. They’re all registered in my name. I live for these life-affirming little deaths because they reinforce what I’ve conditioned myself to believe. I only ever fall for members of the firing squad.
“You’re getting worse,” Summer says. “I don’t remember you taking the Calliope thing this hard.”
“Calliope was basically all I wrote about for two years.”
“Right, yeah, but this seems different. You sound different.”
I take the photographs off the refrigerator and tuck them into a drawer. “She’s different,” I say. “They’ve all been different.”
“Have they, though? I mean, really? You sleep with all of these women whom you feel nothing for because you’re always hung up on the last fantasy, and then every couple years a new fantasy comes along and resets the cycle. And don’t forget that these are your fantasies. You’ve created them. You just wait patiently for someone to come along who can adequately play the part.”
“Melpomene wasn’t playing a part.”
“I’m sure she didn’t know she was.”
“Nobody knows anything.” I remember the piano man, and his song. “Nobody loves no one,” I say, “but the ones they do are never the right ones.”
“Quit it with the melodrama. Romantic idealization is a common trait among narcissists, you know.”
“You’ve always said I’m not a real narcissist.”
“A girl can change her mind.”
I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the mirror on the other side of the room. There are so many mirrors in my apartment and the person on the other side of the glass is never me. It hasn’t been me for a long time.
Later, looking out my window at the fiery destruction below, I think about the strange things foolish people do for desire, and I know I am one of them even if I don’t fully know what I desire or why. I feel apart from everything and everyone, but I am a part of something which is being dismantled. It’s breaking down and so am I.
Maybe I should start setting fires. Maybe I should start destroying things.
Maybe I already have been.
Maybe it’s too late.