Ash Cinema Page 15

  ***

  For days he didn't speak to me and barely acknowledged me. We ate together and I cleaned up after him but I was just another ghost that followed him. We didn't have sex again, either. He drank until he couldn't stand anymore and I took him to bed, held him till the morning, then repeated the process, watching him, cooking for him, cleaning, and making sure he survived his bouts with alcohol, his raves at the ghosts.

  For a week, we lived like this.

  'Why did you come here?'

  His voice surprised me, so long since I heard it. He lied in bed still, awake early.

  'I needed to meet you.'

  'How did you see them?'

  He was shrouded by the darkness of his room. A lump on the bed, rivers of light spotlighted bits of the room, the dust thick in the air.

  'At a library. They had them in their film collection.'

  No sound, no words, no movement, then, 'You shouldn't be here.'

  'I have to be.'

  'I died. A long time ago.'

  'Me too.'

  He sighed. His voice groggy but stepping further from sleep, reaching that high tone I grew accustomed to over the months. 'I can't save you.'

  I walked to his doorway and stood there watching him. He made no movement, not even to look at me until I was in bed beside him, under the blanket for the first time in a week. 'You already have.'

  'Why are you doing this?'

  'Don't you ever feel alone?'

  His eyes bloodshot and lips cracking, 'Forever.'

  'You don't have to be anymore.'

  He rolled away from me. I put a hand to his back and slid it to his shoulder then slid in behind him, took him in my arms the way he held me that night. His breath was shallow and I could feel tears in his chest but he made no sound. Crying silently, the same way he laughed, his body was so still but for the cracked sobs, the reverberations of his lungs, the clicking of his throat.

  'I don't want to be alone,' whispered into his ear, my face against his burning neck. 'I don't want to be alone anymore,' I felt them in me, the tears that never stopped, that I had held back for so long but now came at all hours of this lonely quixotic journey I took to find him, my Sebastian. I dropped tears onto his neck and he reached a hand behind him and put his palm on my cheek. Every inch of skin was on fire, my own and his. Our tears came as one, our sobs united, our bodies perfect, bound to one another, the timing synced.

  ***

  We were together for two years. Two years, the only years of my life that mattered to me. He loved The Passion of Joan of Arc and we watched it often. I cried every time but never let him turn it off. He didn't have any of his other films. He didn't have anything, really. Just his small house away from everything. He never worked and I never asked where his money came from. I didn't have to because there was always enough for anything we needed, though, admittedly, we used very little. He screamed when I told him my age, told me to leave, but I couldn't, wouldn't, so I stayed. He loved me often and I loved him fully. We fought the way couples do on television or in movies but usually about me being too young. It bothered him always but never me. He never seemed so old to me, the way his youth would kick up out of nowhere. Especially after he quit drinking. We walked on the beach, went to restaurants, a normal life. A healthy sex life. His enthusiasm and vitality surprised us both. 'I've been dead so long that I've become a young man again.' In many way he had.

  ***

  I spend a lot of time on the beach these days. It's always summer here but autumn's coming. It's hard to tell if you're not used to it, but it's mostly in the coloring of the sky and the shape of the clouds. I can't leave the ocean and I sit out here for hours now staring off into where I think the waves begin. One day he'll ride them back to me. The ocean is a boundary like the rain. But, more than that, it's a promise. A promise of change, a promise of the past. All life after death begins here in these unfathomable waters of the Pacific. Every crash of the waves brings a new ghost and a new star. The stars, they're everywhere here. So many more than anywhere else I've been. Galaxies become visible, long streaks of clustered stars, like a family tree that began millions and billions of years ago with the very first death. The death of the past universe, the center of this one. From there, the branches stretch in all directions and they're reflected in the water below, this ocean bigger than all others.

  I feel closer to him since starting this. I can almost smell him now. It's been so long, so lonesome without him. When he died most of me went with him but being near the ocean and writing about him brings bits of me back, the me that I was when we were together. He called me his autumn greeneyed girl, his midnight child. I never had a name like that for him, not that I told him. He's the love that doesn't end, the love that kills. He died for his love and maybe I'm to blame. I thought that for a long time, that the sins of his, the sin of legal rape and illegal love eventually took him from this world.

  I couldn't face his funeral. They didn't know me and I know they didn't want me there, not after his will. I don't know where the money came from but even after death he takes care of me. He remembers me and only death keeps us apart. I pray for him to find his way because I know he's lost like all the other ghosts I know, have known. I talk to them sometimes, the newcomers, the ones fresh from the ocean. They haven't seen him.

  I've been afraid to write this and have been putting it off for too long. The end. It's fitting, how his death is the end of this story. But I'm going to begin now. I'm going to write that which sits most heavily in me, that which has dictated the last three years of my life. My hands are shaking and the tears are already here. I hadn't cried for almost two years now but writing this, the flood of the past, I can't keep up, and I've walked in a daze, treading on people's toes, mumbling apologies. I can't face my bed alone, the same bed he offered escape, where I found relief. But I feel better. Maybe even alive. I think, now, me talking, writing, I mean, the future's there. Maybe not for me, but for us. Finishing this, I think I can walk again. I think I can live again. Breathe and not choke on rotten flesh, open my eyes and not have the tears streak my face, making me die prematurely.

  When I finish I'm closing my eyes and counting to ten. He'll be here when I open them. I believe in him.

  ***

  I came home, dropped the groceries, and ran to his body lying so still on the floor. I shook him till I screamed till I ripped at my hair till the ambulance arrived and took us both away.

  His pancreas, ruined, tumored. The doctor told us a lot of things that day and I know I listened but I can't remember any of it other than squeezing his hand as hard as I could and looking at his glassed eyes in that sunken face.

  I should've known. He grew weaker to the point he was often in pain but he never let on. His appetite died but only for food. He still loved me.

  It was too late for surgery. The cancer. He should've been there months ago. Only eighteen and my boyfriend was terminal. Sebastian refused to stay at the hospital.

  'If there's nothing you can do let me go home to die in peace.'

  'We can make you comfortable.'

  He was already pulling at the IV and other medical equipment, 'Fuck off,' and he did and we went home.

  He wasted away and I watched. There was no improvement ever. He just got weaker and weaker and weaker.

  He smiled at me and took my hand, put a palm to my cheek while I wiped the food he couldn't swallow from his lips. 'You're the best thing that ever happened to me.'

  I turned my head, let the hair fall over my face to hide from him. I couldn't let him see me cry, see me disintegrating with him. He needed me to be alive so that he could die. I wanted to go with him, to have him take me with him.

  'You don't have to stay here. It's okay. You've given me everything already.'

  'Just because the boat sinks doesn't mean I'm letting go.' My voice surprised me, steady, almost lighthearted, motherly.

  He laughed, silent, but his face grimaced and he coughed and I wiped the
spittle from his face. 'All my life I've prayed for you and you saved me.'

  'Funny thing for a dying man to say.'

  He grew serious and took my hand with strength and pulled me close, my tears visible to him, his eyes yellow glass, 'I love you,' whispered but not on purpose.

  My lips broke, tumbled and shattered, and my face fell to pieces. He held me like I was dying, soft and comforting, my sobs drowning everything, the last two years, my sixteen year nightmare before, his death, my future, all sunk with me but he held on following me deeper and deeper. I couldn't say it through the tears so I screamed it till my voice tore in half and I forgot that he was dying, only conscious that he was leaving and there was nothing to be done. 'I love you I love you I love,' until the curtain fell on that memory.

  He was so cold then. So fragile. I lied with him for three months, bathing him, feeding him, changing him. He called me a saint and I pierced my heart, tied a knot from it to his. When he fell asleep I promised to follow him wherever he went, promised to find him no matter how far or long he wandered. I stared at his face memorizing every wrinkle canyoned on his face, the mountain ranges of his engraved emotions. If I could hold onto something, hold onto his face, his body, memorize it, make the memories permanent, etch them all the way to my veins, my arteries, the capillaries of my lungs, make him a part of each heartbeat, each breath I take. He slept like the dead then and I was terrified every time he closed his eyes.

  He refused to let me call an ambulance, a doctor, even a nurse. 'I'll die in the hole I dug thirty years ago.'

  'With me.'

  'You need to start living.'

  'Tell me you'll live.'

  'I tried but it never worked.'

  'Till me?'

  'Till you.'

  'Till you,' my whisper, my tears, it was all I had then. And when I cried too long, when I ran out of liquid, my body ached, every molecule tearing with an acid burn.

  He stank of death. Even his breath. He rotted from the inside and could no longer eat.

  I think he wanted to atone for something. When delirious, he spoke of his sins. Not just me. Never me then, actually. Came to terms with it or never really cared. He told me about the others, about the lives he ruined, the marriages he broke, the fights with his family, with other people. He talked about Genevieve and how he hated her and loved her, how she ruined him and so he tore her life apart. He had at least one son that he knew of that he refused to see and a handful of others he was never allowed to see. He never existed to so many people. It was a confession, a final search for absolution.

  His body fell apart, his breath barely leaving his lips, his lungs crackled, 'You are the only thing in my life that matters. That has ever mattered.'

  I stroked his face, tried to give him water, but he kept his mouth closed. It was all he could do then.

  'One day I woke up and my life was ending, all my dreams given to celluloid, and only remembered by you.'

  On the last day of his life he couldn't speak and he only opened his eyes once. His yellow glasseyes beckoned me so I crawled to his side, took his hands in mine. We stayed like that forever, for the rest of his life. For the rest of mine. His eyes closed and I remained there alone for many hours. The sun rose and set and I remained.

  No tears left for me but I could not move. His face, ancient, dried, motionless. His breath no more, his heart no more, his body, inert. He died and left me alone.

  I felt nothing. A hollowness burrowed deep inside me like a disease and rotted my heart, lungs, my life, my soul. When they took me away I was catatonic and in the hospital.

  I left my soul with his body and flowers at his grave.

  ***

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