psycosynthesis
Bluelighter
Gene Rhodes
Ash
They sit at the kitchen table, smoke circling above. It stagnates in the stale air. The windows are usually only opened a day before the real-estate agent, reeking of cheap cologne and ambition, inspects the place.
Andrew is scraping his thumb and forefinger nails together. His other hand is occupied by his cigarette. The combined effort of it and his lungs contribute to the pool of smoke that is swimming above them. Beers sit on the table, half-drunk, warm and flat. They are one aspect of the messy mosaic of the tabletop. Andrew begins to drum his fingers on the table. His hands are calloused, yellow. His fingernails are dirty, signifiers of motor oil and grease. He usually washes them as soon as he arrives home to their small terrace house. He hasn’t tonight. His mind is as nervous and is fidgeting as much as his hands and fingers. Thoughts jump around, wild and jagged tangents. Andrew can't manage a sense of rhythm in the drumming of his fingers, so he reverts back to scraping and flicking his fingernails together. One restless foot jogs incessantly.
George's gaze flickers like the cheap, forty-watt globe above them. His pale blue eyes flit from the tables surface to Andrew's face, and then to the back door. His eyes, like Andrew's fingers, refuse to rest. He takes another sip of beer and considers his friend. He sips and considers the woman who arrived at their house in a rush of chatter, clove smoke and short blonde hair. The woman they were now nervously waiting for. She somehow managed to make chipped nail polish on chewed fingernails attractive. She was a whirlwind of a woman. She would move through the house, leaving in her wake a mess of empty bowls, glasses and piles of clothing. George throws back his head and finishes his beer.
Andrew exhales forcefully, frustrated with waiting, and grinds his cigarette out on the side plate that is currently serving as an ashtray. He reaches for the packet which lays open on the table, then reconsiders and retracts his hand. He scratches the back of his neck, searching for a pimple. Finding none there, his hand wanders to behind his right ear and his first and second fingers move up and down in that little crevice.
Andrew had met Lana about a year ago. He was at a warehouse party in Footscray. Behind the warehouse was a small junkyard. Dull metal gleamed in the night. It was the middle of winter. Wind slipped through and around the wrecks of cars and trucks that were dispersed around the junkyard. It was a scathing Melbourne wind. It was the type of wind that sneaks insidiously under layers of clothes, scarves and beanies and bites at your flesh. A few old school buses in the junkyard had been gutted and converted into squats. Bare mattresses lay in them, bordered by empty bottles, the odd bong and a few syringes. The mattresses were decorated with stains, the spectrum of which challenged rainbows. A dream catcher hung from the roof of one bus, a failure of dangling feathers and crystals. Whoever slept there had probably lost the need or capacity for dreams.
He had had a head-full of strong liquid acid. The dark lighting, lasers, smoke machine and hard, gritty techno inhabiting the warehouse had resulted in a sensory overload. His blood pulsated, flew in electrical jolts around his body. Each beat of the music made the red blood cells jump and tingle. When he closed his eyes, all he could see was an intricate network of veins, vessels and capillaries writhing in time to the steady beat. The pattern was sublimely sanguine. It was also menacing in some indistinct, abstract way. Grappling with the concept that his own veins might decide to constrict themselves and he with them, Andrew stumbled outside, seeking solace in silence. There had been group of people surrounding a bonfire outside, sitting on milk crates. When they had lit the bonfire earlier in the night, the flames licked the sky at such a height that some concerned passerby called the fire brigade. Firemen had rushed in, looking like, to Andrew at least, yellow garbed Stormtroopers. He walked past the chatter, attempting to brush the vein-like fractal cobwebs aside.
Lana had been sitting on the bonnet of a rusted Bug. She was on a similar page to Andrew at the time, reading (or maybe being read) the same psychedelic gospel. Andrew took a while to register that there was a human form sitting on the car.
“Hi,” Andrew had said, once he realized that attempting some form of communication would probably be the polite thing to do. This was quite an effort, as social etiquette was a concept that suddenly seemed quite absurd.
He paused for a moment after Lana returned his greeting with a smile. He was searching for words.
“Sorry, I’m not exactly in a state to make good conversation…. I’m all veins and viscera at the moment,” Andrew said. She cocked her head, from which jutted short blonde spikes of hair. She considered this statement in silence for a minute or two, looking at and through his eyes with her own, which seemed to be a dark brown. It was hard to tell, they were that dilated.
“Aren’t we all?” She grinned then laughed as she raised an arm and plucked at her skin with her fingers. “Flesh, bones and nerves, with varying degrees of vague awareness dispersed throughout. Whether or not we’re aware of this is another thing all together though. ”
Andrew’s laughter boomed through the skeletal wrecks of cars and trucks, and Lana’s joined his. Their laughter was euphoric. Andrew’s irrational fear of his circulatory system disappeared as they laughed, and relief and gratitude washed over him in warm waves.
They sat and watched galaxies form and swirl in the rust of a car in front of them. They sat until the sun rose and the waves of their trip had settled. They shared a flask of vodka that Andrew had brought with him. They shared theories, conspiracies and revelations, the coherency and articulation of which dissipated with the night and the flask. Their rapport remained though, and Lana, in need of a room, moved in a few months later.
Chair legs screamed on linoleum as George stood up. He was prematurely bald, and he ran a hand over his freckled pate as he walked towards one of the kitchen benches. It was a gesture of habit, George always did it when he was even slightly distressed. Andrew wondered if he could feel the ginger hair that used to be there, like amputees can sometimes feel the phantom itch of a missing limb. George flicked through the CD wallet that was resting on the bench, selected one, and slid it into the small portable stereo that sat on top of the range hood. It was one of Lana’s albums, smooth acoustic guitar subtly dispersed over sparse ambient beats. Andrew stared at him, silent annoyance radiating from him. Something seemed wrong about them listening to music while they sat and waited for her.
George walked to the fridge, opened it, and plucked out another beer. He looked over to Andrew, eyebrows raised in query. Andrew shook his head. He was already feeling a bit drowsy.
The music continued to grate at Andrew’s nerves. He had heard the album countless times, often on Sunday mornings spent enveloped within an armchair in their lounge room, a cigarette dangling languidly from one hand, a joint being slowly and carefully passed around between the three of them. Sometimes there were more people present, friends or just random freaks adopted from a club or festival. The music was soothing then, lulling them all into a scattered and stoned sleep. Now it sounded so out of context than Andrew could hardly bear to continue listening to it. He got up and turned the stereo off, casting a glance towards George which suggested that there would be little chance of an argument regarding the music. He returned to his chair and continued waiting.
Andrew remembered the first time he had met, or rather, seen, Hugh. It had been spring. Andrew was sitting at the kitchen table on an early Saturday afternoon; the paper was spread out, a steaming black coffee sat next to it. He hadn’t had much sleep, due to being woken by moans and screams sometime around 2 in the morning. At first he thought that George had brought some girl home, and wondered how he’d managed to do so after they both spent a night in watching films. George wasn’t the sort of guy to go out early in the morning on some horny impulse. Andrew eventually realized that the sounds were coming from the direction of Lana’s room. He lay there, trying to ignore the intense fascination he felt. Feeling voyeuristic and ashamed because of it, he turned on his mp3 player and attempted to drown out the cries with music. He lay there wondering. After a few songs he felt an urge to see if the sounds were still issuing from her room. He pulled the earphones out and lay still. He listened until the moans and grunts reached a crescendo and then listened to the sudden silence afterward.
Andrew had looked up as Hugh had walked unsteadily from Lana’s room into the kitchen. His eyes were squinted and red, his hair a mess of brown. He was wearing a Depeche Mode T shirt and silk boxer shorts. His legs were brown and covered in coarse black hair. He had a slight pot belly. Andrew had taken a sip of the coffee, placed the mug down and had said hello. Hugh had grunted something that resembled a greeting, took a long drink of water straight from the tap of the kitchen sink, and staggered back down the hall to Lana’s room. That was essentially the only impression Andrew had of him, aside from a few glimpses of an idling car outside the house while Lana drifted through the front door, in a waft of perfume, to enter it. She only saw Hugh once a week or so, usually on Saturday nights. He never came back to their home, and Lana would usually return on Sunday afternoons, ensconcing herself in her room to study.
Andrew first noticed the bruises a few months later. It was summer and it was sticky. He was sitting in front of a fan in one of the armchairs, reading languidly. Shifting his position to turn a page required Herculean effort. He looked up as Lana walked from the bathroom to her room, drying her hair with a towel. She was wearing a singlet and a pair of denim shorts, and Andrew saw the beginning of a large bruise above one of her hips. It was an obscene purple and yellow colour, a stark contrast to her pale Celtic skin.
“Fuck mate! What the hell did you do to your side?” he had asked, resting the book in his lap.
She stopped drying her hair, held the towel by her side and looked down at the blemish. She screwed up her nose. “I’m not sure to be honest; I got pretty pissed the other weekend. Can’t remember much of the night, probably stacked it somewhere along the way. We walked back to Hugh’s from town after e55 closed. I think I tripped over a gutter or something.”
She brought the towel back to her head and walked into her room, the door and the discussion of the bruise closing behind her.
Weeks later, she returned home on a Saturday evening. This was a first. She always stayed the night at his. She was in tears, and she flung her keys on to the floor. There was a dark bruise under her left eye. It started from just next to her nose, and reached to halfway under her eye. Under it was a cut which had just begun to scab over. There were tiny flecks of dried blood on her cheek. Andrew wanted to reach out and brush them away. He wanted to cradle her head in his lap. Her mood seemed to be a combination of bewildered, frightened and furious. She was screaming abuse: at Andrew when he tried to ask her what the fuck had happened, at George, woken from a nap, who opened his door to poke his head out and ask what the fuck was happening and at the vacant figure of Hugh. She ripped off a necklace Hugh had bought her, scratching the skin of her neck. She flung it against a wall and flew into her bedroom. She slammed the door so hard a framed ink painting that Andrew had bought from a street artist in Barcelona depicting one of Gaudi’s surreal houses fell off its mounting and the glass of the frame shattered. Andrew swept it up, listening intently to the harsh sobs emitting from Lana’s room.
She agreed to Hugh’s suggestion of dinner at his place a week later, despite Andrew and George’s protests. She said she wanted to show that she was brave enough to see him again before telling him she never wanted to see him again in her life. She said telling him to get fucked over the phone when he called, begging forgiveness, wasn’t satisfying enough. She said she wanted to spit in his face. She said, half-joking, that she could maybe stab him with a steak knife. Andrew pictured it: Lana leaping over the table, the knife already stained with the blood of a rare Porterhouse glinting in a sharp arc, piercing through Hugh’s Depeche Mode T Shirt and into his small, protruding pot belly. He pictured Hugh lying on the floor, blood slowly spreading around him in a blossoming halo, staring up at Lana in disbelief. He pictured Lana walking over him, pausing to grind a heel into his belly, before walking out of the apartment and gently closing the door.
Lana spilled through the back door of their kitchen. Her hair was down. It had grown since Andrew had met her. Her mascara had run; leaving black streaks down her face. Her lipstick was smeared. She stood just past the doorway, breathing heavily. One hand leaned on the kitchen bench, the other was held behind her neck. She looked as though she would fall if she moved. Andrew leapt up, pulling his chair with him. He placed it just beside her, and gently attempted to guide her into it. It was like she was shell-shocked. She seemed to move in slow motion. Her eyes were wide, unblinking. She fumbled in her handbag, searching frantically. She found her cigarettes and withdrew one from the packet. She put it to her lips and attempted to light it but her hand was shaking so much that she dropped the lighter.
She told them what had happened and her words fell onto them and settled there like ash.
Ash
They sit at the kitchen table, smoke circling above. It stagnates in the stale air. The windows are usually only opened a day before the real-estate agent, reeking of cheap cologne and ambition, inspects the place.
Andrew is scraping his thumb and forefinger nails together. His other hand is occupied by his cigarette. The combined effort of it and his lungs contribute to the pool of smoke that is swimming above them. Beers sit on the table, half-drunk, warm and flat. They are one aspect of the messy mosaic of the tabletop. Andrew begins to drum his fingers on the table. His hands are calloused, yellow. His fingernails are dirty, signifiers of motor oil and grease. He usually washes them as soon as he arrives home to their small terrace house. He hasn’t tonight. His mind is as nervous and is fidgeting as much as his hands and fingers. Thoughts jump around, wild and jagged tangents. Andrew can't manage a sense of rhythm in the drumming of his fingers, so he reverts back to scraping and flicking his fingernails together. One restless foot jogs incessantly.
George's gaze flickers like the cheap, forty-watt globe above them. His pale blue eyes flit from the tables surface to Andrew's face, and then to the back door. His eyes, like Andrew's fingers, refuse to rest. He takes another sip of beer and considers his friend. He sips and considers the woman who arrived at their house in a rush of chatter, clove smoke and short blonde hair. The woman they were now nervously waiting for. She somehow managed to make chipped nail polish on chewed fingernails attractive. She was a whirlwind of a woman. She would move through the house, leaving in her wake a mess of empty bowls, glasses and piles of clothing. George throws back his head and finishes his beer.
Andrew exhales forcefully, frustrated with waiting, and grinds his cigarette out on the side plate that is currently serving as an ashtray. He reaches for the packet which lays open on the table, then reconsiders and retracts his hand. He scratches the back of his neck, searching for a pimple. Finding none there, his hand wanders to behind his right ear and his first and second fingers move up and down in that little crevice.
Andrew had met Lana about a year ago. He was at a warehouse party in Footscray. Behind the warehouse was a small junkyard. Dull metal gleamed in the night. It was the middle of winter. Wind slipped through and around the wrecks of cars and trucks that were dispersed around the junkyard. It was a scathing Melbourne wind. It was the type of wind that sneaks insidiously under layers of clothes, scarves and beanies and bites at your flesh. A few old school buses in the junkyard had been gutted and converted into squats. Bare mattresses lay in them, bordered by empty bottles, the odd bong and a few syringes. The mattresses were decorated with stains, the spectrum of which challenged rainbows. A dream catcher hung from the roof of one bus, a failure of dangling feathers and crystals. Whoever slept there had probably lost the need or capacity for dreams.
He had had a head-full of strong liquid acid. The dark lighting, lasers, smoke machine and hard, gritty techno inhabiting the warehouse had resulted in a sensory overload. His blood pulsated, flew in electrical jolts around his body. Each beat of the music made the red blood cells jump and tingle. When he closed his eyes, all he could see was an intricate network of veins, vessels and capillaries writhing in time to the steady beat. The pattern was sublimely sanguine. It was also menacing in some indistinct, abstract way. Grappling with the concept that his own veins might decide to constrict themselves and he with them, Andrew stumbled outside, seeking solace in silence. There had been group of people surrounding a bonfire outside, sitting on milk crates. When they had lit the bonfire earlier in the night, the flames licked the sky at such a height that some concerned passerby called the fire brigade. Firemen had rushed in, looking like, to Andrew at least, yellow garbed Stormtroopers. He walked past the chatter, attempting to brush the vein-like fractal cobwebs aside.
Lana had been sitting on the bonnet of a rusted Bug. She was on a similar page to Andrew at the time, reading (or maybe being read) the same psychedelic gospel. Andrew took a while to register that there was a human form sitting on the car.
“Hi,” Andrew had said, once he realized that attempting some form of communication would probably be the polite thing to do. This was quite an effort, as social etiquette was a concept that suddenly seemed quite absurd.
He paused for a moment after Lana returned his greeting with a smile. He was searching for words.
“Sorry, I’m not exactly in a state to make good conversation…. I’m all veins and viscera at the moment,” Andrew said. She cocked her head, from which jutted short blonde spikes of hair. She considered this statement in silence for a minute or two, looking at and through his eyes with her own, which seemed to be a dark brown. It was hard to tell, they were that dilated.
“Aren’t we all?” She grinned then laughed as she raised an arm and plucked at her skin with her fingers. “Flesh, bones and nerves, with varying degrees of vague awareness dispersed throughout. Whether or not we’re aware of this is another thing all together though. ”
Andrew’s laughter boomed through the skeletal wrecks of cars and trucks, and Lana’s joined his. Their laughter was euphoric. Andrew’s irrational fear of his circulatory system disappeared as they laughed, and relief and gratitude washed over him in warm waves.
They sat and watched galaxies form and swirl in the rust of a car in front of them. They sat until the sun rose and the waves of their trip had settled. They shared a flask of vodka that Andrew had brought with him. They shared theories, conspiracies and revelations, the coherency and articulation of which dissipated with the night and the flask. Their rapport remained though, and Lana, in need of a room, moved in a few months later.
Chair legs screamed on linoleum as George stood up. He was prematurely bald, and he ran a hand over his freckled pate as he walked towards one of the kitchen benches. It was a gesture of habit, George always did it when he was even slightly distressed. Andrew wondered if he could feel the ginger hair that used to be there, like amputees can sometimes feel the phantom itch of a missing limb. George flicked through the CD wallet that was resting on the bench, selected one, and slid it into the small portable stereo that sat on top of the range hood. It was one of Lana’s albums, smooth acoustic guitar subtly dispersed over sparse ambient beats. Andrew stared at him, silent annoyance radiating from him. Something seemed wrong about them listening to music while they sat and waited for her.
George walked to the fridge, opened it, and plucked out another beer. He looked over to Andrew, eyebrows raised in query. Andrew shook his head. He was already feeling a bit drowsy.
The music continued to grate at Andrew’s nerves. He had heard the album countless times, often on Sunday mornings spent enveloped within an armchair in their lounge room, a cigarette dangling languidly from one hand, a joint being slowly and carefully passed around between the three of them. Sometimes there were more people present, friends or just random freaks adopted from a club or festival. The music was soothing then, lulling them all into a scattered and stoned sleep. Now it sounded so out of context than Andrew could hardly bear to continue listening to it. He got up and turned the stereo off, casting a glance towards George which suggested that there would be little chance of an argument regarding the music. He returned to his chair and continued waiting.
Andrew remembered the first time he had met, or rather, seen, Hugh. It had been spring. Andrew was sitting at the kitchen table on an early Saturday afternoon; the paper was spread out, a steaming black coffee sat next to it. He hadn’t had much sleep, due to being woken by moans and screams sometime around 2 in the morning. At first he thought that George had brought some girl home, and wondered how he’d managed to do so after they both spent a night in watching films. George wasn’t the sort of guy to go out early in the morning on some horny impulse. Andrew eventually realized that the sounds were coming from the direction of Lana’s room. He lay there, trying to ignore the intense fascination he felt. Feeling voyeuristic and ashamed because of it, he turned on his mp3 player and attempted to drown out the cries with music. He lay there wondering. After a few songs he felt an urge to see if the sounds were still issuing from her room. He pulled the earphones out and lay still. He listened until the moans and grunts reached a crescendo and then listened to the sudden silence afterward.
Andrew had looked up as Hugh had walked unsteadily from Lana’s room into the kitchen. His eyes were squinted and red, his hair a mess of brown. He was wearing a Depeche Mode T shirt and silk boxer shorts. His legs were brown and covered in coarse black hair. He had a slight pot belly. Andrew had taken a sip of the coffee, placed the mug down and had said hello. Hugh had grunted something that resembled a greeting, took a long drink of water straight from the tap of the kitchen sink, and staggered back down the hall to Lana’s room. That was essentially the only impression Andrew had of him, aside from a few glimpses of an idling car outside the house while Lana drifted through the front door, in a waft of perfume, to enter it. She only saw Hugh once a week or so, usually on Saturday nights. He never came back to their home, and Lana would usually return on Sunday afternoons, ensconcing herself in her room to study.
Andrew first noticed the bruises a few months later. It was summer and it was sticky. He was sitting in front of a fan in one of the armchairs, reading languidly. Shifting his position to turn a page required Herculean effort. He looked up as Lana walked from the bathroom to her room, drying her hair with a towel. She was wearing a singlet and a pair of denim shorts, and Andrew saw the beginning of a large bruise above one of her hips. It was an obscene purple and yellow colour, a stark contrast to her pale Celtic skin.
“Fuck mate! What the hell did you do to your side?” he had asked, resting the book in his lap.
She stopped drying her hair, held the towel by her side and looked down at the blemish. She screwed up her nose. “I’m not sure to be honest; I got pretty pissed the other weekend. Can’t remember much of the night, probably stacked it somewhere along the way. We walked back to Hugh’s from town after e55 closed. I think I tripped over a gutter or something.”
She brought the towel back to her head and walked into her room, the door and the discussion of the bruise closing behind her.
Weeks later, she returned home on a Saturday evening. This was a first. She always stayed the night at his. She was in tears, and she flung her keys on to the floor. There was a dark bruise under her left eye. It started from just next to her nose, and reached to halfway under her eye. Under it was a cut which had just begun to scab over. There were tiny flecks of dried blood on her cheek. Andrew wanted to reach out and brush them away. He wanted to cradle her head in his lap. Her mood seemed to be a combination of bewildered, frightened and furious. She was screaming abuse: at Andrew when he tried to ask her what the fuck had happened, at George, woken from a nap, who opened his door to poke his head out and ask what the fuck was happening and at the vacant figure of Hugh. She ripped off a necklace Hugh had bought her, scratching the skin of her neck. She flung it against a wall and flew into her bedroom. She slammed the door so hard a framed ink painting that Andrew had bought from a street artist in Barcelona depicting one of Gaudi’s surreal houses fell off its mounting and the glass of the frame shattered. Andrew swept it up, listening intently to the harsh sobs emitting from Lana’s room.
She agreed to Hugh’s suggestion of dinner at his place a week later, despite Andrew and George’s protests. She said she wanted to show that she was brave enough to see him again before telling him she never wanted to see him again in her life. She said telling him to get fucked over the phone when he called, begging forgiveness, wasn’t satisfying enough. She said she wanted to spit in his face. She said, half-joking, that she could maybe stab him with a steak knife. Andrew pictured it: Lana leaping over the table, the knife already stained with the blood of a rare Porterhouse glinting in a sharp arc, piercing through Hugh’s Depeche Mode T Shirt and into his small, protruding pot belly. He pictured Hugh lying on the floor, blood slowly spreading around him in a blossoming halo, staring up at Lana in disbelief. He pictured Lana walking over him, pausing to grind a heel into his belly, before walking out of the apartment and gently closing the door.
Lana spilled through the back door of their kitchen. Her hair was down. It had grown since Andrew had met her. Her mascara had run; leaving black streaks down her face. Her lipstick was smeared. She stood just past the doorway, breathing heavily. One hand leaned on the kitchen bench, the other was held behind her neck. She looked as though she would fall if she moved. Andrew leapt up, pulling his chair with him. He placed it just beside her, and gently attempted to guide her into it. It was like she was shell-shocked. She seemed to move in slow motion. Her eyes were wide, unblinking. She fumbled in her handbag, searching frantically. She found her cigarettes and withdrew one from the packet. She put it to her lips and attempted to light it but her hand was shaking so much that she dropped the lighter.
She told them what had happened and her words fell onto them and settled there like ash.
