Who Dies In Her Room
She sat in the open window of the hotel four floors from the rain slick sidewalk and manicured shrubs, as the cool morning air tinged and scented with rain from the harbour drifted in cloud-waves toward and in the window, billowing the curtains ever so slightly. She sat still as stone as the cold mist roiled about, enclosing her as in a cloud, as if she were the jagged pinnacle of a lofty peak thousands of feet above the lowest tide. In that cavity several stories above the dulled rain stained streets of Victoria, she sat soaked to the skin in her pajamas of thin cotton over an emaciated frame. She shifted in the window, pressing her back to the frame, her feet pressed against the opposite end of the open window, sitting parallel to me in bed. I wanted her to continue to hold onto the wooden ledge with her right hand. Right hand. I could hear my own voice which resounded in me, not beyond. Instead she placed her hands behind her head, knitting her fingers to cradle her head. Her pajamas were stained top and bottom with blood. Dark, sickly. It was chilly and yet she did not shiver. It was windy, yet she did not resist the wafting sea breeze that skittered in rain mist emphasis onto the bed I lay in. Barbara was, inspite of her small frame, in good shape. Or as good a shape as I desired. Boyish frame he conceded, narrow hips, small breasts, thin arms, legs, shoulders narrow a bony physique. All this I considered again and again as I lay now in this bed refusing for another instant to acknowledge the pain, to acknowledge the third or fourth bloody towel she’d improvised as a tourniquet to staunch the bleeding from the wound on my left side. “Seize the time.” Barbara had said as she in the window glanced toward me, toward the bed. Her face appeared distorted, cast in shadow, stained from smeared blood. I could still feel it, sense it, even now in the chill room feel her body, colder than expected, still lying next to me, scent of battle and defeat covering her as my blood stained her. And now as she sat into the mist the camera on its tripod at the foot of the bed focused upon me seemed, appropriate, somehow. It had happened the night before as we’d danced to the lilting off key at times cover tunes from the house band. Geriatric show-stoppers pushed through instruments by men who had long since given up the visions of tours, of contracts of interviews and recordings remembered with critique. Now they all as automatons with half themselves past the point of no return when the passion for music gave way to the need for just another night to get through and another cheque to cover the car payment, the rent and for more than one, the bar bill. We’d, Barbara and I, had finished off a bottle of red wine and were into the second when she leaned over the table and touched my hand. Startlingly for she never touched me, not like this, never looked at me, not like this. Something had changed, more than wine, or company. Something profound, altering. Yes, I’d thought, frightened of anything more substantial, wine, enough of which undermines the most reticent of natures, or so I’d been informed about the affects of the grape on the loss of inhibition. To dance. To dance. I smiled at the near empty bottle perched victoriously between them, closer to me than her and grateful for its cooperation. “Dance with me.” Her eyes were red, watery, the colour fading, distorted a filthy brown, fading, shifting into a muddiness that reminded me of old drunks I’d stepped over after I’d watch them being rolled. Bums beating bums for what? Cab fare, cheap bathtub gin? Everybody out of work, everybody fading into desperation with nothing more than a bad plan and a decent piece of pipe. On our feet we approached the cheap parquet dance floor holding onto each other stupidly without co-ordination. She shifted against me under my arm, into the crook, into my protection? My hand draped loosely over her left shoulder intentionally cupping her breast, bra-less, warm, fleshy and loose. She made no effort her free herself as I pressed open palm into her, crushing her nipple until it firmed in aggressive passion and desire lust. I wanted her nakedness more than I’d imagined it. Naked, we’d be in that embrace, we would become as only I contemplated, for Barbara suggested only in her eyes, never her touch, in states such as this, passion without identities without roles, names, addresses, or places they were required to be as the people who wearily, reluctantly and yes desperately brought themselves, defeated into the room. The room had been toned down, from high kitche to something resembling a high end legion hall. That’s how I viewed the place and yet even though we’d spent a good part of the evening giving critique of the ambiance, it had the feel, of safety, that one could have kept coming here and from it another chance would come your way. Barbara was not someone I’d confide that kind of sentimentality to. What lighting there was, was mercifully vague enough to give the denizens surrounding us the appearance of a vitality they’d left in old clothes and tired rooms years back. In this turgid crowd as defeated as the band, Barbara and I, now as drunk as we were, rose to the challenge and in staggering support of one another sidled onto the well healed parquet and began to feebly sway in each others embrace attempting to avoid the obvious. My fingers groped her back from lower spine to nape of neck. Beneath the loose fitting blouse I could count off ribs, investigate liberally each spinal protrusion and trace each of the scars. Even though close to me, her bare back under my palms, she shared but the vaguest body heat. Barbara’s arms were wrapped without relent about my neck, her fingers knitting behind my head and in resignation she slipped into compliance following my drifting motion. Her breath was a sour mix of revelry, risk and loss, a drift that weakened the senses. She in my arms close, was risk and threat and in ignorance I carried her along. She didn’t rest easy against me, in me, but was restless in her skin, as if everything beneath what would be visible if she stood naked were shifting, moving toward a place she couldn’t admit to desiring to go. Nothing was said as we moved without grace across the dance floor, brushing now and again against one of the octogenarian couplings that appeared to have regained life in posture on the parquet. From time to time, without reference to the music, Barbara would slowly yet deliberately let her head loll back from my shoulder, at the corner of her mouth where she’d rested against me would be a trickle of spittle and for a moment, a brief moment, she’d catch me in her eyes, lifeless eyes, a malignancy pooling. And as indifferently she dropped her head into my chest, struggling for an instant, a tremour rippling. I’d feel, her close into me, pressure onto me, humming not to me, not for me, to herself, into herself, humming something indecipherable, drowned in the din of the small band of the defeated and option-less. Dream state realization is occurrence without truth, bereft of rational explanation, a moment in time and space that consumes and denies explanation. Barbara would at moments, brief though, wilt weak in my arms, regain strength without outward revelation. Her body presence suddenly visceral and controlling, victimizing and growing. Without shifting her head in the slightest, without losing rhythm to her hummed mantra, Barbara’s pelvis would press with a lewdness unfamiliar into me, fusing, grinding, holding, cajoling. Her entire frame, now weak, now heated, consumed me, consciousness surrendered. My erection pressed home my intent and she ground herself upon it as if upon God’s most fearsome corral, in the holy round-up. I held her closer, not as close as she did me. Muscles rippled over her back, up to her shoulders as they swayed among the mouldering reeds of aged bank managers, housewives who had wished for something better. Under her blouse her bare skin was greasy slick with sweat which I slid over, desperate to grip and hold her struggling strength. Into my shoulder she rested her head, my shirt now warm, now damp with her saliva and snot staining my skin, burning hot. I stood into Barbara as she ground her face, deeper, deeper, mouth working, lips suckling, teeth bared, now bitten, and still I held on. Her fingers, nails like torpedoes crushed into my sides, pain inspired as she suddenly rigid, snarled. And it was her orgasm that sent us crashing. The glass on the table as did the table itself, yielded to their weight, everything beneath me, shattering into shards of terminal intent. At first I felt nothing, so lost in the vapours of Barbara’s paroxysm. Stirred, joyous at what? We lay upon the floor between the tables at the far end of the room seemingly invisible to the other patrons, I upon glass and shattered table, Barbara upon me, now breathing slower and slower, whispering, sighing. “Shhh,” She breathed, into me, holding me tight, her prisoner. I yearned to be her Prisoner of Love, captivated by her Genet conquest, surrendering to her power to consume. “You’re hurt,” Barbara whispered, her tongue upon my cheek, “do nothing. Shhh, just listen to me.” As her whispering faded the searing presence of jagged teeth embedded in my all too weak flesh revealed itself with malignant laughter and taunting challenge. To cry out, to suddenly call to all and sundry for aid, welled in my chest as a tidal wave of breaking panic only to dissolve crashing upon the rocks of Barbara’s shore of assurance; destroying forever my ability, my desire to resist, to control, to seize the moment. On my feet, her arm around my waist, I felt enfeebled and strengthened, invigorated, as if pain had been integral to all that I ever was, that we would ever be. We reached the elevator without incident, without question. Guests discreet in their distance from commitment. I knew myself to be bleeding and for a brief instant wanted rescue from her assistance. I glanced back toward the ballroom, ancient revelers watching the wounded being carried out of their lives, and they grateful for all that passes them by turned into themselves, comforted by the fact they were all on the threshold at the same time and no longer subjected to the reminders of all they’d lost in years gone forever. I wanted someone back there to for an instant, to rescue me. No one emerged. Never get involved was writ large upon each collapsed face. Up stairs, Barbara locked the door to our room and maneuvered the high-backed upholstered chair until it was severely wedged under the knob. No rescue. The blood from the wound on my left side was thick, thicker than I would ever have imagined. Weakness was coming with deepening night beyond our window overlooking the harbour lights of Victoria. As I sat upon the bed, pulling my left arm free of the blood thick jacket, I studied again with intensity the spreading stain smearing my side. Barbara stepped directly in front of me as I sat, stifling a whimper. I shifted my feet apart so she could press closer. She didn’t smile, didn’t speak as she removed my jacket. I winced and she stopped for just a second, long enough to appear satisfied the damage was serious. “Maybe, I should get to the hospital?” I somehow knew the answer. The attempt had to be made, I wanted it recorded, I needed coverage, defense. She unbuttoned my shirt, pulling it over my shoulders, saying nothing. Stepping back she glanced at the wound and slipped free of her blouse and unfastened her black pants, slipping free of them. For an instant that seemed dream like in its occurrence, I sat in painless wonder gazing at her naked body as she folded her clothes, at her small shapeless buttocks, at her thin thighs at her small breasts, nipples weak and embarrassed. Here entire body was shaved clean and I was frightened for some reason by her body now that it was before me. She crossed the room and without looking at me, stripped me of my clothes. I now stood naked in her grasp, embarrassed by my erect, ignored. My clothes, shirt, pants, underwear were ruined and she kicked the soiled objects off to a corner. With a bathroom towel she staunched the bleeding and lay me into the bed. Weakness was consuming lust, I wilted lying upon the bed, blood seeping over sheets, sticky and pungent. Barbara had returned in her pajamas. In the weak light filtering from the half closed bathroom door, I imagined her as someone other than her, as someone I’d known, years ago, as someone who in out longing seduced me as I did him in a cottage. I felt for my penis and was pleased at its firmness at his imagining. By dawn I was captivated by my own terminal position. Barbara had lay with me, lying on my left side, lying in my blood, soaking her, feeding her and now she rested, waiting in the window, soaked in the vapours of the living sea. Gaia. Woman. The camera continued its record. Barbara waited without a shiver, waited. My glance into the camera was to be more than she could bear. That was to be my statement, that was an epitaph that would defeat, consume and live in her blooded body. I lay there in the bed. I felt chilled, damp. Was I sweating fear into the sheets? Was I scared shitless, sweating without acknowledging, even in the slightest whimper so as not to lose her; that I was in a desperate place? Oh God, would this be my triumph, something requiring grace under pressure, something I did not possess? The dark image cast across the face of the world, that serigraph of Ben Shahn’s of the tormented and brutalized and yet never defeated, Sacco and Vanzetti danced through my head with the two accused smiling, knowingly at me, at my weakness, at my fear. Barbara in the window facing the harbour, leaning into the salt rain and slanting wind, soaked to the skin. North Pacific drifting mists and blood, clotting over her flesh, clammy now with the chilled sea breeze, never drying, never dying. Only I could watch it happen, my image in the cycloptic lens eye at the foot of the bed, there was my paling complexion, my sinking away eyes, as I was chest deep in blooded mattress and enwrapped in my death shroud, in a room with my name on the register. “I came all this way,” Barbara said, facing away from the sea and the harbour of tourist boats crushing the purpose out of the token fishing fleet, dying away a little each day with a diminishing catch. “to finish shooting the film they paid me to do on training aqua-culturalists.” She laughed, so I thought, but what was I thinking, capable of thinking, cared to think about, gave a shit about, what was there to care for now, at this stage of no return. “But then…” and she looked straight into my heart, from her perch in the window and at that instant I knew we would never be apart, never and I would be a lover without end