Please Kill Me

She appears at his shoulder like a magic trick-the left shoulder,
that is; seat of temptation and desire. Briefly, furtively, Marcus
takes a quick inventory; cigarette lighter produced with a flourish;
icy blonde hair tightly-bobbed, rumpled as if she just woke up;
diamond-hard eyes the color of illuminated slate. Also, a tiny mouth
embellished with maddeningly full lips.

Nothing but trouble-he can smell it right off; a whiff of sulfur before
the lightning strike. Her breath is hot on his neck. Perhaps she's
capable of great kindness, he doesn't know, but she sure doesn't look
kind. He wills himself to move away from her, instead making an awkward
shift that only brings him closer. Then the unintentional of his arm
brushing hers.

Marcus doesn't even know why he's there, sitting alone in a bar full of
strangers, drinking a watered-down single-malt and smoking unfiltered
cigarettes. Whatever money he has on him is what he just got from
selling off the last of his records-Rocket to Russia, Unknown
Pleasures, Lust for Life, and all the others. He supposes the books
will be next to go. Jesus, it's like selling your own children.

The Rendezvous is a dump, no doubt about it. Marcus looks at the
old-timers crumpled over their drinks, mumbling to themselves or one
another. The girl regards him with those eyes of glacial intensity and
he can almost see the chalk marks, one for every broken heart. But not
his, not his. He'll finish up his drink and leave before she even knows
his name. Too much power in that, a name. And he won't let her have
his.

The jukebox is whining misery, the codgers at the bar are methodically
working their way toward drunk, the girl's leg is pressed against
Marcus and his hand is trying to wave down the cocktail waitress like a
taxi. Please miss, I have to leave now. I have to leave while I still
can because, if I spend one more minute breathing in the scent of her,
I'm as lost as one of Dante's lost souls.

Too late. She addresses him in a dense, smoky voice and he already
knows he'll accept that hell if only she keeps talking, low and
intimate, weaving her way with ease through music, the politics of
alienation, poetry, philosophy and anarchist theory. We she leans in
toward him, her shoulder eases against his chest. He imagines his mouth
on her nipples, teeth biting, tongue teasing.

A sculpted fisherman looks down on them from the wall about the bar, a
votary saint. The jukebox pauses between songs and, in the sudden
quiet, he hears the mechanical crackle of a dying neon sign. The front
door opens, briefly flooding their self-ascribed purgatory with a shaft
of sunlight. None of these details are connected, merely random
phenomena that have nothing to do with Cassandra's hand as it rests on
his knee.

All the while, she keeps up her monologue. At twenty-two, she's an
aspiring writer, of course-a daughter of Emma Goldman and William S.
Burroughs. This town is lousy with writers. Impossible to spit without
hitting one, but he doesn't care what the hell she is as long as her
fingers keep working their way up his legs. He already knows he'll
forfeit sanity and security. He won't ask for love or phone calls.
He'll forgo any pretense of romance. Just don't stop now.

The old-timers are lying in wait for conversational chinks into which
they might wedge themselves. The looks they cast Cassandra are those of
a lecherous father. They're jealous of Marcus, that young Ulysses, that
black-clad ex-con who can recite Shakespeare, Catullus and Bukowski. As
the girl's fingers slip around the edge of his Levi's, they wonder if
he's carrying a gun.

What is this strange world they've all made for themselves? Look at
them, all of them, nearly drunk before lunch. Seeking a little
companionship in a darkened bar while the clockwork angels reel far
above them, ignorant of pain or bliss. They will never know what Marcus
knows-her touch, the tension, eyes eating into his as if she'd sup on
his soul and then ask for more, the quickened breath, the anxious lips.
All of this converges into a single, primary urge as he stands up and
offers Cassandra his hand.

She takes it without forethought or question and lets him lead her out
the door and onto the sidewalk. Three blocks to his car and a short
drive to an apartment building she'd never recognize because she
doesn't really see it the first time. There's a key in the door, his
heavy hands, their trajectory into the unmade bed.

If they are to be damned for this, they were damned already. Best,
then, to lay each other out like parchment and scrawl an urgent poem on
the flesh.