Collaboration
1.
We decided to decouple. That was what people were calling it when you didn’t scream or cry, or when you only did those things in the shower or your car. It was the winter of ’09, and many of our friends were abandoning Mankato for single, discrete lives in warmer climates. We didn’t want that—we liked the slow, brutal winters—but we also didn’t want what we had: excessive knickknacks, creeping debt, compounding spiritual misalignment.
We announced our breakup at our friends Marlon and Tammy’s house. They were divorced but still lived together and owned, together, many beautiful leather couches in colors like coral and mint. In their former life, in Los Angeles, Marlon and Tammy had been actors. Those were the years of shampoo commercials and playing corpses in procedurals. They excelled in these parts. Tammy could hold her breath for five and a half minutes; Marlon, just under five. Then they married, quit the industry, and escaped to Minnesota. Almost as soon as the movers drove off, they decoupled. “We realized we made the wrong change,” Tammy had said, her lips a little blue after showing us, once again, just how very long she could hold her breath.
There was still intimacy. We’d observed that firsthand—some collaboration between the house and the yard and the dog—but their arrangement was a marvel, held together by unseeable forces beyond the mechanics and slow patience of marriage. And, God, their house smelled like spring rain and moss.
It was our turn.
We held hands and said, “It’s over.”
Marlon and Tammy scrunched their faces into papier-mâché.
Elena was there too, legs folded up on the bench below the bay windows, leaves gusting up behind her. All night she’d been giving unsolicited financial advice. She assured us that there was always another market ready to yield. Her ex-husband was in jail, and we didn’t know whether their divorce had come before or after the verdict. Elena was not quite our friend, but perhaps she wanted to be.
She said, “I wish you’d reconsider, but I know you won’t, so I’m not asking you to.”
We nodded so hard our wineglasses tipped onto a mauve couch. The Doberman rushed in to lap it up.
“He loves Merlot,” Marlon said.
“He prefers Beaujolais,” Tammy said.
You see, don’t you? Things couldn’t stay this way.
We winced together across the distance of our bed that night, considering the afterlife, thinking of the stain.
2.
One afternoon the following week, we found ourselves in the breakfast nook with Elena, and there too, among the crumbs and pilfered butter packets, were our finances. She wanted to assist with this, but we told her that it was too much, numerically. She dismissed the notion with a flutter of hands, and the odor of resinous weed wafted toward us.
At the table, we pushed the papers around like some esoteric board game. We appeared to own less than nothing, having accumulated a negative balance in our thirty-odd years of living.
“We’re not making headway on this,” we said, to each other, but mostly to Elena who was reapplying her lipstick in slow and dizzy rotations. “It’s like that Bible story about the king cutting the kid in half, except if nobody wanted him.”
Because we did not know Elena well, we did not know her beliefs, but it seemed she was some kind of Christian, or otherwise someone who took the literature very seriously. “I’ll let you know,” Elena said. “This isn’t even a bit like that Bible story. Have you even read the Bible?”
We hadn’t.
“I’ll bring you one when I come back with the tax forms.”
After Elena left, we opened the box of wine hidden under the kitchen sink and studied the label—the chintzy white background overlaid with a pixelated image of a wine cask, words that looked like Italian but we knew weren’t actually Italian. We loved it for its garishness, its bold rejection of aesthetics and taste. In its appearance, the truth of its contents.
Then we drank excitedly and without self-consciousness while a home renovation show played for what must’ve been hours. At one point in the evening, we were tracing out the creases in each other’s palms, recollecting a visit to a chiromancer we’d made some years before. She’d pointed to the line at the base of our fingers—the Girdle of Venus—and gasped. Now, we couldn’t remember what it meant, but we touched those little semicircles grooved into our flesh until the sun started to come up.
“The Girdle of Venus,” we said. “The Girdle of Venus.”
We were laughing at everything these days.
3.
Marlon confided in us a few days later at the pet store we liked to visit but where we never bought anything. He was buying dog food. We were petting rabbits.
“I can’t stay with Tammy,” he said.
We weren’t sure what staying meant. We’d modeled our separation, in part, on Marlon and Tammy. Still, the rabbits were soft, so we continued petting them. Marlon began to cry. Between sobs, he talked about everything he missed in L.A. which was mostly street food and nude beaches.
“Marlon,” we said. “What does Tammy think?”
“I think she’s having an affair with Elena.”
“Is it an affair when you’re broken up?”
He went in about the dog, about how they shared so much. He said it was the secrecy that hurt him. That’s what they all say.
4.
Why decouple? We could declutter, settle our debts, and eke out an enviable life in the Midwest. Most disagreements, when they arrived, were brief and muted: whether to bring a flask to the baseball game (ultimately, a yes) or whose parents’ ashes to display on the mantle (ultimately, neither’s). We lacked the invention for drama. Skittish by nature, easy criers, liable to start at a car backfiring or an infomercial for a new kind of blanket. Had that been our original attraction?
That didn’t matter, we thought. We’d reached an impasse.
Namely, we had serious spiritual contention. We’d made up our minds about the afterlife and disagreed. While we both believed there was a next world, we diverged between an ethereal-type afterlife (airy, showered in golden light, filled with loved ones who had already arrived there and set the thermostat to a comfortable sixty-eight degrees) and an afterlife exactly like the world we lived in now, but only from a different vantage (perhaps a leaf or an atom of water or a dictator). And because we disagreed so vehemently about where we were going or what we would be when we died, we felt it necessary to separate now, lest we cause more pain and more confusion when we finally wound up wherever we were going. This was hard to explain to our friends.
5.
On Halloween, Tammy invited twenty-two people to her and Marlon’s house, but Marlon wasn’t there.
Tammy and Elena wore matching headbands with cat ears. We told them they looked fetching—giggling a bit at the word. Tammy was, after all, very beautiful in the way most actors are, and in Mankato that’s a rare and sometimes uncomfortable reality.
Elena had a nose like a straight blade. She was more intimidating than usual with her cat ears, her eyes glossed with silvery shadow. Had she only just stopped wearing her wedding ring?
We had a routine. When asked what we were dressed as, we’d say, “A happy couple.” Responses varied: laughter from the woman dressed as a pineapple, tilted heads from the couple in officially branded Disney merchandise, a theatrical hat-tipping from the cowboy.
When Elena asked, and we told her, she shook her head.
“You know, it’s hurtful. You’re being hurtful.”
We hurt too. But we also knew how temporary hurt was. It didn’t follow you to the next world, no matter what that was.
Then we heard a shatter from the den.
The couple in the best costumes (black bats in hand-sewn velvet, complete with wings), one of them threw their glass at the wood-paneled wall. We huddled with the rest of the guests in the doorway and heard some of their argument, but not enough.
“You know, shame eats the soul,” one bat said, hoarsely.
“Did your psychiatrist tell you that? I bet she did. My psychiatrist knows your psychiatrist, and she tells me all about the quackery that happens in that office,” the other, higher-pitched bat said.
“Quackery? Is it quackery to fall in love?”
“You’re not in love. Paying for braces is love. Blowing up an oil rig is love. You can’t fall in love at a car dealership.”
“But I have,” the bat cried. “So, should I feel guilty?”
The bats were looking out at us from behind Tammy’s large desk, and for a second we felt like we’d been called into a meeting, maybe a family meeting where our parents would ignore the difficulty between them to remind us that this year, in particular, our grades really counted, or that we needed to take more responsibility, or that we’d be moving into a small apartment with just one of them. Though really, they didn’t look particularly parental.
After a moment, one of the bats put their hands to their face and their wings opened out. Jagged black triangles from armpit to wrist. Almost ready for flight. Simultaneously, the black hem of their shirt lifted, and we glimpsed the bare flesh of their belly, the outward spiral of their navel.
Later, we asked one of the bats, who’d gone to the kitchen for a broom, if they were okay.
“I just want to die,” they said.
We were ashamed to laugh. It pained us, really and truly.
6.
Our separation stalled after that, as did our social life.
Tammy and Elena, together and separately, continued to check in on us with unabashed curiosity and counsel. “Love is like God,” Tammy said, one evening on our front porch. “Both give themselves only to their bravest knights.”
We shut the door.
And we knew other people, but they seemed less involved—were, in fact, less involved —after we’d told them about our beliefs. They’d grant us all the pleasantries expected of Midwesterners, but we could tell they thought we’d gone mad. “The afterlife is a pleasant thought, but shouldn’t you be sorting out your finances?” they’d say.
One night, we took a walk and passed Marlon bent over the snowblower in his front yard. “How do you do it? What keeps you two together when you’re splitting up?”
Since the Halloween party, we’d been collaborating. We’d thought of what the bat had said, and though we didn’t want to die, we wanted something similar: to know the hereafter. How could we glimpse it the same way we saw the bat’s soft belly?
No car batteries hooked up to our chests. No bathtubs of ice. No quick-release nooses. No drugs. No meditation retreats. No extendable ladders. No holes in the yard.
Yes, sex, but only because we spent all our time examining each others’ bodies, and the nudity and attention and intensity with which we approached our task gave way to the physical, which had always come easy anyway.
No, not poetry. We told our therapists, separately. Not romance. Research and method.
Yes, it was our bodies, our gaudy little containers, that spoke to our contents. Examine the body—discover the soul. And if we knew the soul, we could know the soul’s destination.
We told Marlon all of this as the snow filled up the path he’d just cleared. He closed his eyes and gave a violent shiver.
“Sounds lovely. Wish I’d thought of that.”
When we returned home, we recalled Elena’s Bible on our coffee table. We hadn’t even opened it. We knew enough about its content by the leather cover, the embossed golden letters, the smell of it, like vitamins and hay.
7.
Each day, we committed to a new part of the body, starting at the top: follicles, forehead, eyes. Then we realized we needed to aim smaller, taking on only a square centimeter of flesh at a time. We also recalled that we had more senses than just sight and began touching, sniffing, listening, and tasting every bit. Occasionally, we’d mistake a bitter tang or a static shock for a connection to the divine.
By spring, we’d covered the entirety of our bodies above the waist.
We refused to share our findings. We took notes in separate journals with dainty locks and kept the keys under our pillows. We were operating in parallel, waiting for surety.
Take, for instance, the two days we spent on the base of the neck, below the Adam’s apple. The most sensitive, lurid, or expressive parts of our bodies were often too stimulating. But the patch of flesh over the trachea, spend a day there and you might find out something from the quick echo of a pulse or the constellation of pores. We stayed awake all night jotting in our notebooks and looking across the bed at each other with rabid smiles. What could we know together? That kind of knowing would come later.
We still had half our bodies to go. We’d need more clarity, keener senses. We were ready.
And one night after our studies, Marlon appeared to us, syndicated on basic cable. Still as snow. He played a dead man, very convincingly.
8.
In summer, we saw Tammy and Elena at the pet store. They were with the rabbits, palming paper-thin slices of carrot and cucumber—what looked to us like the scraps of grocery store sushi. The rabbits ate with caution.
“Oh my god,” Elena said when we sidled up beside them. “You’re both so glowy.”
“Are you having a baby?” Tammy asked.
“No,” we said. That was entirely impossible.
We wanted to ask where Marlon was, but we knew he was in California because of the pictures he’d posted online—indigo waves cresting silver at the top where they segued into the cloudless sky and, in the foreground, blurred bodies, almost certainly naked.
The four of us there—eight hands in the terrarium—we must’ve looked like out-of-work magicians or former cosmetic researchers begging these tiny mammals for forgiveness.
“We got this from you,” Tammy said. “It’s our new favorite activity.”
Could our third-favorite activity really be someone’s first? Tammy had always been a dog person. Elena, when she was trying to befriend us or insinuate herself into our finances, had called animals “toys for the childless.” Regardless, we were disturbed and yanked our hands out of the terrarium.
That must’ve been what spooked the rabbits. One of them snipped at Tammy’s index finger.
We stood agog until the clerk ran toward us. “This isn’t a petting zoo,” he yelled.
Elena brought Tammy’s finger to her mouth and kissed it. We saw the dot of blood on Elena’s upper lip.
“Out,” the clerk said, waving his hands over the terrarium.
He was shorter than Elena, and she seemed to take pleasure in leaning her head down to his level. She said the word “lawsuit” four or five times, and with each repetition, the man shrank back further until he was behind the register.
“Now we can go,” Elena said.
Outside, before we got in our car and Elena and Tammy got into Elena’s car, and we all drove the four miles back to the same neighborhood, Elena asked us if we’d like to come to dinner the following Thursday at their house.
“Whose house?”
“Ours,” Tammy repeated. Her arm was around Elena, pinching her ponytail in the crook of her elbow.
“Which house?”
“Oh don’t be silly,” Elena said. “You two have baby brain, I just know it.”
She said it with quiet menace. As though reading out the balance of a bill past due, a promise of future evictions and shut-offs. We wondered—would we be offered such pleasantries as they carried away all we owned?
Things couldn’t stay this way forever. We returned home and cut Elena’s Bible in half. Folded into the verses of Corinthians, we found a rigid black cloth shaped like a bat wing.
“Tie it around my eyes,” we said. But the cloth would not fit us both.
Vincent James Perrone (@spookyghostclub) is a writer from Detroit. He’s the author of the poetry collection, Starving Romantic, a contributor to the experimental fiction anthology, Collected Voices in the Expanded Field, and his recent work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Action Spectacle, and Pithead Chapel. Vincent lives in Charlottesville, VA, where he’s earning his MFA at the University of Virginia. He reads for Meridian and Conduit and is a member of the co-op bookstore, Book Suey. Find him at vincentjamesperrone.com.