We’re Incapable of the Kind of Love
-N. "Yanni" Stefani
Johnny get your gun…
I waded through the sea of people, scanning the room for her with heavy eyes fighting off the effects of a long night’s worth of alcohol. Guitars roared, punching out a battery of power chords and inharmonious grunts that seemed to stutter. It proved exhausting. I paused for a second and noticed my clothes soaked with the sweat of heaving, grinding bodies, and my own warm beer I had been nursing.
Someone’s yelling fire, in a theater…
My thoughts drifted as my pursuit resumed. I had seen her perfect chest before, although at this point I wasn’t sure if it was a dream or reality. She had posed topless in a magazine once and she was proud of it. She showed me her pictures, even gave me one to keep. She said “for your eyes only”, with that penetrating smile and I was hooked on her. She didn’t need a name, she was my brother’s girlfriend, maybe forbidden. We got close one time, at least I felt so, and we were interrupted by his footsteps down the stairs.
This is the year of the party crasher…
I caught a glimpse of her exposed shoulder blades, the rose tattoo, her unmistakably blue dress trailing behind her body as she glided up the stairs. I pushed my way through the maggots, a gigantic body of one, squirming, twis ting about in violent spasms as screaming vocals and pounding war drums echoed through their collective organs.
Why do I give myself away?…
I reached the stairs and began to ascend. They were steep and crooked. I lost my footing as I rushed to catch her. My spilled beer quickly seeped into the old, dirty wood. At the top I was met by a large room painted in bright colors, orange, red, yellow, blue. Strange drawings and pictures lined its walls and ceiling. Clowns with gaping mouths, horses headless, and solitary people depicted looking…just looking. Some looked toward the floor, some toward the ceiling, some East, some West, in a hundred different directions, no two the same. I moved forward cautiously. Sabrina! I called her name out to her. She didn’t need one, but she had one. I’m here! She called back, but I couldn’t decipher from where. I moved forward again, the floorboards creaking underneath me, worried they might crack.
Come down from there!, or… the Horsemen, come crashing through the Gates…
A half dozen different doors and staircases beckoned me in a dozen different directions. I tried the doors first. Half were empty closets, half led to more staircases. Some went up, some down, some left, some right, some steep, some flat, some narrow, some wide. I called to her again. No answer. I took the safest looking set of stairs up. This set was longer than the others, or so it appeared. Up and up I went. And up. And up. Finally I reached the top of the stairs, struggling to catch my breath. Here I found only more doors, more stairs. Dozens of them, an incomprehensible reality that couldn’t be so, but so it did seem. I closed my eyes, then hung my head and inhaled. Up here, well beyond the noisy, thick air downstairs, the sweet smell of mild tobacco filled my nostrils. A fresh, smoldering cigarette lay between a crack in the floor at my feet. She was close.
mind eraser, no chaser…
I composed myself again. Dozens of doors, dozens of staircases to choose from. One set up was shrouded in darkness, different from the others. I peered up and saw light at the top. The choice being clear, I began my ascent. It seemed 500 feet up as my body’s lactic acid seeped into its dead, aching muscles. Slowly the light drew closer and my pace hastened. Seemingly in response, the staircase narrowed like an unfathomable set of hungry black jaws set to swallow me whole. I was too far up to turn back. Faster I climbed, clawing my way up with wild arms as my toes planted into the old wooden steps, and I propelled forward with a second wind like an Olympic sprinter. The walls closed in further on my body, tighter and tighter, squeezing my tight at the peak. I turned myself sideways to slide through the narrow opening, just barely escaping the wretched staircase with the last of my desperate, failing energy. And finally at the top my fleeting relief was once again dispelled by more of those horrid paintings, but this time to my despair there were no more stairs up. No more possibilities. This room was tiny, with a thick, many years deep layer of dust which coated the creaky floor. “Sabrina!” I called out to her once more knowing the futility of it all. No answer. Yet I called again anyway, and wished my own shallow echo would come alive and say something different back to me. I turned back, my shoulders low and hanging with aching legs, and I squeezed my body back through the narrow opening of the staircase. I descended back into the nightmarish maze, my former desperation replaced by overwhelming nothingness.
I promise we’ll behave, like perfect prisoners…
I looked back toward the sliver of light at the top of the narrow staircase from where I had come, and watched it fade away with each heavy, downward step. In the room of a dozen doors I had passed through on my way up the smoldering cigarette was now a cold lead, a simple pleasure consumed and forgotten and tossed aside, only the faint smell of nicotine left behind in the stale air. My return continued on down the next staircase. The bottom of the stairs emptied into a smaller room, but a different room. Had I reached the bottom too quickly? Had I taken the wrong stairs? So many fucking stairs. I ran back up. Which stairs? They all looked different now. Which one had I taken? Was it a door I had to open? Which door/s had I opened? I opened them all this time as quickly as I could. The doors of course only provided more options. Far too many options. Filled with panic, I blindly chose a staircase and ran down, determined to get anywhere, to be rid of the riddle of the house. Down I went. The hellish paintings with their maniacal faces, looking everywhere, filled with sinister indecisiveness, raced past my eyes as I fled. More staircases and more floors greeted me. The very wood surrounding me seemed to grip my insides and squeeze them tight, as the dust filled my lungs and blurred my desperate vision. Finally, my ears found the growing sound of the writhing bodies below, the maggots still hard at play. I followed the voices, the screams, and the familiar shouts to my freedom. Louder and louder they became as I closed my distance. So close now…My legs pumped faster than ever, matching the pace of my frantic heartbeat. Cold blood began to trickle from my nostril, perhaps my body’s attempt to expel the house from inside of me. Finally I met the lights of the rave downstairs that seemed to control the mass of bodies. They cleared my blurred vision and felt warm inside my head. I coughed puff after puff of a long history of dust from my burning lungs, taking in deep breaths of safety. I regained my composure quickly and straightened my sore back. Through those writhing bodies, I peered, adjusting my dry eyes to the light. I managed to glimpse the tail-end of a bright blue dress trailing behind a beautiful rose tattoo. I pushed through the crowd…
